SS and EM for Scrappers!!

Not really.

First, the "does not stack with same caster flag" causes effects to replace each other rather than preventing use while the first effect is active. This would allow you to completely circumvent any crash while getting all of the benefits of the power (because the crash is actually a delayed effect of the power and you would be replacing the instance of the power with the new version before the delayed effect of the initial instance occurred).

Secondly, while many people capitalize on the +dam aspects of Rage, the biggest problem (pre-IOs) is actually the 20% +tohit that power provides. The 20% +tohit combined with basic slotting (3 tohit and 3 rech) allows you to have a 95% chance to hit against +0-1s without any accuracy slotting and have a 95% chance to hit against anything less than 5 levels above you with a single acc. Rage essentially gives you carte blanche to either ignore or underslot your attacks. This means less when you're using IOs (because it's trivial to get high levels of acc while getting dam, rech, and end redux thanks to the sets), but it's a major advantage outside of SOs because it can allow you to get more recharge or end redux in attacks that otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit thanks to the 6 slot limitation.

Since rage's dmg buff only allows SS to do dmg on par with competing sets, I would hope there would be some sort of advantage to the power since you have to use a power choice and slots on it, and the power has some nasty negatives to it, including an end crash and ten seconds of impotence every two minutes. Without the to hit bonus, rage would offer no real beneficial effect, you'd get the end crash and no damage for 10 sec/2 min in exchange for being able to do damage on par with other sets, while wasting a power choice and slots.

And again, how beneficial is an accuracy advantage in this game, pve-wise? In the vast majority of situations, it's ridiculously easy to hit just about anything. And you noted that with no accuracy enh, rage gives you a 95% chance to hit an even level opponent. While that is true, it's also true that a single accuracy SO gives you a 100% chance to hit. So rage is letting you skip a single accuracy SO, which you're probably going to want to slot with an end reduction to deal with the end issues rage creates, which kind of mitigates that 'advantage'. Then when you get to IO sets, the advantage becomes even more irrelevant. The only place it provides a real, tangible advantage is in pvp, so I'm sure the ten people who do that are pretty excited.

Consider again the numbers I provided earlier. Those numbers factor in the Rage crash. Rage provides a massive untoward benefit when viewed as an individual power. When viewed as a set, it's roughly balanced. When you start bringing in outside powers, that entire concept of "balance" just drops though because you can take powers that are better than the utter pieces of crap that are supposed to balance it out.

You're getting something wrong right off the bat. The highest chance you can have to hit anything is 95%. The single accuracy enhancement is not going to make you more accurate than Rage will. It makes you roughly as accurate (assuming you're not enhancing Rage).

Let me get into this even further. Not only are you getting to save a slot on accuracy but you are also getting to "save" on damage slotting. Because Rage provides that massive amount of damage and it's pretty much perma with baseline slotting, you're getting 75% +dam (factoring in the downtime) in every power as well. That's 2.5 damage enhancements.

Rage doesn't just give you an accuracy enhancement to all of your powers (because it's +tohit, it actually lets you shave more off comparative when you're getting to higher level enemies), it gives you 2.5 damage enhancements in all of your powers as well. That's 3.5 slot equivalences in every power you've got. BU provides about half of a damage enhancement and virtually no +tohit, so it only provides what amounts of half of a slot equivalent. With just a single power, you're making up for whatever investment Rage requires.

Now, even more, because Rage allows you to deal more damage, you're also getting to deal more damage for each point of endurance you spend. 75% +dam over time means that you're getting what amounts to 38% more endurance efficiency. Going with a standard 3.0 end/sec consumption, you're going to deal damage equivalent of a 4.8 end/sec attack string. Losing 30.2 endurance every 120 seconds (5.2 upon activation, 25 end at the crash) equates to only .252 end/sec consumption. You're spending 3.252 end/sec to deal damage equivalent of a 4.8 end/sec attack string (remember, damage and endurance are directly related thanks to the dam/rech/end formula Castle uses to determine the numbers for powers). Rage may increase your end/sec consumption, but it more than makes up for it by making you deal more damage for the same endurance cost.

The additional tohit benefits of Rage might seem less than stellar when you consider IOs, but you're similarly having to consider that some aspects of Rage are further magnified with IO builds. +Dam is one of the hardest things to get ahold of. Rage provides that in spades. End redux is substantially more common as well and, because it's reducing endurance cost rather than increasing damage in order to increase DPE, you're multiplying the endurance efficiency effect of Rage even more, while you simultaneously gain even more endurance and endurance recovery tools to mitigate the crash.

