Kanil

"outlier" as a reason for not comparing is weird to me because beyond the very top and bottom what else are you comparing against to have a proper scale/ref for the overall power level of a set? there isn't actually a "baseline" to work from so the only things left are data (of which the top is the most abundant) and "legacy knowledge/biases" which i feel like im always fighting against because of how backwards it can feel at times anyways, re:staff aoe honestly a better question would be "how many powersets have worse AOE than it" than better, haha. guarded spin and eye of the storm are pretty mediocre to bad overall for the combined reason of having mediocre dpa and kinda whatever slotting options. the only sets i can actually think of where you could argue that it has worse aoe are KM and street justice. and arguably dark melee, with the caveat that dm has soul drain to skew things all kinds of weird. as previously mentioned, staff actually has the same awkward problem in lacking BU but in the opposite direction- it's even weaker than its competition due to a lack of BU and gaussians. there are other factors too ie eye of the storms anim time cutting into BU+gaussians time messing with aoe dmg on the stalker variant (and crit strikes flexibility) but yeah

there's an aspect to how people have a legacy view on a powerset that ends up havin some weird definition on how it functions so where dm is defined as "good at st" actually means "the only good attacks on it were st" rather than it bein good at an objective level or st focused as a design goal you can see similar thought processes for stuff like "km is good at st" or "staff is good at aoe" - it's not that they are necessarily good at it from an objective level, it's that the only noteworthy powers are of those varieties.

this is kind of the thing i'm talking about in my post - out of all of the t1-5 powers (since 4 tends to be the AT's ie scrapper/brute BU, tanker taunt, stalker AS, etc.) it's actually the only actual early AOE power that would be 'cycled out' (by intention) instead of just outright not picked. it's kinda like fire breath, but... a little better i guess? the nature/value of AOE usually makes it a binary choice beyond the "what else do i pick" aspect, which is pretty real. like, here's the total list of attacks you're directly comparing it to: guarded spin, slice, flashing steel, spin, typhoon's edge (db whirling), jacob's ladder, breath of fire, frost, repulsing torrent, psi blade sweep, proton sweep, shred, spine burst, sweeping cross, defensive sweep, titan sweep. there's also two weirdo aoes that don't do damage: hand clap, ice patch. which are obvious skips for most folks. not sure if they fall itno which are those attacks are powers that you actively cycle out at the end instead of just... not picking? i feel like i'm repeating myself over and over, but the general dearth of aoe moves means that the new ToF is in an awkward spot because there's no power that has that... 'design intention'? there's just... bad powers and good powers, and it's kind of sitting closer to the bad side than the good side. even in the 'bad' powersets, slice, guarded spin, and repulsing torrent are all in regular use. the awkward design of dark melee lacking it's build up equivalent until very far into it's powerset alongside the weird stuff going on with the damage being attached to dark consumption and soul drain makes touch of fear just like... another awkward thing in the powerset? i dunno. and that's before you start going into the actual performance of the power itself from a 'strength value' level, y'know?

