Brute vs. Scrapper

If you're talking about the most recent change to Fury, it would be difficult to argue that it did that except under the most extreme circumstances. In lots of other situations it actually *increased* Brute damage.

And what "yet another Brute Nerf" are you talking about specifically? There have been exactly none to my recollection but even if you count the Fury change as a nerf, what was the other one?

Well, there was the reduction of the damage cap from, what, 850% I think down to the current 775%. I suppose you could consider that a second nerf, although as happened at the same time as the fury changes to I tend to roll them all up together.

Keep in mind, VERY HIGH END Scrappers will have access to +damage bonuses, and potentially Musculature Alpha.

As these are brought into the picture, the situation goes downhill for the Brute.


As for Brute Claws vs. Scrapper Claws - I'll wait for someone to prove that on an actual pylon test.

To this point, no Brute posting on the Rikti pylon thread has come near the equivalent Scrapper combination vs. a Pylon.


I understand the pylon is not the be all end all of this discussion, I understand that the builds that are capable of the no temps, no insps pylon runs are very specialized.

My challenge is to anyone who thinks they can actually meet or exceed the best DPS times, with their Brute, using any powerset/combo shared by both Brutes and Scrappers to actually prove it on the pylon. (I actually look forward to being proven wrong here)

SS/FA/Soul, which holds one of the best melee times there are, uses a Primary Scrappers don't have access to.

All the best pylon times use primaries or secondaries or both with the ability to generate high order damage buffs. At high levels of damage buff Scrappers will tend to outdamage Brutes.

But if you compare a primary/secondary combo common to both and that doesn't sustain, say, +100% damage buff constantly, you'll probably find the Brute competitive or superior. Its right around +100% that the numerical break even point happens between Scrappers and Brutes with otherwise identical attack chains (with identical damage scale normalized attacks). Lower than about +100% damage (over and above the standard +95% slotting and a brute fury level of about +170% damage) and the Brute will probably win. Above +100% damage and the Scrapper will probably win.

For identical attack sets, which Claws is not, the difference is going to be about plus or minus 18% total damage: at best the Brute will outdamage the Scrapper by about 18%, and best the Scrapper will outdamage the Brute by about 17%, for situations with similar numbers.

I wouldn't say it required extreme circumstances at all. Before the change I was able to maintain higher Fury most of the time than I can now. Sure there were situations with fast moving teams and/or divided aggro where I'm better off now, but overall I was doing better before the change.

There's nothing about my playstyle that's "extreme". I've never soloed an AV or pylon. Just running around punching stuff I had more Fury than I can attain/maintain now.

Agreed, but that's also a lot of primaries.

I've posited this question before, but does the Brute gain or even have a way to match the Scrappers offensive advantage in those situations with a roughly equivalent across the board Defensive advantage? The Brute certainly can't match the offensive advantage, which in my rough ballpark estimate is 20-30% DPS ahead of the Brute.

Several secondaries work in favor of the Brute in niche situations (Ela, FA vs. their Damage Type).

Several secondaries allow Brutes to beyond the Scrapper HP cap by a solid amount.

Remember, we are talking solid to high end IO builds (in my post, quoting Argebela).


I think in general, yes I agree with your "educated guess" (I'm sure its more than that, but that's all I have to go on).

On the other hand, for "very high end" builds, +15% to +40% damage bonuses from IOs is on the table, SD is on the table, perma +damage boosts like FU, Soul Drain, Power Siphon are on the table, Tier 4 Musculature is on the table and soon a way to increase chances of Critical will be on the table.

None of those benefit the Brute nearly as much and the offensive advantage gap in favor of the Scrapper grows much wider, the Brute has no answer defensively beyond the 12% extra HP/regen or the handful of secondary sets that allow a Brute to go beyond 75% resistance.


I'd still love to see a comparison of top Claws times from both a Brute and a Scrapper.

Granite Agent put up 244 DPS from a Claws/SR Brute with T4 Reactive running FU-Focus-Slash.

