slainsteel

Context? Hurting very well optimized team by a little given a certain number of debuffers. I still stick by that, what's your point?

Should I be caring about people's feelings being hurt by implying that their beloved tank toons are not really viable in every single situation?


I really think you are slightly confused here.
Stating that someone should play the game they want to and let me play it my way somehow shreds all the facts I have discovered?
I usually don't use l33tspeak much but I believe this would express what I want to say best,

...wut?

Let me play my game the way I want to and you play it yours?

Not everyone speeds, nor enjoys it. There are plenty of awesome players that actually don't "like" to speed.

But, if you are really into speeding like I am, picking AT's is quite gratifying.
I've actually had a time when I had a whole bunch of people on Virtue hating me because they thought I was an AT'ist (some of them still do! :P). It is in the end about playing how you want. This is how I want it, I don't enforce it on anyone else, and yes, luckily our population is small enough to escape the big looming hammer of nerf

*shrug* I'll rephrase that; if you don't have illusion trolls, you really want a toon with taunt on a LRSF or STF. Cool?

Not all scrappers need to be buffed, but SR scrappers typically would if they are going to take on Recluse or the Freedom Phalanx.
Again, need is subjective - an SR scrapper could load up on large oranges and manage it, but that is um, less than ideal.

Oh, I guess I kinda neglected to mention the other over-powering reason to have the second illusion troll. Um once in a while, one 'does' die

You're forgetting the big badass flier usually hovering over our heads (usually right in front actually since we're hovering fairly high up). If I cast the phantasm too early, he doesn't always stay on recluse, he switches to the flier at times.


Usually casting more than 3 times is actually moot, since the team usually gets one tower down in about 30-40s, the other in a similar time, then they're all on recluse. I usually get to about 3 casts, sometimes 4 on a slow team - this is of course on the increased recharge.

Actually, it gets better; on our STF's, we never take out the flier before recluse (we take it out after the TF for the 2 merits if someone 'really' wants them).

So my illusion troll is usually tanking recluse AND is taking flier aggro; which is why having capped ranged defense and 30-50% s/l resistances helps (Ill/Cold FTW!) With that aid-self and the one shot rule allow him to survive.

Even then, we usually keep 2 illusion trolls on recluse, because even though recluse really isn't as much of a danger (I shoot straight up way out of his range right before my decoys are about to die, and then recast them in the air, letting them fall down on recluse), that switch to new pets, is sometimes laggy enough that he loses aggro completely and moves to the rest of the team. If another set of decoys are already up, he aggros on them instead.


Of course, barrier is a godsend here

EDIT: Oh yeah, I hit the phantasm too before the decoys are about to go out. He usually gets one shot if he gains recluse aggro, but it does help bridge that gap between decoy casts. The problem is, DESPITE the phantasm, sometimes in laggy conditions, even then recluse can de-aggro and go after team members.

You really want the hoverer to have taunt though; Recluse can get frisky. I *have* tanked him with a blaster before, but I sure would never want to do that again.

In fact, for safety sake, if we don't have illusion trolls on casual speed runs (I know, 'casual speed', sounds contradictory), we take along a stoney (sometimes I even take mine), just to be able to autopilot through the TF. Since we have kins all the time, even a Stone/Fire or Stone/Dark can do some serious damage. Again, not as much as a scrapper or brute :P but enough to not to worry about too much. With all the data gathered on this thread, I think I'll start running with stoney's more, considering it seems the damage loss is minmal, plus a superb experienced player on a stoney is probably going to give the team more damage than an average player on a scrapper or brute.


I did say, I do like playing my stoney once in a while

Sure, if you don't have illusion trolls, you absolutely need a tank or a scrapper/brute with taunt. With enough buffs though, I've seen a scrapper with taunt hold recluse with all towers up. Of course, that is not ideal, considering that means we're losing damage on the two towers.

