siolfir

Rage.

Pre-shutdown, just going with the highest level achieved and only going through melee sets: Dual Blades to 50 (Stalker; played Brute + Scrapper versions to lower levels) Street Justice to 38 (Stalker, for CU crits; I also had a Brute but stopped in the 20s) On Homecoming: Rad Melee to 50 (Brute, on test with a Stalker) Psi Melee to 50 (Stalker) Titan Weapons at 35 and 50 (Scrapper on test using insta-leveling, thus "at" vs "to") At some point I've played every melee set to at least the mid-20s except for Battle Axe, Katana, Savage, and Staff; I haven't played those sets at all, and only played "Claws" to 50 as a Widow, having stalled out in the early 30s on a Brute and Scrapper on live. Include Blast sets and you've got Water Blast (here and pre-shutdown), Beam Rifle (pre-shutdown to mid-30s), and Dual Pistols (to 50 twice pre-shutdown on Blaster + Corruptor: Swap Ammo counts, right?); plus the fast-snipe changes on Homecoming mean that you can add Dark Blast, Fire Blast, Dark Assault, and Fiery Assault (I didn't have a build that would get unassisted fast snipes before). Long story short - I've tried almost all of them. That doesn't make me like the gimmicks; in many cases it was "let's try the new shiny to see how I feel about it." And I'm not the only one who doesn't like gimmicks for gimmicks' sake: the effect of Static in Electrical Affinity was reduced dramatically from what it was based on player feedback while it was on test to make the set a more consistent performer that relied less on an internal gimmick. Up-and-down performance is debated for sets like Super Strength (stacked Rage vs double crashes, is it worth it?), for ATs like Dominators (Domination vs not), or using crashing armor tier 9s instead of building for reliable performance through IO sets. Titan Weapons is slow without Momentum but even then it's still comparable in damage to other sets (seriously, the animations aren't that much slower than Rad Melee's single target chain) and it's such a noted outlier with Momentum that a lot of people put up with it (again, I'm not one of them), but for the most part people build and play to remove these variations from the game. But you don't even need to try a specific set for a "gimmick", since they exist all over the place: just look at the redside inherents. Brutes chase Fury as a minigame (and that variable performance has been changed repeatedly to make it more consistent), Stalkers get some control over their critical hits and have Assassin's Focus, and Corruptors can try to manipulate their attack chains to get Scourge to fire easier, usually with mixed results. Those "bland, boring, just do damage" sets gain those gimmicks for those ATs.

I've played several "gimmick" sets already. Mostly it depends on the nature of the gimmick, but slow/fast/slow animations based on the gimmick is a quick no-go for me: you'll note that this exact situation is exactly why everyone recommends dropping the chance for hide proc in Assassin's Strike, so that it doesn't go into "slow mode" on you when the proc triggers on a different attack. And if people just want high performance with variable speed animations, well, Titan Weapons is sitting right there already with the only compromise being those variable speed animations. It would have to have a similar level of performance as current TW across the spectrum for me to even consider it, and then I'd still probably drop it like I did the TW Scrapper I tried on test (to see if I could deal with the set) when the inconsistent feel drove me nuts. The biggest issue I have is the concept that every set has to have a gimmick and that "push buttons wee" is a bad thing. Why not have sets that have unconditional high performance in at least one area, while having middling-to-poor performance in others? Isn't that also variety? It can be a specialized set without any gimmicks. It just doesn't do its specialty as well as it used to.

Which is exactly what happens when you have a Dual Blades or Street Justice style combo system as well, you just change which powers 1, 2, 3, and 4 are to "builders" and "consumers" or whatever your optimal combo chain happens to be. For Stalkers, Assassin's Focus is this exact mechanic (build Focus, use Assassin's Strike for a guaranteed double-damage hit), and the biggest change to Stalker playstyle was actually including Assassin's Strike in an attack chain (the ATOs, on the other hand, made you think about when you were going to use Build Up and whether it was worthwhile to switch your chain for a different attack after the proc drops you back into hidden status - most of the time the answer is "no" because you make that your normal chain, anyway). The combo system in Street Justice forces you to either skip using your best DPA attack - which contains a control - to lead a fight, so that it can begin recharging more quickly and allow you to use it again sooner, or to use it at minimal effect - a minimal effect that fails to meet the design criteria for the power's recharge (25 seconds should be scale 4.36, it does scale 3.18 which should be 17.625 seconds). And you know what? Some people like that. Yes. I can already play a Stalker.

