Starsman

In theory, if you can convince Synapse, you can add AoE formula obbeying damage to Stun, as long as it's locked behind a formula that justifies the "primary unconditional" use of the attack is either stun or single target damage.

It would be a single target attack that gets transformed into AoE with certain actions.

The cottage rule does not protect the AoE formula. The AoE formula on itself is another separate balance rule. So far, within that AoE formula, you can either extend the radius of WH a bit or increase damage by 18%.

Check Shadow Maul again. It only accept Melee AoE IO sets. That's what the cottage rule is getting in the way off right now: IO set requirement changes.

Sure, that would work. Would not help this set in question but it sounds like something they may accept to be 100% cottage rule safe.

Sort off. Both attacks may be seen as active mitigation themselves. At least Total Focus would. Another factor increasing the penalty for missing.

OK here are the issues as I see them:

AoE is extremely lacking. With tactics you may reach the potential damage of other low AoE damage sets like Stone Melee, but thats a bit of an issue: with work you can reach AoE capabilities of low performers? That's more than bit lame. AoE needs a direct solution.

Unfortunately, cottage rule prevents converting a power into AoE because it would force a change in IO slotting, something I think the devs are not willing to do (they may add slotting options, never change them.)

The other issue is more sublte. The cornerstone of the set's damage are two powers with extremely high damage and slow animations. You can easily waste 6 seconds in a no damage dump. Although the Streak Breaker will prevent you from missing both, Total Focus and Energy Transfer being used back to back with propper slotting, unless you are facing high defense foes.

The Streak Breaker is there to help such issues, but it's not that fair.

In a 6 second window, other sets are likely to land between 3 or 4 attacks. You need to have less than 60% tohit for that window of attacks to have no hits, otherwise the Streak Breaker makes sure at least one attack lands.

Only way the Streak Breaker will help the EM land some damage in such a window is if you have over 90% tohit chance on all attacks. Mind you, the attacks have very high inherent accuracy but I still feel this set rellies too muich on such slow attacks. During a single fight it can be much more disastrous for an EM. This may justify having an instant recharge where the attack can then, use a 1 second cast time.

The final issue is mostly just about frustration, with corpse blasting. Applying the above change to corpse blasting would also help with that frustration, others may also consider you more useful in the team.

The main reason not to tie up corpse blasting to the AoE buff is that it's extremely unlikely you will see corpse blasting solo, not unless there are some heavy hitting Ally NPCs or you running a damage aura and decide to queue one of these heavy hitters on an enemy that has a 1% health left.

Going back to the first issue, this means AoE has to be added to the set in some new mechanic. Since we can't just turn Stun in a cone or Targeted AoE, we may be able to use the Energy Load mechanic I mentioned earlier to conditionally turn it into an AoE. This would allow retaining Single Target Melee IO slotting.

Energy Load mechanic may also be usable for other interesting things like disabling Energy Transfer self damage or giving some other power also an energy burst capability, all of these consuming the energy load.

This would be a way to add AoE to the set without breaking cottage rules, and in a way it's usable solo or teamed.

Oh yea I assume all attacks have 95% damage enhancement, and 50% recharge (be it from slotting or IO bonuses is irrelevant.) Proper accuracy slotting for every attack to reach it's max 95% accuracy is expected but not explicitly quantified.

The goal of this chart was a "casual" build, not necesarely an SO only build.

I have another version with 250% recharge. Cant access it now to post a screengrab, since my workplace blocks Google Docs, but I am looking at it from my phone.

It stands at:

2.30 Stone Melee
2.10 Energy Melee
2.10 Fiery Melee
2.10 War Mace
2.00 Dark Melee
2.00 Super Strength
1.90 Battle Axe
1.70 Dual Blades
1.60 Ice Melee

The test in that chart is basically something very very similar to Arcanaville's Peak DR. It also incorporates Arcanaville. Other than Arcanatime, I designed this entirely independently and was actually a bit surprised the systems ended up being so similar.

Do note the version of Fire Melee you see there is the Tanker version. That version has fewer single target attacks and they dont tend to be extremely speedy ones, at that.

All sets that have it here, have a bit of a priority. They will attempt to accomodate the best DPA attacks they can for the enemy count they can (with 1 for ST and 16 for AoE, relevant for the blast version.)

Bigger priority is given to powers that add self damage, like Rage and Build Up. The window of time that Rage forces near-no damage is accounted for there too.

As I noted earlier, I do some special formula that adds an artificial enemy spacing. The goal is to determine AoE potential without herding or corner pulling. Basically, I give every critter a 7ft diameter of space, no shoulder to shoulder cramping. If you corner pull and cramp foes, Stone and Energy Melee end up with basically the same AoE score. This was done to quantify the advantage of larger radius, the 7ft may be overkill for melee but its also designed to make blasters huge radius AoE display their AoE superiority.

