Scrapper Melee Primary Testing: "Standard" environment

[Sir Myshkin]

2 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Also, anyone know the easiest way to load up IO's on Pineapple?

Welcome to the slowest part of testing on Pineapple. Assuming you didn't delete your SO built characters, hit a respec (fastest way to rebuild without level-up process), and use the POP menu option. There's a topic thread on it in the Beta section; here is the thread. It's a menu you set in the game files that a command line is able to bring up only on the Beta server that will give you access to a menu of all the enhancements in the game based on level range, piece, or whole set. It's the fastest way to load up a character with IO's. And it'll still probably take you about 15-20 minutes per character to grant yourself everything. I sorta time it on one of my tests with Tanks, and from creation screen (no customization, all preset costume choices) to full build took about 45 minutes >_< But I was also catalysing and boosting certain parts too, which take extra time.

Edited October 17, 2019 by Sir Myshkin
linked thread

[Infinitum]

13 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I do think that they'd be slower.... SR especially as it'd be luck based with no HP recovery. Invuln would probably be safer and more consistent with +Acc from Invincibility... worth a shot 🙂

 

Also, anyone know the easiest way to load up IO's on Pineapple?

/boost crafted_damage crafted_damage 50

 

/boost crafted_endurance_discount crafted_endurance_discount 50

 

/boost crafted_recovery crafted_recovery 50

 

/boost crafted_tohit_buff crafted_tohit_buff 50

 

/boost crafted_recharge crafted_recharge 50

 

/boost Crafted_Res_Damage Crafted_Res_Damage 50

 

/boost crafted_defense_buff crafted_defense_buff 50

 

/boost crafted_accuracy crafted_defense_accuracy 50

 

/boost crafted_run crafted_run 50

 

/boost crafted_fly crafted_fly 50

 

/boost crafted_jump crafted_jump 50

 

I just use commands like that then hit backspace up arrow to edit to change types.

 

edit: just added more commands. Just copy and paste.  Hit backspace up arrow enter for rapid multiple creation.  Don't hold me to the run jump and fly ones I couldn't remember if it had or did not have the word speed attached, bu I think it did not.  If you want different lvl IO just change the 50.

Edited October 17, 2019 by Infinitum

[Galaxy Brain]

Went through and replayed 5 runs of Ice, Rad, Broadsword and Elec melee given my better experience with the map and the sets. These 4 were chosen due to being outside the normal range of the Standard Deviation when looking at all the sets (on my personal runs specifically). The new runs looked at the 5 slowest times per set and I gave myself only 5 mulligans to try and best those specific times. I have included the original runs in Blue on both the main sheet and my page on the doc for prosperity.

 

All my runs are now within +/-6ish seconds of the "average" standard deviation (sort of a mouthful there lol).

 

 

 

I feel more comfortable with myself going forward with the runs more tightly packed. Sets I observed to be finicky based on types of spawns still have a higher SD than others, just no longer as wild as before.

 

 

In doing this, the averages of some sets changed.

 

 

Personal:

 

 

 

 

 

 Overall: 

 

 

 

[Galaxy Brain]

So, its been a little while and I would like to talk about where we are so far.

 

 

The Test Overall:

 

At this time, we have 301 runs of the mission across 19 powersets!  

 

The design of the mission and the enemies makes them really only dangerous when they swarm you / when there's a boss or two which tests your skill in both herding for efficiency as well as using the tools in the primary for safety. Being able to round up enemies was dangerous but it was the fastest way to clear the map, and it allows players to have to handle X factors such as enemy placement and how the AI navigates around you / decides to run to emulate a bit of team chaos in a way. This meta was able to show that nearly half the runs had recorded DNF's (Did Not Finishes):

