Lowest Damage Combo

[Murcielago]

So what's the absolute lowest damage scrapper combo you can come up with? It doesn't have to be squishy, it's just punching with sock'em boppers.

[marcussmythe]

I assume we just mean power-sets, rather than a specific ' whats the worst thing we can build with bad slotting and power choices'

 

For Primary - since we dont get Energy Melee for Scrappers - Probably Ice?  I recall Ice not hitting very hard.

 

For Secondary - well, we count out anything that gives +DAM, and anything that gives +RCHG, and anything that gives +END, and anything with a Damage aura... something that gives you nothing at all other than defense.. and we dont get Stone..

 

So probably Invuln.  It does have a +END Power, on T9, but it kills you.

 

Ice/Invuln, lowest damage Scrapper possible.  Also probably the tankiest scrapper possible...

[jack_nomind]

Axe/Regen with perma Shadow Meld.  Out of every five clicks, two are attacks.

[Kaeladin]

I assume we just mean power-sets, rather than a specific ' whats the worst thing we can build with bad slotting and power choices'

 

For Primary - since we dont get Energy Melee for Scrappers - Probably Ice?  I recall Ice not hitting very hard.

 

For Secondary - well, we count out anything that gives +DAM, and anything that gives +RCHG, and anything that gives +END, and anything with a Damage aura... something that gives you nothing at all other than defense.. and we dont get Stone..

 

So probably Invuln.  It does have a +END Power, on T9, but it kills you.

 

Ice/Invuln, lowest damage Scrapper possible.  Also probably the tankiest scrapper possible...

 

Ice is actually a really solid set for both ST and decent AOE. The lowest sets that I can think of for scrapper are:

 

Psionic Melee (See my recent posting on the pylon thread)

Kinetic Melee (I really, really do not like this set on scrapper; it's far better on stalker)

Broad Sword (It'll have better ST than these other two, but it's an inferior katana in every respect)

[Sir Myshkin]

Psionic Melee (See my recent posting on the pylon thread)

Broad Sword (It'll have better ST than these other two, but it's an inferior katana in every respect)

 

I'd vote for these two.

[marcussmythe]

I had totally forgotten KM.

 

You are correct - KM is terrible. Even ‘Free Assassin Strike’ foesnt manage to make it good - and Stalker is a strong upgrade to most sets ported to it.

[Murcielago]

Axe/Regen with perma Shadow Meld.  Out of every five clicks, two are attacks.

That sounds terrible.

[Coyote]

Axe/Regen with perma Shadow Meld.  Out of every five clicks, two are attacks.

That sounds terrible.

 

Get the Presence Pool, then it's 1 out of 5 :D

[Seigmoraig]

Titan Weapon and never attack when Momentum is up, should be like 10 seconds between swings

[Shinobu]

So if you hit, you have to wait 10 seconds or whatever until momentum is gone?  Why don't we just say pick any primary you want and never attack?  :o 

 

Although this does make me wonder if you could do the old Healzor "I don't take any attacks" approach one better and apply it to a melee character like a Scrapper?  Take only one attack from your primary, tale all your defensive powers, and load up on support-style pool powers...  :P  I wonder how gimped you could become?

[Dan Petro]

Freezing touch on ice scrappers I think is the second or third highest damage per animation second attack in the game now.  The rest of the set is pretty bad (for ST damage) but FT is such an outlier that it makes it playable.  Combine it with the ability to add 50% crit chance to it and it is just crazy strong.

 

First is still blaze with max dot tics and psi snipe with instant cast and I think psi snipe (before it is changed to a 1.67 or 1.33 on test) is 172.6 DPA/S.  Frozen touch is 182 DPA/S and 365 DPA/S on a crit. 

 

Kinetic Melee I'm kind of curious on, because its flat numbers are pretty meh but I feel like if you could abuse the crit strike's proc + CS and essentially have perma power siphon it would do respectable damage.  Kind of like running a second hybrid assault toggle.

[marcussmythe]

Freezing touch on ice scrappers I think is the second or third highest damage per animation second attack in the game now.  The rest of the set is pretty bad (for ST damage) but FT is such an outlier that it makes it playable.  Combine it with the ability to add 50% crit chance to it and it is just crazy strong.

