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It's quite simple really: it's on a long recharge. For powers with a long recharge, DPA isn't a viable metric of comparison because you're not going to be saturating your attack string with it. DPA is only a valid metric of comparison when you're talking about a situation in which you are operating at saturated animation time use (i.e. you have no little to no gaps in your attack chain) with powers that will recharge on a constant reliable scale in the short term.|
Originally Posted by Edana
But seriously, why is the third best DPA attack available to brutes a 20' radius aoe in a secondary?
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Because Shield Charge takes so long to recharge (4.5 times longer than Seismic Smash), you wouldn't be able to use it for real gains within any attack string even if you were operating at the recharge cap (18 sec recharge, 19.716 second cycle) since it would take up such a small portion of the attack string that it wouldn't be functionally noticeable (at cap, it would be only 8.7% of the total attack string, assuming the rest of the attack string fit perfectly within Shield Charge's animation time).
For long recharge powers, it doesn't really matter how long they take to animate because their animation time is doing almost nothing to their cycle time (which is a very important number to gauge weight and use within an attack string) compared to their base recharge. With what are considered normal attack powers, the animation time is actually having a substantial noticeable effect upon the cycle time of the power and thusly animation time is an important attribute for them to consider. It's for this very reason that, although many of the best AoE powers in the game have what would normally be considered inordinately long animation times (Footstomp, Spine Burst, Tremor, Frozen Aura), they're still considered to be the very best AoE attacks in the game. The fact that they take a long time to animate pales in comparison to the fact that they deliver a large amount of damage to a large number of targets and the percent of animation time used is rather paltry when compared to ST attacks of a similar animation time.
Good point. Possibly even the right point. Though from the way it works in play I'd argue that shield charge isn't well balanced, it is doing between 39 and 78 (unenhanced) more damage across it's aoe than the only other brute attack with a similar recharge after all.
I think we disagree on what makes "the best AoE attacks" though: footstomp is in that list because of a 15' radius and rage; spine burst because the set has quills along with ripper and throw spines to fill out an aoe chain; tremor has nothing going for it other than a large radius; frozen aura doesn't have any of what makes footstomp good, small radius, no damage boosts, I don't see why this power is even in the list.
Gloom helps increase sustained single target DPS. It is the key reason why a dark/???/soul brute can pull ahead of a dark/???/??? scrapper. We also don't talk about this because of this.
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And, you know, that 14 second recharge time so that it can be used ~25% more often than any of the other powers mentioned.|
Originally Posted by Edana
tremor has nothing going for it other than a large radius;
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| frozen aura doesn't have any of what makes footstomp good, small radius, no damage boosts, I don't see why this power is even in the list. |
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The 14 second recharge and the damage is identical to whirling hands/axe, and the damage is a little lower than whirling mace; you then trade off a ~0.7 second longer animation for 7 foot extra radius.|
Originally Posted by Umbral
And, you know, that 14 second recharge time so that it can be used ~25% more often than any of the other powers mentioned.
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Originally Posted by Umbral
Frozen Aura (as a lone power) is actually quite good. It's functionally identical to Super Strength except for the fact that it has a smaller radius (which is still larger than the minimum size) and uses the best player damage type in the game (Cold). There is a reason it is lauded as the Frozen Footstomp. It's pretty much just as good.
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Considering how much additional space you're getting out of that 7 extra feet and how little animation time actually has to do with the effectiveness of AoE attacks, I'm going to stick with Tremor being quite the nice power.|
Originally Posted by Edana
The 14 second recharge and the damage is identical to whirling hands/axe, and the damage is a little lower than whirling mace; you then trade off a ~0.7 second longer animation for 7 foot extra radius.
