Blaster Primary Comparison: Standard Environment Testing

[Galaxy Brain]

RANGED DAMAGE SET TESTING:

 

Hello Everyone,

 

Following up with what was done in the Scrapper Primary Testing, it is time to take a look at the Blaster Primaries!

 

The above link to the Scrapper post will go into more details, but the premise of these tests are to isolate Ranged Primaries as much as possible to gauge their "realistic" base performance in a given mission environment. This is done through running a course 10 times per primary, and then recording the times to formulate an average 

 

• Using a standardized Office Map, we can set a course that properly challenges the player with movement with corridors and different vertical spawn points that we see in normal missions. Pylon and Farm metrics are nice, but they do not really reflect normal game play. 

 

• 

 

• Broken up into 4 floors, this map contains custom-made ranged enemies that appear at roughly the Red Dot locations shown above. Floors 1-3 have at least 2 guaranteed Boss encounters, and Floor 4 has a guaranteed Elite Boss encounter. Red Lines represent clickable doors with a gentleman's rule to finish the room before moving through the door, and circled areas are where some herding up can be attempted if possible. As some may remember from the Scrapper test, the Warehouse environment was too open and heavily favored herding strategies for completion. That thread will be updated with Office Results soon as well.
• The ranged enemies in this map present just enough danger to the Blaster to where mitigation from the Primary will play a key role in completion, but they do not present such a threat that they cannot easily be overcome with normal play.

 

• The Blasters I used all have a near-identical SO build where I 3 slot all attacks for Damage, then 1 each of Acc/End/Rech except for the Nukes and AoEs which I opted for 3 Dam/Rech thanks to their built in Acc modifiers universally being better than 1 SO, and on normal AoEs I ran 2 rech and 1 Acc thanks to the Sustain ability.
• I also used /Elec Manip for each test with only Build Up and Force of Thunder being used. FoT would only be used between spawns to not have it's CC come into play, and the time spent using it per run was subtracted from the totals to show the "true" speed. I chose this in particular due to being the most "average" of the Sustains where it's secondary effect could be more easily isolated combined with a normal Build Up. Other sets like /Time could have fit if not for the +Rech on it's BU clone.
• Health and Stamina were 3 slotted as well as FoT 6 slotted, other powers used were CJ with 1 Def SO, and Hover with 1 Fly SO (Swift also had a fly SO). The ranged enemies and height restrictions on the map did not allow for much cheese if any, and aside from a few angles with cones I kept myself at near ground level.

 

• Running at +0/x3 allowed for a variety of mob encounters that often would be spread in such a way to utilize AoEs to their full potential as well as test ST / AoE  / Area coverage alike. 
• Like with Scrappers, if I died I restarted the mission and took note of the death in a "Safety" rating. The higher the rating, the more deaths I had. Each death I applied a 20s penalty to the average to give weight to sets with mitigation tools, which will be reflected in a separate column.

 

So, with these rules in place to emulate an "average" mission that tests ST, AoE, and Mitigation of just the primaries at a basic level, lets see what happened:

 

Sorted by AVG:

 

Well, it seems that we have a certain set that is literally melting the competition, and two that appear to have Silencers on. In terms of raw average clear time, Fire is leaps and bounds the fastest with a tremendous lead over the other blast sets, and nearly having a 4x bigger gap from the average compared to the 2nd place Beam Rifle! On the flip side, both Assault Rifle and Sonic Blast are at the bottom with incredibly slow average clear times. Luckily, that is not the only measure.

 

 

Sorted by SAFETY:

 

Washing away the competition here is Water Blast! With it's combination of self healing, reliable knockdowns, and overall great damage it was one of the few sets to clear the course with 0 defeats at all, alongside Dark and Psy blast who all shared the trait of reliable (AoE) CC and decent secondary effects. Coming in second with 1 defeat was Ice Blast, which while it could reliably freeze a single target in it's tracks it had trouble vs crowds if Blizzard wasn't online, leading to multiple stray hits weaseling in and netting a lucky win for the NPC's.

 

Fire is knocked here with 5 deaths, mostly against the Elite Boss spawn where the lack of mitigation outside of killing before you get killed lead to some unfortunate ends. On the bottom of the list though was Radiation Blast with a whopping 9 defeats! The set deals plenty of damage, but I found out the hard way that speed matters here. Many powers deal damage over time or simply animate slowly which allows hits to come in in ways that even Fire Blast didn't have to worry about due to raw application speed, on top of havign a tiny KB chance on it's cone + the ST stun being on a longish cooldown that lead to poor mitigation vs tougher single targets.

 

 

Sorted by BEST TIME:

 

Tracking the best time per set shows sort of the upper lvl they can achieve when you're really in the groove. Of note are Energy and Dark Blast attaining very fast clear times compared to where they end up when averaged out!

