Werner

The only skippable power is Elude. If you're soft capped, it does almost nothing for you in PvE. I also took it to see what it was like, just in case the numbers didn't tell the whole story, but I hated it. A lot. Still, you can do like I did and try it out if you want. Some people like it.

On a lowbie Katana, I'd take at least Sting of the Wasp, Gambler's Cut and Divine Avalanche. At a high level, you'll probably respec out of Divine Avalanche, but leveling without it would be a pain. Divine Avalanche every 10 seconds plus slotted Focused Fighting and Dodge will get your melee defense to the magic 45% mark, making you pretty unkillable for a lowbie. You'll want Build Up when you can afford to fit it in. If you want to do AoE, you'll want to pick up Flashing Steel and/or The Lotus Drops. At a higher level, Soaring Dragon and Golden Dragonfly are your key attacks.

From your secondary, you're taking everything except Elude. Three defense in the passives, three defense one endurance reduce in the toggles. Practiced Brawler takes two recharges. Run speed or flight speed in Quickness.

From pools, you're trying to flesh out your defense, plus get yourself some resistance. I'd take Combat Jumping or Hover, Tough and Weave, and Maneuvers. In your case, you want Stealth, so take that instead of the Leadership pool. No problem. Fitness to power everything. I'd slot Tough with one endurance three resist, Weave with one endurance three defense, Combat Jumping or Hover with one defense. I'd just stick an endurance reducer in Stealth, and not bother slotting it for defense since the defensive values is so low.

I would buy a Steadfast Protection unique as soon as I had Tough and could afford it. I would buy a Kismet unique as soon as I could afford it as well. Since you want stealth, I'd buy a Celerity +stealth and stick it in Sprint. Quickly toggle Sprint on and off for two minutes of being extra stealthy. In the mid to upper 30s, I would cheapo frankenslot my attacks. And that's enough IOs. You'll likely have influence laying around by then with more pouring in all the time, though, so it wouldn't hurt to spend some of it on defense set bonuses until you hit 45% to all positions. For instance, slot Build Up with a Gaussian set.

LOL, 1/10th current damage? So, a Scrapper "nuke" on a 1 minute timer that does 14 points of base damage at level 50?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!

Uh, no.

Well, thanks, and I'm sorry if I was a jerk. My intentions were good - I want people to get good advice. I believe those were your exact same intentions.

It's a filthy, filthy habit. I should try to wean myself off of it. Or maybe cold turkey.

I suppose whether Katana/Willpower starts off slowly or not can be a matter of opinion. "Slowly" is a very wishy-washy term. You may have meant in general, in which case I could almost agree, because most Scrappers seem to me to start off fairly slowly. But I think what's relevant to the topic at hand is whether Katana/Willpower starts off more slowly or more quickly than other strong combinations. Even then, comparing the slowness of secondaries starting off is pretty vague. But I would say that CONSENSUS is that Katana starts off pretty strong due to Divine Avalanche giving you a massive boost to survivability at an early level. Gambler's Cut recharges quickly. You can build a seamless attack chain at a fairly low level if you try. Not that you should, but you can. Your first few secondary powers give you resistance, hit points and regeneration, which tend to be much more useful at a low level than defense, which is what some of the secondaries give you. You get your status protection at level 10. So do some other secondaries, but many have to wait longer than that, with level 16 being fairly typical, or needing to get a lot of slots or a higher level for it to work like in Super Reflexes or Shield Defense. So I'd say Katana/Willpower starts off quite fast compared to the average Scrapper. Not a huge difference, but a difference. But again, "slow" is a very nebulous concept, so technically, yes, I suppose I'd have to admit that you aren't "wrong" in a fundamental sense. You're just "wrong" in the sense of "that's not the experience of the majority of people playing the set". Doesn't mean it wasn't YOUR experience. It's just not the normal experience. Or perhaps I should say not the normal experience of people posting on the forum. It's possible that our experience is not typical. I suspect it IS typical, but I can't be certain.

