Hopeling

Pylons do have resistance to all damage, and they do regenerate about 100 hp/second, but that just means the equation is (DPS*(1-Resist)-Regen)*Time=HP, rather than just DPS*Time=HP. Since the resists, regen, and HP are known, determining raw DPS from kill time is just an algebra problem.

I'm increasingly sympathetic to this the more we've talked about it. Since we're trying to benchmark attack sets more than secondaries, I'm actually not sure Quickness specifically should be included; that can be folded into testing at various levels of global recharge. The issue with WP vs SR is that there are two big differences besides durability (which, like you say, is a non-issue): Quick Recovery, and a taunt aura. Adding Invuln (taunt aura, no endurance) or Ninjitsu (endurance, no taunt aura) as another point of comparison would address this. I... don't think this is actually true? Pylon resistance and regen isn't particularly unique, and can be accounted for with some arithmetic. Pylon DPS predicts DPS on a stationary archvillain about as well as you could hope for. It's just that sustained ST DPS isn't an especially relevant metric in a game consisting mostly of short multi-target fights. I know this is a nitpick, but it's the only part of your summary that I had any objection to. The rest looks great.

It means using five Enhancement Boosters on an IO.

You have to reapply with a slow attack.

Including pools and epic powers will definitely be a boost. That's probably the next thing to test once we get "baseline" numbers with just the primaries. My apologies about the map: I took down the asteroid map and put up a warehouse map like we talked about, then later took down the warehouse and republished it to add the test conditions into the mission text. I've edited my posts with the new arc IDs, and at this point I'm pretty sure the mission is in its final form, but if in doubt, search for arcs by @Hymnblade. Yep, that's the plan. I think we've just about hammered out the protocol now, thanks to everybody's input.

Whatever else happens, Opportunity definitely needs a better description. I've seen tons of people confused about what it actually does.

Only primary powers can crit. Shield Charge and Spring Attack don't have a chance to crit at all, so there's nothing for the Critical Strikes proc to boost.

The fact that multiple blast sets (Energy, anyone?) are weak in absolute terms also does not help. Fire, Beam, and Water are around where most sets should be, IMO.

I agree that these are the main problems. I don't think the inherent needs to be completely redone. I'm not even sure the range and target caps need to change. Right now, Sentinels have a niche for single-target damage and debuffing. I'd rather lean into that than try to get them to compete with Blasters in AoE. (Think about Stalkers vs Scrappers: Scrappers have better AoE powers, but people still like Stalkers because they offer superior ST and controlled crits.) To this end, I would propose two things: Raise the damage scale. Right now it's at 0.95, which is slightly anemic compared to Blaster/Scrapper damage. This should go up to 1.0 or 1.05. Maybe 1.125 to match Blasters, but I think this might be too high in combination with the inherent. Allow Opportunity to debuff multiple targets while the bar is full. Look, Opportunity is a pretty good effect already. It's a -res debuff, which everyone loves, and it offers a perfect role for Sentinels on teams. But debuffing one target every 30 seconds isn't enough to be very useful except on AVs. Specifically, I think it should work like this: For the duration of the Opportunity effect, the t1 or t2 power (whichever was used) will continue to apply the Opportunity -20% resist debuff. This means that you get to continue debuffing targets until Opportunity expires, rather than debuffing one target and being done. This way, you'd be able to have a debuff up most of the time, on whatever you're currently shooting. It also creates a clear role for the Sentinel on teams: Sentinels do target selection. Teammates can always look for the reticle as an indicator for what to hit, or target through the Sentinel, and doing so will consistently boost their damage. A Blaster makes the minions melt, but a Sentinel makes the bosses melt. I'd also like to see Offensive Opportunity's damage proc apply to every target of AoE powers, instead of just the main target. But that's a relatively minor change.

By the way, if you're doing this on Pineapple, the arc ID is 3281.