He's also posted his build IIRC, I'd love to know what a similarly built (Claws/SR, T4 Reactive) scrapper would be capable of.

I calculated his build as 247, but both reactive and lag are subjective, hard to calcuate, and relevant. By the same method and same build, converted to scrapper, the scrapper would be ... 282 with a 10% crit, or 262 without crits, split the difference if you like.

Higher fury should make better performance possible, and he should have had higher fury, so it could be clickies slowing things down, if so, the scrapper would be slowed down too, bringing the two more or less even. In fact, in practice, by the time I average the criticals and adjust for clickiness, I'd call them perfectly even. But all that is pretty much impossible to account for on paper, it's as much subjective feel and guess as anything. Nothing beats building them and trying them.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15076020/Cha...ent%205%29.xls

My first thought: "Weaksauce compared to a solid crit from Clobber."

I haven't had this much Scrapper in forever. WM/SD!

10% crits is the only way to go IMO.

Out of curiosity, do either of them do better with a lower rech chain (due to dropping spiritual) and picking up musculature?



I'm ok with 3 DPS off , however:

@Granite Agent:

1) What was your Fury bonus for the fight?

2) Did you surround yourself with Rikti (even under level Rikti works, no mentalists though as they can affect your rech)?


If you didn't, you should try it to push your Fury higher.

Hmm, I get different numbers. I downloaded your sheet, but because the actual damage numbers per attack seem to be entered in by hand, I cannot determine where the discrepancy is.

First I did a sanity check calculation on Granite Agent's build. I'm going to write out most of the calculation numbers here just so any errors might be spotted. I do calculations a little different than most I think, so bear with me.

First, I calculate the damage per attack for the brute counting slotting, damage buffs, and fury, but no procs. For follow up, that is 0.8 * 0.75 * (1.967 + 1.7 + 0.3*2 + 0.185) = 148.546. That is: 0.8 damage scale times 0.75 brute modifier times the total damage buff which is 1.967 the slotting, plus 1.7 for fury (170% estimated), plus stacked followup 0.3 times two, plus the global damage bonus of the build 18.5%. Doing that for Focus (1.51 scale) gets me 280.5002 and for Slash (1.48 scale) 274.2113. That is a total of 703.2574 damage in 3.96 seconds (my Arcanatime calculations match yours, so I'm assuming no problems there). That alone would be 177.59 dps.

Then I add in all the procs. The Hecatomb proc and the Apocalypse proc, which are both 107.1 damage with 33% chance per cycle, or 107.1 * 0.33 / 3.96 = 8.925 dps. The Mako and Explosive Strike procs, which are both 71.75 * 0.2 /3.96 = 3.62 dps.

Then the DoT. Since the Dot can only stack up to two times and Reactive Radial has a 75% chance of procing the Dot, I just assumed it was always stacked twice, which is a pretty reasonable assumption. That's five ticks of 13.39 damage, or 66.95 damage over ten seconds, or 6.695 dps per, or 13.39 dps for two DoTs simultaneously.

177.59 + 8.925 * 2 + 3.624 * 2 + 13.39 = 216.078 dps.

Now the two resistance debuffs. Achilles Heel is a 20% chance for 20% debuff for ten seconds. But you can't stack it. That means its going to have some downtime: after it fires once, nothing matters until it wears off. When it does, at that point you have to fire it to get it back. It'll take, from that moment, on average five firings to get it back (20%), but the first time you roll the dice will be just about as the previous one was wearing off. So it'll actually take on average four attack cycles to get it back (i.e. "fenceposting"). That's about 16 seconds. Its up for ten, and then on average going to be down for 16, more or less. That is 38.5% uptime. We can thus estimate the debuff as being 0.2 * 0.385 = 0.077, or about a 7.7% debuff continuously.