A pair of ill/colds/ill/rads on recluse means, they throw their debuffs on the towers, and then hold recluse with decoys; their personal damage wasn't too high to start with, so the team isn't losing much there.

On a LRSF, 6 decoys, 7 AV's, works rather well
Gathering them is useful, but as long as the illusions 'know' how to play their toon, you'd be surprised on how well one can control his decoys (I not being one of the better ones, but I've seen some amazing ill trolls).

Of course, considering we 'don't have illusion trolls, given the team compositions, both on LRSF and STF, I'd go with team 2 - but that's mostly because the buff/debuff on that team is already rather low (not in terms of -resistance, but usually having a sonic resonance and/or cold toon really helps team survivability). Also the scrappers are SR, so they'll have a harder time surviving. On STF, it would be a really bad idea to go with team 1 I actually would not run either team without modifications, unless I knew at least five out of the eight really well and knew they were superb players.

But all of that was true pre-i20; post i20, I wouldn't particularly root for team 1, but I wouldn't care much either way - since if even with 2-3 people having T4 barrier/rebirth, the teams survivability would jump incredibly.

I usually don't count post i20 though, I think the incarnate powers achieved their purpose, made our teams literally gods.


So long story short, yes, tanks can be useful, I never said they aren't. Usually on my teams though, again I iterate, I am only speaking of teams that I usually put together, they are not particularly a +, at best, they're not much of a -. Which brings me back to my point, would I take a tank on a high end team? Naah.

I should've probably have stated clearly though would I take one on a high end team that I built for record runs and considering no one really wanted to bring their tank and I didn't have first hand knowledge of the damage capability of the people who wanted to bring their tanks and all the players I was getting were good at their toons which I knew either directly or indirectly and the scrappers and brutes were really high dps and we had one very good kin or 2 kins and we had 4 solid debuffers and...

..it just seemed simpler to state, that the fact that post i20 a tank has solo'd a GM, is well, an achievement, it does count as solo, but does it change the fact that I'd bring a tank along on a high end team now? No. Essentially this entire conversation started with my trying to put across that even with T4 incarnate powers, I do not consider a tank any more or any less of an asset than I did before; when compared to an equally T4'ed and well built scrapper/brute/debuffer/SoA.

I do suppose I did go overboard with the "tanks are just crutches" statement, that could have been phrased better. I also admitted that after doing more analysis 'after' reading people's viewpoints on this thread, I did admit that I was wrong about the 'amount' that a tank would hurt the damage of said team.

If you could send me your code, I could convert it to C++, make it a library call and expand my code to brute force the data with your simulator.

Because the other option is to not have debuffers and go with more damage types, which is already accounted for in the data I generated. With just at tank, kin and melee dps, the total team dps output was low.

The entire point of the program was to try to figure out how much do debuffers help.

There is the related case of using SoA's, which can provide debuff and still be in melee range, utilizing their damage at the full damage cap, plus doing more damage - that isn't a case I've explored yet considering SoA debuff and damage are really a bit at odds with each other. Should they be spending more time debuffing, or more time doing damage? Their debuffs don't last very long so they need to be cast more often than those by fenders/corrs/trolls.


Of course, to find the global maxima, we have the related discussion, which I believe would involve trying out all team combinations and run a simulation with all.

To further add to this, not every speed run has to be optimal unless you're trying to break records on *every* run, which really would ruin gameplay even for a speed junkie like me.

When we put together teams, we simply ask what people can bring and sometimes it's a tank; I've even run several teams with 2 tanks simply because people wanted to get their tanks for that run. Now if I get a team with 3 tanks, that's where I strongly suggest that 'someone' switch out to another AT :P

I don't think a tank is a bad toon to play, I rather enjoy the feeling of invulnerability I get on my stoney. I used to like my SD till I realized I was rarely logging him on, since most of my time IG is spent on speed TF's/trials.

FYI, on trials, I don't even bother with team composition past having 'some' debuff and preferably 1 kin per team.

