Looking at Tremor, Whirling Hands, and Foot Stomp here... Tremor and Whirling hands recharge in 14 seconds and dish out about 42 damage base. Foot Stomp recharges in 20 seconds and deals about 60 base.
The faster recharge seems to be to blame for the lower damage on Tremor/WH, but whether the damage-to-recharge ratios match up I can't say at the moment. 
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It may have poor DPA, but it's also got a big area and a nice mitigation effect. Hit 8 targets and you're still out-DPAing seismic smash, which is one of the top DPA attacks in the game (if not *the* top, too lazy to go looking at the moment). It's not footstomp, but that's more a testament to how absurdly good footstomp is than anything else (like psi shockwave, footstomp breaks the dam/rech/area balance rules for AoE attacks - it's supposed to either do significantly less damage than it does, or only have a 10 foot radius).
It's true that tremor is at best an average PBAoE, but it's still servicable. Toss in an epic/patron AoE and, while you're no fire blast or spines, you've still got ok AoE. And frankly, given how good of a ST and mitigation set stone melee already is, I would be *extremely* hesitant to ask any dev to look anywhere near the set. At a minimum, I'm sure we'd lose seismic's boss hold, given what they did to TF, and fault is scary good.
@MuonNeutrino
Student, Gamer, Altaholic, and future Astronomer.
This is what it means to be a tank!
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If you remove PPP/APPs, Stone Melee has significantly better ST attacks and ST DPS across the board vs. SS, where as SS has a better PBAoE.|
Originally Posted by Muon_Neutrino
It may have poor DPA, but it's also got a big area and a nice mitigation effect. Hit 8 targets and you're still out-DPAing seismic smash, which is one of the top DPA attacks in the game (if not *the* top, too lazy to go looking at the moment). It's not footstomp, but that's more a testament to how absurdly good footstomp is than anything else (like psi shockwave, footstomp breaks the dam/rech/area balance rules for AoE attacks - it's supposed to either do significantly less damage than it does, or only have a 10 foot radius).
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Stone Melee also has much, much better mitigation ability, where as SS gets Rage with a To Hit bonus and +damage to fuel your Secondary & APP/PPP attacks.
So it's a toss up, depending on what it is you're actually looking for.
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Originally Posted by Muon_Neutrino
It's true that tremor is at best an average PBAoE, but it's still servicable. Toss in an epic/patron AoE and, while you're no fire blast or spines, you've still got ok AoE. And frankly, given how good of a ST and mitigation set stone melee already is, I would be *extremely* hesitant to ask any dev to look anywhere near the set. At a minimum, I'm sure we'd lose seismic's boss hold, given what they did to TF, and fault is scary good.
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At the OP:
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| Reading the guides and City of Data, it would appear that Stone Melee is truly a single target set, with Tremor doing approximately 40% of the DPA of basically every other PBAoE with a significant damage component in a melee. And this is our tier 9? Am I reading this wrong? Kinda makes me want to re-roll my (now lvl 29) SM/SR as SS/SR. Any chance of getting the new powers guys to re-evaluate this travesty? |
Quick A: yes.
The AoE size is the only thing that could possibly make SM better than EM for AoE damage, but the high activation time means that if you hit the same number of targets due to tightly packed spawns, it's worse. Whirling Hands supposedly follows the AoE damage/recharge/AoE formula for AoEs, but is widely regarded as trash for AoE and there are more "exceptions" - including Tremor - than powers that follow the formula for scale 1 damage on a 14 second recharge (I got into that discussion in the beta section for KM, which resulted in higher damage for Burst).
That said, I took Tremor on one of my SM Brutes just to have an AoE before level 41; the other was built with single-target in mind and gets far better use from Dark Obliteration.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Add a +rech proc to Tremor and Fault, its worked wonders on my Stone/Energy Aura Brute. I will echo the better ST then AoE damage, but I still prefer Tremor over Whirling Hands.
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Not a horrible use for a +rech proc, but if you've already got enough global and/or slotted recharge to skip Stone Mallet and still have a full attack chain - which isn't hard, if you use Tremor - then you're probably better off with damage procs. Also, the Taunt and KB damage procs are fairly cheap the last time I looked for them.
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Originally Posted by Gypsy_of_Paradox
Add a +rech proc to Tremor and Fault, its worked wonders on my Stone/Energy Aura Brute. I will echo the better ST then AoE damage, but I still prefer Tremor over Whirling Hands.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Indeed, but the reason it works so well for me is because my rech bonuses aren't all that hot. Being SM/Energy Aura, I worked toward softcapping. Sadly my ACC suffered, but remedied with Incarnate slotting. |
Originally Posted by Siolfir
Not a horrible use for a +rech proc, but if you've already got enough global and/or slotted recharge to skip Stone Mallet and still have a full attack chain - which isn't hard, if you use Tremor - then you're probably better off with damage procs. Also, the Taunt and KB damage procs are fairly cheap the last time I looked for them.
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So it all worked out.
You won't want to farm with Stone Melee, but Tremor along with a patron/epic AoE does the job, taking down minions without having to actually target them. The slow animation does suck, but the large area it covers along with the knockdown makes it a potent mitigation power. I find that I rarely need to use Fault due to how much knockdown I'm getting from Tremor.
It's a good candidate for procs. I put the purple fire proc in mine and it's well worth the cost. I highly recommend it.
A little follow-up. My SM/SR is at 45 now and has both Tremor and fault 6 slotted (franken for acc/end/rech and dam in tremor) with the +rech proc in both. In large teams I am the popcorn brute keeping things on their butts fro most of the fight and running not infrequent +240% recharges from both powers procing. This makes both powers effectively chainable. I haven't got to the Armageddon (or Apocalypse or whatever) proc yet and look forward to it, but in the meantime I am pleased with having taken both powers and how they help me satisfy the agro-control aspect of bruting and the damage is not completely pathetic even with the big animation time.
Reading the guides and City of Data, it would appear that Stone Melee is truly a single target set, with Tremor doing approximately 40% of the DPA of basically every other PBAoE with a significant damage component in a melee. And this is our tier 9? Am I reading this wrong? Kinda makes me want to re-roll my (now lvl 29) SM/SR as SS/SR. Any chance of getting the new powers guys to re-evaluate this travesty?