 

First is still blaze with max dot tics and psi snipe with instant cast and I think psi snipe (before it is changed to a 1.67 or 1.33 on test) is 172.6 DPA/S.  Frozen touch is 182 DPA/S and 365 DPA/S on a crit. 

 

Kinetic Melee I'm kind of curious on, because its flat numbers are pretty meh but I feel like if you could abuse the crit strike's proc + CS and essentially have perma power siphon it would do respectable damage.  Kind of like running a second hybrid assault toggle.

 

Dan - I dont know about Scrapper KM, but attempts at using 'T9 refreshes buildup from Hide' on Stalkers proved a pretty hardcore failure - theres no way to use your T9 without making things worse, cause 3 second cast times are terrible.  Ive not tried the scrapper/brute/tanker version, but my guess is given the long cast time of the T9, the outcome would be similar.

[Sir Myshkin]

Freezing touch on ice scrappers I think is the second or third highest damage per animation second attack in the game now.  The rest of the set is pretty bad (for ST damage) but FT is such an outlier that it makes it playable.  Combine it with the ability to add 50% crit chance to it and it is just crazy strong.

 

First is still blaze with max dot tics and psi snipe with instant cast and I think psi snipe (before it is changed to a 1.67 or 1.33 on test) is 172.6 DPA/S.  Frozen touch is 182 DPA/S and 365 DPA/S on a crit. 

 

Kinetic Melee I'm kind of curious on, because its flat numbers are pretty meh but I feel like if you could abuse the crit strike's proc + CS and essentially have perma power siphon it would do respectable damage.  Kind of like running a second hybrid assault toggle.

 

Dan - I dont know about Scrapper KM, but attempts at using 'T9 refreshes buildup from Hide' on Stalkers proved a pretty hardcore failure - theres no way to use your T9 without making things worse, cause 3 second cast times are terrible.  Ive not tried the scrapper/brute/tanker version, but my guess is given the long cast time of the T9, the outcome would be similar.

 

Quoting this whole chain for reference:

 

Yes Concentrated Strike sucks, but Kinetic Melee as a whole does not. Unlike a lot of other sets that have some way of bending their damage through -Res (or other debuffs), KM is forced to just be pure, unbridled power. For the Stalker's their Build Up isn't quite as impressive as what Scrappers get, it's just a standard BU effect (but at 80%), where Scrappers get a stacking flow for 20/s that builds to 156%, so a lot more going on.

 

For Stalkers, in recent testing, I was able to push KM (KM/SR specifically) up to an average of 389 DPS, where my Scrapper (back on Live, I had to go back into the old Pylon archives to find this) was 315 (under the same incarnate/design KM/SR), which is actually an expected value considering crit differences and hide proc'ing. When I added Water Spout with a -Res proc in it, however, I shot up to 455 on the Stalker. A single -20% proc massively shifted my output potential.

 

In both scenarios, yes I excluded the T9 because I have a stupid amount of time playing Kinetic Melee (I absolutely love the design of the attacks and how it flows) and know how detrimental the T9 is to the set. Concentrated Strike is great as a flashy one-off attack, maybe a Minion killer, but its 3+/s animation really hurts when it misses in a DPS chain. I'm experiencing the same issue with Radiation Melee's Devestating Blow, but unfortunetly there's not really a good alternative in that set. For KM, the attack chain breaks down to its first three attacks on repeat. Think about that... the first T1, T2, and T3 attacks... do 315 DPS. No other set has that kind of flux power on a Scrapper. For Stalkers, the chain ends up being the first three plus Assassin's Strike (AS > SB > BB > QS on repeat).

 

Edit: The short end of it is Kinetic Melee is definitely not on the low-end.

[marcussmythe]

Fair!  Pity the T9 is skippable, but... oh well.  I do love my KM/Invuln Stalker - and I may follow you into Water Spout for boss killing, if I can wrap my concept around it - thanks for the note on its impact.  :)

[Seigmoraig]

So if you hit, you have to wait 10 seconds or whatever until momentum is gone?  Why don't we just say pick any primary you want and never attack?  :o 

 

Although this does make me wonder if you could do the old Healzor "I don't take any attacks" approach one better and apply it to a melee character like a Scrapper?  Take only one attack from your primary, tale all your defensive powers, and load up on support-style pool powers...  :P  I wonder how gimped you could become?