I've counted lower numbers for debuffers and kins to account for the fact that for quite a bit of their time will be spent on casting debuffs/buffs. Playing a kin, between casting SP and FS over and over again, it leaves very little time for actually doing damage attacks. On my cold/sonic and ill/cold, my attacks are usually, sleet, benumb, heat-loss, 2-3 damage attacks, sleet, damage attacks. Most of the time, I don't even get to casting sleet the second time since the AV is dead already.

As I also mentioned, debuffers stay out of Melee and AoE range of the AV's, which often precludes them from FS/SP.

You're right, I don't know many high damage tanks; but I do know a few. When they run with us, trust me, they are still not staying a spawn ahead

In fact, the only time the entire team really gathers together is for AV's, otherwise most of the team is really split into solo, 2's or 3's at most.

You're looking at this as a math problem, I am looking at it as a computer science problem.

Keeping everything constant, yeah, just math could determine the maxima; but if you want to start accounting for a non-static environment when buffs and attacks land at different points doing different amounts of damage to the AV based on what has and hasn't landed, how would one do that with an equation?

The reason I wrote my code with individual object instances for each toon was to be able to eventually add action objects of type attacks, debuff, buff, which then in turn can be used to run a simulation.

Maybe, we 'could' expand the simulation out into a linear polynomial equation, but I am not sure how that would work? Frankly, I don't know enough maths to be able to do that or to even know if it's possible, I'll defer to your superior knowledge of math to decide that.


If we do use the simulation as a series of steps applied by different objects from different threads, in that case, we would have to try every possible team combination (with optimizations as I mentioned to drop useless recursive descents), which brings us back to it being a NP complete problem.


P.S.: The advantage to doing it as a CS problem is that it can be used to calculate the math factors also along the way, without doing too much work

Let's for a second forget about trying to find equivalent scrappers and tanks to compare; instead, my simple question is, instead of a Fire/SS tank, why wouldn't I rather pick a Fire/SS brute?

Slightly lower base damage, almost double the damage cap.
People's answers have basically been 'bruising!' which I believe does not help very much once you have enough -resistance stacked that the loss in damage exceeds the increase in damage by bruising for the entire team.


Um, I've already stated several times that on a majority of my runs, I am not anal about what everyone has to bring provided we have enough debuff/buff toons. The entire argument has been about are tanks going to actually make things better, or worse, even if by very slightly.

I've stated several times over, yes, bringing a tank along does not drop the speed by much, just that it does - everyone's point has been that it does not period. In fact, several people have been arguing that bringing a tank would 'increase' the overall speed of a speed TF versus an equivalent scrapper or brute.

If we were to just say that tanks usually will slow a speed TF down by slightly, not enough to really enforce a no-tank policy even - provided it's a tank built for damage versus optimal tanking? Then I'm with ya, completely.

If we were to agree that with damage heavy tanks, the tank WON'T slow down optimal speed TF, or will speed up the TF, then well, that doesn't make sense to me.

If we were to say that we cannot know either way, that also I don't agree with because I do believe that there is enough experimental and theoretical data that seems to clearly indicate that tanks do not increase team speed on such teams but often can slow it; if they're built for really high damage, then they would not slow it by much, or even really a noticeable difference.

That is correct, thanks, fixed

So when speeding TF's, we have two bottlenecks usually.
The first bottleneck is the AV, which is not really 'much' of a bottleneck since the AV goes down in 10-30s with these teams. But, since the argument was that in that particular case, a tank would help the team more because of the resistance debuff multiplying across the team.

The entire point of this exercise was the prove that the tank's lack of damage at it's damage cap, is not made up for by the -20% res that it provides; on a debuff heavy team, since as your debuff increases, that 20% is a smaller and smaller part of the final resistance debuff.




Actually this helps the point I was making more than detracts from it.
If you look at the further numbers, as debuff increases, the tank's inclusion starts to hurt more, quite a bit more.

