Moonlighter

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330% regen, as a comparison, will regen 3.3 bars of health in a minute, or a bar in 18 seconds, or 40% in 7.2 seconds. That's an additional 3.2 seconds of time in that danger zone, plus the Aid Self build is also regain health during that time.

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Wait, what? 330% regen is nowhere near 3.3 bars of health per minute. With 330% regen, it would take ~72.7s to regen a single bar of health (240 / 3.3). To regen 3.3 bars of health in 60s, you'd need to regen a full bar every 18.18s - that is ~1320% regen.

Am I misreading this statement somehow?

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No, I am probably misunderstanding the stat.

/hops on CoH wiki

Ah, I see. Why did I think it worked the other way? I must have confused it with another game or mechanic someplace. My bad.

So 330% regen at 72.7s for a full bar would take 29 seconds to regeneration one Aid Self use. That doesn't seem fast enough to me to solo AVs without Inspirations. Whether *that* is important is another question.

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How are they dealing without the self heal?

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I'm at the softcap with tough, passive scaling dam-res, 356% regeneration and 138.4% max HP.

While other folks are using aid self, I'm ripping someone's intestines out.

I solo pylons without aidself. I solo AVs without aidself. I stay alive in extreme challenges without aidself.

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You're a much luckier man than me then. I'm also at the soft cap on DEF, and when taking on challenges like 3+ level 54 Rikti bosses, they'll land two hits within 10ish seconds of each other at least once every time. Without Aid Self I don't think I would have ever completed those challenges.

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Well BillZ is Claws so as soon as the first hit goes off he can hop back, hit Shockwave, and kite for the 10-15 seconds with Focus to Regen back above the one hit threshold. At least that's how I imagine it going on. Big Rikti don't Regen enough in that time to worry about it.

Aid Self recovers around 40% enhanced health in around 4 secs. If you get hit by an attack that does more than half your bar you need to regen back up above half as soon as possible. I see this time that you are low as a red zone where you are basically a 5% kill, or 7.5% against an AV.

330% regen, as a comparison, will regen 3.3 bars of health in a minute, or a bar in 18 seconds, or 40% in 7.2 seconds. That's an additional 3.2 seconds of time in that danger zone, plus the Aid Self build is also regain health during that time.

7.2 seconds is a long time to kite an AV who is regenerating, but you would lose 4 seconds of DPS waiting on Aid Self anyway. And the regen option is much better dealing with lots of small hits or against anything that can be mitigated by knock down, at least for Claws.

And of course there's greens unless someone is specifically doing an AV without inspirations challenge.

Hmmm. Can I live with those extra few seconds of danger? I can see a lot of times when that extra 3 second means facing another big swing and that's significant if I am trying to take out an AV without Inspirations.

Still the Regen build means if I choose to I don't have any DPS downtime nor do I have the end usage of Aid Self, both significant advantages. And I have extra S/L resistance.

Off to the test server I think.

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How are they dealing without the self heal?

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I'm at the softcap with tough, passive scaling dam-res, 356% regeneration and 138.4% max HP.

While other folks are using aid self, I'm ripping someone's intestines out.

I solo pylons without aidself. I solo AVs without aidself. I stay alive in extreme challenges without aidself.

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Without inspirations?

Nice.

Does that 138.4% include the accolades?

My regen is much lower - 262%. And I have no Tough.

But like I said if I can drop Aid Self and Aid Other in favor of fighting it opens up a lot of possibilities. That's why I am asking; the turn around time for all this is too high to really test all the builds I want.

Hmm, perhaps it is time to build an entire SG on test, outfit a base with IO storage, and start pimping out builds with influence and IOs from multiple copies.

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I'd love to see your data on how large that band of players is.


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I am not attempting to assert any particular size to the band. I do know a couple of things through observation:

~ That band is vocal on the forums.
~ That band buys and sells a lot of IOs.