Vayek, seriously, what on Earth do you think you're accomplishing here? A GM specifically asked us to do this testing. This is not a TW vendetta. This is testing. If you want to participate in the process, you're welcome to. If you have some specific criticism of our methodology, say so, and we can discuss it. But if you're just going to throw around strawmen and fail to respond to any of the things anybody has actually said, we're basically just going to continue ignoring you.

Thanks! Psi Melee is one of the sets I haven't played, so I was going to ask for help with it since I have no idea how to use it correctly. I put 3 slots in Stamina and Quick Recovery, 4 slots in my toggles (1 endredux + 3 heal/def/res or whatever), and just the base slot in Sprint/Swift/Hurdle/Health. Ultimately I don't think defensive slotting is going to matter a lot, because you shouldn't be in any serious danger of dying. After discussing with @TheAdjustor about the herding thing, I actually unpublished the asteroid map, and made a different map that doesn't favor herding quite so heavily. It also fixes a couple other issues with the asteroid map: the asteroid had no variation in enemy level (most missions have a mix of +0 and +1), and that "hidden" plateau was a stumbling block. The new arc is ID 15873 and takes place on a warehouse map. Since this is a different map, that means my times from yesterday have to be thrown out; I'll re-test on the new map today.

Great! If that's true, it will show up in the data. If it isn't, we'll still get a bunch of useful quantitative comparisons of every melee set under a variety of conditions. Even aside from any possible balance adjustments, players are very interested in that kind of thing, so this is worth doing. Seriously, just stop. The only one complaining here is you. The rest of us are testing.

Literally nobody has said that this indicates over-performance. It is wildly premature to draw conclusions from 3 data points under a single test condition.

I don't think anybody wants that. Earlier in the thread, for example, GM Sijin said that "The majority of those who have expressed an interest in reducing TW's performance have clearly been very wary of over adjusting it. You can bet Captain Powerhouse [the dev who would be making any adjustment] will be doubly so." Hopefully, these tests will allow us to figure out where the balance point is. I expect to find some clustering, because like you say, there are a bunch of sets that all seem to be about equally great. But if that cluster is around 6:30 along with TW, that indicates something different than if the band is at 7:45. To my knowledge, it is potentially unreliable - I've seen people cite numbers from it that were clearly not plausible (eg, 400 DPS with an attack chain in which every power dealt <400 damage and took >1 second). I haven't used it enough to say exactly how it becomes inaccurate though. So, it may be useful, but apply a sanity check to whatever it calculates. No problem. Get well soon. I appreciate your participation; the fact that you've been on board with our protocol tells me that we're probably doing something useful instead of just gathering garbage data.

Absolutely, but on a team you also have to "share" those targets with teammates. I mean, I agree that AoE is more important overall in this game than ST is. I just don't want the test to skew so hard that way that it turns into a farm map; Spines and Electric Melee do great there, but not so great in an office map where they can't easily drag the bosses into the next mob. In fact, maybe I should just change it to an office map, or something else where spawns are a little more spread out. Then you can still herd if you want to, but it won't be a clearly dominant strategy.

I'm happy to make x8 one of the test conditions, but for now I'd prefer to avoid herding on x3. Both may be useful, but I expect the second to favor AoE attacks much more, while we're trying to get a metric where both AoE and ST are important.

On what? Target dummies don't work, because they do not take damage. That's why people use pylons. I'm not asking just to argue. I legitimately do not know of a way to do the thing you want to do, besides a pylon or something like it. The goal is to quantify performance under something resembling normal gameplay conditions: a mix of enemy ranks, enough enemies that AoE is worthwhile but not so many that ST becomes unimportant, and comparing analogous builds. This is not a thing that anybody has done before in any depth, to my knowledge; meanwhile, things like sustained ST DPS are well-explored, such as in pylon tests and the spreadsheet I just linked. If you want to look into raw ST DPS, you're welcome to, but it isn't what this project is about - because, bluntly, we tried arguing from raw power data for about 25 pages, and got nowhere with it. TW is insanely good on paper or under perfect conditions (see my first post on page 3 for the numbers), but it's not clear how well this carries over into actual gameplay.

