aethereal
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Posts posted by aethereal
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18 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:
I kept the picture because I think it aptly applies to your response.
No, the Brute is not ahead. When you start the first encounter, mission, the Brute has no Fury. The scrapper is doing more damage. After the first or second spawn, the Brute takes a knee and is back to 0 Fury. The Brute never gets ahead becuase in both my situation and Aetheral's we are describing a situation where we both had to stop to recover health.
Just for the record, no. That is not in fact at all how my brute played. I did have to test relatively often. Not after every spawn, and no, you don't have to let your fury go to zero when you rest, and, just to be clear, to get above low level scrapper damage takes about five seconds, small fractions of one spawn.
18 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:The Live devs used a formula to determine that stats on each attack. It considers Damage and Endurance cost. On Live, someone figured out that big hitters like ET don't follow the formula.
I mean, ET breaks the formula in such a way as to get more damage than its recharge would suggest, not less as you imply here.
18 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:Why? Because the devs recognized the asymmetrical benefits of front loaded damage. To spell it out, there are asymmetrical benefits to scrapper having a higher base damage and crits that front load damage. These benefits are amplified when the Brute cannot build Fury. Those benefits translate into a Scapper killing faster, taking less damage, and using less endurance. You can refuse to accept that because your average numbers tell you something different. I'm okay with that.
Maintaining fury is not hard, and fury builds very quickly. This idea that brutes are constantly struggling with low fury is pure cope.
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6 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:
It's not a "constraint." It's how you benchmark. It's how you compare apples to apples. Power Pools and Set IO bonuses don't benefit all sets equally. In order to understand that dynamic, you need to understand how the sets perform naked. Tough and Weave are not part of any Scapper secondary. They are entirely elective and not part of any requirement to level up a Scrapper.
You don't have to take more than one power from your secondary to level up. If for some insane reason you wanted to, you could literally skip every power in Regen except fast healing!
Clearly in order to get a proper "baseline," we need to understand how each armor set performed when you get the T1 power and nothing else!
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9 hours ago, Blackjoy said:
1. What the sets can do independent of Power Pool and Set IOs and Incarnates is 100% relevant to someone asking about leveling from 1-50, than what is possible at 50+ with 200m build. I will point out, once again, that Scrapper discussion are routinly distorted by what people do at 50+ as if that's the only thing that matters or counts. It's not. I actually tend to lose interest at 50 and spend more time playing alts than playing my 50's. I doubt I'm alone.
Power pools don't, uh, you know... cost inf. You can in fact get them whenever you think it's helpful!
This is not to say that there's some secret magic to getting Tough and Weave as early as possible: there's not. In general, you want them somewhere in the late 20's to late 30's when you have slots to spare. But this whole thing of, "Oh, well, I use the set without power pools" is a totally artificial constraint.
There is nothing about solo leveling that makes you need to have a highly cost-constrained build! Like, I get that people don't necessarily want to spend billions on a character as they go, for a variety of reasons including that they may abandon the character and it can in fact be kinda hard to make billions of inf (not truly hard, but enough of an inconvenience that you might say, "well, this isn't why I play the game"). But making high tens/low hundreds of millions of inf is a simple matter of "spend your merits that you get from ordinary solo play on enhancement converters, sell them," and making mid-to-high hundreds of millions of inf is a matter of "spend your merits that you get from ordinary solo play on enhancement converters, buy recipes, craft them, then use the converters to turn them into salable orange IOs, sell them." The former is about one total minute of activity per let's say 3 to 5 hours of play. The latter is about 15 minutes of activity per 3 to 5 hours of play, plus spending 30 minutes once in your life to understand how to do it.
And I say this with absolutely due respect to everyone's playstyle: If you prefer to make common IO or, for some godforsaken reason, SO builds, then cool, go you. But if you're like, "Oh man it's so hard to play almost every armor set because I can't afford a Performance Shifter proc and also have low endurance reduction slotting," and that's frustrating or you can't understand why everyone else doesn't seem to have these problems, then my brothers and sisters, my message for you here today is that you do not have to be 50 to be able to afford IOs that cost a few million inf, you do not have to farm or have a farmer, you do not have to spend hours doing weird cornering-the-market shenanigans, you do not have to mentally track the fluctuations in supply and demand of dozens of items. You need to, at the low end, spend merits on converters and sell them, or at the high end learn a simple procedure to craft IOs that you can sell for 1-2M inf a pop. That's it!
