Dual Blades: What is up with Power Slice's accuracy?

[RikOz]

I went through this with Flares seeming to miss constantly on my fire blaster (I know there has been endless discussion of that, so I won't rehash here), but I did discover that Flares' accuracy greatly evened out as my blaster got higher in level, and especially once I had a full ATO set slotted into it.

 

Power Slice, on the other hand...

 

This is DB's T2 power (compared to Flares being T1). My DB scrapper has finally reached level 50, and Power Slice actually seems to have gotten worse over time. At level 50, I have the Superior Critical Strikes ATO set slotted in this power. In addition, I have global +ACC from three other IO set bonuses, and on top of that I have the Focused Accuracy power from the Body Mastery epic power pool (slotted with 2 lvl 45 +ToHit IOs). And still, Power Slice continues to miss with alarming frequency. For the time being I have a Defense Debuff set, which offers no +ACC at all, slotted into Ablating Strike, and it successfully hits with more consistency than Power Slice. This power is just not getting any better.

 

What's going on here?

[Zeraphia]

2 minutes ago, RikOz said:

I went through this with Flares seeming to miss constantly on my fire blaster (I know there has been endless discussion of that, so I won't rehash here), but I did discover that Flares' accuracy greatly evened out as my blaster got higher in level, and especially once I had a full ATO set slotted into it.

 

Power Slice, on the other hand...

 

This is DB's T2 power (compared to Flares being T1). My DB scrapper has finally reached level 50, and Power Slice actually seems to have gotten worse over time. At level 50, I have the Superior Critical Strikes ATO set slotted in this power. In addition, I have global +ACC from three other IO set bonuses, and on top of that I have the Focused Accuracy power from the Body Mastery epic power pool (slotted with 2 lvl 45 +ToHit IOs). And still, Power Slice continues to miss with alarming frequency. For the time being I have a Defense Debuff set, which offers no +ACC at all, slotted into Ablating Strike, and it successfully hits with more consistency than Power Slice. This power is just not getting any better.

 

What's going on here?

It's just honestly luck of the draw, it's the same accuracy as your other 75% attacks. It happens. 

[Hopeling]

15 hours ago, RikOz said:

For the time being I have a Defense Debuff set, which offers no +ACC at all, slotted into Ablating Strike, and it successfully hits with more consistency than Power Slice.

How much more consistency? Can you, say, run HeroStats for a session and check the results?

[RikOz]

36 minutes ago, Hopeling said:

How much more consistency? Can you, say, run HeroStats for a session and check the results?

I'll give that a try. But when I say Ablating Strike hits with more consistency, it's because it's a component of all but one of my combos. If it was missing as frequently as Power Slice, I'd almost never get a successful combo off, but that isn't the case.

 

I use Power Slice as my opening attack (on the 1 key), and after that it becomes "filler", i.e. an attack to stick in there while other attacks that contribute to combos are still recharging. That lets me maintain a steady attack rhythm without having to pause for recharges. As my opening attack, misses are painfully obvious, of course. Yesterday, while running an even-level mission and occasionally finding myself fighting 4-6 enemies at the same time, I watched, more than once, as Power Slice missed as the opening attack on 4 or 5 consecutive enemies. As you might imagine, that can get really annoying when I'm trying to interrupt a Sky Raider Engineer but he gets his FF up because I missed. Because of that, I've started just running up to enemies I need to interrupt and hitting them with Vengeful Slice first, instead.

 

I have Power Slice on the 1 key because I wanted to have combo keys grouped together as much as possible. So my attack keys are set up like so:

 

1- Power Slice

2- Nimble Slash

3- Ablating Strike

4- Typhoon's Edge

5- Blinding Feint

6- Vengeful Slice

7- Sweeping Strike

8- One Thousand Cuts

 

My typical attack rotation therefore goes like this against basic enemies:

 

1-2-3-4 (Weaken combo)-1-2-3-5 (Empower combo) repeat...

 

I'll throw in a 3-6-7 Attack Vitals combo on tougher opponents and an 8-1-4 Sweep combo against multiple opponents.

 

Since Power Slice is mostly missing when used as the opening attack, but misses much less frequently on subsequent uses, I have to suspect it's because the subsequent Power Slices are benefiting from the defense debuffs from Ablating Strike and Weaken. I suppose I could start opening with Nimble Slash and reserving Power Slice as nothing but filler, like so:

 

2-3-4-1-2-3-5...

 

(On a completely unrelated topic: I also have a DB brute. When my brute uses Blinding Feint, she displays a "build up" effect, but my scrapper does not. Both are using the "No Redraw" option, so it's not a difference in power customization. The brute is much lower level and doesn't have any IO sets that would be causing it, so I don't know what's up there.)