so, yesterday i realized while testing dark melee that i think all the testing that's been posted is on scrappers and only scrappers because they're the ones who really get really above board. i know in the ST testing scrappers more or less have only a very slight ding in their ST damage rating (being 1st or tied w/ 1st place w/ em theoretically) because of that weird caveat i keep posting about in regards to follow through crit strikes ATO and non-momentum rend armor. based on my testing for everything outside of that string, i was thinking that it's likely the general ST output for non-scrapper TW cratered due to not being able to exploit that and i wanted to test my theory. since my first 'serious' char on everlasting was a tw brute, so i figured i'd take 'em out for a spin and start comparing the times to see what that looks like, haha. these are a pretty small sample size, but figured i'd post 'em for now. trapdoor times: live tw/bio brute: 5m18s 5m3s 5m20s beta tw/bio brute 5m47s 6m1s 6m8s i was curious about why it was matching beta tw scrapper times and went back to test 'em and got stuff still in the same range (5m45s and 5m57s) so there's something causing to even out. i guess the live tw/bio brute times are pretty close too, just never had anything that got lucky enough to dip into the sub 5m range i guess. so the overall loss of AOE power for high-end builds roughly scales about the same as scrappers, which is "probably a lot". there's an interesting aspect to it where brutes are able to leverage the sped up crushing blow more because they aren't trapped with using crit strikes so they can flex aoe strings a bit better which maybe evens things out vs. the crits. probably need to gather more samples but i'm being lazy at the moment, haha. as for pylon times: live TW brute: 1m35s 1m42s 1m48s 1m40s beta TW brute: 2m24s 2m45s 2m26s 2m52s so uh, yeah... that's a pretty hefty increase that i think more or less tracks with the overall time gain for scrappers in ST damage barring the FT->rend armor ato slotting/string. the loss in damage is theoretically apparently 20%-ish or so in DPS but i'm not quite sure how that scales to pylon times. around a 50s-ish or higher gain in time seems like, uh, way more than a 20% loss but it's not like i've ever touched the dps calculator. the bug on where the momentum is generated for crushing blow is really notable too for potentially causing the damage differences - the beta TW can't do the same string as live TW because of the loss of the second or so of momentum time from momentum being generated slightly too early on CB. it theoretically shouldn't cause too much of a difference because the only thing that's being lost is a single FT overall but that might add up. hard to say.

ah, goddamnit it i knew i should've looked more carefully at the generic io slotting choices. all that ramblin' for nothing, haha. they don't slot for recharge time! so i was running off the assumption that the 8s rech time was the enhanced amount. gonna do a bit more testing to see if that changes much, but in my initial runthrough of a level 19 mission the intended flow clicks a lot more - it seems the idea is that 2 shadow mauls + 1 touch of fear will kill a +0 minion roughly, so it's meant as a way to 'soften up crowds' so you can shadow maul 'em to death, or something like that for the lower level since you can basically just run t1->t2->t3->t4 as a chain with the proper enhanced recharge values. properly lookin' at the recharge values at that level makes it more apparent though that doing the power more than once or twice is kind of a waste because it takes 4 full ToF applications at least to get shadow maul to kill in one go, which at that point you already could've shadow mauled 'em twice anyways. it feels very much like 'filler' after the initial application, even in high saturation environments - the goal is less about hitting one enemy with it but rather applying it to as many as possible so you can double shadow maul 'em or t1/t2 'em. weirdly, having that solid chain strengthens my impression of the power kind of being an awkward spot because of the saturation it requires for that to really be... "useful"? the same issues persist in terms of the number of affected enemies where shadow maul usually hits 5 at max and touch of fear can vary wildly between 2-10 depending on how friendly the enemies want to be with their spacing. if the intention is something like that, then the radius might want to see an increase to alleviate that, but i'm sure there's an awkward aspect to that given tanks increased aoe radius/cone too. one of the things i've noticed as well is that whenever touch of fear is in a famine situation in terms of targets, it's likely that shadow maul will also be in a famine situation too - that's more correctable because of the cone/aimable aspect but it's an aspect that clearly comes into play.