A decision I despised then, as well. At least Street Justice didn't require as much micromanaging as Dual Blades, but both tried to dictate what order you activated powers to get the best performance out of an unrelated power. Why can't a set have powers that all work well on their own merits? I don't find that idea stale or regressive nearly as much as I find the "add a gimmick to it!" attitude repetitive and bland.

1.0 cast and 0.5 hit are the numbers used by Power Thrust and Chain Induction, which are also melee attacks that share the old Energy Transfer animation.

True, but taking the time to analyze targets and select only those with sufficient health also cuts into your time dealing damage, making the set slower than it would be on a single hard target with tens of thousands of hit points. That's even ignoring the time to reposition to the new target so you don't corpse-blast the one you have targeted from target_enemy_near. When solo, this is less of an issue as spawns tend to collapse on you, but even then there were reasons to use it on anything: I used the old Energy Transfer as a fast target elimination for troublesome minions and lieutenants along the lines of Assassin's Strike. It no longer functions that way, and none of the stuns in Energy Melee apply as quickly as it used to. And while target selection isn't unique to Energy Melee, the set also has poor AoE damage so target-swapping with multiple single-target attacks are how it clears large groups when solo. Obviously in this case picking a mob off in one second instead of three makes for better clear times. For what it's worth, I wasn't talking about dying to the self-damage from Energy Transfer in my last sentence when I said "it wasn't worth dying for anymore", I was referencing my statement that "the set lives and dies on Energy Transfer" referring to its performance competitive to other sets relies on how often you use it, and that it's currently not so much better than anything else to justify using it every time it's recharged. The double-meaning on ET providing neutral-to-negative mitigation (slow to hit, long rooting animation, self-damage) was unintentional in that case. This is definitely worth considering. But in the case of damage, the faster hit times means that the power acts more effectively as mitigation, since the target dies faster. I'm almost positive that's why originally pure DoT attacks were allowed to violate the damage/rech/end design formulas, with most doing about 10% more damage than they should. It also matters when it comes to stacking stun magnitude, but after a couple of attacks that's less of an issue for EM since the stun comes from so many sources, and you want that first stun applied as quickly as possible anyway to reduce the window of time the mob has to act.

You can thank @Bopper - I got them from the spreadsheet in this thread: For those looking at powers from the other melee sets, I posted a short list in that thread here but will expand on it here: Midnight Grasp: 0.53 Clobber: 0.7 Seismic Smash: 0.83 Crushing Uppercut, Golden Dragonfly, Follow Through: 0.90 Eagle Claw, Rend Armor (Momentum): 1.20 Cleave, Head Splitter, Greater Fire Sword, Greater Ice Sword, Shatter: 1.23 Radiation Siphon, Arc of Destruction (Momentum): 1.30 Impale, Stun: 1.43 Knockout Blow: 1.60 Greater Psi Blade: 1.67 Eviscerate, Ripper: 1.70 Total Focus (Energy Assault): 1.77 Energy Transfer, Devastating Blow: 2.20 Rend Armor (no Momentum): 2.27 Total Focus (non-Dom), Thunder Strike: 2.30 Arc of Destruction (no Momentum): 2.47 Concentrated Strike: 2.53 I ignored primarily DoT attacks (Freezing Touch, Hemorrhage, One Thousand Cuts) since that damage isn't really fully dealt until the DoT ticks off, but included Midnight Grasp because the initial hit is still significant. For giggles, I included some of Titan Weapons with and without Momentum, and Follow Through (which requires it), in italics. Stun was only included because there were suggestions to use that animation for Energy Transfer - I don't like that idea because the animation just looks like a throw: that's fine for Impale, but bad for a punch. It's off-topic for this thread, but Concentrated Strike is the worst offender, and should probably have at least one of the hand-waving circles removed from the animation to bring the hit time down - I don't know why any single-target attack should have a hit time over two seconds.