Edited April 6, 2020 by RikOz

[nihilii]

I have no clue whether there's a bug tied to Power Slice, but I've always felt certain animations, due to their length and look, lend themselves to psychological tricks where we *expect* to see them hit, and so the misses stick more easily to our subconscious as a result.

Whenever the animations are long or composed of several hits, it feels wrong to watch the character whiff.

[RikOz]

4 hours ago, Hopeling said:

Can you, say, run HeroStats for a session and check the results?

Alas, I can't get it working. Checking the HeroStats thread, apparently the author hasn't been back on the forums in at least 4-5 months now, and people are saying it only works in Safe Mode.

[Doomguide2005]

Combat logs.

They'll record your rolls, both to hit and damage.  Maybe something will show up.

[RikOz]

I'm going to need to find a guide on how attack roll calculations work in this game, because when I see something like this in the combat log:

 

You had a 95% chance to hit Badguy, you rolled 96.74

 

... it's hard to see why that was a "miss".

[Cutter]

13 minutes ago, RikOz said:

I'm going to need to find a guide on how attack roll calculations work in this game, because when I see something like this in the combat log:

 

You had a 95% chance to hit Badguy, you rolled 96.74

 

... it's hard to see why that was a "miss".

It's a little counter-intuitive, but basically when looking at rolls, you're hoping to roll less than the chance to hit number. The higher the chance, the more rolls are likely to be less than, therefore more likelihood of hitting.

 

Simply, for this case it means that any roll from 0.01 to 95.00 would hit. In your example, the roll was greater than that value, so it missed.

[Sovera]

This is one of the reasons combo power sets don't work too well with the precious relic of the past that is 5% chance of missing. You remind me of when I tried the Water Blast set and would grit my teeth at seeing my rotation tossed out of the window because instead of T1 T2 T3 AoE finisher, it would turn into T1, miss, T3, AoE builds instead of finishes. T1 T2 T3 eats the combo, AoE has no combo now.

 

Or having both T1 and T2 on a Sentinel, want t2 for the endurance recovery, press button, misses, T1 already queued and eats the charge.

[RikOz]

10 hours ago, Sovera said:

Or having both T1 and T2 on a Sentinel, want t2 for the endurance recovery, press button, misses, T1 already queued and eats the charge.

That irritates the crap out of me when it happens, though in my case it's usually that I wanted the +DAM buff from the T1, but that missed and T2 was already queued up so I get a healing buff I didn't need at all because I was at full health.

[BrandX]

On 4/7/2020 at 10:32 AM, Sovera said:

This is one of the reasons combo power sets don't work too well with the precious relic of the past that is 5% chance of missing. You remind me of when I tried the Water Blast set and would grit my teeth at seeing my rotation tossed out of the window because instead of T1 T2 T3 AoE finisher, it would turn into T1, miss, T3, AoE builds instead of finishes. T1 T2 T3 eats the combo, AoE has no combo now.

 

Or having both T1 and T2 on a Sentinel, want t2 for the endurance recovery, press button, misses, T1 already queued and eats the charge.

 

I've done Dual Blades multiple times, and I'm often getting the Attack Vitals Combo off.  I don't find the 5% chance of missing happening that often.

[nihilii]

9 hours ago, BrandX said:

 

I've done Dual Blades multiple times, and I'm often getting the Attack Vitals Combo off.  I don't find the 5% chance of missing happening that often.

We're all more or less sensitive to this, but bottomline... A 5% chance to miss means AV only happens at best ~85% of the time (0.95 * 0.95 * 0.95).

 

I say "at best", because in my own experience, some combos were simply lost due to switching targets (as in, the entire mob group is dead and I have to move on to the next one, or maybe the remaining enemies are running away).

Combos like Street Justice are much less sensitive to misses because they're order agnostic. But combos like Dual Blades really ought to have a bigger payoff in comparison.

This is also why I can't really get into stalkers despite all the positive sentiment these days. The whole high damage attack chain planned around 3 assassin's stacks deal sounds wonderful until you realise most of your powers don't have 100% chance to generate an assassin's stack. In some extreme cases, certain primaries end up with a cumulative chance to generate 3 stacks reliably within 3 attacks below 50%. Of course you can add a 4th or even a 5th attack to significantly increase your chances, but then you also restrain your normal DPA in the process. For me, it makes for a frustrating experience where I never know if my AS is going to hit for normal damage or double damage - or call me a "glass half empty" type, but I tend to think of it as normal damage or half damage.

That's before we get into chance for BU and chance for hide procs, both of which are highly luck based because you might get that BU right before you used BU, and you might get hit right after the chance for hide went off thus instantly cancelling your crit.

 

Um. I'm not sure why I'm ranting about stalkers now. Buff DB combos please.