A question like "Does Broad Sword do better or worse damage than Katana?" has a correct answer. This isn't a matter of opinion. It's not a matter of how much damage you FEEL like you're doing after playing both sets to 50. It's a question that can be answered numerically. Katana is better. There may be islands of exception at some levels of recharge, and certainly chosen attack strings can make a difference, like a good Broad Sword attack string will beat a bad Katana attack string. But generally speaking, in nearly all cases, Katana does better DPS. Broad Sword probably gets a slight edge for Burst damage, if by burst we mean just the first few seconds, so I suppose there's that, though I don't think it's an important or large advantage. They'll do similar AoE, but Katana will do it with less time spent on AoE attacks. Again, it's slightly better.

It might be the wrong assumption in this particular case, but the general "rule" on the Scrapper forum is that unless you specify PvP, you're talking about PvE. Also in support of that assumption in this particular case, Dark Melee/Super Reflexes and Katana/Willpower are both great PvE combinations, but I believe (I don't PvP) they are pretty sucky PvP combinations. So I'm guessing that the PvP portion of this isn't very relevant.

I don't have experience with Spines/Willpower. I will guess that it IS A beast in PvE. However, it's a beast in the "survives well enough and puts out very good AoE damage" sense, not in the "it's a hard core tank build" sense. Maybe with enough IOs. But I'm pretty confident we could make IOd builds to trounce it in the survivability department using other combinations. And without IOs, Katana/Willpower is simply going to be more survivable due to the contribution of Divine Avalanche. It won't do nearly the AoE damage as Spines/Willpower, but that wasn't what the OP was asking for.

Probably about average. It's not getting much help from the primary. Willpower is a good from the start, but without much help from the primary, yeah, I'd probably describe it as starting out squishy. On the other hand, MOST Scrappers start out squishy, so I'm not sure this means much. But fine, you're right, Spines/Willpower starts off squishy. Not everything you said was wrong.

Much more for a Scrapper than what? Tankers and Brutes don't get Spines. As best I can tell, only Stalkers get Spines/Willpower in addition to Scrappers. I confess to having never played a Stalker or number crunched Stalker survivability. About all I know is that they have fewer hit points (though apparently not by a wide margin). Maybe the hiding and placate and all that makes up for it, so a Spines/Willpower Stalker is less squishy than the equivalent Scrapper? Certainly possible for all I know.

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Now, you're probably looking at the Scrapper forum and thinking, "what a bunch of dicks". But I can tell you that we only very rarely act this way. And we act this way when someone presents misinformation, we correct it, and then they continue insisting that they're right. We're just not fans of misinforming people who are asking questions. We won't just go "oh, OK" when someone is wrong, just because they're really really sure they're right, and really really strident about saying so.

Oh, you posted again. Let's see...

You're RIGHT! Some players DO have it in their heads they are always right. We have it in our heads that we're right in this particular case because we have all these FACTS and DATA to back up what we're saying. You have it in your head that you're right because... uh... because you've played the game a bunch? Because it FEELS like you're doing more damage with Broad Sword? Because your Spines/Willpower FEELS really survivable to you? Something like that?

You could have turned this into a learning experience for yourself. Your ego won't let you. That's fine. No loss for us, only for you.

Yeah, sounds like we AREN'T disagreeing, and merely have different ideas of how much "working as intended" implies. Yes, I'm sure the devs intend that powers and power sets be fun to play, balanced, pretty to look at, and all sort of good things. In that sense, of COURSE that something isn't working as intended is a problem.

I'm just not assigning any of those characteristics directly to "working as intended". I'm keeping them on a separate list. In which case I guess it means we agree on the meat of the matter, and just disagree on a trivial point of where we pile particular beans as we're counting them.

