Looking for some advice from any ?/SD scrappers
By
FitzSimmons,
Posted on: 2009-08-07 22:11 in Scrappers
Hmmm, might avoid both then, and maybe go with Conserve Power at 50, for those extended fights. Mind you.... I normally don't play a toon once I get to 50... 8 0
I just loose interest.... It's all about the journey, then it's time to start again.
Miladys, the explanation that you're not using vet attacks makes a significant difference. I normally do and make short work of them, I was also thinking minion rather than lieut. Also your assertion that you get hit twice 1/5 of the time is off, you have some def debuff res and you're hit say 37% and 44% ? of the time by the attacks which is between 1 in 6 and 1 in 7 (and of course if you're DM as the one I'm playing atm is, then you're debuffing their to-hit as they debuff your def).
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
Quote:
Yes, I understand all that. On live I use all tools available, vet attacks, temp powers, respecs, IOs for franken slotting and set bonuses, etc. When beta testing I use only what is available to a player with a brand new account (that includes temps that you can get from missions available in those level ranges. Cryonite Armor and the Idol of Leghebu did more to help me on the Mercedes Sheldon arc than my secondary did) and I use the Standard Enhancements that the game is supposedly still based around.|
Originally Posted by Minotaur
Miladys, the explanation that you're not using vet attacks makes a significant difference. I normally do and make short work of them, I was also thinking minion rather than lieut. Also your assertion that you get hit twice 1/5 of the time is off, you have some def debuff res and you're hit say 37% and 44% ? of the time by the attacks which is between 1 in 6 and 1 in 7 (and of course if you're DM as the one I'm playing atm is, then you're debuffing their to-hit as they debuff your def).
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My assertion that you get hit 37% of the time is NOT off.
Base defense value of Deflection and Battle Agility is 11.3%. 3 slotted with +3 TOs (enhancement value of 17.2%) brings this up to 13.2% (this also means that you have no end red slotting).
Battle Agility has defense debuff resistance of 13.8% the above slotting makes it 15.47%.
An even level mob has a 50% chance to hit you. 50 - 13.2 = 36.8% chance of hitting you on the first attack (that's more than 1/3 of the time).
An even level hellion gunner has a defense debuff value of (IIRC) 7.7%. When that first attack hits, your defense is reduced to 13.2 - 7.7*(1 - .1547) = 6.69%, which means his second attack has a 50 - 6.69 = 43.31% chance to hit.
Statistically speaking thats a .368 * .4331 = 15.93% chance each encounter that any hellion gunner is going to hit you with his first 2 attacks. When the second attack lands your defense that started out at 13.2% will be down to 0.19%.
16.67% is 1/6th of the time that means that in 1/6th of all encounters with a single Hellion gunner your defense will be at 0.19% after his second attack and playing this game means that you will run into many more than 6 hellion gunners and get attacked by them twice or more before you outlevel them.
.368 + .368 = 73.6% of the time the first or second attack will hit and leave you with 6.69% defense.
That means that in 73.6% (just under 3/4ths of the time) of all encounters with a Hellion gunner that your defense will be less than 7% by the second attack.
The best that you can possibly have is 13.2% resistance to Lethal (and then only if you 3 slotted Deflection for resistances. It's much more likely that you 3 slotted it for defense instead and will have 11.3% resistance to Lethal) which means that you will be taking 86.8% of the total incoming damage.
Dark/ is not the only scrapper primary that can be paired with shields. Dark/ will give you ~11% to hit debuff against 1 target with Shadow Punch and Smite that means that Dark gets to keep most of it's defense.
Broadsword/ gets Parry which (2 acc, 1 end) will get you an additional 30% defense to melee and lethal (if you keep it double stacked) but you aren't going to be killing that hellion gunner by the time he gets 3 (and more) attacks off by Parrying him to death.
Fire/ and MA/ have no such options available.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Actually your stats are wrong (mathematician/statistician by training here). If they have a 36.8% chance of hitting you, they have a 63.2% chance of missing, so the chance they miss you twice is 0.632x0.632 ie 40%, so there's only a 60% chance that your defence is lowered by their first two shots.
Fire has no extra mitigation, and of course hellions resist it so you're in a bad place, but MA has a major long duration stun available that will keep the badguy stunned more than half the time unslotted for stun or rech.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
Quote:
You didn't take into account the defense debuff from the first hit in your calculation above. That's why your numbers don't match mine. Your numbers are only accurate if the first attack missed but aren't accurate if the first attack hits and lowers your defense to subsequent attacks.
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Originally Posted by Minotaur
Actually your stats are wrong (mathematician/statistician by training here). If they have a 36.8% chance of hitting you, they have a 63.2% chance of missing, so the chance they miss you twice is 0.632x0.632 ie 40%, so there's only a 60% chance that your defence is lowered by their first two shots.
Fire has no extra mitigation, and of course hellions resist it so you're in a bad place, but MA has a major long duration stun available that will keep the badguy stunned more than half the time unslotted for stun or rech. |
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Quote:
If the first attack hits, you're debuffed, doesn't matter what the second attack does. For you not to be debuffed it requires the first attack to miss.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
You didn't take into account the defense debuff from the first hit in your calculation above. That's why your numbers don't match mine. Your numbers are only accurate if the first attack missed but aren't accurate if the first attack hits and lowers your defense to subsequent attacks.
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The actual probabilities are:
Not debuffed
miss + miss = 40%
Once debuffed
miss + hit = 0.632 x 0.368 = 23.25%
hit + miss = 0.368 x 0.5669=20.86%
Total = 44%
Twice debuffed
hit + hit = 0.368 x 0.4331=16%
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
Ok I love shields, the first toon I pushed past the Billion inf mark was a BS/SD.
