Dual Pistols better then I thought.

I can do no more. I have exhausted my ability to explain arguments since decided, or, failing that, my patience. We will have to settle for agreeing to disagree, or some such.

Good day to you.

In PvP the only factor for determining damage is animation time. For silly reasons, Flurry is one of the highest attack powers you can get in PvP. So a set that "sucks because it has long animation times" would be pretty great in PvP.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Wait, what? Can you walk me through that?

Sure. The devs thought for some reason that they needed to balance powers differently. So completely ignoring tier, endurance cost, recharge, range, or secondary effects, powers are only designed to deal damage based on their cast times. You get totally upsidedown sets like Fire Blast where the tier 2 does more damage, recharges faster, costs less endurance, and has longer range than Blaze. You get things like nukes being useless and things like Flurry and one of the PPP Shark attacks being the strongest attacks in the game. For a set like DP that has a lot of animations at 2-4 seconds, it would do a lot of damage.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

That seems, uh...

Ya know what? No. I don't know a thing about PvP, I don't PvP, and I don't want to PvP. So, DP might be awesome there? Go DP. The end.

This highlights two problems:

1. The set is good on Defenders and possibly Corruptors who have strong support modifiers and a support secondary to stack with, but isn't nearly as good on Blasters. Why the sets need to be identical on all ATs that have access to them I do not know, given that precedent to the contrary already exists, but this is problematic for Blaster players outside of a few specific secondary combos. A Pistols/Electric Blaster, just to point out what I'm playing, is not going to get ANY stacking benefits and isn't going to get much debuffing with Blaster mods anyway.

But what confounds me is WHY this is. It's Pistols! Pistols shoot lumps of metal designed to punch though other people and really, really hurt. How does one translate a concept that boils down to hurling things at people and implement this as some kind of wildly-variable utility set. This isn't some kind of mystic super power that could heal with cosmic energy or hold with mystic might. It's GUNS! Guns shoot people! Yet, perplexingly, our guns don't seem to be designed with the primary purpose of shooting people. I mean... Wow!

2. The set does NOT solo very well. Yes, if you have 50 Blasters stacking the same debuff on an enemy, they could probably debuff it into nothingness, but the likelihood that I'm going to actually see more than... Well, one Blaster (myself) at a time is rather low. As such, my debuffs are worth precisely bugger all, and I can't even stack them very well between my own powers to begin with, what with Pistols lacking a decent secondary effect. When you play solo, debuff effects do very little, at least compared to the kind of damage hit you take in using them and ESPECIALLY since enemies will sometimes resist the damage type of your debuff ammo.

Any set that's designed with the assumption that it's going to stack with other instances of itself will fail in actual practice, as Shield Defence has shown us. Yes, a phalanx of Shield users is incredibly strong, but unless you design a super team around this concept, you end up with a bunch of people NOT playing in a phalanx for the majority of their playtime, so living with the expectation that they'll randomly run into one is just not something players will do. If part of the balancing of Dual Pistols involves the expectation that many Pistoleers will stack their effects and THAT is what makes it balanced, then this will bomb in actual practice as soon as people tire of their first wave of pistoleers and the novelty dies down. Soon as Demon Masterminds launch, the bubble WILL burst.

There are a couple of problems with that. First of all, even though the Voltaic Sentinel has an 80-foot attack, it will not shoot it at 80 feet. Since practically everything else worth shooting in Electrical Blast is in the 80-foot range, this means that the Voltaic Sentinel will spend a lot of time not shooting. And it does, as I can vouch from actual practice with the thing. Furthermore, because pets trail rather a few feet behind their owners, getting it into AI range requires you to get uncomfortable close to the enemy, close enough to take shotgun and flamethrower fire, which is not fun. When it shoots, the thing really does shoot well, but its recharge, cost and limited lifespan limit its utility. Taking it into account is a good idea, obviously, but you ARE making some assumptions here.

