LF NW chain

What is the best available chain for nightwidows? Tried asking in the SoA forum but not getting any luck and i want to respec soon.

A build would help. Otherwise, you can probably figure this out for yourself.

Mids' can show base damage per activation times if you to to window -> powerset comparison. This gives you a good idea of which attacks are best to use. Procs add a flat amount of unenhanceable damage and only change the best attack in some situations.

Once you have that information, you have to figure out your possible required recharge times. Powers have a 100% base recharge time and 500% maximum recharge time. To figure out how fast a power will actually recharge, divide the base recharge time in seconds by one plus the recharge enhancement percentage plus your global recharge. For example, a power might have a 12 second recharge. Typical enhancing results in 95% recharge enhancement. You would have a total of 180% global recharge for perma-Hasten. So, 12 / (1 + .95 + 1.8) = 3.2s actual recharge time.

After you figure that out, string the attacks together and call it an attack chain. Typical attack chains use your 3 best attacks, but yours may be different. Dark Melee's best chain is Smite -> Midnight Grasp -> Smite -> Siphon Life, so I press 1232 repeatedly.

I would rather build around performing the chain whichever it is.

FU > Slash > Lunge > Strike > Swipe is a good chain. I'm not sure it's the best chain.

I would say something along the lines of:
(Crit Lunge, Followup, Shatter Armor), Strike, Swipe, Slash, Followup, Lunge, Strike, Swipe, Slash, Followup ...

- Try to keep Follow Up Double Stacked.
- Take the Mace and Shatter Armor, using it as sparringly as possible to maintain the -res. Aka: once every 20 seconds or there abouts.
- Slot a Glad Proc in Eviscerate.
- Alternate Shatter Armor and Eviscerate to fill the gaps in your chain depending on your recharge levels. With enough recharge you won't need Eviscerate.
- It's hard to say if at the point you no longer need Eviscerate if it's worth keeping it or not for the -res proc.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=125256

TopDoc's build is what I used to construct my Night Widow. I don't really calculate attack chains per se, but I know that this build is supposed to be capable of soloing AVs and pylons and I know that I can do tons of damage with my own Night Widow. I've had people ask, "Why didn't you take XXXX power" (think the actual question was regarding eviscerate) or "why no actual Night Widow attacks?" I didn't give them good answers because I didn't make those calculations and decisions -- TopDoc did. But I know TopDoc (sort of -- I've played in the Iron Eagles hardcore group on Justice that he's in, that he took a character to level 50 in w/o dying) so I know that he didn't take XXXX power for a good reason. If I can solo AVs, then what does XXXX power give me that I don't already have?

Anyway... I think his advice in this thread is what you're looking for. Specifically:

FU - Lunge - Strike - Gloom is, according to my calculations, a very good "practical" chain for a widow, dealing around 250 DPS with 2 FU stacks and damage procs in your attacks. It's got a +recharge requirement of about 250% total (or 95% enhancement and 155% global) in each of FU, Lunge, and Gloom. Fortunatas can also use this chain, but they don't get mind link helping them on the +rech, so they'd best be ready to break out their pocketbooks.

FU - Lunge - Strike - Swipe works at the same recharge as the above, but does less damage. It's got the advantage of no redraw, if redraw bothers you, and of being available before level 41.

FU - Slash - Lunge - Gloom - Strike actually seems to calculate at around 260 DPS with procs and double-stacked FU. And it won't break your back with recharge requirements, either, being a 5-power chain where Slash only has to recharge in 4.7 seconds or so.

FU - Slash - Lunge - Gloom works with a ridiculously high level of +recharge, like when you have a high-recharge build with Force of Nature/Geas of the Kind Ones or Ageless Destiny going. It's a noteworthy damage increase over the top one... but it isn't something to build around - you need 366% recharge on Slash to make it flow. I calculate it at around 270 DPS. So it's not even a huge improvement, either.

Edit: But, as noted, Slash isn't necessarily key to your dps as a widow. It does do good DPA, but all widow claw attacks do good DPA. Lunge, actually, does the best. Gloom is pretty high too. Using them makes up for alot. Slash gets messy because of its 16 second recharge and 1.6 second arcanatime animation (a full .3 seconds slower than any other single-target melee attack in the widow arsenal). There's only a 10 dps difference in my math between a 4-power chain without slash and a 5-power chain with it.

Edit 2: The build I calculated this off was running TT assault and had another 16% damage buff from set bonuses, for a total of +31% damage outside of followups. And seeing as I posted nice round numbers, I was rounding off.

Gloom only seemed to do bad things to my DPS on a Widow, the redraw was just too much.