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| In isolation and once everything is clustered up a bit yes, it is as good, possibly better in some cases since cold isn't widely resisted. Losing that 5 foot of aoe radius can't just be ignored though, and being down by the 80-160% you can get from rage is a very big difference, especially since at the moment the only AT that can take this power doesn't have fury. If they ever get over the 'slows aren't good on brutes' thing it'll be worth revisiting. |
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14 second base recharge and 3.3 second animation; cut recharge in half or more for decent slotting and the animation is a third of the cycle time. It's a nice power, and if you want to keep a large area on its back it's as good as you can get; but the damage is as low as a melee pbaoe goes and the cycle time is unavoidably longer than most. The larger radius is the only benefit it's got and as you said concerning frozen aura, if you know how to make enemies cluster up a little, that doesn't matter very much.|
Originally Posted by Umbral
Considering how much additional space you're getting out of that 7 extra feet and how little animation time actually has to do with the effectiveness of AoE attacks, I'm going to stick with Tremor being quite the nice power.
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Originally Posted by Umbral
Considering we're arguing the traits of the power rather than the AT that the power exists in, I'm still going to argue that Frozen Aura nearly as good as Footstomp. All of the powers listed would be subject to AT mods, just like every other power under the auspices of cross-AT comparison, so simply saying "Brutes don't get it, thusly it sucks" isn't a valid argument. I'm not going to say that Frozen Aura is better than Footstomp, but the difference isn't particularly vast, especially when you know how to manipulate enemy location so that the additional 5' of radius doesn't matter nearly as much.
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It does occur to me however that you're right, we are comparing the power; I was comparing the damage of footstomp+rage to just frozen aura, which isn't really fair. If I'm going to include rage on the behalf of superstrength I've got to include that ice melee also has a pure cold damage cone to pick up at what would be level 2 on a brute.
Isolating them we're left with two powers, one that has a big aoe and knockdown, one has a medium aoe and an often pointless sleep. Add in fire sword circle with the radius confined to almost melee range but more damage and it's looking like the 20 second recharge aoes are pretty well balanced, footstomp pulls ahead slightly from the extra area and nicer secondary effect, but there isn't as much in it as I'd implied. So on this point I'll conceed; I was wrong.
Umbral, I see a contradiction reading you here. If you think Tremor is that good because of its large radius, you have to agree Footstomp then has a pretty big advantage over Frozen Aura. Radius x1.5 => Surface covered x2.25.
"Manipulating enemy location" as you say takes time, and time is damage. Depending on the map, the type of mob, your team setup... etc, it cannot be 100% of the time, not even 80% of the time you'll get all those mobs standing between 11' and 15' to you inside your 10' radius... at least not in my experience 
Another factor to consider in grouping or herding mobs is that sometimes, there just isn't enough room to get all the NPCs following you inside your aoe. They start bouncing around each other and moving left and right trying to get a lick in.
Footstomp almost universally catches all the mobs on the edges, as well as those close in, while the other melee AOEs frequently leave a few untouched. Overtime that adds up to a lot of lost mitigation and damage.
50s: Inv/SS PB Emp/Dark Grav/FF DM/Regen TA/A Sonic/Elec MA/Regen Fire/Kin Sonic/Rad Ice/Kin Crab Fire/Cold NW Merc/Dark Emp/Sonic Rad/Psy Emp/Ice WP/DB FA/SM
Overlord of Dream Team and Nightmare Squad
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Out of curiosity, where did you pull these numbers from?
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Originally Posted by Edana
So I went on a trawl through all the attacks brutes get to find out. The results actually surprised me.
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I found this most noticable when I tried to make an ae farm using the winter event snowmen. Damn do those things have a large footprint. On the other hand I've seen normal size units stack up in strange barrel like formations and hit the target cap with the innermost radius of lightning rod. (Which being a psuedopet only reports on the pet damage channel, took ages to work out the different damage pulse radii.)|
Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
Another factor to consider in grouping or herding mobs is that sometimes, there just isn't enough room to get all the NPCs following you inside your aoe. They start bouncing around each other and moving left and right trying to get a lick in.
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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
Out of curiosity, where did you pull these numbers from?
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As I said before, when you're considering AoE capability, you'd be amazed at exactly how little animation time matters. Yes, Tremor has a really long animation time, but it's still going to cycle a good deal faster than a 20 second AoE with a 2.1 second animation time. 95% +rech enhancement would generate a 12.5 second cycle in the Footstomp and a 10.6 second cycle in Tremor. Footstomp still has an overall 25% superiority (thanks to having 42% better damage but 17% worse cycle time), but I've already said that Footstomp is top of the tier. Tremor is simply a good AoE.
