Savage Melee and Fiery Melee should double their secondary effect damage on crits for Stalkers/Scrappers

[aethereal]

Both of these sets are lackluster.  On Brutes, their secondary effects (DoTs) get bonuses from fury, and that hasn't been enough to make them be overpowered or particularly sought after on brutes.  Giving them either a second DoT on crit, or else an increase to crit damage lump-sum that's equal to the expected amount of bleed damage, would give both of them a mild bonus on scrappers/stalkers that would probably take them from "low tier" to "lowish-mid-tier" in overall power level.

[arcane]

Savage Melee ain’t lackluster at all, it’s just AoE leaning.

 

(But yeah sure)

Edited October 9, 2021 by arcane

[aethereal]

I got interested in how much that was true, so I made this sheet:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMSg3mw5r6Y0R1lD5c0fGnfaLnsQcU5r2zIm7rb0YdM/edit?usp=sharing

 

My conclusion is that Savage Melee has decent AoE, but it's not one of the top AoE sets in Scrapper primaries.  It looks better by comparison as a Stalker primary, since the field is weaker and it doesn't lose any AoE as a Stalker.

[arcane]

1 hour ago, aethereal said:

I got interested in how much that was true, so I made this sheet:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMSg3mw5r6Y0R1lD5c0fGnfaLnsQcU5r2zIm7rb0YdM/edit?usp=sharing

 

My conclusion is that Savage Melee has decent AoE, but it's not one of the top AoE sets in Scrapper primaries.  It looks better by comparison as a Stalker primary, since the field is weaker and it doesn't lose any AoE as a Stalker.

I don’t quite understand how you go from that spreadsheet to conclusions, but does it account for proc DPS? For instance, the fact that Savage Leap doesn’t get shafted by pseudopet proc rules, like Lightning Rod does, is very significant. I mean I’m pretty positive that makes it the best melee damage set AoE proc bomb in the game.

 

My only Savage though is a Rad/Savage Tanker though, so my personal experience is skewed by the fact that the specific combo has three freakin’ mini-nukes. 
 

I suggest adding columns for “Average damage per proc” and “Average DPA per proc”. I calculate those in my own spreadsheet every time I build anything nowadays 🙂 That as well as consideration of what sets do the best job of using most/all of the purple/-res/+rech procs are key to me. For instance, not a Savage Melee specific issue, but it’s helpful to remember that small cones allow an entirely different set of procs to be a part of your attack chain (Golden Dragonfly, Cross Punch, etc.)

Edited October 10, 2021 by arcane

[ninja surprise]

14 hours ago, arcane said:

suggest adding columns for “Average damage per proc” and “Average DPA per proc”.

 

Nah, sets shouldn't be balanced around one specific form of min-maxing, or force a player to slot that way for the power to be effective.

I really enjoy Savage and it would be great to give it a consistent crit damage buff.

I would also love if Savage Leap were changed to behave like a targeted teleport attack so that it could more consistently attack every target. There are targets that Shield Charge can hit that Savage Leap can't, like the computer in the ITF, at the end of LGTF there's those 4 generator/tower things, and other stuff like that. It's really annoying.

[InvaderStych]

4 hours ago, ninja surprise said:

There are targets that Shield Charge can hit that Savage Leap can't, like the computer in the ITF, at the end of LGTF there's those 4 generator/tower things, and other stuff like that. It's really annoying.

 

Include Burst of Speed and Combat Teleport in that list as well; however, it is not on the power side that causes the issue.  It came up in the various discussions of teleportation when Combat Teleport was in open beta.  Many objects are flagged such that they cannot ever be the target of teleport - iirc to prevent players from pulling sneaky tricks and/or prevent something from breaking.  The best examples are doors for Vaults and In-Mission Jail Cells (remember when those were relevant? ... but I digress) - if those could be teleported (previously via TP Foe, now TP Target and FS) then they could be simply bypassed instead of defeated.

