New Defender Vengeance Question.

The 30% increase in Defender damage seems difficult to gauge. Since Defenders damage is in its secondary, where does the increase put that damage now compared to say a Blasters secondary?

Blasters have a ranged damage scalar of 1.125

Defenders have a ranged damage scalar of 0.65, so thats 57% of Blaster damage.

If both have 3 damage SO's or equivalent in their attacks, the Blaster does 200% base damage (roughly) and the defender does 230% damage due to enhancements and Vigilance.

The Defender is now doing around 65% Blaster damage, or 2/3 Blaster damage as a good approximation.

(This would require a 50% resistance debuff to equalise, which is beyond the scope of most solo Defenders. A solo Blaster will still do more damage, as they should.)

That's just comparing Blast sets. Blaster melee damage is often higher. Blasters mostly have two self-damage buffs of +65% (Aim) and +100% (Build Up) to a typical Defender +50% self buff. (Aim)

Trying to compare it to Blaster secondaries is, as you said, difficult. There aren't any attacks that line up with each other to do the comparisons.

Doing a Blaster Blast to Defender Blast comparison is pretty easy though.

With the damage buffs that Blasters got a little while back, the gap between Defenders and Blasters got even wider than it used to be.

Currently (without the new 30% bonus) Defenders do approximately 57.7% of the damage with thier blasts that a Blaster does with the same blasts. With the 30% bonus (ie solo), Defenders do 75.1% of the damage a Blaster would do.

(ignoring Blasters Defiance bonuses - with those scaling and stacking it makes it really hard to define exactly how much damage a Blaster actually does)

Example: Energy Blast
Power Bolt (defender - team) 36.1 (defender - solo) 46.9 (blaster) 62.6 = 57.6% - 74.9%
Power Blast (defender - team) 59.3 (defender - solo) 77.1 (blaster) 102.6 = 57.7% - 75.1%
Power Burst (defender - team) 76.6 (defender - solo) 99.6 (blaster) 132.6 = 57.7% - 75.1%
Nova (defender - team) 176.2 (defender - solo) 229.1 (blaster) 305 = 57.7% - 75.1%

[Note that the 30% bonus scales up with level and doesn't actually hit 30% until level 20]

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So, I guess you could take a Blaster secondary attack and say that if a Defender had the same attack it would also be doing 75.1% of that damage - but of course they don't have any of those attacks . . .

What I'm kinda curious about is how Corruptors now compare to Blasters and Defenders now that Defenders got their solo damage buff. Do Corruptors still do more raw damage than Defenders or did that change?

Corrupters have a 0.75 Ranged Damage scalar.
Scourge adds about 25% of total damage after damage buffs are figured in.


So with 3 SO's slotted:

Defender: 0.65 * 230% (100% base +100% enhancements, +30% vigiliance) = 1.495 damage scale

Corrupter: 0.75 * 200% (100% base +100% enhancements) * 1.25 (Scourge) = 1.875 damage scale

Without scourge they're level, with it Corrupters do 25% damage more than Defenders

Thanks for the info. I haven't considered three-slotting Defender secondaries for damage because of ED, but outside of my empaths, I do a lot of soloing with my Defenders.

With Enhancements in the mix, Scourge actually wins out because it's applied on top of the power's individual damage amounts, whereas the Defender's static buff applies before.

Defender:
0.650 * (1.0 + 0.95 + 0.30) = 1.4625

Corruptor:
0.750 * (1.0 + 0.95) * (1.0 + 0.3) = 1.90125

Holy 1.9 damage scale, Batman! That's more than Kheldian Nova by nearly the Corruptor's base amount. If only it was persistent instead of mathematical average. (-:

Before anyone can interject, I'd like to remind you that when Scourge pops, it's a flat 2x damage (in most cases), meaning the effective damage scale when it goes off is 0.75 * (1.0 + 0.95) * 2.0 = 2.925.

One thing to note is that the Scourge is actually less likely to deliver the fully 30% average benefit due to the likelihood that it delivers overkill. The closer your foe is to death, the more likely this is to happen. If you need 50 points of damage to kill a foe and scourge it with a 30 point attack, you lose 10 points of damage that can't be applied to your next foe. The best you can do to optimize this is to hit badly damaged foes with small attacks.

I've never seen anyone attempt quantify this in a closed form manner, but it is widely held to reduce the average benefit from the ideal. Edit: The more HP a target has, the closer you are to approach the ideal average benefit.

The thing with Scourge, it's most likely to work when it wouldn't be needed in the first place. Should wasted damage even count?

Edit: *grumbles about Ninja posters*

I would argue that even in practice Scourge sees a 20%-30% effectiveness.

Against weaker enemies like minions, Scourge will likely finish them off. But how many shots does that take? Maybe two to get their HP down, and the last one Scourge? That's 33%.

Against tougher enemies like Archvillains, Scourge will go a long way because it's hit after hit of double damage there at the end.