Btw has anything been revealed about the numbers of the set? if gloom is 1.67 cast time with extra dumb root that 1.67 attack usually have im going to be hesitant to roll one
Quote:
Shadow Maul is a pretty bad single target attack. It is a decent AoE attack, especially since it does not pay any endurance or recharge cost for being an AoE.|
Originally Posted by Hex0000
Shadow maul is garbage
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Hex0000
Btw has anything been revealed about the numbers of the set? if gloom is 1.67 cast time with extra dumb root that 1.67 attack usually have im going to be hesitant to roll one
|
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
Quote:
I had a feeling I wasn't going to like the Dark Blast/Dark Manipulation combo. |
Originally Posted by Dr_Darkspeed
From the Facebook Friday thing about Powerset proliferation, here is the current list of powers for Dark Manipulation in Beta (and hance, subject to change):
|
To me Dark Blast for Blasters looks to be a nice ranged combat set while Dark Manip appears strongly biased to melee.
Kosmos
Global: @Calorie
MA Arcs in 4-star purgatory: Four in a Row (#2198) - Hostile Takeover (#69714) - Red Harvest (#268305)
Quote:
Shadow Maul is an awfully long animation to be locked into in melee range on a Blaster.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Shadow Maul is a pretty bad single target attack. It is a decent AoE attack, especially since it does not pay any endurance or recharge cost for being an AoE.
I am sure the cast time will be 1.67. How they will handle that animation wise I do not know. |
As for Gloom... I'm sure they'll handle that the same way they handled Fire Blast and Ice Blast, which is to do nothing with the animation at all. Both of those drive me nuts with the half second of dead time at the end.
Kosmos
Global: @Calorie
MA Arcs in 4-star purgatory: Four in a Row (#2198) - Hostile Takeover (#69714) - Red Harvest (#268305)
Quote:
Charming!|
Originally Posted by Tramontane
So answer me honestly, are you really this much of an idiot?
|
Anyway, I have to say that looking at that power list brings one thought immediately to mind. That thought is "bleeeuuuuggghhhhhhh." Dark manip isn't even uniquely melee focused or anything, it's no more so than fire or elec for example, though it hardly could be, but were blasters really short on all-melee-all-the-time secondaries? No, they were not.
On the bright side it only has one pointless damage aura instead of two, though they really need to give death shroud a twenty foot radius instead of leaving it at eight (and then do the same for scrappers, please! Sure it'd be balanced!). Shadow maul is also a heck of a lot nicer than thunder strike and combustion, and I'd even take it over FSC, though burn blows it away.
The best thing about the set seems to be soul drain and the new-to-blasters play style that will offer. No building up before jumping into a spawn, instead you start in the middle and go from there. Interesting. Rad/dark or fire/dark would be pretty good combos, lots of aoe without worrying about redraw or ranged cones. Still, seems like those with any interest in long range fighting at all need not apply.
Quote:
Considering that the blaster AT is designed around a Ranged Damage/Melee Damage concept, they better not be short on secondaries focused on Melee Damage. Secondaries that are different, should be in the minority. I am glad some secondaries have options for non-melee, but I never want blasters to abandon their basic concept of Ranged Damage/Melee Damage.|
Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Anyway, I have to say that looking at that power list brings one thought immediately to mind. That thought is "bleeeuuuuggghhhhhhh." Dark manip isn't even uniquely melee focused or anything, it's no more so than fire or elec for example, though it hardly could be, but were blasters really short on all-melee-all-the-time secondaries? No, they were not.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Kosmos
Shadow Maul is an awfully long animation to be locked into in melee range on a Blaster.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Kosmos
As for Gloom... I'm sure they'll handle that the same way they handled Fire Blast and Ice Blast, which is to do nothing with the animation at all. Both of those drive me nuts with the half second of dead time at the end.
|
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
Quote:
You see I feel the opposite, i feel that Dark Blast is lack and Dark manip. is Epic.
|
Originally Posted by Kosmos
I had a feeling I wasn't going to like the Dark Blast/Dark Manipulation combo.
To me Dark Blast for Blasters looks to be a nice ranged combat set while Dark Manip appears strongly biased to melee. |
Quote:
Thought the concept was ranged damage/utility |
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Considering that the blaster AT is designed around a Ranged Damage/Melee Damage concept, they better not be short on secondaries focused on Melee Damage. Secondaries that are different, should be in the minority. I am glad some secondaries have options for non-melee, but I never want blasters to abandon their basic concept of Ranged Damage/Melee Damage.
|
That may be part of the problem with blasters they don't have a concept.
