What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

If my memory serves correctly, Shield Charge (Scrapper) does 3.6 Scale damage. But its a pet that does the damage, and the pet melee damage scaler is 55.6102 (same as Blasters) at level 50. So it should be 200.197 damage at level 50 for Scrappers, if my memory and calculations are correct.

Because Scrappers have a 1.125 damage modifier, and therefore do about 62.56 damage at level 50 for a scale 1 attack, this means Shield Charge (for scrappers) does the same damage as a 3.2 scale attack would do for Scrappers, if the damage was actually dealt by the Scrapper (and not a pseudo pet).

That's what I meant by "normalized to scrappers."

As weird as this sounds, saying a power does "200 points of damage" is something that actually has to get processed by the powers team: even for us players there's all sorts of caveats to such a statement we mentally shuffle through before we put that number into context: what level are we talking about, is that enhanced, etc.

But "hey Castle, SC does 3.2 scale damage and its a ginormous AoE" is going to be meaningful in about 3 milliseconds. Anything above 2 is considered high damage for a single target attack. The mega-hitter Total Focus does 3.56. Nova averages scale 3.875.

Its actually that there are two effects, but the first one doesn't stack with itself. So its capped at one, the other is capped at ten, but they both take effect independently.

Hmmm. With a MA/SR main I was not so lucky. Picture leveling an SR with the machine gun Storm Kick!

Castle, remember that those DPS calculatiuons come from soloing Rikti Pylons. Dark Melee is pretty much pure single target with no meaningful AoE whatsoever, so of course it's going to top the charts on killing a single hard target fast. It's also the slowest Scrapper set in the game against 3+ mobs. Also, those 300+ DPS results for Dark include dragging a bunch of minions to the pylon for Soul Drain fodder so with Soul Drain and Against All Odds you're looking at something like 120% or more damage bonus, or 60-70% above normal slotted damage. But again, Dark has no real AoE damage so even if it could one-shot a minion with every attack it would still be slower against most spawns than Claws since Claws has good AoEs. That's why people love /Shield with Dark... you get Shield Charge to kill the minions with while you murder the bosses and lts with single target attacks.

I definitely think re-examining Fiery Aura is a good idea. /Shield adds about 15-20% total damage against larger spawns thanks to AaO, plus Shield Charge deals significantly more damage than Blazing Aura. My suggestion would be to cut the damage bonus from Fiery Embrace in half and increase it to 90 seconds duration... make it a weaker, crashless Rage. That would give /Fire a sustained DPS boost like /Shield gets instead of just added burst damage.

This post just made my day.

I used my fire/ice tank and ran AE missions, 5 missions kill all, Striga cargo ship fighting Council. I used a Shield/Ice tank and ran the same missions for a direct comparison of Shield vs Fire armor.

The Shield/Ice consistently completed the mission in 6 minutes. The fire/ice was consistent at 9 minutes. All powers were slotted with SO's. (second builds)

AAO and Shield Charge are greater then Fiery Embrace and Burn by far. (SC damages 16, Burn damages 5 at a time.) The constant damage increase of AAO out performs to horrrrrrrible recharge of FE. The time penalty of FE damage bonus with non fire attacks also really hinders the potential of the power.

If you are going to look at fire armor again I will be very happy.

I think AAO is great and produces a constant damage increase, which is what FE should do. Burn (shudder) could be adjusted again. (I shudder even thinking that knowing how badly the power has been nerfed from the issue 4 hayday.) If it could be changed to affect 16, be a contact DOT instead of a placed DoT, I would welcome the change. Leaving the animation and the placement, but making the damage "stick" to the enemy from when it is placed.

My 262 isn't so much of an outlier once you take into consideration that SR doesn't have a damage aura.

Between Lightning Field generating about 30 DPS or so (don't remember the exact number) and the fact that a lot of damage and debuff in my build was from procs, it ends up being a pretty reasonable difference.

Good catch. I was looking at the original power, as I designed it, rather than the reworked version that was done later. For scrappers, it is scale 3.6 on the Minion_Pet table, which is a far cry from the scale 1.4 on the Minion_Pet table I originally designed for it. I vaguely remember someone (Synapse? Sunstorm? I'd have to dig into check in notes to see) asking me if they could update it to include AT Mods in the damage scales and saying yes.

Hmm...yeah, ok. I can very easily see what happened here.

Shield Charge when released was set for a scale 1.7 damage to all targets within 20' of impact, with 0.7 scale bonus within 3' of impact. When the change to allow AT scaling was made, the bonus damage was rolled into the overall damage, for a scale of 2.4 to all targets in a 20' radius. At the same time, instead of have Brutes getting a mod of 0.75 applied, they were treated as the base.

So, instead of:
Brutes 3' scale 1.8, 20' scale 1.275
Tankers 3' scale 2.04, 20' 1.445
Scrappers 3' scale 2.7, 20' scale 1.9125

We get:
Brute 20' scale 2.4
Tanker 20' scale 2.712
Scrapper 20' scale 3.6

That REALLY sucks.

I admit, I didn't look at it too closely before. For the sake of argument, let's see:

Lightning Field deals 12.51 dmg every 2 seconds, or 6.255 dps, unslotted. Add in enhancements (95%) and double slotted Bliding Feint (37.5 * 2 = 75%) or 170% +dmg. Apply that to Lightning Field for a final dps increase of 16.8885 (6.255 * 2.7). If you want to count the 5% chance to miss, that'd drop it to ~16 dps.