modest kept messaging me about this so i ended up being curious about his results. ended up just running a bunch of trapdoors and running through the KR skulls arc to get a feel for the powers - didn't use any build at all, i literally just hit "generic IOs" in the auto-enhancer on the test server, haha. played 'em both at x8+0 with a dm/bio scrapper because i wanted to have an armorset i was comfortable with- kept efficiency mode on so no mega damage buff to skew stuff too crazy. note my impressions are coming from someone who has never even looked at dark melee besides checking out it's animations and going "this looks stupid" and clicking away from it i first tested the target-cap stuff since that seems like it's ultimately the biggest part of the changes, especially given the changes seem to relate to that alongside touch of fear's interesting point being it's really high target cap relative to it's low damage and long recharge. for shadow maul, i got pretty much the same deal - even with very high saturation in a cramped area like the trapdoor mission and more open stuff like the offices/warehouses of the KR skulls arc, you're basically ideally gonna hit 3-6 enemies, with crowds usually sitting in the 4-5 enemy mark. i'm kind of curious on what the conditions were to make it consistently hit above 5. i'm not sure if the original 10 target cap was like a, "well, sometimes it hits 6 or 7 in shoulder-to-shoulder fire farm" type thing to where it's just convenient since it tips over 5 every now and then? that's the vibe i get, anyways. for touch of tear, it's kind of a weird power because it changes so much depending on enemy positioning and saturation. it's a very finnicky kinda move, to where at high saturation and ideal enemy positioning where they are completely circled around you, it'll actually hit all 10 enemies. as long as there is like, an enemy in the "center" and they are really close to each other you're likely to hit 5 or so enemies even if they aren't ideally positioned. however, if there's like, roughly a 1.75+ character length gap at all in the enemy groupings you suddenly only start hitting 2-3 enemies, even if there's 10 or more dudes attacking you. it's extremely feast/famine in a way that feels kinda awkward, especially given it's overall low damage and long recharge. even at level 19, it feels really, really bad against +0 enemies. speaking of which, in terms of being a power that is supposed to be in the vein of like those t1/t2s that you end up dropping or skipping later down the road for more optimized builds, it feels a bit strange. i guess the nature of AOE options makes it kind of unique in that aspect in that most sets don't have a power like that - they either have an AOE that you take because you need everything you can get and it's good, or an AOE that's totally worthless (ie breath of fire, whew) that you would skip even on the way leveling up. given the actual damage of the move, it feels like it's supposed to be akin to something like broadsword's slice or katana's flashing steel which are also low-damage early AOEs that generally only hit 2-3 targets with a chance to hit up to their cap. but it feels like the cute twist of having the "potential" to hit up to 10 targets is something that is actively making the power trend more towards the breath of fire side than the slice/flashing steel side more than anything else. the damage itself is pretty middling and seems to be meant to kinda whittle away at enemies but even with lvl50 generic IOs vs. +0 family and skulls, the move takes 5-6 uses to actually kill minions. i can't say it's useless because at that level you're basically just taking shit to fill out any string at all and having an aoe that does damage is Something, but the damage combined with the really long recharge makes it kinda feel that way. it's a power that really starts to gain value with higher saturation but the level of saturation needed for it to really like, feel worth it is.. strange given the level range it's designed around helping. it'll be rare to see someone really clumping enemies up like that or fighting even x4 and above at those levels, i think. my gut feeling is that it has such a weird design because dark melee has the weird ass build up AND a bunch of weird AOEs in dark consumption and the build up (soul drain? whatever it's called) that are on longer cooldowns. like there's a bit of a soft-touch to it because of how there might be a potential for someone on a high-end build to really push the limits and somehow use all of those together with a good AOE to push dark melee (which is traditionally seen as a ST-focused set) from being primarily ST to a more all-rounder gimmick in the vein of like, super strength or something. in my testing with trapdoor though, those two powers are just like... kinda there? touch of fear at maximum soul drain saturation against +0s who are all clumped together starts to feel better but given the scale of high-end/endgame stuff, esp. when folks tend to fight at +2/3 (or true +4 rarely) it seems like the scale dips extremely hard into the fire breath "don't take this" range, which seems to be by design? it's a power pick that lacks a lot of potential juice over just grabbing the good stuff. cheers to another rambling post that nobody will read while i alt tab between afking in ouro and watching vergil get his ass kicked in dmc5

honestly fire armor needs something anyways because for a live-play comparison vs. it's contemporaries for "offense-oriented armorsets", shield defense, bio armor and (arguably) rad armor all really step on it. it's just in one of those awkward positions where it happens to be quite good from a meta perspective due to fire farms. if fire blast is justified in having a cleartime gap over it's competitors larger than TW vs other melee sets (esp. with high level builds, where the gap gets really silly) due to not having a survival-oriented secondary effect, fire melee should 'logically' follow that, right? really i'd just love buffs all the fire powersets because i want to play them (even more), haha. gimme combustion but footstomp instead of fire breath and make GFS even stronger! make ROTP usable outside of death!

