aethereal

This is a somewhat random post, but I thought people might be interested in Brute vs Scrapper damage and why Savage is a better Brute set than a Scrapper set. I'm going to focus on Vicious Slash, but the same basic lessons redound throughout the Savage set. Baseline for Comparisons So the thing about Savage is it has this DoT component that's unusual. To understand how unusual it is, let's first compare Scrappers and Brutes for a power somewhat similar to Vicious Slash, but without the DoT component. I'll use Soaring Dragon from the Katana set. On a Brute, at level 50, Soaring Dragon does a base 75.0739 damage. It has a 1.584 second arcanatime cast, so its Arcana DPA is 47.4 base. It seems reasonably commonly accepted that Brutes can fairly easily attain and maintain an 80 Fury, so that's +160% damage, and you can get +95% damage enhancement fairly easily on a power, so call it a total of +255% damage and you get 266.5123 damage and 168.2527 DPA. Scrappers are more complicated. On a Scrapper, Soaring Dragon does a base 112.6107 damage. Same cast time, so its Arcana DPA is 71.1 base. Per assumptions above, we give it +95% damage enhancement and get 219.5909 damage and 138.6305 DPA, but that's before crits. Back in the old days, before ATOs, you could fairly reasonably say, "Okay, well, you have a 10% crit rate (against non-minions), so basically scrapper damage averages 10% higher." (ie, if 90% of the time you do X damage and 10% of the time you do 2X damage, then your total damage is .9X + .1 * 2X = 1.1 X). Soaring Dragon has "normal" crits (that is to say, they do double damage), so in the pre-ATO days, it was reasonable to call their expected damage 241.5500 and DPA 152.4937. You will note that that means that their damage is slightly under the Brute damage that we note above, and this is why there was a long period of time on Live where Scrappers were considered just basically inferior to Brutes: lower damage, lower hp, lower resist cap, and Brutes get taunt auras in every armor. But ATOs changed things. Okay, first of all the ATO1, this is simple. It (with the Superior version) raises the non-minion crit rate of Scrappers to 16% instead of 10%. If you only slot ATO1, then we just redo the same calculation above with a 16% crit rate instead of a 10% crit rate. So now your total damage is .84X + .16 * 2X = 1.16X. That means expected damage is 254.7254 and DPA 160.8114. This still leaves you behind Brutes, but erases more than half of the deficit. ATO2 isn't simple. The Superior ATO2 gives you a 3 PPM chance to 3.25 seconds of +50% crit rate (we'll assume you're also slotting ATO1). Ooof. Okay, so first of all let's pretend that PPM worked the way it was originally imagined to. So you got three activations of it per minute. That means each minute you'd have 9.75 seconds of +50% PPM, and the other 50.25 seconds would be normal crit rate. So that's roughly this, if X is your damage: 9.75 * 1.66 * X / 60 + 50.25 * 1.16 * X / 60 = 1.24125X damage. So if we plug that in with Soaring Dragon, we get 272.5671 damage and 172.0752 DPA. We are now mildly ahead of Brutes. But we all know that you can do better than 3 procs per minute. Since PPM ignores global recharge, it's simple enough to get much better than 3 PPM. It gets pretty complicated to calculate the actual uptime of the ATO2. A really optimal build might have it fire 7 or 8 times per minute, and also try to time it so that some of its non-uptime is a no-op, eaten by the animation time of powers. Getting super into this is overly complicated, let's just say that you can get 6 procs per minute and calculate it by how much of the minute you're in its effect: 19.5 seconds in effect and 40.5 seconds out of it yields a blended damage multiplier of 1.3225, which in turn means that our damage becomes 290.4089 and our DPA is 183.3389. And that's roughly the current situation: Scrappers have a significant damage advantage over Brutes. Basically, they reach parity with/very slight superiority to Brute damage if they slot both superior ATOs at all, and their damage advantage increases significantly as they use global recharge to improve PPM on their ATO. But Getting Back to Savage Now instead of Soaring Dragon, let's look at Vicious Slash. Vicious Slash has the same base damage as Soaring Dragon (75.0739 on Brutes, 112.6107 on Scrappers), but it does up to 4 ticks of DoT that do 13.5133 damage (for Brutes) or 20.2699 (for Scrappers). This DoT damage is not doubled for Scrapper crits, but it is affected by Fury. So for Brutes: Damage including average performance from the DoTs is 102.7867, DPA is 55.6. Assuming 95% damage enhancement and 80 fury, we get 364.8928 damage and 197.4528 DPA. You will note that the DoTs are significant! Vicious Slash does a lot more damage than Soaring Eagle! For Scrappers, our non-crit damage is 154.1798 (base) and DPA is 83.4. Our crit damage is 266.7905 and crit DPA is 144.367 (note that it's not double what the base damage is). With 95% damage enhancement, we get 300.6506 damage and 162.6897 DPA (non-crit) and 520.2405 damage and 281.5154 DPA (crit). Okay, so our four Scrapper scenarios: 1. No ATOs: 10% crit rate: .9 * 300.6506 + .1 * 520.2405 = 322.6096 damage and 174.5722 DPA (worse than Brutes) 2. Just ATO1: 16% crit rate: .84 * 300.6506 + .16 * 520.2405 = 335.7850 damage and 181.7018 DPA (worse than Brutes) 3. AT01 + 3 procs per minute of ATO2: 24.125% crit rate: .75875 * 300.6506 + .24125 * 520.2405 = 353.6267 damage and 191.3564 DPA (still worse than Brutes) 4. ATO1 + 6 procs per minute of ATO2: 32.225% crit rate: .67775 * 300.6506 + .32225 * 520.2405 = 371.4134 damage and 200.9813 DPA (essentially the same as Brutes) So to sum up: With Savage Melee, the damage advantage that Scrappers usually enjoy over Brutes is substantially diminished shading to non-existent. Way way way TL;DR With other sets, Scrappers, at level 50 and with the ATOs slotted, enjoy a substantial damage advantage over Brutes. With Savage, they don't. Brutes have better HP, better resist caps, and taunt auras in every armor. They also get better damage from damage auras. They're a better choice for Savage.

