Best Scrapper PvE DPS

GFS>Incinerate>Cremate is the best attack string out there because GFS is actually an incredibly good attack, if only because it's not relying heavily on DoT damage to kill targets like the other two attacks in that string. Incinerate>Scorch>Cremate>Scorch is a close second that's a lot easier to manage, but GFS is still a good enough attack to justify taking.

The lack of knock effects isn't really all that telling simply because the Force Feedback proc is a bit of a joke. It's a 10% chance for 100% +rech for 5 seconds with a 10 second enforced downtime on the proc (i.e. it procs and it won't check again for the next 10 seconds). Assuming you make 2 attempts every 10 seconds, you're only getting ~9.5% +rech from that slot, one that you could be using to substantially better effect elsewhere in all likelihood.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Gambler's Cut is nice, but it's not the hallmark of the set. It has a DPA of only 61.1. Soaring Dragon has a DPA of 76.4. Golden Dragonfly has a DPA of 82.8. GC is nice, but it's nothing compared to GD or SD.

Follow Up. Seriously. Look it up.

You obviously have no clue what you're talking about here. Soul Drain is way better than Build Up could ever be. Better uptime, better values. DM works well with virtually any secondary because of the -tohit, the self heal (which I'm surprised you didn't mention in the least even though it's one of the big attractions of the set), and the endurance assistance.

Power Siphon is, over time, about as strong as Soul Drain and it doesn't rely on being surrounded by enemies in order to accomplish its goals. The -dam is also an incredibly powerful secondary effect.

Lotus Drops is better than Spin in which universe? Hint: not this one.

It doesn't say it to me. The Scrapper forum may be filled with number crunchers and experts on the sets, but we are not representative of the player base. I don't expect even the most experienced players to have even heard of Arcanatime, let alone understand how it affects the actual DPS you're going to see in the game, as an example. And unless you're an experienced Scrapper, I wouldn't expect you to know how Follow Up affects the overall DPS on a Claws scrapper, and how to optimize that effect. Or how the Dual Blades combo system works, and what the best combo is for DPS, and what attack chain you would use with that combo, or why that still isn't the top chain for Dual Blades DPS. It's all esoterica. Yes, it can be understood when explained, but it's not obvious on first reading, even with the "real numbers". And I think the "real numbers" in the game can easily lure people into thinking they understand how things work when they don't. While "real", they can be misleading, and there can be aspects of powers that are not easily grasped on initial viewing. Confusion is to be expected. Comprehension isn't.

Show mercy. As simple as this game is portrayed the ins and outs of analyzing and judging things like damage output are not trivial to someone that hasn't done the math a few times before and hasn't played all the sets before to provide background experience. Even now, very few people get everything consistently correct. We were all this uninformed once.



Well, you all were, anyway.

I would be the most ludicrous disguise in existence. Ok, 9th most ludicrous disguise.


Plus, if Castle was willing to spend enormous amounts of time creating an anonymous public persona that spent a good deal of that time just fact-checking himself, he'd have to be pretty mental. Or I would have to be pretty mental if I was him. But of course this is exactly what a mental person would say, isn't it. But would I point out how mental it was knowing that people would believe that I wasn't mental enough to try to convince people I was mental enough to believe I was mental enough to act that mental?

No, I'm not that mental. Castle might be, though. You'd have to ask him. Or me, when I'm not me if I'm not me. I wouldn't know.


(Note: the devs are not allowed to astroturf. Of course, I'm sometimes an exception to the rules. But Castle isn't. Now there's a logical quandry.)

Follow Up is a Claws attack that results in a short term buff to damage on later attacks. High rates of recharge can let you double stack the Follow Up buff on an entire attack chain for a significant boost to DPS. Some chains even triple-stack it on an attack, at least on paper. Or maybe I'm thinking Dual Blades and Blinding Feint... same idea, in any case. (Edit: Claws chain Follow Up -> Focus -> Slash can triple stack Follow Up on both Focus and Slash. Dual Blades chain Blinding Feint -> Sweeping Strike -> Ablating Strike can triple stack Blinding Feint on Sweeping Strike. Both require insane but achievable amounts of recharge to pull off the trick.) For DPS, it's a nice way to go. Build Up type powers are better for burst damage, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here. Claws doesn't rule the roost for DPS, but it can do a lot better than it may at first appear.