it's a pretty shitty attitude that is really prevalent with a lot of the common posters, unfortunately. it feels like they're obsessed with 'winning' and 'being right' based on factoids over their own personal testing. the video ban has made this stuff especially more frustrating because so much data is ultimately based on "source: dude trust me" which makes communicating things that betray the common logic or understanding of powersets much harder. i'd actually say that the nature of what homecoming is means that it's naturally gonna attract 'those' types more than not - folks who have been sittin' on those chips for nearly two decades, with over a decade of things being "the same" and uh, the culture of internet interaction changin' making it worse. titan weapons bein' the memetic 'top tier so overpowered' set meant it was always likely going to be targeted for those kinda changes, regardless of where it sits in the "real" high-end power scale (with all the strange caveats that come into play there). SS is probably the next-in-line for that kind of misconception in terms of being smoothed out but nerfed (despite it not really being really 'great' over other potential picks), but uh, given how it's the most popular powerset in the game that thread is probably gonna be a real shitstorm if it ever happens, haha. fun fact about em vs tw aoe testing - my own testing of EM scrapper vs. beta TW scrapper cleartimes (via trapdoor testin') was showing that EM scrapper is roughly even with where my battleaxe times are, which is better than beta TW by a bit, haha.

thanks! between your tests covering the baseline of powersets (where the majority of folks will be playing since most folks use SOs/IOs/midlvl IO stuff) and random folks just submitting trapdoor times for testing on the extreme high-end fringes of powerset combinations it covers most of the important bases for determining a powerset's overall value/tier, since clear time/damage starts massively overshadowing safety once you get to that point due to all the ways you can build around survivability. it makes the judgement on the high end a little more straightforward than it appears because of how the game funnels into that aspect at that level. some day i want to make a thread about trapdoor testin' stuff because i love the idea of having a silly "objective" measure of general mission performance over just pylon bustin', but for that i'd really want video so it can be standardized more ie: approaches to tackling enemy groups/rotations/etc. it's definitely way sillier/more loose than your stuff because it's way less objective from a raw "power pick" view than your extremely organized and standardized testing but i'd bet with enough entries it'd be easy to start breaking down the data for what's good there and bringing in a more 'full' view of where powersets lie across the board. a large enough volume of data can probably account for the addition of armorset AOEs (ala rad armor procs, burn, etc) as well, especially when you start factoring in video proof! as an aside, i ended up respeccing my fire melee char and managed to push my time down to comical levels given some extreme luck/positioning: there's a weird factor of how greater fire sword is more stiff for starting off attacks which causes a time loss, but it's gained in just how often crit strikes fires off on it - you can really start abusing crit fireball/FSC with good application of it over even crit whirling smash/titan sweep because of how those two powers combined with build up tend to do just enough damage even without crits to wipe out +3 minions, leaving only the LTs

ah yeah my b, i totally did while writing the post, haha i don't like the use of galaxy brain's tests as the end-all be-all of determining set strength because of the caveats they have which is why i've always run my own stuff to just check the relative power levels of my characters to each other. there's lots of small things to check in terms of nuance that can affect "real" strength in terms of clearspeed/safety for high end builds that can really flip traditional 'tier' logic on it's head. it's not that they're bad or anything, but you gotta consider what strengths are being measured when you're lookin' at them instead of just accepting it as The One Truth. the beta set in terms of performance is fine as is, it's still got relatively top tier ST and top tier safety in AOEs, but in terms of AOE clear times (which in high-end stuff matters significantly more than safety due to the nature of how builds trend and how much easier it is to account for defense) folks calling it top tier is just one of those interestin' observations to me since it doesn't gel with my own testing. it feels like an extension of folks acknowledging the times on tsuko's posts to say "oh, see, TW is still top tier!" but not acknowledging that those results are immediately followed by 'em saying "there's not really like, a real to deal with titan weapons jank anymore when smoother sets get the same results and can be better overall" i'd just prefer if people bothered to just test that stuff presented to 'em instead of seeing a chart and going "yeah sure looks good", y'know? i want to see contributions to that to get a better scope of where it sits instead of just what i've recorded and what galaxy brain's recorded!

