Galaxy Brain

That mission is a good test as it hits a lot of different criteria! I only harp on pylons as the ST dps vs one has limited applications in nearly any given mission, which is what the game is made of.

Also play in different content than Pylons, that is an incredibly narrow viewpoint for any set.

Well, if you're doing anything other than killing Pylons it's still fun 🙂

What I mean by this is do we actually have a measure on how many people in total are running perma-hasten builds. Catering just to the top players is rarely a good call for the overall population

Gonna need to see a receipt for that

Hey all, I've been extensively testing TW along with the other melee set changes on Beta for some time, and rest assured TW is still in a great spot. First off, lets look at the raw results of running every Melee Set available to Scrappers through a custom mission map 10 times each: (The rules of this test are better described here: ) Results on SO's only: All sets were played with a SO build with /Willpower as a secondary and no pool powers/epics except Combat Jumping, in order to isolate the primary set as much as possible. (except for Claws and Kinetic Melee which were given Overwhelming KD IO's + a lvl 50 damage IO to have the same slotting + knockdown on their ranged cones. These were ran due to the incredibly common practice of slotting for KD, and only 2 melee sets actually "needing" it.) Results without the IO in Claws can be seen here: As you can see by some of the names, we have been testing these changes internally for quite a while now to make sure things land in the desired spot! Breaking down this chart, each column represents a different aspect: AVG = the average clear time of the mission from all 10 runs (minutes : seconds : milliseconds) SWING = How far away from the Total Average the set performed SD Deviation = Standard Deviation from run to run, measuring how consistently each set performed despite the 10 runs having slightly different mob formations and placements BEST TIME = the best run time of the set, shows the max potential WORST TIME = the worst run time of the set, shows the minimum potential SAFETY = This counts the number of deaths in the 10 runs. A score of 0.50 means that I took substantial damage but never died, a 0.00 means I was practically invincible! SAFETY ADJ = Each point in the Safety column is multiplied by 20 seconds, and then added to the average to show an Adjusted Safety Average. With those all factored in, we can rank the sets against each other on more than just the average clear time: From left to right, we have the results with Claws KD, Claws "Pure", and the average between the two. As we can see, in a "Pure" SO test, TW is still on top thanks to stellar safety and consistency, and even with Claws getting a big bump with Knockdown (again, incredibly common slotting) it still hands with the top sets. Averaged between the two with all factors considered, it is still a top tier pick at base though more competitive with the rest of the pack instead of dominating. Now, lets see how this changes when we jump to an IO build: Results on a "Mid Level" IO Build: All sets were played with a n IO build with no purples, winter sets, or "special" procs beyond a single Damage Proc like Mako's or Obliteration that *any* Melee attack could slot. All sets achieved 72.5% global recharge (142.5% most of the time with Hasten up, only a 20s cooldown there). All sets had the normal uniques like Numina, Kismet, etc slotted All sets ran the tests at +3/x5 difficulty With recharge and procs thrown into the mix, the top sets become a LOT closer in clear times, and safety really isn't a concern outside of Energy Melee where rapid ET's kinda hurt lol. Like above, lets see how all the factors weigh in: Like above, lets see how all the factors weigh in: TW is the "bottom" of top tier, but the margins are so close that with more than 10 tests a piece I'm sure they'd all be near dead even! Combined Results: Between SO's and mid level IO testing, with nearly 100 runs of TW with every iteration requiring a re-do, I think it is safe to say that the benchmarks for TW are where they should be where it is still a top-performer with it's own playstyle and niche (Mainly safety) where it's within striking range of all the other top performers instead of being well above them. Lets compare to the LIVE Titan Weapons real quick: SO's IO's Using identical builds 10 times each, the new version of TW was indeed SLOWER, but the consistency per run was wayyyyyy better! While not noted here, the end costs were also a non-issue on the new version compared to live which is a huge plus as well. Overall? This redesign does reign Titan Weapons back into "Top Tier" instead of "Titan Tier", but in exchange improves the fluidity and ease of access for the set in a wonderful way, which I see as a net win.

For raw ST damage, probably. TW still does a lot more than EM in the grand scheme tho.

@Infinitum, want to post your Pylon times? 😉

@nihilii, TW is still very popular on all ATs that get them, its just overshadowed by thematic or ez farm picks on non-scrappers. Its also not everyone's cup of tea... but seriously its not hard to play lets not kid ourselves. It's not like you have to do a quarter circle input then slam the other direction to use Titan Sweep. You just need to land 1 attack, then you get a window for fast attacks, repeat.

