Top primaries for ST damage?

No pause. You can count part of the animation time of AS, as you just need to be hidden when it lands.

I'm not sure where you figure this out from, as Kinetic Melee has better DPA in most of its attacks then energy melee, with about the same, or faster recharge times. For example:

Energy Melee
Barrage -> Recharge 6 seconds, damage 80.75, animation time 1.584s, DPA is 50.98
Crits for 154.15 damage, crit DPA is 97.32

Energy Punch -> Recharge 4seconds, damage 61.17, animation time 1.056s, DPA 57.93
Crits for 116.78 damage, crit DPA is 110.59

Bone Smasher -> recharge 8seconds, damage 100.32, animation time 1.716s, DPA 58.46
Crits for 191.52 damage, crit DPA is 111.61

Energy Transfer -> recharge 20seconds, damage 253.58, animation time 2.904, DPA 87.32
Does not Crit, just doesn't cause the self damage of 166.83

Total Focus -> recharge 20seconds, damage 203.53, animation time 3.432, DPA 59.30
Crits for 259.14 damage, crit DPA is 75.51

Kinetic Melee
Quick Strike -> recharge 3seconds, damage 51.38, animation time 1.056, DPA 48.66
Crits for 98.1 damage, crit DPA is 92.90

Body Blow -> recharge 5seconds, damage 70.96, animation time 1.32, DPA 53.76
Crits for 135.47 damage, crit DPA is 102.63

Smashing Blow -> recharge 7seconds, damage 90.53, animation time 1.452, DPA 62.35
Crits for 172.84 damage, crit DPA is 119.04

Burst -> recharge 15seconds, damage 76.46, animation time 2.904, DPA 26.33
Crits for 145.98 damage, crit DPA is 50.27

Focused Burst -> recharge 8 seconds, damage 100.32, animation time 2.244, DPA 44.71
Crits for 191.52 damage, crit DPA is 85.35

Concentrated Strike -> recharge 20seconds, damage 197.97, animation time 3.036, DPA 65.21
Does not have additional crit damage, but each successful crit (from hide, following a placate, or the 10% base chance outside of hide, which scales with more teammates) refreshes Build Up, allowing higher uptime of the Build Up effect.

All in all, Kinetic Melee seems to out perform Energy Melee in just about every way, and with the lower recharge times and higher DPA Kinetic Melee should pull ahead for single target damage. Especially when you factor the higher uptime of Build Up, due to CS crits.

Granted, Energy Transfer is pretty nice burst, but i feel the increased up time of Build up, and the AoE and ranged powers in Kinetic Melee allow it to pull ahead in other aspects as well.

Simple answer (#1 being the best):

1. Martial Arts
2. Energy Melee
3. Dark Melee

More Detailed Answer:

1. Dark Melee: Because all attacks can critical and it deals some Negative Energy which is less resisted than all Smashing in MA.

2. Martial Arts: I still rank it higher than EM because when you factor in team critical, MA pulls ahead of EM easily.

3. Energy Melee: Still has two big punches but Total Focus only deals a small portion of critical and Energy Transfer does not do critical damage (but still hits hard).


Preference?

1. Dark Melee: Even if DM has a tiny bit less ST dps than EM/MA, it has very useful utilities in healing, tohit debuffs, immb, fear and it has a small cone!

2. Martial Arts: It has style but it's secondary effects are scattered. You can stack stuns but Cobra Strike has reduced chance. Eagle Claw allows you to forget about Assassin Strike later on because it critical HARD.

3. Energy Melee: I actually don't like EM because it's just too slow for my taste but it stacks stuns well. It at least does one thing more focused than MA and energy damage is always good against many things especially ghosts. I think EM is best suited for PvP.




Final Words! All Single-Target damage is very overrated even when you solo. It is still nice to have some aoe even if it's a small cone like Shadow Maul. If you want a good mix of ST and AoE, Ninja Blade, Dual Blade and Kinetic Melee are good choice.


I hope you like my answers. :P

Mmmm..not so much pause. I've been using LR + AS on boss. The key thing is to use it when the mobs get knocked down. If not, I'll use Thunderstrike instead.

Just once per attack.

DB on Stalkers is all mixed up compared to other versions. It's best chain should be Attack Vitals, but you can only put one purple proc and no -res procs into that. The Scrapper version can do very well, but I'm thinking the Stalker version falls faaar behind because of the combo mix up.

Oh yeah. I notice the difference for sure. AV just seems crappy on a Stalker, maybe due to the lack of Blinding Feint, I don't know.

So far, the best DPS I see for Stalker DB, doesn't use any combos.

And Empower, BU > AS > THEN PLACATE! Gaaaah...

Maybe if it was Placate > BU > AS, it would be a worthwhile combo (imo anyways)

The best EM Stalker chain I could come up with was ET->BS->TF->BS; it requires a good amount of recharge but not as much as some of the top chains in other sets. Brutes would want to try to fill with Gloom if they could get the recharge for it instead of BS.


