The split damage puts Charged Brawl in favour as an attack, plus it's a little more damage, less endurance but more recharge, but the differences in the last two are minimal. Another bonus of Charged Brawl is it's chance to sleep, which means if you have cash to splash you can slot a Chance to Heal IO into it (10% chance for 5% health).
Personally, I'd grab Kick and put a Forced Feedback +recharge proc in it and cycle through it and CB with the Heal proc between attacks. Without the luxury of IOs though, Kick is a nice choice for the extra flavour of a kick among all the punches of Elec, even if it's not slotted.
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Well, first things first, Charged Brawl does a good deal more damage than Boxing and takes less time to animate. Looking at raw damage doesn't tell you much, especially if you consider attacks like Total Focus or Eagles Claw. They may deal a lot of damage in a single blow, but they're horrible for DPS because they've got cripplingly long animation times. A better metric of comparison is damage per animation time (DPA). Charged Brawl has a DPA of 54.7 (57.8 damage / 1.056 seconds), and Boxing has a DPA of 35.98 (47.5 damage / 1.32 seconds) (if those animation times look longer than you're used to seeing, I can explain Arcanatime). Now, 54.7 compared to 35.98? It becomes rather obvious which is better.
Now, in the Kick v. Boxing argument, DPA matters less because they're both atrocious attacks (35.98 compared to 26.57). All the power will really do for your build is sit there looking pretty, get you access to Tough and Weave, and, potentially, mule an IO set. As a set mule, Boxing wins hands down because Absolute Amazement is absolutely awesome, and even Stupefy is significantly better than any of the KB sets. No one should be using either of them as an attack (if you're optimizing).
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That proc is actually rather bleh. In an optimized attack string (CB>CI>CB>JL) at level 50 (1338.6 base hp), the proc would grant you roughly 13.386 hp (2 attempts * .1 chance * .05 heal * 1338.6 base hp) every 5.148 seconds (1.188 + 1.056 + 1.848 + 1.056) for 2.6 hp/sec. And that's not including the .95% chance to hit (which would pull it down to 2.47 hp/sec). Base regeneration is 5.59 hp/sec, slotted Health brings it up to 9.95 hp/sec, and adding the +hp accolades (which the proc doesn't benefit from) brings it up to 11.9 hp/sec. In an SO build, the proc barely increases your damage recovery capabilities when using a top tier attack string. When you begin to consider what the passive hp/sec of a build that could manage the top tier attack string would probably be (definitely at least 20 hp/sec at the minimum), the comparative benefit is even less. You'd be much better off just going for a 6 piece set bonus (Touch of Death or Mako's Bite) or a damage proc (which would actually add a decent bit to your DPS because that's an extra ~25% of the base damage per activation).
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Originally Posted by CBeet
Another bonus of Charged Brawl is it's chance to sleep, which means if you have cash to splash you can slot a Chance to Heal IO into it (10% chance for 5% health).
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I'm not sure about CB doing a lot more damage than Boxing -- I was looking at Mids' numbers, decided they didn't make any sense, and have been testing this in-game instead of using a character builder.
With 4 pieces of CI plugged into Boxing and 5 pieces in CB, Mids was saying that at level 50
CB would do 105 Smashing, 78.7 Energy, for a total of 183.7. Boxing was listed as 413.4 Smashing. This was either very wrong or I'm interpreting the numbers wrong, so I just started testing them both in-game.
In game, CB was doing 48+70 (118) vs Romans, Boxing was doing 105 (Boxing has one less damage enhancement from the CI set in my current build). Against Warwolves it was something like 21/26 and 39 for Boxing... in any case, the damage was very close and Boxing was not as well enhanced as CB.
edit: those numbers come from a level 48 character
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The numbers you got grok with the numbers that I gave you. Charged Brawl is going to give roughly 20% higher orange numbers than Boxing will. What you're forgetting (and what makes Boxing suck miserably) is that it takes 1.32 seconds to animate whereas Charged Brawl takes only 1.056 seconds. Boxing deals ~20% less damage and takes ~33% more time to animate. That's substantially worse on both counts.
