Reiska

Originally Posted by Synesence

It could use a damage increase. For 800 points, it should be better than average. It could use a small damage increase, but more importantly, and please, for the love of god...

Will someone fix the damage delay on Assassin's Staff?!?!

Originally Posted by PrincessDarkstar

Good performance is not really an opinion. It either works well or it doesn't.

Having said that I haven't played staff (No intention of either) but it sounds very middle of the road. I have noticed the sets that have a large following (Staff/ Dual Pistols/ Beast Mastery) tend to have flashy animations and below par damage, and the sets I didn't epect arriving (TW/ Street Justice) to have good damage.

So they obviously pick an audience when they design a set.

Originally Posted by Reppu

We're saying it's not. Quite the opposite.

Originally Posted by Thirty-Seven

This.

To me, it doesn't sound like this thread is giving credence to a buff for Staff... it sounds more like a needed nerf to StJ and Titan. But that's just me?

Originally Posted by Xyzor

Just throwing this out there, but the idea that in a game literally played by millions of people, with a full company of developers behind it, that you are, in any way, crucial to the end results of a power set, is incredibly arrogant and a bit silly.

Originally Posted by DreadShinobi

I have no doubt in my mind that the best users of staff fighting will be stalkers in terms of dps. Tankers will probably be the 2nd best users of staff due to being able to put out -40% res with mercurial blow, and having better +res and -res in SS and EotS respectively.

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle

Katana may perhaps have "fallen to average" in the esteem of some players, or even many players for all I know, but it still does everything that it ever has. It still has strong ST damage and excellent AOE plus a powerful defense buff as well as tons of -def which allows you to slot as many Achilles heels as you want. I can't stop you from regarding that as bad but I can deem you to be wrong.

I was pretty worried that street justice and particularly titan weapons were too strong. Titan weapons probably is too strong. My concerns have mostly been allayed by reality: where's the overwhelming TW majority? It lasted for the same amount of time that any new set craze does and now we're back to the status quo: most brutes are SS, TW is in there with "the rest." Does it matter if it's unbalanced if it isn't overrepresented?

Since we're on the subject, I feel that there are two major factors limiting the use of TW. The first is that it is conceptually very narrow. How many CoH players knew they wanted to make a character with a comically oversized hammer before that option was made available to them? The second issue is that the momentum mechanic is kind of annoying in my opinion. In reality it is the set's strength: even the slow versions of the attacks are very good, with momentum the set is ridiculous. In spite of that, it feels to me roughly equivalent to a set where I had no choice but to redraw every other attack. Assuming I'm even right about these flaws, does that mean it's fine that the set is numerically broken? That's a question that datamining can answer.
One of the features of modern sets that you skirted around is their versatility. Mace does decent damage with an essentially random array of control effects attached. That was one of the initial design strategies. Another set that was created using the same principle is martial arts. Martial arts may have been worse than mace, but over the years it has been buffed to the point where that could no longer be called the goal of its design. Now it is a high end single target set with good AOE (cool kid ATs only, sorry stalkers) and control that you can take your pick of and usually rely on.

Speaking of reliable secondary effects, let's look at katana and TW again. "TW makes katana look like junk," you may say, "it even appropriates its previously special trick of having a defense buff!" Yes and no. Defensive sweep is less plausible to fit into a good attack chain than divine avalanche. It has abysmal DPA if you use it to build momentum, but if you use it when you have momentum you're basically wasting a big chunk of your momentum. It is not desirable. Assuming the GC-GD-GC-SD chain, just replace one of the GCs with DA: the chain is fine, no annoyance incurred. More tellingly, though, DS simply has a much smaller defense buff than DA does. What that says to me is that the devs actually spent quite a bit of time working on the balance of a set that raised the eyebrows of many, myself included, with respect to the fact that it was pay-for.

Now, take staff. Does it have a "heavy hitter?" That depends on what you mean. Sky splitter hits plenty hard, but it does so relatively slowly. It's comparable to eviscerate. Rather than being a cone it has a slew of potential other effects tied to it. A good trade? I don't think it can be considered a trade. The set already contains a very good cone and pbaoe, plus a defensive cone that's closer to DA than it is to DS in terms of real utility.

The trade, if there is one, is losing build up in exchange for the forms. That's a trade I'd make any day of the week: I know how to get more damage on my scrappers. Starts with M, ends with usculature. The forms seem tailor-made to shore up the same kind of weaknesses as the alpha slot. You may be tempted to cry foul here; if you can build sets with BU to be fine with musculature, staff gains nothing at all! I don't think that's true.

