Concerned about Scrappers.

I agree that tanks do have an edge on survivability. Brutes, however, have a bit of an edge on aggro. Hell, if a tank isn't using taunt, scrappers have an edge on tanks in the aggro department.

But I do agree that Brutes represent a uniquely difficult balance situation.

The hell I do.

If they nerfed Brutes or not, that wouldn't improve Tankers and wouldn't shut me up.

It would just tick off a lot of Brute players for nothing.



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Can you present a coherent argument for increasing all tanker damage and damage caps that does not rely upon either "Tanks are described as having devastating melee attacks and right now they're piddling" or "Look at what Brutes get!"

I haven't seen you do that to date.

Forgive me if my numbers are off.

Scrappers have 1.46x more ST damage at cap than Tankers, if we factor in Bruising as 20% damage, (which it really isn't the same as). That's without factoring Scrapper Criticals. They also do 1.75x more AoE damage, again not factoring Criticals.

Tanker maxHP cap is 1.46x higher than a Scrapper.

Given that, Tankers and Scrappers are in line for ST damage with Bruising...until Criticals are taken into account. Further, Tankers lag behind proportionally for AoE damage.

However, Scrappers only have 75% damage resistance caps and Tankers have 90%, so Scrappers take 2.5x more damage per hit at the cap than Tankers. A 100 point attack will do 25 to a capped Scrapper but only 10 to a Tanker.


Agreeing so far?

Here's where you're probably not going to.
Those numbers don't tell the whole story.

There's four points I think that need to be taken into consideration that aren't usually.

Point #1: The first is that damage resistance and HP (and defense and regeneration) do not make up 100% of an AT's survivability and damage mitigation. Melee ATs get substantial damage mitigation from their attack power sets. If you disagree, look at Foot Stomp.

Given two identical attack power sets on a Scrapper and a Tanker, the damage mitigation that they get from them is probably identical.

The question is, what proportion of damage mitigation is gained from your attack set? I don't know, and it would vary from set to set. But even if it was a 80/20 split (80% from your defensive set/survival numbers and 20% from your attack set) that would put Scrapper survival potential in practice a lot closer to Tankers than the damage and HP and resistance caps alone would suggest.

Point #2: Dealing damage itself is a form of damage mitigation that improves survivability: If you kill the enemy before he can inflict damage and debuffs on you, you take less damage than if the fight was drawn out. So when Scrappers can kill faster than Tankers, that actually pushes Scrapper survivability up in practice. This can vary from enemy group to enemy group, but it's still something that needs to be taken into consideration.

Point #3: If you put a Scrapper and a Tanker side by side on a team, two things happen (or should happen). First, the Tanker takes the brunt of the incoming damage if he has aggro. He should have aggro, and if Scrappers are pulling aggro from Tankers, I agree that's a problem that should be looked at. What this means is when teamed, the Scrapper having less survivability than a Tanker means less because the Tanker is taking the heat. The Scrapper is in practice safer than his own numbers would allow him to be on his own. The other thing that happens is that the Tanker's Bruising more or less buffs the Scrapper's damage 1.2x. The net result is that the Scrapper is safer and doing more damage and the Tanker. When teamed, the Scrappers damage gap from the Tanker increases (because the Tanker is essentially buffing the damage the Scrapper does whenever they share a target), and the survivability gap decreases (because the Tanker is pulling the heat and protecting the Scrapper).

Point #4: Not all situations in the game require Tanker level survivability to survive. In those situations, the Scrapper having less survivability than a Tanker really doesn't penalize them any. Once the Scrappers and Tankers are above the survivability threshold for the same given situation, the Tanker having more survivability than the Scrapper becomes a moot point and doesn't serve him any. In a radio mission against x1+0 Council, chances are no Scrapper or Tanker is faceplanting. So why punish the Tanker with less damage for survivability edge that doesn't matter? That doesn't make sense. Situations like that happen enough that I think it should be taken into consideration, and they only happen more often the more survivability Scrappers are allowed to get (hello Hybrid Melee and Rebirth Destiny).

TLDR: Scrapper survivability in practice is higher than the resistance and HP numbers alone would suggest and Tankers having higher survivability than Scrappers is sometimes superfluous.