no, dude, you're still not reading the patch notes enough. here, let me highlight it for you, because like i said, it's not obvious in patchnotes but insanely obvious in consistent testing Whilst Momentum is active, all Titan Weapons attacks will: Recharge 25% faster, with proportional damage and endurance cost reduction per the standard damage formulas Have an additional 25% endurance cost reduction as in, momentum-up attacks do roughly 30-40 points less base damage than their momentum up versions (this is after the overall 8 to 10pct adjustment on dmg for moves) as to scale the momentum up attacks to their better rech time as to fit the formula. also, my live mission testing results are at the bottom of the first page? and on the last page? you seem to have stopped upon seeing my first post with pylon times because it's like, a few posts down from that? or you just saw numbers and assumed they were pylon times? i dunno what to tell you, man. they've been there. you're spot on for the complaint though, especially since that's what i said from the getgo? it bothers me that the flexibility for live play and slotting was lost for The One True String And Slotting due to a weird incongruity re:that specific thing w/momentum up attacks doing less damage causing the One True String And Slotting to remain strong while every other string/slotting suffers because it takes advantage of following FT with non-momentum up RA

in my testing, on high-end builds (see: i only play [x]/bio scrappers) , it actually performs close-to equal to a high-end TW build for general mission clearing/AOE damage - a lot of it is due to how it has a mitigating factor of being able to use fireball without having to worry about redraw/momentum. it's about equal to ice melee, which also sits at the top for similar reasons. both of them have a 10-target cap radius 10' radius attack that allows for crits on top of being able to smoothly integrate APP aoes in their AOE results. i've been posting all over but yeah, if you just observe the raw numbers FSC is better than whirling smash in terms of damage and most of the time you're not going to need to have max saturation for enemies (in a 10/15ft change) so it tends to take the lead due to just being generally more flexible and mobile than TW on top of doing more damage by taking advantage of +dmg and crit stuff previous post detailing testing i've done since this beta patch launched: i normally just eyeball ranges instead of recording anything- i've been doing these tests for a long time ot try and gauge the relative power level of my characters and sets at the extreme high-end of performance to get a realistic view since i never saw any data that matched my own experiences. annoyingly, since vids are banned all i have for testing sources is "source: dude trust me" and screenshots of my timer ie but yeah, there are factors to consider if you're thinking about strength at the absolute ends of builds as well vs. 'SOs only' or 'generic slotting' - scrappers especially have to consider more variables due to how everything interacts with the crit strikes ATO. conventional wisdom and these tests aren't the end all-be-all of strength determination, it's only just another facet to consider when judging the set as a whole

it's not 8-10% only, please re-read the patch notes carefully and test stuff before you correct me. it's kind of tucked away in the patchnotes, but it's there and very very obvious in testing when you're quantitatively keeping track of results instead of "feel". why do you think i keep mentioning non-momentum damage? the overall goal of FT x2 during momentum uptime hasn't changed, but all the shuffling around it has lost value, which is what i'm talking about - instead of shufflin' around and being able to produce equally good or better results you just do The One String because it's now the best when that tiny bit of flexibility really set TW apart before (at a personal level)

the nature of "doesn't like how it plays" is super real though because the caveat of TW was more in that than anything that you could numerically track, haha. folks who play TW can confirm that as the strength of the team goes up, TW's value goes down by a lot due to the jankiness of the set. it's probably where a lot of the discrepancy in impressions lies, since if it gets any time to breathe or is on regular content, it's waaaaaaaay above the board. the main thing that addresses that aspect is the momentum whiff change + the change to crushing blow, honestly - those two things help smooth out the on/off flow of TW in exchange for a lot of it's power. however, it kinda ties in to that aspect of feeling like something is a bit 'off' - the thing that's missing now is the explosive "wow" factor of TW just blending a target. the nerfs to the AOE damage/radius alongside the changes to momentum up damage make it so momentum doesn't feel like a gratifying release after build up/a momentum starter attack. the rollar coaster is shortened, so the climb to the top is faster but the drop is much less exciting, if ya dig? honestly, i'm kinda bothered that scrapper TW still has a top tier ST damage string by nature of how the 'standard' build and string are laid out when i was getting equal or better times with my own string/build and that string is total garbage now. i liked that there was room for creativity/open interpretation to achieve optimal performance still, especially since i think my personal string is way better than the standard string for live play/performance due to the nature of how crit strikes is placed. it basically went from 'hey optimizing this can happen a few diff ways' vs "just make sure crit strikes is in follow through and that you do non-momentum rend armor as your non-momentunm starter" ...but that's nitpicking that i'm sure nobody gives a shit about, haha

