Hopeling

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.

By the way, if anyone is wondering about why that second run took much longer than the rest: the mission generally spawns with a whole lot of "2 lieutenant, 5 minion" groups, a couple "4 minion, 1 boss" groups, and one EB group. On that second run, it was almost all "4 minion, 1 boss" spawns. This seems to just be random; you see it in regular missions too occasionally. On the one hand, it's nice that this measures ST damage a bit more than usual; on the other hand, since it's random, it kind of disrupts testing. If you exclude that run, the average time was 6:25. An important question to address at this point is: does this methodology actually work? I ran a BS/WP Scrapper through the same test on Pineapple and got clear times of 7:40, 8:27, 8:02, 8:21, and 8:02, for an average of 8:06. I did not get any all-boss maps this time. Endurance was never anywhere close to an issue. I picked Broadsword because it's a set that I'm confident is underperforming, and I wanted to see if this methodology will detect that. It looks like the answer is yes; TW clears in about 80% of the time. In other words, it does 25% more DPS than Broadsword in this test, even accounting for travel, downtime between spawns, etc, a substantial difference. This is good news; at first I wasn't quite sure if the test was going to be sensitive enough to tell apart the performance of different sets. I also ran it with my TW/WP using his regular builds with IOs and Incarnate powers, still on +0/x3, no inspirations, to see if there is any kind of ceiling effect. I got 3:49, which suggests there is not.

I published it on Justin (well, Pineapple, since they renamed it) and also on live.

@Galaxy Brain, if you didn't already have a map in mind to use for testing, I just put mine up. Arc ID 15832, titled "Asteroid Test 1". It uses a custom enemy group called "Punching Bags"; I was going to give them no attacks, but that resulted in them just running away a lot, so instead they have one attack, the t1 power from Street Justice. I also took my TW/WP Scrapper through it, on a second build with the conditions mentioned above: +0/x3, SOs only, no inspirations, no pools besides Combat Jumping, no epic powers, no Incarnate powers. Specifically, I used this build. I didn't turn on the Fighting toggles nor Strength of Will, just had to take something at those levels until I had enough slots. My clear times were 6:31, 7:33, 6:13, 6:32, and 6:25, for an average time of 6:39. I did not do any herding, since that didn't seem to be in the spirit of the test, just fought every group where it stood. Endurance was a mild problem, but not terrible; I sometimes had to wait a few seconds to get back above 40 endurance before engaging the next group, but never went dry mid-fight. Running Fighting toggles would definitely have created more issues though. Runners were a mild problem, but that's probably just due to /WP's weak taunt aura.

Let's leave it at "Combat Jumping, but no other pool or epic powers" for now. I've got an AE arc which I am in the process of testing out right now, which I think should suffice. It's 5 identical missions in a row on the "Space Island" map, which accommodates 15 enemy spawns, in roughly the distributions you laid out in your earlier post, plus one EB fight. Unless something goes wonky on this testing pass, I'll publish it within the hour, and then try to get it up on Justin too.

I was going to say they should all have Hasten if we're including epic pools, yes. If you prefer, I don't mind having the default test condition be "SOs only, just primary and secondary powers".

Sure, I just don't want to get through a bunch of testing and realize half our data is garbage. If somebody thinks a certain set is being badly represented, let them show us how it's done. If we're testing at 50, a similar argument applies to the choice of epic pools: a set like Claws may want to take Moonbeam or Fireball, while a set like War Mace or TW would rather have Conserve Power. Rather than making everybody take the same thing, we'll get more representative results if we let players use the one they think is best.

That's largely up to the devs. We can test under multiple conditions and simply provide the data. Personally, I don't expect SOs vs IOs to drastically change the ordering of melee sets - all the numbers will be higher, sure, but every set benefits a lot from recharge and from procs. If I'm wrong about that, OK, good to know. For what it's worth, I don't think we need to prescribe standardized slotting. The "Average Joe" slotting is probably fine for most attacks, but if we're trying to measure how good sets really are in practice, the player needs to have a little bit of room to use their brain. Lightning Rod is always paired with Build Up, so it's probably better with recharge slotting instead of accuracy. Or, to put it another way, if I run an Electric Melee character and do a bad job of it, and somebody else can get a better time with smarter slotting, that better time is the one we should record in the end. The goal is to test sets under certain limitations (like "SOs only"), rather than to hamstring them with generalizations.

Those level brackets sound fine. Do you have a map picked out to use yet?

It's at the bottom because that number does not include Follow Up. The numbers with Follow Up are listed in the next cell, and are much more competitive.