Those things alone means that the band is visible to the average player, and probably contributes to a large degree to "common knowledge" about what ATs and sets are "good" and those views do trickle down to a larger band of players.

Ignoring that entire subsection of the game, particularly when it drives a lot of the talk on your forums, is a bad plan. I have seen how "common knowledge" can drive a game towards undesirable results even when it is wrong.

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Appropriately refusing to balance the average performance of the ATs around what is possible at the high end is not "simply ignoring" that subset of the game.


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Wait, I never advocated *not* balancing around the average performance. That is very important. You assume there is a either/or but that's not the case. It is possible to balance the game around poor performance players, average performance players, and still pay attention to what balance problems present themselves at the high end.

What I am saying is waving off *any* of those performance points will be bad for the game. And I am not advocating that all those bands in any way need "equal" dev attention. Just that high end play does need *some* dev attention.

And I believe it gets dev attention. Otherwise perma-doms wouldn't be such a hot topic with the upcoming dom changes.

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And again, I want to point out, that every character I know of who operates at their high end, nearly irrespective of AT or powerset, operates radically beyond what is needed to play this game.


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Isn't "needed to play" subjective?

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I want to ask - what is the value to the devs in strong focus on relative performance at those levels of performance?


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Strong focus is your term, not mine. It would be just as detrimental for the devs to devote too much attention to those bands as it would for them to ignore it.

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More importantly, what is it that makes you think that's how they'd focus their attention on changes in those operating ranges?

If the devs intend to address how things compare at those levels of performance, I think there's going to be far, far more involved than worrying about how Brutes and Scrappers compare.


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My argument is, specifically, that waving off high performance balance in general is bad for the game. Perhaps Brute versus Scrapper balance is low on some priority list, perhaps not. Regardless, some dev attention should be paid to all the play styles the game has to offer.

Although I would like to point out that with GoRo coming up any dev who doesn't think that blue versus red balance won't suddenly become a hot topic is perhaps short sighted.

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I just think waving off high end balance will be destructive to the game.

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I think you offered no justification for that assertion.

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I am sorry I have disappointed you.

I was looking at Iggy_Kamakaze's Claw/SR build (excellent build BTW) to steal... err learn some techniques for my own MA/SR build. My own build is actually similar in that it uses Red Fortunes and then steals slots from Agile and FS. The problem is that the recharge is terrible, mostly because I don't have Hasten and a lot of slotting is making up for soft capping without Weave.

I kept thinking to myself "Wow what I could do if I didn't need to take take Aid Self."

Right now I can't imagine life without a self heal. Assuming I don't have Siphon Life or an alternate self heal, I consider Aid Self a must have for SR. Aid Self is needed to stay alive against the Pylon, to stay alive against AVs, and to stay alive in extreme challenges.

Are other people popping green pills in non-self heal builds? How are they dealing without the self heal? Am I gimping myself sticking with Aid Self? Do people get regen high enough to solo Pylons and AVs without a self heal and no inspirations?

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And the question remains: why does there need to be, when the vast majority of the player base doesn't operate there?

Even if the playerbase did operate there, the devs don't (and arguably should not) balance on the basis of parity in this way.


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I don't agree with this sentiment. First, a large band of the player base *do* operate there. Those players can now create their own challenging content. Ignoring that band of players is short sighted. There is no reason that Castle can't design with both the normal player and the extreme player in mind.

I am not having any problem moving IOs that sell for 50 million+. Whether it's purples, LotG Recharges, or Numina's Unique these IOs priced competitively sell well and sell quickly. The high end market is brisk. *Someone* is buying all of these high end IOs. That means that a certain subset of the game that operates at that level is active and it would be foolish for the devs to simply ignore them.

(I actually think Castle pays a lot of attention to high end balance. I think people take the mantra "we don't balance the content for IO builds" to mean "we don't attempt to balance the high end builds.")

