Add more damage to Cobra Strike

Looking at the numbers, I realise why people say Cobra Strike stacks with Thunder Kick or Eagle's Claw. I thought these powers just had a higher chance to stun, but they are the ONLY OTHER powers that stun. And Thunder Kick has a stun mag of 2. Great. At this point, I have to agree that the secondary effects of the set are a mess, because they're just all over the place.

Thunder Kick has NOTHINHG, Storm Kick has an insulting stun (10% chance for diddly sqat manitude 2 stun for seven seconds), Crane Kick has a 60% chance for knockback, Crippling Axe Kick has a low-mag immobilize with a 50% CHANCE of a higher-mag immobilize and a bunch of not very useful slows Dragon's Tail has chance for knockdown... Eagle's Claw and Cobra Strike are practically the only powers which actually have a guaranteed side effect, and the 4 second stun on Eagle's Claw is insulting.

If starting from scratch is not an option, then we can at least significantly up the power of the secondary effects. Give Thunder kick a mag 3 stun, and give it a better chance, something like at least 30%. Give Crippling Axe Kick a mag 3 guaranteed immobilize, give Crane Kick or Dragon's Tail a guaranteed knock effect, and I'd say up the stun on Eagle's Claw. I mean, the secondary effects are all over the place and FAR weaker than I thought they were.

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.

Thunder Kick has the chance to stun...Storm Kick has extremely high DPA.

Not when coupled with Cobra Strike it isn't. I still do not understand how people are unable to reproduce this effect when including Cobra Strike and Eagle's Claw in their build. My main has never had an issue perma stunning bosses with this combo.

Scrappers are not Controllers and are not designed to do this. It takes at least two applications of a mez power for other ATs to affect a boss (even more for certain bosses and lts such as Night Widows) so why one powerset within the Scrapper AT should get to do this right from the start is beyond me.

Adding extra damage to Cobra Strike would give an unfair advantage over other Scrapper sets.

Have you ever played a character with Dark Blast and taken the Targeted AoE Disorient power? (Its name escapes me). Its damage is miniscule, even on a Corruptor. It also cannot stun most bosses after one hit. Granted it hits multiple targets but then it is a ranged power on a set with comparatively low damage.

When I've played MA Scrappers before I've skipped Cobra Strike because I don't get on with it. If it's bugging you that much then try respeccing out of it.

Dark Pit? I don't think that you can even slot that for damage IIRC.

If you are suggesting I hit something with Cobra Strike, then wait until that stun expires and hit it with Eagle's Claw... That's not really a realistic look at how the game plays out. Eagle's Claw is an attack, and as such its purpose is to kill things. A Scrapper tends to make things dead in a few attacks, so hitting something with Cobra Strike and then attacking it is a waste. And if you hit something with Eagle's Claw, chances are it's going down. But on the off chance it DOESN'T go down, the four second stun is rarely sufficient.

Now, granted, hitting a boss with Cobra Strike FIRST and THEN striking with Eagle's Claw will give you four seconds' worth of stun. Which accomplishes exactly nothing. It's not long enough to let you switch targets OR mitigate much damage.

Basically, the stun on Eagle's Claw does almost nothing. It's too short to make much of a difference, especially on the recharge that Eagle's Claw is at, so its contribution is negligible, but for delaying a boss a couple of seconds (with the flip landing eating up part of the stun). Its being guaranteed doesn't really help, because from my experience, enemies stay stunned about long enough to take a step, then turn around and keep attacking. And unlike a pure stun attack, slotting the power for a lot of stun is tricky.

As a matter of fact, a four-second stun is actually WORSE than knockdown, in that things are stunned just long enough to step out of melee range, yet not long enough to actually make a difference.

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.

Silly me - I have a damage proc in it! - no, wait, I don't - *is confused*

It's true, you cannot slot damage for that power. It does rock, however.

Let me just remind you that Martial Arts isn't just a Scrapper set. It's a Stalker set too and Stalkers have Energy Melee as well. I'm not sure what you mean by "should get to do it right from the start" but EM has no problem stunning 2 or more foes or keeping a boss perma stunned *and* output good damage on them at the same time while MA struggles to keep 1 foe stunned.