As far as Zapp goes, I sincerely hope you're not counting it with the same weight as Lightning Blast or Lightning Bolt. Yes, it's theoretically potentially possible to use it in combat, but I can guarantee one thing without a shadow of a doubt - you're not going to get any decent DPS or cycle out of it. WILL NOT. In certain instances, you won't ever be allowed to fire it even once. Behemoths and Spectrals leave long-lasting DoT on you, Council/Column/Longbow tend to have long-lasting rifle and machinegun attacks that end up overlapping for constant fire, and plenty of enemies can catch you in DoT fields that are just going to interrupt the power. Even if you go out of your way to slot the thing for interrupt reduction, all that does is deny you the ability to slot it for actual offence, so you really, REALLY can't give the thing the same weight as proper ranged attacks.

And again - I take and use all of my powerset powers, and in actual practice, Electrical Blast doesn't have nearly the kind of single-target damage that it may seem like on paper. Yes, I use the Voltaic Sentinel. Yes, I use Zapp as much as I can manage. And I still do barely anything unless I practically sit on Electricity Manipulation's melee attacks.

If you can supply me with tactics beyond this one that I can try, I will gladly come back to you on that and let you know how it goes. What I CAN say is that, even with this tactic, the set's performance is far from great. Maybe I'm fighting the wrong things, but against CoT and Crey, which is what I'm currently tackling, this doesn't do too much. Yes, the initial debuff makes the targets more vulnerable, but it only serves to weaken those particular targets. Three people out of a 10-man spawn isn't going to make too much of a difference, and that's IF they're kind enough to line up for me. Hitting both lieutenants obviously helps, but not by enough.

Furthermore, you can only do this ONCE, as every other instance of Piercing Rounds is going to be from the same ammo you are currently using. Remember, you can't drop into Lethal for one attack then jump back into Incendiary, as you're facing a 4 second ammo type recharge. Furthermore, this trick has a somewhat limited yield on enemies resistant to Lethal rounds, such as ghosts, guards, tanks and so on. Yes, you're going to debuff their resistance, but you're going to do rather very little damage to them, and Piercing Rounds as an opener damage dealer is actually VERY potent.

I'm currently doing what I can to maximise my performance, going as far as to swap between Incendiary and Cryo ammo between Ghosts and Behemoths in the same spawn, and I still don't see the set performing all that good. It still struggles and it still gets me killed animating over-long attacks. For the amount of work I put into it, it certainly doesn't feel like I'm getting much back. If it were a fire-and-forget set like Rad Blast, I could live with it, but since I have to be situationally aware, it ought to do something to reward my vigilance, and all it rewards my vigilance with is not sucking. I'd certainly never turn my nose up at not sucking, but I was kind of hoping for more.

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'm sure you probably know what you're talking about and I'm missing something big, but the numbers here don't add up. If final damage taken is damage*(1-resistance), where resistance is [0;0.9], then... Well, let's see.

Take an attack that deals 100 damage, cycles every second and needs to kill 1000 hit points. No resistance. Normally, you'd need:

1000/(100*(1-0.5)) = 1000/50 = 20s

That 0.5 is base to-hit for an NPC against a player. With a 10% damage debuff, we'll get:

1000/((100*(1-0.1))*(1-0.5)) = 1000/(90*0.5) = 1000/45 = 22.(2)

That's an increase in the time needed to kill you by around 11%. I'm really not sure how you're getting a 900% increase in survivability. I accept that I'm probably doing the numbers wrong and that I'm failing to account for something, but I just don't see it.

In fact, by my calculations, increasing your survivability by 900%, or 9 times, would require 90% damage debuff, or:

1000/((100*(1-0.9))*(1-0.5)) = 1000/(10*0.5) = 1000/5 = 200

That's 20 seconds plus nine times itself. That's also the functional equivalent to boosting your resistance up to 90%. Just 10% damage debuff is cute and it WILL help, but to me, at least, it doesn't look like it will add up to nine or ten times survivability.

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.

That's specifically what he's talking about. He said they were taking the outgoing damage down to 10% (i.e. 1 - .9), not down by 10% (i.e. 1 - .1).

