Beyond the adjectives. Real AT damage ratings!

[Snarky]

I am interested in a deep yet casual discussion of the damage output of each archetype.  Are the rating on the character creation screen accurate, or even close to the reality?

 

For purposes of this discussion let us consider a mushy stew of the "average" powerset example of each set.  Yes, we all know fire Brutes and Blasters do more damage.  Just shove the sets in the bag and grind until a sort of average number pops out.

 

To rate this please use a scale of 1-100.  Blasters (I assume, the topic will explore) will be the top damage dealers at 100 on average.  In this case a Fire Blaster rated individually would prob be 105?  110?  But we are talking the nonexistent "average" Blaster.  There should be no one at a 1.  The lowest damage I assume would be ?  Controllers ? according to the game startup screen.  An "average" controller would do % of the average Blaster and that would be the effective bottom of the scale.  

 

The game description has Blasters damage output as 8 melee 10 ranged, an average of 9. Which is horse crap because making a ranged Blaster is like threading a needle in a car on a bumpy road.  Maybe if you consider PBAoE as a ranged attack I would agree.  That is iffy at best.  Yet can we all agree that on average Blasters are the top damage dealers?  If so, the average Blaster (doesnt exist, just a placeholder) is therefore our default 100.

 

If the descriptions are accurate a controller has a melee of 2 and a ranged of 3.  Therefore as the average of 9 on the above scale for a blaster becomes 100, the "average" controller (IF we agree with the assessed values) would be around a 30.

 

I am relatively happy calling an average Blaster a 100 on the damage scale.  But I have seen people do wild things with Controllers.  30% Blaster damage output?  Or was I just watching a great player with an outlier build?

 

But where does an average Brute stand?  I do not think we can fairly average Brutes damage rating for ranged and melee.  Melee is just about all they do.  So I would rate their damage output (and really any ATs output) based on how much they actually smack enemies with.  

 

For clarity all ratings should assume +0 mobs in a standard Task (Strike) Force setting.   This is about as close as CoX gets to a regulation tournament course to play on.  

 

Some of you (I have read with great interest the detailed analyses!) will have data sets that have been meticulously mined and thought about.  Thank you.  I am (almost) as interested in how players "feel" about how each AT performs as well.

 

Please keep this jovial and fun.  In the end it means nothing.  It has been on my mind to ask the question for over a week.  So, I asked.  Thank you for your responses.

 

And yes, if you feel my setup for the parameters and metrics above are wonky please so so, and why.

 

 

[Greycat]

I've got to say some ATs are going to have a ... let's say much wider range than others. Sure, blasters are damage/damage, with damage on top and damage sprinkles. Does that offset (say) a brute having built in mez protection?

 

But that aside, something like a controller can go from my "... why am I trying to solo this, it's taken me 5 minutes on two even con mobs" earth/FF to the "yes, we used to use these to farm" fire/kins.  Are we considering a defender's boost to damage when solo?

 

... and no, I don't have data sets or anything. I don't do a *thing* with numbers. But I will watch this out of curiosity. Discussion can be fun. (Or it can get locked. Let's lean more towards the first than the last.)

 

Only rating I'll put is "most fun = Warshade," for me. *shrug*

[Hexquisite]

I'm not a numbers girl, so I'll leave those to other people.

 

In terms of feel, however... when I play a Blaster, I may know I'm doing more damage, but no matter how much damage I do with any ranged AT, nothing feels as strong as melee. Maybe it's because it's more visceral, being so close to the enemy and pounding your fists into them. It could also be that, personally, I just enjoy beating people's faces in* while simultaneously laughing off the piddling damage they dish out against me. That sheer thrill and pure fun of close-quarters melee makes me feel like I'm doing more damage than I know I actually am.

 

It varies, a bit, with powers. Claws and Spines and Broad Sword don't give that same raw feel of pure damage as Super Strength, Martial Arts, or Street Justice. And, as I say that, I realize that it might the knockback/knockdown that does it for me. Sending a dude flying into the wall definitely makes you feel like your dishing out some heavy damage.

 

 

 

*In video games >_>

[Parabola]

There is a difference in many cases between potential damage and realised damage. Blasters tend to have massive potential damage but they can't always realise it. Mez is an obvious reason, death another. But there is also the simple fact of mobs not always playing ball in terms of positioning. The standard mob behaviour of 'crowd around the hero and smack him' is a problem if you have cone attacks and have no ability to position the enemy for example.

