soft-cap question

I try to avoid absolute rules when it comes to character design. Designing a character is a set of trade-offs and compromises, and these trade-offs will vary with powersets, concepts, and preference. Sometimes this will involve sacrificing some offense, and sometimes sacrificing some defense.

A trivial example of this is that sometimes it might be worth leaving an attack 5-slotted if the extra slot can help you more elsewhere. However, using less than 6 slot is not the only way to sacrifice offense. One common example is using Kinetic Combat. Kinetic Combat is usually not an optimal way to extract offense from an attack, but for many powersets I generally feel that the defensive benefit it gives is high enough to warrant this sacrifice. (for SR, similar trade-offs can me made with Touch of Death/Mako/Scirocco for Melee/Ranged/AoE Defense)

However, for a current high-level, high-cost SR build, I believe that there are enough options out there to reach soft-cap levels of Defense to make me reluctant to sacrifice too much in the way of offense to reach it.

For instance, you chose to 6-slot Dragon's Tail with Scirocco's Dervish in your example. Compared to 5-slotted Armageddon (all but Dmg/Rech), assuming 10% crit chance, this gives an average per-hit damage that is roughly 11% lower (8% with Focused Chi). To get the same average per-hit damage, you'd need a 28% Damage buff. In addition to this, DT would also recharge faster (even if you don't count the extra 10% Recharge bonus), and you would have the option of adding a 6th slot (for instance replacing the Damage Armageddon with a D/R, and adding an extra D/R from another set (edit: I actually tend to use a D/E/R from the other set. D and R end up beyond the ED cap anyway)), further improving the attack.

Since Dragon's Tail is likely to provide a significant amount of your damage output at x8, I would be reluctant to compromise with its damage output like that (though I'd gladly make similar sacrifices on some non-SR characters). The extra Defense is great, but I'd try really hard to find it elsewhere.

I never said I wouldn't scavenge an attack or two if needed, but I strongly believe that 90% of your defensive structure can be completed before looking for additional answers in your attacks. I say this can be taken so far as to build a secondary so high that any primary (with a few slotting choices than can be made by any of them) can be plugged in and have exactly the same high level of attributed stats; and still have a solid, and fully slotted, choice of attacks (5-6).

There's two Mako's you can drop into a Kinetic setup that will optimize all attributes to common/standard levels that you might see from plugging a full set of something else. I don't really see Kinetic Combats as being a devaluing set.

I'm not sure if you'd followed the entire thought process for the build when it was modified from Arcanaville. 400% Regen (32 HP/s), 1900+ HP, 46% Positionals (Minimum), and the kicker challenge was Perma-Hasten. Arcana's build started out with ~46% Positionals, 1922ish HP, and 402% Regen. I included Perma-Hasten into the build at the cost of 20 HP, and 10% Regen, adding 1%+ to Positionals in the process. There really isn't another source of AoE you can pull that isn't going to sacrifice these values, and honestly, Armageddon is not that impressive in Dragon's Tail over Scirocco's. Putting it in the build actually drops Accuracy, raises End Costs, and only cuts 0.300/s off the recharge for an additional 5 damage (it goes from 168 Scirocco's, to 173 Armageddon, neither including Proc, that's only a 6% ED'd difference). To add to that, the Armageddon Proc could be added instead of the Dervish, but at the cost of a little Psi defense that's actually pretty welcome.

So all in all, the Armageddon is actually gimping the attack, in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Either it would work, or I'm pretty sure the GrantPower mechanic could be altered to make it work. The semantics exist: set the grantpower to be a boost template. If the semantics don't actually do that, my guess is the programmers could make it work that way with nominal effort.

I'm honestly still studying the build, not in the sense of the numbers but the thought process and a careful comparison. I do agree with you that the difference between Scirocco's and Armageddon can be marginal and in your case your build leverages Scirocco a bit better than mine does Armageddon. A couple of points though: the accuracy difference is nullified overall by the fact that my build has a lot more accuracy than yours does (60% vs 31%). Also, the speed difference is a little less than hasten itself: yours has 152.5% with hasten up, mine has 87.5% with the original slotting in CAK, 92.5% with the alternate slotting. If I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of max health (mine current has slightly more, with the loss I would have slightly less) or a shifter proc, I can shift a slot from PP to LBE and get an additional +10% recharge in the build, taking it to 102.5%. That would mean your build has +50% more recharge than mine with about a survivability wash (yours has a tiny bit more psi defense, mine has slightly more resistances in most areas, both are basically soft capped to similar levels), except for Aid Self, which would have about a 7% faster cycling speed. Yours would still have the edge in total offense: you have +3% more damage to my +29% more accuracy, and the benefits of more speed in general. But I think my variation can also cut out Eagle's Claw if necessary which is the primary drag on single target damage. And the +3% extra damage buff is mostly canceled by the cast time of Hasten. The higher offense would probably show up more strongly in PBAoE with faster recharging EC+DT. Because my DT does more damage per hit, though, its probably not too bad for my build: I haven't done the math on that one yet to calculate the offensive delta.