 

 

Sorted by WORST TIME:

 

Likewise, sorting by the worst time gives an idea of how well they perform in a less than ideal run. Water being so high here shows how consistent the set performs regardless of the enemy setup.

 

 

Sorted by STANDARD DEVIATION:

 

Speaking of consistency, the Standard Deviation shows us how much variance there was run-to-run on average per set. The smaller the deviation the better a set could probably just follow it's normal gameplan without needing to worry about as many X factors like spacing or special targeting. Sets that rely on such tactics ended up having much higher deviations as seen here.

 

With these 5 metrics in mind, I was able to rank each primary based on the actual score per category + the gap between it and the next set, and then add up these values by weight. The lower the final score, the higher tiered the set is when looked at it alone:

 

 

FINAL RESULTS:

 

Its fitting that the only thing to beat Fire is Water IMO! Lets break this down per tier:

 

S TIER:

With everything put together, the safety and consistency of Water Blast gives it the edge over Fire's Raw Speed given it's lack of those key traits. Ice rounds out the S-Tier at the lower end simply due to lack of AoE speed while having the some of the best times vs the Boss encounters. Really not much else to add here aside from these three being incredibly solid sets at the base level.

 

A TIER:

Beam, Archery, and Energy are all almost tied in the A Tier. Beam and Archery boast some of the fastest recharging nukes and could reliably just delete certain spawns, with beam having a slight ST edge over Archery and vice versa with Archery having a bit better AoE. Energy was a bit slower given Nova recharges a bit slower, but there is a reason we call Nukes Nova's. When it was up and available, it would delete an entire spawn no questions asked and fling bosses about for safety, and the rest of the powers are all very solid versions of your standard blasts that lead to an overall good performance. I'd say the sets in these tiers were held back by not having as 100% reliable mitigation as sets in the S tier with either 100% knockdowns / slows that lead to a few defeats each, impacting Beam Rifle specifically. Nor did they have the raw... literal Fire power like Fire does nor the likes of Blizzard/Geyser to edge out just a bit quicker clear times in the case of Energy and Archery.

 

B TIER:

Next up we have Dual Pistols, Rad, and Dark Blast. These three all had separate issues holding them back, but lets start with Rad as we touched on it for the safety portion: it has none. The combination of slow animations, slow application of damage, and hard to apply/stack Mez effects (by itself) lead to it tanking hard in the safety adjustment + middling scores elsewhere brought it down compared to the high tiers. If you pair it with a very defensive secondary or team support it can shine, but isolated it felt very rough. On the flip side, Dark Blast was able to breeze through each spawn without a care. Guaranteed KB in a cone, solid ST damage, a great ST hold, a Self Heal, a nuke that soft-caps you vs anything left alive + all attacks stacking -ToHit made it probably the safest set in general, though it did pay for that safety when it comes to AoE performance. Having different shaped cones that deal damage in different amounts/ways lead to very inconsistent times based on the spawn set up room to room, leading to sub-average scores except for Best Time and Safety. 

 

The best way I could describe Dual Pistols at a base/isolated level is Anemic. Swapping mainly between Normal and Incendiary ammo depending on whether I needed safety or damage, I was able to clench an incredibly consistent performance, but it was consistently on the slow side. Despite the animations having been sped up, the application of damage is still slow and the mitigation is not super consistent. Add to that different ranged cones / PBAoE that requires >4s commitment where missing a key target leaves you open + slower animating ST attacks and well... you get a B-Tier. Luckily you can proc the hell out of the set!

 

C TIER: ELEC BLAST

The last few sets stand out in their own divisions, so I'll just talk about them as-is. Elec Blast was actually very very safe in practice even by itself as it's great TAoE Ball Lightning + SC would actually do solid work vs mobs of minions + Sparky taking care of stragglers, and the fact that thunderous Blast can be initiated safely + completely drain living targets into submission. In general, if you could survive the alpha you won teh fight vs Bosses and the Elite Boss with elec blast, with the Voltaic Sentinel contributing quite a lot of ST dps at a glance! Unfortunately, the issues add up when you consider the cast times of some key powers (Voltaic Sentinel, Short Circuit, Thunderous Blast) on top of End Drain really only working on bosses about halfway through the fight if not more if you happen to miss thanks to RNG lead to slower times and a bit of inconsistency.