1. Battle Axe - 2 Deaths, KD did not proc in time to prevent death
2. Dark Melee - 2 Deaths, vs a ST you are invulnerable but the lack of AoE damage and mitigation is very risky when tackling groups
3. Dual Blades - 2 Deaths, unlike other sets it had guaranteed Knockdown mitigation but the lengthy animations meant missing those leaves you open to several attacks.
4. Elec Melee - 2 Deaths, mitigation is tied to very slow powers, or ones that scatter the mob everywhere and then slows you down considerably
5. Fire Melee - 2 Deaths, no mitigation aside from well.. killing with fire. Several moments where kiting and pausing needed to happen
6. Martial Arts - 2 Deaths, the % chance to mitigate enemies is a gamble as always, making it almost all ST attacks to do this is even riskier
7. Rad Melee - 4 Deaths! Lack of guaranteed soft control is noticeable. The heal relying on Contamination is funky.
8. Savage Melee - 2 Deaths, no real mitigation outside of a ST knockdown with RNG

Sets not on this list had no defeats recorded and in general all had an impact in the general performance due to the time spent adjusting to danger. Most all sets with deaths are on the lower half with an exception being Rad Melee that had great performance when the ball was rolling in it's favor, but had some luck issues with how it's mitigation works.

 

 

The Standings:

 

            

 

Looking at the overall averages, we can see significant time gaps between certain groups of sets that I have decided to rank into tiers due to similar average clear times. I'll go over the tiers based on my personal experience and what has been noted from the other testers.

 

S TIER: 

Titan Weapons

On top by a significant, 46 second gap, TW has big advantages over the other melee sets. To start, it has generous +Range on all attacks which helps with it's cone positioning and general utility when it comes to moving about the map. It has several ways to get knockdowns on enemies and a parry for safety, and it also deals huge damage in tiny windows thanks to how momentum works. In my experience I never missed a momentum window, which allowed for 80% uptime for extremely fast attacks. TW has great AoE and ST capabilities which makes for great consistency between types of enemies as well.

 

 

A TIER:

Rad, Spines, Staff, Katana

These 4 sets are all top performers and have two things in common: AoE potential and Consistency. Rad and Spines could just delete whole spawns of minions by accident while focusing on single targets, while Staff and Katana had no moments of pause much like TW where you could throw them both at anything really and expect tight results. The former two have much higher standard deviation than the latter, but their ability to wipe mobs effortlessly kept their average times extremely fast with Spines sporting the fastest clear time. 

 

Compared to S tier, these sets seem to lack either the added safety/ST for consistent encounters, or just the raw stats to reach that next level.

 

 

B TIER:

Psy, Claws, War Mace, Battle Axe

A near mirror case to A tier but with worse averages, we see Psy and Claws have good AoE potential but with inconsistent results due to the nature of Insight as well as Follow-Up potentially missing which causes swings in your clear time. On the latter end, War Mace and Battle Axe are essentially the same set with a key difference being that WM has a much better 2nd cone in Shatter. Its a pleasant surprise to see Axe perform as well here based on the negative press it gets on the forums!

 

Compared to A tier, the sets lack the raw stats in animation time / AoE potency to hit the same level, but are still great.

 

 

C TIER:

Broadsword, Dual Blades, Savage Melee, Street Justice, Ice Melee, Elec Melee, Martial Arts

This tier is the definite mid-tier where we have a grab bag of different sets with different strengths and weaknesses.

• Broadsword and Dual Blades have similar issues looking at them again where their animation times leave room to be desired. BS is just a slower, thus worse, Katana and likewise the fancy DB animations leave you wide open and frustrated if you miss and on top of the wait time would break it's combo mechanic.
• Savage Melee feels incredibly average on the whole, but has potential to be very good with certain outside powers thanks to it's +Rech mechanic. Spending Blood Frenzy stacks is still confusing...
• Street Justice feels great, and is really only in C tier due to limited AoE potential causing you to take longer clearing mobs. Skipping ahead a bit to Martial Arts, it too has very limited AoE which both affects kill speed AND safety compared to StJ's multiple AoE knockdowns.
• Ice and Elec both have great AoE potential but oddly enough share a similar issue with mitigation and ST damage. Ice is incredibly safe, but sacrifices speed and positioning time in order to leverage it's powerful Ice Patch fully, and it's AoE seems to be much better than it's ST with an amazing cone and Footstomp. Elec on the flip side also has great AoE.... but very poor mitigation and ST damage which bit into it's time.

