Highest DPS primary?

[You]

I have already known that Ninjas are the highest DPS primary.  But Thugs have Leadership (2x Assault) and Gang War, plus Arsonist can Scourge.  Does anyone use a DPS meter to see which set does more damage?

 

Thanks!

[Mercurias]

Are you talking about the most raw damage in a vacuum, or are you talking about the highest sustained damage?

 

I don’t have a DPS meter to judge both sets by some kind of imaginary “beating up and attack dummy” scenario, but I can tell you that, in practice, Ninjas tend to suffer due in gameplay compared to the steady damage output from Thugs.  Ninjas suffer from low resistances/defenses, an over-reliance on melee, and a tendency towards suicidal mania. Thugs have stronger defenses, better ranged attacks, baked-in double leadership, and a solid tank pet to draw aggro.

 

I’d honestly pick thugs every time.

[plainguy]

9 hours ago, Mercurias said:

Are you talking about the most raw damage in a vacuum, or are you talking about the highest sustained damage?

 

I don’t have a DPS meter to judge both sets by some kind of imaginary “beating up and attack dummy” scenario, but I can tell you that, in practice, Ninjas tend to suffer due in gameplay compared to the steady damage output from Thugs.  Ninjas suffer from low resistances/defenses, an over-reliance on melee, and a tendency towards suicidal mania. Thugs have stronger defenses, better ranged attacks, baked-in double leadership, and a solid tank pet to draw aggro.

 

I’d honestly pick thugs every time.

Funny I think Robots 

[Haijinx]

Cant do dps if dead.  So only sets where pets stay alive can DPS reliably.  

 

Putting Ninjas and Mercs out of the running.  

[Pine]

This dps test was done by Starsman/[Redacted] about 5 years ago.

Edit note: This post originally only covered Masterminds, it has been expanded to include Controller pets. See notes at the end for more info on these.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Due to the demand of certain individual among you, I ran some big Mastermind damage analysis in the last couple of days. My goal was to quantify the damage output of the various mastermind sets. Due to AI whims, Mastermind sets can’t simply be crunched in traditional ways. They don't care about optimal attack chains, they may decide to use the worse attacks, or the best attacks, and it really is not something that can be guessed.

Only way to get a reliable measure of their damage potential, is by running controlled tests against perfectly identical enemies. But hat is a tall order to pull off with conventional ways. Good thing is, I got access to a few cool GM toys that allow me to control things just that way! So, I sat down and designed a series of tests. The tests are simple:

A) A single big unkillable critter that can take damage, never die, and that will not fight back. Survivability tests are a separate order of business.
B) A group of critters that are also unkillable, take damage, and don't fight back. The foes must either have no resistance, or normalized resistances. 10 packed critters and 2 outliers, a total of 12 foes.

This means that every mastermind set would go through two tests, each a few minutes of dishing it out against these unkillable foes.

Build and Tactics notes
 

• All mastermind sets were slotted with 3 accuracy and 3 damage SOs.
• For the case of Beasts, constant spamming of attacks was used to accumulate Pack Mentality stacks, however the damage generated by the Mastermind himself was not measured.
• Demons made use of Hell on Earth whenever available.
• Thugs had two tests done, one with and one without Gang War.
• Ninjas had smoke flash continuously reapplied on the strongest unit, or the second strongest should the strongest still be under its effect.

All the damage data would be logged and then parsed, inserted into a database and then given a quick analysis pass. To eliminate potential issues in the AoE test due to positioning, I ran these tests all back to back. The result were approximately 61 thousand lines of damage data to crunch through, and from those. Let's get started!!!

Single Target Damage



Now, to the joke in the subject line, there is a cool story here: Bots single target damage performance sucks. Horribly. Just look at that... but... that does not make sense!!! Bots are the AV killers!! Everyone knows that! [redacted], you suck, go back do this over again!!!

This is how much DPS each set pulled during the time they kept attacking:

64.8 dps    Bots
69.9 dps    Mercs
82.4 dps    Thugs No Gangwar
98.7 dps    Necro
124.0 dps    Ninjas
129.6 dps    Demons
137.3 dps    Thugs With Gang War
141.4 dps    Beasts

Well, I'm sure some of you already know what is going on, but for the rest, the thing is -Regeneration, something Bots has LOADs off. The standard assault bot, even without upgrades, has a 4 second recharge blast that can land -500% regeneration, and the damn thing can stack!!! Sure, it has about a 30% chance to land (it seems to be affected by accuracy so it may be higher or lower depending on your slotting) and lasts 30 seconds. With a 4s recharge, there are plenty of chances the thing will be up perma on your target, likely even double or triple stacked.