 

D TIER: PSY BLAST

A surprisingly fun set, Psy Blast I could compare directly to Dark in many ways except for AoE.... which it struggles with. With only Psy Tornado and the Nuke to clear mobs with, I had to cycle ST attacks around frantically in between to clear areas. Luckily most of those ST attacks come with hefty -Rech which pairs well with Sustain, as well as a slew of soft/hard control to make it a very safe set of runs. This also made it weirdly faster the more boss spawns there were in the mission as I could tear through them faster than a packed area full on minions/LT's most of the time. If one of the powers were say, a sort of Cone or if Psy Nado was made to animate much faster it would easily bump up in the placings.

 

E TIER: ASSAULT RIFLE

I have a thread on this in the suggestions forum, but the short and sweet of it is Animation Times, different cone sizes, lack of aim and Ignite being weird. Full Auto takes 4s to animate and deals significantly less damage than similar "previously crashless" nukes, Flamethrower takes 7 seconds to apply its full damage after a 2.33s animation! Sniper Rifle animates slower than other fast snipes. To put the cherry on top, the Aim replacement found in Ignite not only takes a bit to animate but you need a method of keeping a foe in the patch which is actively fought by your other powers potentially knocking the guy out of the patch which is just silly.  It was an actual slog for me to run AR through these tests with only /Build Up helping out from the secondary.

 

F TIER: SONIC ATTACK

It's not over till the... slowest set sings I guess.  This set has major issues with animation times averaging around 2s a click outside the T1 attack. Sure, you can sleep groups very reliably but then taking them down is a snore-fest with only 3 ST attacks with the T3 animating slowly, and your other AoE's waking them up anyways. At least the Nuke applies damage dang near instantly compared to all other nukes (I think Psy may have done this as well) which was nice, but everything else just feels incredibly lackluster. Bosses, especially the Elite Boss, in general were a slog to get through with the poor ST output and needing to toss in Shockwave for safety every so often. I guess it is a bit of a philosophical debate though, given the secondary effect is a direct force multiplier... should it remain the worst performer in a vacuum? 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

These are my thoughts and observations on the Blast primaries so far. Take it with a grain of salt though as these runs were designed to highlight just the primary with a little help from Build Up that could emulate the effects of secondary attacks / other effects if we eyeball this compared to Defs/Corrs as well. In the future I'll add in procs and the like to see how certain sets (Dual Pistols) may change radically. 

 

Thank you,

@Galaxy Brain

 

 

 

[Saikochoro]

Thanks for putting this together Galaxy! I’ve been hoping to see one for blasters. 
 

No surprises with the top performers. I had thought dual pistols may have ranked higher as I thought I had pretty good AoE, but B tier isn’t too bad. Still I wish it had a better snipe replacement than piercing rounds. 

Edited August 3, 2020 by Saikochoro

[BasherBot]

These test seem like fun :3

[Replacement]

2 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Sure, you can sleep groups very reliably but then taking them down is a snore-fest

Oh you!

 

Um. Also, really good data.  I declare you King.

[Apparition]

Out of curiosity, did you take the Hail of Bullets bug into consideration?

[Galaxy Brain]

52 minutes ago, Apparition said:

Out of curiosity, did you take the Hail of Bullets bug into consideration?

I took it into consideration, but I'll come back to that soon.

[Parabola]

Good work @Galaxy Brain, interesting results all round. It looks like the top performers are the sets that are fairly self contained in both single target and aoe which makes sense. It would be interesting to see the effect of allowing the secondary to fill in the gaps. Some of the lesser performing sets would really benefit and may catch up a bit. Elec blast really loves a good hard hitting single target attack or two from the secondary for example, likewise psi and aoe.

[Fire Chief]

My three fave blasters Fire, Ice and Water 🙂

[Krazie Ivan]

great work! really appreciate the amount of time you put into these, and how clearly you present the data points you've tracked.

[Six-Six]

Wow. Awesome work! Thank you. Will take a while to digest the info as my brain is not as big as a Galaxy 😃

[Myrmidon]

To Whom It May Concern,

 

If Galaxy Brain is not currently in that closed beta testing, please add him yesterday. That level of dedication to analysis really needs to be put to work for all of us to benefit.

[Neogumbercules]

I have been making the same suggestions about AR for... A decade. I think I even have a thread about it here. I don't want to sound like a broken record so I won't go on a tangent. 

 

I really hope we get an update on that powerset. 

[Saikochoro]

My vote for dual pistols would be to rework piercing shot into a snipe/quick snipe.  Make damage same as other snipes. Rename it perfect shot or something like that. 

That alone would be amazing. 

Edited August 5, 2020 by Saikochoro

[plainguy]

Outstanding Job. 
Everything was easy to understand. 

 

I cannot commend you enough on this work. 
You at a minimum deserve some sort of special title either here or in game or both.. 

 

 

[Troo]

 

well done GB

[ClawsandEffect]

Sonic in a vacuum is very slow. 

 

Where it shines is as the primary for a Blapper build. 

