Kinetic Melee Feedback

[Plutoria]

Have been rigorously testing and experimenting with Kinetic Melee on Brute, Scrapper and Stalker ( with Energy aura secondary).  Using near identical builds as I was aiming to get an idea between the three when it came to dps vs survival.  This mostly is concerning Kinetic Melee with regards to the scrapper.  After a few days and several hours  each session of testing out all three ATs, The critical hit kit for the scrapper seems to be under performing for this set when pushed at a higher performance investment. I do sincerely feel that the state of Kinetic Melee on a scrapper is just the result of the power creep of the game, where as if assumed basic pre 50, standard ( no sets) enhancements, the scrapper would appear to be working "as intended" for this set.

 

Body Blow, Smashing blow, Burst, Focused Burst and Concentrated Strike are the attacks in the general "chain".  I did experiment with quick strike and eventually dropped it for body blow.

 

Not taking the ATO/Procs in account between the brute and scrapper, KM damage output seems balanced with the scrapper pulling a noticeable difference ahead of the brute.  By taking advantage of the fury feature of the brute and loading more procs over raw damage into attack powers I was able to quickly bridge this gap. Once I did I then attempted to replicate the same with the scrapper ( to boost it's dps over the brute)  and eventually got to place where the brute and scrapper were doing close to average damage per encounter with the scrapper pulling ahead only when enough crits landed. Which for Kinetic Melee oddly enough the critical rate seemed higher with burst than it did with the single target attacks. I could clear  faster on the scrapper but only due to the large boost and frequent critical from burst alone. Which is why you will see I subbed more proc and less raw damage for it in the scrapper. Overall the brute and scrapper were doing comparable single target damage with the occasional RNG factor of the scrapper. Since Concentrated Strike does not land critical damage, my primary single target critical spikes would be left to come from body blow, smashing blow and focused burst.

 

 

For context:

 

Body Blow on both ATs is holding a full set. (Superior scrapper strike & Superior Brute fury)

 

 Smashing blow is at 79% dmg with 2 procs (3.5ppm) on scrapper  and the brute is at 45% dmg with 4 procs. ( alll 3.5ppm)

 

Burst is at 51% dmg and 2 procs (3.5&4.5) on the scrapper and for the brute 96% dmg with one proc (4.5ppm)

 

Focused burst is 78% dmg, 2 procs (4.5 & 3.5) and a Decimation BUP for scrapper. The Brute is 78% dmg and 3 procs ( 4.5 and two 3.5)

 

Concentrated Strike 84% with 3 procs ( 4.5 and two 3.5) on the scrapper. Brute is 89% with 3 procs (4.5 and two 3.5)

 

The small differences were eventually made as they seemed to complement the mechanics of each class as I aimed to achieved better performance. These both are operating on very high global recharge and ( against conventional wisdom Agility alpha for 33% recharge) The reason for the higher recharge focus was in part due to the goals within Energy aura and for high uptime of Power Siphon. The fire rate of the procs did drop slightly but nothing too noticeable over the course of any given combat encounter.

 

Kinetic Melee vs Scrapper:

 

One of the leading issues I kept coming across with the performance of this set were primarily the relation between Power siphon and Concentrated Strike  :

 

Power siphon: With a recharge focused build it is entirely possible to have high up time and on the occasion ( depending on force feed back triggers) steady / perma power siphon for both the brute and the scrapper.  Even when I first started with a lower global recharge build ( 110%) I could still get steady uptime ( with force feed back procs) of this power ( having nothing more than a single recharge IO in it) .

 

Concentrated Strike:  Does not have a critical damage component. This attack was doing equal damage as the brute. The scaling is technically higher on the scrapper via paper values but when taking into account mob resists ( level 54 foes) and the general random nature of the average damage delivered the brute and scrapper version of this power was at equal standing ( taking into account a high fury bar).

 

Without taking into account the scrapper crit ATOs, CStrike rarely refreshed power Siphon. Even when just holding out and using the attack exclusively I would get a average of 2-4 refreshes from an entire radio mission solo. When I added in the crit ATOs it was only a marginal and barely noticeable increase.

 

Which brings us to the 50% global crit proc... So I tried placing this in a variety of different attacks to feel out where it felt it had performed "best". Generally I noticed Smashing blow and Burst had the best results for this ATO proc. Entering critical strike mode gives a short window in which an attack has a increased chance to land a crit. 