Fair enough, but I would rather see Storm Kick made into a Cone attack. IMO it is more fitting for the standard animation.

I doubt you're going to get an AoE of any type put in as a tier 2 attack for Scrappers. No set for them has that.

But MA can also knock them down, knock them back, immobilze them, and so on. Energy Melee is a one-trick pony. It tends to do that well. Martial Arts is a grab-bag of effects, that can sometimes be better when used in conjunction with each other. For instance, if you stun and immob an enemy, that's a poor-man's hold.

While Energy Melee can stun them, and send mobs all over the place running away in their drunken walk, which isn't always that great for a melee AT (especially ones where they have an aura in their secondary which depends on the number of mobs in range to work at it's peak), MA can keep them all nearby.

Comparing a set that has a bunch of different effects that can work together with one that does only one thing is kind of silly, especially if you're going to leave out what else the set can do.

Yeah I know. But it would be sweet!

You can perma-stun a boss with Cobra Strike if you slot the hell out of it. But TK and EC aren't going to help you very much, even in the current incarnation of EC. EC's stun at level 50 is only about 4.8 seconds, and including server ticks it has a 2.8 second running time. That means more than half of EC's stun occurs while you are animating the power. Using EC without stun slotting against a +2, the stun is wearing off just a fraction of a second after you land on the ground. I have no problem with saying that's ludicrous on its face.

CS with both disorient slotting and heavy recharge can stack with itself and perma-stun a boss in theory. CS+EC is a stunned boss for a couple seconds. Since CS has base recharge of 20 seconds and EC has base recharge of 12 seconds, the combination itself can perma-stun a boss if you maybe 2-slot EC with disorient and 3-slot it with recharge, or get the equivalent in global recharge buffs and hasten.

Prior to adding Fire, DB, and Electric to scrappers I asserted that MA was about in the middle of the pack in terms of single target damage and inferior in AoE, and could not make the unambiguous case that it had the best secondary effects. Its *still* about in the middle in terms of single target damage, and every single set that is lower than MA on Billz table has unambiguously better AoE with the possible exception of Electric (and only because Electric is a more complex set to analyze, not because it ultimately loses there).

Moreover, of the three sets with *higher* single target potential, two *also* have higher AoE potential, and one has vastly superior secondary effects (anyone that wants to argue that one immobilize, two and a half stuns, a PBAoE knockdown, and a knockback power beats an immobilize, a self heal, a stackable fear that has four times the uptime of CS, an endurance recovery power, and a stackable tohit debuff, be my guest).

MA is not a bad set, because there are no bad scrapper primaries. But its arguably the lowest in overall capability, and unarguably the one original scrapper primary that was given no area to excel in specifically that was achievable**. What's more, the devs know this: its just an incredibly low priority to make the lowest of the good, slightly better.


** Castle has, as I've mentioned previously, told me point-blank that MA was originally intended to be the "jack of all trades" set which specialized in "secondary effects" as those were defined back in the design-days. Unfortunately for MA, what apparently didn't count as a "secondary effect" included nearly every good effect that every other set got: self defense buff (Parry), self heal (Siphon Life), endurance recovery (Dark Consumption), foe tohit debuff (all of Dark Melee), fear (Touch of Fear), defense debuff (both single sword sets), DoT (originally no scrapper set but in Fiery Melee). Apparently none of these was a "secondary effect" as the devs conceived the MA set.

MA was left with stun, knockback, immobilize, and movement debuff. And some genius at the beginning of time put the immobilize and movement debuff in the same power which meant CAK was often debuffing the run speed of things it immobilized.

Then the devs realized that pervasive knockback/down and stackable stuns were too dangerous to allow a single set to have. So MA got the leftover effects, and was specifically barred from having too much of them. That's a recipe for mediocrity. Even the +5% accuracy is honestly weak sauce, because its lower in magnitude than the defense debuff that the swords get, lower in magnitude than the tohit debuff that dark melee gets, and its not stackable. And the single swords get it also. Archery gets +15.5% accuracy: +5% for being a weapon, +10% for being archery, and those were baked into the archery powers multiplicatively. Which is not to say that MA has more issues than Archery overall, its just to demonstrate that +5% is extremely low.

