Werner

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Seeing everyone else has been giving this a shot today, i'd love to see what my survivability is if you can Werner, thanks.

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I'm guessing the empty slot is for the other +3% defense unique? With that, 638. I'm not accounting for Against All Odds in any way, though, which could take you to 690 in ideal circumstances.

I'm currently actually playing the game for once. Be with you later.

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Do you figure in hitpoints in this number?

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Yes and no. We're looking at sustainable average incoming damage as if it comes as smoothly as possible with no spikes, or more accurately with the exact spikes to match your heals. At that point, hit points don't really matter directly. On the other hand, they matter a great deal indirectly, as they buff regeneration and some heals. Generally speaking, hit points have a linear effect on the number. Twice the hit points will give you roughly twice the number.

You're going to have about a 4/10 of a second gap in the chain. To pull off Head Splitter -> Disembowel -> Hack without gaps, Head Splitter needs to recharge in 3.56 seconds.

I wouldn't personally run around at 15% defense with Parry available and slotted, though. I'd chain Head Splitter -> Parry -> Disembowel -> Hack -> Parry. But that's a completely different build, as it only requires Head Splitter to recharge in 6.73 seconds.

With your stats, and if you're aiming primarily for DPS, I'd go with Head Splitter -> Hack -> Disembowel -> Parry -> Hack. Hack has enough speed for it, the DPS is only marginally lower than the chain you wanted with its gap, and you'll at least maintain a single Parry to help your defense. And then, since you're hitting Hack twice in the chain, I'd find a way to get the Achilles' Heel into it.

396

Now, I'm anticipating protest, but let's look at what the score means. In this case, it's JUST your build, and doesn't include inspiration use. Like BillZBubba, you skipped Aid Self on purpose. Unlike him, your regeneration is a very typical 17.6 hit points per second. So from an immortality line perspective, you can only afford to take 17.6 hit points per second of damage on average. Even with soft-capped defense, that's not a lot. Also, some of your serious advantages, like being able to run melee defense at 82%, have little meaning in PvE, where very few enemies have to-hit.

I think the majority of hard core PvE scrappers target challenges that disallow common tools, most typically inspirations and temporary powers. Even when allowed, such as for soloing AVs, we get more bragging rights out of doing it without. So you'll find that we often crank up the regeneration and/or add a heal. That results in a linear increase of the score. Twice the regeneration is twice the score. Aid Self would probably triple your score. Is it worth it for you? Probably not. That's likely just not how you play.

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OK BillZ, looks like 833 for your latest incarnation. That would shoot through the roof with Aid Self, you know.

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ehhhhh
so how much would it be if you factor in aidself say 39.9% heal and roughly 7.8 seconds recharge... (1780 HP 374%regen) those are my numbers, not quite at Billz range...

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Looks like you'd be at 2135, but you'd be standing there healing 1/3 of the time, and I'm assuming it doesn't get interrupted.

1025 with one target in range of Dark Regeneration, assuming you have all the accolades and perma Hasten (it isn't close). 1844 with two targets in range, 1925 with three or more targets in range. I'm not accounting for Oppressive Gloom, either positive or negative, or knockup/down, as already mentioned.

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Yeah, figured it'd be a hasten/no hasten thing instead of an overall average, for what you said =)

It's surprisingly low when not having psi damage tho, is that with one mob in Invincibility range or 10?

Psi damage kills Actin rather hilariously... The "dummy" boss in Arcana's challenge has killed me more often than the other mobs combined

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Looks like it was with 1 mob in range. I just used the settings you had when you posted. With saturated Invincibility, you're at 1557, and if I convert psionic to smashing/lethal, you hit 2342. Sweet!

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This looks like fun!

If you don't mind, Werner (how much work is this for you anyway?), how does Actin fare in there?

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Eh, it's a couple minutes in the spreadsheet as long as I've already done something similar enough to just plug in some numbers. It takes me a lot longer to post than to calculate.

Since I can't plug in Hasten properly yet, I can't do yours all that well. So again assuming perma Hasten, even if it isn't particularly realistic here, I'm calculating 1136. Mind you, psionic damage, even at 5% of overall damage, is pretty much killing your score. If I convert all psionic damage to smashing/lethal, for instance, your score climbs to 1509. So the lower score is just letting you know that you have an Achilles' heel, which is hardly news for Invuln.

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At first, I was a little disappointed with my 1 mob rating compared to Infiniti's Bladeslinger (score 2832), but I decided to reverse engineer his regen rate of 107 determining it to be either a) counting fully saturated RttC (1070% regen at the hp cap) or b) Aid Self (it's not indicated anywhere, but it's a possibility).