Also: Regen does not have the best endurance economy, even at low levels, even with low-cost builds! It just doesn't. Try out Bio or Ninjutsu. If you don't mind working a little harder in levels 1-20 but care a lot about levels 30-49, try Energy or Electric.
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39 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:
A Scrapper does better much better upfront damage compared to a Brute.
Not at low levels it doesn't! People really underestimate how garbage Scrappers are at low levels. 10% crit rate (5% against minions, and you're fighting lots of minions here) is terrible, and there are going to be substantial fights in which you just never crit. It takes a matter of five to ten seconds to get your Fury up high enough to match low-level Scrapper damage.
39 minutes ago, Blackjoy said:Again, I'm playing these sets with IO's and no Tough/Weave so I can see what the set can do, not what my build can do.
This is dumb. There is no "what the set can do" in isolation from the rest of the game. I mean, we can say, "I want to see what a set can do (exclusively as it relates to doing negative energy daamage)," and, I mean, cool, you'll find that Dark sets are the best at everything -- as long as by "everything" you mean "this highly arbitrary benchmark that's unrelated to the actual game."
Not that Tough and Weave are hugely game changing at these levels, but I wish we could just excise this whole type of discourse of these fora which is like, "I have fifteen invisible rules in my head and as long as you play with these totally arbitrary limitations, all of my weird claims are true."
I'm sure that Blackjoy can find some set of restrictions which makes his experience valid. They are his experience, after all. But what I'm saying is if you are playing with these restrictions and you find that under those restrictions Shield is inferior to Regen, the solution is not "roll Regen," it's "relax whichever of those restrictions is leading to your character being so bad."
(Or do roll regen! I did, it was fun, good experience. But don't kid yourself about what you're doing there.)
In general, we now see some huffing and puffing about well, how dare you, my arbitrary restrictions are extremely important, they're only natural. But they aren't. You can make Shield (or Rad, or Bio, or Invul, or EA, or whatever) better than Regen without using the amplifiers, without having a dedicated AFK farmer and a billion inf, without PLing up to 50 and then going back and doing all your content through Ouro, without anything particularly onerous. If you choose not to do that, then hey, cool, you do you. But you could have.
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20 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:
You are missing some AT distinctions, like ATOs and, um, this beauty of an epic power:
https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=epic.brute_soul_mastery.darkest_night&at=brute
This subthread is about the low level experience, and @Erratic1 specified "defensively."
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Just now, Erratic1 said:
Ohhh, is that permission to pull one out?
Go wild man.
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6 hours ago, Blackjoy said:
Those toggles add up and are constant. If you aren't bankrolling, the fights take longer when you aren't max slotted for Dam+Acc. Those defensive toggles slow down recovery during fights and slow down how quickly I can move on to the next group, assuming my health is not an issue. /Regen is adding an +Recovery power AND its only using one toggle. It makes a big a different when you're not getting set bonuses and/or bankrolling.
I actually played an Energy Melee/Regen brute, just recently. I was resting all the time with it. Mostly due to health concerns, not endurance, but endurance wasn't great either until I, you know, got a couple of Performance Shifter procs and so forth -- all the things that you claim Regen is good at.
Regen is not as awful as you might think given the forum memes -- I mean, it's an easy enough game, it's not like there isn't plenty of slack to play somewhat suboptimal sets. I enjoyed my /regen brute. But Regen had a mildly worse 1-30 experience and a much worse 30+ experience than any other armor set I've played.
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Fiery Aura is interesting. 180 second base recharge on Fiery Embrace, 20 second duration. That means an uptime under constant maxed recharge conditions of more than 50% (20 seconds on, 16 seconds off, repeat), and unlike most things that would conditionally add damage, Fiery Embrace is operative (since it doesn't add a damage bonus, but rather adds another effect to a power, which is then enhanced by your +all-the-damage).