 

Arcana cast times: Kinetic Melee has long Arcana cast times ( To which I read were related to the window of how this ATO proc works) . Concentrated Strike would often miss this window or the refresh on Power Siphon was not working as intended.  When the ATO was placed in Smashing blow I could usually get crits to fire off body blow, burst and focused burst. When I had it placed in Burst it would trigger often ( almost every activation) but the window for getting a crit on any follow up attack seemed to be lower. I admit I do not entirely know/understand the internal mechanics of this feature to understand why there was such a noticeable difference in performance.

 

Stalker, Cstrike and build up recharge:

Ctrike would crit very often and combined with the BU ATO in burst it was total overkill. Enjoyable overkill but the crit rate on Cstrike was above and beyond more reliable and consistent. The passive critical hits on all Kinetic Melee attacks was really fun. The rate of criticals firing was significantly higher than the scrapper. I assume it was due to the critical hits being less damage compared to harder crits a scrapper is intended to have? The function of critical of Cstrike appears to be working on the stalker set with high consistency.

 

The purpose of this write up is to ask, Would it be possible to investigate the the critical rate and relationship between Siphon power and Concentrated Strike in regards to the Scrapper? Maybe by either increase the base critical rate of Cstrike or adjust the Arcana cast time?  Or.... maybe .."scrap" the relationship all together and allow a partial critical damage bonus to critical strike since the Brute and Scrapper can hit for equal amounts on this attack. Given power siphon can easily attain a steady up time on both the brute and scrapper...and  the high proc rate of build up refresh via the ATO on stalker, it feels that perhaps this relationship between the two powers has become redundant? Another idea if this relationship is preferred between the two ( Siphon/BU/Cstrike) is add higher stack cap to scrapper siphon? In it's current state the refresh from Cstrike is so low that it doesn't feel like a standout feature given the Brute can also keep high uptime and the stalker can critical refresh build up much easier from Cstrike ( without ATO even taking into account)

[BrandX]

I'm curious as to why you put Focused Burst ahead of Quick Strike.  Quick Strike with same damage slotting and 2 Damage procs as Body Blow looks to pull ahead in DPS, when compared with just the same Damage slotting and no procs.

 

Focused Burst, with same Damage slotting and 2 procs (with one being the purple proc) is still under both QS and BB in terms of DPS.

 

I'd love to hear how you can make FB better than the others, in that I love it's animation!

[aethereal]

So I looked it up.  The "recharge power siphon" effect of Concentrated Strike is often described as the "crit" ability of CS, but it's actually not tagged with the scrapper crit tags.  So it won't benefit from either ATO (or other things that increase the likelihood of scrapper crits, such as the Ninjutsu pseudo-stalker mechanic).  It's just a flat 20% chance, not modifiable.

[Plutoria]

( I assume this is in regards to the scrapper?)

The build is operating on high recharge and found I was simply skipping over quick strike for body blow.  Every other attack in the ST line up was hitting harder and dispatching foes. Body blow/quick strike is acting more as a set mule and rotation filler. Body blow has the stun stack and higher crit damage ( according to what mids is showing) which complimented a more defensive approach I was aiming for. Focused Burst is added Force feed back proc ( along with burst). This is to keep more uptime of the recharge proc to keep siphon going and to assist with Overload usage/recovery. Generally I was just cycling between Smashing blow and Cstrike. Since many attacks have longer animation times Smashing blow is always off cooldown after Cstrike, burst or focus landed.

 

I would slip in body blow to attempt extra crit strikes or when rebuilding up siphon stacks. I would generally have 4-5 stacks of siphon going so even though Cstrike didn't crit for damage it still hit pretty hard ( usually mid cast I would drop to 4 stacks). Focused burst also had higher crit damage over quick strike and the addition of procs since quick would have had none in this particular build layout. I did play with procs in quick strike but the fire rate was extremely poor. I could also play the RNG game with decimation build up which helps scale the base and crit damage of other attacks further ( though it likely in a long run scenario be better with another proc but generally most things in the game rarely live long enough as it is) Focused burst is also my only range attack. ( It's a tight build designed for hardmode content which I did toss it into that fire and the results worked well.) The other incentive for dropping out quick strike was that its damage buff/debuff only had a 4 second duration and found it was not complimenting the building and maintaining of siphon stack buff/debuff. The original build had quick strike in it. On paper it appeared like it would had worked great in the build I was going for. In practice not as much...

[Plutoria]

3 minutes ago, aethereal said:

So I looked it up.  The "recharge power siphon" effect of Concentrated Strike is often described as the "crit" ability of CS, but it's actually not tagged with the scrapper crit tags.  So it won't benefit from either ATO (or other things that increase the likelihood of scrapper crits, such as the Ninjutsu pseudo-stalker mechanic).  It's just a flat 20% chance, not modifiable.

