Galaxy Brain

Dark Consumption is getting less boost from +Dam, not the whole set. Also, Touch of Fear says it does damage when you look at the detailed info.... bug?

Ill run the same test without the new dark consumption, only shadow maul, and show you how much it matters.

I think the endurance refill is in a good spot as of now, just the raw damage scaling should be toned back a bit.

Sapping endurance is sort of a minigame in itself, but the payoff is often no better than if you just applied a more standard mez. I think if there were some cool effect for actually sapping an enemy to 0 or below 0, it would at least be something fun and unique. Hell, even a pseudo-scourge where you get an effect when hitting enemies with electric attacks that scales in chance as end % goes down (Chain Lightning?) would be fun where you get 100% chance when theyre at 0%

Eh, it technically does but those are few and far between + the reward for draining end is rarely different than applying a normal mez right away.

Edit: Somehow double-posted? Also, @Captain Powerhouse... you aren't the one I always see lurking on my google doc are you? 😉

The test's enemies are designed to be a danger to the player (given they are using /WP on SO's with only combat jumping as a legal pool option), so if you just stand there you will get bopped. Dark's sustain did help here where I could heal myself + toss out -ToHit or the Fear to keep myself alive in situations where I would have certainly gotten mowed down otherwise! In the main thread for this I am concocting a way to better measure the defensive properties of the melee sets as well, though I do feel that overall the test is not a pure DPS run as we see in Pylons. Safety does matter as "DNF's" get recorded (I died twice like with the vanilla DM tests funnily enough thanks to bad RNG) and sets with less or more Did-Not-Finishes have that weighed against their overall performance. The main differences now are that you can more easily afflict -ToHit to a crowd to help mitigate more incoming attacks, on top of simply clearing enemies faster which undoubtedly boosts the survival of the set.

Even without the crits I saw Soul + Cons wipe out whole packs of minions, though that is good that it wont crit going forward! My only concern is that it is approaching Spine/Rad/Katana tier offense while also having the least resisted damage type in the game + awesome secondary effects. @ScarySai,I could try running just with maul and soul drain to see how it compares to the vanilla runs.

(Sorry, had to) Anywho, I have yet to try this out but from what it sounds ST is almost like an ST blast set but with the benefit of your ST buffs chaining out! I echo a lot of other comments that End Drain as a whole could probably use some looking into, specifically it could be interesting to treat it like a sort of mini-game where draining to 0 end on an enemy actually has some significant payoff the moment you fully drain...

The set with the most deaths was actually Rad Melee with 4 compared to Fire's 2, though I chock that up to an assortment of RNG on Rad's end and much slower animations on some moves. Fire is in an odd spot where I did have to back off at times and slow down a bit in order to live though. If GFS was like Shatter / Headsplitter and had a narrow cone, and then Fire Breath was a very wide cone ala Frost you'd see a lot better results from it IMO.

Funny you mention that: The new DM on SO's matches an IO'd to the gills old DM! (Well, slower by a few milliseconds but who's counting?) I unfortunately never got to finish the IO runs when Pineapple got snapped a while back, but the spread was a lot tighter overall.