so, i was doin' a bit more testing yesterday to check bopper's theoretical string and yeah, pretty much coming to the same conclusions in terms of BS. adding any non-focus spending attack smooths out the awkwardness of EM's strings in terms of feel - when it's a snipe, it drastically improves the performance as well and gives the set a unique identity in how often you are doing ET and just shredding your HP. in sequences of good luck, your health just plummets alongside the pylon's, which is pretty hilarious and great feeling. pylon times: overall the ST results are pretty strong- it's still worse than WM but overall in ST damage results on scrappers it's probably in the top 3 overall - the moonbeam string seems to put it about even to TW and WM at the probable loss of having better AOE/general performance. given that TW has two sources of -res in it's string, it's probably arguable that it sits at the top or 2nd place spot (WM is really, really insane, haha) for ST damage. pretty cool, but it kinda sucks that the smooth feeling of that is related to just kinda forcing in an alternate attack to ignore the mechanics of the set, haha. i went ahead and also did some trapdoor testing (this is a live play/general AOE test done by clearing a regular mission) with it as well to see if it might be better than fireball since it's so much smoother than EM-only strings and gives you another good high-damage option that doesn't mess with your general strings. general starter is what you'd expect - run up, FT->fast ET->whirling hands->ball lightning->power crush. then clear up the trash left with faster attacks. EM/bio/mu scrapper 5m42s 5m18s 5m21s 5m18s 5m24s the performance is actually a bit above average, though i'm not quite sure why. power crush isn't really doing much as far as i can tell, so it's entirely on whirling hands + ball lightning and EM's ability to clean up scraps quickly.

figured i'd crosspost my trapdoor testing for other sets alongside EM/bio/fire to compare. i'm curious if anyone is willing to try and compare their results. recently learned that the optimal string for TW is different (rather, it's the standard everyone uses than the one i use which i guess had the same results as that one) and found that the pylon times range from 1m5s to 1m35s. the average was around 1m20s~ across 20 or so pylons which is significantly better than the 1m40s average from string i was using prior. however, the reason why it has such great results kinda bugs me. it's related to the use of crit. strikes on follow through and how the standard string always ends in follow through-> non-momentum rend armor. because the non-momentum version of rend armor does so much more damage and follow through is always setting up crit strikes, you end up gaining a massive amount of damage compared to using rend armor inside the string as much as possible (as per the strings i've built) because of how much less damage the momentum-up version of follow through does. it really ties into that backwards feeling i was talking about re: momentum mechanics and how it feeds into weird situations re: optimization that feel 'backwards'. i'm sure it's probably fine overall since it's the output is generally OK usin' that string on scrappers. i'll have to do some brute testing, i guess. also need to run trapdoor with crit strikes in FT, but i can't imagine that it'd have better results than it being in AOD.