Okay, I was just curious if you had some metric I didn't know about. Anyway. It seems like FM is actually drawing us away from the main point here though, so I don't mind dropping the topic, unless you have something else to add. TheAdjustor, I know I trimmed your quote here, but the endurance thing is a bit long, so I wanted to discuss it separately. TW absolutely does suck down endurance, but this isn't because its powers are unusually expensive. Its DPE is actually quite good: Rend Armor, Follow Through, and Crushing Blow have DPE as good as anything in War Mace, and Arc of Destruction has slightly higher DPE than Crowd Control. Whirling Smash offers much better DPE than Foot Stomp, doing the same total damage for 3/4 the cost. Titan Sweep has DPE only slightly worse than Broadsword's Slice. Instead, TW spends endurance faster than other sets because it does more total damage. This is because its powers do bonus damage like we've discussed since page 3, and because it can crank out a lot of attacks very quickly. For a specific example, let's compare two attack chains. For TW, we'll use Slow Rend - Follow Through - Arc of Destruction - Crushing Blow - Follow Through. For a brute, this does 519 base damage in 8.052 seconds, at the cost of 64.49 endurance. That's 64 DPS, 8 EPS, and 8.1 DPE. (It's actually more DPS than that considering the -res in Rend Armor, but I'm ignoring that for now.) Compare this to another high-recharge chain, like say, Clobber-Shatter-Jawbreaker from War Mace. This does 299 damage in 5.94 seconds, at the cost of 37.23 endurance. That's 50 DPS, 6.3 EPS, and 8.0 DPE. (By the way, this isn't a cherry-picked example: every brute ST attack does almost exactly 8 DPE, outside special cases like Claws.) So yes, TW is spending endurance faster. But it's getting exactly the same amount of damage for every point of endurance. "You can turn your blue stuff into damage faster than other sets, but no less efficiently" is not a downside! If TW attacks actually had worse DPE than other sets, even with its damage staying exactly the same, this would be a more reasonable situation. As-is, it's hard to call it a tradeoff. If the recharge thing is true, nobody has yet attempted to demonstrate it. Earlier in the thread, I gave an example of an ST attack chain requiring 0% global recharge, which does only a few percent less damage than a chain requiring perma-Hasten. (Granted, it mixes in more AoE attacks, so its DPE will be worse.) TW's attack chain is pretty simple: you use one slow attack, then 4 fast attacks. Maybe 3 if you have to move. If you want a specific optimal chain, that can get complex at certain levels of recharge, but against regular spawns, mixing in AoEs at appropriate times is going to make a fixed chain mostly irrelevant anyway. If this is a downside, it doesn't seem like it's nearly proportional to the upside of doing 10-40% more damage on every attack.

You can google it if you want, but it isn't the point. I have no idea whether it's accurate either. I'm literally just asking where you're getting the idea that FM is behind lots of things in damage, because whether it's accurate or not, Kaeladin's spreadsheet is to my knowledge the only attempt anyone has made to directly rank powersets by damage.

On what basis are you saying FM is behind lots of things? According to eg Kaeladin's spreadsheet, it's #3 behind TW and Savage. This seems to be roughly borne out in play; my Fiery Melee characters consistently feel like they have damage at least as good as most others. I'm not trying to make any point about FM, but about TW, since that is the topic of discussion. I'm saying that I don't think TW vs other melee is analogous to Fire Blast vs other blast sets, because Fire Blast gets extra damage as a tradeoff for everything else, but TW doesn't make such tradeoffs for its extra damage. Right, like I said, there are lots of reasons a powerset can be popular. We're not disagreeing.

An exception here, as far as I can tell, is the versions which don't have a debuff. My Degenerative Total Radial Conversion has quite a high proc rate. So if you want a DoT, Total Radial is probably the way to go, rather than Radial Flawless.

Better single-target damage if you take full advantage of procs, sure. Fire still offers better AoE thanks to Fireball, and gets top-tier ST with fewer power choices and without spending slots on procs (giving it more freedom to eg pursue set bonuses). Again, that's a tradeoff. If TW does more damage than Fiery Melee in ST and in AoE before counting procs, can slot more procs, and has secondary effects, where's the tradeoff? I think there might also be an argument to be made that, while Fire Blast and Ice Blast do more damage than other blast sets, they are where blast sets "should" be, and that most other blast sets really are underpowered, making them another example of the situation I outlined in response to Captain Powerhouse. I haven't put enough thought into that to decide whether I really believe it, but it's at least plausible to me. But you and I seem to agree that melee has been very good for most of the game's life, so it does not make sense to say that TW is the only melee set up to par and that other melee sets should be brought up to match. Yes, as do AVs. Regeneration debuffs typically come in very large quantities like -500% to make up for this though. Even with AV/pylon debuff resistances, something like Lingering Radiation will still remove most of the target's regeneration. When people say small regen debuffs like Diamagnetic Interface are significantly helpful against AVs, yeah, that's silly. Yes, of course. You used it as an analogy for TW: TW outperforms other melee sets like Fire Blast outperforms other blast sets. I'm saying that analogy goes the wrong way around: Fire Blast does more damage as a tradeoff for not having other things, but TW isn't the melee set with no secondary effects, Fiery Melee is. Out of 538 level 50 TW scrappers, 277 are TW/Bio. If we subtract those out, there are another 261 more TW scrappers, which puts it at around the same popularity as Rad, Psi, Claws, and Street Justice. Still not unpopular, just middling. I agree that popularity isn't a very useful indicator of balance, since there are lots of reasons a powerset can be popular. As I said, it was just to keep the record straight: it is factually untrue that TW is an unpopular set.

I did.

If you want to make another spreadsheet with just bosses, go for it. We've had this exact conversation before, back on page 24. You didn't respond about it again after that comment, but now you're bringing it up as if it's a new point. Fire Blast should do more damage than other blast sets, because in exchange it does nothing else. That is not the situation with TW. Do you feel that you have something new to say about this, or that it wasn't addressed properly? Otherwise, I'm not sure what good it does to bring it up again.

I love when somebody comes into a 27-page thread clearly not having read past the first post. Also, TW is the #1 most popular scrapper set at 50, just to keep the record straight.