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Originally Posted by Edana
14 second base recharge and 3.3 second animation; cut recharge in half or more for decent slotting and the animation is a third of the cycle time. It's a nice power, and if you want to keep a large area on its back it's as good as you can get; but the damage is as low as a melee pbaoe goes and the cycle time is unavoidably longer than most. The larger radius is the only benefit it's got and as you said concerning frozen aura, if you know how to make enemies cluster up a little, that doesn't matter very much.
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I actually already conceded the range advantage that Footstomp has, but you have to realize that Footstomp breaks the rules (really? oh yes! it's substantially too large for the damage it deals on the recharge it has). Frozen Aura still has a large than normal AoE (10' compared to 8'), and you're forgetting that Footstomp uses the single most resisted damage type whereas Frozen Aura uses the single least resisted damage type. Damage type isn't something you can just ignore, especially when you're fighting enemies like robots.|
Originally Posted by Ehina
Umbral, I see a contradiction reading you here. If you think Tremor is that good because of its large radius, you have to agree Footstomp then has a pretty big advantage over Frozen Aura. Radius x1.5 => Surface covered x2.25.
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"Manipulating enemy location" as you say takes time, and time is damage. Depending on the map, the type of mob, your team setup... etc, it cannot be 100% of the time, not even 80% of the time you'll get all those mobs standing between 11' and 15' to you inside your 10' radius... at least not in my experience
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Cheers, thanks!
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Originally Posted by Edana
Base damage divided by activation time corrected for arcanatime. (0.132*(1+roundup(activation/0.132)))
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a. Robots resist cold and are vulnerable to smashing.|
Originally Posted by Umbral
I actually already conceded the range advantage that Footstomp has, but you have to realize that Footstomp breaks the rules (really? oh yes! it's substantially too large for the damage it deals on the recharge it has). Frozen Aura still has a large than normal AoE (10' compared to 8'), and you're forgetting that Footstomp uses the single most resisted damage type whereas Frozen Aura uses the single least resisted damage type. Damage type isn't something you can just ignore, especially when you're fighting enemies like robots.
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b. Cold is not the least resisted type of damage - across the spectrum, it's energy, then fire, then dark. Smashing is not the most resisted type of damage - that's Lethal, then Psi (by virtue of degree than universality), then Smashing.
c. If Tremor is a good AoE power due to its cycle time, and you're ignoring AoE radius on Frozen Aura because "that doesn't matter", then you'd have to agree that with a faster cycle time due to quicker animation and less resisted damage type, that Whirling Hands is a superior AoE to Tremor. Right? After all, those are the claims that you are making, so logically it would only follow...
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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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I lost my resist spreadsheet a few weeks back when my hard drive got fried, so you'll have to excuse that. I remember going through the numbers a while ago with a number of other number crunchers and determining that Cold was actually the best damage type on a scale weighted by target hp and how often you find certain enemies, but it's been a while. I might be misremembering it though. I do recall that Smashing was right next to Lethal (Psi was actually in the middle on the weighted scale) on that scale though.|
Originally Posted by Siolfir
a. Robots resist cold and are vulnerable to smashing.
b. Cold is not the least resisted type of damage - across the spectrum, it's energy, then fire, then dark. Smashing is not the most resisted type of damage - that's Lethal, then Psi (by virtue of degree than universality), then Smashing. |
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| c. If Tremor is a good AoE power due to its cycle time, and you're ignoring AoE radius on Frozen Aura because "that doesn't matter", then you'd have to agree that with a faster cycle time due to quicker animation and less resisted damage type, that Whirling Hands is a superior AoE to Tremor. Right? After all, those are the claims that you are making, so logically it would only follow... |
Radius does matter. Damage type does matter. Cycle time (more affected by recharge than by animation time except when you're operating at the point wherein you're using an all AoE attack chain) does matter. They're not equally valued, though. I've readily admitted that a power with a large radius, poor damage type, and bad recharge time (20 sec compared to 14 sec) is probably the best melee AoE available. However, it's not the be-all-end-all melee AoE power. Frozen Aura is nearly as good (not arguing that it is as good or better). Tremor is admirably close as well.