As far as attack animations following each other with no break, that's usually the best approach for high-DPS attack chains. I think the only exception for Scrappers is Broad Sword, which benefits from spamming its heavy hitters in such a way that there's a slight gap. That small amount of time spent doing no damage is more than made up for by the rest of the time spent doing better damage. Though it's also true that the attacks actually ALWAYS have a very small break between them, which is what "Arcanatime" is about - how we factor in that irreducible delay. A lot of us had realized that there was SOME delay, as things weren't working in game the way they did on paper, but we couldn't explain it adequately, and the times we assigned were at best educated guesses (I'd guessed 0.175 seconds myself, which was in the ballpark, but I wouldn't use it in my calculations because it made no sense). Arcanaville figured out what was happening and how to calculate the exact times involved (which vary), posted it, and we ended up calling it Arcanatime as a result. There have been hints that calculating required recharge might be a little more complicated than that still, some things not stacking quite as well as they should at very high rates of recharge, for instance. But there's been very little testing or theorizing, at least that I'm aware of. Hmmm, I seem to have taken a big detour. *chuckle*

(Edit: To bring up another subject relevant to DPS and the inadequacy of scanning the in-game real numbers, the Achilles' Heel proc, which can be used in defense debuffing powers, can be significantly leveraged in some attack chains on some primaries. Also the Fury of the Gladiator proc at a higher price point.)

(Edit: I also feel like mentioning Shred Monkey here. He was one of the people that had figured out there was a delay of some sort between attacks. Now me, since I couldn't explain it, I shrugged it off and pretended it wasn't there. Shred Monkey accepted that it must exist, planned a build and an attack chain around it, and put out DPS in the game that was shockingly high. Took us a long time to even figure out what he was doing, probably partially because at the time, what he was doing in the game was considered to be impossible, so we just weren't thinking in those terms.)

No, no gap....Parry. It activates and recharges fast enough that it fits nicely in the gaps of a Broadsword attack chain.

It just seems logical that time spent doing little damage will improve your DPS more than time spent doing no damage at all.

My chain goes Parry-Hack-Parry-Disembowel-Head Splitter, mostly because my recharge blows on my build.

I'd rather be hiting with a weak attack and improving my defense than standing there doing nothing while I wait for Disembowel to recharge.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

At high enough levels of recharge, the gap is small enough that the time spent animating Parry hurts your DPS more than just waiting.

The highest DPS BS attack chain is HS>Hack>Disembowel>Hack>(gap) @ ~154 DPS. If you need Parry to cap Defense, then that's a different story.

Thought experiment to exaggerate the effect. Suppose you only had two attacks, one that animated in 2 seconds and hit for 200 points of damage and recharged in 0.5 seconds, and a second attack that animated in 2 seconds and hit for 2 points of damage and recharged in 0.5 seconds. Obviously, its better to cycle the first one and ignore the second one rather than try to fill the 0.5 second gap with a power that will lock you into a 2 second animation for little damage and steal time you could be spending on a much better DPA attack.

At certain levels of recharge, this can sometimes happen to almost any powerset, but in particular when the set has higher cast times than average. Parry in particular has a cast time of 1.33s and therefore a MeTime of 1.584 seconds. That's a longish time to be stuck in one of the lower DPA single target attacks of the set if a better one is about to come along much quicker.

Of course, Parry is a pretty good power to use in general for its defense buff, but if we're talking about pure damage output its not ideal.

This will never cease to amuse me.

Have I ever mentioned that Oh, God! is one of my favorite movies?

I'm afraid you're not going to get a singular consensus answer. Debating DPS is one of the things the Scrapper forums has been doing for years, and for a long enough period of time for most of the old hands to realize that there's no one absolute answer to that question: a lot depends on different variables. Those variables include:

1. At what level of recharge? The answer is somewhat different if you assume no recharge, or assume a small amount of slotted recharge, or assume you will build with Hasten, or finally if you're talking not about a build you intend to level up with but a level 50 build that can use the best inventions. And then the amount you want to spend on those can also change the equation by opening doors to different optimized builds.

