Werner

Hmmm, maybe inf vs. prestige earning rates is one way to look at this. Ignoring my ebil marketeering income, I've probably made about 2.5 billion inf playing the game and selling drops. During the same period, it looks like I've earned almost exactly 8 million prestige. So my personal earning ratio is approximately 300:1 infrestige. Add in marketeering income, and suddenly it's more like 1000:1, and if I cared much about bases, it might be worth converting some of that unused inf to prestige.

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And as you said, there's an inf cap...the rich CAN'T get richer, they can only distribute their surplus wealth to the poor.

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The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah.

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nonsense.

the market is excellent at spreading wealth around.

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I have plenty of alts, so the influence cap is merely an annoyance, not a requirement to spend. I do probably spend half of what I make. But like Fulmens, it does seem like a lot of it is going to the other rich – purples probably represent half of my expenses, and with few exceptions, I use level 50 set IOs.

I'm not sure if it's a problem, though. I'll agree that the market is excellent at spreading ENOUGH wealth around. My poor toons don't feel poor the way they used to before the market. I get tons of influence from drops. I can usually afford everything I want on them while leveling up and without transferring influence. I'm sure some people want more than I do while leveling, but I don't really have much sympathy for their distress. As I'm leveling, I could afford a Ferrari, but am perfectly satisfied with a Toyota. If people who can only afford a Toyota feel they need a Ferrari, well, the secrets of infinite influence are available on this very forum.

If I'm representative of the entire scrapper population, then the most popular primaries are Katana and Broad Sword, with 22% of the scrapper population each, and the least popular primary is Martial Arts, which not a single person plays, despite forum claims to the contrary.

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A good portion of DM damage is smashing which, as you pointed out, is resisted 50%.

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Smite -> Midnight Grasp -> Smite -> Siphon Life is over 90% dark energy. Yet another thing that's so nice about that chain.

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On another note, my Shield/DM tanker could solo LR too.

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I'm working on one of those. I figure it'll do enough damage for all the scrapper-type challenges, while being significantly more survivable. How's it working for you? Sounds like it's working well?

My altitis may come to an end soonish, though. I've dinged a couple fifties, and have three or four more in the forties, maybe a couple thirties, and one lowbie. Then maybe I'll finally IO a couple of them out and see what they're capable of. Mwahahahahaha. <wrings hands>

One problem with inflation is that there's a 2 billion influence cap, which is less than is needed to IO out some toons these days. A simple solution to that is to just raise the cap, of course. Another problem is that it means your influence reserves dwindle in value over time. Yes, you could make some bets on which assets will appreciate, but it seems silly to me to have to tie up all of my influence in purples sitting in my base as a hedge against inflation. I'll do it if it gets bad enough, but most people won't. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, blah blah blah.

They're pretty equivalent overall.

Katana doesn't require as much recharge for the high DPS chains, and shorter attacks benefit more from procs, so it can be preferred by the min/maxers for that reason. And for normal play, The Lotus Drops is much faster and slightly more damaging than Whirling Sword, making it a superior AoE.

So I'd suggest Katana for the numbers, but they're close enough that I recommend just playing whichever seems more fun to you.

As far as secondary, no, there's no secondary that's absolutely better than Willpower. In fact, most secondaries are WORSE than Willpower up to level 20. Basically, you just have to keep going. Most scrappers are just another squishy through the lower levels. Katana/Willpower and Broad Sword/Willpower are actually about the most friendly sets around for people new to scrappers, and give up nothing on top end power.

I'd read this guide for more information. It's a Broad Sword/Willpower guide, but you can swap the powers one for one and do just fine with some minor slotting differences.

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Well, truth is I have rolled my first Redside toon ever and it's because of Going Rogue. Well, that and Bill's thread on DPS and attack chains had me really eyeballing Energy Melee.

I've always been rather envious of Brutes but I like heroes. I don't want to be a Bad Guy.

Funny thing though.

I discovered a whole new game. Will I bring this guy Blueside if I can? I'm not even positive I can say that now. Probably I will but I am having more fun with him Redside at the moment than I could ever have Blue. I know it. I've exhausted everything Blue that I want to do. I'm having the greatest time exploring all this "new" content.

Just don't tell anyone...