Your final dps was 262 while Shred's was 223, a difference of 39 dps, over double our estimate for Lightning Field.

On the other hand, however, it's possible Shred spend more time healing back damage than you did, assuming he took Aid Self. That could be a significant hit if he was unlucky enough.

Heh. I see a big "correction" for shield charge in the future. Reading that it seems like SC for scrappers is doing considerably more damage than intended at all distances. Interesting that it was intended to do more at impact and less at splash distances much like Lightning Rod.

I've actually never even seen the difference in damage at 3' and 20' even before shield charge was changed for AT modifiers.

Castle, are those numbers right? If I'm doing the math right, those numbers should be:

Tankers 3' scale 1.92, 20' 1.36
Tanker 20' scale 2.56

Your numbers seem to put Tankers at an AT mod of ~0.85 instead of their current 0.8.

MA/SRs that played since release deserve a special veteran reward or something. A machine gun storm kick would have been fine: what we actually had was Flurry for Feet.

There is *nothing* to compare to MA/SR at release. If release MA/SR was a difficulty level, it would award a MasterOf badge.

Here's how you can come close to simulating MA/SR at release today:

1. Replace Storm Kick with Flurry (Storm Kick used to do a lot less damage with an animation time comparable to flurry)
2. Replace CAK with Boxing (Boxing actually does *more* damage today than CAK did back then)
3. Replace Eagle's Claw with Sands of Mu (Eagle's Claw used to do Crane Kick damage with Sands of Mu timing)
4. Take only the SR toggles, no passives
5. Take no power pools
6. Slot no inventions
7. Figure out a way to fight even minions, +1 Lts, and +2 Bosses all at once.
8. Whenever a foe casts a pet, turret, rain, or patch, if you don't have at least two purples just use Self Destruct immediately
(SR at release: 5% passives, 10% toggles, vs even con minions: 50%; Lts: 62.5%; Bosses: 75%; AVs: 90%; turrets/pets: 105% base tohit)

That would probably be in the general ballpark.

Oh yeah, and Quickness used to cost endurance (0.01 eps or something like that). Rather unique for a passive.

Yes, but lets not forget that the # of affected targets was reduced because the damage was percieved to be higher than intended. So, while individual damage might be higher than originally intended, there was no limit on how many targets were hit. If you do end up reducing the damage value, I would ask that you also do away with the target cap to balance it out.

I also had a sizable damage buff from set bonuses and had several procs in LF, not to mention the -res procs (Achilles' Heel and PvP) in the build (not in LF specifically).

I actually tested with and without LF to see how much damage it did. I got 235 DPS without LF and 260 with LF. I got 262 after adding in Melt Armor and Assault.

In the end, the real comparison would be between 235 and 223, which doesn't seem too unreasable to me.

You're right. I did use .85 instead of .8 for the math. I always think of tankers having a .85 mod for some reason. I've been making that same mistake for years. Thankfully, the game applies the mods instead of me having to pre-calculate things, so it's not as bad as it COULD be.

FWIW, nothing is going to be done about this for now. It's too big and widespread of an issue for me to unilaterally decide on how to approach it. I'll give folks a heads up on what is decided as soon as I know.

Grin. Somehow I missed reading this... easy to do as I swooped in quickly with my only intent being to apologize.

My hubby and couple of global friends have been telling me this almost from day 1.

I see myself as being stupid, and the forumites as being intellectual gods. So when I read something on the forums "It must be so

Yes, my level 32 Elec/Shields is great fun. I do not intend to PVP, beat up on AVs or Pylons solo. Just regular PVE stuffs.

And yes, I was truly worried that she would suddenly fall apart as I enter the high 30s, 40s...sigh. I think I need a vacation.

Lisa.

No player attack that does primarily foe damage is supposed to have an unlimited target cap, ever. If SC originally didn't have a target cap, adding one addressed a bug, it was not a trade-off for having higher damage.

In fact, so long as the aggro cap is 17, being able to hit more than 17 targets with significant damage from a single attack is probably a priori an exploit or a design error or both.


Edit: its weird sometimes discovering which of my posts will be seen as controversial. Apparently at least one person takes issue with this one, even though its essentially a factual statement about the design of the game. But since there seems to be some question over it, I'll tell you what I'm going to do, my anonymous friend: I'm going to compile a list of every single player power that does damage, either directly or via pseudo-pet, that either has no target cap or has a target cap higher than 16, and email that to Castle so we can confirm whether any of them, if they exist, are working as intended. Don't thank me, its no trouble at all.

Probably just from the forums. Its perfectly fine to spend that vacation in Paragon City. Maybe with the broadcast channels off.

Ahhh, I gotcha. Those things would definitely do the trick. Your raw DB damage output isn't as much of an outlier, it's just numerous other factors (such as your aura) that inflated your number a bit. Nice.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification, Castle.

Confirmed: Castle is increasing Tanker damage scale to 0.85.

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

Either that or give it the Shield Charge/Lightning Rod treatment so it does full damage at melee range and a slightly reduced damage at a greater range (say 15'?)

Isn't there also an issue with Burn not properly inheriting damage buffs from the caster?

It sucks... cuz you have to fix it now... but you gotta admit, man, looking at it laid out like that, it's REALLY FUNNY.

They could use it.

Wet Noodle Strength.

Yes, please. It's beyond Uber with IO sets and sucks hard with SOs. I think that was all mentioned in the Beta test.