Since not all debuffers will have their debuffs up, or some might miss, I often take 4 or 5 debuffers. That means that the tank is now competing even more so with the damage dealer.

If a tank comes, he's bringing 20% more debuff, and we're losing about half the damage of a scrapper. Now, half the damage of a scrapper is very relative term here - if the debuff is -100% resist, the difference is actual dps loss from the tank doubles. He still is providing 20% +damage (in effect) to the team, but the rest of the team is not very high damage, so his gains are limited.

Another reason for bringing 4-5 debuffers is also the fact that we are actually not fighting +3's on most the TF in quite a few TF's - the enemies range from level 50 to 54, with 54 only on the last mission.

On running my calculator again, the optimal number of debuffers changes to 4 and the tank loss increases to 7%, at 5 debuffers, it becomes 17%.

Secondly, we don't always get 2 kins, for the main reason that the other debuff toons aren't able to take advantage of fulcrum shift very well since they fire at range, so essentially with either 1 or 2 kins, the only toons that remain at their damage cap are the melee's.

That being the case, only the scrappers, brutes and tanks are at the damage cap, the debuffers are 'maybe' at 150-250% (my own debuffers often end up at around that much, I don't think I even hit my cap on my troller or fender except in rare cases, this is even with 2 kins). Running with 2 kins usually benefits us when we're running with multiple brutes, with scrappers, 2 kins don't get us much more speed than 1, sometimes even less.

So, in a more 'real world' scenario, the tank is losing half the dps of a scrapper, _and, is contributing 20% damage to a team where a majority of the damage is coming from just the Melee toons (considering debuffers already have lower base damage and aren't even at their damage cap).

Taking that into considering, let's just take approximate values here.
A kin does x base damage (considering the kin mostly just SB's, SP and FS's)
A debuffer does 2x base damage
A tank does 4x base damage
A scrapper does 8x base damage

With a team of 1 kin, 4 debuffers, 3 scrappers (the team that I've till now found to work the fastest. Of the records I've kept of our fastest runs, this has been close to the team composition on almost all those runs), we'd typically have,
debuffers at 100-150% damage buff, everyone else capped,
we're at,
x * 4 (kin) + 4 * 2x * 2.5 (debuffers) + 3 * 8x * 5 (scrappers)
= 144x damage

AV's realistically are really at about -150 to -200% resistance, even with 4 debuffers, we don't really get to 240%, like ever; by the time all the debuffs stack, the AV's are dead. Plus there are cases where Heat Loss hasn't recharged, or a debuff misses, etc.
So that being taken in, our total is,
144x * 2.5 = 360x

Now the team with a tank and 2 scrappers is at,
x * 4 (kin) + 4 * 2x * 2.5 (debuffers) + 2 * 8x * 5 (scrappers) + 4x * 4 (tank)
= 120x damage

Assuming bruising is on constantly, and shifts the AV's -resist from -150% to -170%,
our final damage is now at,
120x * 2.7 = 360x

I am giving the 'ideal' tank scenario here. Not all tanks are FA/(insert high dps tank secondary here). Further more, it's much harder to find a high dps tank than it is to find a high dps scrapper, and of course, bruising can also miss. In fact, unless the team's toHit is really high.

Keep in mind, I am giving ideal tank scenarios throughout my calculations. Finding high DPS tanks is hard - and when I do find one, I am usually a lot more sanguine towards taking the tank, simply because I know that the drop in speed won't be much. The rest comes down to the player playing the tank then; is he stuck in the tank mode of play or can he actually switch contexts and focus more on damage?

Given all these factors, again, why would I 'prefer' a tank over a scrapper or brute?

I should also mention, 'ideally', having more SoA's along helps a lot, except for the small problem is that most of the SoA's I see, aren't really built very well. A well built SoA with debuffs and high damage can replace the scrapper easily, maybe even a lower end debuffer (considering SoA debuffs last for less time and they have to shuffle between debuffs and damage, so one of the two does suffer).


