Highest Damage Buff from AAO?

I did a bunch of analysis on Power Siphon during the I18 beta, but oopsie I forgot to save the threads.

The gist of it was that without too much difficulty you could average about +55% to +65% damage buff from Power Siphon, and that included the downtime of the power, when slotted with SOs (recharge) and using any reasonable attack chain (this was for Scrappers). This wasn't a computed estimate, but an actual measured estimate based on combat logging.

That's actually fairly consistent with assuming that you'll have about the peak buff for 20 seconds, and be up about a third of the time. Why this tends to be true is that so long as you have enough attacks to be attacking fairly consistently, you will stack the buff enough to get at or near the buff cap, and the only difference between a slow attack chain and a fast one is the ramp up time to get to the peak buff. Almost no one has an attack chain that is so bad that (if they have enough attacks at all) it takes longer than ten seconds to emit five attacks, so the ramp up should reach the five buff limit within the duration of a single buff stack.

Ramping up slowly doesn't hurt because if the buffs ramp upward slowly, they will also tend to decay downward slowly with about the same stagger. Something many people forget to consider is that while the Power Siphon power itself has a 20 second duration, it enables 10 second duration buffs. The last buff you get will linger for up to 10 seconds, so you'll actually have close to 30 seconds of at least some buffing. The ramp up to full roughly cancels the ramp downward to zero, and you end up with something close to 20 seconds of 5-stacked buffs (excluding missing).

So you'd guess that the buff would be something close to 5 stacks (+156.25% for scrappers, +125% for brutes and tankers) for 20 seconds, with approximately 60 seconds of cycle time (slotted with recharge SOs). And that is about +52% average buff. That agrees well with the measurements I took that were between +55% and +65% (the higher numbers included concentrated strike, which can insta-recharge Power Siphon and give it a better availability).

The biggest thing that will reduce the effectiveness of Power Siphon, besides being inactive, is being tohit debuffed: the buff only happens if your attacks hit. In that respect, its vulnerable in the same way that Follow Up and Soul Drain are.

For comparison, Soul Drain's peak peformance is to saturate the buff at +150% (again, for scrappers) for 30 seconds, with 60 seconds of up time. That is +75% average buff. Conversely, to beat Power Siphon with Soul Drain you have to average hitting more than 6 targets every time SD is recharged, like clockwork. *Waiting* for six to be available after Soul Drain recharges would reduce the efficiency of SD. You don't have that problem with Power Siphon, because you only need a stream of single targets to keep it saturated.

Stacked Follow Up has the same peak performance as Soul Drain (+75% damage when stacked, and it can be perma-stacked with enough recharge), and can be generated against single targets like Power Siphon.

Still, I think for Scrappers Power Siphon has the potential to reach or possibly exceed them both due to the potential benefit of Concentrated Strike. But only at higher levels of recharge than I tested with.

So basically, a KM/SD Scrapper with fully saturated AAO and a full stack of Power Siphon would have some serious damage potential right? Moreso than even a DM/SD Scrapper?

KM/SD will particularly outperform DM/SD on single hard targets. If you get some AAO fodder, DM will slowly kill it, whick KM will not. If you don't, KM still gets full Power Siphon, while DM faces a weakened Soul Drain. Finally, the CS insta-rechage proc will help KM pull ahead at very high recharge.

Frankly, I'd expect to see KM/SD's advantages over DM/SD show up even more with an unsaturated AAO, as that meas unsaturated Soul Drain for DM/SD, too.

That is one of the reasons why I won't reroll Murcielago to a KM. Plus Dark fits his concept so much better.

Another combination that has some promise (although I haven't done all of the relevant calculations and testing yet) is KM/Fire, due to the unique mechanics of Fiery Embrace.