Obitus

I'd be fascinated to see those calculations.

I apologize if it wasn't clear, but I was talking about respec builds. I never ever skip the first tier attack when I'm leveling up. At level 22, I wouldn't expect you to have done so either.

That said, your third paragraph is about as good a justification to drop an attack as any, for a finalized build. You're saying you're starved for power slots.

I very much doubt that anyone -- not even the most dedicated powergamer -- adheres to a strict attack chain except in very rare circumstances. Quite apart from the robotic monotony of clicking buttons in a prescribed order, the game's content just isn't designed for that sort of gameplay.

Drawing up an attack chain can be useful, though. An attack chain can give you an idea of how much wiggle room you have with respect to power selection, slotting, and even give you an idea how comfortable you'll be spamming attacks randomly. I had a Tanker build, for example, with such a tight attack chain that I found it almost unplayable; almost any deviation resulted in a chorus of "power not ready" sound effects as I flailed about for an attack that wasn't recharging.

If I had been paying more attention to what the numbers were telling me before I rolled that build, I wouldn't have rolled it. For sorta the same reason, I'm staying away from Time Manipulation for the time being; when I look at the on-paper strengths of the set, I start drooling, but looking at the set on paper also tells me that I'd need to manage an uncomfortable (for me) number of clicks to maintain the huge numbers that draw me to the set in the first place.

More to the point of the thread, drawing up attack chains gives us a basis to compare different sets' damage capability. It ain't a perfect model, but it's better than looking at the crit damage of one attack and then proclaiming that, say, Scrapper Street Justice will pwn all. Specific claims require specific evidence.

The available evidence suggests otherwise. They do post announcements about scheduled maintenance, you know. And those announcements are still there.

How many scheduled downtimes have actually done that, though? I play (generally) off-peak in the United States, and I can count on one hand the number of times I remember seeing a downtime notice that extended past noon, EST. And no, a downtime that finishes at 6pm isn't peak hours.

If the servers go offline unexpectedly, that's unfortunate but it's a different subject. By definition, discrimination can't be accidental.

Pretty sure server downtimes haven't been consistently scheduled during your peak hours unless you live in the Hawaiian region of Europe. Or unless your definition of "peak play hours" coincides with business hours on weekdays.

During that 12-hour scheduled maintenance a couple of weeks ago, in fact, the complaint thread was still going long after the servers had come back up, and come back up early; AFAICT, the only thing that extended into the evening hours, GMT, was the forum whining.

There are valid complaints to be made, but stuff like this thread and the hysteria over downtimes that are designed to occur during off-peak times for NA and Europe diminish your arguments.

Yeah, all I know is that the consensus seemed to be 5-6 stacks coming out of the Beta, and then there was that 1-2 week period when Reactive turned any Rain power into a nuke -- so either the stack limit was much higher at some point by design, or the stack limit didn't function at all in Rain powers.

Anyway, this news dramatically changes some of my build theories. Well, ok, it changes some of my builds' on-paper capability; I'm not sure that it changes my options much.

Still think the Reactive DoT is better than the RES debuff, almost no matter what the numbers say about a hard-target situation. Through most content (in AoE attacks, against low-hp targets), even 2 max stacks of the DoT will make a much more noticeable difference. That's just me, though.

Thanks for the clarification.

Interesting. Good to know.

The reason to skip Initial Strike is pretty compelling; you're already looking at taking and enhancing 4 single-target attack powers, and 2 AoEs, just from your primary set. Anything you can do to give yourself a little more breathing room on a high-end build is worth the albeit unfortunate sacrifice of a cool-looking power.

Missing a combo builder on StJ is much more forgiving than missing any element of a Dual Blades combo. The difference between the tier 2 bonus and the tier 3 bonus isn't that big a deal; you'd probably be lowering your DPS anyway if you went out of your way to cram Initial in after every miss.

Heh, no I mean I wouldn't even trust my own subjective impressions about that comparison. Deciding what I prefer is subjective, but even subjective impressions can be skewed. If you're happy with your Brute then that's great; I don't think you can go wrong, honestly -- but your experiment may have given you a distorted impression of how the set would play on a Scrapper.

Just wanted to note that I typoed this chain in my spreadsheet (forgot the second Heavy Blow), so the quoted DPS number should be 144.2.

NP. I started typing that monstrous reply before BrandX and Giant responded to you, and then got distracted by other stuff and only came back to finish much later, so apologies if it seemed like I was piling on with the correction.