Ah, the difference in our calculations was that I was doing three DoT ticks, not four. I think you're right. I always forget how this works, I was interpreting "every 1.0s for 3.1s (75%t chance) after 1.0s." I always want the "after 1.0 seconds" to eat one of the seconds of the duration (that is, for it to start the duration immediately, but not to do anything until 1s of the duration to have passed). But I believe what it actually means is "don't start the 3.1s duration for a second, then do ticks at 0, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0," so you're correct.

I don't think you're calculating this right. It looks like you've got something mildly wrong with the base damage (I calculate 80 DPA for Vicious Slash), but then you're doubling the damage for the crit, and the crits don't fully double the damage because they don't double the bleed damage. So I get 140.987 DPA for Vicious Slash on crit. Hemo potentially has the highest DPA of Savage Melee attacks, but to get it above Vicious, you have to blow your blood frenzy wad and suffer through lockout, which means you don't get that damage very often, and there's an opportunity cost in terms of using your AoE. And of course it's over a five second DoT. Meanwhile, use it with less than 5 blood frenzy and you don't get particularly great damage, you still have to rebuild your blood frenzy from zero, and it's still over five seconds. As a Stalker, you can at least use your mostly-controllable crits to be very likely to crit with hemo and thus get your crit damage all up front instead of over the DoT. But a scrapper can't predictably do that. It's not like... the worst attack in the world. But it's awkward and even if you use it optimally you aren't that much better off than using your ordinary three ST attacks.

Hemorrhage isn't broken -- it was broken on Stalkers for a while, and that made it good for Stalkers. Now it's just pretty bad for everyone.

Savage is pretty high damage on a brute. It's mediocre on a scrapper. This is one of those cases where the DoT being affected by fury, but not multiplied by a crit, makes a big difference.

I'm deeply uninterested in arguing it with you, I'm just saying that those are the stakes at play here. People who feel that taunt auras are already overly accessible to scrappers are not likely to want to give everyone a taunt aura at the cost of just one slot.