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What's this “content” thing you speak of? Does that have anything to do with... I think it's called... “reading”? I have two bad guys at 50 now, and I catch enough bad guy chatter to know the main story has something to do with me or someone being a destined one, but other than that, *shrug*. I just smash faces. It's what I do. It's what I love.

I might play a brute to bring him blue side. Brutes are good face smashers. But I have a tendency to constantly tab over to the forums or other stuff on the web in the middle of solo missions, which isn't very good for building and maintaining fury. As long as I can focus, though, fury doesn't seem to be a problem.

I'd bring my current brute blue side, except that, well, he's a bit of a psychopath. Probably wouldn't fit in. Wait, what am I saying, every character I play is a psychopath. “Go look for clues in the warehouse.” “Kill everyone in the warehouse! I'm on it! God, I LOVE my job!”

exactly how defense works

(Read until your eyes bleed and your brain turns to pudding, take a break, then read some more. )

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what the analysis doesnt show you is that (and correct me if i'm wrong) the harder the target ,the more often a scrapper will crit.

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Crits normalized at 7.5% to cover all minions, LT,s bosses, EBs, AVs, pylons, monsters, etc. From what I've been told, that number should probably be lower considering that the % of minions we face might be higher than all the rest. But since I don't know the facts on that, I stuck with 7.5% on crits.

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I always use the 10% chance of critical (except for attacks with a flat 15% chance). My reasoning is that I couldn't care less about my DPS vs. minions. Minions are for burst and AoE damage. But I think normalizing to 7.5% is just fine too. As long as you're consistent, I think anything from 5% to 10% is just fine.

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If a regular proc hits, you'll do 377 points. If you proc AND critical, you'll do 782 points.

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377*2=754... Am I missing something?

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Yes, that I'm retarded and don't know how to do 305 * 2 + 72 = 682, not 782. I was trying to show that procs aren't affected by critical hits, but instead I just showed that I need a calculator for simple math.

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QR
I'm currently fiddling around with tankers(mmm fire blast) but can't find a proper recharge formula.
Werner posted a chart with the =ROUND.UP(100*Recharge/Req.Rech;0)/100-1
but it's not working for me the numbers are way off when i check in mids and sometimes there negatives.
What am i doing wrong?

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The recharge formula the game uses is:

Final Recharge Time = Base Recharge Time / (1 + Recharge Buffs)

Now, for some math, using R(f) for final recharge, R(b) for base recharge, and Buffs for recharge buffs:

R(f) * (1 + Buff) = R(b)

R(f) - (R(f) * Buff)) = R(b)

R(f) * Buff = R(b) - R(f)

And, substituting things back in with the full name:

Recharge Buff (needed) = (Base Recharge Time - Final Recharge Time) / Final Recharge Time


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Continuing to simplify that equation:

Recharge Buff (needed) = Base Recharge Time / Final Recharge Time – 1

And if you want that in a whole percentage, you need to round up, because if you need 95.2% recharge, 95% won't do.

= roundup(Base Recharge Time / Final Recharge Time, 2 decimal positions) – 1

I can't remember why I did the *100 and /100 to get the 2 decimal positions rather than just specifying 2 decimal positions in the formula. I obviously knew that I could specify decimal positions, as I specified 0 explicitly. Perhaps I ran into a calculation error in Open Office. Perhaps I just didn't trust other people's approaches to rounding off decimal places after seeing a reporting package at work use binary floating point as its internal format for these calculations, which DOES lead to incorrect decimal results.

In any case, the formula I posted works just fine for me. I don't know why it wouldn't be working for you.

The bonus is to base damage, yes. If an attack does 100 points, and you have three SOs for +95% enhancement, and also +10% global damage bonus, the power does 205 points. When you hit Build Up (+100% damage), you'll do 305 points. If a regular proc hits, you'll do 377 points. If you proc AND critical, you'll do 782 points.

In my spreadsheet, I do all of that in one cell, and also take into account a 95% chance to hit. It would look like this outside of Build Up:

=95%*(100*(100%+95%+10%)*110%+20%*71.8)

And like this with Build Up active:

=95%*(100*(100%+95%+10%+100%)*110%+20%*71.8)

LOLZOMG!

I can't touch that. Best I've done is survive a few minutes while not really making a dent.

