Hopeling

LOL, good luck with that. There are, in total, 18 StJ/SD stalkers that have gotten to 50, and 14 Ice/Ice stalkers. Of these, let's be generous and say half are Incarnated-out min/maxers. That leaves 16 people who could even possibly respond to your question, but only a small fraction of the playerbase visits the forums at all, so you're probably looking at a low single-digit number of people who could even possibly answer. But most people who visit the forums at all just lurk without posting much. That's basically any stalker. For this, are you sure you don't want to play a scrapper or brute with the Concealment pool? A stalker can certainly be durable, but without any taunt effects, you can't really tank in a meaningful way. Ice/Ice may not be for you here. The AoE is passable but not great, and Ice Melee in general is not known for dealing great damage. /Ice offers no help with DPS. Street Justice is a great set and suits Stalkers very well. With two melee AoEs and Shield Charge, I'd call it at least 7/10 on AoE, and you can always take Fireball or Ball Lightning if you want more.

I agree, especially since the Willpower rez gives a large 90-second buff and makes you untouchable. I'm not sure if intentionally dying for the buff is a net gain considering the time spent retoggling, but it seems like a silly thing to allow. I'm OK with that. We can always gather more data later if we decide we need more precision.

I tried it again with Defensive Sweep. Got three runs at 5:08, 4:42, and 5:28, significantly faster than without (by ~35 seconds, average). This was primarily because I was able to survive a lot more herding, though: if I don't try to herd, it doesn't seem to improve my kill speed at all.

Whoops, yes, I copied the wrong line.

For Electric Melee, I think the number of boss spawns can affect the run time pretty significantly, since those are a bottleneck. Also, how much I can get out of each Lightning Rod depends on how many enemies I can gather (without dying) when it finishes recharging. For TW, I'm less sure. Mob placement is maybe a factor - if the whole spawn gathers nicely, I can blow them away with AoE, but if they're spread out and don't all aggro together, it takes much longer.

I edited the Punching Bags to take away their throwing knives. I ran with Electric Melee for a while. Without spammable knockdown, I died a lot even on single spawns, which is what made me think removing an attack was the right choice. After that change, I got times of 6:26, 6:07, 6:17, 5:44, 6:51, and 5:46. Very wide swings. Single-target was a very visible bottleneck, especially the EB, who would be at 2/3 health when the rest of his spawn was dead. I've also done some runs with TW at 5:26, 6:20, 5:52, 5:43, and 5:12. Also pretty wide swings, and the fastest average so far, although not by much. Even with no recharge bonuses, TW can actually spend endurance fast enough to run out, unlike every other primary so far. And man, without any recharge bonuses, I can blow all my attacks during Build Momentum and then have nothing to use for a solid few seconds. I did not take Defensive Sweep, because I don't usually take it in my actual builds, but I think it would fill out the attack chain nicely, and the defense buff would probably allow significant herding. Also got some runs with War Mace at 6:08, 6:19, 6:12, 6:01, and 5:38.

It deals less damage, but not by much. And it's still a 15-foot radius, 16-target AoE, so it's pretty good. The snipe is cool too. The other powers, eh.

So far, the only set that seems to be at all limited by endurance is TW, at least out of the ones I've tried. The blue bar got kind of low a couple times with War Mace, but never so low that I actually had to stop attacking. I'm sure that will change with more recharge and/or more toggles though.

Yes. I'm... not super happy about this turn of events, because I had hoped to benchmark pure damage separately from damage-slash-mitigation. But I don't see a great way to avoid it; too much herding disrupts what we're trying to measure. Right now, it looks like a single spawn is basically always survivable, but double pulls get really sketchy. Maybe if I reduced the damage slightly, but didn't go all the way down to a single t1 attack...? I could try taking away the ranged attack and see what happens.

Not -res, but the big robot does have a -500% regen debuff on one of its attacks. Basically any Lore boss pet is a wrecking ball that adds a couple hundred DPS, as long as you can keep it alive. The lieutenants are meh. The buff pets vary widely, most of them offering some kind of short-recharge heal, plus some kind of watered-down buff power; they're not super exciting, but at least they can't die like the boss pets do.

