Quantifying the damage difference between Blasters and Corruptors?
By
Another_Fan,
Posted on: 2012-07-09 14:25 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
I don't remember exactly who, but someone did an Arcanaville-style analysis of Scourge once and came up with similar numbers to yours. I recall that they found a rough way to account for overkill, and concluded that Scourge sort of scales in value relative to the max HP of your target. So, against an AV, you really are getting the full value of Scourge on 20.5% of your attacks, or very close to it, but against a minion, it's substantially less.
Of course, lower ranked enemies tend to get overkilled anyway, even without Scourge.
Defiance is harder to calculate, especially since it can vary so much across different powersets, but I believe a dev or someone like Arcanaville once stated there was a rough percentage boost Defiance is "supposed" to get you, on an average build and average playstyle. Someone with better search-fu than I will have to find that information, though.
I find that with heavy damage boost secondaries, Kin, rad, Time
Corruptors can easily outdamage a blaster in most situations.
Boycott Ncsoft if they close down Coh.
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In an integer-based combat system, this might be correct. But to add up all of the fractions of numbers between 10 and 50 isn't possible, so the mechanic has to be quantified in a different manner.|
Originally Posted by EvilGeko
From my calculations, which could be wrong, Scourge should activate about 20.5% of the time.
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The following chart (taken from this page) shows the relationship between how much HP an enemy has left relative to a full health bar, and the likelihood of Scourge activating at that HP%:
The "2x Damage" region accounts for exactly 30% of the graph, meaning that attacking enemies with random percentages of their max HP will cause Scourge to activate 30% of the time.
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There was a typo in the OP, that should have said 29.5%. Which is pretty close to the chart you have above.
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Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
In an integer-based combat system, this might be correct. But to add up all of the fractions of numbers between 10 and 50 isn't possible, so the mechanic has to be quantified in a different manner.
The following chart (taken from this page) shows the relationship between how much HP an enemy has left relative to a full health bar, and the likelihood of Scourge activating at that HP%: The "2x Damage" region accounts for exactly 30% of the graph, meaning that attacking enemies with random percentages of their max HP will cause Scourge to activate 30% of the time. |
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
I understand why people want to forge Scourge into an average (it fits in better with the preferred DPS calculation method), but it's not really accurate when within the game environment.
As you mentioned "overkill" is something DPS calculations have a really hard time taking into consideration because fights don't happen within intervals of seconds. "Overkill" isn't unique to Corruptors and their scourge either; Scrappers scoring critical hits when the enemy is near dead doesn't speed up how quickly he can kill it, and neither does a Brute's giant fury bar he gained matter if there's not another enemy to go punch in the face right after.
If you want to get a better idea about where Corruptors stand vs Blasters you need to look at how *many* attacks it takes each of them to finish off a minion, then a lieutenant, then a boss, etc., rather than just how powerful each individual hit is. It doesn't really matter if you're doing fifty more damage than the other guy if it's still taking you the same amount of attacks (or period of time, whatever metric you're going by) to defeat the same enemy.
That upper 50% of enemy HP is the key for differentiating Blaster damage and Corruptor damage. For low-HP enemies, the Blaster will win out because on average each attack will eliminate a greater proportion of the enemy's HP. By the time Scourge kicks in, it's usually overkill. The majority of gameplay takes place under such circumstances, so most of the time, Blasters will out-damage Corruptors by a not-insignificant amount.
Against enemies with high HP or high resistances, the Corruptor will win out on average because Scourge is effectively a 100% damage buff when it takes effect. So while the first 50% of the fight will be some 2/3 as fast as Blaster, the lower half will creep up to being 4/3 as fast as Blaster. In extreme situations like arch-villains or bigger, the Corruptor will do more damage over time than the Blaster, to the point that it can turn the tables in a The Really Hard Way run.
Corruptors tend to get better damage mods than Blasters, too. Where Blasters get moderate self-buffs from Defiance, Corruptors can significantly increase their own damage or reduce the resistance of the enemies. It's situation-dependent, but when Scourge factors in, Corruptors have potential for more damage than pretty much anything else. In fact, last I heard, a Corruptor Blizzard that hits every tick and Scourges every hit while at the damage cap is the #1 most damaging player attack possible.
