Savage Melee

[Fan Mail]

I remember seeing someone posted that they would not roll a Savage Melee character.  Just wondering what the issue is...if there is one?  Specifically, I'm looking at a WP/Savage Tanker.  

 

Is it unpopular because of the highly resisted lethal damage?  I'll play regardless of popularity but just wondering what the fuss is all about. 

Edited October 14, 2019 by tafilr

[EmmySky]

I didnt like savage because its basically a rerun of claws and I didn't care for claws.  I also didnt care for the stance.  Purely aesthetic for me.  

[Trademarked Name]

I'm working on leveling up a tanker with Savage Melee right now. Got him upto 30 doing AE farms from about 26 (this is much slower than just teaming radio mishes, but less standing around waiting for team members or mish starts).

I chose savage melee for thematic purposes, but now that I'm playing it I can tell you that I'm not a fan.

Much of this game is leveraging benefits versus the weaknesses of the powers. For example; psionics may seem weak in damage #s, but most factions lack resistance to it and some who elevate to the high tiers will tell you it's a bit OP (but they paid their dues getting there). Darkness/Neg Energy is strong but it comes with a heavy endurance price tag. Energy is sort of meh, but it drains targets of their END (Anyone that has been attacked by sappers knows how effective this can be), Etc.

 

With anything in this game you have to weigh the benefits with the detriments that counter balance it. Let's take Broad Sword for example. Broad sword is good damage output AND has the benefit of a Defense Debuff on some of the attacks (no benefit vs low level factions, but highly effective vs mid to high level factions). There is a standard/typical build-up (+ACC/+DAM) option just over halfway in the power tiers. And there's a nice little benefit of getting to slot Debuff set IOs in five of the powers. Not a bad fringe benefit. The negatives are that it does lethal damage (the 1st or 2nd most resisted/defended damage type in the game) and slow attack speed animations. It doesn't take a lot of min-max DPS to work out broad sword in my raddled brain. You can get into END problems, but the powers aren't END hogs. I find it to be a very solid, albeit straight-forward offensive power set.

 

Now take Savage Melee. It comes with a +minor damage over time benefit on some of the attacks AND Blood Frenzy. Blood Frenzy gives a modicum increase in damage as you stack it. The "special set" slotting for savage melee is Taunt sets, which is sort of meh.

 

And now we get to the negatives: As with BS, the damage type (lethal) is highly resisted in the game. Also, the "benefit" of frenzy is also its utter detriment. As half of the powers "consume" the blood frenzy and immediately cause your hero/villain to become Exhausted. This is usually a side-effect of a Tier 9 power that was meant to off-set the OP benefit you gained. But you get this crippling effect with no less than HALF of your powers.
There are 4 attacks that build up Blood Frenzy and 4 power that consume it (and crash your END). Seems pretty fair, but in actual practice it's a game of hot potato. While you are attacking you are advertently or inadvertently stacking frenzy. When you hit a power that consumes it you get a minor boost in damage (similar to build-up) followed by, BOOM CRASH! If you love Malta Sappers, you'll LOVE Savage Melee because it's like having a sapper ambush that jumps out randomly and goes "GOTCHA!" whenever you need it the least. 

I just notice that I'm spending a lot of time looking at my status bar counting blood frenzy icons now, and hesitate to hit the -Frenzy attacks due to the inevitable crash that follows.

 

For a tank, I do NOT like Blood Thirst. Most Tank primaries have a heal that are obtainable at a lower level and won't cause Recovery crash that really makes this power very skippable IMO. IN fact, I'd rather just take-up slots with large greens than take something that requires me to hold on to blues for the "lean times". Early on in a build I dedicate 3 slots to Numina's Convalescense, Power Shifter, and Panacea. And a 4th to Miracle +Rec at lev 27. These appear to be completely nullified during the exhaustion phase of blood frenzy.