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Originally Posted by Umbral
when you know how to manipulate enemy location so that the additional 5' of radius doesn't matter nearly as much.
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Originally Posted by Edana
as you said concerning frozen aura, if you know how to make enemies cluster up a little, that doesn't matter very much.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
c. If Tremor is a good AoE power due to its cycle time, and you're ignoring AoE radius on Frozen Aura because "that doesn't matter"
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Originally Posted by Umbral
Edana was the one that said what you're attributing to me in an attempt to make it seem like I was ignoring it (I'm not), so don't try to put words into my mouth, much less words that someone already attempted to put in my mouth or draw out conclusions that are known contradictions.
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In conditions X, Y doesn't matter very much...
Y doesn't matter...
I didn't say that she did...
You'd think considering it's there in plain text and half of us are using the quote feature we could avoid this game of chinese whispers.
I didn't say it didn't matter, I said if you knew how to get the enemy to group up it didn't matter very much.
You complain about being misquoted while at the same time claiming that the quote came from me when I'd said nothing that could be interpreted as such without just as much misreading as your original.
Of course earlier you managed to take my comments on the difference rage makes being partly mitigated on brutes by fury and ice being full of slows that tend to prevent you building fury; and turned it into me saying "Brutes don't get it, thusly it sucks"...
Moving past that and back to these AoEs.
Let us assume that it's relatively easy to get targets to about 1 per 3' square box. Arbitrary yes, also seems to fit reasonably with observation.
In this case we can fit 10 enemies into the 15' footstomp and tremor without any worry and 10 into the 10' fire sword circle and frozen aura with minimal delays. In the same time/effort we can only fit 7 targets into any of our 8' aoes and only 5.4 targets in thunderstrike. I'll let it have 6 anyway since it seems to need all the help it can get.
Taking the DPS as targets hit * base damage / cycle time the order goes:
Fire Sword Circle - 59.27 (using mean damage from DoT)
Spin - 56.17
Footstomp - 47.36
Frozen Aura - 47.36
Tremor - 39.30
Typhoon's Edge - 38.39 (not including possible sweep combo bonus)
Whirling Mace - 32.42
Whirling Hands - 29.73
Whirling Axe - 28.95
Thunderstrike - 22.25 (including the extra damage done to the primary target)
Add 80% fury, 95% damage enhancement and the average bonuses from build up (80% for 10 seconds in 45), rage (80% for 110 seconds, 10 second crash), follow up (60%, 95% of the time to allow for misses) and blinding feint (same as follow up).
Spin - 231.44
FSC - 220.94
Footstomp - 188.84
Frozen Aura - 176.54
Typhoon's Edge - 158.15
Tremor - 146.49
Whirling Mace - 120.85
Whirling Hands - 110.81
Whirling Axe - 107.91
Thunderstrike - 82.93
(If you were to somehow manage to double stack blinding feint and still pull off the sweep combo every time, typhoon's edge pulls into the lead with 237.43, a more plausible single feint gives 221.01.)
Spin is making me want to roll a claws brute again; Fire is right up near the top as it should be; Footstomp is where expected with a bit less damage but a lot more mitigation and positional laziness; Frozen Aura is making me wonder whether an Ice brute would be such a bad idea and Tremor is sitting in the middle of the pack with Typhoon. I wish I could be surprised by Thunderstrike, but after more than 1000 hours logged on my elec/wp... I'm not.
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If slows are a reason for saying that frozen aura is worse because "it reduces their fury" then Stone/Dark brutes must be abominations to the holy institution that is Fury.|
Originally Posted by Edana
Of course earlier you managed to take my comments on the difference rage makes being partly mitigated on brutes by fury and ice being full of slows that tend to prevent you building fury; and turned it into me saying "Brutes don't get it, thusly it sucks"... |
IE. If a brute with a primary that has mitigration (normally KD, Footstomp, fault) + Dark armors mez auras, have no problems with generating fury, then every brute should have no problem.