Compared to B tier, these sets suffered with poor animation times or AoE output specifically.

 

D TIER:

Fiery Melee

Fiery Melee is a shock due to it's only effect being more damage. Nearly every fire set in the game tops the charts in this regard except for this one... What the Melee Set is lacking is solid / reliable AoE damage out of the gate unlike Fireball / Hotfeet / Etc,  where you have a slow PBAoE and a narrow (though ranged) cone to work with. More troubling is the sheer lack of any mitigation which allowed other sets to buy time to deal damage in big groups, and made Fire pay for time spent adjusting position for safety.

 

E TIER:

Kinetic Melee

KM is a very safe, but very slow animating set. So while sure, you had no trouble with actually finishing the mission the time it took you to kill enemies was hindered by the long attack times and the need to ramp up your +Damage tool. Having a slow cone that also deals knockback, albeit at a range, was not much of a help either. Really the main issue is the animation times being counter productive to the set's build up mechanic on top of having one of it's only AoE's scatter enemies which further makes it hard to use it's siphon.

 

F TIER: 

Dark Melee

Lastly, Dark Melee has the slowest averages due to having the worst AoE of all the tested melee sets. While a great pairing with many secondaries as time has shown, by itself it can be downright tedious even with Soul Drain to have to cycle target to target with the occasional line up of Shadow Maul hitting max targets. This even lead to some death's as the set could not mitigate a crowd's damage quickly!

 

Its interesting to me that the lowest sets on the totem pole are either hyper-offensive or have a unique, ramp-up damage buff. I feel with different secondaries or simply IO's to help them survive we would see much different results from these ones in particular!

 

 

Consistency:

For giggles, I have also tiered the Standard Deviation to see which sets are most consistent per run.

 

 

 

Next Steps:

Going forward, I am going to re-run the tests given the IO spread for WP given by @Sir Myshkin. This will give a ton of survival which should ease the lives of several sets that had to pause for safety at times, as well as an overall Rech / DPS boost to several key powers. 

 

If anybody would like to continue runs on here on SO's, or even try with another secondary given the standardized parameters, please give it a whirl! The more data we can gather the better!

[Galaxy Brain]

So, I have put some work into IOs but slotting up is tedious to say the least. I was able to redo a few builds on the suggested slotting and re-run the exact same +0/x3 tests while I had the time

 

 

Only ran 4 sets so far and only 5 times each. The sets chosen were for the following reasons:

 

Battle Axe:

On my runs, BA was the closest set to the overall average, so I wanted to see how it performed on the @Sir Myshkin build. Looking at it now though, BA can slot Force Feedback in *every* attack which may make it perform even higher if we are maximizing. Nothing really notable about BA here though, it just sort of performed "Better".

 

Titan Weapons:

The best performer on SO's, I wanted to get it out of the way with IO's. Something notable is that the lack of Defensive Sweep made it a smidge slower to start momentum due to it being the fastest option out of your "slow" attacks, and being a cone guarantees you gain it. Titan Sweep is not much slower though, but times when Crushing Blow was the other choice is when misses became relevant. The biggest factor to speed here though was Build Momentum being on a very short timer. Being able to constantly have a damage boost + high momentum was wonderful. No real endurance issues either.

 

Dark Melee:

The worst performer on SO's. Shadow Maul on a 3 second timer and faster Soul Drain +BU proc helps a lot, but lining up Shadow Maul is just tricky at a base level as enemies move about. Loading up the Endurance Power or Soul Drain with procs may help here tho. TW, Rad, and Spines all outperformed Dark's average on SO's.