The Mids' database shows both the damage and RES debuffs for Rib Cracker at 5 seconds, but hey, these things can be wrong. I haven't checked, but I'm assuming City of Data doesn't have Street Justice yet. Did you pull that 8 second figure out of the in-game info?

Yeah, whether the debuff is 5 seconds or 8 seconds (see above), I think Rib Cracker is designed as a proactive defensive attack. The damage debuff is really really nice if you spam the power as often as you can, at least in theory (have to double-check to see if it stacks with itself).

The option to go into defensive mode is nice, but the number of viable attack options in the set are apt to give the powergamer fits; skipping Initial Strike wasn't a difficult decision for me, but I'm really struggling for something else to skip. Stylistically, I'm leaning towards Shin Breaker, but it does have the best non-finisher DPA available. Course, spammed Heavy Blow with procs is pretty good too.

Decisions, decisions. At least now I'm reasonably sure that I'm not going to hurt my DPS too terribly much if I tinker with the attack chain. Seems the set's real strength lies in situational burst damage anyway.

Eh, that's true, but it's a fairly minor point in the grand scheme of things. Basically, you're looking at a ~20% loss to the crit damage of one attack out of every four. In other words, the net 25% bonus for combo level 3 isn't counted in crit numbers, but combo level 3 requires you to use three builder attacks that aren't affected at all by the quirk you describe.

And since crit damage only applies about 10% of the time, um, yeah.

I'm not saying StJ is better on Scrappers; I'm just saying that we're talking about a tiny edge either way.

Also, to the poster you quoted: if you were experimenting with the set on low-level characters, it's worth noting that Brutes are far and away the most damaging AT in the game in the lower levels, because:

• AT damage scalars don't normalize until something like level 22.
• The low-level game is balanced around TOs.
• Fury functions exactly the same way at level 1 that it does at level 50.

A Brute is doing 2-3 times as much damage as just about anything else at the start and only gradually levels off as everyone approaches SO level. It's just a quirk of the AT. I'd take any subjective comparison with a grain of salt unless you compared the two at level 25+.

If you did compare them at higher levels, then great and more power to you; just thought I'd throw that explanation out there.

There are competing theories on that, and more than a couple of complaints besides.

But the simple answer is that Spinning Strike is a Targeted AoE; it just happens to be a targeted AoE with a very short (melee) range. If you wanna be paranoid, you can argue that the devs made it that way to penalize IO builds -- because PBAoE IO sets are generally better than TAoE IO sets.

If you wanna be positive, you can argue that the devs were doing us a favor by giving Spinning Strike better positional synergy with Sweeping Cross; in other words, because Spinning Strike centers on the target and not the caster, you can get full mileage out of its (relatively small) area if you position all of the targets in front of you, whereas a 6' PBAOE would require you to have some of the mobs behind you.

If you position yourself for optimal use of Sweeping Cross, you won't have to move much if at all to leverage Spinning Strike, and vice-versa.

Well I haven't spent a lot of time on it; I've just been kinda unimpressed by the numbers I'm seeing when I plug various attack chains in for my StJ builds. But for the sake of clarifying (both for myself and for anyone else who's interested) let's look at a typical high-end MA attack chain versus StJ's attacks (using Mids' numbers @ level 50):



Martial Arts:

• Storm Kick - 82.58 damage, 1.056s cast, 6s recharge, 7 end, 78.2 DPA
• Cobra Strike - 122.6 damage, 1.848s cast, 10s recharge, 10.19 end, 66.34 DPA
• Crippling Axe Kick - 132.6 damage, 1.848s cast, 11s recharge, 11.02 end, 71.75 DPA

Attack chain is Storm-Cobra-Storm-Crippling @ 72.37 DPS. That's base DPS, before considering enhancements, crits, procs, or what-have-you. With ~99% damage enhancement (3 level 50 IOs), the chain jumps to 141.12 DPS. With a 10% average crit rate, you're looking at 155.2 DPS, which is lower than I was getting the other day -- hm, ok, looks like Mids' is giving Storm Kick a 25% crit rate, which is almost certainly not correct. AFAIK, Storm has a 10% chance to crit on minions, and a 15% chance to crit on lieuts/bosses/etc. Anyway, if we take 15% for Storm Kick and 10% for the others, our average crit for the whole chain becomes 12.5%. 141.12 * 1.125 = 158.76 DPS.

(I was getting something like 178 DPS the other night w/ Mids' Storm Kick crit number, so my statement in the previous post may be totally off-base; we'll see!)

In order to run that chain, you'd need ~325% total recharge in Storm Kick (and less in the other two), which is pretty easy to do on an IO build, leaving you room to do all sorts of things with defensive bonuses.