I thought about for a while but it's more complicated than that :-\

I am not sure a 'correct' solution can really be reached without any algorithm that is not NP complete. The number of possibilities to cover can't be handled by just generating equations. The faster approach would be a greedy algo but for completeness, the best one can do is prune out descent trees that make no sense (like going over 5 kins say) to optimize the total number of equations to try.

Even then, realistically the algo would have to compute the team damage of the teams approximately 1.6mil times with different team compositions even if we were restricting AT's only to tank, debuff, kin, soa, scrapper and brute. To be more accurate, we really need to consider scrappers, fenders and controllers separately, which would put us at about 43mil equations - which would be fine for a modern computers considering the speeds we run at, but then comes the 'other problem'.

Considering real world factors, as you mentioned here, we need to run a partial simulation, rather than just use one equation.

My best guess would be to not use discreet ticks (since at a resolution of 100ms, the complexity of that code would be, err, horrendous), but rather run a thread for each AT, doing damage/modifying stats on the enemy, but there may be a better approach. Considering synchronization primitives and context switching time introduced because of that (1 context switch due to a sync primitive can take up to a 1000 cycles), this algorithm could take days to run even when written in C++. Assuming that we take only 0.01s to run a simulation, it would end up taking 4.98 days to run it just once.

So, basically I am not sure if we really can get a truly accurate answer for team composition unless we really simplify things, or, well, if we can find a really fast way to run the full simulation.

That last part, I am still thinking about.

Most good scrappers/brutes I know, slot at least 1 proc in each of their attacks, two in the most used one.


Assuming a scrapper has no procs in his attacks, and a tank had 3 procs, including the purple (that would mean about 64 points of increase in average damage per attack with the purp proc and 39.4 for just 3 regular procs; x4 it would be 182 points of extra damage).

From my previous calculation, the max damage for the tank without procs was 185.51 and for scrappers without procs was 412.99

Adding the proc damage for the tank, their max ends up at ~368.


So being really generous with the tank and adding 3 procs per attack for them and none for the scrappers, their DPS still just 'approaches' that of a scrapper, not matches or exceeds it.

Of course, if we're comparing different AT's, we should be comparing the highest damage tanks with the highest damage scrappers; built for damage on both. In which case, tanks would lag behind again by a similar amount.

Most scrappers that I play with BTW, don't build much for survivability, instead they build for recharge and damage.

I would be very interested in seeing a playable tank build that can come even within 70% of the max base damage of my scrapper (which is not specifically built for ultra-damage).

So Crabs/Banes are amazing. My Bane stacks a solid 70% res debuff (counting 10% from reactive), and up to 90% with the achilles heal proc. Along with that it does crazy damage too, brings team buffs, etc, etc.

I am not completely sure which would help a team more, an Ill/Cold or a SoA but I kept away from SoA's since the focus of the argument seemed to be around whether getting a tank versus a scrapper or brute would help or not.

Regarding pets though, I do speed extensively with an Ill/Cold and an Ill/Rad. The primary difference I've observed with my illusion trolls versus other toons with pets.


I usually cast my pets right as or before the battle starts; most AV's are usually dead within half the recharge time of my decoys (56s). So at that point, I invis up and run through everything to the next AV/enemy. This is here the difference comes in,

My decoys can follow me just fine, since nothing can kill them; other pets often die or take a lot of damage on the way.

It may be about 10s or so till my pets catch up to me, but at least they're there; otherwise I recast. Usually for spots where we have multiple AV's to go through (like the second last mission on the STF), I coordinate with another Ill troll, I take the first AV, he takes the second, I take the third, he takes the fourth while I move on to Aeon.


It actually ends up faster than waiting for a tank actually since the debuffers can debuff the first AV, then damage dealers finish him off, while the other illusion troll and some debuffers (who won't need to cast another debuff at that point - usually when the AV is less than half HP) have already started debuffing the second AV.