Still, that majority-of-gameplay consideration remains. In most situations, the Blaster will be doing more damage than the Corruptor.
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Yes, but you're making the assumption that the Blaster has no overkill because his damage isn't attached to a proc effect like scourge. Yet we both know that isn't true and that in reality blasters are entirely capable of taking out minions with powers that far exceed the amount of hit points they have remaining. Corruptors do this more obviously, but Blasters are still subject to it. |
Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
That upper 50% of enemy HP is the key for differentiating Blaster damage and Corruptor damage. For low-HP enemies, the Blaster will win out because on average each attack will eliminate a greater proportion of the enemy's HP. By the time Scourge kicks in, it's usually overkill. The majority of gameplay takes place under such circumstances, so most of the time, Blasters will out-damage Corruptors by a not-insignificant amount.
Against enemies with high HP or high resistances, the Corruptor will win out on average because Scourge is effectively a 100% damage buff when it takes effect. So while the first 50% of the fight will be some 2/3 as fast as Blaster, the lower half will creep up to being 4/3 as fast as Blaster. In extreme situations like arch-villains or bigger, the Corruptor will do more damage over time than the Blaster, to the point that it can turn the tables in a The Really Hard Way run. Corruptors tend to get better damage mods than Blasters, too. Where Blasters get moderate self-buffs from Defiance, Corruptors can significantly increase their own damage or reduce the resistance of the enemies. It's situation-dependent, but when Scourge factors in, Corruptors have potential for more damage than pretty much anything else. In fact, last I heard, a Corruptor Blizzard that hits every tick and Scourges every hit while at the damage cap is the #1 most damaging player attack possible. Still, that majority-of-gameplay consideration remains. In most situations, the Blaster will be doing more damage than the Corruptor. |
For example, according to Paragon Wiki, at level 50 the average minion has about 430 HP. To keep things simple, let's pretend we have a corruptor and blaster alternating between power bolt and power blast at 99.08% of their enhancement value (numbers from mids).
For a Corruptor you have Power Bolt doing 83.03 damage, and Power Blast doing 136.2 for a combined total of 219.23 damage per "attack cycle".
For a Blaster you have Power Bolt doing 124.05 damage, and Power Blast doing 204.3 for a combined total of 328.5 damage per "attack cycle". (ignoring defiance)
So the Corruptor uses Power Bolt and Power Blast and does 219.23 damage to a lv50 minion reducing his HP from 430 to 210.77.
The Blaster does the same thing and reduces the minion to 101.5 HP.
The Blaster can finish off the minion in one more attack, while the Corruptor can only do that if his next attack scourges, otherwise he'll need both. For the Corruptor to catch up to the Blaster in terms required number of attacks to kill a minion he only needs to increase his damage by about 10-15%. Blaster can compete with the Corruptor by increasing his damage until he can finish off the minion with less attacks, but at some point they are both going to be 1 shotting the thing, at which point no more damage is possible and they are effectively tied for damage.
Anyway, that's just an example to illustrate my point. To do it for real you would want to take significantly more competent attack chains and compare them to significantly more competent builds. You may even decide to skip minions and lt's just because both classes should be expected to finish them off quickly enough that being behind by 1 attack isn't really worth the calculation.
DPS and an "Average" Scourge are still very useful when calculating for something like an Arch-Villian, but against most "trash" monsters the damage difference between arche-types is really not that much. That's part of the reason why things with more AOE tend to excel in kill count despite other classes having more "powerful" damage (think back to shield tanks in the wtf days of shield.)
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Well that's my point exactly. Real combat is so different from DPS calculations. Which is why I'm trying to see if anyone has any better methods or are we left with our own anecdotal evidence.
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Originally Posted by Warkupo
I understand why people want to forge Scourge into an average (it fits in better with the preferred DPS calculation method), but it's not really accurate when within the game environment.