 

Fire Melee:

A dark horse for sure, Fire came back with a vengeance on IO's. With the defensive gap closed, you are allowed to actually attack freely with Fire and actually put in work. Fire Breath is a bad power, and Greater Fire Sword has an awkward animation which on top of waiting to see if you need to swing again while enemies show as on fire whether or not they are taking DoT damage made for some odd pauses. FSC is great on high recharge though, and getting enough recharge for Perma Hasten levels may boost performance way higher. 

 

 

Impressions so far are more that IO's just let you not worry about the secondary effects of your primary, or at least make them not matter nearly at all. If Fire can stand in the middle of a ton of enemies and just burn them up with 0 worries, then other sets which had defensive edges should prove interesting.

 

 

[Galaxy Brain]

IO testing update: I was able to run the Top 4 and the Bottom 4 sets vs my personal runs. For comparison:

 

 

S & A tier, as well as D, E, and F tier. I also ran Battle Axe as it was the most "average" set with only a +1.42 sec swing. Due to the nature of slotting up IO's on test (its tedious to say the least) I opted to hit the most average set + the top and bottom of the SO runs to see what happens. Sets in the B and C tier I feel are in a solid spot and most likely would not change too drastically with the IO spread given. 

 

Speaking of the Myshkin spread, with sets that could not 1:1 copy the slotting I opted for another set of Kinetic Combat + Crushing Impact like the Pulverize slotting for extra ST powers, and on a few I slotted up Javelin's Volley for Fire Breath / Spine Throw to get similar total set bonuses with the sets that had the odd Ranged AoE. Kinetic Melee used the Overwhelming Force set to also get rid of knockback. For all sets though, the recharge bonus stayed at the 66.3% outside of Hasten.

 

 

         

 

The results had some surprises for sure. Namely, how Rad Melee did not see as big an improvement and how Fire and Martial Arts had massive leaps. 

 

 

Compared to my SO runs, KM, MA, and FM all had the most improvement while Rad was only marginally faster. For the former sets, the ability to pump out AoEs faster and with essentially immortality vs +0/x3 enemies made a huge difference. Martial Arts was a big surprise for how much work Eagle Claw -> Dragon Tail could pump out in a crowd with the carried Crit Bonus (which could translate to the damage bonus that Tanks and Brutes get). 

 

Kin and Dark still being the slowest is a bit of a surprise. I had higher hopes for KM if I could leverage faster recharge to get the Siphon more quickly into the AoEs, but the animations for them still kill it compared to say, Dragon's Tail or the "Whirling" AoEs. Titan Weapons being the top by itself by a gap again is also a bit of a 🤔

 

War Mace overtaking Spines is interesting. Though, at 5 runs each at the moment the 5ish second difference is something I see run to run within sets anyways. Rad Melee held this spot on SO's, but it seems this particular slotting does not benefit it as well. Added recharge lets you use Atom Smasher / Proton Sweep faster, but the former still has a very long animation and the other big hitters also have slower animations. Irradiated Ground doesn't care about recharge, and without a ton of procs in the powers it can't really scale up as well as say, spamming Crowd Control or Throw Spines faster.

 

 

I could still do more sets or run 5 more runs for the current sets, though the results are much much closer per testing session than with SO's due to the slotting. Are there any sets I have not run that you all think would have a drastic change?

[Haijinx]

So War Mace with IOs is only a step behind Titan Weapons. 

 

Kinetic Melee is a bad outlier on the low end, considering it has two AOE powers, including a ranged cone.  

 

 

[Galaxy Brain]

On 11/15/2019 at 1:10 AM, Haijinx said:

So War Mace with IOs is only a step behind Titan Weapons. 

 

Kinetic Melee is a bad outlier on the low end, considering it has two AOE powers, including a ranged cone.  

 

 

I wouldnt call KM outright bad, it along with darm melee can offer a lot of utility with the right secondary. But, it is telling that they are underwhelming when looked at by themselves 

[Haijinx]

14 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I wouldnt call KM outright bad, it along with darm melee can offer a lot of utility with the right secondary. But, it is telling that they are underwhelming when looked at by themselves 

Seems bad enough to call bad.