Really appreciate this! Thank you for the insight. It makes much more sense now.

[Plutoria]

For clarity of the post, with the new information knowing Cstrike is now a fixed rate I stopped making it a priority to attain a critical strike off of it now null. I moved the scrapper ATO for crit proc into Cstrike. Made further adjustments to other attack powers to gain a balance of raw damage and procs. Between these two actions the damage now far surpasses that of the brute ( with greater control and frequency of critical strikes) and now exceeds the stalker in AoE clearing while staying competitive with the ST output outside of assassination strikes (to which at that point the stalker dominates). Can't thank you enough Aethereal!

[Saiyajinzoningen]

could you post the build? im having similar issues with my KM scrapper, thanks

[Yomo Kimyata]

I've spent some time recently getting my KM/Ice scrapper to 50, and I will eventually get my KM/Fire stalker there as well.  I'm always one to look at "underpowered" sets and determine for myself if I think that it is true that they are actually underpowered.

 

First of all, the animations.  Initially I didn't like them, and I guess I still don't.  But when I checked in Mids, the damage per animation values weren't any worse that the other sets I looked at.  I think that it's a perceptual issue, at least I think it is for me.  Some animations I hate, because they are clearly superfluous and there to add time so that the power can be made higher damage.  Anything with a flip, like Ripper or Eviscerate.  But I don't mind things like Guarded Spin or Eye of the Storm, because the length of the animation seems justified.  Hey, hold your horses, I'm break dancing here!  To me, a lot of the longer animations for KM seem unnecessary thematically.  But heavens forbid we make them shorter and take away some of our damage!  So I think this one is a push -- I don't love the animations, but I understand that they are long because they enable the balance that brings higher damage.

 

Second, the damage.  It *feels* like less damage than similar sets although I'm certainly not quantifying this by parsing combat logs.  And again, I understand why this is because the entire nature of the KM gimmick is that a successful hit on an enemy lowers the damage they put out.  Not just to you, but to everyone on your team.  It's the counterpart to the -to hit debuffs of Dark Melee (which is also not the highest damage set).  And as far as I know, the damage reduction isn't resistible.  So, again this one makes sense to me.  The problem is that in the current meta, the tradeoff between damage inflicted and survivability is extremely weighted towards damage.  It's really difficult to get defeated at all unless you are pushing the envelope, either solo or on teams.  And thanks to SCORE and HC there is virtually no penalty for being defeated.  I don't even know if XP debt even exists anymore, there are a multitude of powers to resurrect you, and even getting back to the mission takes a push of a teleport power button.  If damage gets increased, then this continues to undermine the damage/survivability trade off.  So I'm inclined to call this working as intended, unless you want to change "intended" to "survivability is irrelevant".

 

Third, the strategy.  In a lot of ways this set is like Claws.  Melee +  PBAoE + ranged cone + ranged, and a non-Build Up Build Up power.  But the bells and whistles take a little getting used to.  I'm only going to speak from a scrapper perspective, since I don't have enough data otherwise.  At first I actually avoided Concentrated Strike.  The animation was so long that I felt I was probably getting more done by using shorter powers.  And the nature of Power Siphon leads people to try to get as many levels of siphon mode as they can.  But eventually I came around to a different playstyle.  Hit Power Siphon whenever it is up, and use Concentrated Strike so long as it is not overkill for your given enemy.  A normal Build Up is 10 seconds of +100% damage and +20% to hit for 90 seconds of cooldown (which of course can be cut dramatically, but as a scrapper you can't stack it).  Power Siphon is 20 seconds with a variable amount of +damage and +7.5% to hit for 120 seconds of cooldown.  Getting it to reactivate resets the timer, and appears to stack, so every once in a while I end up with over +200% damage and 22.5% tohit.  You can't depend on that sure, but by my observation the 20% activation rate on Concentrated Strike matches my results, and that means roughly one our of every 25 times, you are going to reset PS twice in a row and those numbers are wow.  Now of course, you can't depend on that, but overall do I want to trade off a 10 seconds of +100% damage and +20% to hit for lower +damage and lower +to hit for 20 seconds?  Depends on your build, but yeah, sometimes.  Also, the -damage gimmick is mostly a gimmick with the exception of Burst, which affects up to ten targets for twice as much reduction for 7 seconds.  My builds are focusing on Burst, Concentrated Strike, and Power Siphon.

 

It seems to me this power set is working as intended, but the problem is that currently players intend it to do more damage rather than to do more damage in relation to added survivability.  I doubt I'll ever play this as a tank or a brute, but I'll definitely work on my stalker at some point.

