Energy Melee - Scrappers

He brings up a good point regarding the speed. One thing that people learned in other MMOs like WoW is that in order to make use of crits more effectively, you want to be attacking more. The more chances you have to crit, the more total crits you will get, and the more total damage you will deal. This is why in WoW, a dual-wielding Warrior will get more total damage generally than a Warrior with a slow, strong two-handed weapon (if using the same build and gear and comparable weapon DPS).

If a scrapper is using hasten, not only will he get more damage from attacking more, but he will get more damage from the fact that he has more crit opportunities, and therefore more crits overall. Giving scrappers a set with a select few slow but hard hitting moves simply means they will be attacking less often and probably not getting as many critical hits as someone with a faster set like claws. Granted, you could still get a freakin' insane crit with Energy Transfer, again, that can be rebalanced like the stalker version so that a crit simply means no damage to yourself. You may still crit hard with Total Focus, but really, for an attack that slow that recharges once in a blue moon, you'll probably not get so many crits with it quite so often.

Not only that, but a lot of other scrapper tier 8-9 attacks have other things going for them. Some have a 15% crit chance (Eagle's Claw), some have DoTs after (Greater Fire Sword/Ripper/Throw Spines), one immobilizes and deals more overall damage (Midnight Grasp), a few are cones (Eviscerate/Ripper/Throw Spines/Shockwave), etc. Eagle's Claw for example will crit a lot more and be used a lot more frequently, meaning a nice steady stream of good damage, rather than a short burst of super-heavy damage. That in and of itself seems fairly balanced to me. At least balanced enough that they didn't feel it would be overpowered to give to Brutes and Stalkers and Tanks as well.

One final note, Scrapper damage scale being 1.125 compared to Stalkers at 1.0, that means Scrappers are only 12.5% stronger. That's only 1% more than the Leadership: Assault damage bonus for a mastermind/dominator. If you feel 12.5% damage added to a stalker would make a set overpowered, then I can only imagine your outrage at the Leadership Pool or Villain Epic ATs, hehe. If defenders with Fulcrum Shift can get Total Focus in their epic pools and Stalkers can have Leadership: Assault stack with their Total Focus/Energy Transfer, then I don't really think the devs would have issue with proliferating the set.

That being said, I'm going to have to agree that it should be ported over to Scrappers.

/signed

My guess is the only reason they haven't yet is because they simply haven't gotten to it yet.

Brutes need maintenance and a LOT of work to keep 75 and up Fury, though. Scrappers just need to wake up. Get hit with a slow, run out of enemies, end up on a slower team, have a runner or otherwise get slowed down and you're losing power. With a Scrapper, I can do this from a standing start, which is crucially important in big-bad battles. Yes, you can run in with full Fury, but as soon as you get smacked down once, you're facing an empty mission with an EB/AV at the end and nothing to build Fury off of. And building Fury off a single target is substantially harder.

It's kind of like Dominators and Domination. If you run Domination against an EB and die, you have no way to build it back up unless you go off and fight something ELSE before trying the EB again. And if you die again? SOL. A Scrapper has this performance ALL the time at no cost at all.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You're missing one crucial point - all Scrapper primaries have enough attacks to keep you attacking constantly, at least as long as you have endurance to keep it up. Using Hasten to speed things up just means you're using your bigger attacks more often instead of your smaller ones. And, really, it's not a question of criticals. It's a question of base damage. You have a set that, with just two powers and nothing else, outdamages all other Scrapper sets currently in the game. Even without criticals, that is a LOT of shock damage.

You have to understand two things. First, few people are worried about Brutes doing too much damage. They have the potential to do a lot, but even with a lot of hard work, that 200% damage buff doesn't carry them too far. Their base damage is low, and their buffs are small as a result. Like I said before - Scrappers can do more with a 500% damage buff than Brutes can with an 850% damage buff. That is a significant difference.

Secondly, you have to remember what Stalkers were when they were first made, which is when Energy Melee was given to them. Back then, they had Defender hit points and a damage mod of 0.9. They were, for all intents and purposes, borderline squishies with a damage mod that wasn't actually all that impressive. 0.9 is about on the mid point between "good" and "meh." They were built around delivering masses of shock damage and then running like all hell was after them, all the way up until the latest levels where you could finally patch up the holes, somewhat. Stalkers these days are a lot better off. They do more damage (1.0 damage mod) their health is more (between Blaster and Scrapper, I think) and they do even MORE criticals. I don't believe you should examine old sets in the context of new design, because the old sets were not redesigned when the whole AT was. And, again, there's a reason Energy Transfer doesn't cause criticals - twice 4.5 is 9.0, which is more than a nuke, more than an Assassin's Strike... More than anything I can think of. In other words, a big no-no.