 

it's 5 seconds for the Momentum to wear off and about 5 seconds swing animation without it :p

[FUBARczar]

isn't Savage really low?

 

Psi is just low against pylons and robots, otherwise, it murders

 

 

[Kaeladin]

isn't Savage really low?

 

Psi is just low against pylons and robots, otherwise, it murders

 

Savage is definitely far from low; it's actually reasonably high (for scrappers), great on brutes, and superb on stalkers.

 

As for psi, pylons have 20% resistance to all damage types (including psi); that means no damage type is advantaged/disadvantaged on pylons.

 

Psi can do "fine", but if psi can "murder" then a lot of other sets can do murder more efficiently.

[Sarrate]

Yes Concentrated Strike sucks, but Kinetic Melee as a whole does not. Unlike a lot of other sets that have some way of bending their damage through -Res (or other debuffs), KM is forced to just be pure, unbridled power. For the Stalker's their Build Up isn't quite as impressive as what Scrappers get, it's just a standard BU effect (but at 80%), where Scrappers get a stacking flow for 20/s that builds to 156%, so a lot more going on.

 

Aside from Concentrated Strike having a long cast time and the problems that come with it (being rooted and unable to respond), it still looks like a strong power.

 

I grabbed the raw scale damage from City of Data, and then calculated the DPA of the powers two ways, first by just dividing damage by cast time (DPA (wrong)) and again by factoring in ArcanaTime (DPA (AT)).

 

Here are the results:

 

Name                Dmg     Cast    DPA (wrong)         ArcanaTime  DPA (AT)
Quick Strike        0.882   0.83    1.06265060240964    1.056       0.835227272727273
Body Blow           1.218   1.07    1.13831775700935    1.32        0.922727272727273
Smashing Blow       1.554   1.2     1.295               1.452       1.0702479338843
Concentrated Strike 3.56    2.83    1.25795053003534    3.036       1.17259552042161

 

Concentrated Strike's DPA is competitive with Smashing Blow when naively calculating it, but when factoring in ArcanaTime, it is higher. That's not even counting the 20% change to recharge Power Siphon.

 

I know people hate long cast times, but that power looks like gravy.

[Sir Myshkin]

Concentrated Strike's DPA is competitive with Smashing Blow when naively calculating it, but when factoring in ArcanaTime, it is higher. That's not even counting the 20% change to recharge Power Siphon.

 

I know people hate long cast times, but that power looks like gravy.

 

Unfortunately, despite the "on paper" appeal of Concentrated Strike, it in fact, still sucks. It's not because of being rooted, or a long cast time, but, actually yeah it has a lot to do with its cast time. In a sustained DPS chain, CS takes 3.036 (w/ Arcana) to activate. If it was a guaranteed-hit power every single time then it wouldn't be such an issue, but that attack can miss, and when it does, it hurts. BAD. So much so that in consistent testing over a lot of Pylon runs, using Concentrated Strike in an attack chain nets equal, or lower overall total DPS compared to just running QS > SB > BB on repeat.

 

For Stalkers this is just as apparent as it was for Scrappers, except they're adding in AS into the mix. AS > SB > BB > QS does better consistent DPS than having CS in the attack chain because of the chance that it will fail, and historically (again, from a LOT of testing) any DPS chain relying on CS will consistently be worse on average than one without it. On top of this, one of the Stalker procs is a 5% to refresh Build Up on each attack. BU only refreshes on CS when it manages to "critical" (which is not guaranteed, and in testing happened rarely following AS, despite having the Hide proc).

 

Something you have to account that most don't when they evaluate probability for an attack chain is that CS takes 3.036/s to animate (with Arcana). I can activate both SB and BB in that same window, and be started on QS by about .2/s. That comes out to be (using Scrapper values, unenhanced) 191.55, against CS's 222.7. Given how easy it is to slot the early tier attacks (don't really need a lot of Rech in them to get the chain), there will be room to toss a proc in each attack (of some kind), meaning their potential for damage growth is 3x more exponential than CS is in that same time frame. Add that in with the fact that if CS fails just once in a given loop, the QS>SB>BB chain instantly becomes the "higher" chain.