Dark Melee in the list is an interesting case. It has a large AoE score, but it's not because of direct AoE damage, but because the magnitude of Soul Drain can reach in larger spawns. So you may say technically Dark Melee IS the ST king, but only while in AoE situations.

This. Although every AT can have it's own pseudo-pet to have their own self-damage scale.

Because I have a very strong feeling there is somewhere a power that has delay and some conditional behavior. Cant remember an example right now, though, I just have a very strong feeling there is one. I'm re-building a database I used to have, once I get that finished I may be able to find out where.

The pet may be the one inflicting damage if it had to.

I am 90% sure it gets evaluated after the delay.

I don't think you will convince the devs that the set being slow paced is a valid issue to fix. You may, however, convince them that corpse blasting and missing on a set that puts so much damage on such slow attack, is a real issue.

I can think of a few "workarrounds" to this. One is adding a extremely small delay to all effects (including damage) that check for enemy health. An effect that occurs on a delay will check for the current target state, not the state at the time of activation.

Edit: as for balance in missing, I must look more into the idea, but the idea of these powers having increased base accuracy is in itself an acknoledgement it hurts much more to have them miss than having a regular attack miss. It's not just about wasted time per cast, but also endurance.

The reason Gloom can't scourge individual ticks is the way it's implemented. It's done with one big effect flaged as damage that gets delivered over time. The properties of such an effect are determined at first land.

Right now, this is how the scourge bit looks like in City of Data:
8 * 9.18 Negative damage every 0.5s over 3.6s

Now, it would be possible to change it to do this:

9.18 Negative damage
9.18 Negative damage after 0.5s delay
9.18 Negative damage after 1.0s delay
9.18 Negative damage after 1.5s delay
9.18 Negative damage after 2.0s delay
9.18 Negative damage after 2.5s delay
9.18 Negative damage after 3.0s delay
9.18 Negative damage after 3.5s delay

This version has a lot more checks on the server, but would result in a dynamic scourge effect that gets evaluated on every "tick".

The dev that said that was incorrect.

The damage formula is:
=((Recharge*0.16)+0.36)/(1 + 0.75 * Radius/5 - (0.011 * Radius/6) * (360 - Arc)/5)

This sets a 8ft radius attack with 14s recharge at 1.18. (1.181818181818181818181818181818181818[...] to be exact)

There are quite a few powers that have this mathamatical error, and I would not be shocked if a dev would think that was the case if they just grabbed a power like Whirling Hands and copy-pasted it.

1.15 is too low for an 8ft radius PBAoE, but seems to fit an 8.4ft radius PBAoE.

BTW, all this means a lot of the Whirling attacks are doing less damage than they should. Doing a quick check now on that too see how many we talking about.

I just looked at Burst and seems whoever was working on this realized it, because at 15s recharge, it has 1.25 ds damage, appropiate for the radius.

As for the extra range, it's 6.6ft longer than it should. Titan Weapon attacks tend to have between 2 and 3 extra feet per attack. My guess is the much larger bonus to radius is offset by requiring being inside Momentum to use it.

I ask you: do you like the sound of missing with either (TF or ET) resetting recharge and changing to super fast versions on the event of corpse blast or missing?

I think it may even be acceptable if it's a shared trait:

TF misses, TF recharge resets and you get to pick using fast TF or fast ET.
ET misses, ET recharge resets and you get to pick using fast TF or fast ET.

This is something that actually bothers me a lot. I understand there has to be a certain limit to how much damge a single attack can do, but I think a power that has it's critical portion artificially reduced this way should have an equally higher critical rate chance, so that, in average, the attack gets the same benefit out of the boost as the rest of the set's powers.

This is also, my understanding, something that is holding sets like Stone Melee and Energy Melee from going to scrappers. They dont want the sets doing too much damage in criticals but they Synapse seems to not be happy with the reduced critical solution as it stands either.

KinMele has that? As I said, got to catch up with the Post-GR sets. Was away for a while

That explains a bit! I have not leveled my Titan Weapons tank to get there yet. Have been slowly leveling a WP/Street Justice tank, holding XP turned off, attemtping to do as much Pretoria content as possible. Still ended missing two contacts... /sigh

Well, based off what I saw and posted in my last post, it does not seem to break the rules, other than having more radius than it should and, again, that being a set wide feature.

Bleeding DOT damage has always been considered bonus and not restricted by damage/recharge/radius formulas.

I reviewed the power (not the set as a whole yet) and it seems Whirling Smash does appropiate damage for a 14s recharge attack that has a 8.4ft radius: 1.15

Titan Weapons as a whole, though, gets bonus reach on all it's powers.

The power also gets an extra DOT, with an 85% chance of triggering that can cancel on miss (similar to Fire). This is a common secondary effect for blade attacks that represents bleeding.

Unlike other bleeding effects seen in Broad Sword and Katana's PBAoE, though, this one is toned down to cancel on miss and have only a 85% chance. Those other powers have a 100% chance to trigger.