flip

given the discussion of this thread and the fact that no other set saw a significant pve adjustment, i jumped the gun assumed that you were referring to KM specifically. apologies for misconstruing that.

KM isn't an outlier in terms of overall performance. KM is okay on stalkers, but it's not top tier. nerfing it not only removes its unique mechanic but makes the overall state of stalker primaries less balanced.

i don't think there's anything wrong with one power being better than ones similar to it. we already have things like blaze, seismic smash, clobber, freezing touch, fireball etc. that hugely outperform equivalent powers but that's just part of their respective set's charm. as is, burst is a pretty weak aoe baseline with a small radius, a long activation time, and mediocre DPA. it doesn't even perform that well with the abnormal crit rate. edit: to add to this, i don't really want something else to make up for it. the crit rate is one of the unique and fun features of burst. even if every other power had its numbers adjusted to compensate and overall performance remained the same, it takes away a lot of the fun factor of the power.

seriously. stalker is the one AT that can use KM without being bottom-tier and this is one of the things that not only makes it competitive, but makes it unique and fun. so many people play KM for the 100% crit rate burst. please please please do not continue forward with this change.

woooooo random stealth nerfs!!! i assumed this applied to things that it didn't actually apply to. sorry for jumping the gun everyone 🙃

i've managed to get my km/bio stalker* pylon times down to a fairly consistent 120-140 seconds, once getting so low as 113 seconds. throwing away defense for procs, particularly in corrosive vial, let me get those numbers significantly lower, but in a way that really wouldn't feasibly work in actual gameplay. so yeah, KM stalker DPS is pretty good but its hardly top tier. and scrapper is an entirely different story from even that.

compare its debuff numbers to any other debuff-heavy set (and nearly all of those come with non-debuff support tools as well) and you will see that relatively, trick arrow being mediocre is most certainly not "nonsense"

you're playing with some absolute garbage blasters if that's the case

Performance wise KM on scrapper is amongst the worst scrapper sets. I'd really highly suggest playing the set on stalker or tanker instead. On stalker in particular, it performs *much much* better.

i got curious about the proc potential of corrosive vial and decided to try it out on test on my KM/Bio stalker. i then got carried away with proccing out every attack as much as i could and incorporating a snipe into the chain to see how hard i could push it. i then ran *a lot* of pylons. the results were pretty damn surprising. keep in mind, this build would be pretty rough to play in actual gameplay and corrosive vial is a bit less effective against non-pylon targets (though the large amount of its usefulness is frontloaded in the procs). t4 assault core (untoggled), t4 musc core, t4 degenerative core. for reference, the live version of this build without vial or snipe and a bit less proccage in its attacks has managed a lowest time of 113 seconds. ordered from slowest to fastest, for your viewing pleasure: 100 99 99 97 96 95 95 94 94 94 94 92 91 90 90 90 89 89 88 87 85 85 85 84 82 82 80 so far I tried using a procced out vial with stj/ena, which saw decent but not nearly as significant gains. i've done some testing with ice/bio as well, which did pretty well but i was unable to push it under 87 seconds so far. i suspect with a bit more troubleshooting and fine tuning, it might be able to beat out some of these KM/bio times.

I've got a feeling no one is setting any farm clear records with psi melee 😛

Yep, as you said I just toggled it on for an even comparison with Croax's numbers. Without hybrid toggled I see numbers around 110 to 120 seconds, with my lowest time being 108 seconds. So I'm still a ways away from StrikerFox's 90 second times. I did a small amount of experimenting with heavier usage of procs as well and didn't manage to get any lower than 1:36. I didn't incorporate Heavy Blow to make up for the small gap thats pops up between Initial Strike and AS every 8 attacks, but I would venture a guess that that alone was not enough to dip my output by the ~6-7% difference between my lowest time and Striker's. Alas, his build secrets shall remain a mystery for the time being 😜