If I were Castle, and did have time to look into this, I'd probably do a quick comparison of Shield Charge as it exists to Shield Charge as I intended to similar powers and any relevant power balancing equations they use. I'd give a quick glance over the other powers in the set to make sure they were all what I intended and were reasonably balanced. Then, assuming my originally-intended version was indeed properly balanced, I'd nerf/bugfix away.

Nobody has ever accused me of being particularly sensitive to what my users tell me they WANT, though. I'm a software designer. Part of my JOB is to look much deeper than what users tell me they WANT, and try to figure out what they NEED. Surprisingly often the two are in conflict. If so, I have enough clout that I can often get away with giving them what I think they need instead of what they've asked for. And usually, this works out for the best.

So yeah, if I were Castle, I'd ignore all the ******** and moaning and just work on the facts and what I personally believed was best for the game. I'd swing the nerf bat without hesitation if I thought it would make the game better overall (though keeping in mind that other things being equal, a game with a lot of nerfbat swinging is, overall, worse than one without it), and I'd sleep just fine at night no matter how many forum threads and private messages told me I was a jerk.

No, I'd argue that "not working as intended" is STILL an irrelevant factoid.

"Not balanced against similar powers" is the relevant fact here, even if the two may go hand in hand in this case, as Castle almost certainly intended that Shield Charge be balanced against similar powers based on his reaction. Balance, in general, is to be sought after, as it promotes diversity and decreases power envy. Diversity is good. Avoiding as much power envy as is practical is good, except to the extent that it makes people want to level up new characters ("Hey! That looks FUN!).

See Frosticus for some other valid reasons for supporting a nerf. I still say "oops" is not a valid reason.

Of course. The things that I care about won't be what most people care about. You weren't responding to me, but it was kind of responding to my "argument". I'm just saying why I personally dislike this change. I am not suggesting that balance isn't important too, or that games should only buff instead of nerf. I'm just saying why I'm unhappy. Sounds like some other powergamers are unhappy for similar reasons. We are of course a minority. But that doesn't then imply that the majority like nerfs to their favorite powers, even when the REASON it's a favorite power turns out to be that the power is bugged.

Yes, the general trend over the past few years has been significant buffing. That doesn't make me happy either. I like challenge, and I don't like change. Buffing reduces challenge and adds change. At least they added the difficulty slider so that the game isn't even more of a cakewalk as a result. I think that +4x8 at current power levels is harder than invincible at the old power levels. So at least there's that.

For that matter, think of what I'm doing. I'll play +4x8. I'll do certain difficult fights without inspirations. I used to run a character on invincible with all toggles off. I nerf myself or buff the bad guys all the time. I'm not upset by nerfs from a "oh noes I is weak now!" perspective.

It is indeed pure semantics to me. My in game experience will be the same whether the devs originally intended this power level, then changed their minds ("nerf"), or if it was a mistake, and now they're fixing it ("bug fix"). What someone else INTENDED doesn't change what IS, and doesn't alter my in-game experience in the slightest.

"Not working as intended" is an irrelevant factoid, an invalid reason to make a change. You make a change because you believe the game will be better overall if you make that change. You might argue, for instance, that the displeasure of all of the people with lesser nukes greatly outweighs the pleasure of the people with this one better nuke, and that overall satisfaction with the game will therefore go up if Shield Charge is adjusted downwards. Quite possibly true, and even if not, it was still a good line of reasoning to consider, a good argument. "Oops" is not an argument.

Come close?

Here are the DPA (damage per Arcanatime) numbers for Broad Sword vs. Katana using unslotted Mids' average level 50 damage. Notice that five favor Katana, one is equal, and only one is in Broad Sword's favor. In practice, Katana usually beats Broad Sword on damage output. It's hard for it not to.

Broad Sword is nothing special as far as damage output goes. In fact, I'd rate it rather low on the list of primaries. Sometimes I think people see the big orange number from a big Head Splitter critical, and somehow equate that to overall damage output. The most damage you can do with your biggest attack is NOT what doing damage is all about. (DPA numbers aren't exactly it either, but they're a lot closer.)

