Werner

Personally, I like to be as solid as possible at all times even if it means I'm not as good as I could be most of the time (and yeah, I'm ignoring the psionic elephant in the room). You may well be right about it not being very important. Chances are excellent that fire/cold soft cap is something I'd sacrifice to meet other goals.

I'd be inclined to say that Broad Sword should be ahead for the first 15-20 seconds of the fight. I think of Burst as a 10 second duration, equivalent to Build Up. If we have a super build up, we're going to be ahead for the first 10 seconds, and I'd like it to be enough ahead to be interesting. Katana's going to have some ground to make up to catch up in 5-10 seconds in that case. That's why one of my suggestions was actually nerfing DPA a little - it would allow for a stronger Super Build up while still allowing Katana to catch up reasonably quickly after it expires. I don't expect that to get any traction, though.

A more reasonable alternative might be to shorten my conception of burst to maybe five seconds. So maybe the super buff lasts only five seconds, then you're at a regular build up for five more seconds. That lets Katana start getting traction after the first five seconds or so. I'd still say 15-20 seconds for them to be even. That might be a bit too long for most people's tastes, though. I like to fight uplevel and lots of enemies, so my fights last longer than that, much longer with a mostly single-target set, so to me, Katana is still ahead if it pulls ahead after 20 seconds. But for a large portion of the game, Broad Sword would be a clear leader. I'm not sure we want it to be that clear.

YES PLEASE. I've basically abandoned my 50s for now because I got sick of the iTrials and feel like so much less than I could be just running regular content. I haven't even tried the new iTrials. I've just stopped caring.

Give me some soloable incarnate content!

On the positive side, that has me spreading my time between quite a few lowbies and mid-level characters, which is a nice change of pace.

Anyway, if you're soloing incarnate content, I assume they'll still have 64% to hit, and soft capping a Fire/Fire to that may not be in the cards except on demand (Barrier, Shadow Meld, and/or purples). Still, you'll probably want a little over the regular soft cap so that a small purple can take you all the way when you need it, so I'm not sure the build goals change.

If we're talking top end builds fighting uplevel x8, though, that burst damage can be done on every single spawn, just like I was doing Shield Charge on every spawn. I'll agree that Thunder Strike isn't as good as Fire Sword Circle due to the smaller radius (7' vs. 10'), though. I'm betting that's a problem in practice. Still, I'd think one nice Lightning Rod per spawn would more than make up for it.

But yeah, now I'm thinking they'd have similar performance.

Maybe, though, Electric could do better at lower level crowds? Stagger the two big hitters, Shield Charge one group, Lightning Rod the other. Use Ball Lightning or Fire Ball in combination with Thunder Strike to do the remaining AoE. Maybe don't even pause to finish off whatever's left - just head to the next group and nuke it with whatever AoEs are up. Nuke, move, nuke, move. If something catches up, they'll go down. If they don't catch up, it wouldn't be worth the time to finish them off.

I'm just theorizing, though.

And I can see wanting better sustained output for an ambush farm, say. I'm counting travel time in the mix here, giving attacks a chance to recharge.

Then Cloak of Fear would do you the most good, I'd say, at least once you've accomplished that goal.

That would kill the burst damage. Turning it from a burst damage set into a DPS set is I suppose an option, but not an option I'd be in favor of. I think it violates the "feel" of the set too much.

Pretty well, yes. Something with good AoE damage would probably hold it better, but I suspect Dark/Invuln would hold it well enough. Alas, my Dark/Invuln Scrapper duos with a Dark/Invuln Tanker, so I can't really say for sure. Yes, we do level slowly, why do you ask?

Edit: My Dark/Invuln Brute duos with a something/something Dominator. There are plants; that's all I know. The Brute holds aggro well despite my constant Brutelock, though there's some bleed on occasion.

The builds have moved on greatly from that point, but yes, enhancement boosters would probably make up the difference. The thread was from before enhancement boosters and before the Resilience buff. At this point, there would need to be some reshuffling of these builds to account for what's become available since then. I think I've personally given up on Katana/Regen for now, though, or at least if I'm going to spend some time in Mids' and rebuilding a character, it would probably be my Katana/Dark, who I think can be more drastically improved.