 

Also Fire seems like its not where it should be. 

 

 

[Sir Myshkin]

5 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I wouldn't call KM outright bad...

I still say KM has a practical curve that's learned from experience out in the wild. I think I still have the SO 50 on Beta, I might flip it into an IO build in the next day or two and see. We definitely have different tactics when it came to KM as seen in the SO approach. Just number crunching, KM should be able to clear the map in 3:45-4:15 if ST is exclusively focused on Bosses and two to three spawns are collected at a time with AoE (Burst/Torrent) taking care of everything else. And yes, I'm thinking of that process as dragging Lieuts into the next spawn or two each time. Under just a 70% saturation Power Siphon, Burst and Torrent will clear any basic level 50 minion (~450 damage, only need 430).

[Galaxy Brain]

4 hours ago, Sir Myshkin said:

I still say KM has a practical curve that's learned from experience out in the wild. I think I still have the SO 50 on Beta, I might flip it into an IO build in the next day or two and see. We definitely have different tactics when it came to KM as seen in the SO approach. Just number crunching, KM should be able to clear the map in 3:45-4:15 if ST is exclusively focused on Bosses and two to three spawns are collected at a time with AoE (Burst/Torrent) taking care of everything else. And yes, I'm thinking of that process as dragging Lieuts into the next spawn or two each time. Under just a 70% saturation Power Siphon, Burst and Torrent will clear any basic level 50 minion (~450 damage, only need 430).

If you can manage it, by all means 🙂

 

fyi, I followed the wm/wp IO slotting you came up with as closely as possible per powerset. With slight tweaks based on powers available the milage may vary.

[Sir Myshkin]

Sometimes the AI in this game is frustrating to no ends.

 

I went through and rebuilt into IO's, started running through the mission, Times between 4:30-5:00, kept forgetting to even watch for Power Siphon to recharge, the more I kept running the mission to work out the kinks of misclicking from muscle memory of different power alignments, the more frustrating the runs became because the AI started to massively work against me. I clocked a run at 6:00 just because every single time I'd hop back to toss Repulsing Torrent, half the mob would jump up to the rafters, land, and then RUN in every which direction, and it kept happening into the next mission, and the next. I chased one guy around that back central circle, the little headless boss just wouldn't stop. I'd knock it down, it'd get up and keep running away from me, and of course each attack plants me for a second, so I have to catch up and strike again... UGH.

 

From a damage stand point, it wasn't a lack there. Whenever I could get "three"* groups together, it only took me three bursts and two torrents to knock out everything plus a couple of extra ST hits on the bosses. From an AI standpoint, I couldn't break the abnormality of them running on me.

 

*Inconsistent spawn sizes, tried to keep within 16 per grouping so carried over on occasion to the next. It's not improbable that the act of merging so many spawns together without a better form of taunt could've contributed to some of the erratic behavior I ended up experiencing. With that being the case it would make it physically impossible for me to ramp through the mission fast enough to round out 4:00 because of an inability to collect faster without the mobs wigging out. From a numbers stand point, if the spawns just fell on top of it, KM could clear every boss in that map >3:00, but trying to collect up the surrounding mobs and keep them in a Burst field killed the speed of it all. /em shrug Looks like it isn't gonna happen.

[Razor Cure]

This is all really cool! Great work guys!

I am having a peek at the FoTM lvl 50 list, seeing how it all compares.

Edited November 19, 2019 by Razor Cure

[Haijinx]

War mace is really low on the FoTm, considering its essentially the #2 Scrapper Primary damage wise.

 

And its definitely less clunky feeling than TW.

 

 

Edited November 19, 2019 by Haijinx

[Galaxy Brain]

War Mace is a legacy set that isnt flashy or the buffs well known. It's a sleeper pick for sure.

