Repost: I7 scrapper secondary comparisons

Anyone has have a fresh look upon SR since Inventions came out?

I've been toying with my SR scrappers and respeced them to add more slots to their defense powers ( even the passive ). By simply 5-6 slotting a few sets of Serendipity and also slotting all my Pbaoe attacks with Multistrikes , i bumped up my aoe defenses and melee defenses by a few percents. I wonder if i i was wasting my time but somehow i really feel my SR is doing ALOT better than before. Now im even considering dropping AidSelf and going for Tough and Weave instead since the endurance cost of pretty much all my powers has been reduced by over 80% ( to all attacks and every toggles ).

Any people have some insights to share? Are IOs the long waited "Fix" for SR?

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Anyone has have a fresh look upon SR since Inventions came out?

I've been toying with my SR scrappers and respeced them to add more slots to their defense powers ( even the passive ). By simply 5-6 slotting a few sets of Serendipity and also slotting all my Pbaoe attacks with Multistrikes , i bumped up my aoe defenses and melee defenses by a few percents. I wonder if i i was wasting my time but somehow i really feel my SR is doing ALOT better than before. Now im even considering dropping AidSelf and going for Tough and Weave instead since the endurance cost of pretty much all my powers has been reduced by over 80% ( to all attacks and every toggles ).

Any people have some insights to share? Are IOs the long waited "Fix" for SR?

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I don't know if I would call it a fix, but because of the way defense stacks, every percent counts for SR: positional defenses can be expensive to get in the sets because they require five or six of a single set, and many of the sets are pricey (not all), but if you can get them, you can increase SR to very high levels of defense. Its not difficult to get to the 35%-40% range without too much difficulty, and that is a substantial improvement in strength. Going tough/weave opens another possibility: getting to the "magic 45%" mark where you begin to floor foes without tohit bonuses. Slotted weave is about 6%, and tough can take the steadfast protection Res/+3%def IO, so the fighting pool actually has almost 9% defense to all theoretically within it. That's most of the way from the about 30% defense SR has to the magic 45%. Set bonuses and power pools can get you the rest of the way.

That's a pseudo perma-elude build there, at least for PvP (in PvE, just barely getting to 45% is of no use against any attacker with any tohit buffs at all).

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Anyone has have a fresh look upon SR since Inventions came out?

I've been toying with my SR scrappers and respeced them to add more slots to their defense powers ( even the passive ). By simply 5-6 slotting a few sets of Serendipity and also slotting all my Pbaoe attacks with Multistrikes , i bumped up my aoe defenses and melee defenses by a few percents. I wonder if i i was wasting my time but somehow i really feel my SR is doing ALOT better than before. Now im even considering dropping AidSelf and going for Tough and Weave instead since the endurance cost of pretty much all my powers has been reduced by over 80% ( to all attacks and every toggles ).

Any people have some insights to share? Are IOs the long waited "Fix" for SR?

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I don't know if I would call it a fix, but because of the way defense stacks, every percent counts for SR: positional defenses can be expensive to get in the sets because they require five or six of a single set, and many of the sets are pricey (not all), but if you can get them, you can increase SR to very high levels of defense. Its not difficult to get to the 35%-40% range without too much difficulty, and that is a substantial improvement in strength. Going tough/weave opens another possibility: getting to the "magic 45%" mark where you begin to floor foes without tohit bonuses. Slotted weave is about 6%, and tough can take the steadfast protection Res/+3%def IO, so the fighting pool actually has almost 9% defense to all theoretically within it. That's most of the way from the about 30% defense SR has to the magic 45%. Set bonuses and power pools can get you the rest of the way.

That's a pseudo perma-elude build there, at least for PvP (in PvE, just barely getting to 45% is of no use against any attacker with any tohit buffs at all).

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You mean it is good to achieve 45% for PvE. In PvP that would not buy much against the common To Hit Buffs that are used all around.