I actually wonder if the answer here isn't something weird like a Sonic Blast Blaster (or maybe Corruptor?), since probably what you're looking to do is find ways to leverage the +damage in all kinds of ways. Though the Scrapper's crit lines are obviously a good way to leverage the +damage.
I kiiiiiinda doubt that Energy Melee is the right set, though I don't know what is. Is there a melee set that gets some longer-recharge powers than Energy Melee does? A world where all your recharges are costlessly divided by five is a weird world.
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3 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:
Don't forget the constant -Res in Evolving Armor. So it gets a damage aura, a damage proc, and constant -Res.
-Res is a good point! As with all -res, it opens up the question of "what level shift are we assuming here."
3 minutes ago, InvaderStych said:I don't recall where, but the math has been done. /Bio boosts damage more than /Stone,
But that's under normal circumstances, where Bio gives you a +31.25% global damage bonus. Under the assumptions of this thread, that (big!) bonus is non-operative for Bio, 'cause you're already at damage cap.
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18 hours ago, Captain Fabulous said:
If you're insistent upon punishing yourself by playing Regen, I'd say go with Brute. The only advantage of Regen is that (if you actually survive a battle) is that you have very little downtime, which lets you get the most out of Fury. But honestly, either one is fine, as long as you're prepared for the suckage that is Regen.
This isn't true -- Regen has lots of downtime. It's a poor mitigation set, so you're more likely to need to rest after a battle, a lot of its mitigation is in long-cooldown panic buttons, so you're more likely to need to wait out some of those cooldowns, and its endurance tool, which was impressive back in Issue 0, is not impressive now. To the extent that anyone needs to care about endurance issues (ie, mostly before level 40), you'll have a rougher ride with Regen than with many other armor sets.
In modern CoH, sets with low downtime are like Ninjutsu or Bio, which give you refill-your-end-on-demand and layered mitigation such that resting is rarely necessary. To a great extent, in high level modern CoH, nobody has downtime.
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5 hours ago, Blackjoy said:
It was true then and it still true now. The advantage that /Regen has is that it only has one toggle. And that toggle serves as both its Mez protection and extra +Heal. The other sets you mention run one or more toggles and/or have click Mez protection. I've been running /Rad and it doesn't have near the efficiency of /Regen. I've had to slot Gamma Boost with End Mod and I still run out of endurance in boss fights. /Regen wastes the least amount endurance on mitigation.
Okay, but your major endurance drains aren't toggles, they're attack powers. I like Regen's one-toggle approach!
And Rad is certainly not the end-all, be-all of endurance tools. Try Bio if you want a set that gets great endurance efficiency early and then gets a second tranche of endurance later.
5 hours ago, Blackjoy said:Now, if you're bankrolling your alts from level 1 and running with full time temp powers buffs, then you might do better than most. But I'm assuming you're buying what you can afford from just playing from 1-20.
This is going to turn into one of these weird conversations where someone packs a ton of assumptions into their post about "the right way to play," isn't it?
For whatever it's worth: I sometimes fund alts and sometimes don't. I don't use "full time temp power buffs," unless we mean 2x XP. It's easy to fund any character from what they can afford by "just playing," as long as you are willing to use your merits to buy enhancement converters and then convert enhancements and sell them (not just sell the converters).
And levels 1-20 go by very fast. If you're soloing to 50 (which I almost exclusively do, doing regular missions), the majority of your time is spent 20-50, not 1-20.
5 hours ago, Blackjoy said:And again, by lvl 50, everyone seems to solve their endurance issues with Set IO. For /Regen's to keep up, you have to find sets that give something else and I'm not sure there is an equivalency. /Regen would have to get that much extra +RES or +DEF instead of +Recovery and I'm not sure if it's out there.
It's not by level 50, though. With lots of sets, you'll get your endurance problems straightened out by level 25 or so. And a problem with Regen is while yes, its endurance tool is available very low, so if you like turn off XP and spend a lot of time in levels 10-20, you may appreciate that, it doesn't have a very strong endurance tool, so you do in fact need lots of help after that, while sets like Electric or Energy struggle until the 30s, but then have limitless endurance forever.
