Hopeling

Nice, thanks.

I don't follow what you're trying to say here. I said that you should use a single-target rotation for single targets; you said that was finnicky. I'm asking why you think that using your single-target attacks when measuring single-target DPS is finnicky.

"Actually using your ST attacks" is "finnicky" now?

I'm pretty sure Crushing Blow was 1.2 seconds with Momentum, ie Arcanatime 1.452 seconds. You can view their power info by typing something like [Crushing Blow.Momentum] in-game, but I can't remember what the syntax was and none of the obvious guesses seem to be right.

It isn't close, unless you do something profoundly silly like use a terrible AoE chain on a pylon. That chain isn't even gapless; even at the recharge cap, you're just standing there doing nothing for about 1.3 seconds between Whirl and the second Rend. You could at least throw a Follow Through in there. It's the best ST attack in the set; of course ST performance is going to suffer if you don't even use it. In regular play, using your chain, TW would kill the boss about one second later than EM, but would also hit 4 other guys with two Arcs, and nine other guys with two Whirls. That's one boss dead for EM vs basically the whole spawn dead for TW. Or if you want to focus the boss, TW goes Rend-FT-CB-Arc-FT, and at this point the boss is dead about six seconds before EM kills his, and you still have enough time to get off three more attacks before Build Momentum expires. Either way, TW is blowing away EM's performance, either by beating it at its own game, or doing equally well while also throwing out a ton of AoE.

Yeah, I'm not surprised you did less than EM with this chain, haha. RA and Arc are the big hits, but Follow Through has the best DPA and a short recharge. Crushing Blow is also a better filler than Whirl for single targets. Try something like RA-FT-AoD-CB-FT and you should see better results. That's one complete Momentum cycle, so it can be repeated indefinitely between BM uses.

Absolutely, and Broadsword really should get buffs. Seeing TW get a version of Headsplitter with 6x the arc and a faster cast was just LOL though.

What would constitute data from actual gameplay? I'm honestly not sure what you're looking for here. I realize that your past experiences with EM have made you fear nerfs in general, but no, I don't want to make the game less fun. I want the game to be balanced, and I want that because I think balanced games are more fun than unbalanced games. Performance doesn't exist in a vacuum. We can't help but compare sets against each other, because we all play in a shared world, and we play multiple characters. Your own experience with EM is actually an example of this: if there were no other power sets and it had always been nerfed, you wouldn't know it was "bad", you'd just think killing stuff was supposed to be hard. But because you have points of comparison, it is bad. Similarly, Titan Weapons sucked the fun out of multiple other melee characters for me, because TW is so overwhelmingly superior that Broadsword just doesn't feel good to play anymore by comparison. I really do feel like TW has plenty of room to come down and still feel good to play, yet not be strictly superior across the board to almost all other sets.

It's very weird to me when people quote a sentence, and say something that is addressed by the very next sentence after the quote. Again, I agree that Whirling Smash's Momentum limitation means it should be unusually strong. But so is Foot Stomp. Foot Stomp already breaks the damage formula, getting an extra 5-foot radius "for free". Whirling Smash gets that, plus increased base damage, plus a blazing fast animation, plus a DoT. I don't think that all four of those bonuses are a reasonable tradeoff for one limitation.

This right here. This is the dishonest part. The very first thing I said in this thread was a specific, detailed analysis of direct power data, nor was this the only time I presented data-driven arguments. You're certainly entitled to disagree with my conclusions, but to say that nobody has presented any data is pure bullshit.

What am I supposed to "include"? He said that it's not the most damaging attack, but as 15-foot PBAoEs go, it actually is, tied with Foot Stomp. And Foot Stomp has a 20s recharge instead of 14s. I agree that, with the Momentum requirement, it should be a better power than average. But 44% better, 70% counting the DoT? That is a much larger bonus than any other power gets for its drawbacks. I don't know why you guys keep pretending you're the only ones who have played the set. It's smug and rude. Infinitum, it's even worse from you, because from you it's also dishonest. We've had this exchange before. You know full well that I'm not arguing from pylon tests, and have played TW to 50 multiple times. I haven't even cited pylon numbers at all at any point in this thread. This is the very definition of not arguing in good faith.

With a 15-foot radius? I can't think of any besides stuff like nukes. Can you give an example? Something like Spin does more damage, sure, but that has an 8-foot radius instead of 15. As I pointed out six pages ago now, Whirling Smash does the same damage as Foot Stomp, with a faster animation and a shorter recharge, even though Foot Stomp itself already breaks the damage formula. Whirling Smash isn't the #1 most damaging AoE, but its combination of damage, recharge, and area are unmatched.