 

Melee types have huge advantages in all this. Not only do they get mez protection baked in but for them positioning is simple. If the enemy are uncooperative ranged types, melee characters can corner pull, if not they can just jump in. They also often have taunt auras to help the process. Blasters (and other typically ranged type damage dealers) often work best if they have someone else to position the mobs or if they adopt a blapping playstyle.

 

Another advantage in realising damage that melee types have (particularly solo) is their greater survivability and what that allows them to do with inspirations. Squishy types tend to have a few different demands on inspirations, from keeping a couple of break frees to shoring up defence, emergency heals and maybe even a rez. Melee types can typically boil inspiration use down to one thing: damage. The farming trick of turning off large, mez protection and rez inspirations and setting up macros for converting everything else into reds, and eating them en masse is an enormously powerful mechanism. I set this up at level 1 with every melee toon I make and never look back. Initially I set the missions to -1 with as many mobs as I can reasonably kill and plough through with the inspirations raining in.

 

All this in my opinion adds up to a situation where although blasters do the most damage on paper (and can realise this with outside help), melee types are often able to deliver more damage more consistently, particularly solo.

[Outrider_01]

Damage scale is easy

 

Blaster still higher then you can crank it

11 As high as you can crank it

10  GM_Jimmy

09 Cats

08 Arcanaville Math

07 Fact

06 Not fiction

05 Fabric of reality

04 Plot hole

03 Regen

02 Fire Brutes

01 Every other AT

 

Realisictly, blaster out damages and destroys all those things.  GMs edge them out, as they can nerf them.  Please don't nerf blasters 😨.  Cats, nobody can stand up to a feline and blasters just have a staring contest.  And Arcanaville Math....nothing compares to it as it wipes out reality and more powerful then a plot hole which is definitely a fact and not fiction.  So, blasters are off the charts

[KC4800]

19 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

Damage scale is easy

 

Blaster still higher then you can crank it

11 As high as you can crank it

10  GM_Jimmy

09 Cats

08 Arcanaville Math

07 Fact

06 Not fiction

05 Fabric of reality

04 Plot hole

03 Regen

02 Fire Brutes

01 Every other AT

 

Realisictly, blaster out damages and destroys all those things.  GMs edge them out, as they can nerf them.  Please don't nerf blasters 😨.  Cats, nobody can stand up to a feline and blasters just have a staring contest.  And Arcanaville Math....nothing compares to it as it wipes out reality and more powerful then a plot hole which is definitely a fact and not fiction.  So, blasters are off the charts

Where's Leeeeeeroy Jenkins in this list?

 

[wjrasmussen]

16 hours ago, Snarky said:

I am interested in a deep yet casual discussion of the damage output of each archetype.  Are the rating on the character creation screen accurate, or even close to the reality?

 

For purposes of this discussion let us consider a mushy stew of the "average" powerset example of each set.  Yes, we all know fire Brutes and Blasters do more damage.  Just shove the sets in the bag and grind until a sort of average number pops out.

 

To rate this please use a scale of 1-100.  Blasters (I assume, the topic will explore) will be the top damage dealers at 100 on average.  In this case a Fire Blaster rated individually would prob be 105?  110?  But we are talking the nonexistent "average" Blaster.  There should be no one at a 1.  The lowest damage I assume would be ?  Controllers ? according to the game startup screen.  An "average" controller would do % of the average Blaster and that would be the effective bottom of the scale.  

 

The game description has Blasters damage output as 8 melee 10 ranged, an average of 9. Which is horse crap because making a ranged Blaster is like threading a needle in a car on a bumpy road.  Maybe if you consider PBAoE as a ranged attack I would agree.  That is iffy at best.  Yet can we all agree that on average Blasters are the top damage dealers?  If so, the average Blaster (doesnt exist, just a placeholder) is therefore our default 100.

 

If the descriptions are accurate a controller has a melee of 2 and a ranged of 3.  Therefore as the average of 9 on the above scale for a blaster becomes 100, the "average" controller (IF we agree with the assessed values) would be around a 30.

 

I am relatively happy calling an average Blaster a 100 on the damage scale.  But I have seen people do wild things with Controllers.  30% Blaster damage output?  Or was I just watching a great player with an outlier build?

 

But where does an average Brute stand?  I do not think we can fairly average Brutes damage rating for ranged and melee.  Melee is just about all they do.  So I would rate their damage output (and really any ATs output) based on how much they actually smack enemies with.  