Oh, probably. But I can be a moody *****. I left the game for about six months after all the Regen nerfs. Came back because nothing else was as fun. Abandoned Werner a second time after a series of changes that were a net BUFF in most situations, because his build was no longer finely tuned to match the new rules, which made me feel suboptimal even if I was better, and it seemed like more trouble to make him optimal than to just focus on some new toon.

This will sound really stupid, because it is, but I somehow forgot about Going Rogue in all of this. Yes, of course this is a bad time to hope for stability. I should probably hold off on anything that I consider "long term" like purpling out a character. It just makes sense right now. I should relax and level up some characters that sound like fun. The cards are all getting thrown in the air soon. I should stop worrying about build planning.

Well, I don't have the cash on hand, but I'm very good at generating it quickly. But I haven't really been in the mood for earning influence. More in a mood for leveling alts. In which case the answer is obvious, I suppose - I should spend my time leveling alts, and not worrying about putting together any top end builds. Do what I currently find fun. Duh.

I USED TO expect a nerf. It was obviously very strong. Looked like a likely target. Then they BUFFED it instead. At that point, I figured they MUST have looked at it more carefully, and decided that not only were they satisfied that it wasn't overpowered, but they felt it was actually less powerful than they intended. So I stopped worrying about the impending nerf to it at that point.

The nerf I still expected (and kind of still expect) was for them to make the DDR in Active Defense unenhanceable. THAT I was prepared for mentally, and I made sure that my character concept and build were still satisfying even if my DDR got nuked. But massive AoE was kind of central to the concept. Even "remarkably good AoE" is kind of drifting away from what I intended. In any case, yeah, Going Rogue, everything changing, not a good time to look for stability. Much better time to go character surfing.

I've got billions of respecs (I counted!). It's not so much the cost as it is the trouble. Replan, repurchase, do a few respecs in a row. Shouldn't I be playing the game instead? The answer, of course, is yes. And so that's what I'll be doing. Trying to just play the game and enjoy myself.

I can't speak for other people. For me it isn't so much about the size of the nerf (or buff), but the mere fact that the rules are changing.

Someone keeps taking my toys away, breaking them, and then gluing them back together all different. I don't care much if it's better or worse when they're done. I care that someone keeps taking my toys away and messing with them. I just want to be able to play with my toys without them constantly being taken away for adjustments.

Right, and my builds tend to be very finely tuned. Exactly soft-capped defense. Exactly sustainable endurance. Exactly enough damage output to achieve some particular goal. Whatever it might be. That fine balance is easily disrupted, even by buffs. But you are right that it is simply the nature of MMOs. I need to roll with these punches, or find a different pastime. That's just the way of it.

Yeah. So I guess what I'm discovering is that I might have the skill to min/max, but I don't have the heart for it, the perseverance for it. Or perhaps more accurately, I don't have the heart for it 24/7. Sometimes I just need to chill out, play the basic game (which is fun and not nearly so sensitive to these little changes), and recharge my batteries. That's cool. Just need to recognize when I'm burning out on the high end game and walk away for a bit.

If I'm honest with myself, I'm in the bowling pin camp. If I wanted smart AI, I'd PvP. I want my bad guys to be lambs to the slaughter. OK, they can be LIONS to the slaughter, and I prefer it that way, but I don't want them, for instance, running away when they get hurt. Stand still and let me kill you! It's so ANNOYING chasing you down! I'd probably have similar opinions if the enemies were smart enough to spread out to avoid AoEs, send someone running to the next group to pull them over too, or whatever a smarter enemy would do.

Well, that's probably the point I WOULD have been making had I not completely forgotten about Going Rogue while in the throes of nerdrage.

I think I'll have more tolerance for change in Going Rogue, at least for a while. It's going to be big and new. Of course I should expect changes. But after a year or two? I'd really hope they have it ironed out, but evidence is they probably won't, and I probably shouldn't expect it. That's just not how MMOs work, even if I wish it was how they worked.

