The hardest hitting scrapping **** in the game

What combo is it?

Its gonna be /shield isn't it

Hardest hitting? Burst damage I'd have to say not many things can beat Greater Fire Sword boosted with Build up and Against All Odds, so yes /shield lol.

wait I thought fire was bad because dots don't scale with crits or something

They don't but Great Fire Sword does a crap load of damage on its own.

Burst damage I am going with BS/Fire I am just seeing that BU + FE + Headsplitter, Disembowel or Burn delivers a brutal amount of damage. No to mention my use of achilles procs then on top of that I plan to get Shatter Armor.

But this strategy at this point is nothing more than one or two devastating hits every minute

I gotta say that my FM/SD does do loads of ST damage, GFS is back every 5 seconds too xD

Fire melts face. It melts face at low recharge, medium recharge, and high recharge. It melts face for scrappers and it melts face for brutes. It is one of my 'three when in doubt, roll a...' melee primaries (three stone melee, three fire melee, two dark melee on Virtue alone).

Barring extra damage buffs I do prefer fire melee on a Brute. Incinerate comes early for boss melting fun, and the dots are buffed by fury. In fact, for anything but /shield defense I'd go with a brute. Yes, build up is better for a scrapper as well but especially at low levels you wouldn't know it outside of a glorious build up crit (and those are indeed things of beauty). I don't know how much extra damage build up would do for a scrapper over time compared to a brute if they both had the same global recharge and used build up every recharge cycle, though.

I vote for Fire/Fire Scrapper. I'm only lvl 39. When I'm in groups I easily out damage everyone.

I always think of burst damage as X time span, where X is a short time frame, such as the length of a single Build Up, or perhaps a handful of seconds.

And no, I don't think that means we're talking about DPS, even if it's time for an attack chain or even two. Compare Broad Sword and Dual Blades, for instance. Pulling numbers out of thin air because I've long since lost the actual comparison, but I compared a Broad Sword with about 170 DPS to a Dual Blades with about 230 DPS. The break even point was around 17 seconds. Any shorter than that, and Broad Sword won the damage race. The reason, of course, is the difference between Build Up and Blinding Feint. And to me, the difference between Build Up and Blinding Feint is burst damage.

You can talk maximum single hit damage, but I put that in its own category, with its own name. I also consider it a useless measurement in PvE, though perhaps more so in PvP. When we're talking burst, I'm thinking short time frame, five to ten seconds. When we say DPS, I think very long time frames. If you sit there and pound on something forever, what will your average damage per second be? Then to me, there's this vast gulf between burst and DPS where the advantages cross over from one to the other.

I also don't make any rules outside of time scale. I consider it a bit artificial to add something like "wouldn't include any give power used twice". I use Gambler's Cut after ever attack. Does that mean my burst damage is limited to Golden Dragonfly -> Gambler's Cut? That seems too short, even if it plays to my advantage against someone spamming five different attacks in a row, where the later attacks are lower damage. Or at least if it isn't too short, then the comparison should be on that particularly short time scale.

I'm not sure it's important to nail it down, though, as long as we all understand how damage changes over time, and how some primaries have very hard hitting single attacks, and some are good at front loading damage, while others ramp up slowly instead. And I think most people in the "what is burst damage" argument understands the underlying facts, turning it mostly into semantics.

All I'd suggest is that if somehow we ever come to a consensus, that if that consensus is that burst damage is a single attack, then we're desperately in need of another term for damage over a short time frame. Perhaps front-loaded damage or something. But I think it's easier and more clear to give a single attack the alternate name.

I mean when everything is factored in like burst, DPS etc

which set averages the best

also I'm guessing the consensus on secondary is /shield

I'll say Fire/Shield. It's almost at the top of the charts for DPS, has a harder hitting attack than Head Splitter, uses Build Up for great damage in 10 seconds. AoE for Fiery Melee is probably merely decent, but Shield Defense adds Shield Charge, and you can always pick up Fire Ball. It can be a rather effective farmer with an appropriate build, and without giving up other categories of damage. I suspect it's the best all-rounder for damage output.

Lightning Rod will do a lot more damage than Greater Fire Sword (it will hit a little over 1100 damage, GFS at around 800 when both with build up and satured AaO), but the two powers are very different in their usage so a direct comparison isn't easy.

You really have to set up artificially-difficult situations before endurance sustainability starts to become a requirement. I wouldn't want artificial situations to be part of the definition for a basic term like DPS. Most of the time, it won't matter, and you'll have time to recover between spawns and even micro recoveries moving between targets.

Granted, we often talk about DPS in the context of soloing pylons and AVs no temps no insps. Maybe that should be "endurance sustainable DPS" to distinguish. Because we need even more terms.