 

For clarity all ratings should assume +0 mobs in a standard Task (Strike) Force setting.   This is about as close as CoX gets to a regulation tournament course to play on.  

 

Some of you (I have read with great interest the detailed analyses!) will have data sets that have been meticulously mined and thought about.  Thank you.  I am (almost) as interested in how players "feel" about how each AT performs as well.

 

Please keep this jovial and fun.  In the end it means nothing.  It has been on my mind to ask the question for over a week.  So, I asked.  Thank you for your responses.

 

And yes, if you feel my setup for the parameters and metrics above are wonky please so so, and why.

 

 

what are the fun rating of all of these?

[siolfir]

As was mentioned earlier, each AT is going to have a range around their "average" and how heavily IO'd the build is will factor in a great deal in how much damage they can sustainably get away with; for example a Blaster with just SOs and no support isn't going to do as much sustained damage as any melee because they'll lose their hit points too quickly, but a well-built Blaster can run through multiple targets faster than anything else because they aren't getting hit.

 

At the lowest end isn't Controllers though, it's petless Masterminds. They have lower hit points, worse buff/debuff modifiers, higher endurance costs on every power, have the same damage modifier (0.55), and don't have Containment to double it.

[Grouchybeast]

6 hours ago, siolfir said:

As was mentioned earlier, each AT is going to have a range around their "average" and how heavily IO'd the build is will factor in a great deal in how much damage they can sustainably get away with; for example a Blaster with just SOs and no support isn't going to do as much sustained damage as any melee because they'll lose their hit points too quickly, but a well-built Blaster can run through multiple targets faster than anything else because they aren't getting hit.

In @Galaxy Brain's tests, even on SOs blasters' clear times weren't much slower than the scrappers'.

[Galaxy Brain]

2 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

In @Galaxy Brain's tests, even on SOs blasters' clear times weren't much slower than the scrappers'.

On average, Scrappers cleared their rest in 5:29 vs Blasters at 5:59.

 

There is some wiggle room though as Scrappers have 20 tested primaries vs Blasters' 13 primaries, and when testing I used /wp for the Scrapper for no added offense.... but likewise /elec on the blasters with only the Damage Aura sustain toggle running (and build up) to isolate the primary. Fire Blast was the fastest among both ATs, but the 2nd fastest Blaster set (Beam Rifle) was slower than the top 8 scrapper sets.

 

Taking out secondary damage likely hurt blasters, but this was also meant to test just the blasts, not "blasters" if that makes sense.

 

In my opinion though, it shows two things. One, I feel Melee sets are much more coherently designed than Blast sets with how the whole package works on combat. Blast sets often have odd ranges (different cones you gotta line up, rains) or situational powers (nukes tbh) where Melee mostly can just jump in and spin like the Tasmanian devil in a mob lol. Two, the test im comparing was at x3 size, which may have favored scrappers *slightly* as the target saturation was not always that huge to take advantage of the blast set's higher target caps... but then its also a question of if the blaster would have been able to solo that many targets.

 

 

 

[Latex]

The closest anyone came to figuring out the hard numbers was this spreadsheet; https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19VuZ9zJ_8eKN11JytgaK9mt9Fy-8pjANopb-FGh68Uw/edit#gid=624942285

It doesn't account for changes the Homecoming team have made. IO's also change things immensely- the sheet is largely inaccurate for Homecoming, but accurate enough for i24 which was the official last patch.

 

From my limited understanding Scrappers are the big hitters, Titan Weapons was king. I love my Katana Scrapper though, the flow of the rotation is unlike any other powerset in the game. I have 5 buttons and each of them delivers massive impact and has it's use. I dislike the general trend of 'ability bloat' in City of Heroes or any game for that matter.

 

Edited January 4, 2021 by Latex

[DougGraves]

Blasters should be slower soloing than scrappers.  A blaster is all damage.  They should shine on teams where someone else is tanking.  Whereas scrappers and stalkers are half defense, which is not that useful on a team with someone tanking.  So scrappers and stalkers should be better solo but contribute less damage on a team.

 

 

[Gulbasaur]

1 hour ago, Latex said:

The closest anyone came to figuring out the hard numbers was this spreadsheet; https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19VuZ9zJ_8eKN11JytgaK9mt9Fy-8pjANopb-FGh68Uw/edit#gid=624942285

The last time I looked at that (which was a while ago) it had some significant errors (some of which are also in the Mids datatabase), like peacebringer attacks being lower than they are in-game and warshades apparently toggling in and out of nova form every other attack but never using any damage buffs, making it look like they're less effective than they are.