[TygerDarkstorm]

@Yomo Kimyata XP debt is still a thing, it's just hard to notice on fast moving teams, and especially if you have a double xp boost while leveling. I can't speak much to it at level 50 as I'm not paying attention to my XP bar once I hit 50. It's there, but it's definitely not crippling like back in live days.

[CloudMouse]

Anyone have thoughts on building a KM/Bio brute specifically to stack +dam self/-dam foes?

[BrandX]

4 hours ago, CloudMouse said:

Anyone have thoughts on building a KM/Bio brute specifically to stack +dam self/-dam foes?

 

Made one that could do a 1:35 Pylon time, while someone else was able to get 1:30 Pylon time.  It's lots of damage.  Don't think there's much more you can do to stack -damage.  As for survival, it survives fine enough 🙂

[CloudMouse]

4 hours ago, BrandX said:

 

Made one that could do a 1:35 Pylon time, while someone else was able to get 1:30 Pylon time.  It's lots of damage.  Don't think there's much more you can do to stack -damage.  As for survival, it survives fine enough 🙂

If you feel like sharing, would love to know your insights on the build through DM. Thx!

[nihilii]

14 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

But when I checked in Mids, the damage per animation values weren't any worse that the other sets I looked at.  I think that it's a perceptual issue, at least I think it is for me.

While there is no large difference to be sure, I think KM is consistently worse at this point due to the buffs other sets got.

 

i.e., it used to be CS wasn't horribly long for this class of big hitters, compared to Total Focus and old Energy Transfer.

 

But TF got sped up, new ET can be fast, EM was ported to scrappers. Stone was also ported to scrappers with its lightning fast Seismic Smash.

Focused Burst is fairly bad compared to Focus, and even Serpent's Reach is ahead. It's good compared to Impale, which itself could use help... There is also Cleave now that trumps all of these options except arguably Focus.

Burst and its 3s animation for 8ft radius standard AoE damage is in the worst AoE category. It shares this category with several other medium tier sets like Broad Sword, Dual Blades, War Mace, so it's not alone there, but it's still the worst PBAoE you can get; and KM is relatively unique compared to the other sets I list in having no other credible AoE option. Dual Blades and War Mace both have great cones as staple powers, even Broad Sword can get some use out of Slice. With KM the best you're going to get is Repulsing Torrent with a KB-to-KD IO. Repulsing Torrent has a lengthy animation and forces you to reposition, both things that go against Power Siphon's stacks and generally makes this a lesser option than what those other powersets have.
 

14 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Third, the strategy.  In a lot of ways this set is like Claws.  Melee +  PBAoE + ranged cone + ranged, and a non-Build Up Build Up power.

This is right on the money, and to me this is the issue in a nutshell. I built a KM/ice the other day.

Then I swapped to Claws in Mids, and just about everything was better.

As it is right now, KM is "less good Claws". You can work with the KM gimmicks and squeeze all the juice you can out of it, and you end up slightly behind.

 

(and I'm talking Scrappers. If we look at Brutes or Tankers, all bets are off, because Brute/Tanker Claws has buffed up values by default *and* the KM Power Siphon mechanic isn't as strong on Brutes)

Then there's the structural KM issues. Power Siphon mechanics force you in a constant hit strategy that plays against epic snipes, misc clicks, fast-paced play when you move and switch target every 2 seconds, let alone every 20. CS doesn't crit "properly".

Also, Quick Strike still has this awkward +0.7 KB value (instead of usual +0.67 KB for melee knockdowns), turning your weakest punch from a knockdown to a knockback on level 50s once you're levelshifted. Giant pet peeve of mine!! 😂

 

My list of changes for KM would be (relatively) conservative. No need to buff the set to godhood, but let's shine a light on opportunity cost, and tweak animation times to fit this.

- Power Siphon from 2.112s to 1s or less

- Concentrated Strike from 3s to 2.4s (comparable powers: slightly faster than TF, slightly slower than KO blow, slower than Seismic Smash, same length as Rend Armor)

- Focused Burst from 2.2s to 1.8s

- Burst from 3s to 2s

- Repulsing Torrent from 2.2s to 1.6s. Make it a mini Shockwave instead of an instant skip.

Change all of this and change just this, and let's see how KM performs.

[aethereal]

Repulsing torrent also gets a weak crit, which is insult to injury.  It should get a full doubling of its damage.

[Wavicle]

Not to contradict any of these points, but do keep in mind that Claws is all Lethal and KM is Energy/Smashing. That counts at least a little.

 

As an aside, I think Feedback would be a great name for a new KM mechanic.