Werner

Slightly higher DPS, but I don't think that's the main selling point. At a low level, it's a nice, spammable attack due to the quick recharge. At a higher level, it fits VERY nicely into a number of really good attack chains at various levels of recharge, and you can stick an Achilles' Heel in it. The good attack chains tend to use Gambler's Cut every other attack, which takes really good advantage of the Achilles' Heel proc.

Yeah, I'm 25, so I can't really check things either.

Well, I haven't TRIED slotting defense debuffs, but the power description says it's -7.5% defense, so I made the assumption. Let me go check in game.

BAH! Yeah, it won't let me slot for it, even though the power does it. I'm giving you bad advice. Still, great power. I'm bummed, though.

I hadn't heard about the crit boost. It's not displayed in the power description, but they could have missed updating the text.

Don't be swayed by text descriptions like "moderate smashing damage". Crippling Axe Kick is your second highest DPS attack. I don't consider the debuff particularly important except that it allows you to slot an Achilles' Heel proc. Personally, I'd drop Eagle's Claw - too long of an attack for the damage done for my taste. And don't use Boxing. Take it to get into Tough and Weave but don't slot or use it. It's not nearly as good as the attacks in your primary. You CAN use it as a set mule, but I only use set mules as a last resort.

And doing it with Katana with a DPS build would be equally challenging. If course, if you ONLY want to test DPS, get help from a Tank. I do think Katana/Fire has a good shot at very high DPS.

Well, I hate people, so I avoid pick up groups like the plague, and only team with one or two other people that I know. If I could solo or run tiny teams through task forces, I'd probably do a lot of them. As it is, I've done three EVER, and two of those were on the test server. I'd like to do them. Just not as much as I dislike having other people in my MMO.

DDR matters, but it matters MUCH less than defense, particularly with the ability to choose which enemy groups you spend most of your time fighting. I describe my soft-capped Katana/Dark (and accurately I believe) as my most survivable Scrapper, even though defense debuffs are a serious Achilles Heel. I monitor my defense and base defense. When base defense goes red, that's my trigger to VERY quickly do SOMETHING - either stacking more Divine Avalanche or popping one or more purples. It's manageable outside of extreme cases. I almost never die from cascading defense failure unless I'm intentionally practicing with cascading defense failure. But I won't deny that it's an issue that you have to have a way of addressing.

In multi-billion influence min/max builds, sure. That's where a lot of the vocal forum population spends their time, and I was one of the people complaining. But it's where almost nobody on average spends their time, so borders on irrelevant to the game overall.

Tough is very worth running. One thing SR needs for better survivability is to be able to better survive a string of bad luck. Tough helps in that department, as does adding hit points.

I assume we're talking about the resistance:defense ratio. As a rule of thumb, two points of resistance is "equal" to one point of defense. Like many rules of thumb, it's overly simplistic, usually slightly misleading, and in edge cases highly misleading. Still, it's probably better than knowing nothing at all when trying to make resistance vs. defense decisions. And frankly, I think the 45% number is even MORE benign. It might not be the whole picture, but if you know that one thing, even if you don't understand all the exceptions and subtleties, I think you're way ahead of most people.

But maybe I just haven't seen and I'm not guessing how rules of thumb like this are being misunderstood and abused.

Approach it in what regard? DPS? I haven't checked the numbers, but I'm guessing that a DPS-spec'd Katana/Electric would beat it. But it wouldn't approach the survivability of the BS/SD it was trying to compete with. But BS/SD doesn't approach the survivability of my Katana/Dark. But my Katana/Dark has horrible DPS since it's a pure survivability build. No combination is best. No combination is worst. Everything has pros and cons. Your "simple truth" isn't so simple.

But fine, to make things simple, I'll just agree that BS/SD is better than Katana/anything most of the time. But the consensus "Katana is numerically better than Broad Sword" is still correct most of the time. An exception doesn't disprove the rule, particularly when that exception doesn't even involve someone choosing between the two, since Katana/Shield Defense isn't allowed. It doesn't mean that someone should choose Broad Sword/Willpower over Katana/Willpower if all they care about are the numbers. It just means that we may want to mention BS/SD when having this discussion. But we DID mention it. Saying "Broad Sword is better than Katana" isn't very accurate, because the exception to that rule is "except for every secondary BUT Shield Defense when measuring damage in any way other than damage of the biggest attack".