 

It's not nearly the worst set in the game, but the negative aspect (though it's pretty singular) is a bit severe for the benefits of the set, IMO. On a tank, you really want to concentrate on defense and resistances anyhow, and is probably the best AT for this set because as a tank you shouldn't have to be pounding on attack keys. YMMV.

 

 

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by Trademarked Name

[MrSnottyPants]

I thought Savage's Exhausted just meant no building blood frenzy for around 10 seconds.  You lose out on the damage bonus and endurance discount that comes with blood frenzy, but I didn't think it crashed your endurance.

 

I have a low-level Savage/Bio brute.  Bio masks a bunch of issues, but I think I'd notice an endurance crash.

[Trademarked Name]

My End Bar drops in half when I trip Blood Frenzy.

I misstated that. My end drains like I'm being zapped by a sapper (due to toggles still going I'm guessing) over the next 15-20 seconds or so until it hits about half way, when I trip Blood Frenzy.

This is usually when I just take my hands off of the keyboard and take a drink/a bite of a sandwich. When the "exhausted" symbol disappears i know I'm clear to hit a Blue and start pounding attack keys again.

(Note as I mentioned above. I have Health slotted w/Panacea, Numina's, % Miracle +rec, and Stamina is Perf. Shifter Chance for end + Performance Shifter END Mod. So it otherwise stays up in the 90% range at all times when using other attacks and all toggles running).

Edited October 14, 2019 by Trademarked Name

[Lines]

58 minutes ago, Trademarked Name said:

 

This is usually when I just take my hands off of the keyboard and take a drink/a bite of a sandwich. When the "exhausted" symbol disappears i know I'm clear to hit a Blue and start pounding attack keys again.

If eating a sandwich is part of Savage’s attack rotation, I’m sold!

[Leogunner]

What is going on here?

 

Is Tanker Savage Melee different from Scrapper and Brute?

[Trademarked Name]

Not sure what's going on. I just ran around brickstown with recovery monitored (2.48/sec) along with End consumption (1.54/sec) with all 4 toggles on ( Temp Invuln., Invincibility, Unyielding and Maneuvers). No numbers change with Blood Fury build-up or consumption.

I can hit Shred, Vicious Slash & Rending Flurry with semi-abandon so long as Blood Fury doesn't trigger and blue bar only wavers a bit. A few second pause bring blue bar to 100. But if Blood Fury triggers, it's like sappers are hitting me. Blue bar drops like Recovery is at zero and End procs are non-existant. 

This is only a level 30 tanker.

Edited October 15, 2019 by Trademarked Name

[Leogunner]

On a Brute, there is no endurance crash, just the removal of the endurance discount.

 

Only 2 attacks consume Blood Frenzy: Rending Flurry and Hemorrhage.  Also, Blood Frenzy only gives an Endurance Discount and a Recharge bonus, not damage.  By damage, Flurry and Hemorrhage are supposed to do more DoT but I've not noticed much for it.   There is no regen or healing in the set (although it would be better if the set could benefit melee builds if there were some).

 

I've heard mixed messages from players.  For some, posters say that Savage is on the top end of DPS but I'd wager it's only because of the minor +rech boosting some other AoEs in a build.  As far as I know, the set doesn't have many avenues to IO slot since the only secondary effects the set has is -def in one and knockdown in another.  Proccing might also be an avenue to make the set better since you can get a bit of extra recharge to make a smoother set of attacks and they animate relatively quick.

 

IMO, Savage is meh...I don't like it.  It feels like it has no impact, the mechanic is annoying and my character doesn't feel savage using it.  There aren't many avenues to build it in a unique fashion and ultimately it is similar to claws in concept.

 

If you want to play it, I heard it is very good for Stalker though.

