Best ST dps

[Frosty15]

What is best single target dps? Is it still tw/bio scrapper?

[MoonSheep]

probably an energy melee stalker or fire blaster, both high damage and low animation times

[Snarky]

my ST go to is the Beam Rifle Blaster.  i use that as fire support in RHW Magisterium badge runs,  i can comfortably keep shooting with little affecting my damage output.  because anything you do besides ST just lowers your damage.  move, calculate, whatever.  just sit still and kill it.  

[Scarlet Shocker]

Ice Blast used to be the most potent ST damage I believe. I think Stalkers have the highest overall burst for a single attack but I don't think they can sustain it over their entire attack chain but an Ice Blaster is devastating but does have some wicked AoE too.

 

I have it in my mind that TW did get quite a hefty nerf - so pays your money, takes your choice.

[Frosty15]

Thx

[Techwright]

3 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

 so pays your money, takes your choice.

 

Ugh...now I have Mark Hamil's Joker voice saying that over and over in my head.  Wish I'd never done so many bonus rounds in DC Universe Online.

[Skyhawke]

39 minutes ago, Techwright said:

 

Ugh...now I have Mark Hamil's Joker voice saying that over and over in my head.  Wish I'd never done so many bonus rounds in DC Universe Online.

 

All. The. Bouncing. Balls.

[Greldek]

Titan did receive a nerd but it's still a top tier set. People act like the nerd dropped it down to kinetic melee levels. I believe it's still a top 5 overall set. It's just not 5x better than all the rest for no reason.

 

 

[Frosty15]

I think Fire/Rad cor would be up there on pylon performance.

 

[Frosty15]

my fire blaster is good

[arcane]

On 2/9/2024 at 2:27 PM, Snarky said:

my ST go to is the Beam Rifle Blaster.  i use that as fire support in RHW Magisterium badge runs,  i can comfortably keep shooting with little affecting my damage output.  because anything you do besides ST just lowers your damage.  move, calculate, whatever.  just sit still and kill it.  

I can confidently say from lots of pylon testing in the past that beam doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of other S/T killers.

[Championess]

I'd probably have to say it would be close, for blasters it'd be Ice blast and stalkers an EM/Bio, both would pump out ridonculous ST damage.  Especially if you can rely on teammates having -res procs popping off so you can just get into your best chains.

Edited January 31 by Championess

[Kaika]

EM/Bio stalker or scrapper if I recall, at least with most builds. Though it depends on what situation you are looking for. Solo vs team with buff/debuffs or even just raw damage and what limitations are put on it when looking at its DPS and how long it can maintain it. Believe it or not, its not a easy question to answer.

 

Likely though you're looking at Em/Bio anyways, TW got a nerf though TW/Bio is still a absolute monster and comparable when built right, honestly I think its better for general play, but thats a different discussion.

 

Edited February 1 by Kaika

[MoonSheep]

14 hours ago, Frosty15 said:

my fire blaster is good

 

not surprising, hard to be disappointed with a fire blaster!

[Ukase]

The truth is, you'll get a number of answers. And in some cases, they're all correct. And they're all wrong. Ultimately, it depends on how you've slotted your powers. DPS relies on not just recharge and damage output, but also survivability, and accuracy. There are some petless MMs that will outdps that one fire blaster that is played by an 80 year old. Or an 8 year old. It all depends. 

As a rule, it's hard to argue against ice or fire blast. The numbers suggest fire does more damage...but ice has freeze ray which improves survivability by a fair margin. 

[Krazix]

On 2/9/2024 at 12:43 PM, Frosty15 said:

What is best single target dps? Is it still tw/bio scrapper?

If it's still scrapper it's probably axe/bio now.

[Maelwys]

39 minutes ago, Krazix said:

If it's still scrapper

It's not.

/Marine MMs and -res-stacked Crabberminds take that crown these days; with the former being far easier to focus-fire on a particular enemy.

If you discount any builds that leverage most/all temp powers ("Division 2+" or "Division 4+" in the above linked thread) as well as any that leverage multiple pets (since their performance can vary wildly depending on the currently-active level differences between each pet and your target!) then Scrappers are still up there; just behind Stalkers and roughly on par with Dominators. With animation-cancelling-exploit Kheldians plus a few Blaster, Controller, Corruptor and Sentinel builds hot on their heels.
 

Edited February 4 by Maelwys

[Kaika]

2 hours ago, Maelwys said:

It's not.

/Marine MMs and -res-stacked Crabberminds take that crown these days; with the former being far easier to focus-fire on a particular enemy.

If you discount any builds that leverage most/all temp powers ("Division 2+" or "Division 4+" in the above linked thread) as well as any that leverage multiple pets (since their performance can vary wildly depending on the currently-active level differences between each pet and your target!) then Scrappers are still up there; just behind Stalkers and roughly on par with Dominators. With animation-cancelling-exploit Kheldians plus a few Blaster, Controller, Corruptor and Sentinel builds hot on their heels.
 

