How good are Trick Shot and Explosive Shuriken?

[oedipus_tex]

I've wavered back and forth on Martial Assault trying to get a pulse on it. It doesn't have any healing or endurance recovery and none of the powers stand out right away like "wow" but it does have a little bit more AoE than a typical assault set.

 

My questions: how good are these powers really? Does the AoE cover for the lower single target damage?

 

I pulled up Icy Assault for comparison because I consider it the "most generic" Assault set.

 

ICY

 

MARTIAL

 

 

A few takeaways:

• Trick Shot versus 1 enemy has lower DPA than even the Tier 1 attack in either set. So its not worth casting unless you have nothing else.
  • However if you actually hit 3 things with it, it has a DPA effectively around 111. This seems to compare positively with Ice's Bitter Ice Blast. With the bonus that Trick Shot is available at a much lower level.
    • BIB: 12 recharge, 1.32s animation, 101 damage (dpa: 77)
    • Trick Shot: 10 recharge, 1.32s animation, 37 damage x 3 targets = 111 damage (dpa: 84)

 

EDIT: Nope, see conversation below.

• Explosive Shuriken is a weird power. It has a 10ft radius (vs 15 for most ranged AoEs). However it is a ranged radial AoE on a Dominator, which itself is very rare.
  • I'd always thought of this as more of a single target attack but its actually a pretty good AoE
    • It caps at 10 targets rather than normal 16 for a ranged blast, but you probably cant fit 10 things inside a 10ft radius AoE anyway.
    • Explosive Shuriken actually has better DPA than the APP version of Fireball (55 vs 62). It also recharges much faster--12 seconds versus 32
    • If this power hits 2 targets, it has effectively reached 124 DPA, barely shy of Fiery Assault's Blaze (128 DPA). At 3 targets it has significantly eclipsed Blaze.

 

 

None of this is factoring in the roughly +12% damage bonus from Envenomed Blades.

 

 

Overall I feel like I've been sleeping on this set. The lack of sustainabilty is a bit of a problem. Ranged single target damage is definitely lacking. But the AoE potential may be better than I thought.

 

Other thoughts?

Edited October 11, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[Carnifax]

Im not sold on Explosive. I think the AoE is spash damage rather than the full whack. Im not sure but it seems to work that way. 

[oedipus_tex]

 

3 minutes ago, Carnifax said:

Im not sold on Explosive. I think the AoE is spash damage rather than the full whack. Im not sure but it seems to work that way. 

 

 

And here's why I'm glad I started this thread to ask.

 

You're absolutely right. I just tested it to be sure. The AoE only applies to the DoT portion. If I'd read closer I'd have realized it says this in the power's mini description.

 

Yikes. That's pretty weak and actually on some Dominators potentially irritating because its mostly nuisance damage that breaks Sleep. 

 

That really makes me want to spec out of the power. However I'm not sure I can without a big drop in ranged damage. Hmm.

[Carnifax]

Im in the same boat with my Dark/Martial.

 

In fact im in a much worse boat of my own making, because as-is I dont have any of the melee attacks.

 

Trick Shot is reasonable okay with procs, the snipe is great, but all snipes are great and explosives animation time and being mostly single target make it unappealing but necessary to have some sort of attack chain.

 

I actually like the two aoe melee attacks, they look cool, but couldn't fit everything in whilest getting permadom and some defense (~35% s/l I think).

[oedipus_tex]

Yep that's my character as well, Dark/Martial. This poor guy is perhaps my most-rerolled character of all time as I search for the right combo of archetype, primary and secondary.

 

 

 

 

 

I really want to make this build work for concept reasons. But I feel my heart sinking, because with Explosive Shuriken out, Savage Assault is so much better. (I already have a Dark/Savage version of him at 50, but was turned off by all the bird attacks.) If only I could modify the bird attack into something else. 🙂 

 

Caltrops leaves me a tiny bit of hope, though not a lot.

[ninja surprise]

Ah, this explains why my Dark/Martial has always felt down on its luck. 

On 10/11/2020 at 12:03 PM, oedipus_tex said:

I really want to make this build work for concept reasons.

Ditto, but looks like it's time to loot the corpse and try another combo.

Edited October 12, 2020 by ninja surprise

[Coyote]

The melee AoEs and the ability to use ranged AoEs without being bothered if you're in melee range is the reason to play Martial. It has two AoEs for melee and access to its (relatively weak) ranged AoE while in melee, which plays very nicely. But if that's not a good enough draw, certainly the weak ranged AoE ability isn't going to be attractive enough.

[Tater Todd]

Martial has a lot of proc potential.  It's what first sticks in my mind while looking at it. 