It is worth noting this run had Assault Core Hybrid toggled, while the other ones do not. Also, opening with CU seems odd to me. The hide proc is going to go off at best every 10 seconds, so you've basically ensured that any hide procs (until an AS misses, at least) will be used on the far inferior sweeping cross rather than crushing uppercut. And it's not just SC's lower DPA - as a cone, it only has a 50% crit chance out of hide, making the procs even more wasteful. It makes far more sense to me to open with Shin Breaker, then AS, then CU. From there, the chain continues on as listed. Additionally, initial strike makes more sense as a pick instead of Heavy Blow provided you have enough reach to use it seamlessly. Despite having slightly lower DPA, it lets you spend more time on your bigger hitters and amounts to a tiny DPS increase. At least on paper. Anyways I don't have an stj/bio scrapper as of yet, but I do have an stj/ena and fortunately the same post from Croax with their stj/bio times has stj/ena times using the same chain as well. The average pylon result they got with that build was 104.9 seconds. So for comparison's sake, I have run a couple of pylons on my stj/ena using the aforementioned opener of SB > AS > CU. It's obviously not a perfect comparison since there could be notable differences in our builds, but is still a reference. I have run with Assault Core toggled on (usually I don't but have here for the sake of comparison), hitting hasten, build up, and SB and starting the timer as soon as SB begins activating. The times are as follows: 87 81 85 93 88 85 82 90 88 90 As we can see my average of 86.9 seconds is a decent amount lower. There's nothing too crazy going on with my build, - I run +193.8% global recharge, fairly standard proc slotting (armageddon + fury of the glad in sweeping cross, touch of death + hide proc in assassin's strike, touch of death + achilles in shin breaker, and hecatomb + unbreakable constraint in crushing uppercut) with slotted recharge minimized as much as possible to ensure max proc rates - So I suspect the different opener to ensure that hide procs are used on CU and not SC are the key.

If you need -def debuffs to get 95% chance to hit, there is something wrong with your build.

That's correct. Well, technically speaking, you *can* turn on Energy Focus via the normal RNG mechanic of using any energy assault powers on a disoriented target, but you do not get it from TF as a guaranteed effect unless you wait 15 seconds after the initial TF that first triggered energy focus.

Sorry for the mouthful of a title. Anyways, there appears to be a hidden internal cooldown on the guaranteed Energy Focus mode triggered by Total Focus in the dominator secondary energy assault. This can easily be tested in game by using Total Focus, consuming the Energy Focus buff, and then using Total Focus again. If you do not wait 15 seconds between Total Focuses (Foci?), it will not trigger energy focus again. You can do this without using a timer by simply paying attention to buff that appears on your bar, which lasts 15 seconds. This seems to suggest that it its not an intentionally built in internal cooldown, but instead just the result of an inability to reacquire the buff while it is still active. Do note that despite the buff's presence, you can not trigger the Energy Release effect multiple times. While the Energy Focus mechanic is very neat and potentially effective, this issue has made it somewhat frustrating to use in my experience and fixing it would go a long way towards making the set play better.

throwin in another vote for KM/Bio. The attacks are all fast and snappy (i skip focused burst and concentrated strike, both of which are noteable DPS losses anyways), it exemps beautifully, the animations are excellent, and the absurdly fast .67 activation time AS feels amazing. it's not the highest dps primary but it's still respectable with pylon times around 2 minutes with hybrid untoggled, and in practical gameplay the quick attacks work great. oh, and 100% crit burst is one of the most satisfying powers in the game.

KM puts out hugely better numbers on stalker than scrapper. KM's cute mechanics (power siphon and CS build up resets) are both pretty actively bad in practice, unfortunately. Replacing power siphon with build up is a net gain and the KM assassin's strike is the fastest in the game. By dropping CS entirely and using an AS > t3 > t2 > t1 chain with the stalker variant you will crush anything a scrapper could do with the set.

I see a lot of referring to DC (DE now I guess? Not really sure why the name change) as a mini-nuke and I feel the need to point out that this is an 8m radius power. An essential component of nukes in general and all of the powers that have been specifically used as comparison points is their radius. If DE is going to be subject to the limitations of those it damn well better have a hugely increased radius and target cap. Now we've just got bad spin on 10x the cooldown. These changes ended in a convoluted, awkward to parse power that plays like a shitty spin in reality.

Gotta say I am not at all happy to hear that Dark Consumption is going to benefit less from +dam. That is entirely counter-intuitive to the way DM plays. I would rather have the bonus damage from endurance reduced or removed entirely rather than having DC not benefit from Dark Melee's defining feature.

shadow maul has never had much of a place in *any* attack chain. with DM's spammy low level bread and butter of shadow punch, smite, and siphon life, I'm not really quite sure how an increased CD on a skill you typically previously avoided using is going to make a huge difference.

Kin melee is by far at it's best on stalkers thanks to the extremely fast AS. Concentrated strike is a trap power. On stalkers, at least, it's a major DPS loss, and I would guess it's the same for scrappers. An optimal rotation skips focused burst as well, though focused burst is less egregiously bad than concentrated strike. With those two attacks out of the way, all the other ST attacks in the set animate extremely quickly with good DPA. In addition to that, burst has a 100% crit rate out of hide, the only aoe in the game to boast such a feature. Despite its tiny aoe, this little feature can make burst extremely effective. My kin melee stalker is easily my favorite melee character. I would highly recommend it over a KM scrapper.