LineNoise

30 seconds with Google says you can buy 10B Inf for $65US. So that 25B that Neander just burnt was.... $160? That's retail, and I have no idea if there's competitors selling cheaper or what rate they're buying at. (Or if anyone's actually buying anything, although I assume *someone* is, or they'd lower the prices.)

It's been brought up before, but I don't know that we ever got the devs to address it. It's a fairly minor issue, since it doesn't lower your actual ToHit or Accuracy values, it just messes with the Streakbreaker code so that sometimes it allows back-to-back misses instead of forcing the second one to hit. Basically the Gauntlet applications are "eating" the forced-hit.

AoE Score (aka Inf Earned)
The Oddities

As is normal in testing of any system this complex, there were a few outliers and oddities, and I feel that I should point these out as they might be indicative of bugs or balance concerns.

Several of the Lt-class pets had substantial endurance issues on the pylon test. Carnival and Storm Elementals Bosses also had endurance issues. For the Lts it's probably a minor issue, but if I calculated DPS based on partial times, both Carnival and Storm Elementals ended up ~15 dps higher than their final posted times. Given that we can't slot them, we can't feed them blues, and mob AI is completely incapable of doing anything intelligent about end management, it's kinda a problem that a couple of pets are getting gimped by something we can't mitigate. (As a special note, I equipped my Ageless and re-ran the Storm Elementals through the AoE test. With the endurance issues removed from play, they snatched the crown on that test from the Polar Lights.)

The Longbow Cataphract never once used his Cone AoE attack against the Pylon, but was quite happy to use it against the Council Empire. This is a problem for them, because the Cone is both highest damage-per-activation and highest damage-per-animation-second of its available attacks. As it stands, 1/3-2/3rds of the Longbow's posted DPS is actually the effect of the 500% -regen available, and their “true dps” is shockingly bad against a single hard target. This makes their overall effectiveness highly dependent on the relative value of -Regen. All of the other pets were happy to use all of their available attacks against any available targets.

The Conclusions

Here's where I give some generic advice for people that just want easy answers, and then ramble on a bit about some non-DPS-based advantages. The vast majority of this section is going to be OPINION, refer to the charts and spreadsheets for objectivity.

Cimerorans are really good. Like, shockingly good for ST. At 41% over the number two contender, they're almost kinda too good, but we've known they were awesome since they came out, so they're probably safe from the nerf bat at this point.

Warworks are odd. They're 2nd from the top for ST, and 3rd from the bottom for AoE. Given that they don't have any AoE, that's not too surprising, but it really points up how much context matters. On the flipside, Storm Elementals go from 3rd from the bottom on ST to 3rd (or 4th/1st if they have help with End) on the AoE list.

You can't go wrong with Rularuu, they're a solid contender in both lists, plus Giant Eyeball. Similarly, Nemesis, IDF, Carnival, and Phantoms have solidly balanced performance.

Seers are horrible. They're just flat out bad, and are crying for some kinda of buff. Clockwork aren't quite as bad, but they also have nothing much to recommend in favor.

Two out of the three top contenders for AoE are spamming AoE KB powers. If you're like me and uncontrolled KB makes your teeth itch, then you're either taking Storm Elementals, or you're taking 2nd tier AoE performance. (There's a small but significant gap between #3 and #4 on the AoE list).

Honorable Mention for “Control”, because I've seen it asked, goes to the Rikti Mentalist. Twice during his duration, he'll cast a powerful AoE Hold, and he's spamming an ST Sleep in his primary chain. Secondary mentions go to Rularuu, for a fast recharging ST Hold (albeit damageless), Carnival for spamming AoE Knockup, and Longbow, Polar Lights, and Nemesis for spamming AoE KB.

Honorable Mentions for Buff/Debuff:

• Longbow Boss, for -500% Regen, stackable
• Carnival Support, for perma Forge, +20% ToHit, +15% Dmg
• IDF, Warworks, and Robotic Drones Support, for a mini Force Field Generator
• Phantoms Support, for Adrenaline Boost (two casts, 60s each)
• Rikti Support, for Accelerate Metabolism (two casts, 60s each)
• Storm Elementals Support, for a non-Repelling Hurricane
• Rulauu Support for AoE +50% Dmg, (two casts, 30s each)
• Seers Support, for Fortitude (5% ToHit/Defense, 15% Damage, but see also “Seers are bad”)
• Clockwork Support, for 7.5% Typed and 5% Positional Defense

And one final note. Take all of this testing with a rather large grain of salt. I didn't do nearly enough runs at it to get real statistical validity, my methods might be flawed or biased in some way that I didn't detect. There might be bugs. The devs might do another balance pass. I'd love to have the time to do 5 or 6 runs with each pet, set up multiple variant tests for AoE performance, or something better than a simple farm for “real world” conditions. But at 15 minutes minimum per test run, times 16 different Lore pets (not even going to mention Radial Superior variations), there's just too much to do. So you get a rough sketch of some numbers that are probably vaguely accurate enough to maybe influence your decisions. But outside of a handful of outliers, most of them are respectably balanced, and so you should never feel bad about taking Longbow just because Giant Robots OMG!!.