Of course, this should be prefaced by saying that the massive debuff benefits that most people are experiencing with the Chem rounds are not really a function of the potency of the powerset but more a function of -dam in general and the general lack of resistance to it (since the only things that resist it are purple patch and damage resistance). -Dam is strong, especially when you start fighting hard targets that are supposed to be especially resistance to debuffs but have no defense to -dam. The fact that Chem rounds gets access to it (and Defenders actually get decent values from it) doesn't really make the set powerful, especially when you're pretty much forced to have multiple users focusing fire on a single target to get the vaunted benefit kind of renders the point null. I'm reasonably sure that you're not going to see nearly the same level of usefulness in the broad spectrum game, especially when the slow build up -dam of the Chem Ammunition has to contend with the instantaneous large -dam of similar -dam powers in secondary sets. It's like comparing the -tohit effects of Dark Blast against the -tohit effects of Dark Miasma.

The bigger issue is also that -dam does, and always will unless something changes, have a substantially bigger effect upon NPCs than it does upon players. There is a whole slew of screwiness involved in the debuffs in CoX and how they're horribly imbalanced thanks to how the game works and everything interacts because NPCs and PCs have access to completely different mechanisms.

Getting back to the point, when the only laudable capability of the set is that, if you have a number of other users of that same set, you can stack up a debuff to do some pretty crazy things, that's not really an advantage. Get together a couple of Dark Defenders and they'll do the exact same thing without having to reduce their damage in order to accomplish it. Having to get any number of the same set together in order to accomplish anything isn't a good way to say that a set is balanced.

Moving back to the switching of ammunition, the ability to manipulate damage types is nice, except that, with only 30% changing, you're not generating much improvement. CoT Behemoths have 20% resistance to fire, 20% weakness to cold and no weakness or resistance to lethal damage. When your damage is comprised of 70% lethal and 30% other, the difference between Cryo and Incendiary Ammunition is a matter of 12% (.7 + .3 * .8 = .94 v. .7 + .3 * 1.2 = 1.06). This seems all well and good because you're getting "bonus damage" for switching ammunition except that Incendiary Ammunition actually generates roughly 15-20% more damage per attack thanks to the bonus DoTs. You're not actually gaining any damage by switching off of Incendiary Ammunition. In fact, you're dealing exactly the same damage because it's actually (.7 + (.3 + .15) * .8 = 1.06), assuming that the contribution only amounts to a 15% increase (it's actually substantially higher for many attacks). All you're really getting out of the bargain is DP's mediocre -rech.

Against Carnies, you'd still deal more damage with Incendiary Ammo (discounting PR's -res against a small number of targets) because 70% of your damage is still benefiting from the 20% weakness (.7 * 1.2 + .3 * 1.2 = 1.2 v. .7 * 1.2 + .3 + .15 = 1.29). An enemy group would need to have 50% weakness to lethal damage before it became preferential to use Standard Ammo over Incendiary Ammo (especially if you quick swapped into Standard when firing PR and out afterwards). Changing damage types just doesn't mean much when damage resistances are so comparatively insignificant for enemies and the percent of your damage type you're changing is so small. Incendiary Ammunition is still the best option for outright dealing damage.

Oh... Well, ignore my inability to read text, then

Really, that's a big problem. In theory, swapping ammo to make use of resistances and weaknesses, until you realise that you're actually reducing your damage output by a not insignificant margin when switching away from Incendiary rounds. If we had four damage types, each with equal damage to where only SITUATION made one better than another, I could see that, but since we have one ammo type which clearly does more damage than another, swapping for damage DOES NOT WORK. Considering how few things resist Fire, why would you bother, anyway?

The comment, as I've seen it, was that changing could help avoid the problem of Lethal resistance by using elemental damage against lethal-resistant foes. The problem with that is that I'm not going to be using Kinetic ammo anyway, so that matters very little, and if I DO end up using them, it won't be for the damage type.

The support effects I can kind of see, but again - how much of a difference do they make? Outside of stacking your debuffs with someone else, how much of a difference do YOUR OWN secondary effects make? Ice Blast notwithstanding, can anyone honestly say a Blast set is "made" by its secondary effects? I know Energy Blast has a lot of knockback on it, bugger all that this does, but it's both still a solid set irrespective of that AND the knockback isn't actually all that strong of a mitigation factor in the long run. At least it wasn't on mine, but then I didn't slot knockback in my powers.