I worry about attack chains in actual play because I design my characters to do one thing, do it well, and do it repeatedly. I go with a minimum number of attacks, tune the recharge so that they're ready when needed in a good attack chain, and spend the rest of the build trying to stay alive. So do I actually use attack chains in regular play? Absolutely. If I hit my best attacks as soon at they're recharged, I AM running my attack chain.

It's not for everyone, of course. Most people like more attacks and get bored hitting the same three keys over and over again for hours on end. I appear to be immune to that particular type of boredom.

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Every 5 levels your cost of SO's goes up by about 30%. (number of slots goes up, cost of SO's goes up.)
They're both exponential but they're not even remotely matched. So you went from utterly starved for cash to totally rolling in it, in the good old days.

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What you described is not exponential. Going up by a (basically) consistent factor of 2.5 or 1.3 is a linear increase.

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It's exponential. Increasing by 30 each time is a linear increase. Increasing by 30% each time is an exponential increase. To make the example more obvious, assume that every 5 levels is goes up by 900%, which is the equivalent of x10. So at level 5, it's 1, at level 10, it's 10, at level 15, it's 100, at level 20, it's 1000. Exponential.

You can only get five of any one particular bonus. The build already has five 5% recharge bonuses. I'm not sure Touch of Death is the best remaining option unless it is six-slotted, but I wouldn't slot Crushing Impacts at this point.

I don't have any foolproof method. I stick all the primary attacks and sometimes pool attacks into the spreadsheet, and make notes about the secondary effects, AoE and so on. Then I try to assemble the pieces and see what I can come up with. You'll want the buffing powers like Follow Up. You'll want to look at the highest DPA attacks. You'll want to look at anything that can take an Achilles' Heel or Fury of the Gladiator.

Often, after a bit of playing, it will become pretty obvious what the best chain is and why it is. In other cases, there may be a few contenders, and you'll have to sort through them in more detail.

Mostly repeating what's already been said.

Super Reflexes is a terrible secondary at low levels. Although I made it to ten without too much trouble on my Claws/SR, I was chain dying through the teens. It's annoying, but it gets better. A LOT better.

Generally-accepted wisdom is to pump up your attacks first, and defenses later. Low level defenses help so little that you're better off just trying to kill the enemy quicker in most cases.

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Blinding Feint, then the Attack Vitals combo (Ablative, Vengeful, Sweeping) is a decent DPS chain that doesn't require a great deal of recharge. I'm not sure it's optimal...

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It's not. Blinding Feint -> Ablating Strike -> Sweeping Strike -> Ablating Strike tears it apart, at least at +280% recharge and properly-slotted. But Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals is the best fairly-easily-achieved DB DPS chain. It's the one I'm using in practice, and I slap a Power Slice on the end when Hasten is down.

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Oh btw the AV I was testing on... Ghost Widow. And I beat her!!!! I suppose a good amount of that was luck, one soul storm does more damage then I have hit points, but heck I'll take it. I know a lot of scrappers have a hard time with her, who thought a widow could do it.

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Fortunatas are obviously totally more powerful than scrappers in every possible way, and the devs need to fix that before GoRo hits!

<runs away cackling madly>

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I know most people around here are like "pics or it didn't happen" so i'll try a few more times today and post the appropriate proof if I get lucky again

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Actually, I think most people in the scrapper forum believe what other people say they accomplished unless it sounds completely implausible. Yeah, we like to post pics and videos, but I think it's more because we beaming with pride than that this forum has a "pics or it didn't happen" mentality. Anyway, grats! She's a hard one. I haven't beaten her in about 40 attempts.

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Werner!!!
You really need to clean up your mail box.

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Oh, is that why I was getting some blessed relief? (OK, OK, I'll fix it. Maybe tomorrow. )

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A heck with this...
I'm heading out to work so here...


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Looks very similar to my DPS template and the first Claws build that I calculated at 227 DPS, and you're putting out 228 DPS. You have a little more survivability, a little less recharge, and threw in Conserve Power. Maybe I should toss in Conserve Power. Maybe I should shoot for sustainable endurance use as one of my criteria on the DPS builds I'm comparing.

For reference, here's the current template I'm using.