Testing Time! I was able to play the new DM tonight and ran the set in the same way as before in my Scrapper Melee Testing, seen in the thread below. I highly recommend you check out at least the OP here to dive into a lot of what a number of awesome players have been able to compile along with myself about the melee sets prior to this patch on Scrappers. For context, this test pits each melee primary available for scrappers against each other in a time trial using a "Mission Simulator" to emulate an average Defeat-All styled mission that has a mix of set Bosses and an Elite Boss for ST, and a healthy mix of enemy spawn formations and locations to test AoE, and restrictions to /Willpower, SO's, and Combat Jumping (along with no insps, etc) in order to isolate Melee Set performance as much as possible. The last time I ran Dark Melee across 10 sets of tests, recording my times as I went. After a total of 190 runs of the Mission Simulator across all 19 Scrapper Primaries, I went back and redid the bottom 5 runs per set as well to make sure that the standard deviation accounted for any hiccups in me becoming familiar with the powerset in general or for the earlier runs, just acclimating to the mission itself. This resulted in the following, combined with the runs of several others: Dark Melee was dead last. While it does well against a single target, and can really output some damage on one guy if you siphon off of surrounding enemies, it was very slow going to actually clear of those enemies. You could hand out naps one at a time with boosted ST attacks, as well as mollywhop bosses, but Shadow Maul's unreliable nature and commitment on top Dark Consumption's pitiful uptime and damage meant that even on full tilt you are still dealing less damage to a crowd of enemies as the activation times per swing add up to where sets with traditional AoEs will outshine DM in a vacuum. Comparing it to Martial Arts for example, that set has only a single AoE attack in Dragon's Tail and still it was over 1 minute faster on average. It also has a variety of strong ST hitters and utility much like DM, but the X factor being it could quickly boost damage and then quickly apply its one AoE again and again without needing to re-position as often. While both of my trials with these sets carried 2 deaths each, I felt MA was actually a bit safer mob to mob. Dark's -ToHit is awesome on bosses as you stack it up, and the self heal is nice too. MA however has a more reliable AoE KD that animates faster and a bit more burst damage, allowing you to more consistently negate hits over the course of hundreds of incoming swings as you either take minions out of the fight instantly or at least guarantee a few seconds where you know they will not hit you. DM cannot reliably apply it's -ToHit to a crowd which can make being swarmed more dangerous especially with the commitment and positioning required to use what AoE it has. So, how do the new changes fare? A huge improvement! Roughly comparable to Staff and Katana, the issues stated earlier have essentially been fully addressed. The new size and speed of Shadow Maul makes it much more reliable and lenient to hit multiple enemies with, which lets you KO faster on top of spreading more -ToHit. Same deal with Dark Consumption, the ability to Soul Drain -> Dark Consumption Wipe out a ton of minions (and refill end if it was missing) > Mop Up with Maul just feels much, much better and you still get to benefit from the ST output while your AoE is on cooldown. That said, perhaps it is a smidge overtuned on Dark Consumption.... (I really only used ToF on bosses as a safety net before Soul Draining) With this super-basic slotting on /WP, I really never saw my endurance dip significantly to where Dark Consumption would deal far less damage. Combined with Soul Drain, I'm not sure if the endurance scaling has as significant an impact at all, and whenever it was able to be popped again I was around 85-100% end + Soul Drain at the ready most of the time even after battering my way through some crowds. The recharge on it feels way better than before, syncing up with SD quite nicely and that feels just awesome. Though maybe a bit too good if you are able to maintain high endurance. The more you invest into that the more and more DM will perform, and this is where some of the other feedback comes into play. Spines and Rad both have a high AoE focus, and Rad even has a Heal like DM does, but it doesn't have a defensive secondary effect nor as reliable/quick mez application. These combined with the new potency of an endurance-efficient / Soul Drain boosted Dark Consumption may have had DM swing a smidge too much on the other end of the pendulum if it keeps its other strengths as-is. Overall though, great job! DM is a lot more fun to play now and the cycle of 2 drains feels just right. Just adjust the damage scale a scootch and it should be golden.

Mind if I steal this for the Suggestions Forum?

What could be done is change the way we encounter enemies. It's not difficult to have to spam more inspirations to bot get hit/heal/deal more damage/hit more, what is difficult is choosing targets in a mob and how to coordinate strategy going into the fight. More decisions = more room for error = more oh crap situations.

While true, it would still be nice if it were made a legit pet

Remembering that the Power transfer heal is unique made me a sad panda when thinking of the Ranged Damage heal proc + this in elec blast won't work

It'd be cool if it were a legit "pet" with armor and good stats, making /Dev stand out even more as a cool secondary

IO's and Incarnates are available to everyone though, so I really see that as a 100% moot point when talking about DA's shortcomings in every other environment.

I do think part of it is the reward structure in place to do this, on top of the (ironic) difficulty of setting it up. You have to go well out of your way to set up the optional difficulty settings when starting a TF, Ouro Arc, etc, or to manually "nerf" your character by only using certain enhancements or whatnot. When you do this (outside Ouro iirc, but that requires a lot of separate unlocking and travel to get there outside the normal game) you do not get any more bang for your proverbial buck. This reflects another popular poll option of balancing the encounter rewards. If you look at it objectively, Council are pushovers compared to Carnies but you get the same Rewards/Time for dealing with both to make Council the go-to for efficiency. If Carnies gave more Inf/XP to fight than Council, or more complex enemies / missions in AE similarly gave more reward than a farm map than it may shift the perspective we have against such content in general and encourage tackling the existing tuff-stuff. Adding to a general buff to the existing hard content rewards (Merits, XP, Drops, etc), you could always apply the same logic to existing advanced TF / Ouro settings besides badges. For example on a TF, you get +10 merits per option selected or even a multiplier for time remaining if you try to do a time limit + other settings. Combine this with these options also tossing in some new enemy types that mix up encounters to not just be a steamroll and it could be something fun and dynamic that encourages all sorts of team combos and strategies besides just "throw DPS / AoE at it".

That would be funny vs ghosts! Ideally, why not have it work on *any* defeated entity? Your pets, defeated enemies.... maybe even a dead player lol

Unrelated, but you should try my Borderlands 2.5 mod I made which changes literally everything 😉 https://www.nexusmods.com/borderlands2/mods/235 Related to this topic tho, you're spot on in that the "ultimate vault hunter" max difficulty was merely a numbers increase and you could either stomp or be stomped depending on your build. What I changed in this mod is altering all enemies to have much smoother stat scaling rather than suddenly being godlike, but then altering their strategies and gear. There are more enemies with unique attacks, attack patterns, shields, etc that cause the player to rethink their approach instead of just facerolling them when they get enough damage going. In CoH, we see this with Sappers, Nemesis, Super Stunner, Battle Maiden, etc.

In a vacuum pitted against other primaries it is consistently the slowest performer and in a pinch its mitigation was not as powerful as other sets which could just eliminate threats or have AoE (soft) control

It was bottom tier before this change while MA was a solid mid tier. I'll have to te run it.

Anyone try out elec blast with the new sets?