 

I have a Sonic/Martial/Mace that I use that way. 

 

Howl, Burst of Speed, Dreadful Wail is a vicious AoE chain that rarely has any survivors. 

[Shred Monkey]

Nice work.   But i'm a bit confused.  What does this word mean?  .... *S*A*F*E*T*Y*  ....  It sounds like something that belongs in the defender forum.

[Coyote]

59 minutes ago, Shred Monkey said:

Nice work.   But i'm a bit confused.  What does this word mean?  .... *S*A*F*E*T*Y*  ....  It sounds like something that belongs in the defender forum.

 

It's what Scrappers care about. 😄

[Shred Monkey]

1 hour ago, Coyote said:

 

It's what Scrappers care about. 😄

I think for this forum we should weight the primaries based first on damage... and second, on more damage.

[zenblack]

The problem I see with the breakdown here is that alongside the minimum defenses there is no analysis of a core game mechanic. Inspirations. If you included even 1 large purple (just as an example) with each run Fire would suddenly jump back up to it's undeniable overwhelming first place. So for me the analysis of damage without the artificial weights is more accurate to what I see in playing the different primaries. Fire is further ahead of others by a huge margin with no competition by Ice or Water.

[Troo]

30 minutes ago, zenblack said:

Inspirations. If you included even 1 large purple (just as an example) with each run Fire would suddenly jump back up to it's undeniable overwhelming first place.

yeaaaaah but then inspirations would need to be included for all sets not just fire.

 

What you wrote is basically similar to: "If you included even 1 large red inspiration with each run Dark Blast would clearly crush the posted times. Dark Blast is the true damage king".

Obviously an exaggeration and silly thing to try and say.

 

Edited August 7, 2020 by Troo

[zenblack]

I disagree. Give all other sets 1 Inspiration of their choice. Or even give them all a Red and a Purple and only Fire a Purple and I am willing to bet you'd still see the time disparity since the only reason that Ice/Water get even close is because of Fire deaths and the only deaths it sees is on the Elite boss which is a single battle that can be covered with a single inspiration.

Edited August 7, 2020 by zenblack

[Galaxy Brain]

@zenblack, in the interest of fairness all sets would then be run with the same inspirations, else why artificially patch one over the others?

 

The safety metric I feel to be a valid point of reference when comparing the sets at a base level and could be useful when deciding a set as a whole. Ignoring that though, yes fire definitely has a big edge on the rest but it doesn't get it for free.

Edited August 7, 2020 by Galaxy Brain

[zenblack]

12 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

@zenblack, in the interest of fairness all sets would then be run with the same inspirations, else why artificially patch one over the others?

 

The safety metric I feel to be a valid point of reference when comparing the sets at a base level and could be useful when deciding a set as a whole. Ignoring that though, yes fire definitely has a big edge on the rest but it doesn't get it for free.

Then I would say do it with all of them but I am not telling anyone to do testing they don't want to do.

 

The more I think about it I think it just comes down to in this particular set of tests, the Defense point you selected is a large aspect of it simply because it is not what any playable character that has at least 32 (assuming you are just looking to have access to all powers) would run at and thus it skews the test.

 

It would be unfair to say, just give 1 Inspiration to this set of tests, because if you pick Purple then it will obviously boost a set like fire which only has a defense issue for one particular part of the fight.

 

I would be interested in the results if you picked a certain defense point that is more applicable to what a character would have (at whatever level you set your tests to) at that level.

 

The main reason I even mentioned anything is because in my tests to create min/max builds the 1st metric is much more prevelant than the 2nd safety metric and this is with multiple secondary builds.

[modest]

13 minutes ago, zenblack said:

Then I would say do it with all of them but I am not telling anyone to do testing they don't want to do.

 

The more I think about it I think it just comes down to in this particular set of tests, the Defense point you selected is a large aspect of it simply because it is not what any playable character that has at least 32 (assuming you are just looking to have access to all powers) would run at and thus it skews the test.

 

It would be unfair to say, just give 1 Inspiration to this set of tests, because if you pick Purple then it will obviously boost a set like fire which only has a defense issue for one particular part of the fight.

 

I would be interested in the results if you picked a certain defense point that is more applicable to what a character would have (at whatever level you set your tests to) at that level.

 

The main reason I even mentioned anything is because in my tests to create min/max builds the 1st metric is much more prevelant than the 2nd safety metric and this is with multiple secondary builds.

What you're asking is unreasonable. It also defeats the purpose of this testing.

 

@Galaxy Brain's testing is meant to compare the relative performance of each Blaster blast set with its included powers in a standard in-game environment. If outside elements are added to the test, then the test would not reflect the inherent performance of the power set.