I actually quite like this idea... scaling base rech on Regen clicks based on HP

Gonna chime in here to show actual work done to compare TW to every other melee primary (On Scrappers) to show the gap: Pulling the data from the runs on an SO build with X/Willpower on 0/3 difficulty on 10 runs a piece, the results I think speak for themselves when you look at TW: It is over half a minute faster than the #2 fastest average, which in turn sort of scales down set by set until we hit Kinetic melee which is the same gap but on the opposite end of the spectrum (that needs a look...). It also has stellar survivability ratings with its combination of reliable AoE CC and self +Def which lets it scale up much easier against more threatening foes, and even a force multiplier power. TW isn't even necessarily slow. The initial swing can take a moment, but your next 4-5 attacks all animate within about 1 second making it a 1 to 5 ratio of Slow to Fast, it just feels slow due to how you always gotta start off slow. The only drawback is that yes, it can eat end pretty harshly but most all Armor sets have an endurance tool + good builds (not even top end) build out the need for end management most of the time. TW leads the pack by a good margin even at the baseline level in multiple criteria, not just 1 setting like a Spines/Fire. That is what warrants a look.

Its complicated. Its like diet-fire in a sense that it realllly lacks safety, but has the potential to do solid work if you eliminate that downside + add in tons of procs

Working on that 😉

AoE knockback

I think this would unfortunately be a net-nerf if it wasn't like, bonus DoT or something 😞 Many enemies are actually Toxic Resistant

Due to how SR performed? To be fair, this was a test of just soaking hits for X time and nothing else. The primary adding mitigation or other factors would surely swing results.

Part of it is that you do not instantly heal when activating Recon / Dull Pain

As part of my next round of testing focusing on Armor sets, I decided to pit Regen vs some contemporaries on a Scrapper. Using SO's only, wading into a group of 8 enemies (1 boss, 1 lt, 6 minions) with all S/L attacks without debuffs just to see how the damage soaking abilities of each armor set ranks. Breakdown of the enemies: Minions: 1 light Smashing Melee, 1 light lethal Ranged LTs: 1 Light and 1 Medium melee (both smashing), 1 Medium Ranged, 1 ranged AoE (both lethal) Boss: Light, Med, Heavy, and PBAoE Melee (smashing), 1 Medium Ranged, 1 ranged AoE (both lethal) I also ran Rad Melee with the only attack used being Irradiated Ground with 2 end SO's and 1 Acc SO just to deal chip damage over time to see if that'd be a factor / help emulate some attacking. The armor sets were also slotted optimally with SO's, with Tier 9's not being included nor Rez powers Results: Invulnerability takes the cake as one would expect vs S/L enemies, but surprisingly did not have the best survival time. This is mainly due to luck, as I would always save Dull Pain till I am near half HP lost and pop that for a refresh, which could dramatically extend my life or simply be a short delay. It at least had the best "worst" time. Regeneration with Instant Healing running as I walk into the encounter was the next best, with the next highest average time to death, but generally being right behind Invuln using only Dull Pain while Regen with IH still had to use DP and then Reconstruction the moment I saw a large chunk missing again. Elec Armor and Willpower are neck and neck with one providing more offensive utility with End Drain actually mattering vs the boss and the added damage aura wiping away minions, while WP opted for a more balanced array of defenses. The 10 runs a piece showed that at least at this level /Elec has a scootch more survival thanks to offense. Regen without Instant Healing is next with a 10 second avg gap between it and Willpower. Needing to use Dull Pain and the Reconstruction almost instantly many times lead to poor scores, with an especially bad 5s death on the books. What is good here is that given that Regen has no damage type interactions aside from a bit higher Toxic Res, that in reality with more damage types it likely has much more consistent performance compared to even Invuln.... with IH on at least. Lastly, Super Reflexes even with 30% def to all positions would often just need a few hits to be taken down. Essentially tied with Regen, it loses out on consistency here by a tad (despite both being top consistency performers lol) as well as the actual averages. The scaling resists barely mattered when you only had a handful of hitpoints to defend to be honest, and with 0 sustain ability it was just a matter of time until luck ran out. So, how does this relate to Regen? Well, from this small sample size with some of the more "defined" sets (Balance between Res/Def, nearly all Res, nearly all Def, Regen2.0) we see that Regen has the potential to hang up on top given a signature power is active. Its just the uptime there leaves a LOT to be desired.