I AM overdoing it. It IS how I feel when I'm in a bad mood, but I also recognize that I'm being a petulant child over a fairly minor "we'll look into it" regarding something that was very, very powerful. I like playing this game. A lot. There are aspects of it I don't like, and moving my cheese constantly is one of those aspects. But it's simply part of the MMO genre. I've actually pretty much told other people to suck it up and deal with aspects of the MMO genre they don't like, or find a different genre. I seriously need to take my own advice.

Yeah, I don't think I'll continue forward with my IOing plans for my Fire/Shield, and I'll probably dump what I've bought so far back into the base. My intent was to make a damage powerhouse. The AoE portion of that now sounds likely to take a big hit, probably about the time I finish earning the billions of influence and dumping it all into the character, since that takes me months. No thanks. No longer worth the time investment.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be examined. Perhaps it should. I'm just not going to bother IOing something that's definitely going to be examined. I am way, way too tired of fixing or abandoning carefully-crafted characters that the devs nerf or even buff into something not at all like what I planned. Perhaps if someone could just tell me what powers and which IOs might be STABLE for a couple years, it'll be worth the investment. But obviously that can't happen. At this point, I'm kind of thinking I'll never bother with a top end build again. I'll just keep leveling up alts until I tire of that, and then give up on the game completely.

Again, not saying not to nerf Shield Charge. Not working as intended, blah blah blah, fine, whatever.

But I'm just not sure if I can take it any more.

Nope, not much. As you said, a fair amount with Arachnos, but only enough to be annoying, not enough to make you throw up your hands in despair. Currently leveling a Dark Melee/Invulnerability myself actually, though red side.

Now I'm curious. I don't bother with stealth often either, but when I do, I've noticed that it... well, it hasn't been working very well. I've never bothered memorizing any stealth numbers, but the basic equation in my brain is "two stealths = invisibility". That doesn't seem to be the case recently. These days, while I can get near bad guys with two stealth's worth of invisibility, I can't spawn dance. I could swear I used to be able to spawn dance not all that long ago. Friend of mine had the same sort of experience with some version of invisibility - he just wasn't invisible. Very stealthy, but not invisible. I didn't worry much about it. Like I said, I never knew what my stealth numbers were, so I figured either I was remembering incorrectly, or they nerfed them. I don't often read patch updates, so stuff happens all the time that I don't know about. No biggie to me either way. I mean, how often do I need stealth? It's more to amuse myself than anything.

I can't really nail down when the apparent problem started since I use stealth so rarely. I'm thinking maybe a few months ago.

Or am I just smoking crack, and nothing changed here? Certainly possible too.

Not to answer for Gaidin, but you CAN take AAO earlier. It's mostly a matter of how much aggro you're willing to pull. If you're solo, it doesn't really matter, since you'll get all the aggro anyway, so you might as well be doing more damage. But if you team a lot, taking AAO before you can handle the aggro can get you killed.

Yeah, as already said, Frankenslotting refers to mixing IO sets in your powers. Generally, you're ignoring set bonuses. You're just after the best enhancement values you can get, which means you're trying to slot a lot of triples (enhance 3 separate things) and doubles, quads if you're being spendy. Me, I usually have a very specific goal when I'm Frankenslotting, specific amounts of recharge, how much endurance reduction I'll need, that kind of thing. But you can just try to get as much as you can of everything, of course.

Frankenslotting takes care of endurance, but I don't tend to do that until the 30s, so until then, yes, you'll probably want some endurance reduction. At a low level, I tend to slot primarily accuracy and endurance reduction. By the time I'm in SOs, I usually just have one endurance reducer. Maybe two. Basically, whatever it takes to keep me moving, and not spending all my time on one knee. Most of your endurance use comes from your attacks, so they're the primary target for endurance reduction. But I generally go with one endurance reducer in every toggle except for Combat Jumping.