So, given those four points, plus the fact that Bruising still leaves a disproportional larger AoE damage gap, and that Scrappers get Criticals that also allow bonus for damage above their 500% damage cap, I think a case can be made for looking at the damage numbers for Tankers again and upping their damage cap. I apologize if you don't find my arguments coherent. I'm doing my best.



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It's actually a bit less than a 20% (base) damage boost on account of the fact that you can't quite achieve 100% uptime with Bruising, right?

Also, I never noticed that symmetry. Interesting.

One thing you didn't point out: in a team situation, Bruising buffs everyone's damage by 20%, not just the tanker's. I'm not sure what that means in the grand scheme, but it's interesting.

*Sigh* Then I'll retract my previous characterization of the post. I missed the dev statement that it'd be a Trial only unlock.

Aside from the first attack you make against an enemy, I'm pretty sure that a new application of bruising replaces the old one, so you can keep it up afterwards.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Most of the effects that grant the foe a debuff it uses on itself don't work that way. New applications are simply lost until the prior one expires.

This is a discussion it itself.

Up time is a factor, yes. Another consideration is Bruising isn't on the first attack.

Another is that you have to take your Tier 1 into consideration for your attack chain:
Compare an EM Brute and EM Tanker. The Brute may have an attack chain that doesn't use Barrage at all because better Damage Per Animation attacks are there. But a Tanker *has* to use Barrage every 10 seconds to get Bruising to work when perhaps a larger DPA attack would have been better. You lose from having a worse attack chain, but it's still a net gain, but it's not 20%.

Another thing to take into consideration are any sets like Dual Blades. Trying to do an Attack Vitals combo? Your 10 seconds are up and you have to use T1 Nimble Slash, even though it breaks your combo mid way. Choose!

And obviously, Bruising doesn't improve Tanker AoE damage really.

Given all those caveats, I'm loath to call Bruising a straight 20% damage boost.

BUUUT...

In all fairness, Bruising helps when it comes to things like Interface procs, and Lore Pets.

It has advantages, and disadvantages. So, in the end, I prefer to treat it like 20%.


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Same. I don't like fluctuating power levels and having to watch the tachometer.

To go back to the actual thread topic (crazy, I know) that's also why I prefer Scrappers to Brutes.

Originally Posted by PapaSlade Rangle's right....this is fun.

Should we name them brankers or trutes?

You and I both know the playerbase would riot if brute was nerfed heavily enough to make Brutes look "less like tanks" at the caps. Besides, it would introduce another problem: if Brute resistance caps were reduced, they'd have to gain damage, because their peak damage is measurably behind Scrappers or Stalkers (as it presently should be).

When Bruising was first introduced in Beta, it wouldn't reapply until it fell off. This was a significant performance loss, since:

1) Using the t1 attack too early would leave it on recharge when Bruising fell off, leading to low uptime.
2) Holding off using the t1 attack could potentially cause issues with an attack chain (some t1 attacks are better than others, and this would effect lowbie/non-IOed Tankers especially).
3) If you missed, there would be downtime as well.

It was later changed to refresh the duration if reapplied early. I tested it after the change was made and confirmed it.

Whether or not it still does, I don't know. I haven't tried testing it in a while.

True, but only for one Tanker at a time.

Brutes are still more survivable than Scrappers, though. They have extra hp (~12% more survivability there) as well as higher caps (at 85%, that would amount to taking 60% the damage of a Scrapper at their 75% cap).

No matter how you look at it, Brutes has way more perks than other ATs.

* They have the second highest base hp and hp caps in the game.
* They have the highest res caps in the game.
* They have the same threat mod and taunt durations as a Tanker.
* Taunt, not Confront.
* They have taunt built into all their auras and attacks. (No aoe gauntlet on single target attacks, but that effect is extremely weak.)
* Non-trivial damage output.
* Fury effects powers that can't crit (ie: damage auras).

Their high damage cap is a pro (a lot of breathing room for +dmg effects), but also has a con (very low base damage), so it's a bit of a wash.

They're, essentially, the perfect AT to benefit from the power creep going on - not just in Incarnate abilities, but also the prior change to make single target buffs aoe.


Note: I didn't say Brute are the most powerful AT, it could be argued that buffers/debuffers are that, I said they benefit most from the power creep.