To clarify, we don't cycle our decoys to provide continuous tanking (everyone on our team is expected to survive on their own); but if we both use them at one AV, the damage at the even AV's will be reduced, which tends to be sub-optimal.

Sure; but whichever gaps to the chain that reduce a scrapper's DPS, would also reduce a tank's DPS.


That's the whole point here; when capped to damage, self buffs, even IO's, don't matter anymore. All that matters is your base damage (however high or low it is) x your damage cap.

If the scrapper's base damage is lost for xyz real world factors, they are lost for the same xyz reasons for the tank also.

The only situation in which the tank's efficiency would not drop and the scrapper's would, is if survivability were to be taken into question, since a scrapper would take more time to heal/regen versus a tank.

As I've explicitly stated, for the purposes of the calculations on an ideal team, survivability would not be in question simply because of the builds and buffs that the team members would have.


Additionally, if you looked at the further calculations (with 4-5 debuffers), a tank's advantage from bruising drops even more as debuff increases, I only picked the optimal case.

Hell, as you start approaching the -resist cap, the advantage from bruising totally disappears.

Let me try to make this clear again.

I do not have *anything* against tanks or people playing tanks.

What I think about tanks, or what preference I'd put them in terms of toons in a team buildup, should not 'offend' people. I do not tell people not to play tanks, or somehow make them feel bad about playing a tank. Hell, I don't even try to tell them that somehow playing a tank is not 'fun' or anything of the sort.

'My opinions' on a specific AT in the game shouldn't be offending that many people. If someone told me that an Illusion/Cold is a really bad toon (for whatever reasons), I'd simply smirk, think they are wrong and move on. I do not believe that I'd think the person was a tool or an ***, and if the reasons the person gave seem thought out (even if missing or refusing to acknowledge something that makes them wrong), I wouldn't even think that the person was an idiot. The only time I've been hostile towards anyone on this post has only been when they initiated the hostility.


It's a damn archetype in a online 'game'; it's frankly quite surprising to see how sensitive people can get about it.

So the problem with your maths is that you're not taking the 'base' dps of a toon. When you're damage capped, all your self-buffs and IO bonuses and buffs, are all the same thing. It is damage cap x base damage for an attack.

Let's take a DM/SD scrapper's base damage,
smite + SL + smite + MG = 90.8 + 134.9 + 90.8 + 189 = 505.5
The arcana times for those attacks are,
1.188 + 2.112 + 1.188 + 2.244 = 6.732s

So the base DPS for that scrapper, completely ignoring crits, would be,
505.5/6.732 = 75.09

When damage capped, this scrapper's DPS will now become,

75.09 * (4.0 buff + 1.0 base damage) = 375.45
Over time, adding 10% for crits, this becomes, 412.99


This is assuming a total of 0 resistance on the enemy. Having a higher enemy just reduces this by .65, doesn't change the scale of things.


Now a tank, looking at a XXX/DM tank (to keep the primaries as close as possible), we'll take the attack chain of,
Shadow Punch + SL + Smite + MG
(throwing in SP of course for the bruising)
37.4 + 87.2 + 58.7 + 122.8 = 306.1
Total time,
1.056 + 2.112 + 1.188 + 2.244 = 6.6s
base DPS, 306.1/6.6s = 46.38
(In my calculations, I was MUCH more favorable to a tank; I used 52 base dps for the tank and 75 base dps for the scrapper and did not include crits, if I took those into account, at the 3 debuffers calculations in my data? that gap would have increased).

Multiple that with the tank cap of 300%,
46.38 * (3.0 + 1.0) = 185.51


So when both are at capped damage, a tank would be doing less than half the dps of the scrapper. Having bruising, it helps against +3 mobs, till you have enough debuffers on the team that the higher damage by each of the DPS toons is more important than the small resistance debuff that the tank provides.


Feel free to do your own calculations again, using the correct DPS numbers, and you'll reach the same values that I did.