And if the argument is that Blast sets for Defenders and Corruptors are "made" by their secondary effects since that's what the ATs are supposed to want, then my question in response is "So why slap the same damn model onto Blasters, fully aware that a large part of the utility would do diddly squat for the Blaster in comparison?"

Yes, the secondary effects do have their uses on a Blaster, but at the point where you're reduced to playing mock Defender, I happen to feel you miss the point of what a Blaster is supposed to bring to the table.

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.

PvP is a different beast and damage there is based of cast time, not recharge, so DP should be VERY nice in PvP, plus ice rounds should do a great job at slowing down the foes, Slows and -Recharge tend to be very very annoying in PvP (or meaningless, depends how much you get stacked on you and not sure how this will work with diminishing returns)

Depends on the foe, their resistances and weaknesses. You will eventually face foes that are both, resistant to fire and weaker to cold, for example.

Not to mention that you may still get to a point where the damage loss is minimal, but the knockdowns of lethal, -dmg of toxic or -recharge/slows of cryo will end up more than justifying the tiny loss from fire. That's, though, not noting that Fire's damage is not sure damage, the DoT may not happen at all, and it can cancel mid-way. In average, it can do high damage, but it's a bit of a gambling when looking at a specific fight where sure -dmg/-rchg may had saved your life.

I specifically brought up that issue in the post Sam quoted. Even in foes that are resistant to fire and weak to cold, the comparative damage advantage of the weakness compared to the resistance is completely mitigated by the bonus DoT offered by Incendiary Ammunition.

The problem with counting on the secondary effects to accomplish much is that you need to stack them very heavily to see much benefit from either. Unless you're talking about beating down on single hard targets like bosses, EBs, AVs, and GMs, the secondary effects of Dual Pistols aren't going to generate much of an effect: Chem Rounds' -dam needs to be stacked heavily in order to generate a substantive survival benefit and Cryo Rounds' -rech doesn't really accomplish much for pretty much the same reason (and the fact that it doesn't do much to decrease the damage capability of NPCs thanks to purple patch and enemies attacking often even with substantial slow effects). The only secondary effects that are going to have a meaningful effect over a vast majority of solo and group play with Dual Pistols are the chance for KB/KD in Standard Ammo and the always useful bonus DoT with Incendiary Ammo. The -dam is only effective when you're stacking it with other -dam effects and, even then, only against hard targets wherein you actually have the time to stack the debuff up.

Starsman, I have nothing but respect for you and your knowledge of the game in general, but you are mistaken when it comes to PvP.

While it is true that PvP damage is based on animation time, the lack of aim hurts DP tremendously because you need to quickly eliminate your foe before they can counter or run away. Since you don't have aim to boost your initial volley a DP blaster will never be able to compete against a fire or sonic. Even psy, who also doesn't have aim, will out perform DP due to a quirk of how the set animates and records damage allowing you to basically hit your target with two attacks at once. The long rooted animations also leave you vulnerable to counter attack.

Additionally, while slows used to be a viable tactic and a major annoyance, I13 changed all that. The new PvP metric all but eliminates slow movement effects and requires heavy stacking for slow recharge. A trick arrow player used to be able to slow someone to a crawl. Now you feel the effect of travel suppression but can't even tell that you have been hit with a slow attack.

I have a friend who already leveled, IO'd, and accoladed a DP blaster to try out in PvP. He is a solid PvPer with lots of experience playing all sorts of ATs, but especially experienced with blasters and defenders. He is very dissappointed in his DP blaster's performance.

You sir and the mad charlatan you cite need cease your rogue tomfoolery this instant.

Broadsword animations are paragons of comeliness. Broadswords are weapons for persons of substance and they simply shame the flowery vainglory that is Katana and Claws.