 

And as for Power Siphon, as I did touch on why it doesn't work with Stalkers, that 20% chance does not happen nearly that often. An entire chain with CS involved still consumes 6.864 seconds. Power Siphon has a 20/s duration and does not stack itself, so there's a minimum expectation. In 20/s I'd have ~3 chances to refresh, but is only a 20% chance, which is 1 in 5, and in 30/s I'd only have 4 chances, and that's assuming I don't miss that magical refresh-intended-roll. With enough recharge globally in a build, Power Siphon can be brought down to at least a 30/s recharge anyway, so I'm not really saving myself anything, and actually coming out ahead statistically.

 

Like I said, looks great on paper, in testing however... not so much.

 

Edit: missed a / on an italic code.

[Sarrate]

Something you have to account that most don't when they evaluate probability for an attack chain is that CS takes 3.036/s to animate (with Arcana). I can activate both SB and BB in that same window, and be started on QS by about .2/s. That comes out to be (using Scrapper values, unenhanced) 191.55, against CS's 222.7. Given how easy it is to slot the early tier attacks (don't really need a lot of Rech in them to get the chain), there will be room to toss a proc in each attack (of some kind), meaning their potential for damage growth is 3x more exponential than CS is in that same time frame. Add that in with the fact that if CS fails just once in a given loop, the QS>SB>BB chain instantly becomes the "higher" chain.

 

And as for Power Siphon, as I did touch on why it doesn't work with Stalkers, that 20% chance does not happen nearly that often. An entire chain with CS involved still consumes 6.864 seconds. Power Siphon has a 20/s duration and does not stack itself, so there's a minimum expectation. In 20/s I'd have ~3 chances to refresh, but is only a 20% chance, which is 1 in 5, and in 30/s I'd only have 4 chances, and that's assuming I don't miss that magical refresh-intended-roll. With enough recharge globally in a build, Power Siphon can be brought down to at least a 30/s recharge anyway, so I'm not really saving myself anything, and actually coming out ahead statistically.

 

Like I said, looks great on paper, in testing however... not so much.

 

Thanks a lot for this post, it has given me a lot to think about that I wasn't previously considering. It's exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.

 

I understand what you're saying when it comes to CS missing being very high impact, but on the flip side, by doing 2.x attacks in the same window, you have more chances to miss in the middle of the chain. The more frequent attacks have a smoother dps curve than one with CS, but over a big enough window, that alone should average out. (You could argue that most enemies don't last long enough for that to happen, and that's also a valid point. On the flip side, it means that CS could yield higher dps if it never misses, ignoring other factors.) Your point about procs is also very interesting, because I never really played proc heavy builds, but that is additional damage CS wouldn't have. On the flip side, with the PPM system in place, the short recharges of the powers would leave them with a very low chance to proc... *does some math* Or, those procs would have a higher proc rate than I expected. (A 3 PPM proc in QS without recharge would have a ~20% proc rate. Of course, if you did have recharge in it, say 40%, that would still be ~16%.)

 

As for Power Siphon, if you can can cast CS 4 times in PS's duration, then (assuming I'm not botching the probability calculation), you'd have a ~59% chance to refresh it. (0.8 ^ 4 = 0.4096 chance to not proc, or 1 - 0.4096 to proc). Not guaranteed, but more likely than not. On the flip side, every cast of CS is 2.x attacks that won't have a chance to proc. Additionally, the more recharge you have, the less value the reset has. PS with just 3 slots has a modified recharge of ~60s. If it procs early, you probably wouldn't want to cast it (spend more animation time on PS and not attacking), but if you get it too late, it could only save seconds of recharge.

 

I'm starting to understand what you're saying, and that's a bummer. In the future, I was thinking of making a KM Scrapper specifically because I figured the PS recharge would make it far more valuable than on other ATs (because PS lasts 20s, with the ~10s of ramp down as stacks fall off). Just chaining 3 attacks gets boring, too.

[HelenCarnate]

This is why we need EM and stone armor on scrappers.