SpittingTrashcan

Yeah, on retrospect, it's somewhat idiosyncratic. What I did was take the numbers from City of Data for each attack before multiplying by the final damage table, worked out the total for those, then multiplied by .8 for Dwarf and 1.2 for Nova to show the difference between their damage tables. To get actual damage numbers, divide the Dwarf damage numbers by .8 and then multiply by the damage of an unslotted Dwarf Smite at the level you're interested; to get Nova damage divide by 1.2 and multiply by the damage of Nova Blast. There are damage tables available in CoD but I'm not sure if they're up to date for Dwarf form.

I'm not entirely up on calculating the effect of Arcanatime, but it looks like that chain requires something on the order of 400% total recharge for Mire. That's around 100% from slotting, and 70% from perma-Hasten, plus... 130% from sets? Yeah, that's not realistic to balance around. It also doesn't do the Warshade as many favors as you might think when comparing to other ATs - with the budget to do that, some quite obscene things are possible elsewhere. But yes, the vast majority of Dwarf damage comes from saturating and self-stacking Mire, so getting the recharge on Mire to at least the point where each use can buff the next is a critical tipping point for Dwarf performance.

What I did: for each build, I took a recharge constant (1.95 for SO, 2.95 for IO) and applied it to the longest recharging power. That gave me a chain window within which to fit other attacks, which I then did so as to try to get the best damage out of the available time. Totaling up the damage for the chain got a bit complicated, due to the effect of number of enemies on both AoE DPS and self-buffs - Mire actually introduces a quadratic term in the damage-per-enemy equation.

Here's where I court controversy. The short answer here is that DPS is the deciding factor because Khelds don't have as much else going for them as you might think. The long answer takes some time to explain, which I don't have at the moment, but I'll see if I can get around to it.

I'm not sure how you got to "you must have breakfrees to drop out of Dwarf form" from what I've been saying, but I'll try to clarify. What I'm referring to here is a very specific scenario, what I've been calling the "crab trap". In this scenario, your opening salvo has failed to incapacitate one or more mezzing enemies, and they have hit you with a stun or hold. At that point, you have three options:
1. Wait for the mez to wear off. From a performance standpoint, this is unattractive for reasons that should be obvious.
2. Use a breakfree. This is the option which most ATs without always-on mez protection tend to use. For a Kheld, it is attractive because it gives you access to all your powers.
3. Go to Dwarf form. This seems like the obvious option that the archetype provides, so that you don't need to use breakfrees. But it is not, because it limits your strategic options - sometimes to the point where it is no longer actually possible to win, although it will take longer to lose.

The damage numbers I compiled show part of the problem, but they don't even show the worst part. When putting those attack chains together, I noticed that although the Dwarf's sustained damage numbers are about half that of the Nova's mire-sprint numbers, the endurance consumption actually increases. Now, keep in mind that many Warshade builds lean heavily on Stygian Circle for sustainability - they don't even come close to matching their end consumption and recovery. That means that once you commit to dwarfing it out, you are running against a hard deadline of your own endurance bar. So at the same time that you're dealing less damage, you need to be finishing the fight faster. This is a problem.

The other alternative, of course, is to dwarf and flee. This is also not optimal from a performance perspective. If a relatively frequently occurring scenario forces you to disengage and recover, you are never going to match other ATs' performance. I've come to see it as the characteristic play experience for Warshades - either you're flying high or you're coming to a screeching, painful halt. And if you're an optimist, it's easy to remember the good times and dismiss the effect of the rough patches. That's how we believed Blasters were doing fine. Sure they died a lot, but when they weren't eating floor they were dealing out such awesome damage that they must be keeping up! But they were not, and the data mining showed this.

If I am right about how Warshades are performing - and I have no guarantee that I am beyond personal experience and eyeballing some numbers on a spreadsheet - then only datamining at the dev level can show whether Warshades are sprinting fast enough to make up for the rough patches. What I can say is that on a personal, aesthetic level, I feel that the Warshade design makes a promise that it fails to deliver - the promise that it can be played, should one prefer, as 90% of a Scrapper. In fact, the numbers appear to show that this is a terrible plan, and the smart move is to treat Dwarf form as a team utility rather than a true combat stance.

The thing is, switching to human form requires not having a mez effect on you. Which requires breakfrees, to get it off, and purples, to keep it off. And if you had those, you didn't need to dwarf up in the first place. The issue with khelds is not soaking alpha - they have plenty of tools to blunt that, with shields and active mitigation - but what happens when a mezzing foe slips through. In that case, breakfrees > dwarf, which is classic Blaster tactics. Except not even Blasters have to do it anymore, what with Defiance and all. It'd be interesting to compare Dwarf DPS and mezzed Blaster DPS.

As for Dwarf fluffy-tanking, I've done it. As a fight goes long, though, the fluffies go away, either due to grabbing aggro (Dwarf taunt can be quite lacklustre sometimes!) or through expiring, and you're back down to slugging it out. And, for a Warshade in particular, you really don't want the fight to go long.

