How does shield charge work on Brutes?

Does the damage increase with Fury? With build up? With AAO? What if I was SS, would it increase with Rage?

It doesn't seem to work right on Mids compared to the Scrapper version, so I can't experiment with it on my own.

It worked with fury last time I played my elec/shield, cant comment on if it works with rage. AAO effected it too.

At this point, no one should consider the scrap version as "working right," but as far as what you mentioned, it seems to be working.

Shield charge as it is was implemented in a sloppy way that allowed for it to be doing too much damage over too large a radius. It seems it was originally intended for it to follow a pattern similar to Lightning Rod, with more damage in the central radius and less on the edges.

On top of that, they applied AT dmg mods treating the brute version as the base, resulting in a very high result for scraps, with their high damage mod.


Fury, Build Up, Rage, AAO, damage enhancements, all affect sheild charge dmg for brutes. The thing to remember is though brutes have a 850% dmg cap, Shield Charge summons a pseudopet that itself is capped at 400% dmg. this means with 95% dmg enh and full fury you are brushing that cap, and with AAO or build up, you're probably over it.

It sounds worse than it is. Yes, scrapper shield charge will do more damage than brutes, but at this point it's like comparing which tactical warhead does less damage.

Thank you for that description, it cleared things up for me.

I'm curious about how it's going to be nerfed. Will the nerf effect Scrappers harder than everyone else, or will it be equal all around? I really, really hope it doesn't ruin the set. Seems to be one of the only ones I could see myself sticking with to a high level.

Nerf?!? What nerf to shield charge?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Athanatosis Thank you for that description, it cleared things up for me. I'm curious about how it's going to be nerfed. Will the nerf effect Scrappers harder than everyone else, or will it be equal all around? I really, really hope it doesn't ruin the set. Seems to be one of the only ones I could see myself sticking with to a high level.

The details emerged in this thread, now buried on the Scrapper boards:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=219592


You have to read a lot to drill to the point. Here's the 30 second version (starting on page 6 of the thread).


[...lots of stuff...]

Castle: This thread makes my head ache. I *really* don't want to look at Shields, do I?

Arcanaville: At the present time, I wouldn't recommend it. Just AAO alone opens a can of worms best left till after GR at least. And we all know what happened with SC.

[...lots of stuff...]


Bill Z Bubba: Seeing FM/SD and DM/SD break the 300DPS mark while my claws/sr hit the wall at 200 was, quite frankly, kinda sad.

Castle: This is the point my temple began to ache. There shouldn't be a 50% disparity in max performance here. I'm not too concerned about the protection levels shields can generate; it'll be needed. The DDB Resist is higher than designed, but, again, not really the major concern here. AAO, actually looks fine. The maximum boost it can generate isn't that large.

Shield Charge isn't bad, basically it can get you to 2 scale 0.7 aoe's on, at best, an 19.5 second cycle time (ignoring Arcanatime, for the moment.) Then again, to get that, you've got a +400% Recharge, which is freakin' huge.


Arcanaville: Huh? That doesn't sound right, but I don't have access to my numbers at the moment. I could have sworn Shield Charge for scrappers was *way* higher than that. I think it should be (normalized to Scrappers since it does pet damage) about 3.2 scale (i.e. 200 points of base damage at level 50). Its an AoE with a DS/sec (DPA) rating higher than nearly all single target attacks. That's what makes it always good to insert into an attack chain, even if you are only attacking a single target, if you can activate it fast enough and if you have the endurance to power it.

At SC's scrapper numbers, my Blaster would gladly trade Nova for Shield Charge. It does slightly less damage (on average) in a slightly smaller radius, but doesn't crash and recharges a gazillion times quicker.

[..bunch of stuff..]


Arcannaville: 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.


Castle: 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.


There's a lot more but that's the essence of it. Shield Charge for Scrappers currently does slightly less damage than the Blaster nuke Nova, and all of the versions of Shield Charge incorrectly apply too much damage across a much wider area than they are supposed to. The Brute version, for example, deals more than twice as much damage in the 20' range than it should. It should hit close to a Tier 1 single target attack, but hits between a Tier 2 and 3. This is why everyone is predicting a nerf in our near futures.

The fate of AAO is also undecided, BTW. As was pointed out in the thread, it grants much much more +Damage than any comparable power available to melee ATs.

If you dip into that thread, you can also see how Firey Aura was a part of the discussion, and how it just isn't effectively trading more damage for less mitigation. Castle said he'd take a look at FA, and i'd expect to see (at some point, who knows when) an offensive bump to FA and a slight decrease to Shield Charge, and maaaaaybe AAO.

IMO, Shield is rediculously awesome now, and would still be awesome with those changes. Perhaps i'd use an extra aoe attack to do what my shielders are doing now.

Meh, I picked SD on my latest Brute because I wanted a positional defense set that wasn't SR.

If they do nerf Shield Charge and AAO I won't be too upset as I consider those powers to be more in the line of nice bonuses than required sources of damage in my build.