But Milady's is spot.
SHIELDS HAS LOW MITIGATION.
It makes up for it with Shield Charge, AAO and a few other benefits, but it certainly doesn't offer the same raw survivability as say SR, which is a much more 'up and down' Defense set.
The reality is, that it does need a bunch of IOs to overcome this and reach the softcap, whereas SR can do it with a few extra power picks only.
It's an awesome set, but it does not offer the sheer survivability 'straight from the box' as many other secondaries and needs tweaking to get the best from it (ie IOs and ancillary pool picks).
But as for the OP question, what to pair with Shields, I'd ask the "How much Inf do I have?" question.
- DM will give you extra end recovery and a heal, it's damage is pretty good, and is the cheapest option.
- Fire gives insane damage with AAO fully loaded, is poorly resisted by enemies, and doesn't need a lot of recharge, but has zero secondary benefits
- Broadsword gives insane DPS too, but only at high recharge, it also gives the Def bonus of Parry, but it doesn't shine as quickly or as well at budget costs, definitely the most expensive option.
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Got it thanks. I see where I went wrong on my calcs.|
Originally Posted by Minotaur
If the first attack hits, you're debuffed, doesn't matter what the second attack does. For you not to be debuffed it requires the first attack to miss.
The actual probabilities are: Not debuffed miss + miss = 40% Once debuffed miss + hit = 0.632 x 0.368 = 23.25% hit + miss = 0.368 x 0.5669=20.86% Total = 44% Twice debuffed hit + hit = 0.368 x 0.4331=16% |
That to me it still too much incoming damage especially when compared to how the other secondaries fare. Only SR "can" have that much trouble in the early levels and it's alot easier to soft cap, gets higher defense debuff resists, higher slow resists, and the scaling resistances give much higher values than /Shields gets on its own.
I'm still of the same opinion that I was during the closed beta. Sheilds was balanced with what IOs "could do" in mind instead of on what SOs actually do.
Alot of folks may be basing their idea of shields on what a Dark/Shield can do. In my book that's like basing your opinion on fire controllers by what fire/kin can do. It's the scrapper outlier in the same way that Fire/Kin is the controller outlier.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Quote:
Actually, as Castle said, */SD was designed around achieving a similar level of survivability as */Fire (re: lower than everyone else) to account for the additional offensive output that the set is capable of (AAO and Shield Charge). It's actually perfectly serviceable from this standpoint and excellently balanced as such. The reason it's generally seen as a powerhouse is because +def is much easier to work with from a optimization standpoint than +res is and */SD's offensive capabilities have much greater utility than */Fire's.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
I'm still of the same opinion that I was during the closed beta. Sheilds was balanced with what IOs "could do" in mind instead of on what SOs actually do.
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It was never intended to be on the same level as other sets that are more fully developed to survivability. That's the reason why, in SOs, it's lower and, as many people that enter into it assuming incredible performance all the way through learn, a much harder time leveling than they originally bargained for.
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Which is exactly the reason that Dark/Shields is a beast and an outlier like Fire/Kin.|
Originally Posted by Umbral_NA
Actually, as Castle said, */SD was designed around achieving a similar level of survivability as */Fire (re: lower than everyone else) to account for the additional offensive output that the set is capable of (AAO and Shield Charge). It's actually perfectly serviceable from this standpoint and excellently balanced as such. The reason it's generally seen as a powerhouse is because +def is much easier to work with from a optimization standpoint than +res is and */SD's offensive capabilities have much greater utility than */Fire's.
It was never intended to be on the same level as other sets that are more fully developed to survivability. That's the reason why, in SOs, it's lower and, as many people that enter into it assuming incredible performance all the way through learn, a much harder time leveling than they originally bargained for. |
Bottom line is shields is under-mitigated and is "too high" on damage, the "balance" of extra damage for less mitigation is a bad one since what it does it cause frustration in the low levels and for the players that are SO only users, some of these players then try to fill the mitigation gaps with IOs. Most of which are not in high enough supply for the majority of players to do.
It's also the reason that so many players were skipping the team buff power in the Beta test and even after "buffing" GC is still the power I see that is skipped by the majority of shielders.
I could tell before I got in closed from the numbers that the dev vision for shields and the player vision for shields were not congruent. The problem is the same for all power sets like this where player vision doesn't match the dev's vision. After a couple years of data mining the devs will look at it and say, "oh you guys aren't using this the way we intended, that's why it doesn't work."
We will say, "it's not fun the way you designed it, it's more fun when we do X."
Then because the players are using it the way they intend, instead of the way the devs designed it, its underperforming except in "x" situation (in this case the "x" is being heavily IO'd) where it way overperforms. After another couple years of kicking it around they'll finally get to the point where they "balance" it so it isn't a frustrating debtfest in the early levels or without the best IOs but by then even the average player will have had time to load it up on uber IOs and then everyone will scream about the damage being nerfed to bring the mitigation up.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Quote:
I think that skipping this buff power makes sense for any scrapper... it just doesn't work for the scrapper mindset, if it doesn't benefit me as a scrapper I don't want it. For a Tank I can see it and would most likely take it. In my mind, Tanks, Defenders and Controllers are there to offer buffs to the team (not exclusively).. a scrappers/blaster buff to a team is to take out the threat before it hurts the team.
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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
It's also the reason that so many players were skipping the team buff power in the Beta test and even after "buffing" GC is still the power I see that is skipped by the majority of shielders. |
It will be hasten, you'll burn up quite a bit more endurance when it's active (because you'll be attacking more often in the same amount of time) and it has a minor crash (10 end IIRC) when it expires.
OWtS increases your end recovery by what amounts to .5 end/sec while it's up (120 seconds) and then crashes and costs you 60 endurance.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson