Galaxy Brain

Grain of salt here: DM paired with sets with +Def can be very, very safe. Paired with AoE's that can be saturated by Soul Drain can be even better! The /WP testing so far has been trying to isolate primaries without any other pairings, and while DM may be the "slowest" it is still probably one of the safest and can be great with other attacks outside the set. Dark is also the least resisted type in the game in PVE. On the other side tho, Dark/ takes a while to get going IMO until you get those AoE's and Soul Drain.

BA does have a ton of knockdown which let's you go crazy with the mad king special (slotting 5 Firce Feedback procs) at least

Wp, bio, rad, and regen all have a passive + rec Elec and energy get a drain and a discount Fire and ice get drains Nin has a +end button Invuln, SR, Dark, and Shield (and stone armor) are the only ones without any built in management. 9/13~14 armor sets is about 67% majority. The split between passive and active end recovery is sort of 50/50 as well with Nin being an outlier where you get "free" end, and elec/ea having doubled down on end tools.

On the note of sets "feeding" TW, most all armor sets do have end management. What could be interesting is just rolling TW/Dark on SOs for 5 and then IOs for 5 and seeing if the most end heavy secondary with IOs becomes a non issue. We could also roll fire armor and just not use burn...? SR or Nin would also be good given their either end hungry or clicky nature. I lean more towards SR as it is more volatile and had an offensive boost.

Shield is also not available for all primaries.... /Elec?

DPA = damage per activation, which is essentially action. If your attack deals 100 damage and animates in 1 second, it has 100 DPA. If you have an attack that deals 120 damage in 2 seconds, it unfortunately has 60 DPA, and so on.

Gonna give this a big ol bump and say that it also needs a Shatter cone in here 😉

+100

Anyways, War Mace is in a great spot IMO. It's very very solid on SO and IO levels and boosting other sets to around its performance given the tools / damage types / etc couldn't hurt. Having power variance is fine and encouraged as that opens up more synergies and strategies for fun gameplay. What isnt fun is when a set has a similar theme but is just flat out better or worse or if a set is just lacking power to the point of being a chore to play with 😞

A nerf hurts 2x as much as an equal buff heals. I would rather boost up under performing sets and if need be tweak over-performers slightly down and then make more difficulty options than do sweeping nerfs. My OG thread discussing slightly toning down a certain... advanced weapon set had some fun discussion 😉

What was nice with WP was that herding let each set have a similar strategy to compare against each other. Im cool with the strat changing as long as each set could use the strat similarly for comparison.

War Mace is a legacy set that isnt flashy or the buffs well known. It's a sleeper pick for sure. @Sir Myshkin, that's the same experience I had and I'm actually glad the test has weird terrain that sort of encourages the AI to be tricky. This allows more "efficient" attacks to shine in a practical environment like Throw Spines / Shockwave / frost as they give less time for enemies to do weird stuff or control their movement. Kinetic Melee (and TW) would have a tougher time given slower animations allowing more windows for enemy jank. @Demon Shell gave great feedback in the suggestion forums about our testing and I think it may be time to re run with another secondary. The trouble is picking what we want to see... WP was incredibly non invasive. Do we want to go 180* to a super invasive secondary?

@Demon Shell, that is great feedback and is something I've wanted to do going forward to retest the primaries with another more offensive secondary. WP is more of an outlier with how passive it is yes, but it was chosen specifically to show how the primaries perform in as close to a vaccuum state as possible. Most armor sets have a recovery tool available which would help all primaries, and the end drain ones over time would probably even out compared to the recovery boosts where they are inevitably slower but not by much if used wisely. The bigger X factor using a different set with a click heal / etc is the timing and how that effects performance. WP was "squishy" enough to where a lot of incoming hits would actually be dangerous enough in the test to matter and actually kill the player on SO's + combat jumping but also healed quickly enough on it's own to be fresh fight to fight. Other sets would be more varied where luck comes into play on top of the cooldowns / amount of self heal and other such factors which would be interesting to see work. Anyways, I think this is best talked over in the testing thread than here. Even with other secondaries though I think that Shatter's design is just a gamechanger compared to the other "pencil cones" and it's just weird how they are set up comparatively.