Anyway, some preliminary numbers for Warshades. These are expressed in DS, using a melee mod of .8 for Dwarves and a ranged mod of 1.2 for Novas - not the best way to do it, but at least it allows comparison within the set. For slotting, I'm going with the above suggestion of slotting 1.95 dam and rech for the SO build and adding another 1 rech for the high-power build - these numbers are extremely optimistic, especially for Dwarf, due to the brutal end sustainability issues.

SO Dwarf: Mire Strike Smite Strike Drain Strike Smite Strike: 11 seconds

n dps
1 1.19
3 1.59
5 1.99
10 2.98

IO Dwarf: Mire Smite Drain Smite Strike: 7.5 seconds

n dps
1 1.21
3 1.85
5 2.58
10 4.8

SO Nova: (Mire) Det Blast Bolt Em Blast Bolt: 11 seconds

n dps
1 1.39
3 2.64
5 4.08
10 8.46

IO Nova: (Mire) Det Blast Em Blast: 8 seconds

n dps
1 1.46
3 3.14
5 5.11
10 11.01

I wasn't exaggerating when I said that fighting a single foe in dwarf is an order of magnitude below peak performance. AoE sprints in Nova is clearly where the action is, and anything that keeps you from that is what will kill your performance dead. That includes: form switching, Stygian Circle, pet summoning (though they are well worth the time), and the dreaded crab trap. On the bright side, what with the AoEs providing most of the joy in Nova, you're at least not sacrificing much if you switch to Dwarf for a single hard target - you do relatively poor damage either way.

Some things that could be done to make this more accurate:
- Proc up Strike. There's probably better damage to be had via procs than in the attack itself - it's DM.Shadow Punch with the animation of SS.Punch, and that's terrible.
- Factor in endurance. The chains above are utterly unsustainable without some kind of endurance mitigation, which will either push down recharge or push up the slotting price. Probably not as big a deal for the Nova, who will be firing off the AoEs once, maybe twice, and then Stygian Circle to top up - but that's no way to survive in Dwarf.
- Add the pets. I'd do them myself but I had a sudden attack of the lazy.

Not that I would mind a buff to Whirling Hands, but doesn't Whirling Axe have exactly the same dam/end/rech/radius and lower DPA to boot?

Thanks. Math time!

/thread

Mole Machine.

It seems you have more axes to grind than the loading issue. I won't bother to argue with your contention that the foes are ridiculously powerful except to say that their statistical superiority is, as you note, to compensate for their idiocy - which means that it doesn't reflect well on you that you can't seem to out-think them.*

Here are some potential solutions to your immediate problem.
- Lower your difficulty. It would take a *lot* of spawns of -1/x0 enemies to chew through PFF.
- Reset the mission, returning the aggroed enemies to their spawn points.
- Don't summon pets before entering, as they may be aggroing enemies before you load, and they don't seem to be able to handle it.
- Purchase a stealth temp power and activate it before entering.
- If your load is less than a minute long, use several orange or purple inspirations.

If the map were actually set up so that it is not possible to enter without automatically aggroing multiple spawns, that would be a bug or design issue. Having run that map several times, the latest quite recently, I'm pretty sure this is not the case.

* Of course I would prefer encounters with a good scenario, balanced powers, and cunning AI. The problem is that not only are those more difficult to create than you seem to think, and not only would their creation take away developer time from the many other things required to create a sellable game, but I'm not even sure you'd actually like that. If enemies weren't so dumb as to have manageable aggro, herdable pathing behavior, limited perception, and random use of their powers, and instead prowled around maps looking for enemies, called for backup, applied focused fire to support characters from ambush positions... well, it'd be an interesting game, to be sure, but a very different one, and one in which I doubt you'd feel anything close to super-powerful.

I stand corrected. I just remember Zippyist's Golem and Tornado doing this a lot.

I also forgot about Plan A. Plan A: Hit it until it stops moving!

Defenders generally have a ranged attack chain. Claws scrappers cry if they can't reach out and Follow Up someone.

Which is not to say that I support the OP. You can take my Shockwave KB when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

All Life.

Though rumors abound, it's not entirely certain what induced the woman known as the All Life Assassin to throw away her humanity to become the perfect killing machine. Some say she is the result of a secret Vanguard program for the next generation supersoldier; others call her an intelligence agency project gone rogue. What is known is that her augmentations don't stop at the concealed ceramic blades in her arms. Radical neurosurgery has sped up her perception and reaction times to millionths of a second, giving her eons of perceived time to assess and analyze combat situations. The most fearsome augmentation, and the one that gives her her name, is the dedicated stress analysis computer that nestles against her brainstem. Its sophisticated algorithms allow it to sense and highlight the key weak points of any structure or organism. And with its help, the All Life Assassin can kill or destroy anything.

It's just unfortunate that the procedure also methodically stripped her of anything resembling a conscience.

As long as your Domination bar is above 90% and the Domination power is recharged, Domination can be activated. If the bar then drops below 90% due to decay, you will not be able to activate Domination until it gets back above 90%.