Not the only - shared with Blasters. But yes, the low defensive numbers seem strange. Lower base HP seems like enough of a tradeoff for getting to attack from range. I don't think the Ward proc is underpowered per se - tankers get the same proc, and 181 points of absorb at 5 PPM is actually pretty substantial (if none of that absorb goes to waste, that's roughly equivalent to +200% regen), although it's weird for it to be affected by the purple patch. Defensive procs in general are just kind of unexciting. The Opportunity Strikes proc is basically garbage in its current state (PPM 1, and wasted half the time it goes off? Really?), so I absolutely would not mind if it changes to something completely different.

There was a thread in this subforum just a few days ago, in which someone said they prefer to be a 'real tank', ie, don't take any attacks and just spam Taunt and Provoke. It's not common, but it exists, like the "heals only" Empathy defender. I've never played a game where this was literally the meta, but I'm sure there are some out there. In eg World of Warcraft, tank damage used to come primarily from high-aggro debuffs (Sunder Armor); it wasn't until later expansions that tank damage became significant.

@TheAdjustor and @Sir Myshkin, thanks for the data! TA, are those timestamps on the first and last power used in each run (ie, clear times of 7:30 and 6:55 with WM/WP)? Since we're looking to compare primaries here, I'm less interested in the secondary as a package and more in testing how the components of each secondary contribute. For example, it would be silly to test Quickness and Lightning Reflexes and IO recharge bonuses as three separate things; those can all just be folded into testing at various levels of global recharge. Similarly, while Power Sink + Energize is not identical to Quick Recovery or Consume or Energy Absorption, an endurance-heavy primary is going to benefit about equally from all of them, so comparing (a set with endurance) vs (a set without endurance) should roughly cover it. Repeat again for taunt auras and damage auras, and we've covered the majority of non-defensive differences between sets. Some secondaries have truly unique effects, but things like Fiery Embrace or Against All Odds should be mostly agnostic to the primary. The big one to worry about, it seems to me, is Burn, since that becomes part of the attack chain. I consider this one a feature, not a bug. ST should matter, but AoE should matter more, just like it does in most missions. It looks like all the runs so far have also used sets that are at least as good at ST as they are at AoE; multiple bosses and an EB might cause more slowdown with a set like Electric Melee. I'm going to try that later today. I agree this won't simulate actual gameplay. The goal is just to get a metric that is less removed from actual gameplay than the existing ones. It won't be be perfect, but will (hopefully) still be more informative than no data at all. Investigating the effects of tohit, recharge, and varying amounts of incoming damage is already on the agenda, and me, Galaxy Brain, and TheAdjustor have talked about some ideas for testing how much each set is affected by disruptions to its attack chain.

It's a nice buff for non-stacked Rage. Double Rage looks way worse now though, yeah.

I'm OK with just excluding runs where you die or otherwise lose a bunch of time for some reason.

Whirling Mace is a pretty feeble imitation of Whirling Smash, but the jewel of War Mace's AoE is Crowd Control and Shatter. Shatter requires knowing how to abuse pencil cones though. Yep, it starts clicking around the time you get Whirling Smash and Arc of Destruction and can slot them. At 28, you don't have the latter, and only 3 slots in the former. Very late-blooming set.

I did with a scrapper. Took a lot of inspirations, and the stun made it sketchy, but on ×1 and with enough DPS it didn't take long enough for things to fall apart.

@tinytim1183, you were right, herding is still the dominant strategy. I had done it wrong before, but I just clocked 5:30 with Broadsword via aggressive herding, a dramatic improvement over the 6:30-7:00 range I'd been hitting before. I'm giving the <Punching Bags> back their "normal" number of attacks instead of just a single attack. According to a quick test, you should still be in no danger while fighting a single spawn, but 2 spawns together is now right about the limit of what can be survived unless you have mitigation from your primary. So a little bit of herding will still work, but gathering multiple full spawns will be sketchy, especially with bosses. This is definitely true. I'd like to test with Invulnerability and Ninjitsu later, to see if losing bonus endurance or losing a taunt aura scrambles the rankings.

Testing with nontrivial incoming damage is part of the plan, I just intended to do it as a separate test condition. Maybe Fiery Melee clears fastest when not in danger, but drops to middling when it has to pace itself for fear of dying, for example. How much herding are we talking about? I picked a warehouse map in the hope that herding would be self-limiting; spawns are far enough apart that it didn't seem to me like herding saved time unless it was eg two spawns already in the same room. If you're doing the whole map in one pull and clearing in three minutes, yeah, maybe I do need to give enemies more than the one attack. That is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how informative it would be, since we'd be getting pretty far from "realistic conditions" here. If you try it, let us know how it goes!

