I have a bunch of lvl 50 brutes, and my EM/(WP) does prolly feel the weakest, from a primary point of view. I really wanted to like her, I invested alot cash on her a while ago, but it did not help at all. She still remains subpar to my other brutes, at least for my taste.
The AoE is non existent, and the ST dmg, while not bad, does not make up for that big loss in my opinion. Above all, your big hitters are incredibly slow and that's a pain in any team : you fire a big ET or TF on that boss and bam it's already dead before your attack lands.
I'd really like to see some EM improvements, but that's very unlikely to come. After the big nerfs hit like 1.5 year ago, the devs prolly think the set is fine now.
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It should be noted that with the removal of redraw in combat (check dev digest for BAB's post) those DPS studies are about to be made somewhat moot.|
Originally Posted by Siolfir
They're both bad at it, was what I was getting at (at least, if you just count the attacks themselves and not what you can add through procs). In that situation, DB will hit a plateau much earlier since most of its powers do similar DPA, but it actually has a slightly lower single-target DPS than Electric Melee, because the only two higher-than-normal DPA attacks are Ablating and Sweeping; BillZBubba's thread with the high recharge attack chains had these numbers - and keeping in mind that every other Brute primary except Battle Axe (@~187) in the thread got numbers around 200+:
Brute Electric 169 4.69 EPS Brute Dual Blades 168.3 4.42 EPS In that thread, Dual Blades was dead last among Brute primaries in ST DPS - that particular thread also included using pool powers (notably patron powers, and Gloom in particular) in the attack chains. Note that just using SOs or common IOs and not using any pool powers, Dual Blades will outdamage Electric Melee in single target (Brute Dual Blades 134.8 3.5 vs Brute Electric 106.6 2.9 in the other set of calculations) because Electric Melee's only "good" DPA powers are Chain Induction and Lightning Rod (but I'm not going to count something with a base recharge of 90s as an attack chain power). But adding a lot of recharge doesn't help DB as much (note that at low recharge, FM has the highest damage followed by EM; with high recharge it's DM* (*assuming 10 targets for Soul Drain), then SM, FM, SS, and EM); the key to getting ElM up there is cycling Gloom and Chain Induction - the best DPA attacks available for the primary - as often as possible, and the chain used cycled each roughly every 4 seconds - this is one of the cases where not having redraw means that Gloom helps the chain a great deal since it has a higher DPA than any attack in either primary). So no, neither one is "good" for single-target damage, but Electric Melee can get slightly better DPS on a dedicated build for it as well as having a less-resisted damage. |
Also, for dual blades, I did not factor in the buffs from the combos. DB will have better ST damage than I accounted for there.
Be well, people of CoH.
War Mace with access to Gloom/Dark Obliteration and Mu Lightning/Static Discharge/Ball Lightning just became the best set in the game IMO. It was already a top tier set from my experience.
BF, SS, Gloom, Ablating with both -res procs sounds tasty.
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Agreed on the first point - it definately changes a lot of the numbers (and will make my Fortunata even more silly than she was before); as for the second part, there wasn't a combo in the attack chain used (I just double-checked, it was BF->Abl->SS->Abl), so any bonuses from combos would force the chain to change and (iirc this was debated a bit in the thread but I didn't search that far, and it may have been a different one entirely) would end up with worse damage - I think Attack Vitals was the closest one but Vengeful ate up too much time in the chain.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
It should be noted that with the removal of redraw in combat (check dev digest for BAB's post) those DPS studies are about to be made somewhat moot.
Also, for dual blades, I did not factor in the buffs from the combos. DB will have better ST damage than I accounted for there. |
But undoubtedly the weapon sets will get a huge boost from being able to mix in better attacks without adding a long pause in their attacks once BAB's changes go live. Now if I just need to force myself to get past the aesthetics of the running/jumping animations with weapons(/shields) out...
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Was ET's -health factored in the dpa or whatever equation when it was given its numbers?
Also, it would be excellent to get a redname posting on whether EM is working as intended or not, so I can plan my toons future.
The -health didn't count towards the numbers; it would've been an interesting way to artificially inflate the numbers, tho!
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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I'm pretty sure the -health component was the reason why ET did so much dmg/dpa. I'm not saying it was balanced as it was (obviously in certain situations it was not). But, why would you use a power hurting you, if you can get one doing the same kind of dmg/dpa that only hurts your enemy ? The devs must have factored the -health in one way or another in the ET equation... at least before the nerf 
And even after, it still does one of the best DPA in the game. It's just annoyingly slow, and I know many people who would have prefered to keep the old animation with a slight dmg nerf instead.
Concerning the state of EM, the set does not shine as it used to, but we cannot say it's totally broken either. It does not feel great anymore, but it works, and people who did not play it before the nerfs may have fun with it. That's the reason why I don't think we will see any improvement to the set coming soon.
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BaBs has actually hit a wall in that development because Shields are giving him trouble. Hopefully he'll make another breakthrough that takes care of it but with Going Rogue still churning away at his time I wouldn't expect too much. It's good to see the devs okay with that concept, though.
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Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
It should be noted that with the removal of redraw in combat (check dev digest for BAB's post) those DPS studies are about to be made somewhat moot.
Also, for dual blades, I did not factor in the buffs from the combos. DB will have better ST damage than I accounted for there. |
Brute Electric 169 4.69 EPS
Brute Dual Blades 168.3 4.42 EPS
In that thread, Dual Blades was dead last among Brute primaries in ST DPS - that particular thread also included using pool powers (notably patron powers, and Gloom in particular) in the attack chains. Note that just using SOs or common IOs and not using any pool powers, Dual Blades will outdamage Electric Melee in single target (Brute Dual Blades 134.8 3.5 vs Brute Electric 106.6 2.9 in the other set of calculations) because Electric Melee's only "good" DPA powers are Chain Induction and Lightning Rod (but I'm not going to count something with a base recharge of 90s as an attack chain power). But adding a lot of recharge doesn't help DB as much (note that at low recharge, FM has the highest damage followed by EM; with high recharge it's DM* (*assuming 10 targets for Soul Drain), then SM, FM, SS, and EM); the key to getting ElM up there is cycling Gloom and Chain Induction - the best DPA attacks available for the primary - as often as possible, and the chain used cycled each roughly every 4 seconds - this is one of the cases where not having redraw means that Gloom helps the chain a great deal since it has a higher DPA than any attack in either primary).
So no, neither one is "good" for single-target damage, but Electric Melee can get slightly better DPS on a dedicated build for it as well as having a less-resisted damage.
I'll have to go check that CI-Gloom attack chain. o_o
"It's a scrapper. If he can't handle it, no one can." -BrandX