EDIT: I didn't add in bruising since I am counting that as a debuff; in my calculations, debuffs are counted from all sources then applied - do see the math that I've posted a few posts ago in reply to Orbitus's post.

I love contextless quoting. Quote the line you like, leave out the one you don't, even though they were meant to be said as a set.

Oh geez, I forgot; you're not interested in either what I meant or whether I am right, all you need is a snippet showing you're right! How silly of me.

I am pretty certain I didn't get a PM from you asking me for my code?
I spent 2 hours on it because it's been written to be extendable to my final algorithm for it, which automatically tries out every type of toon in all numbers to brute force an optimal team composition. I am not completely sure if you get this part though, considering your insistence that because I didn't post 2 pages of data, my data cannot be correct (my previous posts shows, using your calculations, that my data is correct - you just read it wrong, albeit probably because I didn't clarify that I wasn't counting kins as debuffers).

And this is why it is complex, so I don't have to do the calculations you just did, over and over by hand to find the maximum DPS; the fact that we should have 2 kins and 3 brutes and 3 debuffers for the optimal team didn't require me to calculate everyone's damage, final resistance, total dps, over and over and over again. And I can't run a NP-complete algorithm in a spread sheet macro, it would take hours to get through just one run.


I think you are having a very hard time coming to terms with the fact that teams can run without having to worry about 'anyone's' survivability. Maybe you haven't been on such teams?

So I've admitted clearly that I was wrong about how much DPS we lose with a tank, but I was correct about the fact that on debuffer heavy teams, we do still always lose it, so yes, the margin is indeed small.

But I am not sure what it is with you; first you attacked me for poor maths, then poor logic, now you're attacking the premise I started with? I don't get it, are you just desperate to prove me wrong?

Your calculations are right, but for the wrong case. I should've made it more clear. The optimal case is for 3 debuffers, that means 3 debuffers, 2 kins, 3 dps'ers/2 dps'ers and 1 tank.

What you calculated was the 2 debuffers case, which the data already shows, is inclined towards having a tank, but is not the best possible dps you can go to.

So using your data,
DPS toon (Scrapper) = 100 base DPS (capped at 500, 500% of original)
Kinetics toon = 40 base DPS (capped at 120, 300% of original)
Generic debuff = 60 base DPS (capped at 180, 300% of original)
Tanker = 66.6 base DPS (capped at 266.4, 400% of original)


3 debuffers, 2 of them Kins and 3 Scrappers: ((3 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (3 * 500)) * 0.65 = 1443 DPS w/o resistance debuffs.

1443 * (1 + (1.8 debuff * 0.65 purple patch)) = 3131.31 DPS

Now with a tank,


3 debuffers, 2 of them Kins and 2 Scrappers and a tank: ((3 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (2 * 500) + 266.4) * 0.65 = 1291.16 DPS w/o resistance debuffs.

1443 * (1 + (1.8 debuff * 0.65 purple patch) + 0.2 bruising) = 3060.04 DPS



As you can see, having 3 debuffers along yeilds more DPS, and having a tank along reduces that DPS, despite bruising. Again, I admit, by a small margin.


The whole point for writing this code was to find the optimal point and then throw in a tank; the data already shows with 2 debuffers or lower, having a tank along increases the team's DPS.

I am not arguing how I should or shouldn't play the game. How I play it is really my choice and let me reiterate, I do not force anyone to play the same way.


The entire point of the 2 hours of coding I put in was to get real data of can tanks actually be more helpful on a team versus DPS'ers, or not.


The answer is not; though I admit, by a very small margin.
BTW, this is mostly in response to Archana's post, in which she mentioned that the AV fights were the bottlenecks; this is simply to prove that on optimal teams, even for AV fights, tanks hurt, even if by a very small amount. They don't actually 'help'.


Completely survivable teams has been an assumption from the start. If we challenge that, then we're no longer in the realm of 'dream teams'.