Quote:
You lost me on it being better than FSC. I hope you were joking. |
Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Shadow maul is also a heck of a lot nicer than thunder strike and combustion, and I'd even take it over FSC, though burn blows it away.
|
My new Youtube Channel with CoH info
You might know me as FlintEastwood now on Freedom
Ah it's DPA isn't as much better as I remembered. I guess I'd take either one, really. One is a small pbaoe with a long recharge and one is a "large" cone with a short recharge. They do different things and I think cones are very manageable.
I wouldn't call it a "large" cone. Not even close. Besides that the difference in target caps will leave Shadow Maul behind in any situation that's not solo at x1.
Quote:
I consider them both OK but not great. My point is they don't work together well except for the stacking -ToHit. Having to close to melee to use most of Dark Manip (2 ranged powers, 7 melee) reduces the value of the AoE Immob and KB that Dark Blast can use for mitigation.
|
Originally Posted by Negate
You see I feel the opposite, i feel that Dark Blast is lack and Dark manip. is Epic.
|
Kosmos
Global: @Calorie
MA Arcs in 4-star purgatory: Four in a Row (#2198) - Hostile Takeover (#69714) - Red Harvest (#268305)
Quote:
Just because other powers are iffy doesn't mean Shadow Maul gets a pass for being so too. The argument that they can't all be winners has some validity in considering the whole power set, but my comment was specific to Shadow Maul, not Dark Manipulation.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Meh. Vet blasters I play with seem to use Sands of Mu all the time (and it makes me weep, but they use it all the time anyway). Blasters have also had attacks that are of similar length since release (yes, similar complaints exist about most of those, but the point is Shadow Maul's longer animation is not an anomaly).
|
The long cast time melee powers are: Total Focus, Thunderstrike, Combustion, Fire Sword Circle and now Shadow Maul. Fire Sword Circle blows Shadow Maul away. The other 3 are also mediocre powers. I don't really see an argument in favor of Shadow Maul versus any of them either, making it probably the worst power in the class.
Kosmos
Global: @Calorie
MA Arcs in 4-star purgatory: Four in a Row (#2198) - Hostile Takeover (#69714) - Red Harvest (#268305)
Quote:
I admit they seem to not clash very well but I definitely will pair them with other sets!
|
Originally Posted by Kosmos
I consider them both OK but not great. My point is they don't work together well except for the stacking -ToHit. Having to close to melee to use most of Dark Manip (2 ranged powers, 7 melee) reduces the value of the AoE Immob and KB that Dark Blast can use for mitigation.
|
Quote:
I will repeat the argument in favor of Shadow Maul once again (and expand a bit). It does not pay any extra endurance or recharge time for the fact that it is an AoE. I also think it has a flaw in its damage/end/recharge ratio in its favor even if it is treated as a single target attack. Now, I cannot say what happened when it got ported to blasters. Perhaps they fixed those "problems" and made it a truly sucktastic power. If they did, I will be lining up to complain loudly. If they ported it faithful to its armored ATs version, it is a fine power (they never fixed those issues when it was ported to brutes and tankers, I do not see why they would now, but one never knows). Sure it has all the drawbacks of any long animation power, but it does have pros in its favor, just like most other long animation powers.|
Originally Posted by Kosmos
The other 3 are also mediocre powers. I don't really see an argument in favor of Shadow Maul versus any of them either, making it probably the worst power in the class.
|
Ice Patch also has a long animation and while it can be used out of melee, it is often used in melee.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Thought the concept was ranged damage/utility
|
Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
Quote:
Thank you that was an interesting read. It's nice to have authoritative information for this, and it had a couple of gems all their own.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
Some people have wanted to believe that, but it has never been true. Once they ended up on the idea of having Archetypes, Ranged/Melee has always been the concept. Some small utility was added for filler and flavor. Gadgets fell into the blaster realm due to a lack of anywhere else to go. I imagine they had some trouble making a good pool power grouping of the gadget powers (and pool powers is where they really belong).
|
Quote:
| Each of these Archetypes had its own "specialty" - the sorts of things it did best. And all of these Archetypes also had their drawbacks. The Tanker, Scrapper and Blaster were good in combat - but they needed the help of Defenders and Controllers to allow them to survive. |
Quote:
| . A person might not understand that Crowd Control plus Melee is a challenging combination to make work. The hero would be extremely fragile up close, despite the melee power. And though the hero could root people from afar, his melee power wouldn't allow him to do anything. But to the new player, why not choose those two categories? |
I'm really surprised not to see Cloak of Darkness in there. Dark Manipulation without some sort of stealth seems a little unusual to me. All of the other ATs where Dark makes an appearance have a stealth power in one powerset or the other.