 

Destructible mission objectives are the same. (ITF and LGTF examples) Given my Combat Teleport addiction I've run into a lot of things that are flagged this way.  I'm not going to pretend to understand the coding issues involved, but somewhere in the feedback thread on beta Teleportation Pool updates one of the Devs explained this in game programming terms.

 

At least they fixed the Chantry/Storm Palace exterior ring so we can use Leap, BoS, CT, et all there now.  😄

 

18 hours ago, arcane said:

I don’t quite understand how you go from that spreadsheet to conclusions, but does it account for proc DPS? For instance, the fact that Savage Leap doesn’t get shafted by pseudopet proc rules, like Lightning Rod does, is very significant. I mean I’m pretty positive that makes it the best melee damage set AoE proc bomb in the game.

 

I don't think we should be balancing sets on proc chances, for starters, and I am fairly confident that one or more Devs have said similar.   Further, playing through the first 33-34 levels of Savage without Leap and before getting slots into it will demonstrate clearly just how lack-luster the set is for single target with Hemo being trash and Leap being lack-luster damage without Procs.

 

While leveling my last two savage scrappers (bailed on the first one in the early 40s to swap secondaries) whittling down a boss with Savage made Spines feel like a Single Target King by comparison.  From an experiential standpoint at least.  Bear in mind this is on SOs with some select IOs peppered in once I know which ones a toon will keep. This is how I level everything, fwiw, I can neither build a toon nor decide if I even want to build it without leveling it "by hand" as it were. 🤣

 

It's hard to judge the set properly when it's big single-target attack is woefully bad, but here we are. Resorting to Patron attacks to bolster single target performance. 

 

On 10/9/2021 at 8:10 AM, aethereal said:

Giving them either a second DoT on crit, or else an increase to crit damage lump-sum that's equal to the expected amount of bleed damage, would give both of them a mild bonus on scrappers/stalkers that would probably take them from "low tier" to "lowish-mid-tier" in overall power level.

 

I haven't looked into Fire Melee as I haven't touched it since Retail, but if it is the same as Savage where the secondary DoT is coded "Cancel on Miss" then perhaps a simple change to test would be to remove that flag before anything else.  Turn the "bonus" damage into something reliable; the DoTs are most useful on EB/AV targets anyway which is where Savage falls most behind in performance.

 

So, three things for Savage:

 

- Fix Hemorrhage

- Remove Cancel On Miss from Bleed damage.

- Fix Critical Damage attributes to include Bleed damage. (pending results of the first two and technical feasibility)

 

See where that puts the set.  I have other notions as well, but in general Savage awesome and fun, but not great on hard targets without significant investment in IOs/Procs, so most of those notions are overkill. 😄

Edited October 11, 2021 by InvaderStych

[arcane]

I’m not talking about balance guys. Go ahead and make this buff happen. But you can’t deny it’s missed potential to not consider procs.

[arcane]

4 hours ago, ninja surprise said:

 

 

I would also love if Savage Leap were changed to behave like a targeted teleport attack so that it could more consistently attack every target. There are targets that Shield Charge can hit that Savage Leap can't, like the computer in the ITF, at the end of LGTF there's those 4 generator/tower things, and other stuff like that. It's really annoying.

That would be a massive nerf to its damage potential if it were changed to be like Shield Charge, so careful there.

[aethereal]

1 hour ago, arcane said:

I’m not talking about balance guys. Go ahead and make this buff happen. But you can’t deny it’s missed potential to not consider procs.

Fwiw, I considered adding proof chances to the spreadsheet and didn't not because of any philosophical objections to considering procs, but because I didn't feel like I could show useful information without cluttering up the sheet with lots of additional columns that made it harder to absorb.

[ninja surprise]

3 hours ago, arcane said:

That would be a massive nerf to its damage potential if it were changed to be like Shield Charge, so careful there.

 

Well right now it does no damage when Savage Leap can't attack something.  But looks like it's a "bug working as intended" so not likely to change 🤷‍♂️