That band of players also tend to drive a lot of the forum discussions. This forum is one of the best in the numerous forums I read, and that is in large part due to the discussions among that band of players. In terms of marketing a game, dead forums are bad for a game.

I just think waving off high end balance will be destructive to the game.

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Didn't you (or someone else along the same line of debate) say that we should ignore the high recharge outlier builds because they're not indicative of normal performance?


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Not me. I usually favor balancing top of the line performance because, really, who cares if my level 35s are doing radio missions and Sky Raider arcs 10% faster? I am more concerned with top line potential of builds; what in the long run can I achieve. But I am the type of player who can work through painful times if the end result is impressive.

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~ Even if you argue that Brutes are too good are we really looking at the fact that Gloom is too good? Granted DB and War Mace don't use it but everything else relies on it pretty heavily.

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In all of my calculations, I have specifically regarded scalars, which are a much better tool of baseline number comparison than attack strings. The chains that Billz has done are looking for absolute peak performance over time. I've always tried to use average performance across as many conditions as possible, which is what balance considerations pay attention to as opposed to absolute peak.

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But arguing against using top of the line builds in your "Brutes versus Scrappers" discussion (while interesting) seems to run contrary to the thread's "best attack chain possible" origins, which is what drew me into the thread. That's why I am typing with best build/ best attack chain in mind. That's what the thread started as. When you look at that Gloom is a big reason Brutes perform so well top end.

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And then they both hit BU and the scrapper does more damage.

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That's specific burst effect. You'd be amazed at how little BU actually contributes to real DPS, especially if you think that BU is going to be an equalizing factor.


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Actually, the high recharge builds we are talking about have better than 33% up time for Build Up powers and almost perma-Soul Drain. I'd call that significant.

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As to the argument of "starting out with more damage" that's not really an argument. That's a declared intent of the developers that doesn't really apply since a Brute may be starting the fight low, they're going to eventually hit high Fury if they're even remotely good players. This is why an average is used. It's the assumed median Fury value for Brutes actively fighting.

This discussion would be a lot nicer if the defenders of the Brute numbers actually knew anything about the terminology or the underlying concepts.

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~ One thing to keep in mind is that Brute Fury will be pegged during all the stress tests that we tend to use to drive the game designers nuts. Really if the Corruptors are killing stuff on a team so fast that my Fury keeps dipping do I care what my damage output is? I should probably be more concerned with punchvoking stuff off the squishies. On the other hand I can pretty much count on pegged Fury on EB's, AV's, solo Rikti spawns at level 54, ridiculous AE missions with 15 mob ambushes, and all the other crazy stuff.

~ Even if you argue that Brutes are too good are we really looking at the fact that Gloom is too good? Granted DB and War Mace don't use it but everything else relies on it pretty heavily.

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Or scrapper's resistance caps to be raised to 80% or even 85% >_>

Nah I want more damage.

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Plus, other than Invuln and S/L I don't think any of my builds are even close to the cap.

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They're decent fury builders for Brutes, but that's not even a consideration for Scrappers.

OTOH, a big advantage to Fury (esp. stacked Fury) that hasn't been discussed here is the ToHit buff. Since it's a big ToHit buff which is there 100% of the time, attacks can be slotted with less accuracy to achieve a similar hit rate. Also, KO Blow has a big base accuracy buff.


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I was confused (especially since you had just mentioned Brutes) until I figured out you meant Rage, not Fury.

One thing that this thread overall points out that I don't like is that +Recharge plays *way* too much role in DPS. This makes Hasten a must have power. I'd like to see Castle bring some filler attacks up to par so +Recharge was great for saving powe picks but didn't so dramatically affect top DPS of every single set. I would like some builds to be able to skip Hasten without dropping so much in DPS.

I would also like to see the Epic attack powers to be more competitive. If someone is going to wait 41 levels to add an attack to their chain I'd like it to be pretty good. Maybe not Gloom good, but it shouldn't gimp an attack chain.