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While I can't say for sure, if it was Aid Self, it should have been indicated. That was almost certainly with fully saturated Rise to the Challenge. I think when doing Willpowers, I would first calculate with 1 target, then with 10. I didn't take an average, just looked at both scores. So the spreadsheet would end up showing a score for fully-saturated RttC.

I haven't actually plugged any tank builds in, but yeah, I'd expect them to blow scrappers away.

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I'm curious as to how you account for IH and MoG. Do you just figure out their average contribution over time? Or do you have some other method

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Yeah, since the base idea here is average survivability over time, yes, I just work out the average contribution over time. So for Instant Healing, what's the average additional healing it provides over time, with a little extra complexity if Dull Pain isn't permament. For Moment of Glory, I use a time-weighted average of resists and defense with it up and down. It would be better instead to use a time-weighted average of survivability with it up and down, and I'll probably change that at some point.

To explain that in a little more detail, say you're at 25% to all defense half the time, and some power puts you at 45% defense half the time, no resists, and you heal 60 hit points per second. I'd average to 35% defense, so 15% of attacks getting through, and 60/15% = 400, which is the score I'd give.

But let's look at it a little more realistically. Half of the time, we're at 25% defense, 25% of attacks getting through, 60/25% = 240. The other half of the time, we're at 45%, 5% of attacks getting through, 60/5% = 1200. Our average performance over time is actually (240 + 1200) / 2 = 720, not 400.

Now, I chose the example to exaggerate the problem, but in any case, it's something I should fix at some point.

And for simplicity, I assume that nobody ever heals to full or is injured to zero, so everything functions at 100% effectiveness, the rate of damage always precisely in balance with the rate of healing. That said, I put some numbers in that let you play with the effectiveness of the clicks, but I decided to always leave them at 100%.

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How does 1763 stack up against other SR builds?

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Well, I haven't actually done this for any large number of builds.

My DM/SR is at 2242 with the same assumption of 20% resistance from the scaling resists, but since I've tuned my characters partially based on the same assumptions that are baked into the spreadsheet, it stands to reason that my characters would pull off pretty high scores. It doesn't necessarily translate into any better in-game performance.

You have BillZBubba's Claws/SR at 833, but that's because he'd rather be dead than stop killing to hit Aid Self.

Powerforge is also Claws/SR, but he took Aid Self, and exactly doubles BillZBubba's score for 1666. But even then we're downplaying a couple major factors – movement and knockback. Movement + knockback helps Claws a whole lot for things like the RWZ challenge and its harder variants, but I don't really know how to account for that numerically. And movement + Aid Self helps a lot for AVs, where we DM/SRs kind of have to just stand there and duke it out with no relief from the heavy pounding. So we need a higher score to achieve the same results, again showing that the score isn't everything.

And it looks like that's all I have for SR builds that I've looked at.

1763, assuming you actually run Tough and assuming 20% from the scaling resists.

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Care running my latest DM/Regen build through your angry number machine?

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Assuming your build from 4/21/09 is still current, 904, but that's not including anything from your to hit debuffs.

And for fun, I plugged in your high def, high recharge concept build from 4/22/09, and got 1163.

I pretended you had perma Hasten in both since I haven't set up anything for Hasten yet, and since both were pretty close.

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I think Abyssal Seraphim would score a lowly 1736 on your scale. That's not counting AAO though, I couldn't quite decide on how to account for that. So the score is somewhere between 1736 and 1877. That's skipping Tough for you.


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Yeah, hard to say how to handle it, but I'll agree that you can as least define the boundaries of the score. I never worked out how to handle to hit debuffs either. I can't really count them as defense, because in most cases I care about they'll be heavily resisted. Fortunately, I'm soft-capped, so I didn't need to solve that one. But it'll matter for a lot of builds. But then do I need to bring attack chains into it? Ugh.

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Which brings me to another question, how do you split the damage types and positions?

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Assuming you were looking at my spreadsheet, the split is at the very top of the spreadsheet, and can be easily changed.

I split it up 70% melee, 20% ranged, 10% AoE, 30% smashing, 30% lethal, 10% energy, 10% negative, 8% fire, 5% cold, 5% psionic and 2% toxic. I then just calculate the combinations, but you could enter those separately too if desired since it turns it into a matrix. It doesn't account for non-positional attacks in any way, so there's another weakness that I should do something about, even if non-positional psi shows up as maybe 1% overall.

And those numbers don't come from anywhere except my own [censored]. I thought I saw some numbers recently from someone who did an actual study, and I told myself “I should plug those into my spreadsheet”, and then promptly didn't. Wonder where that was...