It is technically possible, yes. I very much doubt that they would make it. Basically, I think that the difference of opinion here is between "people who think that a taunt aura is the natural right of every character who wants it/thinks that it's a quality-of-life thing that just makes the game fun" and "people who think that taunt auras are a powerful ability that you should have to pay a significant opportunity cost to get." People who are concerned that taunt auras are already too accessible to scrappers are not going to want to make the "cost" of a taunt aura be only one slot.

I believe you can set the arena to disable incarnates (you might want to double-check), just the default is that it allows them.

Vengeful Slice and 1,000 Cuts both do knock"down," which is to say low-magnitude (0.67, in this case) knockback. Basically it's knockback with no actual distance, so they immediately cut to the end-of-knockback animation where they fall down and then get back up again. Knockup is a relatively rare power effect. The power that immediately comes to mind that has it is Air Superiority from the Flight powerpool. Superstrength's Knockout Blow has it as well, plus Crushing Uppercut from Street Justice and Jawbreaker from War Mace. I'm sure there are other examples, but most knocks in the game are back/down. What the dev in this thread is talking about should be basically unchanged in terms of the effects that you see on screen. Maybe very subtle differences. But they aren't talking about removing knock effects from powers, they're talking about making changes in the way that the game represents the same or very similar effects.

Correct, mob rank (ie minion, lt, boss, av etc) is not part of the purple patch, just mob level. Rank affects other things that can accumulate with the people patch (eg you get some bonus accuracy from being a boss and some more bonus accuracy from the purple patch), but rank does not increase your effective level.

Did she say she was going to do zone PvP? The arena allows incarnate powers. To the OP: I think it's worth asking yourself, "Do I want to hilariously destroy my husband in PvP, where it's not even a match-up and he can't do anything I could win 20 times in a row? Or do I want to go in for a real fight, but maybe the odds are in my favor." Assuming your husband is not an experienced PvPer and is not building specifically for PvP in mind, some of the suggestions you're getting here are going to bias towards the first scenario. Like if you hover-blast him and use web grenade to keep him grounded and Poison to debuff the hell out of him, I mean... Unless he is himself pretty experienced with PvP, you won't really be fighting any more than you're fighting if you attack a gray-conn opponent.

Your bit about the purple patch doesn't really make sense and I'm wondering if you typoed it, but: No, AVs do not have any special resistance to resistance debuffs (as they do to most other debuffs) Yes, Resistance debuffs are affected by the purple patch, so they will be reduced against higher-level foes

I have no opinion on whether the taunt in Entropic Aura "should be" the 13.6 second taunt that Invul, Bio, Rad, and Shield get, or the smaller 2.25 second one that's coded into the power. Willpower, for what it's worth, also gets a low duration taunt. But the taunt should presumably be mag 3, not mag 4.

It's based on data from Homecoming. If this is a CoD bug of some kind, obviously that's not a HC bug, but it's very likely that it's accurately reflecting a bug in HC powers data. This is all wrong. Brutes have several inherents. They have Fury (as in, the "+2% damage per point of fury bar" power). That power is not being invoked by Scrapper Entropic Aura. They also have a punch-voke power that taunts things that they hit. That is the power that is being invoked here. Assuming CoD is accurate, Entropic Aura is doing a weak-ish taunt by itself (2.25 seconds, mag 3) by itself and also invoking the Brute inherent taunt (13 seconds or so, mag 4). That would be inappropriate and pretty certainly unintended. It's possible -- I don't know how the powers coding works -- that when Scrapper Entropic Aura tries to invoke the Brute inherent punch-voke, it doesn't actually happen because there's some check that says "Scrappers should not be able to invoke this power," and nothing actually happens (ie, the superior taunt does not actually apply). If so, this is a pretty harmless bug, and it's likely just using a very small amount of server resources to keep trying to invoke the power and then aborting out of it. It should still be cleaned up, but it's not very important. If it does actually successfully execute the Brute power, then Entropic Aura gets a meaningfully greater taunt effect than any other Scrapper aura in a way that certainly looks unintended. No other scrapper taunts attempt to execute this power.