Anyway i mostly play the PvE game and it is really nice to be able to wade into Nemesis packs without Elude on and not being shredded by all the aoes and jiggers explosions

I still have lot of problems when i face packs of enemies that are 3 levels above me but at least now they often miss me enough to buy me some time to react, hit inspirations or withdraw. I rarely faceplant on the alpha-strike like it used to often happen. Overall, i am very happy with how the IOs helped SR powerset. And i added over that the Numina and the Regenerative Tissue unique IO and my health bar really seem to replenish somewhat faster even during combat. I also get 5 times 4% regen from all the Serendipity sets i have slotted so its all adding up. And finally all the accolades bonus hitpoints are adding over that. No doubt Regen and DA scrappers still are greater overall but i am not ashamed of my SR performance during combat anymore. And i must say that my SR really seem to be the first runner when it comes to fight packs of carnies and maltas. Dodging endurance drain really is one of the thing i like the most with SR

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You mean it is good to achieve 45% for PvE. In PvP that would not buy much against the common To Hit Buffs that are used all around.

Anyway i mostly play the PvE game and it is really nice to be able to wade into Nemesis packs without Elude on and not being shredded by all the aoes and jiggers explosions

I still have lot of problems when i face packs of enemies that are 3 levels above me but at least now they often miss me enough to buy me some time to react, hit inspirations or withdraw. I rarely faceplant on the alpha-strike like it used to often happen. Overall, i am very happy with how the IOs helped SR powerset. And i added over that the Numina and the Regenerative Tissue unique IO and my health bar really seem to replenish somewhat faster even during combat. I also get 5 times 4% regen from all the Serendipity sets i have slotted so its all adding up. And finally all the accolades bonus hitpoints are adding over that. No doubt Regen and DA scrappers still are greater overall but i am not ashamed of my SR performance during combat anymore. And i must say that my SR really seem to be the first runner when it comes to fight packs of carnies and maltas. Dodging endurance drain really is one of the thing i like the most with SR

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I believe scrappers Defense caps at 45%. That is the magic number Arcanaville is referring to.

I also believe she means that for most PvE encounters, 45% is overkill except for the few critters with native To Hit buffs. I believe Malta Gunfighters are an example of a critter with built in To Hit buff.

Since 45% is the defense cap and it would not be needed for most circumstances, and because small Luck inspirations give 12.5% defense, then we could lower our target from 45% to 32.5% (45% - 12.5%).

I have seen people's Mid builds showing 32.5% defense. So it is possible to achieve but would most likely be very expensive.

My Dark Armor scrapper currently has 22% Defense to Melee with her target defense is 24% to Melee, Ranged, AoE, Psi. While her numbers are not quite their yet I can already tell a difference. If the fight is rough, I just use a Luck and the situation is noticeably easier.

no, the defense cap is like 200%.

the 45% "cap" that people refer too is no cap at all. It's simply the value that one needs to floor the tohit of a PvE target that doesn't have any tohit buffs. Lots of things in PvE have no Tohit buffs, so for 95% of the time, anything over 45% defense is wasted in PvE.

Celestial Fury is right when he states that 45% isn't enough for PvP. Rampant tohit buffs and lots of accuracy lower the usefulness of it.

Isn't it the case that the only thing you floor with 45% Defense is an even con Minion? What if you go up against, say, a +4 Minion (a not uncommon occurance in my gameplay)? Or an Archvillain? If Defense in excess of 45% is wasted in PvE, why does the huge amount of Defense in Elude seem to help so much (even with IOs)? Perhaps the developers know that defense in excess of 45% is not wasted?

WARNING: I bold names.

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Isn't it the case that the only thing you floor with 45% Defense is an even con Minion? What if you go up against, say, a +4 Minion (a not uncommon occurance in my gameplay)? Or an Archvillain? If Defense in excess of 45% is wasted in PvE, why does the huge amount of Defense in Elude seem to help so much (even with IOs)? Perhaps the developers know that defense in excess of 45% is not wasted?

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In I6, a +4 minion's base tohit would have been 70%, relative to an even minion's base tohit of 50%. From I7 to today, a +4 minion's base tohit is now still 50%, and it gets an accuracy bonus of 1.2. As a result, since defense subtracts from tohit, but does nothing to accuracy, the best you can do is still 45% defense.