Now, normally, an Archvillain will regenerate 94.239 HP per second. At level 50 (the level this test was ran at) AVs also happen to have 85% -Regen resistance. This mean that a single stack of -Regen would go down to "only" -75% Regen. 2 stacks will bring regeneration to a halt. Effectively, that debuff is as good as if you had inflicted an additional 94.239 damage per second. In other words, actual effective damage dealt by bots against this hypothetical AV would jump from 64.8 dps to 159.0 dps. Basically what you see in the chart below:



Bots: king of the hill.

So, although the direct damage dished by Bots is low, it's AV and GM killing potential can be significantly high. This can be even more so if the AV has high damage resistances, since damage resistances will weaken other sets much more harshly than they will Bots (given most of its damage comes via debuffing regen, not via landing damage.) Mind you: this also means that facing a foe like Hammy or Crimson exposes Bots low raw damage potential.

AoE:



As we can see, the best AoE belongs to Thugs with Gang war. Ridiculous amounts of AoE damage dished by those guys. That damage may variate a bit, though, as there can be anywhere from 9 to 13 Posses in a single use, 4 of these guys are totally random.

Without Gang War, AoE seems to be nearly tied up between Bots, Thugs and Demons.

AI

Of all things in the AI, I think the thing that bothered me the most was seeing things like Mercs insist to go into melee range. I am not sure if there is a solution for this. I notices that even units with only ranged attacks will slowly creep into melee range, but I will look into the possibility of replacing melee attacks with ranged ones for Mercs units and see if that helps any with that.

Closing

At the end of the day we come to the conclusion that everyone already knows: Mercs suck. Their single target damage is the lowest (once you account Bots -Regen) and their AoE is nearly tied with Necros (that are also damn low in the charts.)

Potential survivability and utility balance issues aside, Demons and Beasts seem to be the best balanced mastermind sets, from a strict damage point of view. Beasts can dish some unmatched Single Target damage (you got to work for it,) and Demons can dish some slightly better and well-rounded AoE damage.

All this to just tell everyone something they already knew!!! But I would say, at least relatively speaking, this shows that Bots is not THAT OP, not when you consider that -Regen is not that useful against weaker foes. So long as the MM keeps active using its attacks (and in many cases it may be best to ignore them in favor of using your secondary) a Beast MM can dish more reliable Single Target damage than a Bots, and it can also dish competitive AoE damage.


What comes next? Nerfing everything to Mercs levels, of course!!! ...   

JK.   With this at hand, I'll take some time and consider some possible tweaks to Ninjas, Necros and Mercs. I would not say this always has to mean more damage, it may also mean better utility or even increased survivability to serve more of a tanking role. I think there is room for such a thing in the underperforming sets.

I also now have a better idea on what to aim for when I create a new mastermind set.

(If any part of this is incomprehensible, like all of it, I apologize, it is late as I finish this up, just ask any questions you may have and I'll try to clarify tomorrow.)

Edit: New Chart Legend

The updated charts above are now color coded by damage source. The first 6 sources should be self-explanatory, but the final one, MISC variates from set to set:

For Necros, Misc mean you performed a soul extraction on a Lich. It also assumes you summoned a new Lich.
For Thugs, Misc means Gang War
For Demons, Misc means Living Hellfire (the minions, not the damage buff.)
For Bots, Misc means the effect -Regen has in a standard Archvillain.

For Controller sets, the legend is a bit different:

The pet colors denote different pets.

Each Fire Imp does the same damage, but they all have separate colors.
Electric Gremlins have a similar thing going on.
Controller Illusions first 3 colors are Phantom Army. The orange bit is the Phantasm.

[Pine]

Looks like the pictures of the graphs did not get archived.