I keep asking you for details about this and you keep not providing them, so I don't know what you want me to say here. What chain is your EM character using? What chain is your TW character using? TW can make complete attack chains in which every attack has higher DPA than the best attack in Energy Melee. If you're finding that EM does better ST damage despite all of its attacks being worse, it is pretty likely that the TW character is doing something wrong. Redraw, and because cones cap at 5 targets, which is plenty in normal content but worse than a 10/16-target AoE when farming. It also doesn't offer a second damage aura, which again is more valuable in farming than in regular play. I played a TW/Fire brute. It did indeed do great damage, more than my TW/WP. Fiery Embrace plus Build Momentum was a thing of beauty. But it doesn't dominate the farm scene for the reasons I just mentioned, and it doesn't dominate pylon tests because Offensive Adaptation is like Fiery Embrace but perma, so it doesn't stand out as the poster child for any specific thing. It's nevertheless the #11 most popular brute combo at 50, above TW/Bio. I don't know what you're saying 'why not' to. People clearly do play it. Yes, I played TW/WP before shutdown. I played it to 50 within two weeks of launch; you can see the thread I made on the old forums. It overperformed then too. This isn't a new idea. There were plenty of threads about it on the old forums; in this one you can see one of the old scrapper forum regulars saying that it looks like it might set records, and giving a basic attack chain that does significantly more DPS than one of the best DM chains. This was one (1) day after the set went live. Are you kidding me? I ONLY MENTIONED BIO AT ALL BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT IT UP. This thread is nine pages long. I've made dozens of comments. Literally none of them are focused on Bio, not even the one you're responding to there. I haven't played Bio. I have no opinion on Bio. I haven't talked about Bio except to make direct responses to errors of fact like claiming that TW/Bio is not a popular combination. I know that, in a long thread, you can't expect everyone to keep all the context in mind, and sometimes new commenters have to be brought up to speed. Nor are you the first person to say Bio is the issue. But it's getting incredibly annoying to yet again write a detailed analysis of something about TW, then have it quoted, ignored, and to be told "nuh-uh, you're just salty about Bio". Come on. Respond to what I actually said rather than putting things in my mouth.

TW rises to #3 in the 32-49 breakdown, and #1 at 50. This seems to line up with the claim that it's mediocre to bad at low levels, then becomes very strong later. TW/Bio is the #2 most popular scrapper combo at 50, after Elec/Shield. But all of this is not especially convincing either way, since popularity is only weakly correlated with performance. Unless you're seriously going to contend that Martial Arts and Regeneration are the best scrapper primary and secondary, which seems rather difficult to defend. It is not strictly a Bio Armor issue, as I went on to say in the very next sentence, which you quoted. Have you read my breakdown on page 3?

Since this may not have been clear before: 295 pylon DPS for a brute, without even building for damage, is in fact a very good result, especially for a set that also has very good AoE damage. I distinctly remember purpling out my BS/Inv scrapper, specifically aiming for max ST DPS, and clocking him on a pylon at about 165. Granted this was before Incarnate powers and PPM procs, but today I doubt I could get him far above 200. You're not building for damage and still beating that handily. If anything, TW/Bio scrappers are the poster children for TW brokenness, moreso than TW/Bio brutes. It outperforms other sets with every secondary, though. See my first post on page 3; TW powers literally get to break the damage formula in their favor. TW knockdown is mag 0.67, just like every other knockdown power. The swords in Apex have Parry. If you can't hit them, get out of melee range for ten seconds until the Parry defense buff falls off, then lead with a knock or mez when you come back in. I honestly don't find that TW has major weaknesses, certainly not in proportion to its strengths. It's good at ST, good at AoE, most of the attacks are very fast, it offers lots of soft control, and with Build Momentum you're not even slow on the opener for about every other spawn. And it gets +def and -res, for some reason. It costs a lot of endurance, but not because the powers are more expensive than comparable counterparts; it simply can pump out lots of big attacks very fast, which means it can spend endurance very fast. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction to pylon times or somebody soloing something. Again, see my comment on page 3. Yes, as good as TW is on a single hard target, it's also at least that good against crowds. You can nearly guarantee Momentum by using cones on multiple targets, which largely mitigates the issue that you just mentioned. It has multiple strong AoE attacks; in fact, Arc of Destruction is good enough to make it into most single-target chains, yet in a crowd you get to hit five targets with it instead of just one. TW isn't at all an ST specialist set. That's why it's so silly for it to be the top ST set.