If you mean "BS/SD is better than Katana", you could just stick with that, and probably very few people would argue with you. Unless you just like provoking arguments. I suppose it isn't strictly a bad thing to provoke this one, as it educates people at lot more than just a restated consensus.

He experimented with both. He liked BF > AS > SS > AS better. I've got it doing almost 10% more DPS than BF > SS > AS at +296% recharge on my old DPS template build. I'd only go BF > SS > AS if you had that sort of recharge and wanted the extra AoE damage, or if you were expecting a lot of speed boosts, in which case the longer gap of the chain ends up playing to your favor, and you can exceed the BF > AS > SS > AS chain when the boosts remove the gap.

The standard BF > Attack Vitals chain is plenty good unless you're shooting for a pylon record or something, though.

Back on topic, then. Scrappers are obsolete because they've taken up reading, which destroys scrapperlock. ClawsandEffect does it. I just started doing it in Praetoria. The end is nigh. Only Brutes can save us. (They can't read, right? )

Very nice summary.

Follow Up is a Claws attack that results in a short term buff to damage on later attacks. High rates of recharge can let you double stack the Follow Up buff on an entire attack chain for a significant boost to DPS. Some chains even triple-stack it on an attack, at least on paper. Or maybe I'm thinking Dual Blades and Blinding Feint... same idea, in any case. (Edit: Claws chain Follow Up -> Focus -> Slash can triple stack Follow Up on both Focus and Slash. Dual Blades chain Blinding Feint -> Sweeping Strike -> Ablating Strike can triple stack Blinding Feint on Sweeping Strike. Both require insane but achievable amounts of recharge to pull off the trick.) For DPS, it's a nice way to go. Build Up type powers are better for burst damage, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here. Claws doesn't rule the roost for DPS, but it can do a lot better than it may at first appear.

As far as attack animations following each other with no break, that's usually the best approach for high-DPS attack chains. I think the only exception for Scrappers is Broad Sword, which benefits from spamming its heavy hitters in such a way that there's a slight gap. That small amount of time spent doing no damage is more than made up for by the rest of the time spent doing better damage. Though it's also true that the attacks actually ALWAYS have a very small break between them, which is what "Arcanatime" is about - how we factor in that irreducible delay. A lot of us had realized that there was SOME delay, as things weren't working in game the way they did on paper, but we couldn't explain it adequately, and the times we assigned were at best educated guesses (I'd guessed 0.175 seconds myself, which was in the ballpark, but I wouldn't use it in my calculations because it made no sense). Arcanaville figured out what was happening and how to calculate the exact times involved (which vary), posted it, and we ended up calling it Arcanatime as a result. There have been hints that calculating required recharge might be a little more complicated than that still, some things not stacking quite as well as they should at very high rates of recharge, for instance. But there's been very little testing or theorizing, at least that I'm aware of. Hmmm, I seem to have taken a big detour. *chuckle*

(Edit: To bring up another subject relevant to DPS and the inadequacy of scanning the in-game real numbers, the Achilles' Heel proc, which can be used in defense debuffing powers, can be significantly leveraged in some attack chains on some primaries. Also the Fury of the Gladiator proc at a higher price point.)

(Edit: I also feel like mentioning Shred Monkey here. He was one of the people that had figured out there was a delay of some sort between attacks. Now me, since I couldn't explain it, I shrugged it off and pretended it wasn't there. Shred Monkey accepted that it must exist, planned a build and an attack chain around it, and put out DPS in the game that was shockingly high. Took us a long time to even figure out what he was doing, probably partially because at the time, what he was doing in the game was considered to be impossible, so we just weren't thinking in those terms.)

It doesn't say it to me. The Scrapper forum may be filled with number crunchers and experts on the sets, but we are not representative of the player base. I don't expect even the most experienced players to have even heard of Arcanatime, let alone understand how it affects the actual DPS you're going to see in the game, as an example. And unless you're an experienced Scrapper, I wouldn't expect you to know how Follow Up affects the overall DPS on a Claws scrapper, and how to optimize that effect. Or how the Dual Blades combo system works, and what the best combo is for DPS, and what attack chain you would use with that combo, or why that still isn't the top chain for Dual Blades DPS. It's all esoterica. Yes, it can be understood when explained, but it's not obvious on first reading, even with the "real numbers". And I think the "real numbers" in the game can easily lure people into thinking they understand how things work when they don't. While "real", they can be misleading, and there can be aspects of powers that are not easily grasped on initial viewing. Confusion is to be expected. Comprehension isn't.