Oh, and if you didn't already know, take Hurdle to go with your Ninja Run, and jump everywhere. It'll be a lot faster than running. And you might want to do this:

/bind e "powexecname Ninja Run$$powexecname Combat Jumping"

Make sure you understand that when we talk about 300 DPS from Fire melee or Dark Melee, we're talking about absolute top end performance - IO'd to the gills, fully saturated AAO, and for Dark Melee, fully-saturated Soul Drain. Also, LUCKY - most people are posting their BEST Pylon runs, not their AVERAGE runs.

The problem isn't with Fire Melee or Dark Melee. I did a DPS comparison for absolute top end performance using Super Reflexes as the secondary. Here are the numbers I got before I got tired of the project:

253 Dark Melee (7 targets hit by Soul Drain)
243 Katana
238 Dual Blades
227 Claws
217 Dark Melee (1 target hit by Soul Drain)
216 Martial Arts
212 Broad Sword

Dark Melee is in the lead if it is surrounded by bad guys and reliably hits seven of them with Soul Drain. It's near the bottom if it only hits one. Actual performance in most circumstances will be somewhere in the middle.

While I didn't evaluate Fire Melee, the Pylon soloing times lead me to believe that it'd probably be near or at the top, but not by much of a margin, and it probably should be near or at the top.

There really isn't a 50% disparity between Claws and Fire or Dark. If you could make a completely-pimped Claws/Shield Defense, it wouldn't do 300 DPS, but it wouldn't be far off the pace either. As Frosticus says, give it a try, and you'll see.

It is also the most awesome avatar EVAR.

That is so full of win I can only stand in awe.

And I will almost guarantee that you're wrong. I think most people are talking about soloing capability. Things get confusing on teams, but you're right, Shields only gets better there. I think people are looking at the Pylon results thread, seeing the ongoing rush of Shield AV soloers, recognizing what they can do in Mids', and that kind of thing. I mostly solo. Shield Defense is great for soloing. It has plenty of survivability for soloing.

I do have a more in depth system, and Arcanaville as an even more in depth system, but I find the idea of comparing two secondaries by simply taking all the powers in them, slotting with SOs, and skipping all primary powers and pool powers to be a silly way to compare two secondaries. That's not the way anyone plays the game. Also, I don't take inspirations into account because I do all my calculations to support no-inspiration challenge play. That's not the way most people play the game.

But fine. Fire Armor and Shield Defense, was it?

The survivability score for base Shield Defense is 32.

The survivability score for base Fire Armor is 108.

Basically, when you have no mitigation of substance, the main thing that matters (in my spreadsheet, anyway) is how fast you can heal. Oh, Shield Defense doesn't have a heal, so it loses. In other words, this tells us NOTHING except that Shield Defense doesn't have a heal.

By way of comparison, my leveling up Fire Melee/Shield Defense build has a survivability score of 255. So nearly ten times the survivability by adding pool powers and cheap IOs. A multi billion influence build I'm considering for him raises that to 506, so another doubling of survivability for a hundred times the price. For the sake of argument, if I could add Aid Self to it, let's say with a full set of Doctored Wounds for simplicity, that would nearly quadruple again to 1902.

My Katana/Dark, when surrounded by minions, has a score of 5603.

Just sayin'.

As a very rough ballpark, I'm going to say that the Rikti War Zone Challenge takes a survivability score somewhere in the 500 to 1500 range. My multi-billion Shield build probably couldn't reliably do the Rikti War Zone Challenge, though his high kill speed combined with multiple tries might yield success. Aid Self would trivialize it, though, and let you solo AVs with no inspirations, and do most everything the big boys do. But 1902 is just a boring, every day, run of the mill "challenge play" score, approaching but not exceeding what I have on Werner and Sergei, who have builds 4 or 5 issues old now. On the other hand, that's the point some people make. You have ENOUGH survivability combined with massive damage output. That IS a great combination.