Brute Claws and Follow-up

I've already taken Follow-up. However, I'm looking at different sets and as a result I've noticed something in Brute Claws that isn't making sense to me. It looks like the base damage of follow-up is so low, that with a reasonable amount of fury, I'd get better ST dps by skipping follow-up, and just hitting things more often. This isn't true of the scrapper version, the +damage in double stacked follow-up for scrappers makes it un-skip-able, but I'm taking a serious double take with the Brute version.

I'll double check the numbers in-game later, but does anyone else have an opinion ?

brutes in general tend to suffer from "dmg bonus saturation", their dmg bonus is normally so high that adding some more +dmg wont be noticeable unless its enough to hit the dmg cap (most of my brutes run at around 200-300% dmg bonus just off fury and maybe one use of their +dmg powers)

i am still lvling my claw/invuln brute but i think he still has follow up for the tohit boost and a little dmg bump for my next hit which is usually eviscerate

So far I have a L44 claws/sr, L37 claws/electric and L27 claws/fire brute. I have taken follow up on the first two and will eventually take it on the claws/fire brute. Yes, the damage bonus is smaller than a scrappers and can get lost in a brutes fury, but its still 30% and in even a moderate recharge build its not hard to double stack (thats 60% - nearly as much as rage but without the crash).

However, the real benefit is the 10% to hit buff - that tends to be really nice when facing anything with to hit debuffs (or def). There are not a lot of other way to get to hit buffs without taking high end cost powers that don't give you nearly as much in return. You can take tactics at 0.39 end/sec for 7% to hit or focused accuracy for a whole 5% to hit at a whopping 0.78 end/sec and neither of those can be stacked with itself like follow up.

Its not as must have as it is on a scrapper but neither is it totally worthless. I just wait longer on it until I have enough recharge in my build so that it fits into the attack chain easily, usually picking it up around L30-35 depending on what else I need to take there.

I get it double-stacked on my Clws/SR running FU-Focus-Slash. Seems to be worth it.

Also the +Damage is a lot more useful when your just starting an attack and have yet to build any Fury.

I fixed the numbers, but it's still pretty lackluster. 177 dps with it double stacked to 164 without it. Damage bonus saturation is definitely a problem. Much like Brute AoA on SD: Useful, but it's not like it is on a scrapper.

That's with an Achilles, but Achilles isn't saturated.
Also, I'm not using Gloom. Gloom in place of strike will boost both numbers.
Not perfect chains either.

Without FU at all, with Achilles: 152 * 1.08 ~= 164 dps
Burn -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike

With Single FU, with Achilles: 162 * 1.067 ~= 173 dps
FU -> Burn -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike

With Double FU: 168 * 1.06 ~= 178 dps
Burn -> Fu -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike -> Fu -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike

No, none of it's perfect. Yes, it's just paper. I like to look at it on paper before I take all the time to rebuild and try it on test or live. The thing is, from my Scrapper and Veat experience, I had expected a much larger boost due to double fu. It is a boost, but it's a magnitude smaller than with the scrapper or veat. A smaller boost of 0.085x, three times smaller than a boost of 0.24x that I am more familiar with.

You saw my post in the scrapper forums / pylon thread, I think.

My best run so far on my Claws/SR Brute has been about 196dps.

That's with a procced-out seamless chain of FU-Focus-Slash (Heca proc in FU, lethal proc and Achilles in Slash, and Apoc proc and Explosive Strike proc in Focus). With double-FU stacked on at least Focus.

So the fact that you are pushing 180 with Claws/FA with a less optimized chain says a lot about Burn and maybe Blazing Aura.

Are you sure Gloom increases dps even with redraw? The redraw would annoy the pants off me.

No Blazing Aura in the Calcs. No Lightning Aura. I've never bothered to measure either.

Never calcled gloom, and redraw can only be measured in-game. I know gloom doesn't work out for Fort Claws, but I was of the opinion it would help Scrapper and Brute claws. I could be wrong on that. I personally had not planned on picking it up, so I didn't even try to figure it out.

And, I'm not there yet. I'm pushing 47 with the oldest one, and late 30s with the youngest. Which is why I'm working on builds and their potential, I won't be keeping and IOing all 8 of them. I'm keeping the Kat/Will and only one, maybe two more.

Claws/FA, WM/FA, FM/FA, SS/FA, DB/FA, WM/ELA, Claws/ELA

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Purpled Build with Purple Procs and Achilles (and 67% fury), No Burn, No Aura so as to be similar to SR: 180.54 * 1.075 ~= 194.98
FU -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike

To remove Strike you'd have to have very high recharge, 314% on FU. The net gain would be ~5 dps, or 199.69.

That matches pretty close with what you measured, so I don't think I'm doing anything vastly wrong. There are just a few things I need to measure more closely, or get better info on.

Has anyone done the math on including eviscerate with the gladiator -res proc in the chain. It does have a long animation time to hurt DPA, but I'm thinking the extra -res could make it very close without nearly as much recharge required.