(emphasis mine) I think that the barrier is mostly perceived - that some people expect that there will always be toxic behavior (there isn't; in my experience the PvP community here is one the the least toxic) and that their personal interest isn't sufficient to overcome the possibility of a toxic encounter. Almost all of my PvP encounters have been neutral-to-good in nature, but not all of them. But I don't know what they expect the community to do about it, since players can't kick others out of broadcast except for their own viewing (ignore!) and can't ban players for bad behavior: that's for GMs, and then only for abusive language since entering the zone (or arena) and waiting out the timer is consent to be attacked by other players.

The highlighted portion here is also part of the problem: Energy Transfer deals self-damage and the damage hits all of 0.1 seconds before the damage from Total Focus (2.2 vs 2.3 hit time). By that point your target is probably dead on a team unless it's a large target, so you're saying that the way the set is competitive is taking self damage while frequently hitting corpses on teams. The old Energy Transfer hit 0.5 seconds into the animation and so on teams that damage actually was highly likely to get applied, and the faster hit provided additional mitigation that the set otherwise lacks while the faster overall animation allowed you to use other powers for mitigation. Yes, the set lives and dies on Energy Transfer. The problem is that Energy Transfer isn't worth dying for anymore.

And just because it's been brought up that this thread hasn't had a lot of discussion and that it's been in other threads... here are a few from a very quick perusal of the Suggestions & Feedback section. It's almost like this has been talked about a lot already.

Which still doesn't get rid of it using the old Tanker melee modifier rather than the current one, but if the plan to normalize all the pseudopets to use the AT modifiers rather than differing scales on the pet modifier is imminent, then there may be no reason to change it. I was just pointing it out since I thought that there could've actually been an issue with the pigg files based on those details. Either way, thanks again for creating the spreadsheets.

Other bugs that were known: the Sentinel version did no damage (guess which AT isn't listed in your damage scales?) and if those scales are actually using the pet AT modifier then the Tanker version is bugged since it uses their old melee scale. I know the Sentinel version did damage the last time I played my Sentinel, but that was a while ago. There might have been a merge issue reverting the fix if those are from current pigg files.

This is off-topic, but since it was brought up as a complaint about Energy Melee, and the way to reduce endurance consumption over time using the design formulas is to reduce damage over time - something that is a hard NO for me - I want to address it here. For Brutes, Fury creates more damage (+2% per point of Fury) than slotting for damage, so especially at low levels you should slot accuracy and endurance reduction before damage. Blasters (now) get sustain powers that help their recovery or else refill their endurance. All Invulnerability provides for endurance management is some drain resistance, while also running toggles with mid-to-high endurance costs. Sure, the drain resistance helps a little since the Brute is also likely to be attacked by the mobs with endurance drain and -recovery effects since that's part of their role on the team, but that isn't a fair comparison taking a set that offers endurance help with one that doesn't. As for the Scrapper, unless it was also Invulnerability (which I am assuming it was not) it's the same situation, with several secondaries including the ever-popular Bio providing +recovery and/or endurance refills which Invulnerability simply does not have. Energy Melee is no worse than other primaries for endurance consumption, although Whirling Hands should hit harder than it does or else have a larger radius based on the design formulas. But Energy Transfer also violates the endurance cost formula (costing less than it should for the recharge), instead paying for extra damage and an endurance discount with self-damage.

I think there's only been one post in this thread that was seeking to remove someone's preferred kind of gameplay (which was the post quoted in the pot meet kettle response you found umbrage with); instead the premise of the thread is to ask what is causing a barrier to entry for people from trying a different kind that they may or may not enjoy, but usually don't know because they haven't tried. As for smack talking being an emotionally driven response - yes, it can be. It can also be an attempt to create one (ie, to "tilt" your opponent). I personally find it either petty or stupid, and occasionally actually humorous based on the creativity and/or wit, similarly to how I see insult comedy: most of the time tedious, but so great when done well. Others' reactions may vary, and the tedium of "learn to play" talk isn't strictly a PvP thing, either (hooray for team drama on a game that's typically pretty easy when for once the team doesn't curb stomp everything in the way). There are a-holes in all parts of the community (just look at the pro-/anti-knockback threads) and from my experience (most of which was arena with some zone) the PvP community here overall is full of helpful people who are looking for more players, not more victims. As for the OP, my barrier to entry is simply laziness. I have at best a mild interest anymore, and I've been in RV a few times but have all of 0 "PvP builds" across any of my characters. Prior experience with arena here would have me trend towards arena-friendly builds if I were going to invest the time to make a PvP build, but as I said - I'm just too lazy to bother because I have other things going on instead.

