Possibly another AV solor?

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

My Characters Deviont Art page Currently-reading Me Skydiving

AFAIK, Werner was building that toon more to be a mega tank and less to deal gobs of damage. It could probably solo AVs, but it wouldn't do so as fast as other builds could. It was also very precariously balanced from an endurance perspective.

It's kind of a build in search of a reason to exist. I'm sure it'll solo AVs, and I did crank up the healing enhancement in Dark Regeneration to perform well against single targets. But of course Dark Regeneration will also benefit from additional targets. And while it's probably OK, I'm not entirely convinced that endurance is completely under control to the point of AV and pylon sustainability. It does have Death Shroud and The Lotus Drops, but isn't really AoE focused. No confront or aggro aura, so not really a good off tank for a team, but it does have Leadership and should be team friendly. For reference, or if anyone wants to actually give it a shot and let me know how it works, here it is. I'm still leveling up.

Empty slot is for the PvP +3% resist. Duplicate Steadfast protection is the PvP +3% defense.

Looks like I haven't calculated DPS or the “Wernerscore” for it yet. I'm guessing moderate DPS (175?) and a very high Wernerscore (2300?), particularly when surrounded (3000?).

(edit: I underestimated the on-paper survivability. Wernerscore is 2521 against a single target, increasing to 4192 against two targets, and 4906 against 3+ targets. Those are the best numbers I can remember for any scrapper.)

(edit 2: I see that Powerforge had a DM/SR build with Aid Self that put out better numbers against a single target, 3373.)

(edit 3: Since it is a significant potential problem, I'll mention that these numbers don't take defense debuffs or to-hit buffs into account. Those will certainly limit survivability in some situations.)

You know, I can kind of see your point.

It's not going to be a A/V soloing machine, AoE killer, Tank substitute or PvP build.

It's a very interesting "odd duck" that would be decent DPS wise and very durable (Barring swarms of mobs hurling boulders at him) but it really isn't the best at any one thing.

I definitely wouldn't have thought to build it that way.

On a side note; I have been trying to figure out the calculations for your "Wernerscore" so as to understand it's meaning.

I take it that it represents an amount of incoming damage that the character can sustain before losing ground and dying?

If that is so, does that imply that the build posted above can handle 2521 DPS incoming from a single target?

I assume that you calculate the character's maximum HP recovery/sec through regeneration and healing powers in order to come up with a baseline for the rest of the calculations. In the case above factoring the 22 hp/sec + Dark Regenerations heal (minus the 5% potential miss factor) divided by the activation and recharge time of the power (or roughly 41.45 additional Hp/sec) for a maximum sustained health per second of 63.45?

As there are different levels of Defense and Resistance vs. different damage types, which damage type are you using for the calculation? The one with the most mitigation (Lethal) or a composite average of all of the various Defense and Resistance scores?

With a 45.6% ranged defense and 54.7% smashing resistance, swarms of mobs can hurl boulders at him all day long.

(edit: Wait... were you just looking at the typed defenses? That would explain the boulder hurling comment. The typed defenses are incidental. The build has soft-capped positional defenses.)

Here's a copy of the spreadsheet I use for calculating survivability.

The “Wernerscore” (not a name I came up with) is in a very broad sense a measure of incoming DPS that the build can survive indefinitely, yes. So in a very broad sense, this build can (on paper) survive about 5000 DPS of incoming damage from a crowd. You'd never see it in practice, though.

Yes, my approach is about what you're guessing. Two main parts of the calculation – damage mitigation and hit point recovery. For hit point recovery, I'm looking at base regen plus healing powers. And now that you mentioned it, no, I didn't take the 5% miss on Dark Regeneration into account. I really should, particularly when talking about a single target. At 3+, it starts mattering less and less, but I might as well calculate it correctly rather than assuming it hits.

For the defense and resistance, I'm using a matrix of percentages. The typed percentages are based on a careful analysis by... (I'm so sorry I'm forgetting your name!). The positional percentages were pulled out of my ***, and I set them at 70%, 20% and 10%, and just multiply those by each of the types for the % of incoming damage from that combination. In the past, when comparing builds, I've done quite a bit of fiddling with those numbers to see how the builds behave in different circumstances. You can see some graphs on the second sheet where I was comparing some builds for my main as we shift from melee to ranged or AoE damage. I haven't gone that far for a long time, though. Lazy I guess.

Anyway, I'm not using a composite average of all of the types and positions, but rather splitting the incoming damage by those ratios, so that the one that fails first is, in a sense, the one that dominates your survivability score. But take heart, Invulnerability tankers, with only 2.04% of the damage being psionic, it won't cause you to fail particularly fast. The 29.25% lethal melee damage is likely to be a bigger factor, despite your huge defense and resistance to it.