The reactive debuff we can handle in a simpler way because it can stack - up to four times in theory. In practice, with a 25% chance of going off, and an attack chain that averages 0.76 attacks per second or about 6.3 attacks in 8.3 seconds (the length of the debuff), that we'll get on average about 0.25 * 6.3 = 1.575 stacks. Since this is far below four, we'll estimate the stack at 1.575 (the stacking limit will lower this slightly, because random chance will mean sometimes there's no stacks, and sometimes there's four, and if there's four you can't get another). So I'll estimate the Reactive debuff as being 0.025 * 1.575 = 0.0394, or about 3.94%.

The total concurrent average debuff is thus about 11.64%. That means the DPS rises to 216.078 * (1 + 0.1245) = 241.2 dps.

Now, the build has to use Practiced Brawler and Hasten, and they have cast times. So we can calculate the arcanatime delay involved in using both powers: its 1.716 for PB and 0.924 for Hasten. That means, on average, you're losing 1.716/120 = 0.0143 = 1.43% of your time casting PB and 0.924/120 = 0.0077 = 0.77% of your time casting Hasten, if you do this more or less optimally. So in actuality, your net damage has to drop by about those percentage levels. So its actually closers to 241.2 * (1 - 0.022) = 235.9 dps.

That's pretty close to the reported 244, so I think I'm on the right track there. The thing is, if I repeat these calculations, changing only the base damage (from 0.75 to 1.125 * 1.05 for criticals) and eliminate Fury (170% damage buff), I end up with a lower number: 221.6 dps. Which is what I would expect, actually. Since the total damage buff in this situation, outside of slotting and Fury, is close to +80%, its under the break even point where Scrapper damage overtakes Brute damage for otherwise identical numbers, and in this case the Scrapper claws numbers aren't identical either: they are lower than the Brute numbers in terms of damage scale.

In any case, I can't quite reproduce your Brute calculations, although its close, but I really can't reproduce your Scrapper variant calculations, unless the Scrapper variant is using a completely different build or something. Its otherwise seemingly impossible for a Scrapper do deal that much more damage - or any higher damage - than a Brute when the damage buffs involved are lower than +100% (outside of slotting and Fury) which they seem to be in this case.

Two questions.

Did you adjust FU for the Scrapper's higher bonus? (37.5%, Brute only gets 30%).

Did you do criticals at 5%? Linea did them at 10%.

I asked Posi this question, and never got an accurate answer, so until now have stuck to observed data post nerf. The observed data of 30 to 40dps, is apparently overestimated. But I knew this number was likely off, but I though it was close. Now I know.

If the most you can get out of The Dot is 2 stacks and 14 dps, there may be a stronger arguement for taking the core version ?
If 2 stacks is max, at what raw dps number does the Core version make more sense ?

I estimated the resistance debuffs as 1.1, but that's close enough to agreement as well.

I estimated the criticals as 1.1, but averaged the final answer so 1.05.

I estimated based on observed data, when I applied that to both I got dead even numbers brute vs scrapper. I'll take your version here over mine.

If you didn't use the different scrapper follow up, that change would probably put them dead even.

I knew my estimates for Reactive and Clickies weren't entirely accurate having been based on less than accurate in-game observations. I might look at it again tommorow, with this additional information. I already copied and saved the new info for future reference and calculations.

Ok, Adjusting for Arcana's Reactive, and Arcana's Clickies, I get 247 gapless, and 230 with the small gap, for the Brute at 75 Fury. The scrapper is still coming out even to slightly higher, I'll have to double check all the numbers later using CoD by hand.

Interesting. So Reactive's max stacks have been reduced from ... 5 or 6 down to 2?

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I think its been 4 stacks of resistance and 2 stacks of DoT for a while. I know in beta at one point the DoTs stacked like crazy, but I thought that was reduced either in beta or soon after release.

So in answer to Linea's question, it might in fact be better to go the other way, and take 75% chance for the debuff and 25% chance for the DoT, since that better reflects their stacking potential. With a 75% chance to trigger the DoT and it only stacking twice, most DoT triggers are being wasted, but you are far under the limit for the resistance stack. My gut instinct says Core is the better way to go, but I'd want to run analyze the two a little more carefully before making that pronouncement.