okay, went ahead and did some live mission/aoe testing for EM scrapper vs. my other sets so try and compare them. i ended up trying to supplement the set's lack of great AOEs with fireball. as usual, my method was testing by running mender ramiel's defeat trapdoor mission at +4x8. all incarnates, similar rules to pylon testing where you don't use hybrid active nor lore pets - only destiny and yellow insps for the blinds that the arachnos do. you kill everything up to trapdoor except the popup turrets (this favors ranged by a lot to run off to the sides) and then waste trapdoor. timer starts when you self-buff w/ destiny or whatever, ends when trapdoor turns blue. why trapdoor? it has a good combination of enemies, is a straight line with room for enemies to flee still and a decently sturdy EB at the end. the general strategy was to open with TF (with crit strikes procced because it's got an insanely high chance to fire off), fireball, whirling hands, power crush (with focus on). that's pretty much it. you just keep doing that or go into ET/bonesmasher to pick off stragglers. if melt armor was up, i'd use it on the next possible group. times are as such: EM/bio/fire scrapper 6m34s - 1st run 5m44s 6m2s 5m48s 5m41s 5m43s 5m57s 5m21s 5m42s now, those are pretty meaningless by themselves without context, so here's a giant list of times i just ran on a bunch of chars: so, yeah. it seems pretty alright in AOE - pretty much middle of the road as far as i can tell. power crush is a bit disappointing for AOE purposes, but as a non-weapon set you have the advantage of not having to deal with redraw times for stuff, so it's something to consider re: picking up fireball or ball lightning. nothing too out of the blue there, i guess, but a tad disappointing when the ST results that i've been able to muster have been just kinda "ok"

well, just spent the better part of the night pyloning with em/bio/fire scrapper, best time was 1m20s, worst time was 1m50s~ on the best string i've got so far. average around 1m40s (both mode and mean) probably killed about i dunno, 100 or so pylons? maybe more? it was a fucking lot, haha. i cleared out most of the map at least 5 times, i think? anyways, used the general lineup for incarnate stuff, t4 muscle core, t4 ageless core, t4 assault core (turned off), t4 degen core. the build itself is extremely proc heavy, but doesn't quite feel 'optimal' just yet. my string was: melt armor starter-> (( TF-> ET->BC->EP->PC))x n - you save build up for TF start string, don't use it immediately when it's up. melt armor as soon as it goes up again, which should be about 10-30s before you kill the plyon. overall the set feels pretty similar to fire melee in terms of output on a ST level over a sustained period of time, which is... weird, i guess? it definitely hits harder when things get lucky (and esp. in short bursts, incinerate DOT be damned), but overall the average time is pretty similar to my fire melee/bio tests, just with a faster best time (1m20s flat vs 1m27s). it's like.. there generally is no major damage spike that occurs based off crits, it's just a slow burn string that you do until they die, with luck factoring into the crits on the lesser powers. there's a really bizarre aspect to building/strings that is really hard to ignore after awhile, that i think is probably the source of some folk's anguish? i haven't really read the EM thread so i've got no idea how much this has been addressed but i'm guessing probably quite a bit given how you can feel it when trying to optimize strings. specifically, it's that to optimize the string, you actively want to avoid setting up crit strikes to follow into two strongest powers in the set. since TF and ET don't really do anything for your damage (in the same vein as a crit) when they crit, it's actually a massive (20-40s minimum just slotting crit strikes differently) damage/time loss for sustained DPS when you do that. it feels like, backwards against how you optimize strings in other sets where you generally want to have crit strikes fire off before you use your two biggest hitting attacks (unless the anim time is obscene, like eagle's claw). the hyperbole to it is like, "boy, these crits feel worthless" but it's not like i've really gone and done any fighting against live enemy sets yet, so i've no idea if that feeling transfers over to something out of just nonstop sustained ST (which would theoretically be EM's forte, i guess) i'm not sure how i feel about the ST performance just yet since the string i'm running just feels super unoptimal but i'd have to really fiddle with the slotting on powers to mess with that. something just feels 'wrong' about it. i have a good feeling about the AOE though, because power crush kept swatting enemies way off to my side during testing when they'd run up - if it's possible to do something like crit strikes-> fireball->whirling hands-> power crush as a consistent string, there's probably a lot of juice AOE-wise. i'll do some trapdoor testing another day, but figured i'd report my testing and see if anyone else was getting that vibe.

