When did Barrage in EM change?

Dont recall Total Focus getting any nerfs.

It was Energy Punch that was hit the hardest, despite people just screaming about Energy Transfer.

EP was changed? How?

During the patch that all weapon attacks had their animation times "cleaned up" (removing pauses between attacks) a lot of attacks got looked at.

Any attack that used the Energy Punch animation (think its the same used in Brawl and Charged Brawl) was discovered to be animating faster than intended and cuttiong off the animation too early. That was fixed.

It's also the same patch that Stone Melee got some nerfing for the same reasons.

The change is too small to be percievable by anyone without some careful video recording and frame by frame analysis, but it was big enough to drop the damage per activation second considerably.

Total Focus was a MAG 4 stun. It was reduced to MAG 3. Which for Blasters was one of the most unjustified nerfs I've ever seen.

lolwut?

Oh yea I remember that now.


Energy Transfer nerf was big. It did 4.56 damage per activation second, but on a 20 second recharge. In an SO world, you would use it tops every 11.26 seconds.

Energy Punch, though, I think h ad a cast time of 0.53. That means it did 1.89 ds per second, on a 4 second recharge. Usable every 2.58 seconds.

This REALLY hurt the set's sustained DPS.

Didn't that particular issue get fixed back during I3 or I4?

Wasn't that a gauntlet issue?

Yes, every tanker attack had it.

The issue was a bit technical. Power effect lines can have variable radius. That's how Gauntlet was originally implemented.

Taunt covers the full attack base radius.
Single target damage component had a 0ft radius.

This resulted in two odd buggs, one is that sometimes foes where close enough to eachother for multiple foes to be standing in the exact same same spot that your attack makes contact, effectively applying full base damage to all of those enemies.

The second issue, was a strange behavior where, should an enemy move during the animation of the attack, he would no longer be in the position of the attack and therefore no enemies would be hit.

At somepoint they added a functionality that flags an attack as "only affects target", meaning that no longer is the single target component based off a zero range radius, but instead off this flag.

It's also the way that they make a cone like the T1 in Titan Weapons apply Bruise to a single target.

During those days Energy Transfer did get a highlight, not because the insanity of hitting multiple stacked enemies with an AoE Energy Transfer, but because every enemy you hit meant an extra self damage. Few tanks ended up killing themselves accidentally in extremely packed herds.

It was .63 seconds. And you're excluding Hasten in your "use it tops" rate for ET; you weren't likely to get perma-Hasten without external buffs or going really far back in builds but you could use it a lot more often than every 12 seconds.

Barrage is still the worst DPA attack in the set despite the damage increase and DPA reduction in Energy Punch - which pushed Bone Smasher past EP once Arcanatime is included if you're strictly using SOs (procs favor EP's faster animation). Note that I'm excluding Stun as an attack because it has no point in existing in the set - pre-i13 it was okay for stacking in PvP, but with two 60% chances and a 100% chance for stun in your three highest DPA attacks it's useless in PvE and there's no mez protection in PvP anymore.

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I must have been thinking either stone melee or Elec Melee... I know one set somewhere had a 0.53 cast time...

Hasten I dont count for various reasons, but it would also bring down the uptime of Energy Punch.

At the end of the day, Energy Punch suffered about a 30% DPS loss, on a power that was spammed like crazy in every shain.

I don't think the set suffers drastically in Single Target damage, but I do think the set has many issues, some playability ones, others in plain design (lack of AoE, issue any set with just one AoE power suffer.)

It's the worst, sure. But it's not a bad DPA attack at all. It nearly has 1ds per second damage. The "worst" attack in the set, has a 1dpa! Most sets would look at that and get angry about anyone considering it a complaint.

I agree Stun is useless. If there was not the cottage rule to think about, I'd dump the power and turn it into a cone or targeted AoE.

The problem is: Energy Melee has no single target damage problems.

Look at the attacks and how good their DPA is:

Barrage: 0.99
Energy Punch: 1.2
Bone Smasher: 1.09
Total Focus: 1.08
Energy Transfer: 1.71

These are some great numbers.