[SmalltalkJava]

54 minutes ago, Pine said:

124.0 dps    Ninjas
129.6 dps    Demons
137.3 dps    Thugs With Gang War
141.4 dps    Beasts

This seems about right from my testing on the Pylons posts that i made.   Single target I could get Beasts up the highest.  With Demons you want to pop and slot out Hell on Earth and use it as much as you can.   Its their version of Gang War.   Ninja's was about in line with Demons...      Mercs, I also tested, but damn it was so far behind that even with them triple proc'd their DPS was just barely getting into normal range for the other pets.    Their base DPS was horrible.    I really thought Merc's with the damage procs that impact like 99% of their attacks would bring them over the others, but nope,  it just got them into the normal range.  

 

Mercs with Lady Gray, Shield Breaker, and the -res.  Just barely, brings them into not quite shitty realm.  and they proc a boatload.  I'm talking a lot!

 

Basically, your seeing Beasts, and to an extent Thugs, Demons, doing DOUBLE the damage that Mercs does.  And mercs doesn't really have the AOE power that Bots does to make up for it.

Edited November 14, 2019 by SmalltalkJava

[StrikerFox]

If someone has a taunter to draw pylon aggro, we should IO up all MM primaries and do a dps test. Only pet damage to see how they do.

 

I don't know how accurate SNBR is but pylon runs using Merc/Storm has the Merc pets tallying around 285 dps by themselves. That's with T4 Musc Radial and a ton of procs. Hybrid equipped but not toggled.

[You]

Thanks for the input!

 

Which secondary to go with Bots to make the most of its high DPS?

 

Trap and Cold seem to be logical as both has defence and -regen to complement Bots. 
 

But itself is quite sturdy. So Storm May work too to push the DPS output higher. 
 

Any suggestions?

[Frosticus]

introducing a secondary can change things

bots /storm does good damage. a strong build could kill most anything.

demon/storm probably does way more damage though. I was just shy of 1k dps vs a pylon. 

[You]

11 minutes ago, Frosticus said:

introducing a secondary can change things

bots /storm does good damage. a strong build could kill most anything.

demon/storm probably does way more damage though. I was just shy of 1k dps vs a pylon. 

assuming /Storm contributes the same power output, Demons do more damage than Bots?

[SmalltalkJava]

Storm brings additional damage, because it has actual damaging powers.   Something other sets don’t do.    

When I tested Ninja, Beast, Mercs, Demons.  I used /Nature with the exact same slotting and build.  I did of course have to make minor tweaks but nothing that would skew the results that much.  Once I got a baseline then I started tweaking by using procs.   To sum it up.  Pines info seems right on target.    
 

- about Bots.  They should in theory do monster damage to stationary targets due to their burn patches.  

[Kommon]

I have a love/hate relationship with bots.  On one hand, their AoE potential after their level 32 upgrade is crazy good mainly due to one power, Incendiary Swam Missiles with its stacking burn patches.  One the other hand, before level 32, their low dps potential is painfully obvious, and their single good AoE up to that point is on a Tier 3 pet that is available no sooner than level 26.  Mercenaries are in the same boat, except they deal mainly lethal damage.  This make for leveling discrepancies between the original ranged MM sets like Mercs and Bots and the newer hybrid sets like Demons and Thugs.  It's almost like the original Devs figured out how to develop Mastermind henchmen after they released Thugs.

 

It's not just the leveling issues with Bots (and Mercs have this problem too).  After the Bot's level 32 upgrade, the Assault bot struggles with deciding to either toy with enemies by using its flamethrower or dual plasma blast powers with their ridiculous cast times and low dps, or use its swam missile powers to end the engagement rather quickly.  Then, of course, there's no mountain high enough, no valley low enough, no river wide enough to keep the Assault bot from running into melee range to bash a minion's face in instead of blowing away the entire mob in seconds.  Anyone remember when recharge enhancements in pets affected their powers?  Back then, summoning the Assault bot and only using the level 32 upgrade on it resulted in a massive damage increase simply because it wasn't wasting time bathing a few enemies in a light fire damage via flamethrower.

 

I would love to see the original MM sets looked at and maybe modernize them a bit.  Merc, Ninjas, Bots, and Necro could all benefit from some tweaks to survivability and/or animation times.  One other thing that would be cool is if we gave the mastermind the ability to revoke melee attacks from primarily ranged henchmen to, hopefully, stop them from trying to run in, get too close, and die over and over (Arsonist!, some bots, all mercs).  Something like what dual pistols have with toggles that change what powers do, except this power would  revoke certain powers from pets within a wide radius.  When using the protector bots, I can't remember a time where they decided to, on their own, close the distance to an enemy except when they lose line of sight; protector bots do not have a single melee attack...