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It's weird to act like Regen has some kind of great endurance management that's a big advantage. That was once the case, but it hasn't been true for a long time.
Bio gets Inexhaustible as its second-tier power, which is more +recovery than Regen gets if you're in Efficient mode. It also gets DNA Siphon at level 24.
Electric gets Energize at 20 and Power Sink at 28
Energy Aura gets Energize at 24 and Energy Drain at 28
Fiery Aura gets Consume at 20
Ice Armor gets Energy Absorption at 20
Ninjutsu gets Seishinteki Kyoyo at 16
Radiation Armor gets Gamma Boost at level 1 (and Meltdown at 30)
Stone Armor gets Crystal Armor at 20 (and Geode at 30)
Willpower gets Quick Recovery at 20
Armor sets that don't have endurance tools are vastly outnumbered by those that do (just SR, Invul, Dark, and Shield don't), and many of the armor sets have significantly better endurance tools than Quick Recovery. Most (but not all!) armors get their endurance tools a little later than Regen, but in return they get better tools and with the latest page, they get them a bunch of levels earlier than they used to.
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The value of Bio seems like it's significantly less in a world where you're damage-capped. Then it's just the global proc and the damage aura, right? Might as well do Stone instead of Bio, get a global proc that crits. Fire is also a distinct possibility.
Scrapper seems to me to be way better than Stalker in this case, because Scrapper can broker all of that free global recharge into their ATO2, and a Stalker remains restrained by the 10.25 second internal timer on their ATO-chance-to-hide.
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19 hours ago, Lazarillo said:
This makes me think of the whole Nemesis version of the Peter Principle, where the more of his upper management removed from a group, the less incompetent the group becomes.
It's actually the middle managers who are dragging the group down. Upper management and rank and file are good!
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1 hour ago, Captain Fabulous said:
Slotting Provoke with taunt enhancements doesn't increase the MAG level, only the duration, so that's not gonna help.
I mean, it would presumably allow you to stack taunts and up the mag that way.
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9 hours ago, ZemX said:
To @PLVRIZR's point though: Fiery Aura and Fire Melee are a great combo because FA's Fiery Embrace is a kind of second build up that, while it adds fire damage to most any damaging attack, also boosts Fire Damage specifically by 100% for 20 seconds. So it's most effective when your attack powers are doing Fire type damage. And Fire damage is certainly already much less commonly resisted than Lethal or Smashing.
Fiery Embrace only adds to fire damage in PvP. In PvE, it just "turns on" the Fiery Embrace line for melee powers.
However, it looks like Fiery Melee does get special bonus DoT when using Fiery Embrace, so it does remain true that Fiery Melee gets a little more from Fiery Aura than other melee sets do. Just, the mechanism of that "little extra" is other than you described.
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Beast Run (like Athletic Run and Ninja Run) does not have slots.
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20 hours ago, kito said:
Ik what it should do I copy pasted it in and it does Nothing. Even asked for help in game on it and we did not find a way to get it to work
Did you copy and paste it verbatim? It has the word "key" where you'd actually want the key you're trying to bind.
So if you want to make the "y" key trigger the power, it would be:
/bind y powexeclocation target teleport
Obviously you actually need the teleport power as well.
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Traditionally, the Theft of Essence proc could fire on multiple targets in Dark Regen, reducing endurance cost of Dark Regen not by 10, but by 20, 30, or even making it endurance positive.
I haven't played dark armor recently, and it's possible that the proc was changed to no longer fire on multiple targets. However, I can see no sign of that in CoD. If the proc can still fire multiple times in a single power activation, @Zect's analysis above seems incomplete.
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As @kelika2 succinctly said, you can already do this, with that bind/macro. There is a range limit, of course, but you should be able to select an alt from the team window, then use that bind/macro, and teleport to them through walls, if there in range.
You can also teleport to enemies, most notably Tsoo sorcerers or Sky Raider Porters, if you have them targeted and they teleport away, with the same macro.
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Nope, sentinels do not get snipes.
