HelinCarnate

Except for being weak to leathal, you could easily make those in AE. Use WP for the secondary, pick the self rez and give them Indomitable Will. If you skip the other powers including HTP they will not have any bonus HP, just mez protection and they will all pop up once you kill them. I know alot of players that do something similar to max out the inf/min. WP for example does great vs all S/L mobs, same with invuln or granite, (yes I have seen granite farmers).

That would even out the playing field so that a comparison between the sets would be accurate since both would be at the optimal conditions for max inf/min.

Why would we forget about using attacks outside of the primary? Footstomp in addition to Rage is what makes SS good. I don't think anyone here believes that SS on its own with only Footstomp is better at aoe than any other set. That is why people are saying SS/Fire/Mu or in some cases SS/Fire/Fire. Since those options are available and they are all boosted by Rage they should be taken into account.

Also once again you are forgetting the point of the thread. Best aoe damage, not how easy a set is to level or if it is a late bloomer or not.

And Billz, yes claws/fire/whateveryouwant rocks. But over time, it will take more time to clear wall to wall mobs than ss/fire/mu. While math is helpfull to figure out the potential, it does not tell us reality. I have seen a great claws/fire in action and yes it is a sight to behold. But it still took longer to clear the same area than my ss/fire/mu which is not quite finished yet.

Burn can do some huge damage to bosses. If the game decides that they will be one of the 5 hit with the front loaded damage. But lets pretend that you get lucky, every single time and the bosses get hit with burn for the full damage. That puts burn at around 650 damage with FE and BU and a full fury bar. Also if you manage to get the bosses in the high damage portion of LR they will take around 890 damage.

So far that is about 1540 damage to the boss, pretty decnet. At this point you claim that only the bosses are left and you only need one more burn (1540 + 650 =2190) and a thunderstrike (2190 + 540 =2730) to finish them off. I am assuming you have blazing aura on as well so that would be about 30 dps added to this and the chan you provided last right about 10 seconds for an extra 300. Ill even assume you have the 230% ish recharge to get burn to cast 2 times in 10 seconds as well. (I do so it is within the realm of reality) Grand total of 3030 damage. And this is assuming 100% hit rate, even though 54 mobs are much harder to hit.

Level 54 bosses have 1730 hp but wait. Fighting +4 mobs means you are only 48% effective due to the purple patch. So even if they had no resistance to your damage type, you would only do 1454.4 damage. Sorry but once again you are lying to make your favorite set seem better than it is.

Video or it didn't happen. Oh and we are still waiting on the 2:30 1500 ticket video.

Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. It was touched on before but I will expand a little. If you somehow managed to get to the recharge cap it would still take 40 seconds to recharge. But lets pretend for just a moment you were able to get that much recharge. You would only have a 10 second down time for FE so most of the time footstomp would be pounding out around 500 damage on its own every 5.4 seconds, counting animation time. Throw out burn in between and those 10 seconds of down time every 40 seconds are pretty meaningless because just about everything is already dead. More damage = faster killing. Over time, there is no ammount of recharge you can put on rage that makes it do less damage overall.

The thread is about damage, not on durability.

This^^

For once I would have to agree with BBJ somewhat. ST damage for farming? wuh? If farming in AE you have tons of bosses around so they get melted with the aoe. If farming as a brute on a normal map, if one group is dead except for the boss, I move to the next group. No sence in waiting to kill one mob when I could be killing 12 in the same amount of time.

That is if there are even bosses spawned. The most effective inf or tickets / min or hour is done with +2/x8 w/o bosses in most cases.

If build A can do a task in 5 min and build B can do the same task in 4:59 then build B is better at that task. Better overal, maybe, mabye not but yes better at that one task. And considering that the OP is looking for the best aoe damage and not the 2nd best I am guessing he/she cares.

Depends on the user. To those like yourself that seem to not be able to manage to exchange 1:50 of the best damage possible for brutes in exchange for 10 seconds of the worst damage it is not worth it. To those that can manage that terrible 10 seconds yea it is worth it. Just a small cost in being the best at something.

Has a chance per mob killed with no modification to the number of people on the team. So if you are playing set for 8 solo, you will get on average 8x the number of drops as you would on a full team.

Not sure about the second question. I am pretty sure it would treat it just like if you were full and solo and just dissapear and no one would get it.

Exactly right. One quartz in a group with just a few mobs can tear down a SR toon in a hurry, even while they try to kill said quartz. A small handfull of psi mobs are not a big deal for invuln because they have Dull pain to boost their HP and heal. Or they can pop 2 medium purples and not get hit. You can also slot for psi resist to plug that hole. This is one thing the entirely negates SR. There is no one thing that entirely negates any other melee armor with just one use.

Yes there are things that SR should be weak against, but +100% to hit is overkill. +50% is more realistic as it can be overcome with just 2 medium inspirations instead of 4.

Temp grenades are affected by damage buffs. Vet temp powers are not.

That build is made for just fire mobs in AE and occasional teaming. Nothing serious like trying to tank an LRSF which I have actually done. Yay for several def buffs for that one along with some excellent healing when I was up against psi damage.

The only reason I have elec fences is as an extra aoe attack while I am waiting for burn, footstomp or ball lightning to recharge. Once I get enough recharge, I will probably switch to fire for more upfront damage with fireball.

No rage crash still does not mean better damage. Other builds of elec/fire that I have seen do a great job farming. But ss/fire is still better. Just ran a 53/54 farm myself and capped out on tickets in 3:42. I would have been faster but I got unlucky and did not get that many reds to drop. As far as not seeing ss/fire toons running farms then you are not looking hard enough. Middle of the night right now and I just saw 3 of them and nothing else in the AE building in Cap.

Sorry to break the news to you, but your friend does not know how to farm. That does not mean there is an issue with the powerset, there is an issue with your friend. Also footstomp does not send the mobs flying away. If that was hapening then it is even a greater indication of your friends inability to farm because he was probably using handclap or acutally slotted KB into FS.

More aoe powers still does not mean it does better damage. 10 seconds of down time every couple min is really not that bad to deal with. Also rage increases the damag on all attacks, not just Footstomp. Patron powers, burn and blazing aura all do more damage because of Rage.


With AE any brute can get the fury bar to the 80s and have it stay there so that point is moot. Any good farmer will also keep as many mobs around them as possible, also moot. There is no fear in burn anymore and FS only does KD not KB so the elec fence comment is also moot. The only thing SS has to work around is rage. And that is easy. I take that time to clean up my insp tray, combine to make reds and such. Just keep an eye on your buffs and monitor your damage bonus and you will be prepared. It is far less difficult than you are making it out to be.