Recharge is important because most offensive sets have some really great attacks in terms of doing a lot of damage in a short period of time (DPA), and others not so good. The higher your recharge, the more you can use the better powers and the less you need to use the less concentrated powers. Some powersets start off with a bunch of powers that are decent overall, and do well with any level of recharge. Some start off worse because they have some stinkers, but at higher levels of recharge the stinkers disappear and they are left with nothing but more potent attacks. Dark Melee, for example, can't even build a complete attack chain with zero recharge. But some of its attacks do very high DPA, and a high recharge build can compensate for its lack of attacks by allowing the player to cycle the ones it does have very fast.


2. Single target vs AoE. If you are talking about doing the most damage to kill the most targets as fast as possible when there are lots of targets around, AoE will generally do more damage than single target attacks. The break even is roughly three targets or so. If you can hit more than three or four targets consistently with all your AoEs, your AoEs will generally outperform all single target attacks out there.

But if you're trying to bring down one single tough target like an AV or a pylon, AoEs are usually (not always) rubbish, because they do less damage to a single target in the same amount of time that a single target attack would. If you care about AoE, the rough rule of thumb is pick the set with more of them. In general, three AoEs beat two AoEs no matter how good the two are and how bad the three are. Not always true, but usually true simply because if you hit enough things with them, no AoE is actually bad.


3. Variable damage buffs. Different sets have different ways to self-buff damage, and how you use these powers can have a big impact on your damage output. If you can saturate Soul Drain every time you use it - which requires just happening to have the right number of targets all standing around you at the moment it recharges (not easy to arrange if you're also trying to kill them continuously) Soul Drain is the best self damage buff Scrappers can get. On the other hand, if you cannot consistently do that, its just average. Follow Up is fast enough that it can actually be stacked: with enough recharge you can self buff yourself multiple times. But there are practical limits to that because FU itself has low DPA: there is a slight diminishing return aspect to that. And Power Siphon is even more complex.

Different number crunchers will factor these in different ways, and it can be sufficiently debatable that many people will compare DPS without them, and then add them back in afterwards so that at least the non-buffed DPS numbers can be debated without getting into an unresolvable argument over the best way to account for these powers.


4. Then there's secondaries. It can get doubly complex when you throw in certain buffing secondaries. Shields in particular.


So here's the broad strokes. If all you care about is damage output, and you want that damage over a wide range of situations, Fiery Melee is your first stop. Its bonus DoT makes it a legitimate competitor for among the highest levels of damage across the board, period.

Claws is also a contender at low to medium recharge, because it has intrinsic recharge bonuses and frankly a broken adjustment to its AoE attacks, making it a decent single target performer and a really good AoE performer. It doesn't have quite enough single target DPA oomph to put it at the top with ultrahigh recharge, though.

At high and really high recharge levels, Dark Melee starts to get really good at single target damage, because it has two really good single target performers. Once you get high enough recharge, they start to dominate your attack chain.


Two wild cards from Going Rogue:

Somewhere in the mix is the new MA, but I think its not quite high enough to challenge Fire and Dark Melee at the moment. Its good, and much better than it was, but probably not the best.

Kinetic Melee is a bigger wild card. With an ultrahigh recharge build, and saturated Power Siphon, I don't know if we've seen the full potential of KM yet. But I wouldn't place bets on it until someone has done a top end analysis of the maximum capability of KM. Its also decent at lower recharge, but probably not a top performer. At the highest levels of recharge, though, when Power Siphon can be basically perma? I think its in the mix.

It'll probably take more time and analysis from more people before we converge on a more accepted opinion on these two. But my guess: MA ends up near the top at low to medium recharge, better than average at high recharge but not quite a top contender at high recharge. KM ends up near the top at very high recharge, probably among the top contenders.


Bottom line: if you're looking for the absolute best on-paper level 50 money is no object scrapper damage dealer, you're probably looking at either Dark Melee/Shields or Fiery Melee/Shields. Maybe Claws/Shields for AoE more than single target. Or, if you're going all out on recharge and willing to do the homework yourself, KM/Shields for single target may be a strong play.

Quoted for epicness and posterity.

Haha, brain glitch. Big enough one that I'll keep it there to remind myself.


(For those less familiar, Shields cannot be paired with Claws, Katana, Dual Blades, or Spines.)

Instead of a mistype, I'm hoping it's an unintended foreshadowing to a future patch... I know I'm not the only one either. <looks at BillZ>

edit: Hope addressed and smashed while I was typing even.