First I will note that once you factor in the up-time and the animation time, BU isn't actually that much better than just running assault. At the high end the tohit bonus is its more unique trick, yet as we know that is often extraneous. For evidence that the devs agree, see recent sets: SJ an TW both get BUs that have token nerfs to their damage buff in exchange for something much more useful than that. Even if you like BU though, what are you getting instead?

Quite a lot! You have, at any time, the option of choosing an assault-style damage buff, a quickness-style recharge buff or far and away the most powerful, a global endurance discount. That effect is huge. It's huge while leveling, but it can also be huge at the high end depending on what you choose to do with it. The thing to note is that the level 3 buff is basically as powerful as cardiac or vigor. Try and sneeze at that.

Of course, those buffs aren't perma, are they. You cash them in by using one of the key powers in your single target chain or your best aoe. Again, yes and no. You only cash in your perfection if you're already at level 3. If you're already at level 3 then not only do those key powers benefit from the level 3 buff, they also gain additional damage and additional buffs or debuffs. If you're any lower they themselves build perfection and you can then fire the finisher that you hadn't just used as a builder, or you can continue with your chain and enjoy the full strength buff for its duration. That right there is staff's best trick and it is completely opaque unless you dig through the guts of the powers. It has versatility unlike any previous melee set in the game in a way that unfortunately means most people will probably never really understand it.

tl;dr: TW is overrated, staff is destined to forever be underrated. Those in the know will find a lot to like about it.

Originally Posted by B_L_Angel

Am I reading you correctly ?

Are you saying that people who don't play their characters to their best potential should do as well as people who do ?

If you want to play a blaster like a scrapper, just play a scrapper. Don't go complaining that a blaster isn't as good a scrapper as a scrapper.

Originally Posted by Rangle M. Down

For me, this is what JB's argument(s) come down too; Brutes are too much like Tanks at the Caps. So... instead of making Brutes less like Tanks at the caps, let's make Tanks more like Brutes at the caps... weeeeeee.....

Shall we continue to blur the lines more?

Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane

Scrappers have 1.46x more ST damage at cap than Tankers, if we factor in Bruising as 20% damage, (which it really isn't the same as). That's without factoring Scrapper Criticals. They also do 1.75x more AoE damage, again not factoring Criticals.

Tanker maxHP cap is 1.46x higher than a Scrapper.

Given that, Tankers and Scrappers are in line for ST damage with Bruising...until Criticals are taken into account. Further, Tankers lag behind proportionally for AoE damage.

However, Scrappers only have 75% damage resistance caps and Tankers have 90%, so Scrappers take 2.5x more damage per hit at the cap than Tankers. A 100 point attack will do 25 to a capped Scrapper but only 10 to a Tanker.


Agreeing so far?

Here's where you're probably not going to.
Those numbers don't tell the whole story.

There's four points I think that need to be taken into consideration that aren't usually.

Point #1: The first is that damage resistance and HP (and defense and regeneration) do not make up 100% of an AT's survivability and damage mitigation. Melee ATs get substantial damage mitigation from their attack power sets. If you disagree, look at Foot Stomp.

Given two identical attack power sets on a Scrapper and a Tanker, the damage mitigation that they get from them is probably identical.

The question is, what proportion of damage mitigation is gained from your attack set? I don't know, and it would vary from set to set. But even if it was a 80/20 split (80% from your defensive set/survival numbers and 20% from your attack set) that would put Scrapper survival potential in practice a lot closer to Tankers than the damage and HP and resistance caps alone would suggest.

Point #2: Dealing damage itself is a form of damage mitigation that improves survivability: If you kill the enemy before he can inflict damage and debuffs on you, you take less damage than if the fight was drawn out. So when Scrappers can kill faster than Tankers, that actually pushes Scrapper survivability up in practice. This can vary from enemy group to enemy group, but it's still something that needs to be taken into consideration.

Point #3: If you put a Scrapper and a Tanker side by side on a team, two things happen (or should happen). First, the Tanker takes the brunt of the incoming damage if he has aggro. He should have aggro, and if Scrappers are pulling aggro from Tankers, I agree that's a problem that should be looked at. What this means is when teamed, the Scrapper having less survivability than a Tanker means less because the Tanker is taking the heat. The Scrapper is in practice safer than his own numbers would allow him to be on his own. The other thing that happens is that the Tanker's Bruising more or less buffs the Scrapper's damage 1.2x. The net result is that the Scrapper is safer and doing more damage and the Tanker. When teamed, the Scrappers damage gap from the Tanker increases (because the Tanker is essentially buffing the damage the Scrapper does whenever they share a target), and the survivability gap decreases (because the Tanker is pulling the heat and protecting the Scrapper).