 

@Sir Myshkin, that's the same experience I had and I'm actually glad the test has weird terrain that sort of encourages the AI to be tricky. This allows more "efficient" attacks to shine in a practical environment like Throw Spines / Shockwave / frost as they give less time for enemies to do weird stuff or control their movement. Kinetic Melee (and TW) would have a tougher time given slower animations allowing more windows for enemy jank.

 

 

@Demon Shell gave great feedback in the suggestion forums about our testing and I think it may be time to re run with another secondary. The trouble is picking what we want to see... WP was incredibly non invasive. Do we want to go 180* to a super invasive secondary?

[Sir Myshkin]

1 hour ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Do we want to go 180* to a super invasive secondary?

Shield Defense or Dark Armor would probably be your extreme opposite, although for all that DA is on a defensive aspect, its nature would prevent herding unless toggling OG or CoF off and on a lot. It definitely changes the dynamic of the test though.

[Galaxy Brain]

What was nice with WP was that herding let each set have a similar strategy to compare against each other. Im cool with the strat changing as long as each set could use the strat similarly for comparison. 

[Demon Shell]

I would specifically avoid Dark Armor. Not just because going in the complete opposite direction isn't going to create an average by comparing Will to Dark. But Dark Armor is brutal without IOs. It is unfun. You're not going to want to play half these characters.

[Galaxy Brain]

Shield is also not available for all primaries.... /Elec?

[Demon Shell]

I had thought about it a bit and feel that /Elec or Ninjitsu would be about as close to neutral as armors can get.

 

Electric has a bit more end management tools than average, but its toggles cost more. And without the ability to perma Energize at the SO level, I think some sets would still need to use Power Sink.

 

Ninjitsu has, in addition to a heal and end return, a survival power. It's not the best, but maybe some sets like Fire would use it while sets like Ice would ignore it.

 

If Fiery didn't have Burn, it would probably be the best option. As is, I would think the damage aura of Electric would be more valuable to test and compare against than Ninjitsu.

Edited November 22, 2019 by Demon Shell
Grammers

[Infinitum]

2 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Shield is also not available for all primaries.... /Elec?

Need something that's not as forgiving on endurance usage, and Elec is probably more forgiving than WP.

[Infinitum]

2 hours ago, Demon Shell said:

I would specifically avoid Dark Armor. Not just because going in the complete opposite direction isn't going to create an average by comparing Will to Dark. But Dark Armor is brutal without IOs. It is unfun. You're not going to want to play half these characters.

That's kinda what you need to see though, how something like TW will compare with a set that will starve it vs other sets.

 

If you keep feeding what it needs you won't ever see if it's end hunger outweighs its capabilities across the board.

 

We know it's the best hands down if you build for it with sets that facilitate its needs, but how does it compare when a defense set kicks its butt and starves it or has no management that facilitates it?  Will it still outpace other sets? Or is it even worth taking on some sets?

[Haijinx]

SR or Invul for the secondary to get a feel for end use would work.

 

Neither are going to survive as well as WP on just SOs though.

 

 

[Haijinx]

Though both will likely be more survivable than electric.

[Sir Myshkin]

2 hours ago, Infinitum said:

If you keep feeding what it needs you won't ever see if it's end hunger outweighs its capabilities across the board.

 

We know it's the best hands down if you build for it with sets that facilitate its needs, but how does it compare when a defense set kicks its butt and starves it or has no management that facilitates it?  Will it still outpace other sets? Or is it even worth taking on some sets?

I kind of agree here that its conditioning on SOs and IOs is something for consideration here. If the testing that Galaxy Brain is considering follow-up with is for SO and IO base all over again, then demonstrating what an End-Heavy set causes has merits. It might suck, but the point it is to see what impact is causes in performance.

 

I think my vote would stay on Dark Armor, or also look at the potential of Ice Armor or Radiation Armor. They're all kind of on that polar-opposite scale. Ice would give access to a toggle damage aura, but also a mitigation aura with Chilling Embrace, and also an in-set endurance correction tool. Radiation Armor would give access to two burst AoE's that'd be pretty significant too, I'd think.