For the most part, but they don't get identical powersets. Statistically speaking, Tanker secondaries have more mitigation than Scrapper primaries (although proliferation is closing the gap over time). The sets Scrappers have that Tankers don't (Claws, Katana, Broadsword, Spines) tend to have less mitigation than the sets they don't that Tankers do (Ice, Stone, Energy, Super Strength). The swords are the big exceptions, but probably not enough to completely overcome the overall gap.

Proliferation has made this gap very small though.


This one turns out to be counter-intuitively not true, at least to a very large extent. Imagine a fight lasting 60 seconds from the beginning of the fight to the end of the fight. You take a certain amount of damage from that fight. Now imagine increasing your kill speed. The fight now lasts 40 seconds instead of 60. Do you take less damage? Yes. But what's the *average* damage you take? In the first case, its the total damage divided by 60. In the second case its the total damage divided by *40* because the fight is shorter. If the kill speed was higher, but proportionately higher, you probably took 33% less damage in 33% less time. The average damage rate is about the same, to a first order approximation.

Now, if in the second case you stood around for 20 seconds so that you went at the same pace, one spawn every 60 seconds, that extra kill speed would in fact be reducing your average incoming damage significantly and improve your survivability. But players don't do that. Kill faster, and to proceed faster, and that counteracts the damage mitigation benefit of killing faster. Not completely, because there's travel time between spawns which remains mostly fixed, so there is *some* advantage. But its surprisingly small.

What's more, if you think about fights like this, as a continuous set of spawns starting at high damage and ending at zero in a roughly triangular sawtooth pattern, there the interesting question of AoEs. There's no question that AoEs at the start of the fight can wipe out critters fast enough to radically reduce incoming damage. That has to help survivability, and it does because it basically takes that downward damage curve and makes it steeper at the start, and then level off at the end. It looks like something took a bite out of the damage triangle, and that translates into lower average damage. But what if you use AoEs in the *middle* or *end* of the fight. Then, the triangle falls off faster at the end, like half a triangle with the right side taken off. In that case, average damage over time actually goes *up* because you spend more of your time facing lots, and less time facing less, because you're wiping them out closer to the end.

Which actually means even AoEs do not automatically improve survivability in a mission by much. If specifically used at the start of a fight, they do. If they are used randomly, or as often as possible, and that happens at different random times during the fight, they can actually average out to neutralize their own survival advantage.

More damage always means faster kills in the general case. It means finishing missions quicker and earning rewards faster. It does *not* actually directly translate into more survivability, because players don't pace themselves in a manner to make that possible. More damage at best has only a marginal impact on survivability except in the degenerate cases where things are being wiped out so fast they can't attack back.


Actually, anyone who's farmed with melee probably knows this intuitively. The only way fast kill speed helps with survivability tends to be when you kill so fast you earn insps faster than you can burn them. But separate from that, if anything higher kill speed can cause you to face spawns at full strength increasingly more often, which actually requires *more* survivability to be able to do. The higher kill speed can translate into the need for a defensively stronger build, because of this effect.

This is also why the devs have had difficulty balancing anything with the notion that offense equals defense. It doesn't, which is what has made things like Fire Tankers and Blasters in general problematic to balance. Pumping offense into them doesn't make them more survivable in practice. It just makes them kill faster.

Burst damage, specifically used at the beginning of the fight and specifically at no other time, improves survivability. That is the only time more damage directly translates into higher survivability. In other cases, it has at best an indirect and weak effect on survivability, and can sometimes have the exact opposite effect.

What if the damage rate increases as the fight goes on, like from say cascade failure and other stacking debuffs. Or that cheap b**** of a Sapper who drops your toggles if you can't one shot him. There are also other factors like patrols wandering into a drawn out battle.

Things aren't as cut and dry in practice as they are looking at numbers.
I can say for a fact this has been the case on more than a few occasions.

Now I ask you kindly to take your hypocrite self elsewhere, like to a thread where you're asking for more survivability for the AT designed for the most damage while you have the gall to belittle my efforts to get damage improvements to the AT designed for the most survivability.


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I have the courtesy to not constantly pick apart arguments for Blasters and harass Aracana's efforts. I don't see that Blasters need anything, but I at least have the respect to leave alone the people that think they do.


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What I find amusing is that I've today read two of his posts in this thread that tell people to take their points to another thread while this one about scrappers he continues to hijack over tankers...

The thread is otherwise derelict. Besides that, I'm just paying back some karma.


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