Some commentary on Brute Savage Melee

[aethereal]

Recently, a few people have asserted to me that Savage Melee is, on Brutes, Good, Actually.  I wanted to investigate whether this was true.

 

I built this spreadsheet, comparing Savage Melee with Fiery Melee, Energy Melee, and Dual Blades.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fc1udA5UVacIFGWOz5MkA4aQublmLhO7tn9Jwp3WLJ4/edit?usp=sharing

 

Some disclaimers:  I built this spreadsheet by hand-copying-and-pasting data from City of Data.  It is definitely possible that there are mistakes in it! You shouldn't take it as gospel.

 

What follows is some commentary by me about Savage Melee.  I don't know that I have a particularly strong thesis statement here, just I thought there were some interesting things.

 

Savage Melee vs Fiery Melee

 

I thought this was a useful comparison because, first, Savage and Fiery share a bleed/burn DoT mechanic on their attacks.  This DoT is affected by Brute Fury, and I think some component of the claim that Savage is good is based on this interaction.  Fiery is I think fairly universally acknowledged to be a weak set, so it would be useful to compare why, if we contend that Savage is good and Fiery is bad, they don't benefit from the same mechanic.

 

(The spreadsheet has a filter, and you can set the first column to only show Savage and Fiery to help ride along on the comparison).

 

So first, despite the conceptual similarities between burn and bleed, there are a surprising number of differences in practice.  Savage scales bleed damage to the base damage of the power.  Fiery gives a constant burn damage for all powers except Greater Fire Sword, which gets double the normal burn damage.  Savage gives a pretty constant three ticks of bleed damage, with a 75% chance of proceeding to the next tick every time, while Fiery gives 2 ticks to Scorch, 4 ticks to Greater Fire Sword, and 3 ticks to the remainder, with an 80% chance of proceeding to the next tick, except Cremate always gets all three ticks.  Also for whatever it's worth burn damage starts half a second before bleed does.

 

In general, Savage does pretty solidly overperform Fiery.  A couple of caveats on comparing them:  lethal damage is generally considered pretty bad, and I'm not really trying to quantitatively compare that.  And Fiery gets a normal Build Up, which is probably better than Savage's Blood thirst, which gives a much less powerful to-hit/damage buff in return for five stacks of Blood Fury and increasing Bleed chance to 100% for 15 seconds.  But the bleed bonus is better, and the damage bonus is less consequential, on Brutes.  Fiery also presumably gets a better interaction with Fiery Aura's Fiery Embrace if that feels consequential to you.

 

But I think the power-by-power differences swamp the above paragraph.  The powers in Savage are for the most part one-by-one comparable to Fiery.

 

Scorch vs Savage Strike:  Savage Strike has much better DPA due mostly to much more attractive bleed compared to Scorch's abbreviated burn.

Fire Sword vs Maiming Slash:  Maiming Slash has much better DPA due to animation time and more attractive bleed.

Cremate vs Vicious Slash:  Vicious slash has much better DPA due mostly to the fact that its bleed is triple the damage of Cremate's burn.

Incinerate vs Hemorrhage:  Incinerate is I think basically the winner here.  Hemorrhage has higher DPA when fully enhanced with Blood Fury, but Incinerate has better DPA in its base stats, and a much lower recharge, so you can use it more.  This is mostly because of animation time.  Hemorrhage is clearly one of the worst attacks in Savage.

Breath of Fire vs Shred:  Shred has much better DPA.  Breath of Fire has a bigger overall area that it covers, but I think most people agree that the long, narrow cone is a bad shape for a melee set.  Despite Shred's fairly slow animation time, Breath of Fire is yet worse.

Fire Sword Circle vs Rending Fury:  They have similar DPA (FSC is in the middle of Rending Fury's range of possible values, depending on Blood Fury), but FSC obviously doesn't get the chance for an enlarged radius and I think more importantly has a 20 second recharge vs the 14 second of Rending Fury, making it much slower to spam while taking down a mob.

 

So then finally the two powers that aren't a very straight-up comparison are Savage Leap vs Greater Fire Sword, and while they're very different powers, there's no doubt in my mind that Savage Leap is better -- its DPA can actually be better at its maximum range, it's AoE, and it procs better, and more importantly it's very unclear that Fiery Melee really wants its T9 to be a mediocre ST attack, when it already has four ST attacks including the pretty good Incinerate.

 

Savage Melee vs Dual Blades

 

Dual Blades is a much less straightforward comparison to Savage Melee than Fiery, but I chose it for a few reasons:

 

1.  They're both lethal damage sets

2.  Dual Blades is generally a "good" set without being necessarily an arguably-overbuffed meta set like WM, TW, or Energy

3.  I have some recent experience with DB and thought I could be reasonably nuanced

 

One thing that I was frankly not expecting was what a baseline DPA advantage that Savage has vs DB!  Like, I knew that Nimble Slash was not a gem of DB, but its DPA is 29.5 compared to Savage Strikes' 39.4.  Yikes!

 

For almost every reasonably comparable power, Savage has a strong DPA advantage.  However.  Dual Blades doesn't really need to care that Nimble Slash and Power Slice have pretty terrible DPAs, because its strength is the ability to make an attack chain that consists mostly-or-entirely of Ablating Strike, Sweeping Strike, and Blinding Feint.  Now, Ablating Strike and Sweeping Strike have pretty good DPA, but not amazing ones -- 46 and 48 compared to 53 from Vicious Slash, for example.  But of course the deal with DB is you're getting a constant damage increase from Blinding Feint as well, and Sweeping Strike is a cone.