However, there is a design flaw with many melee sets: At minumum, every set should have at least a cone and a PBAoE. You can rebalance and compensate (nothing wrong with having two PBAoEs if you want the set to excel in AoE potential) but no set should only have a single PBAoE.

Only exception I would grant is Super Strength, and the reason is Rage boosts it's only AoE (Plus any Ancillary one) to more than compensate.

Isn't Energy Punch actually weaker in reality? Or am I interpreting Arcanatime incorrectly? Or do these numbers factor in Arcanatime?

Didn't factor Arcanaville as i was posting a bit of a rush. Energy Punch, from all my recollection is still a great power even with Arcanatime considered. My last analysis, with Arcanaville used, still had EM as the best single target set tied up with Stone Melee and Fiery Melee (ages ago) for tankers.

It is a slow set, though, other than energy punch, attacks tend to be on the slow and heavy hitting side. Not a bad thing, there should be such sets in the game. Some people like slow animations that feel as if they pack a punch.

As long as it's "balanced" it is acceptable.

What I find not acceptable is the inability to build for average AoE due to the set having just one PBAoE. This is also the reason why my Energy tanker is also Shield Defense.

If you use DPA solely as your indicator of how much damage a set is doing, then sure. Energy Transfer and Total Focus do lots of damage, and the set looks good on paper. The problem with that is those attacks also have really long animation times, which in many cases means you're either wasting most of the damage potential of that attack on a critter with lower HP, or it's dead by the time your attack animates, in which case your actual DPA ends up something more like zero. You can argue "don't use those attacks on critters with lower HP" but when you're on a team, more often than not you're locked up in your attack animation on a critter when suddenly the entire group is dead because of everyone else's AoEs.

Energy Melee hasn't been terribly popular since the ET nerf because there are other sets that have comparable, or better, single-target damage without the long animation times, and most of those sets manage to offer better AoE damage output as well. Lots of fast, single-target damage used to be EM's schtick, at the expense of decent AoE output, but the "fast" aspect got taken away and the set was given nothing in return. EM's problem now is that just about every other melee set can do its job better.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

Under my model, that is an Arcanaville-style Peak DR system, they are literally tied.

Note I designed this variation to intentionally remove second decimal accuracy, mainly because during the entire process back then, a lot of people made too much fuzz and derail over a difference of 0.1% in damage output.

Note this is tankers, and old, but this is how it looked back then:

1.80 Energy Melee
1.80 Fiery Melee
1.80 Stone Melee
1.70 Battle Axe
1.70 Dark Melee
1.70 Super Strength
1.70 War Mace
1.50 Dual Blades
1.30 Ice Melee

This includes the last buff to Dark Melee.

Dual Blades does not account for combos. This is under 50% recharge for all attacks, 95% for buildup and Rage. I have another chart somewhere for higher recharge rates but I won't dig it up now because anyways it's a bit old.

Remember this is basically Arcana PeakDR, meaning it is not about attack chains.

Thats interesting but I was referring to the three attacks EP, Bone Smasher, and Barrage?

With Arcanatime:

Bone Smasher 0.96
Energy Punch 0.95
Barrage 0.83

Been ages since I seen this argument, never held much water in my view.

You see, the overkill in teams will happen with every set out there, many sets have attacks that exceed Energy Transfer Cast time (Shadow Maul, Sky Splitter to name a couple.) Due to how teams work, chances are you will waste a lot of damage on enemies that will be dead before your animation ends, even with Energy Punch. It's just the nature of the beast, and it does not matter that much.

Solo, you have full control. There are more than just heavy hitting attacks in the set. If an enemy is about to die you have plenty of options, from lowering your DPS for an attack that will still likely do the job or simply ignore that target, focus on the next, and let that target die due to Whirling Hands or damage auras.

If the argument about overkill was valid, Titan Weapons would never had made it out of beta.

Mind you, I still agree with you at some level. Energy Melee does need something else. It's horribly weak AoE capabilities were only acceptable because of it's insane Single Target capabilities. Once that got toned down, AoE should had been addressed. It may be a good thing it didn't, though. Today it may be... more interesting to get some full revamp for the set. I would love to see some form of combo mechanic or similar cool system for the delivery of AoE.