Point #4: Not all situations in the game require Tanker level survivability to survive. In those situations, the Scrapper having less survivability than a Tanker really doesn't penalize them any. Once the Scrappers and Tankers are above the survivability threshold for the same given situation, the Tanker having more survivability than the Scrapper becomes a moot point and doesn't serve him any. In a radio mission against x1+0 Council, chances are no Scrapper or Tanker is faceplanting. So why punish the Tanker with less damage for survivability edge that doesn't matter? That doesn't make sense. Situations like that happen enough that I think it should be taken into consideration, and they only happen more often the more survivability Scrappers are allowed to get (hello Hybrid Melee and Rebirth Destiny).

TLDR: Scrapper survivability in practice is higher than the resistance and HP numbers alone would suggest and Tankers having higher survivability than Scrappers is sometimes superfluous.


So, given those four points, plus the fact that Bruising still leaves a disproportional larger AoE damage gap, and that Scrappers get Criticals that also allow bonus for damage above their 500% damage cap, I think a case can be made for looking at the damage numbers for Tankers again and upping their damage cap. I apologize if you don't find my arguments coherent. I'm doing my best.



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Originally Posted by Reiska

Currently, Brutes have a 775% damage cap, Scrappers and Stalkers 500%, and Tankers 400%. When you apply this to each AT's base modifiers, you get the following damage scales with capped damage: Brute 5.8125, Scrapper 5.625, Stalker 5.000, Tanker 3.200.

Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane

No thanks.

-Brutes would still do 1.34x the ST (and 1.6x AoE) damage of Tankers at the cap while only having 10% less max HP.

-Tankers would still be getting screwed out of +damage buffs and Hybrid Assault.

-It would be giving Tankers higher damage out of the gate which is something I don't think should happen.


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Originally Posted by Another_Fan

You never claimed to be an expert on game theory ?

You didn't state that Kepler data mined his laws of motion ?

I suppose for you it must be difficult to keep your fabrications straight.

Originally Posted by DMystic

The ATIO adds 2/4(normal) and 3/6(superior)

so the crits become 7/14 and 8/16

Originally Posted by UberGuy

This analysis of comparing Brute damage to Scrapper damage was done to death some time back on the Scrapper forums when Fury was changed in I18. The conclusion was that Scrapper damage does indeed exceed Brute, both at the cap and general, once you include criticals. There are a lot of variables involved because the % chance of critical depends on what the Scrapper is fighting and sometimes what power they are using, but sensible weighted values had the Scrappers ahead.

The difference was not proportional to their survivability difference, if I recall correctly. There was not much campaigning for that to be the case.

The new Brute ATE proc and Scrapper ATE global likely calls for the non-capped analysis to be redone.

Originally Posted by stevie_james

Reiska, that was a very well written and informed post I would just like to ask a question related to it, though. It seems unfair to me to judge Brutes based on their damage cap and request it be nerfed when the AT's damage isn't static. It takes a fairly significant amount of building (and maintaining) to keep their damage comparable to a Scrapper and even more to surpass it.

I personally like the potential to do damage being higher but the damage, generally, remaining lower other than the occasional spike.

Those are just my two cents, though.

Originally Posted by Jibikao

War Mace is definitely one set that I'll play as Stalker!!!

Scrapper's StJ's ST damage may be a bit behind Stalker in terms of raw damage but I am sure Scrapper can make it up with a bit higher HP and more aoe damage from secondaries. I just don't see some people's point of view that just because Stalker is now doing similar damage as Scrapper, it needs to be nerfed.

Originally Posted by Jibikao

I am not sure if pylon test is the "true" measurement of how Scrapper VS Stalker. I know it's probably the best method we have but Stalker gets a lot more ST damage with party members around him, while Scrapper's aoe has greater potential on a larger team.

And I am also curious to find out if Scrapper's SJ is really that weaker than Stalker's.

Originally Posted by Lobster

It sounds like:

*The argument is that SJ is significantly better than other stalker primaries in pylon (single target sustained dps) tests.

Is it significantly outperforming scrapper single pylon results as well? By what kind of margin?

A) If it's not, then my initial thought is that other sets should be brought up to it and SJ left alone.

B) If it is out performing scrapper #s, then I'd have to see which sets and by what margins... I'm not convinced that's necessarily a bad thing, as long as the margin isn't huge. If it is pretty substantial, then I can see where the nerf argument is coming from.