 

DB vs Savage in any non-Brute class is pretty clearly in DB's favor for the ST attack chain, with Blinding Feint being better for non-Brutes and Savage's bleed being worse.  But how about on Brutes?  I think it's pretty close.  If you get the full on three-attack chain that DB is capable of with very high recharge, I expect DB outperforms Savage in ST.  But in lower-recharge situations where you aren't actually triple-stacking BF all the time, Savage's high base DPA seems like it at least keeps things going pretty well.

 

In the AoE front, Savage looks pretty good.  Typhoon's Edge's DPA is atrocious.  Rending Flurry can actually (with 5 blood fury) outperform the DPA of 1000 Cuts.  And Dual Blades has nothing comparable to Savage Leap at all.  It is worthwhile to note that Sweeping Strike makes Shred a sad little pathetic thing and has a slightly larger area to boot, but one cone does not make for an AoE set.

 

I'd overall say that Savage and DB are pretty close to each other.  Savage has better AoE (but Sweeping Strike means that DB has decent AoE and I know from my own experience can very successfully close a lot of AoE holes with a single epic AoE attack), but somewhat worse ST.

 

Savage Melee vs Energy Melee

 

Finally, I wanted to compare Savage with a meta set and just see how close it is.  Obviously we aren't expecting Savage to have Energy's ST damage, but what does the comparison look like?

 

And really, the answer is that it's surprisingly close!  Vicious Slash has basically the same DPA as Total Focus (!!).  Energy Punch and Bone Smasher have DPAs that are much more competitive with Savage than Dual Blades manages, but both have lower DPAs than Maiming Slash, much less vicious Slash.  Hemorrhage also has high potential DPA on paper, though in practice it still sucks.

 

Obvious, Energy Transfer blows everything out of the water -- fast ET has more than triple the DPA of Vicious Slash, and even slow ET has better DPA than anything in Savage.  That's just Energy Transfer for you.

 

Some caveats:  Savage is getting this ST performance dragged out over several seconds with bleed, Energy gets it all up front.  Lethal is a less attractive damage type than smashing/energy.  Savage gets this and only this, while Energy is piling stuns on top of its ST damage.  This is why Energy is the best ST damage set in the game.

 

On the AoE front, Power Crash is competitive with Shred, but a bit behind, while Whirling Hands is anemic compared to Rending Flurry.  Obviously Energy gets nothing like Savage Leap.

 

Summary

 

I don't have a super strong conclusion.  Savage has much better DPA as a Brute than I was expecting.  It's definitely better than Fiery Melee.  Aside from that, there are a lot of judgment calls to be made.

[SeraphimKensai]

I have an Savage/Regen Brute and it's alright, but it's not my favorite. Perhaps that's because of my powerset combination of savage/Regen, where maybe I'd enjoy it on a different secondary more so.

 

In all fairness though I have 121 lvl 50 toons to juggle play time of and the savage/Regen doesn't get much of it.

[Marshal_General]

53 minutes ago, SeraphimKensai said:

I have an Savage/Regen Brute and it's alright, but it's not my favorite. Perhaps that's because of my powerset combination of savage/Regen, where maybe I'd enjoy it on a different secondary more so.

 

In all fairness though I have 121 lvl 50 toons to juggle play time of and the savage/Regen doesn't get much of it.

I have a friend who made the same thing. I told him SM takes time with the mobs beating on you to kill them. Regen hates that.

[Outrider_01]

2 hours ago, aethereal said:

Recently, a few people have asserted to me that Savage Melee is, on Brutes, Good, Actually.

aethereal: So I got this long thesis and spread sheet to show Savage Melee...

Me: Yes!

 

SM/Fire is my farmer 😁

 

Seriously, SM beats them hands down; except for Hemorrhage.  Way to long dot, like Gloom in Dark Blast.  Yeah, its lethal damage...but the combo builder is so easy compared to DB where you have to build into the combo, SM just builds and dumps where you only hit 2 attacks and burn 3 stacks.  It builds every 5 seconds maybe.  DB is soooo clunky its like playing Street Fighter on your keyboard. 

 

Its not that SM is super uber powerful, its just so much fun and easy to play. Just wish it had Feral Charge like the Dominator Savage melee, single target attack but splashes like Savage leap. Feral Charge recharges so insanely fast you can jump back and leap every few seconds!

Edited February 21, 2022 by Outrider_01

[ninja surprise]

On 2/21/2022 at 11:53 AM, Outrider_01 said:

DB is soooo clunky its like playing Street Fighter on your keyboard. 

 

I guess it depends on how you do your attacks, but I just pull out 2 or 3 floating trays, set them to 3 bubbles wide, and then put the combos in order in the tray.

Then if I want to do Attack Vitals I do that row, or the row for Sweep, etc. Piece of cake! 

 

That said, my current favorite Brute is Savage/Bio. No re-draw, all clickies, slashies, and slurpees! so fun.

[JayboH]

Curious, how does it compare DPS wise, instead of DPA?

 

Is there less corpse-blasting (wasting attacks) due to the faster ticks of fire for example?