I didn't account for procs, just high recharge chains. I'm sure they alter things and push EM even farther down do to long animations, but I suppose you could always throw procs into EP. My EM/Elec Brute has at least 1 proc in every attack but I can cheat with the taunt procs there.

• Neither Concentrated Strike nor Energy Transfer critical and of those ET hits much harder with a shorter animation and the same recharge.
• The numbers you provided for DPA included criticals over time already, since you used the average numbers from Mid's
• Build Up will be up more often for KM but the instant recharge only happens when the best attack in the set has just been used and has the longest possible recharge time and +dam affects both sets equally
• KM's 4th best DPA attack is Assassin's Strike - which is EM's worst, even with a longer animating version

However, using your own numbers:
EM:
Bg: 50.98
EP: 57.93
BS: 58.46
ET: 87.32
TF: 59.30

KM:
QS: 48.66
BB: 53.76
SB: 62.35
Bs: 26.33
FB: 44.71
CS: 65.21

Now, unless your attack chain consists of CS->SB only, EM is going to win out. ET is considerably higher than CS, TF and BS - or, for that matter, EP - aren't that far behind SB, and nothing else in KM is even competitive. I never bothered to create a chain based on those observations since there wasn't a need to - you're welcome to make one, though I think unless you proc it out (which is the only reason NB and DB can even enter the discussion) it's just going to show a worse chain.

It's better all around, no doubt - but it's probably* not better in single-target damage. I actually like my KM Stalker, but that's because AoE is much nicer than single target... which is what this thread is about.




* - like I said, I haven't run chains for KM. What can I say, I'm lazy and haven't cared to...

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

ET is only higher at base, with critical, from both placate and hide included, ET actually falls behind pretty quickly due to not having additional damage.

Here's a quick comparison. Your best Energy melee chain is ET->BS->TF->BS, which would require about 216% global recharge to pull off (in order to get TF to recharge in the required 6.336 seconds)

Assuming you do that, the chain will take a total of 9.768 seconds, for a total of 657.75 damage, or about 67.33 DPS. This is assuming base damage.

Now, a decent chain for Kinetic Melee would be CS->SB->BB->QS->SB which would require about 279% global recharge to pull off (in order to get CS to recharge in the required 5.28 seconds)

The above chain would take a total of 8.316 seconds to animation, for a total of 501.37 damage, or about 60.29DPS. This is again assuming base damage.

Its about a 7 DPS lead for energy melee, but with more attacks in the KM chain, in a shorter duration, you'll get more fuel out of BU, and possibly more use out of damage procs.

I'm not sure how to go a step further with those numbers, but i feel they are close enough (7 DPS really isn't much on paper) that with decent slotting of damage enhancements affecting the crit damage of KM more-so then it would affect the crit damage of EM as only bone smasher crits for 100% damage, TF is about 50% extra damage, and ET doesn't crit at all, where Smashing blow, body blow, quick strike all have 100% crit damage, CS doesn't crit at all, but the refresh on BU could factor into higher uptime and allow for more damage over time as well (especially with the recent change that allows forced crits with CS, either via hide, or from placate, to refresh BU as well)

This odd... I thought Stalker's Ablating can take -defense set. Weird. I guess it does not. I know I've tested Mako damage proc in it and when it proc, it hurts everyone within Sweeping Combos' radiuis (which is what? 10' or 8'?).

I actually have not tried Dual Blade on other ATs. I thought Stalker can chain Attack Vital faster but too bad they put a little delay timer right after Vengeful so if you click Power Slice again, it doesn't que up combo. It would be nice if you can keep doing Power, Nimble and Vengeful with no "pause".


I also think that when they increased melee range from 5' to 7', they should have increased Stalker's 1K Cut from 10' to 12' too.

Simple answer. The dev hates Stalkers. :P

I think it was more that Attack Vitals for everyone else has AS and SS, for Stalkers this isn't the case, so they loose out on 2 -Resist Procs and 2 Purple Procs in one combo.

Ablating can indeed take the achilles proc, but Ablating is not in the Stalker version of Attack Vitals (it is in all other versions). The only Stalker combo that uses Ablating is Sweep, but that also requires BU and AS, so it can't be chained.

Edit: Oops, BrandX explained it above me

If you're using Placate, only Assassin's Strike comes close to Energy Transfer's DPA and even that doesn't top it. You have to add in the cast time of Placate or else your numbers are worse than useless, they're deliberately misleading.

And if you're talking from Hide on a single target and using anything but Assassin's Strike then you're either not level 6 yet or don't understand that a full critical on Assassin's Strike is far higher DPA than anything else a Stalker has access to.

The 7 DPS you mention as not being much on paper is also an 11.7% disparity which holds through as the slotting is accounted for (see below); while KM's BU is going to be around a little more often I don't see it providing enough overall +damage to make up the difference without interfering due to cast times. It's also a lot easier to hit 216% global recharge than it is to hit 279%; in other words Energy Melee does more damage while also being cheaper and easier to build.