Street Justice:

• Initial Strike - 52.55 damage, 1.056s cast, 3s recharge, 4.37 end, 49.7 DPA
• Heavy Blow - 72.57 damage, 1.32s cast, 5s recharge, 6.03 end, 54.9 DPA
• Sweeping Cross - 93.84 damage, 1.848s cast, 8s recharge, 8.53 end, 50.77 DPA
• Rib Cracker - 82.58 damage, 1.584s cast, 6s recharge, 6.86 end, 52.1 DPA
• Shin Breaker - 102.6 damage, 1.584s cast, 8s recharge, 11.86 end, 64.7 DPA
• Crushing Uppercut - 198.9 damage, 2.376s cast, 25s recharge, 14.35 end, 83.7 DPA

Now personally, I've been debating a couple of different attack chains for this set, but I'm not going to go into all of that because it's boring; suffice to say that normally attack chains are pretty straight-forward: you pick out the best DPA attacks available and try to make them chain together. With StJ, you're pulled in a number of different directions because of the combo system, the RES debuff in Rib Cracker, and the perhaps unusually diverse proc selection (Achilles' Heel in Shin Breaker, Armageddon and/or Fury of the Gladiator in Sweeping Cross).


Then you have the utter primacy of Crushing Uppercut, which means that you want ideally to structure the attack chain so that CU is cast almost as soon as it recharges; in other words, ideally the the length of the attack chain should be roughly equal to CU's cycle time (recharge + cast).

Anyway, what we see immediately is that the second chain you suggest is impossible: Rib-Shin-Initial-Crushing would require Crushing Uppercut to recharge in 1.584+1.584+1.056 = 4.224 seconds, which is lower than the minimum achievable cooldown of 5 seconds (25/5 = 5; the recharge cap is 500%).

The first chain you suggest, Rib-Heavy-Shin-Heavy-Crushing, is possible, but very very unlikely for any build to achieve on its lonesome. Crushing Uppercut will have to recharge in 5.808 seconds, which corresponds to 430% recharge in the power. The first 100% is free, and let's say the power's enhanced for 100%. Hasten's 70%. So you're gonna need to get about 160% in global recharge bonuses from IOs (and/or Spiritual Alpha, which at best will account for ~32% in a fully enhanced Crushing Uppercut).

The above chain would give you 153.71 DPS w/ ED-compliant damage slotting, the 10% crit rate, and the bonus combo damage for CU. Factoring in one copy of the Rib Cracker RES debuff would raise that value to 165.24 DPS.

My rule of thumb is that 400% recharge in any given power is about the practical limit I can expect to reach on most any IO build. YMMV, but just for argument's sake, my practical limit would put Crushing Uppercut at a recharge timer of 6.25 seconds. So if we take 400% recharge as the standard, and go with the above criteria of making CU available as often as possible (combo points be damned), we end up with something like:

Rib-Shin-Heavy-Rib-Crushing-pause 0.178 secs -> 148.3 DPS, 159.5 w/ Rib debuff.

If we cut out the pause by adding an extra Heavy Blow, we end up with Rib-Shin-Rib-Heavy-Crushing-Heavy -> 147.3 DPS, 158.3 DPS w/ RES debuff.

If we go with Giant2005's attack chain, we end up with Rib-Shin-Heavy-Crushing-Shin-Heavy -> 151.8 DPS, 163.2 w/ RES debuff. The caveat is that the chain's too long for (AFAIK) the Rib Cracker debuff to be permanent. It is 5 seconds long, isn't it? If we say the debuff has approximately half uptime, then we're looking at 151.8 * 1.0375 = 157.5 debuffed DPS.

Please's recharge-friendly chain gives us Heavy-Rib-Heavy-Sweeping-Heavy-Shin-Heavy-Crushing -> 147 DPS, with the same caveat as above, so about 3% higher with the Rib debuff.

Conclusion (also known as TL;DR): So, um, yeah. Looks like Street Justice is very ... er, modular for lack of a better word. All manner of different approaches end in basically the same place, unless I'm doing my math wrong (which is not at all unlikely).

And because I was using the wrong number for Storm Kick earlier, I had an inflated idea of what MA was capable of. My suspicion is that the greater availability of high-end procs on Street Justice will push it farther ahead; MA really only has one uber proc option (Hecatomb), whereas Street Justice could potentially have three purple damage procs in a singe-target chain (Armageddon, Hecatomb, Unbreakable Constraint) and two RES-debuff procs.