Remember, any time you try to argue that Rage is balanced because it's in a bad set (which is the crux of your argument), you have to remember that you can still get attacks from outside the set. Taking Boxing allows you to get get an attack that's already better than Jab, and the APP attacks let you bypass Punch as well. It's not a requirement that you take every attack from the set. The way Super Strength is designed, there are fully a third of the powers that you can easily skip (if you could skip one of the tier 1/2 powers, you could add another to that list).

I am willing to bet virtually anything that Super Strength is not going to get proliferated in its current state. Castle knows the set is borked. He's not going to proliferate it without changes to address that (just like he didn't do with Elec Armor or SR, and those required substantially less work than Super Strength would).

That has WOW written all over that. Balanced old power sets > new balanced set and a ton of subpar sets.

Thats what I thought, I just wish Castle had more people power in order to tackle all of the power sets at once.

I'm hoping to tackle some of that on my end. I've been busying myself with doing a lot of analysis to try and deal with specific sets. I've already gotten a few of my changes through and, hopefully, after GoRo hits live, Castle will be able to tackle a lot of the other write-ups that I've got in the works. The problem with Super Strength is really that they would need to tweak the animation times on many of the powers to get it balanced around properly.

You'd be amazed how much players can help out the devs if they actually use analysis and precedent rather than simply blithely stating numbers with vague reasoning. I'm more than confident that we, the players, could speed up a lot of the work of proliferating sets by helping the devs address the problems that are preventing proliferation in the first place.

You seem to be a proponent of player based power research, so take a look at bills set statistics threads. With rage, SS is a mediocre damage dealing set. Even when using outside powers that rage buffs, there are still several sets that do better damage than SS, and those sets don't have to waste a power selection to achieve that damage, nor do they have to deal with the end crash and ten seconds of impotence every two minutes.

So within the SS set, rage does not provide a 'massively untoward benefit', even when outside powers are used, and that is the only analysis that is necessary since rage is only used in the SS powerset. The fact SS drops more severely in performance in one of bills studies when outside powers are excluded simply speaks further to the fact that many of SS's powers are underpowered, even with rage. As I mentioned earlier, you can't look at an individual power within a unique powerset and balance it with powers inside of other powersets without taking into account the powers native powerset, because SS is clearly not balanced like other powersets.



I was using the numbers in mids, I'm aware there is always a 5% miss chance. If that did not exist, however, one SO would be more powerful than base rage, according to mids. But even with the 5% miss chance, you're at 95% to hit with either situation, that's not 'roughly as accurate' that's 'as accurate'.



Again, according to bills studies, with similar slotting and rage running, SS is mediocre in dmg dealing ability vs. competing sets, so if you skimp on damage enhancements due to incorrectly thinking rage creates some sort of damage advantage vs other sets, you're going to further weaken your damage output vs competing sets. Yes, rage's damage bonus is equivalent to 2.5 dmg SO's (roughly), but SS is starting out behind competing sets in terms of damage output without rage, rage simply bridges this disparity.

Again, I don't agree with your damage enh savings when a SS toon requires rage's damage bonus to compete vs other sets. So you end up with an accuracy advantage in exchange for a nasty end crash and ten seconds of impotence every 2 minutes. Again, in a game where hitting isn't exactly difficult 99% of the time, not only is that not overpowered or imbalanced, it's not very impressive.

First of all, just looking at statistics, I'm not seeing any end advantage whatsoever. If you look at bills study, you'll see that SS's end usage is mediocre to poor. And again, it's doing mediocre to poor damage vs competing sets.

Secondly, when you experience it in game, you quickly realize getting hit with end crashes all at once is far more problematic than end costs spread out over time.


Again, rage's damage bonus only makes SS competitive vs competing sets. If SS could compete damage-wise with competiting sets without rage, then touting its damage bonus as an advantage would make sense. Of course that is clearly not the case, without rage's damage bonus, SS would be in the basement in terms of damage dealing ability.

In terms of endurance, I've made countless top-end melee builds, and SS builds give me the most difficulty in terms of end management for long drawn out fights, by far.

And again, even utilizing outside powers, SS is mediocre to poor in terms of damage vs. competing sets. It's evident in bills study, and I believe Starsman also did an extensive study as well.

And yeah, there are a lot of powers in SS that you can skip, and should when a pool power like boxing is better than one of your sets attacks, but that simply supports my argument that SS is balanced differently than other sets, in that it has some ridiculously poor powers balanced by some really strong powers. That is why you shouldn't try to balance SS's strong powers to powers in other sets that are balanced more evenly, or you end up gimping SS, because it needs those strong powers to balance out the weak ones.

And your argument that SS is somehow superior to other sets because it can take outside powers that would be buffed by rage, simply does not match up with the information we have. Again, if you look at bills study, even in the study where sets could take outside powers to create a 'best' attack chain, SS came in mediocre to poor in damage dealing ability.

