Hopeling

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viewing them before shutdown, probably on City of Data, but sadly the fast versions of the powers don't appear to have been archived.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.

One thing that nobody seems to have brought up yet is that TW outright does not follow the design formulas, and instead all the attacks deal more damage than they're "supposed to". For a Brute, here is how much damage the attacks "should" do for their recharge and area, versus what they actually do: Defensive Sweep: 25.7 formula, 30.4 actual (18% extra) Crushing Blow: 68.4 formula, 75.2 actual (10% extra) Titan Sweep: 50.5 formula, 59.6 actual (18% extra) Follow Through: 81.7 formula, 89.9 actual (10% extra) Rend Armor: 121.8 formula, 134 actual (10% extra) Whirling Smash: 33.4 formula, 48 actual (44% extra) Arc of Destruction: 91.6 formula, 108.3 actual (18% extra) So by the game's own rules, every TW attack deals at least 10% more damage than it "should". Follow Through and Whirling Smash then get a DoT effect for free in addition to breaking the damage formula, and unlike Fire which gets DoTs instead of secondary effects, these powers also have a high chance for knockdown. The numbers make it look like the devs thought the Momentum mechanic was going to be a drawback, so they gave it better raw numbers to compensate. I don't think this works out in practice; Momentum means TW is blazing fast for 4 attacks out of 5, which is a pretty major perk. It's only a serious drawback when you can't reliably land a hit, or when you have to move so often that you can't chain attacks together. Now, in fairness, many attacks break the damage formula in some way. For example, Head Splitter is calculated as if it were a pure ST attack rather than a narrow cone, so its damage isn't reduced for being an AoE power; the ability to hit 2-3 targets occasionally is "free". Or for another example, Foot Stomp's damage matches what it would do if it had a 10-foot radius, when in fact it has a 15-foot radius, so it gets that increased radius "for free". Many sets have one or two powers that get free bonuses like this. But TW is the only set I know of where all the attacks break the damage formula. Whirling Smash is especially egregious: it get its extra radius "for free" just like Foot Stomp, then gets the 10% TW bonus, then gets a DoT too! With the DoT, it deals as much average damage as Foot Stomp, in the same area, with nearly the same chance for knockdown (75% vs 80%), with a much shorter recharge and half the animation time - even though Foot Stomp is already an unusually good power! So I think there is a real argument to be made that TW is overpowered in an absolute sense, because the original devs overcompensated for the Momentum mechanic. I don't want to see the set nerfed into the ground either; it's one of my favorite power sets and I've played it from 1 to 50 three times. But if nothing else, I think it would be very reasonable to just remove the DoT component of Follow Through and Whirling Smash; these are very good powers already, and there's no clear thematic reason they should have a DoT at all.

Buffs or debuffs from different powers or different players always stack. Some buffs or debuffs are flagged to not stack from the same player, like Force Field bubble, but Sonic Blast attacks and most support-set debuff powers do stack though. Unfortunately, power info does not display the "does not stack from same caster" flag, so it's hard to tell which powers will or will not stack with themselves except by direct testing or looking through City of Data. As an additional wrinkle, a few debuffs (mainly Tanker Bruising, the Achilles' Heel proc, and Interface procs) do a weird thing: rather than actually applying a debuff, they grant the target a short-duration temporary power, which is an auto power that reduces resistance. This means they don't stack even from different players, because you can't have that same temporary power twice. On the other hand, it means these debuffs are not reduced by the purple patch, because it's the target debuffing themselves, so the level difference is 0.

Technically no; some debuffs are flagged as unresistable, like Rest. But every -res debuffs that players can apply to enemies is resistable, yes. This is already accounted for in Bopper's math though.

I mean, the actual game got shut down. It's hard to give you any guarantees about an unofficial server run by fans. At minimum, it doesn't look like Homecoming is going to vanish any time too soon.

I soloed it with my Beam/Elec sentinel in the mid-40s. I couldn't do it without using stupid tricks with temp powers, though. When you're solo, only one Cleansing Flame spawns, and you have 12 seconds to kill it before it heals him; just pull him to the spawn point and kill it where it appears. For a character with strong single-target damage, that isn't a huge issue, although doing it for several minutes without messing up gets difficult. Also, Positron himself isn't toothless, with huge -def from his attacks and some Radiation Emission debuffs. There are multiple other AV fights to handle too, including the triple AV fight against the Midnighters, which is rather hairy solo. So... yeah, soloable, but I would not call it an easy introduction to soloing SFs.

They are, but that code could be changed in a future patch. cejmp proposed raising that price from 10m to a higher number as a way to take more influence out of the economy, hopefully reducing inflation.

Incidentally, searching for other Sentinel pylon scores reveals that - at least, according to a search for the keyword "sentinel" - Nihilii's Fire/Rad times are the only recorded pylon times for a Fire/ sentinel. So it's not that most players are around 200 DPS and Nihilii is somehow at 450, it's that nobody else has even tried. It makes me want to roll a Fire/Bio sentinel and see what can be done.

Placate is a debuff, like stun or immobilize. The effect of a placate debuff is that the target cannot attack you. The power [Placate] places a placate debuff on the target, and as a second separate effect, it immediately puts you into Hide. Other placate effects don't do that second part, including (as far as I know) the Fortunata Hypnosis proc.

I... just did. Here it is again: Actually, I just noticed that I wrote it the wrong way above: I said "...Tsuko asking how you got less damage for a Corruptor than a Sentinel", rather than "more", stating the comparison the wrong way around by mistake. If this is the entire point of confusion, I apologize for the error. Right, and again, it's not unbelievable for that AT and powerset combo, but it is unbelievable for that specific chain under those specific conditions.

People weren't contesting the power info numbers, they were contesting your projected DPS. Right here: You did not answer these questions. You said you agreed with her assessment of /Storm, and then cited some more DPA numbers, again without saying where you got them. Yes, if somebody posted a pylon time that did not seem believable, I would indeed criticize them for not providing details.