Oedipus_Tex

I agree with you. Sonic's shields are not very good mitigation regardless. You end up with about 16% more resistance than Thermal brings, and Thermal needs to use its heals a lot. That 16% difference is usually one or two attacks from the enemy. Despite the way the graphics look, Sonic is not comparable to Force Field really at all in terms of mitigation. The slotting options are pretty weak too.

I disagree. Just because fighting some spawns is easier than fighting others doesn't mean that you don't actually have an easier time fighting one half of the spawns. You are basically arguing that if a player rips through one spawn and then attacks another that the damage they did to the spawn they just destroyed didn't actually happen because they can't immediately repeat it. In essence, that DPR is all that matters. But you don't "need" HoB to be recharged in order to attack any more than you'd need any other kind of attack. It certainly helps if it is recharged, but I don't see many people standing around waiting for it. I certainly don't. Energy Blast doesn't get an attack like this at all and is expected to perform. The fact that Pistols can pack this extra damage is an asset, not a detriment.

Anyway, my incomplete Pistol/Dark Corruptor's build's Hail of Bullets recharges in about 32 seconds, which is more or less every spawn. Compared to my plan for my Rifle/Cold Corruptor, it's neck to neck and even somewhat ahead in the nuke department because it does all of its damage in a burst during the opener instead of hitting 10 enemies at the start and then hitting others 15-20 seconds into the fight when it launches the nuke a second time.


You won't hear me arguing against RoA being amazing.

I agree that Hail of Bullets recharge time has to be considered. It should be part of the evaluation process because sustainable damage is something to be considered. However, it is not the whole picture. We cannot get to discard one part of the evaluation because another part renders a result we favor or disfavor.

As for AR vs DP, I'm continually flummoxed that folks (not just within this thread, but in general) calculate DPS down to the millisecond of Arcanatime but no one seems concerned that 10 enemies means 37% less damage than 16 before calculations even get started. Any comparison between powers has to address this. Powers with different target caps are not directly analagous. Everyone would (rightfully) cry foul if I said Dual Pistols had the best AoE based on the Piercing Round's base damage of 128, which it does to just 3 enemies. AR can hit 20 enemies for less damage in about the time DP can hit 16 for more. Which is better is subjective. If we say "well I don't fight that many enemies with AR because I can't hit them or survive against them" then you've actually taken a step back if we can find a DP who can.

IMO central to all of this the overuse of the generic term "damage." "Damage" in the context of a detailed discussion like this is similar to a word like "value" in an analysis of financial statements. If I tell you a business is "is valued at 5 million dollars" it matters whether we're talking about cash flow, liquid assets, long term assets, EBITDA, projected sales, or some combination of those things. This is the reason business financial statements contain documentation of their assumptions. It is not appropriate to boil everything down to 2 or 3 numbers and make all of our evaluations from there. And many times we actually take it a step further in our discussions, and in our discussion of powers basically do the same thing as when a financial analyst talks about a non-profit as if its goal was to make money, as we do when we bring Fire into the mix and pretend that damage/profit is the only consideration.

[EDIT: It occurred to me after the fact that one of the ways that Fire Blast should probably be analyzed, but seemingly rarely is, is with its bonus damage portion lopped off. That's because this extra damage supposedly is balanced to match the secondary effects of other sets. The resulting numbers would be entirely hypothetical, but would render a closer picture of intended balance, since secondary effects generally aren't reflected in damage sheets. I'm not advocating that this method replace standard analyses, but it possibly should be part of the overall evaluation package, in the same way financial advisors consider multiple financial statement documents in rendering an opinion.]

I missed this the first time. I'm really curious about it. The AoE is "only average" in what way? Compared to Energy Blast? Like the discussion about Full Auto this is extremely difficult to evaluate because it depends on whether you want to measure sustainable damage, burst damage, damage versus opportunity cost (i.e. damage output versus the need to "manage" side effects like knockback), and damage versus groups of various sizes. By having a crashless nuke at all I would argue the set does not do "only average" in at least some categories.

I feel sort of the same way, though I actually like Assault Rifle. And Radiation and Electric which could easily come up in these discussions.

But Psychic Blast... I don't think I could do it.

I agree. But that is an "if" statement that has to be made. In a discussion about damage we simply cannot gloss over the fact that Hail of Bullets hits 16 enemies and Full Auto hits 10 within a 20ft x 80ft cone. I like both of these powers, but comparing them side by side directly requires us to know what we're firing at. Builders of spreadsheets tend to ignore this distinction, which IMO is actually bigger than any issues of recharge, animation time, or other things builders tend to evaluate. The question of which is "better" is extremely complicated and impossible to resolve without knowing the circumstances of the fight. Meanwhile, that Assault Rifle neglects to include a Tier 3 blast at all makes direct set comparisons even more hazardous. Throw one difficult boss in the mix, or add a team, or spread the enemies out more, and the big picture becomes harder and harder to evaluate.

[EDIT: I agree about the soloing part. On a large team of 7 or 8 you are virtually guaranteed to have more than 10 enemies per standard spawn.]