I just want to say thanks for the work putting it together - I had started something similar and burned out before I got even halfway through the ATs, and mine didn't have a couple of the columns (specifically Dmg2 and Time Hit). That Time Hit column also puts to numbers what people have been complaining about for a while in terms of power speed and corpse-blasting, too. Just look at Concentrated Strike having an animation time almost a half second less than Total Focus (2.83 vs 3.3), yet the damage hits 0.23 seconds later from the power activation (2.53 vs 2.3). Energy Transfer went from 0.5 seconds to 2.2 when it was nerfed, while other "heavy hitters" have times like 0.83 seconds (Seismic Smash), 0.9 seconds (Crushing Uppercut), with even the comparatively slow 1.3 (Eagle Claw), 1.6 (Knockout Blow), and 1.67 (Greater Psi Blade) still landing their damage more than a half second earlier.

Add me to the chorus of "revert the nerfs," and I'll also include the "eliminate the Stalker nerfs" for the set as well. Stalkers have lower stun percentage chances with all of the attacks except for Total Focus (which is 100% for everybody), are missing the only AoE, and in exchange they get Stun. Which is, unless you were trying to stack stuns to break Tanker mez protection (back when mez mattered in PvP) is a completely useless garbage power that doesn't deserve to exist in any melee set, let alone one that has a stun attached to every other power in it. Energy Transfer and Total Focus have either no or reduced critical damage respectively. Basically, make the set have the same secondary effects across the ATs, and allow the AT inherent to actually work correctly. Then port whatever you do for Stalkers over to Scrappers, replacing Assassin's Strike with Whirling Hands and Placate with Confront. What I don't want is a gimmick to add AoE damage that keeps long animation times (Rad Melee already exists, I've played it), nor do I want a BS momentum gimmick for fast/slow/fast speeds on attack chains. I want a reliable, hard-hitting set with a fluid attack chain, that can do top-tier damage for both burst and sustained durations. Old Energy Melee did that, and saying "old Energy Transfer is too good" is not a reasonable excuse: as I've pointed out before, the "fix" for Stalkers not doing enough damage was to essentially give every Stalker primary an "old Energy Transfer" tier single-target attack (Assassin's Strike with a Focus critical is a scale 5.0 attack in a 0.67-1.67 second animation, with 1 second the "default"; Energy Transfer is scale 4.56 and was a 1 second animation). Even with the changes reverted it would still probably only be 3rd or 4th in single target DPS for melee sets behind sets that leverage procs and/or have in-set -resistance.

Electrical Affinity

I can neither confirm nor deny using a respec to shuffle around a large number of enhancements just to rearrange them so the procs are to the right (then again, you get one every 10 levels so they aren't all that hard to get). Although usually I use them to move slots from early powers to later ones.

They don't, though - it's 85% for all four EATs and 90% for Tankers and Brutes. First, there is a lot of good advice in this thread - which I hinted at in my post by referring to the market allowing you to keep up with the paltry inf gains at low levels, but I was also trying to avoid telling you how to play: although I disagree with "pure tank", "pure support" builds, I know some people prefer to play that way and the game isn't hard enough that I can't drag the mostly dead weight around on a team. So you can be a better Tank in general, and also make your own inf by following that advice. I strongly recommend that you do so. But you could also shortcut the whole thing and just read this post, which is in this same section of the forum: That's enough that if you're going to waste inf on SOs (you shouldn't, but they're convenient if you can't or won't get IOs) I think it'll get you through to the level 45 sets without making any more inf along the way. I may be off on that, too, I haven't actually done it recently. The advice to hit 50 on at least one character isn't bad, because the inf gains increase as you level and the higher-level common recipes sell for much more, but if that's not how you want to play it's also unnecessary. But if you make a lot of alts, which it sounds like you do, and don't level at least one up to the higher levels so it can fund the others, you'll need to use the market to keep up until somewhere in the mid-30s.