I should probably write up a list of all the ways that this number is wrong so that I can post it every time. It assumes an infinite number of hit points, essentially, and only cares that you take a random walk rather than trending up and down. It therefore underestimates the true benefit of more hit points, and how the same mitigation level from resistance leaves you in a much more secure position than the same level of mitigation from defense. On the opposite side, it ignores the various detrimental effects that defense stops that resistance lets through. It makes no allowance for to-hit buffs or defense debuffs, which can be very important. And so on and so forth. There are definitely better ways to calculate survivability, but this is one I consider good enough for my own purposes, which is to say comparing very similar builds to each other. Should I swap some sets around to give up 2% melee defense but gain 3% smashing/lethal resistance and another 8% regeneration? That's how this started, not as some way of assigning any sort of absolute numbers to builds, or reading too much into those numbers.

Oh, and my number doubles a later-developed forum consensus on the meaning of the words “damage mitigation”. Basically, I'm assuming a baseline of enemies hitting you 100% of the time for 100% damage. Since even with 0% defense and 0% resistance, even level enemies only hit you 50% of the time, my calculations would say that all super heroes start with 50% damage mitigation. The consensus was that it was more logical to consider this 0% damage mitigation, and work up from there. But I didn't want to go through and confuse myself by cutting all my numbers in half. I just think of them as a score anyway. Just keep in mind that if 5000 means taking 5000 DPS, that DPS includes all of the attacks that would have missed even if you had no defense.

Put more simply, these numbers aren't particularly meaningful, so take them with a grain of salt.

That's the rub right there, and why I abandoned this project myself, stalling my Kat/Dark at 47.

I'm too lazy to figure out the attack chain atm and the end needed to make it run but looking at the build it doesn't look good.

Otherwise he looks pretty damn strong though. If the end can be managed he'll be amazing.

When last I looked at it, endurance looked nearly sustainable. I asked for help on the endurance, and Umbral said that he thought it would probably be OK, and did some calculations himself to show why. I did take his advice of moving a slot from Build Up to Conserve Power. It looks like it will depend a lot on the situation. Do you need Death Shroud? Do you need Tactics? How often are you hitting Dark Regeneration? How many targets do you have for the Theft of Essence proc to reduce or eliminate the endurance cost? Are you lucky or unlucky with it and the Performance Shifter proc? There are so many variables that I think it's something I'll just need to try in a lot of situations to know for sure.

Chain is my standard DA -> GC -> GD -> GC -> DA -> GC -> SD -> GC. Also just noticed that I have no Achilles' Heel, so I'll need to downgrade my uncalculated DPS estimate to maybe 150? Still enough for AVs and pylons, but it'll be slow going. OK, I just rushed through a DPS calculation and got 148 DPS and 2.73 EPS. That's better DPS than what I used on most of the AVs with Sergei, but it's a long slog. I'm not including Death Shroud, as you'd turn that off when fighting AVs to conserve endurance.

Again, a build in search of a reason to exist. *chuckle*

Yeah I was just looking at the typed defenses. That's what I get for trying to analyze a character build at Two in the morning..



And I just looked over your spreadsheet...

Wow.

Quite a bit of work (and a lot of characters) there.

From glancing at it I take it that Gyles 4 is a WP scrapper? Using that character as a template, I punched in the numbers for my Claw/WP toon and came up with a score of 1064 with one target in melee and 1758 with RttC maxed out. Which seemed a bit low to me.

I do wonder though, I didn't see a place where I could factor in the tohit Debuff from RttC which I know from in-game observation actually has a measurable effect on the enemy's to hit chances once they are in melee range.

I am also curious as to what part the numbers in columns N through U play as they don't seem to be defined. Is that a place to set aside alternate number sets for quick swapping of character variables?

You would be wrong. Honestly, */WP does fine on single targets. RttC's additional regeneration for additional targets serves more to allow you to survive the higher levels of damage that are going to be hurled at you by larger groups than to feed your need against a single hard target. It is still perfectly serviceable against a single target.

In general, you just want to go at the AV alone. In some circumstances (re: high mitigation), the amount of damage that the minion will contribute will be less than the additional hp/sec that it provides by being in melee, but that depends entirely upon how much damage mitigation you're bringing to the party.

Oh hell yes! Kat/WP is very capable of soloing AVs. In fact the first time I saw Werner go "Holy Moly, that looks HAWT!" he was looking at a proposed Kat/WP build that was softcapped.