Membranes offer significantly less defense enhancement than Enzymes. I'm getting 38.3% out of a single Enzyme, while two Membranes would provide 46% total. The extra slot has to come from somewhere. Now, I could drop a slot for two Enzymes. For argument, let's say from Golden Dragonfly. Two level 53 Enzymes raise my lethal defense to 67.5% and my melee defense to 68.8%. As in an earlier post, this will only make a significant difference when to-hit climbs over 69% or defense is severely debuffed. Nice to have, but I think I'd rather keep Golden Dragonfly properly slotted.

Unfortunately, your slotting doesn't really translate to Katana/Regen since you're chasing typed defense instead of positional defense.

I'm not sure what you mean by "chasing defense is a long shot". It's possible you mean what we concluded in the thread, which was that chasing 45% defense wasn't as good as settling for 33% defense and having a lot more of everything else. In that case, I agree with you.

Looking over the set bonuses in comparison, it looks like you gave up 47.5% recharge for 70% regeneration? Are you suggesting that I should do something like that? I'm pretty sure that would result in a drastic drop in the survivability scores because Regeneration is much more dependent on recharge than passive regeneration.

Well, the situation where it would help survivability is when I'm only single-stacking Divine Avalanche. I'd be single-stacking Divine Avalanche in an attempt to trade survivability for damage. But giving up Achilles' Heel is giving up quite a bit of damage, I suspect a similar amount. If so, then it's really comparing 44% lethal defense to 64% lethal defense in most situations. I'm not currently accounting for the chance of missing with Divine Avalanche, so the numbers would only show a difference when to-hit goes above 69% or so, higher than incarnate. There would be a slight difference at lower to-hit that I'm not accounting for, and a more significant difference when faced with defense debuffs.

Even though it wins on survivability in practice, I don't think it will be by much, and won't be worth giving up the damage to get.

Now, as Linea Alba mentions, you could grab the slot from Golden Dragonfly, as that would have a lesser effect, in particular when I'm doing a double-stack chain. I'm very happy that the build has properly-slotted attacks, though, and still wouldn't want to give it up for the extra survivability.

Eh, let's just see the numeric difference, which I expect to be small. Again, keep in mind that 50% and 64% survivability would be calculated exactly the same even though they'd slightly favor the swap in practice.

Werner BBQ:

75% to hit = 3797
90% to hit = 2174

Werner BBQ with slot swap:

75% to hit = 3929
90% to hit = 2217

It isn't really. Regeneration bonuses are typically the thing that helps survivability the least on a Regen. I probably have MORE regeneration than I should from a purely numeric point of view, but I like to have some passive Regeneration. I haven't compared all alternatives here, though. I'm just going on past experience with similar calculations and comparisons.

Slightly, yes. The Werner BBQ build has 64.8% lethal, 66.1% melee, 33.3% ranged and 33% AoE. From that we subtract set bonuses of 7.2% lethal, 8.5% melee, 21.3% ranged and 21% AoE. That gives us 57.6% lethal/melee and 12% ranged/AoE. I would expect the defense enhancement to not be 33%, but 20% like Nerve, which means between 2/3*20% + 1/3*20%*15% = 14.3% and 20% enhancement depending on current slotting. So it would give me 8.2% to 11.5% lethal/melee defense but only 1.7% to 2.4% ranged and AoE. For that I'd be giving up some of the recharge from Spiritual and all of the healing. I doubt it would be a good exchange.

TL;DR - Unlike any other two Scrapper sets, it can be directly apples to apples compared with Katana, and we then find that damage output slightly favors Katana in single-target, multi-target and arguably burst damage.

And now the wall of text.

The consensus that Broad Sword lags Katana by a bit tends to hinge on a few basic things:

• DPS for the good attack chains favors Katana
• AoE favors Katana with the radius PBAoE doing more damage faster with the same recharge, and the arc PBAoE doing at least better DPA with a faster recharge
• Even burst damage, generally considered better on Broad Sword, is ONLY better if you consider a burst to be a single attack, maybe two. Some people do define it this way, but I suspect most of the forum regulars would consider a burst to be more in the 5-10 second range. I personally would say about 10 seconds, or the duration of Build Up. On time scales like that, Katana is better at burst damage.
• Faster attacks allow Katana to take better advantage of procs and Interface, as they get more chances to fire in a given period of time.
• Parry and Divine Avalanche are identical powers, so no advantage to either set there.

So to summarize, Katana is better than Broad Sword at single-target and multi-target damage output, and is arguably better at burst damage. Broad Sword appears to have no advantage at all, unless that advantage is something like "can be used with Shield Defense" or a more personal preference like "I like the animations" or "I like seeing big orange numbers".

Since these differences are actually quite small (as someone said, relevant probably only to number-crunching min/maxers), most people are proposing minor buffs, and most of these buffs seem to be of the form of giving Broad Sword an unarguable advantage at burst damage, while perhaps at least making it lag less at DPS and AoE.

Now on to specific comments:

I hope that's true, though obviously one started. I'm hoping I can clarify the situation a little. Hopefully we can get everyone on the same page. My writing, unfortunately, probably won't be good enough for that. It's worth trying, though.

Which, I agree, is a terrible reason for a buff. I think this thread assumed familiarity with the general body of Scrapper forum knowledge, which includes the things mentioned above. It perhaps would have been better had these been mentioned explicitly, but it was also something that could be explained later in the thread as necessary, so I'm not blaming the OP for anything here. I probably wouldn't have posted a highly-detailed rationale either had this been my thread, except with the benefit of hindsight.

It isn't, particularly if you don't have Arcanatime turned on. There's really no magical value. What there is is an analysis of damage done, typically broken into three semi-separate areas - DPS, AoE and burst. There's no particularly simple way to analyze these in the general case (unless you consider burst to be a single-attack deal). However, we HAVE done the analysis in a large number of threads over the years. I should also point out that when I say "DPS" I mean "single-target damage over time" and not "the DPS figure reported by Mids' or in game", as that considers damage and recharge in a way that is unrealistic for anything but the very early portion of the game.

Spines sucks at DPS. Spines excels at AoE damage. It is decent at burst damage.

It's interesting how much people can argue when we're basically on the same page. It doesn't need a buff. It's a good set, even if it's arguably on the low end or even the worst set (I probably wouldn't argue that personally). Something has to be worst, in any case. But it is in a unique position of being "easily" compared in damage output to Katana, as every power is functionally pretty much identical. In this comparison, it is arguably slightly behind in all areas of damage output. So we think it could use a minor buff.

A very legitimate fear in my opinion.

This is irrelevant to most metrics anyone cares about - let's say average damage over a certain time period. Let's say Broad Sword has one attack that takes 4 seconds and does 400 damage. Let's say Katana has two attacks that take 2 seconds each and each do 220 damage.

At 100% chance to hit, 440 vs. 400 = 10% better
At 95% chance to hit, 418 vs. 380 = 10% better
At 50% chance to hit, 220 vs. 200 = 10% better

Since the chance to hit is applied to all attacks, the number of attacks is irrelevant to average damage done over time... until you start getting into more sophisticated arguments like procs and wasted blow through damage.

Continuing the above example, let's add a proc that has a 20% chance of doing 100 points of damage. Let's say 95% chance to hit since it won't make a difference, and that's what we typically assume when calculating DPS. For each attack, the proc does an average of 95% * 20% * 100 = 19 points of damage. With two attacks in the Katana "chain", we add it twice there, and only once to the Broad Sword "chain".

456 vs. 399 = 14% better

So adding procs to the mix improves Katana more than Broad Sword, and increases the gap between them. I'm not saying the effect is huge in practice, but it's there.


DPA comparisons of all attacks in a set is a mostly irrelevant metric, but even on what I'd consider more relevant metrics, I consider Katana to be a middle of the pack set for damage, elevated to a great set (with some secondaries) due to Divine Avalanche. Broad Sword I consider a low end set for damage, elevated to a good set due to Parry. Broad Sword doesn't really need a buff over all. It is only in comparison to Katana, its closest competitor due to their similarity, that we see that it might be appropriate to buff.

But if you were suggesting what I think you were, I'll agree that it's a dangerous game buffing a set that I think is already at least middle of the pack. Arguably, we might nerf Katana instead, but the general trend for the past few years has been cautiously upward. I would expect a small buff to Broad Sword rather than a Katana nerf. Arguments for other sets needing buffs would be separate from this thread, whether or not those arguments might even be stronger than the argument for a Broad Sword buff.