[GrayMatter88]

I just recently started playing elec/martial and I’m really liking it. I’m only 26 with this toon. I can’t really say how I’ll feel after I get ES (which I was really looking forward to) I can’t use caltrops because it just totally ruins my sleep power, and it sounds like ES will do the same. But I’m thinking that I won’t really need to rely on that sleep nearly as much because of the confuse power being on such a low cool down. Also you can put force feedback in a lot martial powers which is really nice for easy perma dom.

[Excidium]

I think Trick Shot is an under-valued power - apart from the snipe, possibly the best in the set. It's fast animating, comes at a low level, recharges at around 3 seconds on a typical permadom build, and supposedly has a higher than usual proc rate. Most critically, it's an AoE that works from any position with no movement or re-targeting required. A cone, especially the pathetically narrow ones like Night Fall, needs both the correct position and the correct target to hit much of anything, and you can easily waste a second or two in a fight getting both right. Trick Shot doesn't care, and will hit its 5 targets from any range, from point blank up to 70 feet. I rather miss it when playing other dom secondary sets.

 

Explosive Shuriken, on the other hand...well, your ranged ST chain needs it, and it's nice to have a non-Lethal dmg type in the toolkit, but it's pretty uninspiring, especially compared to insta-snipe. I had a quick look at Mid's powerset comparison numbers for DPA, was surprised at the disparity between ES and Blaze - 152.4 DPA vs 68.8 for ES. Okay, so comparing to the best T3 in dom secondaries is a bit unfair, but even Bitter Ice Blast scores 95.1. However, /energy's Power Burst scored almost identically to ES at 68.7 and nobody seems to complain about that. Though Power Burst has a nice knockdown effect, which ES doesn't.

 

A while back I wrote a log parser to track total damage numbers for various powers, to get an idea of their real-world DPS output. Unfortunately, my mind/martial doesn't have Shuriken fully slotted atm, so I can't properly quantify how TS and ES compare to the rest of /martial and each other just yet - maybe in a few more levels.

Edited October 14, 2020 by Excidium

[Carnifax]

3 hours ago, Excidium said:

However, /energy's Power Burst scored almost identically to ES at 68.7 and nobody seems to complain about that. Though Power Burst has a nice knockdown effect, which ES doesn't.

Weirdly I've just literally done a Fire/NRG build which skips Burst entirely. Mostly because NRG has Power Push now. Most Domi level 38 powers (except Blaze) are pretty unimpressive overall so being able to skip one in favour of earlier Sleet & Frozen Armour seems nice. 

 

Trick Shots DPA is terrible against 1 enemy. But as you say you can spam in in the middle of the bunch and the DPA just gets better and better as a fire-and-forget bouncing around. 

[Coyote]

What animation time are you using for Power Burst? It got an animation upgrade last year, but I don't think it's updated in Mids. Also, it benefits from the Energy Store/Release mechanism to do WAY more damage when you set it up, which should be at least half the time it's used. I think with 50% Energy Release uptime it still ends up better than BIB, and improves as the uptime goes higher.

[Carnifax]

2 hours ago, Coyote said:

What animation time are you using for Power Burst? It got an animation upgrade last year, but I don't think it's updated in Mids. Also, it benefits from the Energy Store/Release mechanism to do WAY more damage when you set it up, which should be at least half the time it's used. I think with 50% Energy Release uptime it still ends up better than BIB, and improves as the uptime goes higher.

Oooh. I knew none of this. Oh well. Plenty of time to rejig. Ill check the ingame stats

[Excidium]

18 hours ago, Coyote said:

What animation time are you using for Power Burst? It got an animation upgrade last year, but I don't think it's updated in Mids.

Ah, good catch. It's 2 secs in Mids, 1.67 in game. Assuming the dmg is correct, or at least equally broken as everything else, that brings Power Burst's DPA to 82.3, not counting Energy Release.

 

I also played the Belladonna Vetrano arc on my mind/martial at +4/x8 with a team, and ran the resulting logs through the parser. Here's the resulting damage breakdown:

 

Trick Shot: 25624 (34.4%), Masterful Throw: 9001 (12.1%), Dragon's Tail: 7884 (10.6%), Terrify: 7655 (10.3%), Spinning Kick: 5413 (7.3%), Thunder Kick: 4499 (6.0%), Shuriken Throw: 4429 (6.0%), Malaise's Illusions: Chance for Psionic Damage: 4209 (5.7%), Dominate: 2204 (3.0%), Sting of the Manticore: Chance for Toxic Damage: 1902 (2.6%), Explosive Shuriken: 1483 (2.0%), Mesmerize: 103 (0.1%)

 

So the takeaway is that Trick Shot is doing almost three times the damage of any other skill in /martial, and over a third of all damage done. I had thought it would be best or second-best, but not that it would dominate quite so much. My Trick Shot is also only 5 slotted atm with Decimation, and doesn't have a proc IO slotted at all yet. (I have an Apocalypse: %Neg Dmg waiting for lvl 50.) So properly slotted at 50 with a proc IO, it should be even more effective. Some caveats - this was at +4/x8, so ranged skills are over-represented, since there were rather a lot of enemies that could mulch me in one hit. Also, my Explosive Shuriken was only 1-slotted, so the low number here is not an accurate representation of its performance. But I don't expect even with full slotting it would do any better than 3rd place.