The problem is it is impossible to enhance two different sets equally with set bonuses because they are not apples and apples. Even if you could, how the set performs under IOs would still be relevant discussion. It IS worth knowing, IMO, that if Assault Rifle and Dual Pistols are IOed with the same amounts of Recharge, AR's nuke's lead gets smaller as the Recharge gets bigger. (This fact is for some reason not generally well known but affects all powers on long recharges. People still tend to quote base recharge values, perhaps for dramatic impact.) Add to this the fact that some IO benefits are indirect. Radiation Blast, for example, benefits tremendously from the slotting Defense of some kind due to its inherent risky nature.

How can a power that only hits 10 targets eliminate 16 targets before there is an alpha?

We do that because that is how the set performs in reality. How the devs built it is actually irrelevant. I'd agree that looking at how the set performs in a variety of situations is paramount. But discarding experiences because it's not what the devs envisioned for the set is not something I'd want to do.

Full Auto is really hard to rate. It recharges twice as fast as Hail of Bullets, but hits 6 fewer enemies and (I think) animates longer. There is also no mitigation built into Full Auto. But it's range is enhanceable. It comes down to what you're shooting at, how many of them there are, where they are standing, and how often you need to repeat the action.

Recharge time itself is also challenging to rate because a Recharge time that is "twice as long" as another power drops in significance by approximately one half with lvl 50 Recharge IOs, and further with global Recharge IOs. That is, unslotted HoB vs Full Auto is a difference of 60 seconds, but with IOs its 30 seconds, and the numbers compress more and more with added Recharge. If either set ever hits a usefulness saturation point where it becomes more effective to hold off using the power a second time against a single group because saving it for the next group is a better option, the recharge numbers become even harder to compare.

Full Auto, and other large cones in general, have the added risk of accidentally aggroing enemies behind the intended victims, or bypassing intended targets altogether.

Rain of Fire takes 15 seconds to deliver its damage and allows enemies to run out of its area during that time. Fire Breath has a target cap of 10 and an oddly shaped area of effect. The comparison is not clear cut.

I agree with everything said here. I just want to add a special addendum RE: Dual Pistols, and balance in general.

Whether a set is good or bad depends on more than the set. It depends on the type of challenge a character is actually faced with in the context of the actual game. Dual Pistols charts somewhat poorly compared to other sets on spreadsheets for some of the reasons that have been brought up. However, it's not possible for us to make a spreadsheet showing how the set behaves in actual practice. This is for two reasons:

1) Some game challenges are more or less standard and unavoidable
2) The player can still choose to steer the character to whatever situation is most favorable (e.g. my "marginalized" Force Field Defender is the demi god of buffs when exemped to level 35 or 40)

There is no way to perfectly weigh 1) and 2) together. They contradict each other but are both true at the same time.

Some people approach the situation by creating categories. For example, "AoE Damage," "Single Target Damage," and "Soloability." But these categories are inherently misleading. Is AoE Damage as important as Single Target? Is one extremely powerful nuke better than a very strong attack chain? And what of categories we don't consider? If "Flexibility" were a category, we'd have Dual Pistols at the top and everything else in last place.

This isn't to say that balance is entirely subjective. Sometimes the numbers do tell a story about power. But you always have to make sure you're comparing similar things. This includes avoiding comparing sets piecemeal to each other instead of as full sets.

In the case of Dual Pistols, we have a crashless nuke. Only two other sets have this. One of the two nukes significantly outdamages Pistols'. The other nuke also does better damage, but has a cone shape and a target cap of 10. Which one wins? The answer is that it depends. Personally, I prefer any of the crashless nukes to any of the crashing ones, so the answer for me is that Dual Pistols is not in last place in this category but in third. In fact I would argue that all 3 of these sets should be removed from "nuke" discussions altogether and the nuke should be considered in the set's overall AoE damage category, because that's how the power is used.

The second thing is the general nature of knockback. I am not a fan of it in other blast sets because I feel like it limits the ability to supply consistent DPS. But Dual Pistols gets to turn it off if (many people would argue "when") it becomes a limitation.

Then there is the fact that Pistols sidesteps having a snipe power and replaces it with a power you might actually want to use. For some reason some people count this against Pistols. My opinion if we don't discredit Fire and Archery for the blasts that kind of suck, its unfair to do that to DP for a power that is actually somewhat viable.

While I can appreciate not wanting to derail the thread, the "debate" isn't a debate. It's just piling on about "healers" yet again, and didn't start with me. I responded to what was already stated (and is stated over and over on the boards in incredibly incendiary language without often enough being challenged).

I have to play devil's advocate here with the terminology.

5 of 9 powers in Empathy do nothing if people aren't taking damage. Three heal damage in a burst, one heals over time, and the final one heals someone back to life. The anti-mezz power Clear Mind is nearly textbook standard for video game healers except that it lasts a little while. Likewise the shield portion of the Fortitude buff. The only two powers remaining are garden variety "mana battery" powers, the offshoot being +Recharge.

This is all my way of saying that I have a problem with people who have a problem with the word "healer." It's just a word. And an apt one. Somehow it's been construed to mean "someone who only heals." Well since a tanker doesn't only tank and crowd control doesn't only control why do so many people clutch their pearls when talking about "healers" as if the term is uniquely awful?

You're right, my mistake.

However I am close to sure the devs aren't going to be buffing Shield Defense.

I'm pretty sure Hasten does root.