"An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of BS." -General George Patton
-Lord Azazel
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An 8' radius PBAoE has an area of (pi*r^2) approximately 201 sqare feet. If you're allotting 9 square feet (1 per 3' square box), that's room for 22 1/3 in the area, not "only 7".|
Originally Posted by Edana
Let us assume that it's relatively easy to get targets to about 1 per 3' square box. Arbitrary yes, also seems to fit reasonably with observation.
In this case we can fit 10 enemies into the 15' footstomp and tremor without any worry and 10 into the 10' fire sword circle and frozen aura with minimal delays. In the same time/effort we can only fit 7 targets into any of our 8' aoes and only 5.4 targets in thunderstrike. I'll let it have 6 anyway since it seems to need all the help it can get. |
It looks like you're merely squaring the radius, which gives you a little over a quarter of the actual area a PBAoE covers.
@Roderick
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I think it's a little under a third actually, hence the missing pi. I'd set my formulae up to reference pi and then forgotten to define it. Oops.|
Originally Posted by Roderick
An 8' radius PBAoE has an area of (pi*r^2) approximately 201 sqare feet. If you're allotting 9 square feet (1 per 3' square box), that's room for 22 1/3 in the area, not "only 7".
It looks like you're merely squaring the radius, which gives you a little over a quarter of the actual area a PBAoE covers. |
You do have to remove the area that you occupy at the centre, then take into account that targets are solid and the ai a bit dense so the area usage is anything but optimal. The maths on that bit might have gone totally wrong, but only hitting 7 targets doesn't seem like too unreasonable an assumption anyway.
Realistically, I'd say that you can ignore the amount of time it takes to get things into the radius of the 15' AoEs, a little time for 10' (mobs aren't exactly fast to move), and a couple/few seconds for 8' - roughly as much as you'd spend lining up a cone to max it out. If you end up herding, then the amount of time waiting on trailing mobs eats into it and the only thing you care about at all is AoE burst (insert Elec/Shield - Scrapper specifically - here).
I'm also very curious how you figured out cycle time - considering that my SM/WP Brute runs at ~150% global and at least 60% slotted in each attack, I'd say that a huge chunk of Tremor's cycle time is eaten up by the animation (which is, incidentally, why I don't have it and use Dark Obliteration for AoE damage).
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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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I think it says somewhere further up in the thread that cycle times assume no global and 95% recharge slotting in the power. The AoE rankings also assumed 95% damage slotting so I could factor in rage, follow up, build up, fury, etc with approximately the right weightings.
I attempted to avoid having to account for positioning time at all by only using the single pbaoes and giving the 8' ones a 7 target limit to account for uncooperative mobs not being in the smaller radius. It seemed to fit in with what I was expecting from TF runs, which is why I didn't notice my maths was lacking in pi.
As it happens I agree; with high recharge activation time does get very significant. My only stone melee brute spends most of her life at around 160% global recharge simply from decent IO slotting, hasten and seeming to find it impossible to start a TF without at least one person bringing a kin. So theoretically I can get tremor off about every 7.9 seconds, with 3.4 seconds of that being the animation time... Alternating with fault looks suspiciously like a popcorn machine.
Once you start factoring in the patron aoes and other aoes you might have (burn or shield charge for instance) activation becomes more important still since you start to have aoes recharging faster than you have animation time to use them all. Some people are very dismissive of the single target damage you can do between AoEs; I find having time for a knockout blow/seismic smash/whatever in amongst my aoes reduces the amount of time I'm standing around after a mob is dead killing the remaining bosses.
Half way through blindly recommending someone take Gloom as part of their attack chain it occurred to me that I didn't actually know where it would come out in the DPA heirachy. So I went on a trawl through all the attacks brutes get to find out. The results actually surprised me.
Ok, so on any possible brute Gloom will still be the second highest DPA attack you can put in an attack chain, nice to know common knowledge is so easily proved right. Burn is easy enough to justify considering you need to immob anything to make it take all the damage and that still takes 10 seconds. But seriously, why is the third best DPA attack available to brutes a 20' radius aoe in a secondary? And is Energy Transfer's reduction in endurance cost really enough to justify the self damage and that the stun is only 'chance for' not guaranteed like the holds in seismic/KO or the stun in clobber?