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They could give MA some -resist >_>, be melee equivalent of sonic blast.

Kicking the enemy in the jewels, his damage tolerance goes down sharply.

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lol

(I like this idea a lot.)

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I'm not sure what I'd do when Going Rogue comes out and Brutes are available blue side.

That's the only edge scrappers have for me, that I can play them in Heroes instead of Villains.

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Don't discount front loaded damage. Sure, Brutes can reach Scrapper+ levels of damage. But having a large dose of front loaded damage on demand without having to engage warm up enemies is an advantage of scrappers. Many times in longer missions I can use Build Up plus burst to take down a selected mob (Sapper, Communication Officer, Earth Mage) before the rest of the pack turns to attack. Brutes suffer in long sparse maps, Brute suffer while cherry picking targets street sweeping (god I hate the inevitable False Nemesis street sweeping needed for that accolade) and other times when Fury can't reliably build up.

Basically I like being able to land in the middle of a random mob and unload damage immediately and at full effectiveness.

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~ Can only slot 2 purple sets. Martial Arts doesn't have enough variety to get the third and fourth purple set. Claws and Spines, for example, can slot 4 purple sets.

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How does 1 + 1 + 1 = 2? Absolute Amazement (Cobra Strike) + Hecatomb (Thunder Kick, Storm Kick, Crane Kick, Crippling Axe Kick, Eagle's Claw) + Armageddon (Dragon's Tail) = 3 last time I checked.

That's actually on par with what Claws and Spines get and better than what every other primary gets. Claws gets Hecatomb, Armageddon, and Apocalypse. So does Spines. Every other primary only gets 2: Hecatomb and Apocalypse.

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You are right. Since I don't have room in my build for the mule power and since boxing provides the same thing and most of my builds have to take that I spaced.

Actually it's *4* since if you build an attack chain that doesn't use Crippling you can add in Gravitational Anchor.

*embarrassed*

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Ya know, I'm honestly a bit surprised to find that "Brutes" are, for the most part, on top of the list ahead of Scrapper in damage. With all the hype given to Scrappers. However, does this chart include critical chances and fury generation? I'm just wondering.

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Methinks Gloom being *so* good and propping up most of their attack chains has a lot to with with that. 1.76 damage scale with a 1.1 activation?

Shuriken at nearly the same activation time is 0.882, or about half that. Dark Blast while only slightly faster (and probably the same after Arcanatime) is 1.05.

Heck, outside of Storm Kick my Martial Arts *primary* powers aren't that good.

If we took Shuriken and Dark Blast and gave them the same numbers (1.1 activation, 1.76 damage scale, 12 recharge) then you might see a lot of scrapper chains jump near the top.

Although the basic attack chain shows middle of the pack DPS, Martial Arts has several details that hamper it when building.

~ As you mentioned, Smashing damage. Not a huge problem itself except a lot of enemies I encounter over and over tend to have bosses that are resistant to it.

~ Poor mitigation. Martial Arts has only single target mitigation that doesn't work well against hard targets like EBs, AVs. This makes it useless since scrappers at the high end tend to either trophy hunt single hard targets or wade through hordes of soft targets where taking one specific target out of the pack is rather useless. Other mitigation doesn't require you to pre-select a source (Siphon constantly refreshes small bits of Health and Parry works on everyone attacking you) and works on hard single targets.

As a result Martial Arts doesn't compliment any secondary particularly well.

~ Can't slot -resist procs. It may seem like a small thing, but many of the other middle of the pack sets can slot -resist procs, sometimes in multiples. This really helps prop up their overall damage.

~ Can only slot 2 purple sets. Martial Arts doesn't have enough variety to get the third and fourth purple set. Claws and Spines, for example, can slot 4 purple sets.

~ No "freebie" secondary effect like -ToHit, -Def, extra damage, or Slow/Toxic.

~ Endurance usage is too high for what it does. Of you look at the EPS for the best attack chains, only DB is higher.

