Dps

Why is it that if you want to make the best of your dps class be it scrapper brute etc have to take fiery aura to maximise your dps?

Would be nice to have a few more damage type armors with equivilent dmg outputs , and not feel you have to take fire to have the most dps possible.

Again assuming im correct it seems a big let down in the otherwise very good customization of powers that your limited to one for full dmg potential.

If im wrong here then by all means explain to me im still fairly new to the game so i may of missed some mechanic some where , but from what i can see no matter which primary you take you need fiery to maximise it ( strictly from a dps vantage ) .

Saying that you have to take /FA in order to "make the best" of your dps class is dramatically oversimplifying things. Fiery Aura is a defensive set. Every bit of extra damage that you are wringing out of it comes at the expense of survivability. That's not to say that a /FA character can't be very tough, but it's not what the set does best.

If all you care about is maximum damage output? Sure, take a gander at Fire. But keep in mind that how much dps you can put out is far from the only thing that matters.

Fire armor is the best melee secondary for the purpose of farming, which should be all you need to know regarding its popularity. It's also good for other things but that's why half the threads in the brute forum are about fire armor builds.

As far as dps in a vacuum, well, do you mean aoe or single target? What circumstances are you trying to do this damage under? Fire is also good at facilitating single target damage but shield, for instance, is I believe still considered far superior to it for that as it tends to make you much sturdier against a wider variety of enemies while you apply that damage. No set is "best at dps" in all situations. Every set can do something that fire armor can't do in one way or another.

The deal is Fiery aura has a damage, ah, aura that hurts enemies all on its own while you attack. If everyone around you is half dead by the time you've killed 1 guy, then you're killing faster than anyone else.

Y'know, in theory. Very basically.

Way, way, crazy oversimplified question.

FA grants a high bonus to damage (and generally to DPS) explicitly because it is one of the weaker survival sets. For ages people complained that it did not live up to how much weaker it was compared to sets like Shields, which provide a basis on which you can build for immense survivability and very high +damage. There are other sets with damage auras - what sets FA apart is Burn (which was only recently improved after being nerfed into the floor for years - seriously) and Fiery Embrace. At the same time Burn was "un-nerfed", FE was changed from a Build Up-like power that only really worked best with Fire Melee into the beastly power it is now. And finally, after that, people started saying "hey, now FA feels worth it compared to Shields".

Giving that away to other powersets would just put FA back at the bottom of the pole again.

I think your missing my point , it was meant to be a simple question , let me try it this way then .

If i say make a scrapper and i take broad sword - will i do more damage over all by taking fiery rather than say dark ? or any other for that matter.

All theoretical ofc, im not looking for some smart long answer about how something has defense , the question is very simple do you have to take fire to maximise dps or can you take another and still keep up?

I was toying with making a cyborg themed scrapper and thought hey elec def set would fit that , but i then started thinking that if i took fire i would then do more dmg.

My point is that you have all these different powers that fit one roll , but when it gets to maximising dmg you only really have one choice?

Is 10-15% more DPs worth having 20-25% less survivability? Of course these numbers are made up but Fiery Aura's 'increased damage' is at a substantial cost. Especially in a game where 'maxed dps' is barely noticeable. Expecially on a team of 6 or more. Is it really worth it to max out dps (say, 5% more) but have a higher chance of face-planting?

Personally I's rather have a Stone Brute on my team than a SS/Fire Brute simply because I know for a fact that Stone Brute can stand up to 8 or more enemies and not need any kind of support to survive, while a /Fire brute will need his team to sacrifice potential damage just to support him.

Its better to have a nice balance between defense and offense so that a team isn't forced to build around a specific character. By going Fiery aura (brute, scrapper whatever) you may potentially be sacrificing your team's overall damage since they have to use more supportive powers instead of more damaging powers.

This is 100% hypothetical. Just like 'max dps'

It makes sense that Fire does the most damage, seeing as it comes with the lowest survivability out of the box.

Admittedly, IOs, insps and incarnate powers sort of ruin that balance ; but it's still much better than when the set with the best survivability (IMHO), Shield, also had the best offense.

Specifically speaking about scrappers, I still find /fire to do less DPS than /sd as lacking aggro makes things run (especially with Burn). Half a second spent jumping to your running target out of every 5 seconds is already a 10% DPS hit.

I would just like to point out to you, Dlloyd, that if you are trying to maximize your DPS, you shouldn't be going with Broadsword as a primary.

I think what you might want to take away from this discussion is the following:
In this game (I'm assuming you're new, so welcome!), unlike other games, a question like, "How do I get the max DPS" is not really the right question to ask. The better question might be, "How can I be most effective, in a general/team/solo/on TFs/On Incarnate content/leveling up/after L50/in PvP/in PvE (or whatever floats your boat)..."

Because, as many people have pointed out, balance is a key concept in this game (and is achieved to varying degrees in different aspects). And in many cases, the tradeoffs for +dps often cost you the very dps you seek.

One other takeaway: Often, the simplest questions have complex answers, both in general, and in this game in particular.

Ok first off thank you all , seems a few of you got what i was getting at, it was a generic question was never meant as i only want a max dps char for myself.

I have read through all of those replys and got alot of helpful and useful information so thank you all for that ( yes i am new to the game )

MY main point in this was even though im new im sick of seeing ss/fa everywhere would be nice if there was more choice for the same results.

Anyway thanks again for all the replys, cyborg themed scrapper here i come !

If you're seeing lots of SS/FA Brutes running around it's because there was a time when it was a popular farming build for Villains. That was about its area of affect (AoE) damage capabilities, though, not really its (single-target) damage, which is what most people focus on around here when talking about DPS.

You can't have everything exactly the same, that would be boring. Fire's niche is added damage pretty much across the board... and it sacrifices something in all cases as well... usually something related to survival.

That said, if we're talking firey aura and the ATs that get it, well, you're actually wrong... /Shields gives more DPS boost.