Quote:
If you include Ice Patch you need to include Trip Mine too. IMO, both of those are quite a bit better than even Fire Sword Circle. Though it's really hard to do a direct comparison with Ice Patch.|
Originally Posted by StratoNexus
I will repeat the argument in favor of Shadow Maul once again (and expand a bit). It does not pay any extra endurance or recharge time for the fact that it is an AoE. I also think it has a flaw in its damage/end/recharge ratio in its favor even if it is treated as a single target attack. Now, I cannot say what happened when it got ported to blasters. Perhaps they fixed those "problems" and made it a truly sucktastic power. If they did, I will be lining up to complain loudly. If they ported it faithful to its armored ATs version, it is a fine power (they never fixed those issues when it was ported to brutes and tankers, I do not see why they would now, but one never knows). Sure it has all the drawbacks of any long animation power, but it does have pros in its favor, just like most other long animation powers.
Ice Patch also has a long animation and while it can be used out of melee, it is often used in melee. |
The four I think are in the same general area performance-wise are: Thunderstrike, Total Focus, Combustion and Shadow Maul. I consider the last two pretty close, but TS and TF a step better than either. TF mainly because of Power Boost and the stacking of Stuns. TS because of the Stun/KB (and I hate KB). None of these powers are great since TF lost its Mag 4 Stun. But none of them are complete Time Bomb level garbage either.
A quick comparison of Combustion and Shadow Maul reminds me why I rerolled my Ice/Fire Blaster and moved Combustion WAY down the build.
Combustion does 1.5 DS with an 18s cycle time and 13 END cost. It also takes quite a while for the damage to complete (7.1s). Shadow Maul does 2.156 DS with an 11.07s cycle time and 8.528 END cost. So, SM's DS/cycle is 2.34 times that of Combustion. As for the END. Shadow Maul does 2.19 times the DS/E of Combustion. Both of these numbers are close to the effective damage multipliers I get for Combustion versus Shadow Maul. On average I hit 1.8 foes with Shadow Maul (that's on Scrappers though) and get 84% of the full damage (which surprises me, I would have expected it to be lower - I guess that's because I don't use that long cast when I don't expect to get most of the damage). For Combustion (on a Blaster, I'm ignoring the Tanker numbers as laughably inappropriate) I hit 6.8 foes and get 64% of the total damage on average (I don't have a lot of data on this unfortunately, but the numbers don't seem too far off what I'd expect). That's a 2.88:1 advantage to Combustion.
Anyway, the discount to Shadow Maul's Recharge and END both seem about right for the tiny AoE it provides compared to Combustion. So I still consider Combustion to be a generally better use of END and to do better damage per cycle. Though that will change if you solo or duo on x2 or lower. Shadow Maul also provides a small -5.25% (Blaster's attrib mod is the same as Tanker's) ToHit debuff. On the minus side, it also has a somewhat longer effective cast because of the time to position to get the extra foe or two hit.
All-in-all I'd call those two close to even, and tied for dead last amongst the PBAoE click damage powers in Blaster secondaries.
Kosmos
Global: @Calorie
MA Arcs in 4-star purgatory: Four in a Row (#2198) - Hostile Takeover (#69714) - Red Harvest (#268305)
TF and TS are better than shadow maul? Now that is a completely outlandish claim. Total focus is an utterly garbage power whose sole purpose is the animation, if you're into that, but why don't we look at thunder strike? If we're to be charitable, we can compare their saturated damage: if thunder strike hits 16 targets it does 516 damage, whereas if shadow maul hits 5 targets and its damage scale is unchanged from the scrapper version it does 629 damage. Thunder strike doesn't look THAT bad, right?
Except that this implies you've got your entire aggro cap within its radius, but more troubling than that, what if each of them only hits two targets, for example? 190 vs 252. Three targets each? 213 vs 378. Four? 236 vs 504. Five? 259 vs 629.