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Originally Posted by GrandSpleenPART2
In game, CB was doing 48+70 (118) vs Romans, Boxing was doing 105 (Boxing has one less damage enhancement from the CI set in my current build). Against Warwolves it was something like 21/26 and 39 for Boxing... in any case, the damage was very close and Boxing was not as well enhanced as CB.
edit: those numbers come from a level 48 character |
At the moment, my boxing is doing roughly 9% less damage than my CB, and its damage is 19% less enhanced -- if I enhance them equally, boxing will be doing more damage.
1.056 and 1.32 won't be noticeable for me, I'm sure. For me 100% more of "not much" is still "not much," so percentage analyses are of limited use. Thanks for the feedback, it was helpful! Although maybe not in the way intended 
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I highly doubt that unless you're fighting enemies that resist energy damage more than smashing damage. Boxing's base damage is less than Charged Brawls (and I checked in game to make sure). All things equal, Boxing will always do less damage than Charged Brawl.|
Originally Posted by GrandSpleenPART2
At the moment, my boxing is doing roughly 9% less damage than my CB, and its damage is 19% less enhanced -- if I enhance them equally, boxing will be doing more damage.
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1.056 and 1.32 won't be noticeable for me, I'm sure. For me 100% more of "not much" is still "not much," so percentage analyses are of limited use. Thanks for the feedback, it was helpful! Although maybe not in the way intended
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Ah, I did make a mistake there -- forgot about enhancement diversification. Though the extra enhancement will add about 19%, the effective number for damage should only be around 3% extra damage for boxing if equally slotted.
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I'd never replace Charged Brawl with Boxing.
I DID, however, replace Thunder Kick with Boxing on my MA/WP, just because I like the new punches in MA and didn't really want that kick in there (I like Crane Kick though)
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately. |
Charged Brawl contributes 52% more DPS than Boxing. You asked if there was a good reason that you should stick with Charged Brawl. To me, that's a good reason. Now, if you don't care about DPS and just want to save a power, that's cool, play whatever sounds like fun to you.
As for Kick, that's 55.2 damage in 1.98 seconds, or 27.88 DPS. So Charged Brawl contributes 96% more DPS than Kick, plus Kick takes even more time away from your better attacks, so it will hurt your DPS even more than that would indicate. Really bad choice. If you're just trying to save a power and actually use this attack, please at least use Boxing instead of Kick.
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Charged Brawl animates faster than Boxing. It's damage is only slightly higher, but due to the faster animation it does significantly more damage over time. The DPA (damage / activation time) of Charged Brawl is well above that of Boxing, and once you get a seamless attack chain it's DPA that matters most.
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Listen to Umbral and others who say that DPA is what matters. Dont get blinded by seemingly decent dmg while it really isnt.
Boxing for 5 or 6 slot mule is great and kick can be used to patch some ranged def (1.88% with 3 slots of Explosive Strike). Elec singletgt dmg is already poorish, you really dont want it to be any worse.
Besides, Charged Brawl IS pretty as Santorican said 
As an elec/elec, I held out for a long time against taking tough (for no better reason than that I'm stubborn), but I finally decided to take it in the twilight of my character's career. To get it I grabbed Boxing, and subsequently realized that it has almost exactly the same effectiveness as Charged Brawl.
Now I'm considering dropping Charged Brawl and putting Boxing in earlier, and picking up Lightning Clap in later levels, which I have skipped in my current build. I just want some other voices before I decided to do it -- any good reason that I should stick with CB? The damage is almost the same, except that CB does about 50% energy damage while Boxing is all smashing... not such a big deal since the damage is small anyway.
And since I'm up to it, I thought, "Well, why not Kick instead of Boxing?" Any thoughts?
Thanks!
GS
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