[Kaika]

I main a Savage/Bio brute, and honestly I don't know what people are getting at calling it "Meh". I'm able to dish out enough damage on my brute to take out AVs and GMs solo with relative ease. I wouldn't be surprised if Bio is doing a bit of the heavy lifting there but it seem fine on the damage front. It's particularly pretty good on the AoE front, with Savage leap covering a huge area and dealing good damage even in melee range. On the topic of Blood Frenzy, I do feel like its rather poorly designed, hemorrhage doesn't seem to be strong enough to warrant the loss of the stacks in many cases, rending flurry is fairly nice with its extended radius (its like nova sized) though I don't really feel the damage increase, but it still feels like more of a punishment for wanting to use these powers rather then a reward for building up Frenzy. However functionally I feel it's on the stronger side to be honest, maybe it could use some added secondary effects but I'm sure as hell not complaining on my brute.

 

And yeah from what I hear its a monster on stalker.

Edited October 15, 2019 by Riot Siren

[Sidious]

38 minutes ago, Riot Siren said:

I main a Savage/Bio brute, and honestly I don't know what people are getting at calling it "Meh". I'm able to dish out enough damage on my brute to take out AVs and GMs solo with relative ease. I wouldn't be surprised if Bio is doing a bit of the heavy lifting there but it seem fine on the damage front. It's particularly pretty good on the AoE front, with Savage leap covering a huge area and dealing good damage even in melee range. On the topic of Blood Frenzy, I do feel like its rather poorly designed, hemorrhage doesn't seem to be strong enough to warrant the loss of the stacks in many cases, rending flurry is fairly nice with its extended radius (its like nova sized) though I don't really feel the damage increase, but it still feels like more of a punishment for wanting to use these powers rather then a reward for building up Frenzy. However functionally I feel it's on the stronger side to be honest, maybe it could use some added secondary effects but I'm sure as hell not complaining on my brute.

 

And yeah from what I hear its a monster on stalker.

This. It's a perfectly fine set of powers. I have it on 3 my Sav/Da Brute, my Sav/Regen Brute, and my Sav/bio brute. It performs extremely well. The Da brute is almost all io'd out (still need a hecatomb set) and he's almost unstoppable (except the knockback thing, bugger).  My Sav/Regen I'm currently leveling up and he's proving great.

 

The speed of attacks with Sav almost makes me thing I might not need Hasten but I'll decide later. I've given the sav bug to a SG-mate that is using it on his Stalker and is loving it.

really it's a good powerset and it has VERY LITTLE similarities to Claws.

[Trademarked Name]

Okay. So I need to clear up a few more things I erroneously stated before. I played for about 1.5 hours last night.

Blood Thirst is actually a "build-up", and not a heal power as stated in Paragon Wiki. I confirmed this by taking the power. It looks like it does consume blood Fury and I do experience the end loss as with Rending. I wound-up taking it out of the number attack line-up as it was messing up the chain. As Riot Siren pointed out, the blood fury consumption feels more punishing than beneficial here as well.  

 

Playing AE for the hour and a half last night and I can only assume the "crash" I'm experiencing is the loss of the End discount from blood fury. Though it seems strangely odd that Panacea seems to stop functioning as well at that exact duration. Combat logs aren't showing the discount and monitoring Combat Details doesn't seem to express the discount either even when fury is building.  Most of my attacks are 5 slotted but because it's a 30-ish level toon the End discounts aren't as aggressive as what you experience on a toon with 50's or purple sets (actually purple sets don't have the best END reduction bonuses), but you probably understand where this is going. But I'm not only playing my three 50's. I have a 38 dominator, a 15 level sentinel that I'm also playing and don't experience weird Endurance problems with the Stamina procs, but they also aren't putting out this level of damage per round or have Fury.

 

Also Sidious makes a good point about the speed of attacks in Savage is impressive and that's something I didn't mention. The animation are QUICK! Even though I am running Hasten on this toon, I am also thinking about dropping it in a respec. I can chain Savage Strike, Maiming , Shred, Savage (again), Maiming and Savage (3rd time) in an endless cycle with barely a break for recharge, and this is for a lev 30 not fully slotted. By the time he's 50 and fully slotted, I don't think Hasten will make much difference at all, despite the fact it has become ubiquitous on every other one of my toons.

