Tanker Staff - Awful

Krogoth from the Repeat Offenders is the one that is doing all the number crunching for Tank Melee sets. He is busy going through every Melee set figuring up the DPS and DPA for each and every power. So far his conclusion has come to the point that Staff Fighting is the lowest Damage set overall for Tanker Melee. Now he isn't quite finished crunching all the numbers yet, but he has done both Staff and Ice, and yes Staff does lower damage than Ice from his numbers. At least that is what I have gathered from the information I have seen so far. He is not very happy with the performance that Staff has given during his tests.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

It is the work of all about two minutes to copy the data from City of Data, slam it into a spreadsheet, and add calculations for individual attacks and powersets for DPA.

Here is an Excel spreadsheet for such. (Note: Damage is based on the damage scale given at City of Data. You can multiply as appropriate to get actual damage.)

Yes, if you look at the average of each power's DPA for the powerset, its value is lower than any other powerset's average. Of course considered that way Ice is ahead of Dual Blades, Kinetic Melee, and Super Strength (which probably should tell you something about looking at things this way).

Tell me, are you going to be using Staff Fighting without being in a form? 3 stacks of Form of the Body provides an 18.75% boost to damage. Going by the above method of comparing powersets that is sufficient to boost Staff ahead of Dual Blades, Kinetic Melee and Super Strength.

But as I noted above, if you're fighting a single target you're not going to be using every attack you have. You will instead be working with a subset of the attacks in your powerset. Most likely for single-target damage you will be using something from a set including Mecurial Blow, Precise Strike, Guarded Spin, Serpent's Reach, and (if you want to lose your levels of Perfection) Sky Splitter. Please feel free to note that of the powers I just listed only one has a DPA less than the powerset average. In fact, average together, that selection of powers is 0.92666. That is higher than the value you calculate for Ice, though to be sure you would need to perform the same sort of consideration for a set of attacks for Ice (or any other powerset). And again, that is before you consider Form of the Body which would boost your set average to 1.1 (some quibbles about needing to build Perfection again apply here).

All of this to say that the method being used to say Staff does the least damage of any powerset is flawed. You can not look at things that way and expect to get meaningful results.

Perhaps if I am bored enough I will consider writing a program to calculate out a reasonable series of attacks for single target, tacking into account Form of the Body and/or Form of the Mind.

Considering that Staff Fighting has a +end discount, and it is the only melee powerset with a +resistance buff, perhaps you should evaluate whether or not it is the best melee powerset ever for tanking?

I'm an objective guy with too much time so I ran some numbers from Mid's and got the following results:

1) The WORST T1 Tanker Secondary is from Super Strength at 30 dpa. That's a full 7 worse than the next highest and nearly half of the best. Staff does 37 which is pretty middle of the road.

2) The T2 from Staff is pretty middle of the road at 58 dpa. Better than some, worse than others.

3) Staff is ALL Smashing damage where most of the other sets have whole or partial damage from other classes. Is it possible that enemies are more resistant to pure Smashing at 50+?

It's late so that's all I got for now. Good luck though.

After playing 22 levels, I'm considering 3 different attack chains depending on what I need at the time.

For ST DPS, I'm considering Mercurial>Precise>Mercurial>Serpent's>repeat (with an Achille's proc in MS). I will probably throw Sky Splitter in on occasion as well. I'm opting for that chain so I can keep Form buffs active, which is why Sky Splitter will not be part of the normal chain. I will probably also add Guarded Spin at the tail end of it if it turns out I do not have sufficient recharge for that chain.

For AoE, I will be opting for Guarded>Innocuous>Mercurial>Guarded>EoTS. Mostly because that is my guess as to what I will be able to pull off with my expected level of recharge.

For tanking I will be using Mercurial>Precise>Guarded>Sky Splitter (with the +resist form active). I will be alternating between Sky Splitter and EoTS for the last attack in this chain.

I will be in Form of the Soul nearly exclusively, only switching forms when I need an extra boost. I haven't noticed the damage or recharge buff making as much of a difference as the end discount.

My tank is DA/Staff, and I rolled it not expecting huge damage out of this combo. It is actually perfectly thematically appropriate as well, since staves have traditionally beendefensive weapons rather than offensive ones. You didn't see many standing armies equipping their foot soldiers with staves, but you very frequently saw people defending their villages with them. It is very difficult to land a sword strike on a skilled staff-wielder, due to both the extra reach the staff affords them.

Thus far in my playing, I have not found Staff Fighting to be noticably weaker than other secondaries. I'm soloing at +0/x4 with no difficulty at all, which isn't something most of my tanks have been capable of until several levels later than I am currently. I'm level 22, and have been running at that difficulty since level 12. I could probably crank the difficulty up a little more, but I'm waiting until I have a little more defense before I do that.

Wow at this thread. I have a /Ice Tanker and I have played a /Staff Tanker and there is no way that Ice can outdo Staff across the board...in fact Staff has better mitigation and better damage output than /Ice.