I've actually tried to avoid herding. It's not feasible in most indoor maps, and the point of running on x3 was to face x3 spawns rather than x8 spawns. In any case, we need to agree on whether herding is "kosher".

That's why I said we should check whether results are reproducible. At ten runs per powerset, each taking ~6-8 minutes, we're looking at over a dozen hours just to test every powerset in a single test condition. It's going to become very unreasonable to have one person go through very many conditions; splitting up the workload seems appropriate. Besides, we're primarily interested in variation between powersets, but within a single test condition: we want to know if TW/WP beats WM/WP, and we want to know if TW/Inv beats WM/Inv, but it's less useful to know whether TW/WP beats TW/Inv. So if one person takes a test condition, the results should still be useful even if they don't align perfectly. Not using toggles is equivalent to giving a large recovery buff, since then you're not dealing with their endurance costs. Also, for practical reasons, I simply don't think testing without toggles will work: your character will die. I tried making enemies that don't have attacks, but enemies run away when they can't attack; I don't know how to fix that besides by giving them an attack. So... a pylon? I thought we already agreed that testing under pylon conditions was not useful. That is not a thing that's possible to do. Accuracy is an attribute of powers, tohit is an attribute of your character. The closest you could get would be to bake a -tohit debuff into Momentum, but then that will affect non-TW powers too. Moreover, high-end builds certainly can get enough accuracy to overcome tohit penalties. For example, it's very common to build for a capped hit chance against +3 or +4 enemies, against which you have a tohit penalty. No. We are specifically trying to use in-game data under realistic conditions. If you want theoretical DPS calculations on a single target, things like Kaeladin's DPS spreadsheet already exist.

@Vayek, we've already chosen a set of test protocols to start with, using /WP. But if you want to run another battery of tests using Dark Armor, you are welcome to do so.

Decreasing the base accuracy is an interesting idea, and I agree it's kind of thematic. If the issue really is that TW scales better than most sets with IOs and Incarnate powers, though, that seems like a change in the wrong direction: high-end builds are the ones that can easily have accuracy out the wazoo, while SO builds will feel the penalty hardest. Right now though, I'd prefer to focus on collecting data and determining whether changes are necessary at all and to what degree, rather than brainstorming what those changes could be.

See, this is why I wanted you to read the thread. You're confused, because you don't understand what we're talking about, because a lot has happened and the conversation is no longer where it was on page 1. Starting on page 5, we had interest in the topic from GMs and devs, eventually asking us to gather data comparing the performance of melee sets. This led to some discussion and eventually settled on the tests that we are just now starting to perform. My comment above is an extremely preliminary attempt; I've only even looked at two primaries, paired with a single secondary, using a single AT, on a specific mission setting, with a specific kind of build. We plan to explore all of those variables and more. I am aware that Broadsword underperforms; that's specifically why I chose it to test next. I already explained this in the very post you quoted. If you're correct about this, the data will support it. I am not a dev. I do not have the power to change anything. All I can do is collect data and present it to the devs. If you want to make sure that data is reliable, you are welcome to participate in data collection.

We plan to, as I've said before. If you want to help, feel free; there are a lot of powersets and multiple testing conditions, each one taking several minutes per run for an intended 10 runs. If you feel that something is not being represented in the data, step up and make sure it gets represented.

Oh, one more thing worth testing: is this repeatable? In other words, if someone else does the same thing I just did, will they get about 6:30 for TW and about 8:00 for Broadsword, or does it depend on fiddly little playstyle quirks? I can't test that myself for obvious reasons, but if somebody else wants to repeat a TW/WP or BS/WP run, that would do it. Or just test whatever powersets you want to compare and I'll try to duplicate a couple.