We're talking about game balance, set balance. That has nothing to do with whether people like the set or not. But if it matters to you, I have two Broad Sword characters at 50, and my Broad Sword/Shield Defense was the most fun I've had leveling 1-50. But fun is subjective, and isn't what we use to balance the sets. We're talking about objective, verifiable differences between highly-comparable sets.

And the sort of DPA comparison that you did is much less relevant to a balance discussion than a comparison of the DPS of good/common attack chains, and AoE damage output, and burst damage output. And we aren't shooting for sets being the same in all three areas, so we get into a fairly subjective area of questions like "How important is DPS in comparison to AoE?" Even worse, we get into questions like, "What is more valuable, Siphon Life or Parry, and by how much?" But we don't need to delve into these sorts of questions if Broad Sword is actually behind in all three areas with no compensating advantage, as seems to be the case, and since Broad Sword's powers are functionally identical to Katana's.

Ack! Yeah, DPA arguments aren't really what this is about. If that IS Geko's core argument, I'd suggest that the DPA difference isn't relevant except in context - DPS, AoE and burst damage output. I should probably reread the OP, but I'm personally approaching this from years of forum calculation and test and consensus, not on some specific point in some specific post.

I think the real argument is more along the lines of what I stated at the top of this post. That said, a DPA argument (which I am NOT making) WOULD be much more relevant to a comparison of Katana and Broad Sword specifically because their powers are functionally identical. The same cannot be said of Spines. They are drastically functionally different. The result is that Spines excels at AoE and is poor at DPS (and burst is questionable, as it would be good at burst AoE and only mediocre at burst single-target, and I haven't felt the need to draw a distinction before, but of course there is one). Now, how do we compare a set that is good at AoE and poor at DPS to, say, a set that is bad at AoE and good at DPS? That gets very subjective, and depends on play style, what you normally fight, and so on. Apples to oranges, as already mentioned. But when comparing Broad Sword and Katana, we're comparing apples to apples in a way that no other two Scrapper sets can be compared.

I suspect you feel like Geko is setting up goal posts (compare by DPA) and then moving them (you can't compare by DPA because AoE makes it apples to oranges). But you can compare Katana and Broad Sword by DPA (because the powers are functionally identical) and can't compare either to Spines so simply (because the powers do very different things). Again, DPA isn't what matters (and now you probably think I'm moving the goal post, where I'm really just pointing out that it wasn't where you were told it was), but the same argument applies to what does matter.

Agreed, both are mostly worthless except to tell us that these two sets are not easily compared.

Now try making a list of the things that Broad Sword has that Katana doesn't, or vice versa. You'll find that they're all things that are relatively comparable, because the arcs, buffs, debuffs, knockup and so on all match. That makes it much more of a straight comparison of damage output. Even damage output comparisons tend to be complicated, as we get into questions like whether AoE or DPS damage is better. But this, too, doesn't apply to the Broad Sword vs. Katana comparison, since Broad Sword arguably loses to Katana in the three main categories of damage output.

Basically, you haven't won an argument by knocking down a DPA straw man, whether or not that straw man was set up by someone else, and whether or not you knew it was a straw man. I think I understand exactly where you're coming from, though, and certainly don't blame you for knocking the straw man over. I'm just pointing out that knocking it over hasn't changed anything really.

And assuming your posts have been made in seriousness, I'm sorry for the names you've been called. Your tone has been confrontational, so probably people felt provoked and their reactions might be considered reasonable, but trying to read this thread as I suspect you're reading it, I can understand why your tone has been confrontational. I'm hoping I've clarified rather than confused the issue, but it's hard for me to know.

Honestly, it's not surprising. I haven't tricked out any Electric Armors, but I'm betting you have to compromise almost everything to hit 45% to everything, if it's even possible, and it might be going overboard regardless. So maybe just 45% smashing/lethal, and decent to the other types, like 32.5% FCEN? Not that you hit that either, and again, I'm not sure what a realistic goal for Electric Armor is. I should probably defer to someone with more experience with Electric or the combo at this point.