Edited October 14, 2020 by Excidium

[Carnifax]

On 10/14/2020 at 10:21 AM, Excidium said:

Ah, good catch. It's 2 secs in Mids, 1.67 in game. Assuming the dmg is correct, or at least equally broken as everything else, that brings Power Burst's DPA to 82.3, not counting Energy Release.

 

I also played the Belladonna Vetrano arc on my mind/martial at +4/x8 with a team, and ran the resulting logs through the parser. Here's the resulting damage breakdown:

 

Trick Shot: 25624 (34.4%), Masterful Throw: 9001 (12.1%), Dragon's Tail: 7884 (10.6%), Terrify: 7655 (10.3%), Spinning Kick: 5413 (7.3%), Thunder Kick: 4499 (6.0%), Shuriken Throw: 4429 (6.0%), Malaise's Illusions: Chance for Psionic Damage: 4209 (5.7%), Dominate: 2204 (3.0%), Sting of the Manticore: Chance for Toxic Damage: 1902 (2.6%), Explosive Shuriken: 1483 (2.0%), Mesmerize: 103 (0.1%)

 

So the takeaway is that Trick Shot is doing almost three times the damage of any other skill in /martial, and over a third of all damage done. I had thought it would be best or second-best, but not that it would dominate quite so much. My Trick Shot is also only 5 slotted atm with Decimation, and doesn't have a proc IO slotted at all yet. (I have an Apocalypse: %Neg Dmg waiting for lvl 50.) So properly slotted at 50 with a proc IO, it should be even more effective. Some caveats - this was at +4/x8, so ranged skills are over-represented, since there were rather a lot of enemies that could mulch me in one hit. Also, my Explosive Shuriken was only 1-slotted, so the low number here is not an accurate representation of its performance. But I don't expect even with full slotting it would do any better than 3rd place.

What is this Parser and where do I get it?!

[Excidium]

34 minutes ago, Carnifax said:

What is this Parser and where do I get it?!

It's some Python code I wrote for analysing log files. Unfortunately it's not available anywhere because it was written rather casually and uses a couple of other CoH API and library files to collate skill names, so it's not really portable in its current form.

 

 

[Carnifax]

11 minutes ago, Excidium said:

It's some Python code I wrote for analysing log files. Unfortunately it's not available anywhere because it was written rather casually and uses a couple of other CoH API and library files to collate skill names, so it's not really portable in its current form.

 

 

😪

 

Dang it!

Edited October 15, 2020 by Carnifax

[oedipus_tex]

On 10/14/2020 at 4:21 AM, Excidium said:

Trick Shot: 25624 (34.4%), Masterful Throw: 9001 (12.1%), Dragon's Tail: 7884 (10.6%), Terrify: 7655 (10.3%), Spinning Kick: 5413 (7.3%), Thunder Kick: 4499 (6.0%), Shuriken Throw: 4429 (6.0%), Malaise's Illusions: Chance for Psionic Damage: 4209 (5.7%), Dominate: 2204 (3.0%), Sting of the Manticore: Chance for Toxic Damage: 1902 (2.6%), Explosive Shuriken: 1483 (2.0%), Mesmerize: 103 (0.1%)

 

Excellent analysis.

 

The most outrageous part of your data is that Explosive Shuriken was outdamaged by the procs in Malaise's Illusions and Sting of the Manticore. I assume you have Malaise in Mass Confusion, which means its only up every 60 seconds at max. That's pretty damning for Explosive Shuriken, tho I also can't see from your data  how many times you cast it versus other powers.

[Excidium]

16 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

The most outrageous part of your data is that Explosive Shuriken was outdamaged by the procs in Malaise's Illusions and Sting of the Manticore.

ES is pretty average, but you might have overlooked this part of my original post:

Quote

Also, my Explosive Shuriken was only 1-slotted, so the low number here is not an accurate representation of its performance.

Properly slotted, I think it would do better than the Malaise proc, but can't say just yet. I was mostly posting the numbers to show how surprisingly strong Trick Shot was, sorry if that wasn't clearer. In that run, ES was cast 24 times with an average damage of 61.8.

 

Though you would perhaps like another finding. I tinkered with the log parser code a bit today to add cast totals as you suggested, and found some other minor damage sources that I'd overlooked previously. The smallest of them all was this:

 

Shuriken's Explosion: 58 (0.1%), 30 hits, 1.9 avg dmg.

 

Shuriken's Explosion is the name used in the logs for the ES splash damage effect. 58 points of damage across an evening's play - so yeah, I wouldn't be taking Explosive Shuriken for its AoE properties.