OK BillZ, looks like 833 for your latest incarnation. That would shoot through the roof with Aid Self, you know.

As further evidence that these numbers are approximate at best, there are my two mains. Sergei is a little more solid in more situations, but Werner has bigger spikes of performance to make up for it. Overall, they “feel” similarly powerful, even if they play quite differently.

I have Werner at 1845, and Sergei at 2242. On top of that, we would expect Werner to be overrated because he's Regen. So either these numbers have a pretty large margin of error, or I'm not very sensitive to differences in power, or quite possibly both.

Just an additional warning to anyone putting too much stock in the... uh... Wernerscore.

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I personally use 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and infinite to see how well it can take burst damage as well. Werners numbers will give regen sets a much higher rating that it deserves in my opinion, Willpower in particular.

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I partially agree with you. With identical numbers from my spreadsheet, the safest toon is the one that gets that number with the lowest regeneration, highest hit points, and highest resistance. The spikes of performance are smaller and make less difference on those toons – they're much closer to seeing average performance in game. It doesn't matter if a Regen on average can handle the damage if their hit points swing below 0 during that random walk And based on that, I actually think that Regen is the most overrated by my numbers, not Willpower, since Willpower gets a substantial chunk of mitigation from resistance, which smooths out the spikes somewhat.

However, I think something like running the analysis for a one minute time period won't fix it much. Yes, the Regen will start to look a little worse than before, because damage in excess of the immortality line will take out the Regen faster than sets based on defense and resistance. But it won't look ENOUGH worse, because I think the discreet effects, the spikes, are an even bigger factor in top end play.

That's part of why I prefer using it just to compare builds with the same or similar powers. But even then, I should keep in mind what the setup is overrating and underrating, lest I be pushed overly towards low hit points, high regeneration, and no defense or resistance.

So yeah, it's by no means perfect. Arcanaville has a better setup. I'm sure some other people do as well, and you might be one of them. It's just been good enough for my purposes.

I might want to look into the time periods like you have, though. It doesn't seem like it would be very difficult to add, and it might provide a little more insight.

Anyway, we all know what this means... BUFF REGEN!

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Well now I'm curious what Bill's Wernerscore is. Werner, what's the easiest format for you to use? Just totals for defense, dam-res, regen, hp?

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It can go a little further than that, so I prefer to just see the whole build (well, the link or data chunk). You can post it if it's public, or send it to me privately if not. Or you can try to figure out the spreadsheet at the link, but that's kind of like cruel and unusual punishment.

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Question, what is the survivability rating?

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A meaningless number that I totally make up every time someone asks for one?

The basic philosophy is very similar to Arcanaville's immortality line from this Ph.D. thesis. To quote, “the immortality line represents the maximum average damage rate sustainable indefinitely by the scrapper”. My scale is actually two times DPS. I'd cut it in half to be DPS, but I've been doing this for so long that I'd just confuse myself, even if it made it more clear for the rest of the world. Maybe I'll still do it that way some day.

So anyway, when I say something has a survivability score of 672, I'm basically saying that in a sense, the build can survive an average incoming DPS of 672/2 = 336 DPS.

There are some issues with the calculation. I assume some sort of average distribution of types and positions of attacks, which will obviously not match any one fight exactly. I assume that damage and regeneration/healing are steady, where in the game itself, they can both come in spikes, and this can significantly affect survivability. However, I don't have the time or inclination to go as far as Arcanaville has and write a simulator to better represent the spikiness of the data. And I don't have a good way to account for things like knockdown and knockback, so I ignore them. Characters with a lot of knockdown and knockback will be better than they appear on the number. I also don't know how to account for the scaling resistances of Super Reflexes. I think I've plugged in 20% for them. Don't remember.

Still, the spreadsheet accounts for the major things. It handles damage resistance and defense by damage type, and defense by position. It handles all of the Regen clicks including Moment of Glory, taking into account recharge times, how much they heal, how much they boost regeneration, how they overlap, and so on.

Although I often find myself doing it, I didn't really set it up to compare characters with different power sets. I set it up to compare characters with pretty much the same powers. Specifically, I've mostly used it while tuning my own characters.

A slightly out of date version of it is available at this link if anyone wants to study it in more detail, make changes, and so on. It's in open office format, but Excel should be able to handle it.

672

One thing about that number, though, is that it doesn't include wishy washy mitigation like knockdown and knockback. So if you're good with Shockwave and Focus, you'll perform better than a simple number like that indicates.

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I will correct you on the fact that the "known" scrappers haven't gone nuts on this set. And there is a reason. There is a rule of BS/DA that quite a few of those that are decked out tend to keep. We don't talk about it. Sure you can tweak using MIDs, but that will not compare to learning the set.