As you mentioned "overkill" is something DPS calculations have a really hard time taking into consideration because fights don't happen within intervals of seconds. "Overkill" isn't unique to Corruptors and their scourge either; Scrappers scoring critical hits when the enemy is near dead doesn't speed up how quickly he can kill it, and neither does a Brute's giant fury bar he gained matter if there's not another enemy to go punch in the face right after. If you want to get a better idea about where Corruptors stand vs Blasters you need to look at how *many* attacks it takes each of them to finish off a minion, then a lieutenant, then a boss, etc., rather than just how powerful each individual hit is. It doesn't really matter if you're doing fifty more damage than the other guy if it's still taking you the same amount of attacks (or period of time, whatever metric you're going by) to defeat the same enemy. |
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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Basically the method I am suggesting is that you build your attack chain as normal, and then compare how many cycles of your attack chain it would take to down a boss/av against how many cycles of that attack chain it would for a blaster. So you're average level 50 arch-villain has about 28,271 hit points. So if your attack cycle does something like 1,000 damage every rotation and takes 12 seconds to finish, you can quickly figure out that it takes about 28 cycles of your attack chain plus some extra to down an AV, which would take (12 x 28) = 336 (about five and a half minutes) seconds to take down. |
Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Well that's my point exactly. Real combat is so different from DPS calculations. Which is why I'm trying to see if anyone has any better methods or are we left with our own anecdotal evidence.
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Then you would take each chunk of your 28 attack cycles and apply average critical hit formula for each interval of boss HP, which would likely shorten it considerably. If you want to be SUPER DUPER ACCURATE TO THE POINT PEOPLE STOP LISTENING TO YOU you could take each individual power and calculate for average critical hit damage bonus to get an even more refined idea of what Scourge is doing.
Then you compare it to whatever numbers you get for your blaster.
Just make sure, for your corruptor (and blaster) that you are taking your attack chain out far enough to consider things like Build up, Fulcrum Shift, or anything else that requires you to stop hitting things and buff yourself. I've seen too many kinetics post their DPS numbers like Fulcrum Shift and Transference just happen magically.
*EDITED FOR CLARITY*
Its really when the secondaries of the corruptor start factoring in.
Some will eat up animation time others such as Disruption Field don't. Of course DF requires an Ally.
If we are talking about just blasts, then sure blasters will have higher dps.
When you add in secondaries blaster/corruptor, then it gets muddy.
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
This is a fascinating quantification challenge, because the folks who have chimed in here are right - Scourge isn't something that is quantified easily in a manner that's applicable to the game environment unless you're talking about high-health AV's.
I'll have to think about this. There's probably a way to show the cascade, and then a way to demonstrate its effects on a practical level, ie, does it help you kill that minion with less attacks.
You'll have to take Defiance into account to get a clear picture.
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Another potentially interesting wrinkle: say the minion is a Carnival of Shadows Attendant, and after you complete your first attack chain, the Attendent hits you with her Energy Rings, disorienting you.|
Originally Posted by Warkupo
For example, according to Paragon Wiki, at level 50 the average minion has about 430 HP. To keep things simple, let's pretend we have a corruptor and blaster alternating between power bolt and power blast at 99.08% of their enhancement value (numbers from mids).
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The corruptor now either pops a Break Free and continues his attack chain, or waits until the effect wears off. The blaster simply fires off Power Bolt via Defiance 2.0, defeating the enemy. She can now pop off her own Break Free to fight other enemies, or simply wait for the effect to wear off if there's nobody else around.
This specific example focuses on one of the blaster's strengths -- in this attack chain, the blaster has effectively 100% mez protection thanks to Defiance. The corruptor can't say that, and will be slowed in DPS and kill rate. However, as other posters have already pointed out, this is a somewhat artificial example, and Defiance doesn't do anything to prevent mez from stopping higher-tier powers, which would effectively slow a blaster's DPS in a more realistic scenario, just not as much as an un-Break Free'd corruptor (for which DPS is zero while mezzed).