It isn't, no. Firstly, because you're not in the shitter that whole time. While TW really does suck at low levels when you can't even chain together attacks to take advantage of Momentum in a meaningful way, that largely goes away by the time you get Follow Through and Rend Armor (ie, by about level 20 for brutes/scrappers, 30 for tankers); at these mid levels, TW does about as well as many other sets in the same level range. Your Brute has not yet reached this point, and your Tanker is only barely reaching it now. The set then really comes into its own when you have Whirling Smash and Arc of Destruction (level 32 for brutes/scrappers, 38 for tankers). But secondly, you know which other sets don't bloom until they get their last two powers? Super Strength, Broad Sword, War Mace, Street Justice, every blast set, every control set, every Mastermind, Peacebringers, Warshades, Kinetics, Storm Summoning, and many others. Plenty of powersets or even entire archetypes bloom late, but nobody seems to think this means they should be objectively better across the board than indicated by the game's own design formulas.

"SS" generally stands for "Super Strength". Do you mean something else that starts with S, like Shield Defense or Stone Armor?

Maybe I'm confused, but why does that make it especially good for procs?

For a brute in a pylon test, it's pretty good for an "everyday use" build without a damage-boosting secondary like /Fire or /Bio, yes. Bosses have about 2600 HP, so it takes 260 DPS burst to kill a boss inside the duration of Build Up. I would consider that a decent baseline for "good ST burst". Pylons are a poor measure of burst damage, but if you can do 326 sustained, you can probably do at least 326 burst unless your damage requires a lot of setup or something. Smashing and Lethal are both resisted more often than elemental damage types, yes. Lethal is resisted significantly more than Smashing though. For example, a lot of robot mobs in multiple factions have high Lethal resist and negative Smashing resist. No other melee power set gets a damage bonus across the board just for doing S/L damage, and nobody seems to think that Dual Blades, Claws, Broadsword, Katana, Battle Axe, War Mace, Super Strength, Stone Melee, Staff, and Street Justice are underpowered just on the basis of their damage type, so I don't think it makes sense to say this is what balances out TW's damage. I guess it's theoretically possible that the devs decided S/L melee sets needed to be buffed in general but TW was the only set that actually got that treatment. But even if we assume that, we're still concluding that TW is in fact stronger than other sets, we've only reframed what should be done about it ("bring most other melee sets up" instead of "bring TW back down").

Crushing Blow is 1.2 seconds. FT and WS are 1.0s. I don't recall the others offhand, but they're in the 1-1.5s range. This is before Arcanatime.

I don't think that is true. The Follow Through DoT finishes in 1.6 seconds; the Whirling Smash DoT in 2.1. I mean sure, the target can die before getting the full value, but they don't have to live very long to get full use out of it, basically just through one more attack.

More than what? I don't see any possible chain of attacks that would do more damage inside Build Up than plenty of other sets can do in the same period of time.

Does anyone know what the animation times are for the TW powers during Momentum? I remember viewing them before shutdown, probably on City of Data, but sadly the fast versions of the powers don't appear to have been archived. Pretty sure they were all in the 1-1.3s range or so, but it varied and I don't recall exactly.

Right, that's the thing I'm disagreeing with. EM is terrible, on paper and in practice, even for ST burst DPS. By the time you get through ET+TF (338 damage base, 6.3 seconds), a TW character has landed Rend-Follow Through-Arc-Crushing Blow (418 damage base, 6 seconds and change), even more if we're including Build Momentum. I'm not even saying TW is the only set that matches or beats it in ST either. None of it. The powers deal extra damage beyond the formula before even counting the DoT; the DoT is then even further extra. That's why I proposed it should be the first thing to go in a potential nerf.

It's definitely not topping any charts without Momentum. But it's actually not bottom of the barrel either. For example, the hypothetical chain SlowRend-SlowArc-FT-SlowCB actually gives slightly better DPS on a single target than Headsplitter-Disembowel-Hack, the best Broadsword chain (47 vs 42, using base numbers for a Brute and ignoring the -res in Rend). Broadsword isn't a great set for ST DPS, but it's not the very worst. If you mean literally no Momentum so that Follow Through and Whirling Smash are disallowed, it's gonna suck. I have not said that. I said that TW attacks without momentum are comparably slow to other sets' heavy hitters, as a counterpoint to the claim that TW's major weakness is that, if you mess up, you have to use a slow attack. If that is so, most melee sets have that weakness, and are messing up all the time. I agree that if you literally deleted Momentum as a mechanic and used the slow animations all the time, the set as a whole would be underpowered. How do you figure? I don't see any way for an EM chain to beat, say, Rend-FT-Arc-CB-FT. That chain has higher DPS than Energy Transfer's DPA, and the rest of the Energy chain is only going to get worse from there. If you mean 'on paper, EM has the largest single hit of any set', sure, that's true. It's true in play too. Large single hits are kind of meaningless though. That's not a theory vs practice thing; having the largest single hit is pretty meaningless even in theory.