Hopeling

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.

Sure, but EM is also terrible on paper. It has godawful AoE, mediocre DPA on all but one attack, no secondary effects besides unreliable ST stuns, and that one decent attack has the worst downside out of any melee attack in the game. I apologize, but I can't defer to your in-game experience, because it contradicts my in-game experience, as well as every kind of analysis I can think of. If you don't feel this conversation is going anywhere productive, I'm happy to tap out, though.

I honestly think you're being misled by "feel" here. You keep stressing that you're going by feel instead of by the numbers, and I think that is giving you the wrong impression here. If you play a set like Broadsword, you'll notice that the weapon moves more quickly than TW does, but then your character just seems to pause between attacks for no reason. There's basically dead time at the beginning and end of the animation where not much is happening, and the damage is delivered in the middle. With TW attacks, the weapon connects and damage is dealt at the very end of the animation, which makes it feel slow. But there's no dead time where you character is just kind of standing there or ponderously returning to a neutral stance; attacks flow right into each other. The attacks are all only a bit slower than other sets overall, but they feel much slower because they fill the entire allotted animation time. Similarly, missing an attack and failing to get Momentum feels terrible because you know you could have had a fast attack. But when you use Devastating Blow and then have to slow-cast an Atom Smasher, that doesn't feel bad because Atom Smasher is always slow. That's not a question of performance, but of player psychology. The devs did a great job of making Momentum feel like a huge downside. I'm saying that, in terms of actual performance, it is not much of a downside, and more than balanced out by its own upside (very fast animations once you have the buff).

I have not said otherwise. I agree that the set feels clunky outside of Momentum. However, the key word there is "feels": a large part of it is because the animators did a really great job of making the attacks look clunky outside of Momentum, rather than because the animations actually are longer. The attacks you lead with on a fresh spawn are as fast, or just slightly slower than, everyone else's strong attacks that they would lead with. For example, in Rad Melee you probably lead with Devastating Blow or Atom Smasher, either of which is slower than Rend Armor. If every other power set needs a buff, then it sounds like we are in agreement that TW offers higher performance than other melee sets.

I did, yes. This is now the third time I've said it. It first came up on the previous page, where I laid out the numbers directly. Rend Armor is as slow as Head Splitter and deals more damage. Arc of Destruction is slightly slower than Shatter or Eviscerate, and stronger than either. Even Crushing Blow is merely middling in terms of DPA, for a t2 attack, with its slow animation. TW without Momentum is slow, but it's not so overwhelmingly slow that it should do significant bonus damage on every attack, especially when TW with Momentum is very fast and you get more attacks with Momentum than without.

I have played three different TW characters to 50, as I said in an earlier comment: a TW/WP scrapper twice (once before shutdown, once on Homecoming), and a TW/Fire brute. I've also about a dozen melee characters to 50 total. While TW blooms late and the Momentum mechanic can be clunky, my TW/WP scrapper is comfortably the strongest melee character I've ever played. I find him extremely reliable and have played him through all sorts of content. I'm quite familiar with the downsides of Momentum. I think they are largely balanced by the upsides of Momentum, namely the fact that most of your attacks get to be very fast. I would not even call it a net drawback at all, much less such a large one that all TW powers should do significant bonus damage. On a team, winding up a big attack to hit corpses is frustrating, but that happens to every set. Atom Smasher is slower than every TW power, and doesn't accelerate future attacks nor cast faster during Fusion, yet nobody thinks that Rad Melee can't contribute to teams. Again, TW without Momentum isn't even unusually slow. Overall, I find that my TW characters have no more trouble contributing to teams, even fast-moving teams, than my other characters do. It feels frustrating to get Momentum and then have to move to the next spawn, but it's not actually any worse than casting Head Splitter and then moving to the next spawn. Again, what do you think of the things I asked you about before?

@Infinitum, what do you think of the damage formula stuff I posted, or the DPA comparisons of slow TW attacks against other power sets? You haven't really made any comments on either, even though you quoted the former and the latter was a direct response to stuff you said. Like, I'm trying to give an argument to support my position here. I get that you think it isn't OP; I disagree with you. The typical way for that conversation to go is to discuss the arguments in favor and against, not just to repeatedly assert our positions.

Right, that was my guess too. I didn't say it has 80% uptime, I said that 4 attacks out of 5 are fast. I mean that literally: one Momentum window is long enough to use 4 attacks if you line them all up gapless, eg Rend-FT-Arc-CB-FT-repeat. Accounting for movement and imperfect timing and misses, it's still at least 2-3 fast attacks for every slow attack. The DPA is unusually bad outside Momentum, but unusually good inside Momentum; in practice, I think it's wrong to treat that as a net drawback. TW would still have a schtick without DoTs, or with a slightly shorter Momentum window, or even if its damage was just nerfed across the board. "Dealing bonus damage for free" isn't a schtick. Of course you're done for a few seconds if you miss an attack. That's how every power set works. The TW animations feel very slow without Momentum, which is a credit to the animators, but in reality they are merely about as fast as most heavy-hitters in other sets. Without Momentum, TW powers have animation times in the 2.2-2.9s range. For example, Rend Armor has a 2.508s animation time, which means a slow-cast Rend Armor is exactly as slow as Head Splitter or Greater Fire Sword, and also does more damage than either. Few people seem to think that Head Splitter or GFS are inherently terrible attacks. Arc of Destruction with its slow animation has the same DPA as Shatter, and hits a much larger area. Rend Armor with its slow animation has higher DPA than every single Broadsword power. Crushing Blow with its slow animation has DPA that puts it in about the middle of the pack for a t2 attack. Momentum is a perk, but even without it, TW attacks are pretty good. The fact that you sometimes don't get Momentum is not much of a penalty. 10% more damage per hit, much more for some powers, especially once you count the DoTs. But then TW is also, in practice, able to pump out more attacks per minute than most other sets thanks to Momentum - it hits faster AND it hits harder. And it gets lots of knockdown, it's good at both ST and AoE, and it has -res and even +def if you want it. This is mostly false. Theme pairings are still wildly popular, especially when they involve launch sets: for example, the top two most popular blasters are Fire/Fire and Energy/Energy; the most popular tanker is Inv/SS; the most popular Mastermind is Bots/FF. In fact, /Regen is still the most popular Scrapper secondary overall. /Bio is only the third-most popular Scrapper secondary, yet TW/Bio is the second-most popular scrapper combo, above anything involving Regen. Other new combinations like TW/Rad or Psi/Bio or Rad/Bio or even new theme pairings like Rad/Rad are much much less popular than TW/Bio is. The popularity of TW/Bio cannot be attributed to just the fact that it's two new sets; it's that that specific combo is extremely strong.

No idea, but it doesn't take Tanker ATOs either. The fact that it spawns a patch instead of being a damage aura per se might make it interact weirdly with self-buff procs. Or it might just be an oversight.