You're counting criticals here in the chain itself (ie, quoting numbers from Mid's instead of in game - they're included even when you tell it to use minimum with the latest patch) and then saying how much of a difference criticals will make. Yes, it helps KM more, but that still leaves the gap you already calculated.

Just to show the math here, since I actually have a KM chain to work with:

The base damage of the chain, taking numbers from in-game, is:
82.30 (base SB damage) * 2 = 164.60 +
64.51 (base BB damage) = 229.11 +
46.71 (QS) = 275.82 +
197.97 (CS) = 473.79

For EM:
91.20 (base BS damage) * 2 = 182.40 +
253.58 (ET) = 435.98 +
197.97 (TF) = 633.95

KM: 473.79 / 8.316 = 56.973 base DPS
EM: 633.95 / 9.768 = 64.901 base DPS

So, let's look at 100% damage slotting (because it's easy). The base damage for each is multiplied by 2.0, while the animation times remain the same.

KM: 473.79 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting) = 947.58 / 8.316 = 113.947 DPS
EM: 633.95 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting) = 1267.90 / 9.768 = 129.801 DPS

As you can see, that "small on paper" DPS lead grows along with damage slotting because it was working with base damage. It's at 15.854 DPS difference here. Now, since criticals are annoying with both of these sets - if all of the powers had a full critical you could simply multiply by the critical rate - but still relevant, let's go ahead and look at them. The easiest way is to recalculate the chain's overall damage based on the effect of the criticals.

A 10% critical rate at a full critical provides 10% more damage after all damage buffs. Since Total Focus has a partial critical, we'll multiply that 10% boost by the amount of the critical. Here's what it looks like:

KM:
SB: (1.1) * (82.30 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 181.06 (each)
BB: (1.1) * (64.51 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 141.922
QS: (1.1) * (46.71 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 102.762
CS: (1.0) * (197.97 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 395.94

EM:
BS: (1.1) * (91.20 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 200.64 (each)
TF: (1.0 + (10% critical rate * 28.09% critical amount)) * (197.97 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 407.062
ET: (1.0) * (253.58 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting)) = 507.16

Adding everything back up, we get:
KM: 181.06 * 2 + 141.922 + 102.762 + 395.94 = 1002.744 / 8.316 = 120.580 DPS
EM: 200.64 * 2 + 407.062 + 507.16 = 1315.502 / 9.768 = 134.675 DPS

Now yes, having Build Up more often will help KM out, but Build Up isn't free - it has its own animation time during which you aren't doing damage. With the chain listed for KM, you would need (134.675 DPS * 8.316 sec = ) 1119.9573 damage to hit EM's DPS numbers. Remember that 11.7% from before? 1119.9573 / 1002.744 = 1.116892... or roughly an 11.7% difference.

For fun:
Not that it's likely to happen but just for giggles, let's say that Build Up recharges every time you use Concentrated Strike (note that either chain will fit into a BU window)

KM + BU: add 1.320 (BU's animation time adjusted for Arcanatime) for a total chain time of 9.636. Since SB is the next attack, it'll start with a stacked BU.
SB: (1.1) * (82.30 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting + 0.8 BU)) = 253.484
SB: (1.1) * (82.30 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting + 1.6 BU)) = 325.908
BB: (1.1) * (64.51 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting + 0.8 BU)) = 198.6908
QS: (1.1) * (46.71 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting + 0.8 BU)) = 143.8668
CS: (1.0) * (197.97 * (1.0 base + 1.0 slotting + 0.8 BU)) = 554.316

Total damage: 253.484 + 325.908 + 198.6908 + 143.8668 + 554.316 = 1476.2656 / 9.636 = 153.203 DPS while accounting for criticals, 100% damage slotting, and with BU recharging every time you hit CS - essentially a perma-BU situation.

So there you go, in a best-case scenario KM can do significantly more damage than EM*, and do it while not damaging itself with ET. So what does this prove? EM needs to be buffed. Bring back old Energy Transfer!





* - although on the average EM is going to do more damage than KM, and MA and DM with similar investments will put out similar results

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I'm guessing you meant buff? I'd think EM's already been over-nerfed, especially for Stalkers who don't even get the higher stun percentage on EP and BS that all of the other ATs with those powers have.

I would disagree with the comment about Focused Burst not having horrible DPA, though. It's a scale 1.64 attack with a 2.244 sec animation, along with Hack (1.584 sec), Bone Smasher (1.716 sec), and Vengeful Slice (2.640 sec - the only one it beats). It's DPA is lower than Assassin's Strike, roughly the same as Power Slice, a significant drop even from Quick Strike within the set, and lower than Mu Bolts and Dark Blast from the Patron Pools which can also be used to pick off runners with twice the range. It would compare favorably with Impale, which also does 1.64 scale damage on the initial hit, but the DoT for Impale pushes it past... and I don't think many people would consider Impale to be great DPA.

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.