Mentally reviewing my calculations, I'm pretty sure I did in fact use the same follow up for both, so the Scrapper version is off by fifteen percentage points of damage buff. My spreadsheet is not in front of me now, but my mental estimate is that would increase Scrapper damage by about 20dps in this case, and close the gap between the two substantially, probably to a wash.


Theoretically speaking, this build condition should at least come close to satisfying Deus' challenge, although as specified on a pylon the critical rate should be 10% constantly, which would help the Scrapper numbers (by something like 8 dps, I think: I'll have to check my numbers later). Its pretty close either way, which is what I would expect in a situation where the damage buffs being considered are in the range of +100% - and especially when the Scrapper ones are slightly higher (about 78% vs 93%) - and criticals are factored in at 10%.

It *WAS* changed after release, but I don't recall the exact patch. And now that you mention it, looking back through my PMs, Synapse confirms it's now 4 and 2. The total implications of that just never really sunk in till now. Also, I always thought the debuff duration was 10s, I didn't realize it was only 8.3. I'm going to have to take that new information and take another look at Reactives. The decision to go radial was based on the pre-patch Reactive, at which point you would have needed 300 to 500 dps to leverage the core over the radial. But with this post-patch version and information, I expect that dps number to leverage core will be much much lower.

I don't know exactly how to calculate it, but I would guess that with 8 attacks in 10 seconds, the dot lasting 10 seconds, the debuff lasting 8.3, that core would be the better choice once you reaching something between 110 and 125 dps.

Assuming no collision of stacks ...
min(0.10, .76 * 8.3 * 6.3 * 0.75 * 0.025) = .10x
min(13.4, .76 * 10.0 * 0.25 * 6.7) = 12.73 dps
[strike]12.73 dps / 0.10 = 127 dps[/strike]
Meh, not that simple, see: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15076020/Reactive.xlsx

It would appear a whole lot of people that have a raw dps over 125 and took Radial pre-patch, need to switch to core post-patch. Myself included.

So....

Brutes do comparable damage, have inherent survivability 12 percent better to waaay better, have better utility due to taunt auras stopping runners....


Wouldn't it be simpler to just say, "Brutes are better" and be done with it?


If all you care about are the numbers, brutes are better.

My Brute pretty consistently is 75%+ on a Pylon. Not sure 84% is consistently achievable but I can test this out tonight.

This fits with Iggy and I's testing - it takes 85% Fury to tie a Scrapper against a Lieutenant. I found 95% fury does the trick against bosses (15% crit rate, right?)

Yeah, all I know is that the consensus seemed to be 5-6 stacks coming out of the Beta, and then there was that 1-2 week period when Reactive turned any Rain power into a nuke -- so either the stack limit was much higher at some point by design, or the stack limit didn't function at all in Rain powers.

Anyway, this news dramatically changes some of my build theories. Well, ok, it changes some of my builds' on-paper capability; I'm not sure that it changes my options much.

Still think the Reactive DoT is better than the RES debuff, almost no matter what the numbers say about a hard-target situation. Through most content (in AoE attacks, against low-hp targets), even 2 max stacks of the DoT will make a much more noticeable difference. That's just me, though.

Thanks for the clarification.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

It depends on whether the things you are typically shooting at will live, on average, at least ten seconds or more. If they don't, some of the DoT isn't realized. Against a pylon, or an AV, or even a Boss, most of the DoTs you stack you'll get full value for. They will speed up the time to defeat. But in a typical mission with mostly minions and Lts, the resistance debuff might speed you up more. That's something these calculations don't really look at.

My guess is the DoT is almost always better than the res debuff, but that's more of a feeling informed by the numbers than a conclusion based on the numbers.

It does seem very close, ideally it would be great if someone could test it live.

What happens if we increase fury by 10% (although 85% is a very generous assumption without surrounding yourself with enemies) and increase criticals to 12%? (i.e. the AT specific sets)

For single target DPS.

For AoEs, I think I'd stick with the better rate for Procs.