One thing I can't really think of a good way to quantify at the moment is the different between mine and yours in a way my original posted build doesn't reflect. In actuality, I slot Winter's Gift slow resistance into Superjump, which your build has nowhere to place. I thought an extra 20% resist to slows would be helpful stacked on top of the 40% resist from quickness. But for that to wash the speed difference between our builds we'd have to be the victims of -250% recharge, which isn't likely. At best, it can shave a few percent off the gap under slowing situations.

Its still a really good build because it has Elude in there which would hurt my build where ever I tried to put it, but I think the builds are closer to a draw outside of Elude than it first appeared to me. I'd still give the edge to yours objectively, but by a narrower margin than I first believed. I actually find it interesting how the two builds get to almost the same place by very fundamentally different means.


PS: Unless I'm looking at the wrong version of the build, yours has +0.7% more melee, +0.3% more ranged, and +0.2% more AoE defense than mine. The big melee gap comes from that Mako set in Cobra, which is something else I need to calculate: the damage difference in single target damage given your higher damage global, but lower damage slotting on Cobra. My guess is that at best that's going to account for a half percent drop in damage total, maybe, which will be a marginal difference overall.

I'm not disputing that you can get very good defense before considering the slotting of your attacks. I'm saying that you can often get significant defensive benefit from the slotting of your attacks, and that sometimes it's worth giving up a little offensive capability to take advantage of this.



I'm not saying that Kinetic Combat is a devaluing set (in fact I said that it's a trade-off that I often consider worthwhile). I did say that it is usually not an optimal way to extract offense from an attack. It is not.
Yes, you can get good A/D/E/R properties in an attack while 4-slotting Kinetic Combat. If you don't use KC you can get similar (or, depending on your goals, superior) A/D/E/R properties using 5 slots. This leaves you with an extra slot that could be used for a proc, or whatever else you might want to use it for (like getting even better A/D/E/R). Yes, I am aware that this is often not a huge deal. That's why I (for many powersets) generally feel that the defensive benefit it gives is high enough to warrant this sacrifice. (that, and the defensive benefit can be freaking huge)

I'm aware of the context. However, personally I would value the damage output of Dragon's Tail strongly enough that I'd try *really* hard not to compromise on its offensive potential.

Just look at the effective DPA values of the attacks being used. When hitting two targets, the effective DPA of Dragon's Tail is better than that of any of the other attacks. This means that when you're fighting at least 2 foes, you usually want to use DT as often as possible. At x8, you're usually fighting way more than two foes (I'd say that four would be a conservative value), and at this point it is even more attractive to use DT.

This is just looking at the base damage of the attacks. None of the other attacks have an activation time that is less than half of that of DT, so when you add procs, DA also gets a higher proc DPA when facing 2 foes or more. This includes any damage (or in the case of debuffs, debuffPA) from the i20 Interface powers.

In addition to this, DT's 75% AoE knockdown is a very potent defensive tool, which also encourages using DT as often as possible.

Simply put, whenever you fight "large" spawns, there are many strong incentives to using DT as often as possible. At the recharge levels we're talking about, DT will pretty much make up the bulk of your damage output (if you use it "often") when you fight "large" spawns. This makes it a very tempting target to optimize for damage output.


5-slotting Armageddon (all but Damage) and using a D/E/R from another set decreases DT's Accuracy by about 8% (but increases the Acc of all other attacks by 6%), decreases End Costs, and cuts 0.421 seconds from the recharge (which would decrease its cycle time by 7-8%, and that isn't all that bad actually).


Not including procs. A purple proc does 2.5 times the average damage of the Scirocco proc. The average damage of a purple proc is actually around half that of DT's base damage. It's a significant increase.

The effective average per-hit damage would (assuming 10% crit rate) increase by 12.5% (8.6% with Focus Chi) if you use the slotting I mentioned instead of 6-slotted Scirocco. That is also a significant increase.

Combine the increase in per-hit damage with the decrease in cycle time, and DT's (edit: non-FC) effective damage output (assuming you cycle it as often as possible) would increase by over 20%. That's pretty good for an attack that probably constitutes the bulk of your damage output.



It seems obvious to me that using Armageddon makes *the attack* better (at least in cases where the slightly lower Acc would (edit: not) present an issue). Scirocco grants a couple of nice defensive set bonuses though, and the question then (again) is what you value most, the offensive benefits, or the defensive benefits. As I said from the start, in this case *I* would personally value the offensive benefits highly enough to try to find the defensive bonuses elsewhere. It's not a question of giving up AoE Defense in favor of the offensive increase, it's giving up *something else* to get the offensive increase (personally I'd trade Elude for CJ in a heartbeat, but if you want Elude in the build, that's obviously not an option).

As with all (well, most) things when it comes to character builds, it all boils down to preference and trade-offs. What do you want, and what are you willing to give up for it. If you want that extra offense or not depends on your goals with the build, but I stand by my statement that going with 6-slot Scirocco over 5-slot Armageddon + D/E/R is in fact sacrificing when it comes to DT's offense.

I'm not sure; limiting the boost to working in only the power the enhancement is slotted into might end up being tricky. It might be easy, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's not.