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>| Copy &amp; Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|
|MxDz;1418;706;1412;HEX;|
|78DAA59349531A4114C77B8411641510716711A3888C58D99 7328720298D1802C45|
|3128B600B2835500C56B492433E404E594FB965FD08A99CF2 C12CF296C64A25C74C|
|C1FFD7FDFABD7E7FBA99C249CE23C4CBDB42F3DD69552D6BA F5CEB563B1DD975556|
|4AD61B65BEDFAE968FE61663DDFAE1D5B99F53224351C4288 B141E25E41B6A434A0|
|FA99153D0FE6E481342D69948F715692072D7922ADC0A6D99 05D69F68CC1C0556CB|
|75B46B923E5BE8786F966CF9496E555937AA3D734EB7E9A6D CBEABEEC5A8D6627BC|
|D169D68C5CB57B84B97B85AAD593DDD309B095826F13FDD1D 3870F3CA280118D22B|
|A70C1604D0CB9197E82DDCBF01126C2841DA8D25495C655C3 5C35CCE94E4E77F21E|
|41AEBA0F5536AED26C4E182C8AA44E48C08AAE56F4B4C0641 7A3052B0E32D8D71D8|
|B4318F22C315204DF3261224D983AA4AA43A81AE1DFA98F70 C8754098AA13668E18|
|B7000E9B98FB05D521A143999B6D087786321C10F22A67DE2 D32EBDBA55FA3C18A9|
|F7BD8FD5BD47DF41E639B102C10523B041BA407D44681080C 66456C9DBBDB6129A4|
|4E33C4A739C6A739C6A739CEA739CEA7B9C2A75982AAB0321 B66B34E0845D44691D|
|7D476EE0321F98670E12DE31DE33DE101544D2A67937C2D29 BE9620AC4CAB16D371|
|6A1180D0AC6A31CBB6E6D8728C2DC7D8729CBDC6D96B08AAA 2AA2AFA89BAC6BF111|
|63F33BE1096BF1232DF0915A84AA8AA043799E726F3BCFB3C F74AFAFE3C1713AA16|
|D4DD2FACF0EE06DFC42A6135CB58639CD2D5BFB009B1A46E7 329C76636189B84B53|
|CE32EE139A4A7557AFA2A85562EB2F74B8CCB9C7E8550064F 863A48E34CE0E51721|
|9455A12CFFD767EC7FBF9DDBFF448A76F5BA4244A348D47EF E06FFD7F3C333D867A|
|4E402ADA01441B45D1C3D42798CD32738AAE2E8294A0DA7FD 9F9E8153FF3534741D|
|E506CA4D945798E47083B8513C285E141F8A1F65142584328 E3285F211A5FF1B712|
|3F42C|
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|</pre><hr />

228 DPS, then, which is one better than I calculated for my DPS build, and mine didn't have sustainable endurance. Nice.

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I'm beginning to seriously doubt the belief that the two different types of DR debuff procs stack.

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Possible. I'd still calculate 195 DPS without the stacking, though.

But I think it's also likely that you aren't running a perma-Hasten, +22% global damage, Assault, chance for build up, double damage proc'd Follow Up and anything else silly I could do for DPS build.

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I think I'll be very interested in seeing what it and the gladiator will do for FU, Slash, Eviscerate.

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Not much. Here's what I have so far.

Claws:
227 DPS Follow Up -&gt; Focus -&gt; Slash
217 DPS Follow Up -&gt; Slash -&gt; Focus -&gt; Slash
201 DPS Follow Up -&gt; Slash -&gt; Eviscerate

Dual Blades:
241 DPS Blinding Feint -&gt; Ablating Strike -&gt; Sweeping Strike -&gt; Ablating Strike
226 DPS Blinding Feint -&gt; Sweeping Strike -&gt; Ablating Strike

Spreadsheet

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Bought all the necessary IOs on live. Copied to test.

Time to bring down pylon with FU, Slash, Evisc? 12:26

That's right: 12:26

Your Calculated DPS: 201
Actual DPS on first run: 179.212

Going for another run after a smoke and a beer.

Thing is, I'll probably keep this build because FU/Spin/Eviscerate is glorious farming damage.

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I'm guessing you didn't have the exact powers and slotting as the build in the spreadsheet with the 201 DPS. Not that you'd WANT that build, but a discrepancy of 22 DPS for a different build running the same chain isn't surprising. As I set it up, the build would only make it a little over two minutes before it burned out of endurance. I suppose a tray of blues would make it doable.

(edit: And mine would probably get slaughtered by the Pylon. It has soft-capped defenses, but no heal and nothing like your regeneration rate.)