For Controllers, I think getting the pet much earlier would be nice, and swapping with their AoE control as a true AoE Control-Nuke power.

While I do agree, I think it is safe to say that unfortunately Recharge and Defense bonuses from IOs overshadow a lot of the creative potential the system could have provided.

Bold of you to assume there won't be 2020.1

Welp, Absorb is WAY rarer than pretty much every other mitigation available so I think that'd be a good place to start. We pretty much have the following mitigation strats: Resistance Defense Elusiveness is also a thing, but is really only in PvP. It counters Acc directly unlike how Def counters ToHit +HP This is actually kind of rare, and either in small amounts or big enough to pretty much cap you but on a long cooldown Self Heal +Regen Absorb over Time Like blaster sustains or sentinel regen, where you have a constantly refreshing amount "Chunk" Absorb Like in /Rad or /Bio, where you can gain a very big amount temporarily -Damage/-ToHit/-Recharge All of these debuffs are pretty much mirrors of Res/Def, or at least slow down incoming damage considerably Affected by purple patch tho so these generally lose out to self-buffs to the reverse stats Crowd Control (vs enemies, and Mez protection for yourself of course) Cant hurt you if they cant use powers Offense! Dead enemies can't hurt you! Any powers that boost your offense can in turn increase survival. Movement Much more niche due to how the game works, but simply being out of range / out of an area = you don't get hit Untouchable The absolute rarest, and usually with the drawback of being unable to affect others (Phase) or simply inability to act (actual Invulnerability), this is a mechanic that could actually be used more in small doses... I think that's comprehensive.... and everything highlighted in Green is what we currently see in /Regen. I don't really count defense because MoG just goes so overboard and is up so little that I wouldn't peg it as something Regen provides. Anywho, the issue with Regen's kit is that it has most all of it's eggs in a basket that does not scale to the eggs you place in it with how it's regen/heals work. Either you have enough regen + self healing to simply never die, or you get overwhelmed near instantly with little in-between. You have a few tools to circumvent burst damage, but with caveats in that they eat into your action economy or have to be used pre-emptively. Or, in the worst case you go down and while at least you can get back up (with Untouchable), you still lost in a sense and you need to reset yourself. I don't think any additional mitigation types would make much sense aside from Absorb + more Untouchable tho. For Absorb, I think a refreshing absorb amount would make sense like we see on Sentinels. Better yet, the new hybrid version they got where it constantly stacks up to a total higher number if left alone. The design space here is that a refreshing absorb is essentially equal to a regeneration rate where X dps cannot truly harm you. If you regenerate 10 hp/second, it takes 10 or more DPS to actually begin hurting you, which would be the same as having a refreshing absorb equal to 10 absorb/sec. What is different though is that the Absorb shield also takes away from damage bigger than itself. Lets say 20 DPS is coming in. Vs 10 hps regen, you'll still be taking the full 20dps right to your health, it just takes 2x as long to bring you down. Vs 10 aps, it's the same deal EXCEPT you are technically taking 10dps as the absorb negates a portion directly. Put together in tandem and the absorb layer actually increases the potency of your healing factor to further ignore small stuff (strength of healing bits non withstanding to accommodate) while having something that also helps cushion bigger blows. Taking a note from the Preventative Medicine Proc, what if Revive gave a similar effect where you get a large amount of absorb automatically for having the power if you dip to 1/3 hp? As for Untouchable, this is actually the theme behind MoG currently. You pop that power and functionally become untouchable (except psy lol) and allow you to freely heal without incoming DPS reducing your health. What if each click in regen gave a brief untouchable window as well? Imagine reconstruction having ~2s of untouchable status to allow you to heal up uninterrupted (how often have you clicked Reconstruction only to eat more hits as it went off?). If MoG was watered down in values, lasting much longer with a fraction of the current Res/Def but the first 10 seconds were Untouchable? Other ideas to toss at the wall are of course Scaling regen (less health, more healing) which I'm shocked isn't in there after /Rad Armor had it, or even something like +Healing or -Heal Resist on yourself if you have a certain power active to boost all your self heals / heals applied to you. IMO, Regen has an amazing strength on paper in that it does not have any Damage-Type holes.... but it pays for that for being equally vulnerable to all and mechanically weak to BIG hits very fast. Giving players more tools to ignore "flesh wounds" and instead monitor for big hits and use *effective tools* to actively mitigate big hits would be a huge plus.