Regardless, I think it's fair to say that the Original Poster's estimation that Scrapper Street Justice would blow the doors off of everything else is highly exaggerated. It appears to be competitive among Scrapper Primaries for single-target DPS, but it isn't as good as the OP may think from just looking at Crushing Uppercut's ZOMG crit number.

At tier 4, 2/3rds of the Alpha enhancement ignores ED. At its most restrictive, ED reduces the value of your enhancement by 85%, so basically the Tier 4 Spiritual is, at worst, the equivalent of (45*0.66)+(45*0.34*0.15) = about 32% in global recharge. It can be worth significantly more in powers that are not fully enhanced for Recharge.

It's a pretty big deal. AFAIK, Mids' takes care of the calcs for you, though, so I wouldn't sweat it. If you have selected the appropriate Alpha boost in the Incarnate window and have the toggle set to ON, the numbers you're seeing for each power include the Alpha bonus.

Interesting. So Reactive's max stacks have been reduced from ... 5 or 6 down to 2?

"Crushing Uppercut's crit breaks a rule I don't remember set by a developer who's been gone for years."

"Super Strength and Gloom are awesome; therefore Street Justice sucks on Brutes."

"I don't have any evidence that Street Justice's ST DPS is awesome on a Scrapper, but it sure makes my complaints more dramatic if I pretend that I do."

(For what it's worth, my own at-a-glance calcs at this early date show that StJ's single-target DPS is mediocre on a Scrapper, well behind Martial Arts. When you toss in the combo bonuses and the RES debuff from Rib Cracker, you might be able to reach respectable levels, but it's not yet clear to me that fully leveraging the combo system is optimal on a high-end build; in other words, in order to make sure that Crushing Uppercut/Sweeping Cross are always at their full damage potential, you have to spend extra time on lower-DPA attacks. Anyway, the set is pretty clearly designed to strike a balance between single-target and AoE damage potential, and there it succeeds.)

(More to the point, Crushing Uppercut is awesomesauce, but one great-DPA attack doesn't necessarily make for great DPS.)

Absolutely. And even if we ignore Defiance, from what I've read of your Blaster, I get the impression that super-duper recharge is kind of her schtick anyway; if you really want to max recharge, then I think putting FF procs every where they'll fit is great. It certainly doesn't hurt.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure: I may be a little biased against the FF proc because when it first came out there was a forced cooldown on the proc effect; it could never be up for more than 5 seconds out of every 10 (on top of not stacking with itself). That's around the time I did most of my hands-on experimenting with it.

The OP has a very tight build though, and (s/he can correct me if I'm wrong) I don't think the goal of the build is to maximize recharge, per se. It seems like s/he was more interested in getting just enough recharge and happened to stumble onto the somewhat misleading way that Mids' handles FF procs, which led to a "hey, look at this" thread title.

Anyway, just wanted to clarify a bit: I maybe came off as a little too critical of the FF proc in my previous post. Slotting it in single-target attacks isn't the most efficient use of slots, but as long as you're aware of the trade offs there are no bad or wrong choices. In your case especially, it's safe to say you're aware of the trade offs.

On to the build stuff:

Ok, finally got a chance to go over the build, and -- keeping in mind that I haven't a whole lot of personal experience with Willpower or Street Justice, here's a suggested revision:

Defense: 45.5% S/L, 32.5% F/C, 45.6% E/N, 29.3% Psi
HP: (with all Accolades) 170.4%, or 2282
Regeneration: (with one foe in range of RttC) 64.1 HP/sec
Global Recharge: +65%
Accuracy: Enough to cap against +3s without using Tactics, which remains in the build as a set mule/emergency thing. Generally I don't sweat extreme DEF/ToHit debuff situations on characters that have access to a Build Up power; those situations are rare enough that I figure I can just pop a yellow or two if BU isn't enough to carry the day.

Basically, I lost a tiny smidge of standing Resistance (down 1.7% to S/L), and a fair bit of peak Resistance (w/ Strength of Will) for a little improvemet on just about everything else.

I'm still leveling up my Street Justice character and don't have a really good feel for the set, but you should be able to construct a seamless attack chain without Initial Strike pretty easily. What's interesting to me about Street Justice with respect to ST attack chains is that the combo-builder system can almost encourage sub-optimal attack selection. And because aesthetics are such a selling point of the set, I can see people purposely choosing a slightly less optimal attack chain just for the sake of looks.