I agree with you that Dragon's Tail is perhaps better than it's given credit for. Despite that, MA is generally lackluster because the details of the set hamper a lot of the DPS boosting tricks people tend to use with IOs.

The reason I say I hate the set sometimes (and that was somewhat tongue in cheek) is that there isn't much you can do in a build to push MA scrappers to perform better.

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I'll assume I'm wrong and do a quickie DPS calculation the old way and see if it doesn't add up to how I'm doing it now.

FU Cast(arcanatime 1.056
FU Dam: 50.05

Slash Cast: 1.584
Slash Dam: 82.58

Focus Cast: 1.32
Focus Damage: 86.96

Strike Cast: 1.32
Strike Dam: 67.57

Total Chain Cast: 5.28
Total Chain Damage: 287.16

Buffs: 75% from FU and 95% from enhancements

287.16 * (1+.75+.95) = 775.32

Add 5% for chance to crit: 814.0986

814.0986/5.28 = 154.185341

Calculation from spreadsheet: 154.1851154

Discrepancy can be accounted for due to rounding.

So... am I missing something painfully obvious? (We all know it wouldn't be the first time.) Cuz you're making me think I'm smoking crack.

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I don't see anything wrong with those numbers. All they numbers match my spreadsheet. I'm not sure how someone could pump out 233 DPS without heavy procs or global damage, and the latter would be severely diminished by Claws dependence on damage boosts.

Maybe resist debuffs work in a way we don't understand, such that damage boosts are more effective than expected? Assuming he wqas using those.

Quick question; are you accounting for the 5% miss chance in these chains? The reason I ask is that missing a Follow Up (or the DB equivalent) is a substantial DPS loss.

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Sure the raw numbers may seem to suggest that the DPS is lowered, but come on, laser beams shoot out of your eyes. That's got to at least double those numbers.

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This.

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That looks correct to me, too.

Btw, if you wanted an explanation of where the formula came from, you can read Arcanaville's Guilde "How long do your attacks *really* take?" As usual, make sure you have your refreshments handy before you start reading, it's a doozie.

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Yeah I read it a while ago. Doesn't mean I remember the details of the formula though.

The reason I did a double take is for some reason when I did the calculator math the first time I screwed up somewhere and got 1.716 for Crane Kick and just assumed CAK would be even lower. My build was only getting Storm Kick down to 1.76 recharge and it was was driving me nuts. But if the real activation of both is 1.84 it means I can relax some recharge and get some more hit points / regen into Aid Self instead of Doctored Wounds.

God I hate Martial Arts sometimes.

So...

I entered the formula for Arcanatime into my scrapper DPA spreadsheet so I could have a handy reference with all this talk about attack chains. It is my understanding that the formula is this:

0.132 x ( ROUNDUP((Activation Time /0.132) +1) )

Where ROUNDUP rounds up to the nearest whole number.

With this formula I am showing that Crane Kick (1.67 Activation) and Crippling Axe Kick (1.6 Activation) both effective have an activation time of 1.848 when taking Arcanatime into account.

Is this correct?

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Quick questions for the masses, though, do the IO global damage buffs act in the same way as all the other buffs? Meaning all they do is add on another X% of base damage?

To put it another way, if I have 9% global damage buff and 100% from BU, it's still just Base*(1+1+.09) correct?


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This is correct. This is why +Damage is much less cool for primaries that use heavy damage buffs like Claws and Dual Blades.

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EDIT: Same goes for damage auras. If you want me to figure them in as well, (and the associated end suckage) it should be easy to do so.


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While I am not an interested in secondary damage auras because they are irrelevant to primary balance (they would add to any primary equally), I am interested in how Spines damage aura boosts it's single target and AoE output. We should be able to figure out the base DPS of the damage aura and add it to the DPA of the spine attacks, assuming the damage bonus slotted into the aura is roughly equivalent to the attacks themselves.

