After playing Kinetic Melee extensively on what is arguably one of the best AT to play with it...

... I think it sucks, for highend performance.

Its DPS at high recharge levels, without the "right" secondary, is middle of the pack to good, and that's only if you leverage Power Siphon to its fullest. In real game situations, not so easy to keep those 5 stacks going.

PS can seem awesome at first glance, but spending 2 seconds of animation for 20 seconds of buff - and a buff that builds up rather than always on - isn't all that impressive. So much of the DPS being tied to it also means you get less out of damage buffs (be it external, or stuff like Assault and Musculature) than some other primaries.

The AoE isn't anything to write home about either. Burst has the standard terrible PBAoE radius, 8 feet, and Repulsing Torrent can't possibly be intended as a damage power, as it does less than Quick Strike.

Now for Concentrated Strike ; great damage, but the long animation makes some corpse blasting bound to happen. The chance to recharge Power Siphon is of course unreliable, and will often happen while PS is already recharged, and during the animation, you often go down to 4 or even 3 stacks of PS.


Thankfully, highend performance isn't everything.


In spite of all of that, in my opinion this is one of the best melee powerset the devs ever made, if not the best.

The feel in general of the attacks is great. The sounds make it sound like you hit hard, the animations are beautiful ; I find myself logging on my KM characters just to whack stuff and watch the pretty hand motions, and then later I glance at the time and notice I've been here for a whole hour doing just that.

The DPAs on the powers (speaking about the 4 melee ST attacks) are relatively even, with a slow, steady increase as tiers go. This lets you build all kinds of attack chains while leveling, or even not care about an attack chain and do barely worse than someone who would optimize each millisecond of fighting. It also means there isn't as wide of a gap between high recharge chains and lower recharge ones, and the DPS KM does while leveling is very solid (possibly one of the best, if not the best) compared to other primaries.

The first attacks are fast and recharge quickly. By level 4 you have your bread and butter ST powers, by level 8 you get your shiny buff. This makes for a great early game experience, as well as a potent character for exemplaring. You get your PBAoE at level 18, which is right about the time you need it ; a flavor power / ranged attack at level 26, which is more or less the point when team content gets more dynamic (Kal, Sutter) ; and finally, the tier 9.

Concentrated Strike does everything a tier 9 should do. It looks powerful, it hits very hard consistently and the whole nature of the power, a slow, hard hit whereas all previous ST attacks were fast but weaker punches can turn the playstyle into a fun minigame of ramping up damage to deliver a super buffed up CS to take down a lieutenant in one go or remove a significant chunk out of the HP bar of a boss. *Can* being the operative word, because you're not forced to do that either ; you can just as well play willy-nilly and remain at an acceptable performance level comparatively speaking. This is one of the greatest strengths of KM - it doesn't force you into doing something, but rather gives you all these options and tells you it's alright to use any of these. Just punch faces as you see fit.

There's other nice things about CS. Earlier on I complained about corpse blasting, but just as well doing more damage in one hit can be useful. Killing those freakshows before they get to pop Dull Pain. Killing a sapper in one go. Doing good damage while kiting against Apex Battle Maiden or Nightstar/Siege while under warnings.

The way Power Siphon works can also be nice for regular missions. While people often discount it, there are travel times, from the knocked out baddies on the floor to the next punching bags to be. PS doesn't root so can be used during that travel time, at which point its animation time is irrelevant.

The mitigation isn't too bad either. After Concentrated Strike, bosses often end up stunned while attacking at full speed, as well as under a ~-20% damage debuff. It's not fantastic, but it's there. At high levels, combining that with Void Judgement (for the -50% damage) and/or Paralytic Interface can turn KM into a nice damage debuffer. There's knockdown here and there, with % high enough to not feel anecdotal.

All in all, the powerset is more focused on providing a balanced experience through the whole game than balance at high levels, and that's smart. Let's face it, few players care about the latter part ; we're maybe a few dozens actively speaking about highend performance on here, there's maybe a few hundreds or thousands caring about that in game. Compare and contrast with the 70,000 or 80,000 subscribers we have - as in any game, most players are casual. More importantly, even for spreadsheet-loving number junkies like me, the set is so much fun than any concern about performance just disappears.

Kinetic Melee is a fantastic, well designed powerset. It's such a departure from older powersets, that seemed to be mostly about making cool animations and cool powers, and then trying to adjust the numbers to make it somewhat fit. With KM you can really see a lot of thought went into it, and everything just works as a whole.

Thumbs up for a job well done. It's things like this that give me faith in the current dev team.

It's a little disingenuous to start off with "it sucks" before admitting in the same breath that it's actually pretty good in the circumstances in question. Also, power siphon is still buffing your damage during the ramp up and ramp down periods so I'd call it a thirtyish second buff for two seconds of animation. And corpse blasting? C'mon, nobody has forgotten that all you ever do is fight increasingly large piles of AVs at once.

The reason I enjoy KM as much as I do is that, like you said, it seems like it was specifically intended not to hinge on any particular gimmick. It has a number of strengths, therefore a number of possible secondary synergies. It seems particularly suited to the resist sets, as their damage auras love long-uptime buffs, this in turn supplements burst, and their heals are just the ticket for bolstering its somewhat incremental mitigation.

Really though, it was made for fire armor. AoE for days, or as much single target as you can handle, both on tap. Ideal for, well, that just about covers all of the content in the game, really. This combination's only drawback is that in a target rich coupon oriented reward collection facility, or similar such setting, power siphon is legitimately inferior to build up and collects dust with the rest of the single target part of the primary.

I thought KM was the BEST ST dps...?

Are you a solist Nihilii, because my biggest gripe with km is how it works on teams. The build up power was very frustrating on teams, because it either makes you an underperforming aoe player (because you either fire them off immediately non-built up, or you build up and fire them at corpses) or a strictly single target player, with your best attack ridiculously slow animating, neither of which is a very good design for a powerset in a team game, imo. I played it on a scrapper, and I felt like a stalker with really hard hitting single target ability but not much else and the key attacks all felt very slow.

I totally disagree with you on the sounds, they sounded like some kind of wierd old atari game sound effect. I usually don't notice sounds, and I cant think of a single sound in the game i've ever had a problem with, until I heard the km sound effects. But I do agree with you about the animations, they look pretty damn nice, except for maybe the excessive concentrated strike three stooges move.

But to each their own, if some players like it, rock on.

I was considering a km for highend performance. I think you just talked me out of that.

I have an idea. You guys should try KM/FA. I hear it's a great combo that everyone likes if they're cool.

I have to admit I agree with you, after coming from my dm/sd scrapper it is going to be hard to find something that can top that performance. Some friends decided to create some toons on Union and I rolled a KM/SR and I have had a blast with it, love the animations (except power siphon, I hate the mini-whirlwind around me) and is just an enjoyable set to play. I have noticed the CSing dead bodies which tends to be annoying but also noticing one-shotting things. I agree fully with ya, fun to play, maybe not so much high-end performance wise.

What is considered high end? My pylon time is 2min 50sec with my KM/EleA. That seems pretty good to me.

I would have to say that KM is the most fun I have had with a set since DB was released. I prefer flashy animations, and would love updated versions with this amount of style for all of the melee sets. Some need it more than others (Claws and BS I am looking at you).

The only thing I don't like about KM is the sound fx with it. I like the end hit, but would rather of had a swooshing wind sound.

Yea, except killing minions and leiuts isn't hard in this game, especially on a team, but AVs tend to take at least a little time and that is where sets like this shine.