[Frosticus]

10 hours ago, You said:

assuming /Storm contributes the same power output, Demons do more damage than Bots?

demons do ok to good damage, but they are a force multiplier because they put out a lot of -res. 

 

storm is a force. 

[Frosticus]

2 hours ago, SmalltalkJava said:

 

- about Bots.  They should in theory do monster damage to stationary targets due to their burn patches.  

iirc the burn patches get insane because of the way they overlap when there are multiple targets in close proximity to one another. A single target should only result in one patch.

 

I ran bots/storm on live so admittedly the memory could be hazy.

[SmalltalkJava]

1 minute ago, Frosticus said:

iirc the burn patches get insane because of the way they overlap when there are multiple targets in close proximity to one another. A single target should only result in one patch.

 

I ran bots/storm on live so admittedly the memory could be hazy.

Your probably right @Frosticus.  I haven't ran Bots in a long time.  But i remember someone saying that Bots burn patches worked really uber in packs of mobs that were immobilized due to the stacking.

[TheSpiritFox]

Assault bot fires a missile at an enemy, and up to 16 targets within 20 feet get hit with a burn patch, each burn patch being able to hit up to 5 targets. So yeah, in packed mobs things just absolutely melt, and the fact that the attack comes from the assault bot and not like your arsonist with thugs means that the attack is made at the same level you are, including incarnate shifts and such. Assault bot burn patches are less subject to level differences and do way more damage. 

 

The end result is against a single hard target bots do low DPS and only the -regen makes up for it, but in a target rich environment with burn patches cycling every cooldown the AOE damage potential of bots is absolutely nuts and you can melt entire packs including bosses in seconds solo. If you can keep stuff mobbed in burn patches, everything dies. And I feel like the AI is halfway decent about it. I use goto commands alot which resets their attack chain and I see the assault bot pretty reliably open up with burn patch missles quick. The biggest pain with bots is killing bosses after everything else has melted, it can take a minute. 

Edited November 14, 2019 by TheSpiritFox

[Maxzero]

 

On 11/15/2019 at 3:10 AM, TheSpiritFox said:

Assault bot fires a missile at an enemy, and up to 16 targets within 20 feet get hit with a burn patch, each burn patch being able to hit up to 5 targets. So yeah, in packed mobs things just absolutely melt, and the fact that the attack comes from the assault bot and not like your arsonist with thugs means that the attack is made at the same level you are, including incarnate shifts and such. Assault bot burn patches are less subject to level differences and do way more damage. 

 

The end result is against a single hard target bots do low DPS and only the -regen makes up for it, but in a target rich environment with burn patches cycling every cooldown the AOE damage potential of bots is absolutely nuts and you can melt entire packs including bosses in seconds solo. If you can keep stuff mobbed in burn patches, everything dies. And I feel like the AI is halfway decent about it. I use goto commands alot which resets their attack chain and I see the assault bot pretty reliably open up with burn patch missles quick. The biggest pain with bots is killing bosses after everything else has melted, it can take a minute. 

 

Once you hit Incarnate shifts all your pets are the same level anyway.

 

I like Thugs due to good proc access and softcappable defence. Just taking them against Pylons and its a lot easier to keep a softcapped Thug build alive then a Demon one. The highest DPS secondary is /Storm and Thugs works a lot better with in then Demons.

 

 

Edited November 16, 2019 by Maxzero

[TheSpiritFox]

3 hours ago, Maxzero said:

 

 

Once you hit Incarnate shifts all your pets are the same level anyway.

 

I like Thugs due to good proc access and softcappable defence. Just taking them against Pylons and its a lot easier to keep a softcapped Thug build alive then a Demon one. The highest DPS secondary is /Storm and Thugs works a lot better with in then Demons.

 

 

yeah Demons/nature is absolutely fun, but without defense you're gonna run into alphas that absolutely chew your pets to bits, enough to kill you. You can't outheal some of the shit late game enemies came out very well. It feels tanky and solid damage without excelling anywhere and definitely without being immortal. My bots/traps forgot what debt was a long time ago, my demons/nature fully slotted out eats it when I have bad luck way more easily. Mez fucks it up bad pre clarion. If you ain't healing you won't be alive for long. Absolutely depends on incarnates, feels like it would be a nightmare to try to like do a lambda with. 