The door selection code glitches once in a while. Most of the time it happens when I'm talking to my contact while I'm in Oro, or something. Generally, if you head back to the zone that the contact is in, then abandon the mission and re-take it, it'll select a valid door and you can proceed.

^_^

The reason I brought up the Dom and Tank procs in relation to the Brute proc is that they're all self-buff procs. Which, in theory, should all work the same. I don't remember that patch note, but...

Given what that says versus what the proc does in practice, what probably happened is that the "limit to one proc per activation" got left out by accident, so people were getting multiple procs per activation. The patch put the limiter back in. Mechanically, a proc in a foe-targetted power *must* check the proc for every foe hit. It's just that the self-buff procs are supposed to block out the proc after one activation, whereas damage or debuff procs keep hitting everything they can.

So, recap. Hitting multiple targets with a foe-targeted self-buff proc will increase your chances of getting the buff. But you can only ever get one buff per cast. And Footstomp on a farmer will probably give you +Fury on every cast, if you're a halfway decent farmer.

Incorrect. It rolls per target, but it has a limit of one proc per activation. You can test this pretty easily, if you want. Grab a Dominator (proc is a self-buff) and put the proc in your AoE Immob. Against a single target, your proc rate will be rather abysmal. If you're spamming it against a large spawn, your proc rate multiplies up to "pretty darn good". But no matter how many mobs you're hitting, you'll only ever see one proc per activation.

(The same effect was also seen with the Tanker ATO when the gauntlet bug was in place. Pounding on a single target, I was getting only 50% proc rate, but when I was surrounded by enemies, I never saw it fail to proc.)

So far, the only thing that stands out is that Cimerorans are still *insane* on ST DPS. Although they're solidly in the middle of the pack on the "real world / aoe" test that I devised. Also, buffs Seers already.....

It's just a text error.

Probably because Alpha is mostly the same as slotted recharge, code-wise, and they'd have to write extra core code to disregard the Alpha +Recharge, and it's enough of an edge-case that it's not worth the programmer time. I highly doubt that they're like "Let's punish Spiritual!"

I have a comprehensive Lore analysis in the works, hoping to publish the results Sunday.

As far as the Accuracy question....

In Mids you can open Options, Configuration, "Exemping and Base Values", and edit the base ToHit chance. I usually leave mine set to 48%, which is 50+1 fighting 54. Then just slot up until you have 95% final Accuracy on the main Mids page.

TL;DR: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor

The best attack chain is going to be the chain that maximizes Seismic Smash. At near-recharge-cap, that's going to be SS/Heavy/Gloom/Fist. That's.... probably unsustainable, so you throw an extra Fist in there somewhere, for SS/Gloom/Fist/Heavy/Fist.

At that point, your limiter is pretty much SS. Base 20 seconds, and you need it down to 5.28 to be gapless. Solve for X, you need ~280% recharge in SS between enhancements and global. That's within a few % of the number for permahasten.

But you have to also consider the opportunity cost of all the *other* things that you can spend the cash from that hour of overtime on. Versus there's not really anything else you can do with inf.

(Plus for me, I tend to accumulate a lot of inf just *playing the game*, which I'm going to do anyways. Your comparison only works perfectly if you consider "making inf in game" and "working overtime" to both be the same value on the leisure vs work spectrum)

So for smaller teams stacking a couple copies of Assault, the Brute keeps his edge. As soon as you toss a Kin on there or start talking about Leagues, the Scrapper is probably going to edge it out. If both players are spamming reds efficiently, the Scrapper is almost always going to be in the lead.

I had actually thought that Brutes had a bigger lead than that. Clearly I need to roll a couple more Scrappers. Now to wait for Hybrid Melee and the Taunt aura option so that stuff stops running away every two seconds.

Not really. It wasn't "bugged". It was working exactly as designed. They just designed it horribly and realized after they had already released that it was working way better than they wanted it to. So they nerfed it.

What's the breakpoint if you assume a reasonable 80% Fury for a Brute going all out, and then start stacking exterior +Dmg% on both of them? Eventually the scrapper ends up way ahead when they're both at 500% total, then the Brute makes up some of the difference when you keep going. But at what level of global +Dmg are they roughly equal?

SBE purples are only slottable at 50, the same as crafted purples.

Here's the first problem. That chain is *horrible*. Guarded Spin is utter crap for damage *Because it's a defense power!* And EotS is even worse unless you're surrounded, because the animation is so insanely long.

Try running using actual *good* attacks like Mercurial, Serpent's, Innocuous, instead of spamming the worst DPA power in the set every second hit. Also, you want to build up three levels of Perfection before blowing your finisher, so that you can actually leverage the Form benefits.

If you need to have the +Def from GS to stay alive, then try MB/GS/SR/SS. Or MB/GS/IS/EotS for AoE.

They don't need new code, they just need a new vendor. Standing right next to Empyrean Michael, takes Catalysts as payment, returns emailed Character Item voucher for Catalysts. The emailed catalysts already exist, the "takes special salvage as currency" already exists, and I remember redname comments surrounding Null the Gull that adding an NPC to do some weird thing is easier than UI work or code.

This. Energy Aura is probably the strongest of the defense-based sets *defensively* in the current environment. But if you're building an offense-tuned melee, it's hard to come even close to AAO + Shield Charge for making things dead.