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Hee! Gotcha. So if I join the club, do I have to promise not to say anything about what I can accomplish with it?

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No promise required, but you may convert willingly to the code!

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(wringing hands with glee) Mwhahahahahahahah!

We love ya', Umbral.

Back on topic, OK, I'll try to give some quick and dirty thoughts on the build.

I'm a big fan of taking as few attacks as I can get away with, then focusing the build on keeping me alive and allowing me to spam those attacks. Still, without expensive IOs for recharge, you'll be limited in what you can do with an attack chain. So about the only thing I'd likely drop is Touch of Fear, and even then, people seem to love it. So who knows. Still, if an attack is worth having, it's usually worth 6 slotting. That you can't is another hint that you have too many.

In a normal build for normal content, I'd slot Siphon Life for damage over healing, particularly on a Regen.

I usually only put one endurance reducer in Tough and Weave. I know they're expensive, but your attacks are MORE expensive. If you have endurance trouble, cheap frankenslotting will do more for you than a couple slots in toggles ever will. Cheap frankenslotting is pretty much a good idea regardless.

I wouldn't put heal enhancers in Instant Healing. I mean, you can, if you're swimming in slots. But your underslotted attacks tell me that you aren't swimming in them.

If your going to use Blessing of the Zephyr, I'd pick up the third for the AoE defense. Or is the knockback protection one seriously expensive or something?

I'd want Health and Stamina. Regeneration is pretty low. Some great builds have low regeneration, but they typically are very high somewhere else, like defense. I think more regeneration might be a good idea in this case, though. Also, I personally prefer Stamina to Dark Consumption, though I haven't run the numbers to see which would actually serve you better on this build. Stamina would be cheaper on slots, though.

I'd slot Weave for some defense.

Don't slot Soul Drain for damage. Don't think of it as an attack. It's a buff, and the damage enhancement in it isn't helping the buff.

Slot Midnight Grasp for damage over immobilization. It's far too good of an attack to turn it into a control power (kind of like Siphon Life is too good of an attack to turn it into a heal unless you're seriously trying to push the envelope).

The main point of Luck of the Gambler is the +recharge IO. If you're not slotting that, and I assume you're not because of budget, then don't slot the set, particularly in Moment of Glory. Go with three recharges and call it good.

I'm not a fan of two travel powers unless you're using them as set mules for Blessing of the Zephyr. In this case you aren't, so I'd drop one or the other.

I'm not a fan of Revive, but lots of people swear by the self rezzes, so I guess it's more of a personal preference thing.

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My Attack chain:
Smite, Shadow Maul, Smite, Midnight grasp, Laser eyes, rinse repeat. If i'm willing to wait a fraction of a second I dont even need the laser eyes anymore.

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You can do a little better DPS than that for a fraction of the recharge, or somewhat better DPS for similar recharge, or a lot better DPS for way more recharge.

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Siphon life? Never needed it.

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Well, that's your problem. Siphon Life is now the third best attack for DPS, PLUS it's a heal. As far as never needing it, then you're not trying hard enough to get yourself killed.

Simply replacing Laser Beam Eyes with Siphon Life would raise your DPS about 8% and give you a self heal on top of that. It also wouldn't take any more recharge. Slightly less, actually. That's probably the best chain at that level of recharge.

For 28% more recharge, you can do Smite -> Shadow Punch -> Midnight Grasp -> Smite -> Shadow Punch -> Siphon Life. That would boost your DPS by about 17% compared to your original chain. Getting better from there just means dropping one or both Shadow Punches.

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Ditto the fighting pool.

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Ditto not trying hard enough to get yourself killed.

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I've never had trouble soloing anything on invinc.

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We on the scrapper forum kind of consider that like eating and breathing. Of COURSE you can solo on invincible! What scrapper can't?

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Have you ever considered checking your ego?

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Granted, you didn't deserve to be round-about-ly called an idiot. That said, Umbral knows what he's talking about, and it would be useful to listen to him if you can get past the aggressiveness (sorry, Umbral!). I do think he's trying to help. And I believe he's also concerned that you don't give poor advice based on things like not realizing that Siphon Life was buffed into the stratosphere not all that long ago. That's my concern as well.

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I will correct you on the fact that the "known" scrappers haven't gone nuts on this set. And there is a reason. There is a rule of BS/DA that quite a few of those that are decked out tend to keep. We don't talk about it. Sure you can tweak using MIDs, but that will not compare to learning the set.

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Hee! Gotcha. So if I join the club, do I have to promise not to say anything about what I can accomplish with it?