You can literally sit at the door of a mission and collect rewards without doing any damage. The reason you get "fast" inf for more damage is because you get more kills per minute, not because you get more per kill. Over the course of a single mission, if you clear it out, you'll get the same rewards as a high damage character - it will just take longer unless the high damage character is bad and keeps dying, causing themselves to slow down to the low damage character's pace (the tortoise and the hare scenario). I'm not going to say that everyone on a team gets an equal amount of xp, inf, and drops because that's not true, but everyone on the team (except the leader) gets an amount of xp and inf based on their level and the relative level of the mobs for defeats, and based on their level and the difficulty slider setting for end of mission rewards (their slider setting if they also have the mission and do a simultaneous completion), with some missions also throwing in inf for glowy clicks. The leader gets a different amount for end of mission which is usually lower than the rest of the team for some stupid reason (it's been reported as a bug a few times iirc). Enhancement, inspiration, salvage, and recipe drops are random and could go to anyone on the team, but it's a chance per teammate per kill with another chance at the end of a mission, and another at the end of a task force; the leader (or everyone through Ouroboros) gets an end-of-arc reward for story arcs. If you feel that you're not getting a lot of inf, it's because your team isn't defeating many mobs (playing on x1 with small teams?), the mobs are at a low relative level (playing on +0?), you have a 1.5/2xp booster running (which cuts inf gain), or you're not using the market and simply noticing that the low level drops don't keep up with your inf needs if you only go to the stores - which is why I'll either send inf from alts, use a 2xp booster to get past the low levels to where you can make enough to support yourself, join high-level teams since the level 50 common IO recipes sell for much more and you can get purple drops, or a combination of any or all of the above.

The fastest way to get an Ouroboros portal (at level 1, even though you can't even use it at that level) is to use a base teleporter to go to Echo: Galaxy City, then go to Ouroboros through the tram. That'll put you in the back of the zone, so you just go to the top of the sundial to get the exploration badge and get your portal. Since bases are free, can be made at level 1, and you don't need to unlock beacons anymore, you can do this on anyone. Edit to add: it's in one of the loading screen hints, but if you didn't know you can also use "/altinvite {character name}" to invite your alts to a super group without needing someone else.

I keep seeing this, and it's just blatantly false. DoT is bad for Scourge, since it determines whether or not all of the DoT ticks will Scourge based on the health at the time the power is activated. That means that the damage for the DoT has the same chance of Scourging as it did if it hit all at once, and the next power activated has a worse chance to Scourge than if the DoT hit all at once because the enemy health is higher when the power activates. Rain/Patch powers (aka Whirlpool) activate frequently, so they get a lot of chances to Scourge instead of just one. They also used to Scourge for more than double damage per tick (some still do), and they also used to use the Blaster modifier for damage because the old devs cheated on a lot of the pseudo-pet powers. But they aren't traditional DoT powers. As for the OP, if you want your attacks first and a bit more hit points, take a Corruptor. Otherwise play a Defender - the difference in -resistance is significant and will likely make up the difference in base damage, especially if you proc out your attacks.

Relevant posts: It wasn't a year ago (which matters if you were looking for it), but otherwise matches what @Number Six said earlier in the thread. Of particular note is @Captain Powerhouse stating that if it was immediately available he wouldn't use it and that if the cap was changed on a per-AT basis, the aggro cap for anyone not a Tanker would go down, rather than anyone getting an increase above the current limit. This one's a pretty cut-and-dried "hell no" by the devs.

Everyone else has already gone through the list for Dominator powersets, so I'll throw in the oddball AT just as an "if you haven't thought about it" situation: Fortunata. You get all of your holds and confuses (one single-target and one AoE of each), an AoE stun/nuke at 32, don't need perma-Dom for mez protection, have high positional defense with scaling resistances, and you have higher caps for hp and resistance if you're being buffed. And with all of that said, if you want to play a Dominator - as you said - then the easiest sets are earlier in the thread, but any control primary with a good IO build should have little to worry about.