Mu Mastery: Zapp

Hello scrappers! ..and hopefully castle. Can someone explain the purpose of this power and if it's currently bugged? It does damage in both pve and pvp that is about the same as mu bolt, but it has a 7.33 second activation time as opposed to mu bolts ~1 second activation time. The power looks neat I suppose, and I would use it if it behaved like a normal snipe but the damage is sub-par and the incredibly long interuptable animation time makes this power seemingly useless. The endurance drain isn't worth the activation time either.

Is this power bugged or just forever doomed to be one of those neglected powers that will forever suck? I've been working at getting my elec/elec scrapper over villside JUST for mu mastery and Zapp is very dissapointing imo.

Thanks

It just sucks.

It sits next to shadowy presence in the pile of.... things that just take up space.

Wow... that kind of ruins the whole set for me. Shame.

At best, you can use it for a IO set mule.

I can't say it's much better for Stalkers, either.

At least for a stalker it will crit while in Hide, scrappers don't even get that benefit.

Sniper attacks for meleers are somewhat odd. Most ranged attacks for meleers, like Hurl, use the melee damage modifier. The Epic ranged attacks are the same, presumably so they are consistent with ranged attacks in the Primary. (Or Secondary, for Tankers) Sniper attacks, however, seem to use the ranged modifier. This results in them doing about half the damage they would with the melee modifier.

This is even worse for Scrappers, because Scrappers have a higher melee modifier (1.125 versus 1.0) but Stalkers have the higher ranged modifier. (0.6 versus 0.5) Which only brings up the question as to why the devs would give Scrappers the Stalker Patron Pools in the first place. Scrappers and Tankers share two out of four APPs, and Brutes and Tankers share four out of four PPPs, so it seems reasonable that Scrappers and Brutes would also share the same four PPPs, instead of trying to fit in the Sniper attacks of Stalkers.

Interestingly enough, Moonbeam appears to do damage as if it is using the melee modifier, if City of Data can be believed. Its damage is 2.3 times the damage of Dark Blast. This kind of inconsistency is exactly what is wrong with this kind of kludge, the devs are giving Scrappers a certain ranged modifier, and then giving all their ranged attacks the melee modifier so that they are not penalized by that ranged modifier. It would be easier to simply make the ranged modifier slightly lower than the melee modifier across the board, and let the ranged attacks use that modifier accordingly.

At the moment, though, if you want a Sniper attack, try out Moonbeam. You can copy over to test if you want to try out the damage for it.