It is trivially easy to line up two to four targets for a shadow maul even if you are approaching an untouched spawn. I would estimate that thunder strike is going to be hitting six to eight targets on a fresh spawn if you are quite good at positioning it. What you absolutely won't be doing is saturating its target cap, which is the only way for it to be anything other than a waste of animation time. And this is without even looking at its endurance cost, recharge, and so on.
/Dark looks really really good for blapping, which is weird because Dark Blast is cone heavy. So Dark/Dark looks like it might have some synergy issues, while Fire/Dark looks amazing.
Mains (Freedom) @Auroxis
Auroxis - Emp/Rad/Power Defender Pylon Video Soloing an AV
Pelvic Thunder - SS/Elec/Mu Brute
Sorajin - Elec/Nin Stalker
Neuropain - Sonic/Mental/Elec Blaster
Quote:
Shadow Maul is a super tiny cone.
|
Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Ah it's DPA isn't as much better as I remembered. I guess I'd take either one, really. One is a small pbaoe with a long recharge and one is a "large" cone with a short recharge. They do different things and I think cones are very manageable.
|
My new Youtube Channel with CoH info
You might know me as FlintEastwood now on Freedom
Not for a melee cone it isn't. However I suppose this is the first time a blaster secondary has gotten a melee cone so expectations differ.
Quote:
I guess you don't care about mitigation. Presumably your Blasters never solo or are pimped out so much that they don't need active mitigation. For me this boils down to SM having little value beyond the damage it does - like Combustion - and Blasters typically having more effective options to provide damage than a long cast+maneuver time melee attack.|
Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
TF and TS are better than shadow maul? Now that is a completely outlandish claim. Total focus is an utterly garbage power whose sole purpose is the animation, if you're into that, but why don't we look at thunder strike? If we're to be charitable, we can compare their saturated damage: if thunder strike hits 16 targets it does 516 damage, whereas if shadow maul hits 5 targets and its damage scale is unchanged from the scrapper version it does 629 damage. Thunder strike doesn't look THAT bad, right?
Except that this implies you've got your entire aggro cap within its radius, but more troubling than that, what if each of them only hits two targets, for example? 190 vs 252. Three targets each? 213 vs 378. Four? 236 vs 504. Five? 259 vs 629. It is trivially easy to line up two to four targets for a shadow maul even if you are approaching an untouched spawn. I would estimate that thunder strike is going to be hitting six to eight targets on a fresh spawn if you are quite good at positioning it. What you absolutely won't be doing is saturating its target cap, which is the only way for it to be anything other than a waste of animation time. And this is without even looking at its endurance cost, recharge, and so on. |
As for the assertion that it is "trivially easy" to line up 2 to 4 targets for Shadow Maul... that's simply not true. I wouldn't even call it merely "trivial" to line up 3, let alone 4.
I did a fair bit of testing with Shadow Maul during the beta where DM was buffed (using 2 Scrappers and a Brute), and found that the time taken to line it up was often more than it (the maneuver time that is) was worth. My DPS capped with strategies that produced somewhere between 1.8 and 2.3 targets per cast on Shadow Maul. I was actually a bit surprised by this, as I thought I'd be hitting about 2.3-2.5 targets per cast of SM when used optimally. However, the Damage Scale per sec of cast for Shadow Maul came out lower than expected when I used demorecord for the maneuver+cast time. I topped out at about 1.35 DS/sec with 2.3 targets hit per cast. More time spent setting it up for more targets resulted in a drop in DPS for Shadow Maul alone, let alone for the complete attack sequence which also saw a drop from less use of Smite and Midnight Grasp. However, the big hit to the optimal targets hit per use didn't really come from what I could be doing instead, but rather from the cost in lost personal DPS opportunities due to what my teammates were up to while I was doing the Dark Melee Two-Step.
As I said, I think the value of all of these powers is in the same area, but I think TS and TF are slightly more useful since SM mostly just provides damage a Blaster can usually get in a more efficient manner another way while TS and TF provide mediocre damage but also significant mitigation that often isn't readily available elsewhere.
Kosmos
Global: @Calorie
MA Arcs in 4-star purgatory: Four in a Row (#2198) - Hostile Takeover (#69714) - Red Harvest (#268305)
Are you aware that if you target the furthest enemy you intend to hit and then spend a quarter second or so backing up while you fire a cone, the cone's range becomes larger? This has a very minimal impact in terms of time spent positioning but it pays big dividends for damage. A patch in the last year or so attempted to alter this behavior but it failed to do so.
Shadow maul is garbage