With side switching and the ability to start off neutral with any at on the horizon with GR, I'm not so sure they still plan to proliferate all the sets anymore anyway. Having said that, to those who think the set is 'borked', I guess that is simply an opinion I don't share, assuming borked means providing pefromance well above other competing sets. That certainly is not evident in bills or starsmans studies, or from my in game experiences.

Are we looking at the same "study"?

What scrapper numbers would be, from take 2

Name | DPS | EPS |

Scrap Energy 151 3.3
Scrap Claws 149.6 2.9
Scrap Fiery 149.3 3.1
Scrap Strength 142.1 2.9
Scrap Dark 141.6 3.1
Scrap Martial Arts 141.5 3.6
Scrap Warmace 141 3.7
Scrap Dual Blades 136.3 3.5
Scrap Stone 131.8 3.5
Scrap Katana 128.6 3.2
Scrap Battleaxe 123.3 3.2
Scrap Broadsword 121.7 3.1
Scrap Electric 103.6 2.9
Scrap Spines 80.1 1.6

When limited to basic IOs, the only set that uses less endurance that what superstrength does is spines, which is only low because of the absolutely horrible activation times. The only currently existing sets that are better for dps are fiery melee and claws. Several, like martial arts and dual blades, use more endurance for less dps.

As had been mentioned in Bill's threads, the brutes' ranking of superstrength is not as high as it would be for scrappers for various reasons. And, if you look at the differences between take 1 and take 2, brutes superstrength is much more competitive with more aggressive IO slotting, which would put superstrength even farther ahead for scrappers.

Your definition of poor is curious. The brute sets that beat SS were fiery melee, stone melee, and fully soul-drain saturated dark melee, and they only beat SS at very small margins. The relatively poor performance of superstrength with basic IO slotting for brutes should clearly show you how easy it is to improve the performance of superstrength by taking outside powers and adding a lot of recharge. You're drawing the opposite conclusions you should from the very threads you reference.

Edit: to be more clear, there is one (existing) brute set with less single-target DPS than superstrength in the basic IO slotting calculation. When gloom and heavy recharge are included, there are six sets with less single-target DPS than superstrength... for brutes, who gain less from rage than scrappers would.

Mediocre to poor...

Hooray! I support this! You are awesome for doing the write ups.

Why would they ever stop proliferating the left over sets, primary and secondary? I bet you there are still plenty of folks that don't want damage mitigation as their primary and don't want the Fury mechanic with their melee characters, no matter how easy or difficult it may be to maintain.

Well, you also seem to be a person willing only to look at a single data set and, even then, only assume that single target damage is the only valid comparison. I can assure you that I've looked at Billz' charts. In fact, I was one of the people that helped in creating a few of the attack strings for them. They are not, nor were they ever intended to be, a definitive listing of effectiveness of the various sets. The intent of them was more to outline any disparity between Brute and Scrapper performance than to try to outline any specific outlier sets within the ATs.

One of SS's greatest strengths is not, in fact, single target damage. It's the fact that it performs incredibly well in both ST and AoE damage. Footstomp, even by itself, is an incredible power. Augmented by rage, it provides obscene performance. ST damage cannot be taken as the only mechanism by which a set is measured. Honestly, AoE damage is arguably the more important measure of performance considering the way PvE ends up operating.

Except that it does prove that Rage is more powerful specifically because you can take outside powers. As Dersk has already pointed out, you seem to be rather incapable of actually interpreting the data from Billz' analysis (it's not a study, as a study would require the collection of data rather than the use of existing data).

I never said anything about skimping on damage enhancement. I said that the power provides what amounts to free damage enhancement. Unlike accuracy and tohit, more damage is always welcome so there is no reason to reduce your slotting because of additional capabilities provided by a buff power. Anyone that reduces their +dam slotting because they got some +dam that didn't bring them over the cap is not a particularly intelligent individual.

The problem with this is twofold: if Rage is designed to allow SS to bridge the disparity and allow it to compete with other sets, it shouldn't be allowed to augment outside powers to the same extent that it can because then it's providing an untoward benefit. As I have repeatedly stated, when you begin bringing in outside powers, the entire "balance" of the set goes out the window because you're providing the higher level of damage to every power in the set. I would be as if taking Fire Melee gave every single power you took, including pools and APPs, a bonus DoT.

I'm not even going to touch on your inability to actually read and comprehend Billz's charts. I don't even think you understood what I was referring to when I discussed additional endurance efficiency because it wasn't a question of spending less to get greater efficiency but rather getting more for the same price (as dam/rech/end is standardized). Once again, as Dresk pointed out, Billz's charts rather obviously demonstrate that increased efficiency rather well.