Proportionately speaking, the best you can do in both cases is the same thing: reduce net tohit to 10% of its original value. For even minion, that is dropping from 50% to 5%. For +4 minion, its dropping from 70% to 7%. That is comparable to, and analogously functioning as, the 90% resistance cap.

Having more than 45% defense helps under three cases:

1. Fighting things higher than +5. At +6 and higher, critters start getting higher tohit again. However, as a practical matter, fighting +6s is a losing proposition all around: your damage is so low, that its only worth doing for bragging rights.

2. Fighting things with tohit buffs. Unusual, but not totally unheard of in PvE, especially post I6. And the quartz eminators that the DE drop emit a +100% tohit buff to everything in range. That's enough to nullify well-slotted Elude plus well slotted toggles plus well-slotted passives combined. And in PvP, the unusual thing is fighting someone *without* tohit buffs.

3. Fighting things with defense debuffs. Especially high order ones like those possessed by the Rularuu. Or the really big ones you can see in PvP. And some of those are unresistable, which means the SR resistance to defense debuffs doesn't affect them, and you feel them at full strength. And some of them autohit.

So barring ToHit buffs (and level differences of +5 and greater), everything is floored with 45% Defense (PvP being its own animal, as usual). And the huge amount of Defense in Elude is pretty much wasted, with the same exceptions as above (ie, in the presence of ToHit buffs, it isn't wasted).

Excellent answer as always Arcanaville! I'm not a numbers person so I'm always struggling to understand these things.

WARNING: I bold names.

Nice post... interesting stuff on Weave and how it calculates into nothing for regens and DA's.

That was an amazing post, Arcanaville! Yet I think I see a possible issue with the comparison of Tough and Weave on a Regen. I don't doubt the data! I just think we may be looking at the wrong data point for practical applications.

This may be difficult to explain without showing a simple graph, but I'll try.

Take the Y axis as a count of observations, and the X axis as health, where X can also be negative. I believe that in the tests you ran, the lowest that the scrapper's health goes in 30 minutes will follow a classic bell curve. The part of the bell curve that dips to 0 or below is the chance that the scrapper will die in that time frame.

To oversimplify what you said, when discussing Tough vs. Weave, you were looking at the amount of incoming damage where the scrapper still had a 99.9% chance of survival (in other words, where 99.9% of the bell curve was above 0.) While this isn't exactly what you stated, I think it is roughly equivalent to say that on a Regen, Tough significantly increases the % of bell curve above 0, while Weave has no effect on the % of bell curve above 0. So far so good.

Yet, since Weave must obviously block some incoming damage, it must also shift the center of the bell curve to the right. So how is it possible to shift the center of the bell curve to the right while not changing the % of the bell curve above 0? I would guess that for some reason, the bell curve has gotten wider with the addition of Weave. The net effect would be no increase in survivability. This seems perfectly consistent with your findings, as well as with the intuition that Weave should help in some way. It helps keep health higher on average, but doesn't help prevent death.

Tough comes out looking much better by comparison. I suspect that it both shifts the center of the bell curve to the right, while also narrowing the distribution. The net effect is a significant increase in survivability.

But these simulations are based on someone playing extremely safe. If I understood correctly, the analysis of Tough and Weave was done with 30 minute trials and a 99.9% survival rate. That's an average of one death every 500 hours of near constant fighting. I think most of us are willing to accept far more frequent deaths than that. But how frequent? One every 10 hours? Every five? Every hour? I'd suggest that most players are comfortable with something in that range.

For the sake of argument, let's say we can accept a death every hour of near constant fighting. If so, that's a 50% survival rate instead of 99.9%. I believe that will also put us in the center of the bell curve, not way off at one end. Half the bell curve is at 0 or below, half is above 0.

But as I already mentioned, I think Weave does shift the center of the bell curve to the right. It must, because it has a chance of making some attacks miss. Therefore, if we're accepting a death every hour of fighting, Weave is increasing our survivability. But by how much?

I suspect that by looking at the center of the bell curve, we're looking at the most simplistic version of the numbers. And from that standpoint, I think that Weave would be about the same as Tough. Weave is about a 6% defense to all, or about 12% damage mitigation. Tough is about 18% resist to smashing and lethal. If we assume that's about 2/3 of the damage in the game, then it's also about 12% damage mitigation. They behave quite differently, but I would still expect the center of the two bell curves to be at about the same point.