To clarify, Stalker MA only has the KB (they lose out on DT). The immobilize is so short-lived and the mag isn't consistently good it can almost be written off. So MA can have KB/KD and stun yet doesn't do any of them consistently well.

And if you're going to point out stunned mobs wobbling away slowly as a detriment to EM, they why not the KB in Crane? Sort of evens out when you're considering buff auras from secondaries.

Another suggestion I had MA was to make the immobilize from CAK suppress KB for a short time if the immobilized proced. That just gives synergy within the set so, if you don't want to send a foe flying with Crane you just axe kick 'em first.

...oh and Crane needs 100% KB...

Without stun slotting, EC should be wearing off somewhere between CAK and DT. And to repeat that chain, factoring in "ArcanaTime" you'd need EC's recharge to come in under 1.848 + 1.056 + 1.848 + 1.848 + 1.716 = 8.316s and CS's recharge to come under 1.056 + 1.848 + 1.848 + 1.716 + 2.772 = 9.24s. The first is not difficult, requiring +44.3% recharge. The second is harder, requiring +116.5% recharge. If CS is 3-slotted with disorient, its stun duration on an even boss would be 23.2s, and the cycle time of that chain is about 11.1 seconds. CS would be capable of perma-stunning the boss by itself without EC under those conditions, which no one argues CS is incapable of doing with very high recharge and stun slotting.

*However*, the boss would only be stunned about half-way through the chain in the first cycle, and wouldn't be perma-stunned until the second time through.

EC is acting as a margin for error buffer in the event you attack something of significantly higher level and CS cannot quite overlap in that chain. But that perma-stun is coming 90% from CS, and only 10% from EC.

A Dark Melee trying to perma-fear a boss would, with similar levels of recharge on ToF, apply ToF once, and then 3.7 seconds later apply ToF a second time, and in a total of 1.32 + 3.7 = 5.03 seconds the Boss would be perma-feared. What's more, there is so much overlap due to the low recharge and high duration of the effect (base fear duration at level 50: 22s) that the Dark Melee scrapper can focus on attacking and not even have to reapply the fear for nearly 17 seconds at even con. And this is with *no* fear slotting. With fear slotting comparable to the implied stun slotting above, a DM can hit a boss with ToF twice in about eight total seconds, and then wail on him for over thirty five seconds without reapplying (alternatively, the DM can just keep applying ToF as fast as possible, stacking an additional -11% tohit debuff on each application which lasts 20 seconds per application).

Ok, if I could choose between aoe Storm Kick or more damage for cobra strike then I would choose aoe as well.

One can dream right?

This is the kind of thinking I can get behind when we talk about any possible adjustments to MA. You have to look at MA as a whole, because no one change is going to make the set just right without some thought given to how it all fits.

Arcana's comments on the relative usefulness of all the secondary mezz/buff/debuff really hits home. I think the one thing I don't like in the older sets is, that most effects were treated as equally useful. It's become clear in several years of playing that Stacking effects trump nonstacking, and (in melee) effects that mitigate but at the same time keep the foe in range are far superior to anything that makes you stop and move to get back to attacking.

So here's my thinking. Is there another way to simulate the "precision" aspect MA is supposed to have, that would serve better than a simple +Acc bonus?

In the first attack in the set, the short description mentions an increased chance to Critical Strike, and that got me thinking. What if the entire set had that advantage? Either that or a variation on Furyfiance that gave an increased chance to crit for successive attacks until you critted, then went back to the base chance?

I'm not a numbers guy, and I realize that tinkering with Crits is probably a quick path into Overpowered land, but couldn't there be a sweet spot?

I was referring to the OPs suggestion that the mag of the stun be increased to one-hit-hold a Boss.

And Grinning Spade's comment that every powerset pretty much has a less-than-useful power could be changed to every powerset has a less-than-useful power depending on personal playstyle. (paraphrased etc!)

I'd be more than likely not to take Cobra Strike on either a Stalker or a Scrapper as it stands as I just don't like the slow animation (does it root?) - even the new one.

Now that I think about it, Flashing Steel is a cone that you can pick up at level 2.

Yes, it is a Tier 3 power, not a Tier 2. You can get Tier 2 powers at level 1. No AoEs exist that you can get at level 1, that I know of, for attacks at least.