--
Pauper
FWIW
Damage = (damage mod)(1+Enhances+Global boosts)(1+Damage Multipliers)
Blasters =(1.125)(1+.95+.30+.40)(1) = 2.985
1.125= ranged mod
.95= from enhancements
.30 = average value defiance
.40 = benefit from aim and buldup
Corruptors =.75(1+.95)(1+.6+.3) =2.785
.75= ranged mod
.95 =enhancements
.6= maximum resist debuff sleet+heat loss
.3 = scourge
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Alternatively:|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
FWIW
Damage = (damage mod)(1+Enhances+Global boosts)(1+Damage Multipliers) Blasters =(1.125)(1+.95+.30+.40)(1) = 2.985 1.125= ranged mod .95= from enhancements .30 = average value defiance .40 = benefit from aim and buldup Corruptors =.75(1+.95)(1+.6+.3) =2.785 .75= ranged mod .95 =enhancements .6= maximum resist debuff sleet+heat loss .3 = scourge |
Corruptor = .75 * (1+.95+3.05) * (1+.3) = 4.875
.75 = ranged mod
.95 = enhancements
3.05 = Fulcrum Shift to self-cap damage
.3 = Scourge
Of course, this doesn't track animation time involved in stacking Fulcrum Shift to remain at the damage cap, nor does it take survival into account. But if you're going to look at Sleet + Heat Loss, which is one specific outlier case, then I'm going to look at Kinetics as another.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Fair enough, I don't play many kins so I tend to forget them.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
Alternatively:
Corruptor = .75 * (1+.95+3.05) * (1+.3) = 4.875 .75 = ranged mod .95 = enhancements 3.05 = Fulcrum Shift to self-cap damage .3 = Scourge Of course, this doesn't track animation time involved in stacking Fulcrum Shift to remain at the damage cap, nor does it take survival into account. But if you're going to look at Sleet + Heat Loss, which is one specific outlier case, then I'm going to look at Kinetics as another. |
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It's a great set, but it looks better on paper since those numbers also don't factor in that you need mobs to stay alive through Fulcrum Shift's animation to stay at the damage cap the whole time. It's possible, especially when farming, but on a team that's a lot less likely to happen because your teammates are going to be doing silly amounts of damage as well and often will have everything in the spawn dead during the animation of the next FS... once it wears off you cap them again in the next spawn, though, so it doesn't stay down for long.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Fair enough, I don't play many kins so I tend to forget them.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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That's not a huge challenge. When I did the Blaster writeup I did so, and it wasn't too bad to figure out Blaster average Defiance level over the long term of a rotation. Defiance ends up maintaining an average.|
Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
You'll have to take Defiance into account to get a clear picture.
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Scourge is *much* harder to quantify on an effective level because of how it works. I'll really need to be able to rack and stack AOE abilities / rotations first before I can analyze Scourge's impact, and I'll have to provide different levels of spawn to establish the comparative effectively... right now, I'm thinking I'll do +0/3, +2/4, and +4/8.
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Did you account for misses? When your blaster attack misses, you also do not get the Defiance buff. It is a small thing, but I figured I'd point it out in case.
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Originally Posted by Rakeeb
That's not a huge challenge. When I did the Blaster writeup I did so, and it wasn't too bad to figure out Blaster average Defiance level over the long term of a rotation. Defiance ends up maintaining an average.
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Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
Yeah, I did. Basically it was a .95 multiplier on the average Defiance level to account for performance over the long term.
soloing a corr on +0 I barely noticed scourge. I'm sure it happened sometimes, but damage comes in such chunks they often go from not half defeated to defeated.
I am sure at higher difficulty the mobs stay up longer and are below half health more often.
when playing a corr you also want to change your attack order to do your high damage attacks first and finish off with your low damage attacks. Get them below 50% health and then get scourge. But given how recharge works, that often screws up your attack chain.
additionally, blasters have melee attacks that do a lot of damage. A corr vs a blaster both only using their blast powerset may be a fair comparison, but if the blaster is using their secondary attacks their damage will be much higher.
There are SO MANY factors to figure into this argument it might make my head 'splode.