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I don't know, dude, maybe you should just be better at this? Seriously, while Fury isn't literally at 85 all the time, it's trivial to keep it well above 60 95% of the time -- which is all you need to outperform Scrappers. I agree that at SUPER low levels, or before you genuinely are slotting things, there's lots of resting and that does hurt Brutes -- but they're helped by their scalars and so forth. There may be an island of time in the low 20s where it's hard to have good endurance slotting due to low numbers of slots available/low enhancement values, where you still need to rest a lot and thus you decay your fury. But even then, I don't usually go to 0 Fury during a rest.
Now, for one ~10 second fight, if you have Build Up available, that fight will probably be slightly on the edge for a Scrapper. But at low levels, Build Up is available every three or four or five fights, not every fight.
If you're routinely finding that you end all your fights having used up 70% of your endurance, I think you should more aggressively look at endurance tools.
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20 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:
What? I don't play seriously? My expectation is that I am not going to be at low levels long enough to make the hassle of replacing enhancements worth it.
Levels you play seriously at. I don't bother doing a lot of slotting at low levels either. But I'm also not trying to "solo all story content." Now the OP was pretty light in his explanation of what exactly he means by that! I don't know if "soloing all story content" means just "I'm going to solo up to level 50 mostly with story arcs," or "stop XP to exhaustively play every single arc available at every level" or "solo all TFs" or what.
If he's going to turn on 2X XP and just solo, I'd do pretty light slotting at very low levels. But if he's going to spend hours or days below level 20, he should slot!
20 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:Which is pretty much what I said. But you are not spending any real time at level 2 and not much time getting to level 10.
Again, you and I may not, but he might be! And you did not in fact say anything about scalars below level 20.
20 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:As noted, they are not going to be majorly more survivable than Scrappers, every rest they take brings them down to 0 Fury, and Scrappers enter every fight at full damage value.
It takes a few seconds of fighting to get back up to high levels of Fury, and Fury decay is a joke now. There was a point in this game's evolution where building up to a high level of Fury and sustaining it was hard, but that point is not today.
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3 hours ago, Erratic1 said:
I was going to make a comment on this last night, but I was not up for doing the digging to support what I wanted to say. Guess sleep energized me.
If we look at a powerset, say for example Battle Axe, we have the following raw damage values courtesy of [url=City of Data v2.0 (uberguy.net)]City of Data 2.0[/url]:
Battle Axe Brute Scrapper Ratio Beheader 41.7 62.6 1.5 Chop 68.4 102.6 1.5 Gash 81.7 122.6 1.5 Pendulum 56.2 84.2 1.5 Swoop 95.1 142.6 1.5 Axe Cyclone 41.7 62.5 1.5 Cleave 115.1 172.7 1.5 Call that the messy way of demonstrating the scalar difference between ATs with Brutes being at 0.75, Scrappers being at 1.125 and the ratio of those two values being 1.5.
Certainly true, though I note that the scalars don't come fully "in" until level 20 -- below 20, Brutes enjoy much closer base-damage parity to Scrappers, and Fury is just whoah-good. Not generally a big deal since levels 1-20 go by fast, but potentially relevant at for someone who's being a completist.
(So for example at level 10, a Brute Beheader does 15.4279 damage and a Scrapper Beheader does 18.7338 -- Scrapper's damage advantage is 1.29, not 1.5)
3 hours ago, Erratic1 said:The Scrapper has higher base damage and criticals, the Bute has Fury.
In the early game is the point where players are least likely to slot enhancements. True, some people always do so, but some people don't really bother for a while. (Personally, I don't bother until level 22.) Depending on target the Scrapper has a 5-10% chance of critting for double damage so the ratio goes to 1.575/1.65. A Brute needs 29/33 Fury to be matching the Scrapper. Those are not really hard values to achieve or maintain and broadly the Brute will surpass them. But there will be some healing (at least when solo), travel, and possibly organizational (party) downtime which can push the Brute back down to no Fury between fights. Overall, the Brute is probably more effective in delivering damage.
People should slot enhancements for levels they are going to play at seriously. This thread is specificallya bout someone who wants to "solo all story content."