how would you feel about non momentum attacks having their damage overall lowered but momentum keeping the same damage on its attacks? i'm sure this was tested/considered since it's such an occam's razor answer, but is it one of those things where it skews off The Formula too much to keep a decent balance between the two? the rift between "its a buff because better dpa" and "why is my damage per attack being lowered when the mechanic thematically is a giant sword accelerating" is a pretty real thing to consider, especially with the additional layer of "i just did build up/bm and now my attacks do less damage...?" kinda feelin'

it's universal as far as i can tell, between the brute and scrapper i've got. i can record video of it, but the 'no video' rule makes it kind of a problem to share, haha. it's not only on initial draw as well - if the weapon is drawn on live, it still has the 4s~ cast time

sorry, no idea how to tag folks so i'm quoting you: any idea if non-momentum crushing blow acting the way it is in beta (being 2s activation time instead of ~4s on live) is a result of the redraw fix? or if it's a bug or somethin'? curious if that's one of those weird side effects where the 'proper' activation time (it's always listed as 2s) comes into play with the fix rather than whatever is going on with the live version edit: probably not doing any favors for the case to buff fire melee (it needs it) but, lol: started adding in melt armor into my clearing times and turns out i can match/beat live TW trapdoor times with a helping of fireball. what a power, man that was the first run i did with melt armor, too! with a fuckup where i ran out of endurance!

the reason you can't do the string is related to the crushing blow change. on live, crushing blow's momentum begins when the animation is finished while the sped-up version of crushing blow in the beta actually has momentum begin when the attack "hits" in the animation, which still has an additional second or so of animation time left before you can swing. so you're losing about a second of momentum uptime. honestly though, at the moment it's better to just do AOD last so you can get the crit strikes proc going off for the non-momentum version of crushing blow. anyhow, it definitely feels a bit weird to me to see all these posts commenting on tsuko's results going "see, tw is still top tier!" without really addressing my own testing, but i guess that doesn't really fit that viewpoint, haha. using proc-based builds to determine high-end strength/tiering, especially in the scope of pyloning has always been one of those things i've wondered about - i've got personal times on pylons with battleaxe dipping into the 1m5s range and broadsword times dipping into the 1m18s range but it's like, conventionally those powersets aren't seen as "top tier", for good reason. when it comes to high-end builds, a lot of the conventional 'tier' knowledge seems to go out the door but there's always a desire to just try and shove those results into that scope without really considering other factors.

is this actually like, true? what even were the paid powersets, 'cuz between stj, tw and staff you got TW tier, stj bein' OK (only great on stalkers after ATOs are considered) and staff uh, being extremely bad. what were the ranged sets? beam rifle and water? beam rifle was like, real, real bad before SCORE, wasn't it? 2/5 doesn't feel like a trend to me anyways, did a bit more testing and yeah, TW got hit pretty bad. in terms of my extremely narrow scope of chars/builds, i hate to say that i really can't see a great reason to actually pick it over practically any other powerset at the moment given how much damage is weighted at that level vs. mitigation. the additional layers of mitigation it adds basically do nothing, and way more flexible (in terms of being able to smoothly play in live scenarios and power choice/slotting wise) sets are available and better. like... almost every single melee powerset i've tested is either equal or better than TW in terms of both AOE and ST performance at the moment. i'm not really sure how i feel about high-end tw being roughly good as high-end broadsword, haha. i know folks are out for blood so they'll be fine as long as it gets it's knees broken so i figure there won't be as much of an outcry, but i might as well provide a "realistic" perspective in terms of high-end performance that TW is being specifically called out for also, in my additional testing, the main thing that actually adds to the smoothness of TW is the change to crushing blow. the other changes ultimately don't seem to do much to smooth things out at that high-end besides making TW more similar feeling to other powersets (the vibe i get instead of giant momentum death top i.e. guts from berserk is more like... 'slightly slower katana', haha). i'd imagine in SO and mid-level IO builds that the buffs probably smooth out the experience a lot more since double whirling smash will be more available to them, but it's definitely notable.

for reference, just tested a few trapdoor runs with kat/bio as well and was hitting around 5m30~s on those runs (with huge fuckups!), so beta tw is also worse than kat/bio in the aoe department as well, meaning it's overall output is worse than that set too. ofc, it has more mitigation but those kat/bio runs included having to deal with healing more/using parasitic aura more anyways