Yeah Division 2 is around where I would consider it, temps just feels bit cheap in the grand scheme and I general don't include things like lore pets due to inconsistency, cooldown. Not to say it's not already very valuable but I find lores/temp pets cause -res to get overvalued. Not to discount the effort that goes into these, they are certainly a useful resource but most of the builds used are tailor made for just pylon testing, optimizing everything for shear single target damage with little to no AoE, sustainability, or utility and often aren't realistic in many ways like having crabs pets actually all attack the same target and survive or abuse things like assault incarnate transferring to MM pets if summoned after activating. While I think pylon testing is still a useful benchmark at a certain point it's only really checking how quickly you can burst it down rather then some level of overall performance. It's still obviously worth noting and something to account for I just often don't think it's realistic specially outside of coordinated situations. It feels more like a "whats possible" rather then a "What will work the best". On that note though I don't have a better benchmark to replace it with and I'm not even gonna try to argue my opinion is right because it's very up to interpretation, just kinda how CoH is.

 

Either way just my two cents

Edited February 4 by Kaika

[Maelwys]

22 minutes ago, Kaika said:

most of the builds used are tailor made for just pylon testing, optimizing everything for shear single target damage with little to no AoE, sustainability, or utility and often aren't realistic in many ways like having crabs pets actually all attack the same target and survive
...
I just often don't think it's realistic specially outside of coordinated situations. It feels more like a "whats possible" rather then a "What will work the best"

Agreed.

However leaving aside the pet issues (which I mentioned in my previous post!)... I think Pylons are still a fairly useful yardstick of what order you can expect different ATs and powersets to end up in; regardless of whatever "external performance doping mechanisms" you choose to allow or not. Every power set is always going to be limited by its attacks' base damage, animation time, and recharge rates; plus whatever damage procs they are capable of taking. Allowing additional temp powers/buffs that grant -res/+damage/summons/whatever on top of that is mostly just going to end up increasing the performance of everything equally.

In "real world" situations you're going to have to contend with a lot more variables such as enemy resistances; "overkill" damage (AKA "my attack dealt 1000 damage but it only had 1 hit point left") and long animation times (AKA "my teammates killed it before my attack even landed").

FWIW I personally can't stand the idea of one of my toons having a build that is so "specialist" that they become incapable of functioning decently in regular gameplay. Even my AFK AE Fire Farmers still have softcapped S/L defense and a Single Target attack chain... 🙈
 

Edited February 4 by Maelwys

[Kaika]

33 minutes ago, Maelwys said:

Agreed.

However leaving aside the pet issues (which I mentioned in my previous post!)... I think Pylons are still a fairly useful yardstick of what order you can expect different ATs and powersets to end up in; regardless of whatever "external performance doping mechanisms" you choose to allow or not. Different power sets are both always going to be limited by their attacks' base damage, animation time, and recharge rates; plus what damage procs they are capable of taking. Allowing additional temp -res/+damage/summons/whatever on top of that is mostly just going to end up buffing everything equally.

In "real world" situations you're going to have to contend with a lot more variables such as enemy resistances; "overkill" damage (AKA "my attack dealt 1000 damage but it only had 1 hit point left") and long animation times (AKA "my teammates killed it before my attack even landed").

FWIW I personally can't stand the idea of one of my toons having a build that is so "specialist" that they become incapable of functioning decently in regular gameplay. Even my AFK AE Fire Farmers still have softcapped S/L defense and a Single Target attack chain... 🙈

Honestly I was kinda just getting my thoughts out on the subject but I figured it would add to the conversation.

 

More to the point though It's why I agree with the statement that Stalker/Scrapper tend to have the best ST damage realistically, at least from my bias viewpoint simply because as pure damage dealers I feel they have the least amount of caveats twords accessing that damage, and tend to not rely on support powers that would give others the same DPS boost. While I don't want to belabor this point they are simply alot easier to reach those damage values as well, specialty for the kinda person to ask "whats the best DPS" in the general forums, not to throw any shade at the OP of course. Either way though, this is one of those things where I feel everyone will have a different opinion of where the line of judgment is drawn, but a interesting topic none the less.

 

And yeah SAME, I completely get why people specialize but if my character feels weak in any situation it's usually back to mids for me.

Edited February 4 by Kaika

[tidge]

On 2/4/2025 at 8:24 AM, Kaika said:

... and I general don't include things like lore pets due to inconsistency, cooldown. Not to say it's not already very valuable but I find lores/temp pets cause -res to get overvalued.

 

For a long time now in the HC era of easy-to-get-enhancements, I've felt that -Resistance (and %-Resistance) is mostly of valuable in limited circumstances for solo play, and much more important for team play. Obviously: if the AT brings its own team (Masterminds) or the Primary/Secondary bring -Resistance as a primary/secondary effect... sure, roll with it and get the benefits. As @Kaika notes, bringing out the (damage-dealing) Lore pets is essentially bringing out teammates.

 

For me: some choices of -Resistance get complicated because of the "no stacking, but replacement" affects of many -Resistance sources. Extending the duration is fine, but only one character is necessary to do that. And if we are talking about +10% more damage for 10 seconds (%-Res) vs. 70 points of damage (from a %proc, before resistance) things look a little clearer to me for solo, less so for teams.

 

Also as noted, it kinda depends on the target(s). If the target is going to take 2 attacks to defeat with-or-without -Resistance, the Resistance didn't really improve performance form my PoV. Pylons take multiple attacks, so I suspect solo-testing against Pylons (no teammates also applying the "same" -Resistance) can be skewing perceptions.

[Murcielago]

WM/NRG scrapper. Its strong and pretty.