 

 

[Erratic1]

(1) Electric attacks drain endurance, not energy attacks. Energy attacks disorient.

 

(2) The exhaustion of Savage Melee is nothing like a T9 exhaustion. Savage Melee exhaustion merely means you cannot gain Blood Frenzy stacks. Moreover, it is not invoked whenever you use a spender but only when you use a spender while at maximum (5) stacks.

 

(3) Blood Frenzy stacks do not add damage. They do reduced endurance cost and recharge time of your powers. Spending the stacks increases damage and depending on the spending power increases area of effect or bleed duration.

 

[Erratic1]

I have two Savage Melee characters currently--a Savage Melee/Invincibility brute and a Savage Melee/Bio Armor scrapper. I am not sure why the difference exists between what Paragonwiki has and what is in game, but if it was a late design change, I think the developers were a bit too cautious and did not think through the implicit tradeoffs of the set.

 

Savage Melee has quick animations in part because Blood Frenzy stacks reduce your recharge time. At maximum stacks you are looking at a 20% recharge reduction. Moreover Blood Frenzy stacks also reduce your endurance cost. If you monitor the changes the scaling is oddly not quite linear, but seems to cap out around 25% endurance cost modifier. So you get 1-1/1.2=17% more attacks in a fixed period of time at a 1-1/1.25=20% savings. Basically you get the increased attack rate at no extra endurance charge so long as you maintain the stacks (technically you save 6.4%). 

 

The above is nifty enough but that does not really, on its own, stack up to what most other attack powersets bring to the table. But you also can spend your stacks to empower a couple of your attacks, gaining increased damage and depending on power increased area of effect or increased bleed duration. However doing so locks out your ability to gain stacks. I need to check to see if when exhausted you can pop Blood Thirst and get stacks. If so, that means you might want to build to five stacks, spend, then pop Blood Thirst and not spend (unless you just really need to use your other spender, since the first is likely to be on cooldown).

The problems are:

(1) The recharge reduction is tiny and so the corresponding boost in damage is as well. Moreover, it does not scale with outside recharge reduction. If you had perma-Hasten for 70% then full stacks of Blood Frenzy take you to 90% so you'd go from 1-1/1.7=41% more attacks to 1-1/1.9=47% more attacks. This is an artifact of the method of calculation so applies to adding more of any effect--damage boost, endurance cost reduction, etc. But most other effects that other powersets have are not likely to have anything that adds to them. Recharge reduction is baked into every damage IO set and Hasten is quite commonly taken.

 

(2) The extra damage applies to one power and then you are locked out for a duration. Psi Melee at least gives you a period of enhanced damage where you can get in several attacks from the powerset in exchange for its empowerment being locked out. 

 

I think a better mechanism, which would have fit with the notion that the user of savage and driven by blood in the air, would have been to either give some benefit for the number of foes nearby with DoTs on them, or perhaps less computationally expensive, give a benefit for hitting targets who have DoTs to represent the empowerment a savage meleer feels from all that blood in the air.

 

That all said, it's not a bad set. Not great, but not on the avoid list.

Edited October 15, 2019 by Erratic1

[Blastit]

Savage Melee's biggest problem is probably that Brutes already have the fury mechanic so you can't just port a lesser version of it to every melee AT.

[Kaika]

7 minutes ago, Blastit said:

Savage Melee's biggest problem is probably that Brutes already have the fury mechanic so you can't just port a lesser version of it to every melee AT.

I definitely wouldn't compare it at all to fury, they work very differently, with fury directly boosting damage by alot. Other sets have stack mechanics like this too, like Street justice and Staff, I just feel like the payoff for spending the stacks vs the reward for keeping them needs to be tweaked a bit, it doesn't quite feel right atm, maybe since its all in DoTs which are hard for the player to track. Either way in my book it's a fine set as is if a little odd.