This one I'll dispute. You mention debuffs, so what are you soloing with? I solo with lethal. ES has a 70% knockdown chance, which outside of guaranteed knockdowns is the highest you can get. You also have 4 powers that can hit multiple targets (you have all the time in the world to set up PR while solo), -DEF, -RES, various random knockdowns, and a stun/hold.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Well for one, psi blasters do have aim. Second, in pvp most blasters try and use either aim or buildup not both at the same time. Due to DR and defiance its not worth popping both at the some time in PvP. So not having aim does hurt the damage output but not in the way you stated.

What I do agree with is that DP is sub par as far as pvp goes. I have a 50 DP blaster with a pvp build fully IO'd and it's not that great. DP's damage is quite good and you can load the attacks up with procs, but the thing that makes the damage good is the same thing that hurts the set... the long animations. By the time you fire off a attack chain a psi blaster will be halfway through his second.

Multimedia Genius Submission

I did note I was not sure how the debuffs would behave under the new diminishing returns rules, but as far as the lack of Aim, i know there are at least a few viable melee builds in pvp and no melee AT get's aim, all blasters get Build Up in their secondary and, there is the point of range, off course. But again, not much of a PvPer here, mainly because I am mostly a melee player and i get eaten alive in PvP. Never even considered taking my part-time blasters into pvp.

Devices doesn't.

The -resistance gets more credit than it deserves. Yes, it's very strong, but the power is slow to recharge, and if you fight large spawns like I do (-1x3) then you can never really hit more than around a quarter of the enemies with it. Beyond using Piercing Rounds as an opener, it's all but guaranteed to only ever hit one person, so the -resistance is worth even less. And even further less to me, since I have bosses turned off and the things I'll want to use it on are resistant to Lethal anyway.

-Defence is a cute concept, but it's very rarely worth so much as mentioning. Outside of things with high defence values, of which there are very few (Drones, some Behemoths, a few Crey agents and... What else?), it's fairly easy to cap or close-to-cap your accuracy. Even easier with Dual Pistols, since it has the second highest native accuracy mods on its powers, with Executioner's Shot having Snipe accuracy. Oh, certainly, I've had some use out of the -defence in, say, broadsword, but that's been rare.

Knockback IS useful, but every time I've defaulted to it, the results have been underwhelming. Yes, Executioner's Shot does have all but guaranteed knockdown, but for how long that power takes to recharge and activate, I'm not going to use it for that. It's fun to watch and occasionally does help, but it's too rare to count. Beyond that, Bullet Rain has decent knockback, and I've occasionally used it for that, but it's an AoE power, and a fairly expensive one, at that. It's useful, but not by too much. The rest of the powers (I've not played with Hail of Bullets yet) may as well not have knockback on them, because I don't think I've ever seen them knock anything back.

Certainly the mitigation in Lethal ammo is there, but between resistances, lower damage and effect unpredictability, it doesn't make nearly as big a difference as something as simple as Hover.

Of course, that's not to say Dual Pistols suck at solo play. They just don't solo WELL. Then again, my definition of "solo well" might not be entirely objective, since it's based around a Fire/Fire Blaster, an Archery/Devices Blaster and characters that aren't Blasters. It's quite possible my beef may be with the entire AT more so than with just Dual Pistols.

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.

There's a reason I don't count Piercing Rounds or it's -res in an AoE context. It's a good deal easier than it was early in beta, but it's still not particularly reliable.

Well, as far as use goes, it's reliable in that capping its three target maximum is actually doable on a first shot now. That arc increase really helped. As far as its debuff goes, however, it's unreliable in that you can't really hit more than one target in the heat of battle.

That's kind of why I'm apprehensive to just take and use other people's conclusions - oftentimes either I miss something, or they're based on a playstyle I don't support. In this case, I kept seeing Piercing Rounds touted as a big help, and assumed it helped in general (my fault), whereas practically all I fight is spawns of upwards of six enemies at a time.

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.

Well I'm not sure what playstyles you support, but I have no issues soloing both Blaster and Corr with lethal ammo. Can pretty much always line up PR to hit 2-3 targets for the opener, and even in the midst of battle I can often hit 2 targets. Even if I only hit one, it's high damage and does -RES so if I drop it on a boss or lieutenant I get my money's worth.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.