You make a CAPITAL mistake here. Scrappers have a higher BASE damage modifier. A base damage modifier is almost completely incomparable to a damage buff. Why? Because the damage buffs themselves are calculated off your base damage. Literally. Every damage buff goes like: base damage + base damage*buff. So you can't really compare the Scrappers' higher base damage to the Assault buff. Why? Well, not only do Scrappers do 12.5% more damage, damage buffs given to them are 12.5% stronger. This isn't as clearly evident between Stalkers and Scrappers (it is, but you have to look hard), but it IS quite obvious between Brutes and Scrappers, with Scrappers having 150% the Brute damage mod. On the dot, in fact, which quite surprised me way back when.

Base damage matters a LOT. That's one of the key reasons why Blasters underwent such a damage increase with the Defiance changes - they got a 12.5% base damage increase to their ranged powers, which actually made their defiance buffs STRONGER, pushing ranged damage into a very impressive bracket. That's why a Snipe at 2.7 scale damage ALMOST catches up to Total Focus, at a damage scale of 3.56 - because a Snipe is a ranged power, and so uses their 1.125 damage mod, whereas Total Focus is melee attack, and as such uses their 1.0 damage mod. With enhancements, Aim and Build Up, that adds up.

Of course, I'd like to see Energy Melee on a Scrapper. Who wouldn't? I don't expect it will happen soon, however, and I don't expect it will happen without tweaks to the set of some manner or another.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I find it bad form to assume Brutes will always have so much Fury in general, especially not in situations where Energy Melee truly excels at, which is boss fights.

Also, Castle mentioned something along those lines at one point - Energy Melee for Scrappers as is is unlikely. Something somewhere will have to give.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Odd. It's against hard targets like bosses that high fury is easiest to come by.

I've never understood any of the complaints about fury building, but then, I design all my brutes to have smooth attack chains FOR fury building. It's become even more easy to do so now that brawl cost zero end.

I can build a new brute and hit level 7 in under 20 minutes by doing nothing but street sweeping in Mercy thanks to running from spawn to spawn and not dipping Below 75% fury. It bounces from 75 up to 90 within a few attacks.

I don't recall Castle stating that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

With the distaste I have for the current EM, a total EM overall for scrapper EM would probably turn out better than what we have now.

Flavor. The fury mechanism turns off some players. They prefer to be able to push out the same damage all the time rather than being forced into a rushed playstyle.

I don't personally have that issue and play my brutes and scrappers the same way at full tilt all the time, but I can understand what they're saying.

Tack on to that the fact that the devs have repeatedly stated that anything that can be proliferated probably will be eventually tells me that eventually we'll see it.

There was quite the contingent stating that claws on brutes would be grossly overpowered and not only did we get that port, it got buffed during the port.

Same case here. Those stating that EM on scrappers would be overpowered are sharing an opinion that is based on what I would consider an incorrect analysis of the situation.

Wrong. In Wow, 1% chance to crit = 1% increase to DPS (for melee, and casters with increased crit damage talents). Dual-wielding one-handed weapons deals more DPS than one two-handed weapon because two one-handed weapons have higher DPS than a two-hander, even with the to-hit penalty and the off-hand weapon dealing 75% damage (50% base + DW spec talent). Two-handed and DW Warriors have vastly different talent specs and gear, with two-handed Arms Warriors preferring Mortal Strike's high burst damage for PVP, while DWing Warriors use Fury's high DPS for PVE.

That's the short version. In the long version you're even wronger.

When was that?

It might have been before alot of changes were made to the set/system. Now that powers can have different effects in PvP and PvE and some of the powers in EM have been touched up, I think they've set it up nicely for a clean(er) port to scrappers.

Honestly, a while back when Scrappers were pining for EM, I just considered them selfish min/maxers that wanted to destroy balance. Now? Meh, they probably just want tintable glowie hands.

I can boil it down even simpler;

If everyone could do a Bill Z...well, we'd end up with a demonic world much like the warwolf world in the PI missions. We'd be more screwed than a screw-cap bottle faced with Chuck Norris

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.