[SmalltalkJava]

I agree.  Defense on pets rules.  Bots and thugs combined with nature is pretty sweet 

[StrikerFox]

On 11/13/2019 at 5:13 PM, SmalltalkJava said:

This seems about right from my testing on the Pylons posts that i made.   Single target I could get Beasts up the highest.  With Demons you want to pop and slot out Hell on Earth and use it as much as you can.   Its their version of Gang War.   Ninja's was about in line with Demons...      Mercs, I also tested, but damn it was so far behind that even with them triple proc'd their DPS was just barely getting into normal range for the other pets.    Their base DPS was horrible.    I really thought Merc's with the damage procs that impact like 99% of their attacks would bring them over the others, but nope,  it just got them into the normal range.  

 

Mercs with Lady Gray, Shield Breaker, and the -res.  Just barely, brings them into not quite shitty realm.  and they proc a boatload.  I'm talking a lot!

 

Basically, your seeing Beasts, and to an extent Thugs, Demons, doing DOUBLE the damage that Mercs does.  And mercs doesn't really have the AOE power that Bots does to make up for it.

I don't know. I threw together some barebone MM builds on Beta, paired with Dark, to test their dps. Only the pets, defense powers and Provoke are IO'd. No Tar Patch was used.

 

Incarnates are:

 

T4 Musculature Core Alpha
T4 Degenerative Radial Interface
T4 Assault Radial Hybrid (Untoggled)
T4 Rebirth Radial Destiny (MM Survival)

 

Mercs: 3:31/221 secs, 301 dps. No Serum used.
Beasts: 3:45/225 secs, 298 dps. No Fortify Pack used.
Ninja: 2:06/126 secs, 432 dps. No Smoke Flash used.
Demons: 2:57/177 secs, 344 dps. No HoE/whip attacks used.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really have no idea how to get Beasts to the top of the MM food chain. They seem to be on par with Mercs.

 

Dark is a probably better secondary to test with. Iirc, procs do not benefit from damage buffs so NA's Overgrowth probably does less for Mercs, Lich etc than it would do for harder hitting pets like Bruiser, Beasts etc. 

[SmalltalkJava]

@StrikerFox  nice results.  I’ll defer to your tests.  I did use the MM attacks in my tests and nature secondary so it probably wasn’t as pure of a test as yours.  

[Riverdusk]

Haven't really done any tests like this myself, but @StrikerFox watching your beast video I wasn't seeing any crits?  My beasts get the "crit" message constantly and of course that would greatly increase their damage.  I missing it somehow or are pylons immune or some other weirdness?  Just found that strange and have a real hard time believing beasts are even worse than mercs, in general play anyway.  Hasn't been my experience, albeit just going by general feel here.

 

Also don't seem to see stacks of pack mentality showing either (once you did expand the pet buffs on the window), which is of course even more damage, unless I'm missing that somehow or you have some kind of buff display option set that doesn't show them.

Edited November 19, 2019 by Riverdusk

[StrikerFox]

37 minutes ago, Riverdusk said:

Haven't really done any tests like this myself, but @StrikerFox watching your beast video I wasn't seeing any crits?  My beasts get the "crit" message constantly and of course that would greatly increase their damage.  I missing it somehow or are pylons immune or some other weirdness?  Just found that strange and have a real hard time believing beasts are even worse than mercs, in general play anyway.  Hasn't been my experience, albeit just going by general feel here.

 

Also don't seem to see stacks of pack mentality showing either (once you did expand the pet buffs on the window), which is of course even more damage, unless I'm missing that somehow or you have some kind of buff display option set that doesn't show them.

Thanks for the info. I'm not sure why there are no crits or no stacks of PM. I'm going to look it over and retest when I get home.

[StrikerFox]

I didn't realize the Beast MM needs to use his primary attacks to build Pack Mentality. So new dps test, though the build is missing Call Ravens. There were a few crits in there as well.

 

Pylon time of 3:57/237 seconds for 290 dps. It did worse than before... Haha! I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

 

I did notice the Dire Wolf doesn't seem to receive the Musculature Alpha damage buff. I scroll over his stats at the end of the video and it's at +97% damage while the T1 and T2 pets are +125% or more.

 

 

I didn't even notice one of the wolves died. Will retest in a bit.

 

New run. 3:15, 195 seconds, 324 dps.

 

 

Edited November 20, 2019 by StrikerFox