Erratic

It is good to hear that Staff Electric is as good as I thought it would be. I had made the following comment over in the Scrapper forum:

Or of course you can pair it with a set which covers its weaknesses and whose weaknesses it covers. I was actually just trying to get a heal and endurance gain which were up sufficiently often that I would not have to take a break every pull or so when I paired Dark Melee with Electric Armor and wound up with something much better than I planned for. As example, in getting my Ten Times the Victor badge, everyone else died multiple times whereas my brute came through without being put down once. 90% energy resistance and a healing attack that is up every 3 seconds is handy.

It is the work of all about two minutes to copy the data from City of Data, slam it into a spreadsheet, and add calculations for individual attacks and powersets for DPA.

Here is an Excel spreadsheet for such. (Note: Damage is based on the damage scale given at City of Data. You can multiply as appropriate to get actual damage.)

Yes, if you look at the average of each power's DPA for the powerset, its value is lower than any other powerset's average. Of course considered that way Ice is ahead of Dual Blades, Kinetic Melee, and Super Strength (which probably should tell you something about looking at things this way).

Tell me, are you going to be using Staff Fighting without being in a form? 3 stacks of Form of the Body provides an 18.75% boost to damage. Going by the above method of comparing powersets that is sufficient to boost Staff ahead of Dual Blades, Kinetic Melee and Super Strength.

But as I noted above, if you're fighting a single target you're not going to be using every attack you have. You will instead be working with a subset of the attacks in your powerset. Most likely for single-target damage you will be using something from a set including Mecurial Blow, Precise Strike, Guarded Spin, Serpent's Reach, and (if you want to lose your levels of Perfection) Sky Splitter. Please feel free to note that of the powers I just listed only one has a DPA less than the powerset average. In fact, average together, that selection of powers is 0.92666. That is higher than the value you calculate for Ice, though to be sure you would need to perform the same sort of consideration for a set of attacks for Ice (or any other powerset). And again, that is before you consider Form of the Body which would boost your set average to 1.1 (some quibbles about needing to build Perfection again apply here).

All of this to say that the method being used to say Staff does the least damage of any powerset is flawed. You can not look at things that way and expect to get meaningful results.

Perhaps if I am bored enough I will consider writing a program to calculate out a reasonable series of attacks for single target, tacking into account Form of the Body and/or Form of the Mind.

The average you have calculated is not a meaningful one to the question of how long it would take to take down a boss or anything else. An average across all the powers of the powerset is meaningful only in that you are putting all the powers of the set to use. But most people use a particular chain of attacks, and that is what you must consider the average damage of.

Also, someone trying to pump out damage is likely to be using one of the forms and keeping it up by avoiding finishers, so you would need to up the damage being considered for staff.

I am curious about the damage output strategy you followed. Did you shoot at direct damage increase, speed, a combination?

Been looking at Mace Mastery for my new Staff Fighting scrapper and while it is a pure thematic fit, the recharge times on its powers seem longish.

What is the word on how good the powerset is?

(Saw a guy with an Aquaman theme going and will bet good money he's going for Leviathan. . .boy that looks good).

I ran the Laura Lochart series of missions (the series with Leon in it). In the penultimate mission where the commander sends a half dozen waves of men at you I stepped out of line of sight as each wave approached and when they came around the door and were all nicely gathered I popped Guarded Spin and Eye of the Storm. Bam, most of them dead. One time I apparrently crit with Eye of the Storm because that is all it took for them to all fall over. I have never had it so easy on that mission. Most times it ends up being a fighting retreat. And the boss at the end? For Staff Fighting having middle of the pack damage, he went down easily enough.

Heck, in the antepenultimate (yes, its a word, so is preantepenultimate) where you have to clear the town square on a timer it was easy moving from group to group popping AEs and finishing up with single strikes. Finished with 40s to spare whereas usally I'm just barely able to finish.

I know, not end game stuff there. But at least some consideration of the worth of the powerset should lie with how it handles as you level up with it, and hands down it trumped every other powerset/AT I've run that mission arc with.

Survivable in what sense?

Against regular content, my DM/Elec sailed through most of it with few problems which weren't self-inflicted (like trying to gather up three groups to fight all at once). Heck, it felt like I was cheating a lot of the time.

Having reached 22 last night on my Staff/Willpower scrapper and slotted SOs, I took to charging at groups in missions as quickly as I could, not pausing to rest, to see what it would take to overload the character.

The combination is amazingly robust.