In the testing I used the same slotting as much as possible in order to eliminate variables such as some powers getting another recharge or not. The only powers that did not get the same slotting were parry/divine avalanche due to 1 defense SO being very impactful to survival in the test scenario. If I were to change up the slotting, I would want to do it across all the sets similarly. When it came to the IO tests later in the thread it has a build with ~70% perma rech before hasten as well as ample recharge slotting in the powers thanks to the nature of set values. Ideally those two extremes should highlight data within the sets given that WP should be the least invasive secondary for primary performance. (Quick recovery is also a common thing to see given that WP, Regen, Rad, and Bio all have recovery powers while Elec, Energy, Fire, and Ice also have straight up end drains. It's more common than not to have endurance tools) Anywho, as for Battle Axe the issue was not so much the ST damage as it was the ease of AoE. It is the closest in design to war mace aside from Clobber DPA and shatter's coverage. Of the two, I can say from my experience that the ability to swing at more targets more reliably made a bigger difference.

Correct, and depending on the secondary or IO slotting parry can go from amazing to skippable 😕 I just think that at the least making the weapon sets have an easier to use extreme cone would be a good step to making them more popular / fun. Especially Axe if if got some attention! In the testing thread, my experience with War Mace had the literal only difference being due to shatter more reliably hitting multiple targets and thus clearing minions faster / reducing incoming DPS / getting faster clear times. The increased area is clearly better than the other extreme cones, and sets like ice and fire could use something like that on their greater swords as well. The melee sets are already rather homogeneous, so at least putting them on the same footing for a first pass before ither tweaks I think would be nice.

That is another topic altogether, but something we could definitely go over since the upgrades should always be beneficial imo 🙂

The only pet iirc that doesnt like all the upgrades is the Assault Bot, since its flamethrower takes 5-ever to animate compared to missiles. Bot MMs would used to skip the first upgrade on it.

To be fair, most every armor set provides some form of endurance management whether it be straight +rec or an end drain. With IOs involved that is even less of an issue with all the endurance procs you can get.

It would immediately be better imho. Axe and Mace are essentially the same set aside from that big difference, and a couple other number tweaks.

Having run every single melee set available to Scrappers in a standardized environment for a total of 190 timed tests, I think I have a solid data point for a handful of the sets to look into. One thing I noticed is that a lot of sets, namely the weapon sets, have a similar blueprint: 3 ST attacks Confront Build Up 1 Utility Attack (Parry, Divine Avalanche, a strong knock-up attack, etc) 1 PBAoE 1 "Normal" cone (For Battle Axe and War mace, these cones come later in the set and have a 180* arc + 10 target cap) 1 "Extreme" cone (Shatter, Cleave, Head Splitter, etc) War Mace, Katana, Battle Axe and Broadsword all follow this blueprint but one of them was much, much better due to one power: War Mace's Shatter. Comparing Broadsword's Head Splitter to Shatter we are looking at a 19* Cone with a 10 ft reach to a 45* cone with a 7 ft reach. The sword (or Katana, or Axe) reach further sure, but given all 4 attacks have a 5 target cap it makes the much wider area of Shatter win out over and over again in order for that set to stand out. Goal: Give the other weapon sets some parity by changing their "Extreme" cones to have the same stats as Shatter for ease of use. Stretch Goal: Looking at Ice Melee and Fire Melee, they also have a similar conundrum when it comes to Greater Ice Sword / Greater Fire Sword. Freezing Touch and Incinerate respectively are extreme damage DoTs found in both sets that fill the niche of "very hard hitting ST attack" with each having better total damage (with no /Lethal split!) in less than half the animation time. Looking at the animation, these attacks also seem quite similar to Shatter... what if they also became "Shattered" in that they are cone attacks going forward? It would give the "Greater" sword attacks a niche in their respective sets over a clearly better ST option.

TW is the best melee set in the game hands down, and it is not slow or hard to play aside from one initial slow attack that on average is the same slowness as other slow attacks in other sets. Use defensive sweep against more than 1 target and you are practically guarenteed momentum, thus making it a fast set that hits very hard.

True, you can disengage and resummon then go back into the fray, but this is still an issue unique to high lvl content for MMs where they basically keep dying from AoEs. Other classes dont have to spend so much time resummoning only to have to do it again in the middle of a fray / back off and become even less of a help in order to swoop back in.

If you can manage it, by all means 🙂 fyi, I followed the wm/wp IO slotting you came up with as closely as possible per powerset. With slight tweaks based on powers available the milage may vary.

You have full access to all powers while confused, you just have to retarget

I wouldnt call KM outright bad, it along with darm melee can offer a lot of utility with the right secondary. But, it is telling that they are underwhelming when looked at by themselves