Brute Statistics (Answer, not a question)

Alright, so I do not remember who it was but a while back someone had questioned whether or not the Primary Powersets for a Brute were truly equal in terms of damage output. This is hard question to answer because some Powersets specialize in AoE damage while other focus on single target damage. Also, there is the matter of damage type and enemy resistances.

But, I used a program to run statistical analysis on the damage to see if one does technically do more damage than the other.

The damage tested "as is"; that means Lv.50 damage with no enchancements and ignoring enemy resistances. What I did was find the average (Mean) damage for each Powerset for the Brute and it is presented in a table. In statistical terms none of them are significantly different. You can tell from looking at the Means that some are a bit higher than others overall but that is raw damage. You should also take into account that although your ultimate may not do as much damage as another powerset, your recharge is probably slower than a uber strong Tier 9 ability from that other powerset. I could not add what is called a Scheffe's Test, which tests not only for significance but which Powersets would be significantly different. Again, the base damage output of all Brute Primary powersets is pretty much equal.

So choose what flavor you like, not which one "does more damage" cause technically (and statistically) none of them are "better" than the other in terms of damage.

If you have any questions about the tables or what they mean please feel free to ask.
(The document is a word document with the output tables pasted in there and in docx format. If you can not open it please PM me and I can send you an email with the stats pasted in it.)
http://www.2shared.com/file/B9GzgWxb..._DMGstats.html

I plan to run more analyses on other powersets to determine if there is a significant difference in terms of better damage, defense, resistance, healing, etc.

What exactly is this an analysis of? How did you arrive at your numbers?

I'm extremely suspicious of an analysis that ranks Katana lower than Broadsword, and Super Strength lower than Energy Melee. There are much better ways to analyze a set's damage than by taking the mean of all the powers. Moreover, your analysis does not at all match empirical evidence.

OK... but then you're not actually calculating anything meaningful. You set out to answer the question of whether all Brute sets have the same damage output (they don't), but did so using a metric that doesn't correlate at all to how much damage the sets actually do.

An analysis of set damage that does not even consider recharge, activation time, buffs, and whether a power is ST or AoE is so far removed from what the powers actually do that it's not really calculating anything at all. It's only slightly less meaningless to damage output than calculating the average number of letters in power names.

Well, it might be helpful if you posted an analysis of the powersets damage with all of the factors that you're talking about. It would be interesting to see the analysis considering all of the variables and not just base damage means.

Making such an analysis in a pure statistical sense is both extremely difficult and extremely subjective. How should long single-target fights like AVs be weighted in such an analysis? One player who teams for fun says they should be counted but weighted below most other things, another player who likes to solo crazy things says they should be most important factor, a farmer says they don't matter at all. How about AoE? A farmer says it's the only important thing; the team player says it's about as important as ST; the AV soloer says it's negligibly useful.

It's pretty straightforward to compare sets for specific purposes (the Pylon thread in the Scrapper forums is two thousand posts examining single-target DPS in excruciating detail), but a metric for overall performance is a different matter entirely.

Which is why we use base average. But, the point is moot.

You actually do not need to look at the chart to tell that it would give no useful information. Just carefully read what was said in the first post. The OP clearly tells you what information will be found, and what will not. Anything useful to be found he summarized, but with the caveats that he placed on the data even that is suspect. My take on it "Pick your Brute, they is all good." is a decent synopsis. Look at the chart for hours though. Could find something interesting in there. Also, telling me that a Dark Melee Brute powerset is pretty much the same as a Brute Super Strength powerset (implicitly stated in the summary) does not lead me to want to pick into the research data on the statement overly much.