Redraw having an effect on DPS supposedly was fixed... at least for most sets. I forget which ones are the unlucky ones though. Gloom can 'seem' to be doing worse damage than it is, though, because it's a DOT. Did you run any pylon tests comparing chains with or without it?

Moving to swipe as your 5th attack in a 5-attack chain would probably not be that good.

I haven't run pylon tests comparing chains with Gloom on a widow.

If the chains are close, wouldn't the 20% -res from Shatter Armor trump Gloom ? I haven't calculated it, but I assumed it would given any reasonable level of dps. Gloom is a great attack, but unless it adds 40 or more to the chain the -res sounds better to me.

I haven't calculated it either because the math wasn't something I could easily do on the back of an envelope while I was poking around in Mid's after not being able to sleep this morning

The thing is that shatter armor has a ~2.5 second animation speed, and while my mids is saying it does enormous damage, I have the feeling it's wrong because the power description ingame is listing at about 1/3 the unenhanced damage that mids is. I'd go with the ingame value, myself, which puts the base DPA at about 65, or somewhat less than Swipe. Since it has a 20 second duration you'd want to use it as infrequently as possible. And since it's mutually exclusive with Gloom, any chain that uses gloom will have to change to swipe instead if it's using shatter armor.

To give it a useful comparison with you'd have to see how many iterations of a given attack chain could fit in 20 seconds, then string that together like "shatter armor -> 1.2 * (attack chain * X) -> shatter armor -> 1.2 * (attack chain * X)" to a certain time frame, say 1-2 minutes worth time, to get a sense for what effect shatter armor's long animation and low DPA will have on your DPS.

Off the cuff though, the DPS I calculated for FU - Lunge - Strike - Swipe was around 220. Simply improving it by 20% and ignoring Shatter Armor's animation time entirely, would move you to 264. FU - Lunge - Strike - Gloom calculated to 250 in my mids'. If there's a redraw impact I think shatter would have it worse, since it's got a draw animation of its own. Estimating the impact of shatter armor's animation time/DPA on things, considering you could in a perfectly lag-free environment get 4 cycles of FU - Lunge - Strike - Swipe in between shatters, I'd say shatter comes out slightly ahead of gloom, but not by very big margin. If there's a redraw impact I'd bet they're very close to the same, but if there's a redraw imapct then using Swipe instead of Gloom starts looking like a better idea too.

If Shatter does Mids' damage instead of the damage that it's telling me in the 'real numbers' ingame, then shatter wins any which way, and you may even wanna use it off cooldown, cause Mids has it doing almost 700 damage slotted.

Came back to share some test results and correct myself:

Gloom isn't a particularly good attack for widows. Some pylon testing on Test whlie a friend tanked for me so I was purely attack, confirms that redraw does have a negative impact on widow damage output. I respecced into gloom, took out my musculature and reactive incarnate powers, and did two trials of each attack chain.

Running FU-Lunge-Strike-Swipe, in two runs, I downed the pylon in 8 minutes each time (as in, 8:01 and 7:58). Running FU-Lunge-Strike-Gloom I downed the pylon in 8:50 and 8:15. Since I was expecting a DPS increase of 20-25% for using gloom, the fact that my times got slightly worse is a strong indicator that redraw's impact on DPS isn't a myth, or at least, it's not for night widows. FU-Slash-Lunge-Strike-Swipe yielded 6:46 and 6:45 times on the pylons, for reference. Of course, end management becomes a throttle - I ended up using the recovery serum temp power to keep myself from bottoming out with that chain, even after adding a cardiac alpha so I wouldn't have to concentrate as much on end management.

Maybe mixing in shatter armor would be worth it, maybe not.

So, while it's not really a scientific number of trials, it was enough to convince me. Don't redraw with your widow.

Thanks for testing it.

I'd rather test things out and then man up and admit I'm wrong, than have my name get put on bad advice

Goodluck with your widow. For the record, I'm kinda turning into a fan of the FU-Lunge-Strike-Swipe chain. It was doing quite well when I added my incarnate powers (with the 75% reactive DOT rare, it took down a pylon in 5:09), and it's a lot friendlier to the end bar. It'd probably be very practical to shift between using slash, and not using slash, depending on if you're having end problems at the moment.

I also tested 'filling with gloom instead of swipe, but only when I had a gap' - that came out to 7:45. And I tested filling with placate, which came out to 7:57, possibly because placate was only up for 1 gap out of 3. Maybe alternating placate and swipe for filler would be an improvement, but my friend who was tanking was getting tired. Placate at least doesn't cause redraw.