I didn't actually know this! But still, that is cumbersome at best as the ghost would require you to re-do this process over and over every X minutes. There's gotta be a better / smoother way to produce this unique asset. To keep the "spirit" of the power, it could even be relabeled "Support Drone" and be a gun drone that also has a PBAoE aura with watered down effects from Serum.

I re-ran the same test, same difficulty, but this time crammed in the Pet Aura IO's + as many procs that would normally be slotted per pet: Taking all factors together, we actually have a bit of a suprise: First off, Ninjas made a MASSIVE leap up when they had the pet auras + procced out Jounin. They were still the least safe by a scootch, but really only the Genin ever got in trouble. Secondly, the list is a lot closer balanced compared to the "Raw" test in the OP in terms of progression from S - D tier, with no set comparatively bad enough to warrant an F tier. Granted, this re-run was still on +0/x3 to get a direct comparison, so higher difficulties would likely yield different results (like for Bots as the Assault Bot scales much better). S TIER: Thugs and Ninjas both climbed the ranks thanks to their LT's making excellent work of the Achilles Heel, Lady Grey, and Shield Breaker Procs. While they had similar safety ratings, the Ninjas had an very noticeable increase here where they could actually avoid some hits / take a hit or two instead of instantly dying. Thugs pulled out ahead ultimately though thanks to Gang War being able to mule the Aura IO's + enforcers with Gaussian's + Bruiser/Punks with Explosive Strike proccing off multiple attacks + Arsonist not being *as* squishy lead to their kit out-speeding the Ninjas which only had the Jounin pulling weight with constant smoke-flashes. A TIER: Demons actually did not have many options for procs, outside of a Ghost Widow for the Prince's hold + Impeded Swiftness allowing smash damage on all it's slow powers, and then an Explosive Strike for the Gargoyle and its few heavy hitting ST attacks that can proc it. Overall they had improved performance in ST especially, and a bit better AoE. B TIER: B is for Beasts I suppose! They dropped only in relation to other sets becoming better with the new slotting, wolves (both normal and dire) could take a lot of procs which let them DECIMATE a single target, but spreading out the hurt was not really improved with no real AoE improvements. C TIER: Mercs gained a MASSIVE boost in performance with the soldiers/medic able to lay on Shield Breaker / Lady Grey / Achilles, the Spec Ops using Lady Grey/Shield Breaker, and the Commando using Explosive Strike. The myriad of procs went off constantly with nearly all their offensive powers using each... but they're still mercs at the end of the day. They definitely need QoL as they shouldn't need to rely on a ton of procs going off per attack to "work". Necro likewise was able to get a lot of usage from the -Def sword attacks on Knights with the trio of procs, and the Lich was able to make good use out of Cloud Senses/Trap of the Hunter/Explosive Strike/The fear one (name escapes me lol) in a plethora of it's AoEs to shore up that department, as well as use the Ghost to help mule some of the auras. However, the base damage of the Lich is still low and while they proc often, the procs on it's AoEs weren't really enough. As mentioned in the notes, adding survival to the zombies was actually kinda awkward as they would not die unless I really let them, and even then only 1 Grave Knight got unlucky and was able to summon a Ghost... but the avg time from that run didn't change much at all even when summoning everything mid-fight with no pauses. I feel like this demonstrates better how weird Soul Extraction is in practice, as the "better" you get with adding survival to your pets to maximize output, the less you can actually use the signature ability of the set. D TIER: Bots is in an odd spot here that is due in part to this being a re-run on 0/3 and not taking advantage of the missile-swarm potential. That said, Explosive Strike on the Battle Drones/Prot Bots only helped ST damage every so often... it helped a lot with the Assault Bot though, as did Overwhelming Force in it but lacking the Dual Plasma blast as I skipped that upgrade to focus more on missile spam (it's Flamethrower is that bad) was noticeable. I'm sure it will fare better and better as the mission scales up, but for this test it ended up on the low-end.

I gotta ask, how is more recovery broken when top end builds already go well over the endurance needs? Wouldn't this just offer more variety while not affecting top builds?