 

It's a decent attempt but it's also half-finished and abandoned, meaning it's fairly useless.

[Latex]

3 hours ago, Gulbasaur said:

The last time I looked at that (which was a while ago) it had some significant errors (some of which are also in the Mids datatabase), like peacebringer attacks being lower than they are in-game and warshades apparently toggling in and out of nova form every other attack but never using any damage buffs, making it look like they're less effective than they are.

 

It's a decent attempt but it's also half-finished and abandoned, meaning it's fairly useless.

 

True enough, it's certainly not on the level of hard math that has been datamined from other MMO's. But, it is the only resource I know that puts in some numbers (aside from Pylon testing), even if some are false or incorrect theres some that are correct, of course that doesn't make it a science but from my experience having played some of the 'top DPS' powersets in the Spreadsheet it 'feels' accurate to some degree, it still isn't accurate though I agree!

 

One thing I've learned about this game is that damage cap is very easy to reach in an optimized team, the thing that brings the pain most of all seems to be -RES, -RES seems to be absolute in bolstering damage and that's how you get insane numbers and it's because -RES doesn't seem to have a cap. I begin to drool when I see a Sonic/Sonic Defender on the team (along with a Kin) cause I know I'm going to be hitting like a truck.

[Monos King]

12 hours ago, Latex said:

-RES seems to be absolute in bolstering damage and that's how you get insane numbers and it's because -RES doesn't seem to have a cap

-Res cap is -300%. It's definitely not a cap you usually reach.

[Carnifax]

14 hours ago, Latex said:

One thing I've learned about this game is that damage cap is very easy to reach in an optimized team, the thing that brings the pain most of all seems to be -RES, -RES seems to be absolute in bolstering damage and that's how you get insane numbers and it's because -RES doesn't seem to have a cap. I begin to drool when I see a Sonic/Sonic Defender on the team (along with a Kin) cause I know I'm going to be hitting like a truck.

Yup. It's because -Res is applied to the final damage total. So it acts like a power multipler when combined with Damage Enhancements and Damage buffs. 

 

So a -40% Res debuff actually tends to mean "78% more damage than your base damage" because everyone has ~95% damage slotted into their attacks generally. It gets even more pronounced as people add more Damage buffs via Assault, Build-Ups, Fulc Shifts and Reds. 

 

For the same enhancement reasons your damage cap tends towards 100% less than when it goes blue on combat monitoring. My DP / Kin corruptor is actually capped between 305% and 340% (depending on the power as some of mine are underslotted for damage due to slot crunch and it not really mattering) not the 400% shown in combat attribs.

[Snarky]

THis was posted in the Sentinel Archetype threads.  This is one of the reasons I started this thread.  Where do the ATs really (no, REALLY) stand?

"Almost every AT does more DPS than a Sentinel. Even Tankers. The Tanker sheet is using purely wagged enhancement numbers and no actual optimized builds.

I changed the sheets to operate off of drop downs for secondary and primary instead a sheet for each attack set. I'll probably port the Sentinel sheet to work like this, it's just easier to change things this way.

Tanker Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13czdhsxYChsOfEHJMRk6dJIlJ_YogIB_q_G-0l8HD5w/edit?usp=sharing
Corruptor Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1buBhaMjezBrNDf_lWklDFeA1AxsnGiPZQwCC-dbTg0s/edit?usp=sharing

Dominator Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10GVDAM2e7SPbRSKNC2PrcKENY00GPg7lfJ-re8GgHR0/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 04:44 PM by underfyre"

Edited January 7, 2021 by Snarky

[Ukase]

There's one problem to this. Slotting. 
Some players will do the math and use procs to full advantage. In these instances, a water blaster could outdps a fire blaster. As could perhaps other blasters. 
Others have done pylon testing, but the issue of slotting remains the same. Further, NPCs tend to be more susceptible to certain damage types, while others are more susceptible to different damage types. It's all apples and oranges. Heck, part of the reason fire is so good is because of that very reason. 

Lastly, most tests look at final builds at 50+3, but don't even think about how the characters will fare at levels 10, 20, 30 and 40 and everywhere in between. Sure, a lot of folks PL straight past that, but a number of other players play through content to 50. There is no one, best answer. 

Attack chains, slotting, NPCs - all impact any answer.