As Siolfir mentioned, when you get to the point where the enemies are being 1-shotted relative damage becomes 1-1. You also have to factor in Accuracy, the RNG, number and type of Insps used (if any) and so on.
IMHO the best way to get a solid scale of the two is to run the same mission a LOT of times with both toons. Check the time to complete. Record xps dropped because the spawns won't be identical every time.
Instead of comparing the damage of one AT to the damage of another or DPS or anything like that, how about using XPs generated per minute? If the rest of the toons are the same (identical IO loadout, no travel power etc) then run a mission 10 times with a Blaster and 10 times with a Corruptor. Record deaths, average time to run and XPs generated per minute then compare them.
If the Blaster kills faster (with Defiance) but dies more often his DAMAGE might be higher short-term but his leveling speed (more important to some players) might be lower.
Figure out what you want to measure before getting out the ruler.
"Comics, you're not a Mastermind...you're an Overlord!"
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I was curious about this during the Dominator revamp* a couple or so years ago and was not able to come up with any good model because... well, it's heavily dependant on the attacks used and enemies fought.|
Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Not trying to start any controversy here, just looking for my less mathematically challenged colleagues to help me. I don't really think my math skills are up to estimating the value of Scourge and Defiance over time.
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I ended up doing a small simulation process, and posted my study here: Scourge Quantified
In the time between my departure and my return, a lot of melee sets have been introduced with extreme conditional damage, so I have been planning to expand on this idea for actual DPS analysis of all offensive sets... but its a garganthuan project and on my free time I rather sort of catch up with my gamings after nearly 2 years of not playing.
Anyways, hope that guide helps you with the question.
*I did this because I thought it was very important to have a true estimate of the AT damage output as it perhaps would had defined an acceptable maximum or minimum level of offensive performance for Doms
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Thanks for posting that link. I thought you were the one that did the analysis on it, but didn't say anything because I wasn't sure about it and didn't want to attribute the work to the wrong person. I could have done a search, but I freely admit to being lazy. |
Originally Posted by Starsman
I was curious about this during the Dominator revamp* a couple or so years ago and was not able to come up with any good model because... well, it's heavily dependant on the attacks used and enemies fought.
I ended up doing a small simulation process, and posted my study here: Scourge Quantified |
So the numbers above which are using a 0.3 multiplier for Scourge are being really generous to Corruptors, which I knew already. Either way, I agree with Comicsluvr that measuring straight DPS probably isn't the best measure between the ATs - but it's what was being asked in the thread.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Not trying to start any controversy here, just looking for my less mathematically challenged colleagues to help me. I don't really think my math skills are up to estimating the value of Scourge and Defiance over time. I'm trying to understand what the relative difference in damage is between these ATs. Primarily because I've exhausted all the Blaster secondaries I'm interested in and I don't have a huge amount of experience with Corruptors.
I know that the damage mods are 1.125 for Blasters and .75 for Corruptors. That means that Blaster at base do 150% of the damage of Corruptors. But then Blasters are building Defiance and at 50% and below Corruptors have a chance to Scourge for double damage.
From my calculations, which could be wrong, Scourge should activate about 29.5% of the time. Listed below is the spreadsheet where I worked that out.
But going with the 30% we come up to an effective damage scale of .97 (.75*1.295). Let's round that up to 1. Is that what other folks are finding? that Corruptors do damage as if they have about a 1.0 damage modifier?
Now as for comparing Corruptors to Blasters with Defiance, like I said, I just have no idea how to start quantifying the difference there. My gut and personal experience with blasters tells me it's roughly a 20% damage buff on average, but I imagine that others' experiences could be all over the map. But what we know is that the damage buffs should favor the Blaster given their much higher base, but in the presence of large amounts of damage buffing (e.g. Kins) Defiance can get subsumed in the buffs leaving our heroes (or villains, rogues, etc.) at a difference of an effective Damage mod of 1 for Corruptors (since Scourge is applied after damage buffs) and 1.125 for Blasters.
Does that make sense to anyone? Anyone come up with a better estimation of the damage differences?
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.