I don't think anyone literally builds a character just to kill pylons, but top pylon times often involve weird tricks. Like, Water Spout is great for pylon DPS, and I'm sure it's also great for DPS on an AV, but I would call it a pretty significant tradeoff against something like Fireball or Conserve Power. Yes, but I don't think this is a game with an especially high skill cap, at least not at the level of "clear a mission on +0/x3". As long as it's a set you're reasonably familiar with and you don't have super high ping, I would be surprised if performance varies widely between players. If I'm wrong and it does, I agree that creates issues for the project. The plan is to collect them in this thread.

Eh, only for positional defense sets. I wouldn't say that Build Up is the #1 reason to want global recharge, nor even especially close to it. And like @Croax, for me it seems to recharge through Assassin's Mark faster than any amount of slotting would give. But that might depend on the number of AoE attacks you have, since it feels like AM gets a separate proc chance for each hit.

I don't think anybody wants to do this, or even expects to get that level of precision out of the data.

It's interesting to me that the intent of Opportunity was "below Scrapper damage without, above Scrapper damage during". Even with Offensive Opportunity and optimistic estimates, Sentinel damage during Opportunity was just barely at par with a scrapper. The suggested new inherent sounds... pretty meh? But it's extremely preliminary, so I'm not going to worry about it yet.

The motive is "Kaeladin's DPS spreadsheet, now with more empiricism in every bite!" Information like this is also probably useful for balance/design reasons, but players have always been interested in things like this. Pylon times have become a minigame in themselves, but they're also used to benchmark DPS on archvillains. This is great if you want to take down an AV, but sustained single-target DPS is pretty niche metric in a game consisting mostly of short multi-target fights. Yet there aren't actually any widely-used metrics for the latter. Hopefully, this will allow us to figure out exactly how true some common wisdom is, like "Battle Axe is a weaker version of War Mace", "Scrappers get more mileage from Dual Blades than Brutes do", or "Titan Weapons loves recharge". Roughly yes, although "standardize" has unfortunate connotations. If eg Broadsword needs a buff, making it even more like Katana is probably not the way to go.

I'm excited about this project because, to my knowledge, nobody's ever really attempted to do anything like this before. I'm sure the original devs had some kind of internal metrics, but I don't know what they were. If you're skeptical that +0/x3 with SOs is representative of "normal" gameplay conditions, so are we, but don't worry: this is only the initial setting for the test. We plan to explore relevant variables like pools and epic powers, IO slotting, global recharge, secondaries, difficulty settings, ability to mitigate incoming damage, and Incarnate powers, as well as further testing for other ATs. Altogether, this should give a reasonably comprehensive picture of how each set does under all kinds of parameters. This, in turn, can inform future changes, like long-needed buffs to underperforming powersets. (This isn't just hopeful speculation: we already have GM and dev interest in the project.) The thing is, at about 5 minutes per run, and wanting 10+ runs for each powerset under each condition, this is just too big a project for two people. Plus, I just plain don't know how to play eg Psi Melee, so any data I could generate for it myself would probably be garbage. A few other random notes: Goodhart's Law is relevant here: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." I am absolutely certain that the Scrapper board regulars can find ways to break this test in half, but the point here is to see how a powerset does rather than how hard you can game the test. 6-slotting Sprint and Swift for run speed may get you faster clear times, but it isn't really in the spirit of what we're trying to do. (If you want to game the test for bragging rights, let's keep those runs separate from regular test data.) Herding groups together IS allowed, and in some places can't even be avoided, because this is a thing people do in regular missions too. But due to the layout of the map, it isn't always be the best choice... I think. If you're herding so much that you are at serious risk of dying from enemies that have only a single attack, again, that's probably not in the spirit of the test. You're not required to use the standard slotting if it doesn't make sense for that power; for example, Lightning Rod is probably better slotted 3dam/3rech so its recharge matches Build Up. Some cross-validation is going to be necessary; if I'm clearing with Broadsword in about 7 minutes, and somebody else is doing it in 5, then something is wrong on one end or the other. So it absolutely does not hurt to run something that somebody else has already tested and see if we're all on the same page.