(Personally, I'm not sure I want to use Shin Breaker yet; it's not bad looking, but I prefer all of the other attacks, and after years of playing MA in its various incarnations, I'm wary of building myself a StJ character that's too kick-heavy. YMMV.)

(What I really wish is that we could combine some MA moves with Spinning Strike and/or Crushing Uppercut. How cool would that be?)

Anywho, you should be end-sustainable for something like 20 minutes running just about any single-target attack chain I can conceive. If you wanna get spammy with the AoEs, you're gonna run yourself dry in like a minute and a half.

Yeah. For what it's worth, my criteria for using the Force Feedback proc in a given power are:

1.) Is it an AoE attack?
2.) Does it have a large area and (relatively) high target cap?
3.) Is it feasible/desirable to spam it?

Footstomp is the poster child, though I'm sure there are other good examples. Street Justice doesn't have anything like Footstomp; Spinning Strike is an awesome attack that takes the knockdown proc, but you're gonna have a hard time cramming ten targets into its much smaller area every time the power recharges. Still, Spinning Strike isn't a terrible place for the FF proc, if you're really jonesing for recharge.

Crushing Uppercut and Heavy Blow? They are terrible places for the FF proc. Oh, it'll fire off occasionally against single targets, but the over-time benefit of the FF proc in single-target attacks is pretty pathetic when weighed against other options (damage procs, or just other enhancement schemes in general).

As far as the rest of the build goes, I haven't looked over it very carefully, but I do question why you'd skip Fast Healing and why you'd take Body Mastery on a Willpower character. One of the really great perks of Willpower is that you already have very high endurance/health recovery; trying to tack extra onto those strengths is a valid approach, but it's rarely the most efficient one. More specifically, even if you are married to Body Mastery, I'd definitely skip Physical Perfection before I'd skip Fast Healing.

If you possibly can, Energy/Negative DEF would be nice to have higher. Fire/Cold is, in my experience, not worth trying to soft cap.

This ... concept build is now the ultimate power in the universe?

(I suggest we use it.)

I didn't assume that there's no ToHit roll because it doesn't appear in the combat log. That there is no ToHit roll is rather thoroughly demonstrated by the fact that I stood in front of a Tarantula Mistress for minutes at soft-capped DEF and she never missed.

The fact that the attack also doesn't appear in the combat log is suggestive (and possibly unintended), but it's not the entire basis for my conclusion.

Eh, the power probably should appear in the combat log, but after I thought about it, I saw no reason why the power shouldn't be auto-hit. There are more appropriate places to ask if you think the question's worth asking.

Heh, didn't realize this thread was that old until just now. Yeah, always imagined I could get the power to miss, too. I don't know if it was changed at some point or whether it was just because I rarely face Arachnos in small numbers (and there's so much pink crap flying around in large encounters that it's hard to know exactly what's going on).

Anyway, was disappointing to find out the truth.

Yes. I explicitly tested this a week ago. I had just retooled my Tanker build to incorporate Psi DEF in large part because of the Tarantula Mistress debuff. I stood in front of a single Tarantula Mistress Lieutenant for minutes on end, watching the combat log and monitoring my defense/buff bar. Like clockwork, every 20 seconds or so the TM would stop flailing at me with her metal arms long enough to apply the debuff. My PSI DEF was maxed. She never missed.

Mental Scramble doesn't even appear in the combat log. There is no ToHit roll.

The good news is that each Tarantula Mistress can only apply one instance of the debuff; they apparently only have enough recharge to use it once it expires. Also, the boss version of the Tarantula Mistress apparently doesn't have the power, according to CoD as of the last time I checked.

The only solutions are to kill the Lieutenant Tarantula Mistresses as fast as you can and/or pop Lucks.

Layering type-based DEF? I might be confusing what you're trying to say here, but to clarify: if an attack is dual-typed (say Smash/Energy), there is no benefit in having high DEF to both types. The higher value of your DEF applies; the lower value is ignored.

Other than that, yes, new-era Energy Aura is very nice. I had some fun drawing up a build that soft-caps Psi on top of everything else -- looking forward to playing some variation of that build when Street Justice comes out, in fact. And the extra +regen/end discount are really nice perks. In terms of pure (quantifiable) survivability though, EA seems to be basically a less-consistent version of SR, potentially stronger in some cases, potentially much weaker in others (IIRC less DEF-debuff resistance, no inherent DEF against Psi). If SR is a one-trick pony, then EA is a slightly more diverse but singularly less talented cousin.

Subjectively, and ignoring aesthetics, I'd rather play EA over SR these days, but that's a different discussion.

(Edited because I forgot EA has Toxic RES.)