Brutes are massively better than Scrappers at very low levels, since as mentioned above their scalar deficit is mitigated, while Fury is what it is.
3 hours ago, Erratic1 said:Move into the realm where both ATs have slotted for damage and things shift a bit. Say the Scrapper has triple-slotted damage enhancements for a bonus of 96% (level 30 damage enhancements should put you there with level 25 enhancements being only somewhat behind that). That takes the Scrapper ratio compared to the Brute base to 3.087/3.234. So the Brute needs to pick up 210/224% damage. He of course can slot as well for 96%, leaving him wanting 114%/128%, which Fury of 57/64 puts him at. The thing is that Fury falls off faster the higher its value and those downtime bits from before are still there. So the Brute has to ramp up damage and is behind until he does while the Scrapper walks into each fight at full value. Sure, the Brute can push up to 85 Fury (it is hard to get past that value) but that has to be balanced by whatever time he spent beneath break even. It does not strike me as quite so obvious the Brute is significantly ahead of the Scrapper. This is going to be the case from somewhere in the mid-20 level range.
If you have trouble maintaining 57 Fury, idk man. Maybe look into your play.
3 hours ago, Erratic1 said:From their 30s upward I cannot say my DM/EA, WM/Shield, or WM/Nin scrapper have felt less damaging than any of my Brutes.
I don't know how you feel, but I assure you it's not very hard for Brutes to actually be more damaging than your Scrappers in their 30s.
At 50, a Scrapper has a few major advantages over a Brute:
First and most importantly, their critical values can get insane. A Scrapper with the Superior ATO1 slotted starts at 16% critical rate against LTs+. Then they have 4 PPM of the +50% crit value ATO2. With perma-hasten level global recharge, that's about 10 activations per minute, which leads to about half of your attacks benefitting from the +50% crit rate. So call it 25% crit rate all told, leading to about a 41% total crit rate.
In contrast, if you're level 49 or lower (truly level 49-, not exemped down), you're starting at 14% instead of 16%, and you're at 2 PPM instead of 4 PPM. Even if you're perma-hasten at level 49, that still means you've got about 5 activations per minute instead of 10, call your total crit rate about 26.5% instead of 41%. Huge difference! But you're probably not perma-hasten at level 49, because you don't have access to 10% global recharge bonuses. Your ATO2 proc rate might be more like 3 activations per minute, instead of 10.
Secondly, Scrappers get much more out of Build Up than Brutes do, with both a higher percentage value and it working off their higher scalar. But of course the Build Up uptime is again heavily affected by global recharge, so... same deal.
Thirdly, Scrappers get epic snipes instead of the less-effective ST attacks that Brutes get. This bonus comes in earlier -- you can get your epic snipe at level 35 and even fully slot it at that level with your respec, though it might more likely be slotted at more like level 37 or later. Of course, global recharge also helps with these long-activation-time powers.
Fourthly, Scrappers get more use out of the armor sets that give +damage, most notably Bio. Relevant at much lower levels, but I note that the OP is planning to use either Fire or Energy.
Specifically for the OP's somewhat strange use case, assuming he plans to do the story content as he levels, rather than going up to 50 and exemping back down, I think he'll likely get more use out of a Brute than a Scrapper.
This isn't to say that Scrappers don't have a significant damage advantage over Brutes at level 50, but people overestimate how much that translates down to pre-50.
(EDIT: I'll add that if you want the most damaging melee class at mid levels, I think there's a solid case for Stalker over both Brute and Scrapper.)
Is Regen poor or simply challenging (Psi/Regen build request)?
in Scrapper
Posted
We perhaps have different definitions of "all the time." My brute would rest every three or four spawns (which I'd regard as "unacceptably a lot") at low levels (so basically it would go something like "do a spawn, be at half health, do the next spawn, use reconstruction and come out at 75-80% health, do the next spawn and be down at 25% health, rest," roughly). When I rested, I'd usually let Fury drop to about 20. It'd be back up above 60 by halfway through the next spawn. So you can try out your math on "enter two spawns out of three at solidly north of scrapper damage, enter one spawn at slightly below scrapper damage and exit it at solidly north of scrapper damage."