So I'd be curious to see what happens to Tough and Weave if you reran the simulations with a 50% survival rate. You did run some simulations later in the post with a 50% survival rate, but unless I missed it, none that compared Tough and Weave at those levels.

A death every hour may be more of a challenge than average play. So if I'm right about the shapes and positions of the bell curves, I would expect Weave to provide less benefit than Tough in average play, but a still noticeable benefit.

Of particular interest to me is what happens when pushing the performance envelope. What about PvP, the RWZ challenge, or a Storm Palace lap? In that case, I'd expect a much lower 30 minute survivability than 50%. I'm guessing that puts us at the opposite end of the bell curves. Perhaps in that case, Weave would help even more than Tough. It seems a bit far fetched to me, but then I wouldn't have expected Weave to be useless in boosting Regen survivability when playing extremely safe, and I was obviously wrong.

These are just my suspicions. But I'd definitely be curious to see what happens to the Tough vs. Weave comparison if you have the simulator look for the 50/50 point and beyond.

Thanks again for the great post.

(edit: I think I see a serious flaw in my reasoning. When I defined the curve, I stated that it was the lowest health reached in the half hour. Later, when arguing that the midpoint for Weave would be moved to the right, I discussed it as if it were the average health during the half hour. It seems perfectly reasonable that the midpoint of the lowest health during the half hour might hardly budge, regardless of the percent survival chosen, because a half hour is likely long enough to get a big unlucky streak with or without Weave. So it doesn't seem reasonable for me to argue that because it will prevent some damage, that the mid point of the curve will necessarily move to the right. I'd still be curious about the actual results, but I think my prediction was based on flawed logic.)

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Yet, since Weave must obviously block some incoming damage, it must also shift the center of the bell curve to the right. So how is it possible to shift the center of the bell curve to the right while not changing the % of the bell curve above 0? I would guess that for some reason, the bell curve has gotten wider with the addition of Weave. The net effect would be no increase in survivability. This seems perfectly consistent with your findings, as well as with the intuition that Weave should help in some way. It helps keep health higher on average, but doesn't help prevent death.

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You are correct in that for riskier situations, eventually the curves will cross and weave will look better than tough. However, that generally happens so far to the left, that it happens in unreasonable regimes of play. I believe that if the crossover point happens further away than about 80% chance of survival, it represents an area that scrappers are not going to play, in the general case. They might enter such an arena for an AV fight, say, but they are simply not going to throw themselves into a mission where *every spawn* has a 20% chance of killing them. So tough seems much stronger than weave for most "normal" modes of play.

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Nice post... interesting stuff on Weave and how it calculates into nothing for regens and DA's.

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It doesn't so much do nothing, as it only makes the risky slightly less risky. And that isn't because weave is intrinsicly weak, its rather that regens and DAs are sufficiently strong, that when they push themselves to the point where they *need* extra help, that extra help has to work in environments where every hit is taking a big bite out of their health. And its specifically in those areas where defense is not as strong as a survival tool as resistance is, all other things being equal.

However, if defense is all you've got, more is always better. Stack weave on an SR scrapper, and you get a big return on investment there. And also, if you are pretty squishy to begin with, it can help at those levels of damage: if blasters got to run weave for free, they would notice a slight but material improvement (its the cost of running a toggle while needing endurance to constantly power high-cost offense, and its power choice cost, that makes weave often dubious for blasters).

I believe one thing that’s under rated is layered mitigation. Willpower has shown how well combining all 3 points of mitigation work. (Regeneration/Resistance/Defense) Granted I am speaking from my experiences on my WP Tank.

As for adding Weave to SR, that’s a huge boost. Something I notice now that I do plenty of flashback missions is that when I am doing Level 35 to 39 Arc's I have to play far safer then my normal play at 50. The key reasons are missing set bonuses however the real major reason is missing Weave. Once I am doing 40 to 45 Arc's I can almost work at my normal pace and really not watch my health bar. Obviously at 50 with all my bonuses its back to mass destruction with no worry. 50% Melee/AOE/Ranged defenses are fun.