That depends on how you build for them. The Hasten crash isn't anything to write home about and, if you play intelligently, it's no harder to make sure you spend within your limits than it is for any other set. Of course, this isn't even getting into how IOs can quickly marginalize endurance costs, if you want to get into the argument as to whether SS is too good at the top end.

That's because, and I'm not sure you understand this, that SS increases efficiency by increasing performance for the same cost rather than outright reducing cost. SS is going to give you better performance per point of endurance consumed than almost any build out there (and Billz' numbers support this). There is a difference between increasing efficiency by increasing damage and increasing efficiency by decreasing cost.

Of course, I'm not even sure how SS could be all that problematic to design to be endurance sustainable. Rage double stacked provides lower endurance costs than FA and that's at the extreme top end of performance. Of course, I've never had a problem designing for endurance sustainability. I know how to deal with it. I could probably fix any of those builds you want to make them sustainable without much effort or loss of performance. With IOs, it's simply a foregone conclusion.

Once again, not a study, but analyses. There is a very substantial difference.

And I've never put much weight into Starsman's numbers. He calculates attack string averages algorithmically, which has never generated anything even approaching realistic performance assumptions except when attack competition is largely irrelevant (i.e. attacks would progress in a priority chain rather than in a cohesive attack string). Another is that he automatically assumes that attacks are fully saturated and require no additional work to be so. Because of this, he places Dark Melee as an above average AoE set (I'm incredibly good with DM and even I wouldn't venture that it's even close to a set with real AoEs).

The only times these assumptions are actually valid are when you have areas with make target acquisition arbitrarily simple and a very simple attack choice progression, both of which Super Strength has. If those assumptions aren't met, the actual numbers drop as you lose a great deal of efficiency (attacks begin interfering with other attacks and you hit fewer than the max number of targets). Comically enough, Starsman's numbers (even discounting the fact that SS is the only set that would realistically perform under those assumptions) would actually support my claims rather than the other way around because he places SS as routinely above average damage in both AoE and ST and below average endurance consumption as well.

I would urge you to honestly learn what you're looking at rather than simply blithely spouting it. I've actually critically analyzed both of their analyses and determined what conclusions can actually be drawn from them. I've looked into this a lot more than you. Bringing up two of the more famous examples of numerical analyses, both of which I am remarkably familiar with, isn't going to surprise me, especially when I've already factored those depictions into my conclusions.

Just try actually looking at Billz's analysis rather than just talking about it. You're outright wrong. Brute SS came in 4th, behind saturated Dark Melee, Fire Melee, and Stone Melee. Saturated Dark Melee isn't even a reliable measure of performance for the set, Fire Melee is designed to be the damage king because it lacks secondary effect (and its contributions for Brutes are actually inflated compared to Scrap numbers because the DoT benefits from Fury while it doesn't benefit Critical), and Stone Melee is up top simply because it has obscene damage output thanks to high EPS use. This completely ignores the fact that Scrappers would be able to put SS to use even better because Scrappers get better relative gains out of +dam.

Well, it's obvious that you don't know how to interpret Billz's study or Starsman's numbers, and, even though I automatically doubt anecdotal evidence when it isn't supported (and the sheer prolific nature of SS toons in optimized damage and farming situations would disagree with you here), I doubt yours even more since you've demonstrated a distinct lack of critical thinking capabilities, much less the ability to actually read what directly in front of you.

Fury. You meant to say that Fiery Melee's DoT is affected by a Brute's Fury, not Rage.

My bad. I often misuse the words. Correcting it now.

You should just go and get a CS or SE degree and go work for NCSoft

This. While I can see the argument that Super Strength's single target damage is manageable (but still excellent) for Scrappers even adding in Boxing and other outside single target abilities, using rage to boost not only Foot Stomp but also Fireball and god forbid Shield Charge would be obscene.

I'm working on it! Quit bugging me about it! You sound like my parents!

When the devs say "we balance with SOs in mind" they do not mean they dont ever look at IOs or Pool powers, instead what they mean is the set should perform acceptably without requiring IOs or pools.

The devs, in fact, actually try to answer questions like "as far as we can tell, would IOs make this set overpowered?" They dont go too far, though, for the most part they do things like "OK, with 300% recharge on top of regular slotting, would it be too strong?"

So yes, the devs do not balance the game to require IOs, but they do their best to make sure IOs dont go way to out of control. They dont always succeed, nor do they aim at "do all sets perform similarly once IOd".

This means they do try to avoid some level of performance when they can foresee it, but that does not mean they make sure that all sets can reach that level of performance.

Are you in college now or on your way to getting one?