[MrSnottyPants]

I'd say the problem with Blood Frenzy is its impact is so vague many of us were confused as to what it is doing for us 😀.  Compare this to something like Water Blast, where the full-stack rewards are more obvious.  Even simple stuff, like graphically showing Rending Flurry's expanded circle, would help.

Edited October 15, 2019 by MrSnottyPants

[Sidious]

3 hours ago, Erratic1 said:

I need to check to see if when exhausted you can pop Blood Thirst and get stacks. If so, that means you might want to build to five stacks, spend, then pop Blood Thirst and not spend (unless you just really need to use your other spender, since the first is likely to be on cooldown).

you can and, as you said the other will be on cooldown. I Typically have both Rending Fury and Hemorrhage so i can pop one. Hit BT, then pop the other. 

[Blastit]

2 hours ago, Riot Siren said:

I definitely wouldn't compare it at all to fury, they work very differently, with fury directly boosting damage by alot. Other sets have stack mechanics like this too, like Street justice and Staff, I just feel like the payoff for spending the stacks vs the reward for keeping them needs to be tweaked a bit, it doesn't quite feel right atm, maybe since its all in DoTs which are hard for the player to track. Either way in my book it's a fine set as is if a little odd.

I mean conceptually, because the Fury mechanic is great for representing savagery. If you wanted a melee set that feels like clawing like a mad beast then Fury would be perfect.

[Leogunner]

7 hours ago, Erratic1 said:

However doing so locks out your ability to gain stacks. I need to check to see if when exhausted you can pop Blood Thirst and get stacks. If so, that means you might want to build to five stacks, spend, then pop Blood Thirst and not spend (unless you just really need to use your other spender, since the first is likely to be on cooldown).

I tested that back when I was trying to figure out my feelings on the set.  No, when you use Blood Thirst while exhausted, you gain no Blood Frenzy stacks. [EDIT: Just hopped on my brute to verify it but seems I was wrong. You can remove exhaustion with Blood Thirst and it gives you 5 blood stacks.]

 

Also, Blood Thirst has a lower damage bonus than Build Up type powers (+44% damage and +10% ToHit vs +100% damage and +20% ToHit) but last 50% longer (15sec vs BU's 10sec)...might sound like it starts to even out but then look at Blood Thirst's abysmal activation time...a horrendous 2sec cast!

 

 

Edited October 16, 2019 by Leogunner

[Leogunner]

11 hours ago, Riot Siren said:

I main a Savage/Bio brute, and honestly I don't know what people are getting at calling it "Meh".

It's my opinion.  I feel sets like Katana or Street Justice fare better as they have more tools in their kit and their effects are very evident.  Whether you can solo an AV/GM is hardly a measure of anything since a lot of sets can manage it.

 

Like I said when I made a thread in the past about this set, I wanted to understand why this set wasn't beating out sets like Dual Blades in just usability.  From my experience leveling a Savage/Electric Brute, it was painful.  I'm not a power-gamer so I don't often min/max but that character was struggling to keep END and not dying to regular sized +1 mobs...which is just pitiful compared to the ease and fun I had leveling my DB/Fire Brute.  I don't doubt you can build the set up but I specifically asked other Brutes what the deal was and didn't get much of an answer so I am left with my opinion that Savage (at least for Brute) is 'meh'.  

[Haijinx]

Brute buildup is only 80% 

 

I wonder how this makes Savage Stalkers play, since the get normal build up instead.

[Erratic1]

I think part of the reason they do not get as much +Damage from Blood Thirst as compared to Build Up is that spending the stacks of Frenzy will give you extra damage.  Brute Blood Thirst gives 33% Damage according to the tooltip. If each stack of Blood Thirst is boosting a spender's damage by 10%, all total you would be at 83% Damage.

Edited October 16, 2019 by Erratic1