On to Dark Armor, actually Weave would make a difference depending on slotting and power selection. Cloak of Darkness has a Defense Bonus built into it at 3.75 % to All and is also positional Defense. That stacks with Weave and Melee/Ranged/AOE set bonuses. Considering that a slotted Weave, COD a Steadfast Def/Res IO and 1 slotted CJ with a Defense IO actually gets you to 17% Defense to all before adding in set bonuses. Something I have done on my DA Brute is add 13 % Positional Defenses to Melee/AOE/Ranged to get to or close to 30% Defense. That layered with DA's resistances and Dark Regeneration its very unkillable. At least in a PvE setting.


As for Regen I can not speak about it since I do not have any.


For Invuln, Adding Weave the Steadfast IO and CJ can significantly alter your experience with Exotic Damaging mobs. Consider starting with 1 Enemy with 18.52 % Defense, that will scale up to 34.59 % Defense with 10 in Melee and I am not even accounting for Tough Hide because I am trying to remember what the Inv Scrapper Def Debuff is from Unyielding, I am thinking 3.75 % however I could of swore it was 2.5 %. Anyway at this point I consider Tough Hide to cancel out the Def Debuff of Unyielding.

Great work. Looking forward to the Willpower Update & the MoG 2.0 Update.

I applaud anyone with the mental fortitude to read this, much less write a guide like this. Just curious, how long did it take to write?

Given all the advancements in melee armor sets, I'd really like to see an update to this.

My suspicions:
Willpower is too strong.
Energy Aura is too weak.
Electric Armor is vastly improved.
Invulnerability is still a solid, middle-of-the-pack performer, like it's always been.
Dark Armor still beats them all...except for Willpower.
Super Reflexes is the Golden Fox of powersets.
"Powersets" is one word.
"Powersets" is a word.
People still ditch Regen when they see the green/variously colored stars flying out their pants. Seriously. This is the reason I've never been able to level a Regen.

Inquiring minds want to know all this and more, next, on a very special "Scrapper Secondary Comparisons"!

WARNING: I bold names.

I don't think you need to be ambitious here. The guide is already informative simply discussing SO-slotted secondaries alone. Even with many additions to the game, people are still interested in how a power set performs out of the box. Power set synergies and invention leverage probably need specialized discussion, so it's a bit too much for this guide with such a broad coverage. However, this is work for you, so it's up to you to decide whether it worth the effort or not.

The level and extent of analysis given through this thread is far beyond 'commendable', and firmly into the 'astounding' levels. Thank you for it.

I do have one question though that I didn't see addressed and wondered as to your thoughts about:

How do you feel about 'late bloom' powersets, and do you believe there is a place for certain powersets that are weaker, trickier or otherwise less than steallar performers at lower-levels, to become more powerful than 'easier' option sets without this being detrimental to game balance?

In other words, would it not be an acceptable imbalance and overal 'a good thing' (TM) for a powerset to be the most powerful at 50 because it was one that required somewhat more thought and determination to get there? (The controller effect?)

In particular, I think that some of the powers of Dark Armour come quite late, and the need to gain Knockback protection from another power or from IOs and bonuses may justify it being more rewarding at the top end.

It might be quite fascinating to look at how the various armours work with only the powers available at level 20, and with only DO level enhances. I think here we'd see SR be far more comparable and perhaps ahead of other sets, while seeing DA a fair bit behind the curve when a large part of its mitigation (a heal that must hit accurately) is both weaker and less accurate. Of course, I think this would only serve again to emphasize much of the superiority of Regeneration in general use.

Still a good read. With elec, fire, shield, and WP available, and energy coming, very curious where they all fit in.

And I still think I must not be as good a player as I think I was because I never enjoyed my DA scraps or brute a couple years back. Maybe now with inherent fitness I could make it work.

Even though the actual data is no longer current, I found this to be a very interesting read and could imagine the enormitiy of the task that it took to compile and relay all that information. Furthermore, I could only imagine what the data would be today with all the new secondaries.