This is just coming from inspection of CoD, so it's possible it's not "real." https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=scrapper_defense.energy_aura.entropy_shield&at=scrapper If you look at the last power effect on that page, it's an execution of the Brute Inherent taunt effect. I remain a little unclear whether this actually means that scrappers do actually execute this power, or whether it's a no-op, but it shouldn't be part of the scrapper effect groups for this power at all.

It's in the middle and I probably don't remember the details exactly right, but I think it's something like "you get protection against kb once you've been kb'd," and then "you get protection against common mezzes (hold/sleep/stun?) once you've taken any common mez," and "you get protection against exotic mezzes (terrorize/confuse?) once you've taken any exotic mez." Again, that's probably not exactly right, but the point is that they've lumped mezzes into a few categories and taking any mez in that category protects you against all mezzes in that category for a while. Edit: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Player_vs_Player#Status_Effect_.26_Knockback_Suppression So the categories are "kd/kb/ku", "confuse," and "everything else, including terrorize and immobilize." The protection timers are 15 seconds for the two mezzes and 10 seconds for knocks.

Mezzing is really different in PvP vs PvE. Unlike in PvP, he won't have outright protection to holds/stuns/sleeps, so your first mez will mez him (and detoggle RttC). But it will only last like 1-2 seconds. And then you won't be able to re-mez him for a while. So, I don't know how terrorize will work, but the role of mezzing in 1v1 PvP, especially if you're not a troller/dom, is like "detoggle and set up one attack," not "lock him down."

Yeah, it looks a lot like it's copy-and-pasted from Brute Energy Aura. The Brute taunt (assuming it actually happens) is much stronger than the taunt in the actual power (13.6 second Mag 4 taunt from the Brute inherent instead of 2.25 second Mag 3 taunt from the actual power).

No, I mean the question from the original post -- when Entropic Aura redirects a Scrapper to a Brute inherent, does the power actually activate? Or do you have to "have" the power that you're redirected to, so it's a no-op?

Anyone know about the power redirect?

Blasters are very strong in sort of naive PvP, where you aren't using any complex tactics and just banging on each other. Compared to PvE, his brute will lose a ton of durability, while your blaster will gain a bunch of resistance (though maybe lose defense). Hit him with a hold to detoggle Rise to the Challenge and back away from him between attacks.

Got it, so basically even the basic non-stacking +5% recharge time of Entropic Aura will only go into effect if it hits at least one target, since it's in Standard Effects rather than Activation Effects.

Using Scrapper Energy Aura's Entropic Aura as our example case: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_defense.energy_aura.entropy_shield&at=scrapper I noticed that this has two categories of power effect, "Activation effects" and "Standard effects." I haven't gone hunting, but I assume that other powers also have these distinctions. What's the difference here? Anyone know? This power also has a redirect to the Brute inherent Fury proc aura (https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=redirects.inherents.fury_proc_aura), last power effect on the Entropic Aura page. That seems like an error, but my question is, is it a harmless error or a harmful one? When a power redirects to another power, do you have to have that power? Or does it execute regardless? Does this do nothing because Scrappers don't have the Brute inherent, or does it execute the Brute inherent anyway?

You're right. That also has a redirect to the brute inherent, seems sketchy.

As far as I'm aware, Brute taunt auras have target cap 10 as usual. Both Brute and Tanker Taunt actual power has a 5 target cap. It would be weird, admittedly, for a Confront replacement to target more than Taunt does, but hear me out: in this world, scrappers would get no taunt aura, and hypothetical 10-cap Confront would be non-perma out of the box (while Taunt is way, way, way more than perma out of the box), and it would be PBAoE rather than targeted. So in this scenario, I think that Confront would be more comparable to the (10-target) taunt auras that Brutes and Tankers get rather than the (5 target) Taunt that they get. You'd use it when enemies started running to pull them back so that you could kill them before the taunt wore off. Note also that Brute and Tankers both get punch-taunt effects. The concept I'm trying to get at is, instead of having some scrapper armors having Really Good Taunts and everyone else has no/really pathetic (Confront-only) taunts, try to normalize Scrappers to "way less taunt than Brutes and Tankers, but still something."