One interesting thing about attack chains:

I was working out the best MA attack chain for my main and I wanted (of course) to use Storm Kick as much as possible. So I was working on this chain to see if it was possible:

Storm Kick > Eagle's Claw > Storm Kick > Crane Kick.

The hardest thing about that chain is getting Crane Kick's recharge low enough to be smooth.

It turns out that to do that I'd have to change around my slotting, drop Assault, and virtually eliminate all my 31% global damage boost in favor of Recharge sets.

My current attack chain:

Thunder > Storm > Crippling > Thunder > Storm > Crane

With the +30% global damage is virtually identical in DPS, except Focus Chi recharges faster in the +Recharge build.

At what point does the +Recharge actually detract from your ability to get +Damage? Can people present higher attack chains based on +Damage?

Obviously this simply won't work for some builds. Claws and DB have built in damage buffs that degrade the meaningful effect of damage buffs and stack when +Recharge is added to the build. So for them recharge is king.

Also, a Regen build ultimately benefits from +Recharge, as does Soul Drain.

On the other hand +Damage would boost damage auras like /Fire, /Dark and Spines.

How about heavy hitting primaries like FM, MA, and Katana? Can you build better attack chains stacking +Damage over +Recharge?

I just started looking into it. The fact that Focus Chi cycles faster seems to indicate that +Recharge is better for MA (which makes me sad because my Natural build doesn't like the Hasten glow). I am wondering if this has to be the case.

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The others are mitigation attacks (except for ToF, of course), however they are all stackable, which makes them consistent and useful (or just consistently useful).

A breakdown of the numbers:

Touch of Fear puts a -11% tohit debuff for 20 seconds, with a 8 second base recharge. (Neglecting fear for its arguement of usefulness)

Parry/DA gives +15% defense for 10 seconds with a 3 second base recharge.

Cobra Strike gives a mag 3 stun for 12 seconds with a 20 second base recharge.

Cobra Strike is the only one of the three that gives you a longer recharge than duration of the effect. That means bosses can be taken out of commission with the power by itself in various cases. I agree that either giving it better damage or a shorter recharge would make it more useful.


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The quoted post explains it fairly well.

Out of the box Touch of Fear can negate a Lt. indefinitely. It also has a hefty ToHit debuff for things immune to fear. Cobra fully slotted stacks for only a second or two, and it doesn't have any secondary effect against hard targets.

Siphon Life basically negated the need to take Aid Self in high defense builds at no loss of DPS. That's huge.

Of course there is no direct correlation that makes comparison easy. I can only tell you from experience that other than shutting down toggled ToHit debuffs off Lt mobs, Cobra Strike is pretty useless, and even then it's questionable since it also has to hit through the debuff.

I have three MAs, and my MA/Dark with Obsidian Shield was specifically designed to use Obsidian Shield + Cobra + Eagle's Claw + Thunder Kick to keep enemies stunned out. After working up and testing that strategy against hard bosses and trying to keep them stunned out I determined that Air Superiority was better mitigation than the combination of all those stuns.

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This is all well and good for you guys who have been playing for awhile, but for the new guy (or returning guy) AE was great because it broke the market and the strangle hold the REAL farmers had on it. Now that its not so easy for me to get tickets I have to resort to the market but I never had a bank roll to begin with. Needless to say my toons are not tricked out with IO sets and probably never will.

Dump on the casual player more please? Let the asian (poor asians get a bad rap) continue farming your game and making cold hard cash. Good choice.

Farming wasn't affected by the AE nerf, everyone knows this right?

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Running normal story based non-farming AE missions I can get around 1500 tickets in an hour easy. That's 3 rare salvage. How much more casual do you want?

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~ Make Cobra Strike useful.

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I have a problem with this. cobra strike is useful.


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Fair enough.

Instead, I'll say this:

~ Make Cobra Strike on par with other mitigation powers like Touch of Fear, Siphon Life, and Parry/Divine Avalanche.