Spring Attack

[Story Archer]

I'm having a difficult time finding up-to-date discussion on Spring Attack, and since this is for a Brute, I figured I'd drop it on the Brute forum.

 

Spring Attack is an ideal place to drop damage procs, and a FF proc to get it back a little quicker, right? 

 

Does Spring Attack require Accuracy? As a 'psuedo-pet', I wasn't sure...

 

I'm using it on a Claws/Rad Brute, as an additional mini-nuke to go with Radiation Therapy, Ground Zero and eventually Void Judgement. I didn't like the longer animation time of Eviscerate and I didn't really need it as my attack chain is smooth and super quick as is. It took a little while to get the hang of, but since I have so many long recharge click powers (aforementioned mini-nukes, Particle Shielding, Hasten, Meltdown, etc.), I liked the little bump that the FF proc gave me on recharge. I don't love it as an alpha power due to its limited range, but it works superbly well as a mid-fight repositioning power, to get exactly where I want to be relative to the mobs completely surrounding me. 

[Uun]

18 hours ago, Story Archer said:

Does Spring Attack require Accuracy? As a 'psuedo-pet', I wasn't sure...

Yes

[aethereal]

In general, pseudopet powers proc poorly.  Basically, they proc as if their recharge time + cast time were 10 seconds instead of the usually longer recharge time of the "real power."

 

Spring Attack is not actually a pseudopet.  It has a redirect instead, which will have different proccing characteristics, and potentially more attractive ones.  I'm honestly not sure how procs work through Spring Attack.  I suspect but am not sure that they are still much reduced from what they "should" be for a 120s recharge power.

[Onlyasandwich]

With the redirect @aethereal mentioned, I believe it takes on the proc profile of the power it redirects to - link here in CoD.

 

This power is shown as 20 sec recharge, 15 ft radius, 1.167 animation time. This means it would proc a little worse than your average epic aoe attack. Decent, but not maxed 90% like you might expect for such a long recharge power.

 

Foot Stomp is a fairly close comparison. It has 15 ft radius, 20 second recharge, 2 second animation. This means that it has a slight edge in proc % due to the longer animation. With all this, it has 48% chance to fire a standard 3.5 ppm damage proc. Spring attack would be a smidge less than this.

 

Mids doesn't reflect this accurately, and instead goes off the assumption that it would proc as a 120s recharge power.

 

You can expect roughly 30 damage added to its power per standard 3.5 ppm damage proc. Not useless, but honestly pretty mediocre return for something you are using so rarely. Damage enhancements will bring you a similar return until ED cap. A damage maxed Spring attack fully procced would do about 242 damage. A little more if you reserve the purple proc for it, but the purple would be better used in your primary.

 

One thing I'm not sure of is if it benefits at all from Fury, since it's a power referring to a power. It may not inherit damage buffs.

 

 

 

 

Edited Thursday at 02:11 PM by Onlyasandwich

[ZemX]

14 minutes ago, Onlyasandwich said:

One thing I'm not sure of is if it benefits at all from Fury, since it's a power referring to a power. It may not inherit damage buffs.

 

It should.  If you look back at the effects line in pool power Spring Attack it has attribute "Boosts are copied to entity".   

[Onlyasandwich]

24 minutes ago, ZemX said:

Boosts are copied to entity".

That makes sense! I wonder if the duration allows it to copy over effectively. Since it's a power that hits right away rather than doing damage over time, I would guess this is not an issue.

Edited Thursday at 02:53 PM by Onlyasandwich

[aethereal]

24 minutes ago, ZemX said:

 

It should.  If you look back at the effects line in pool power Spring Attack it has attribute "Boosts are copied to entity".   

 

There is no entity, now.  Maybe this power was once implemented as a pseudopet?

 

I believe that Fury should work normally because your character is still the originator of the power, it's not indirected through another entity, so there's no reason that all of your global effects wouldn't work as normal.

 

The "boosts copied to entity" stuff with pseudopets (for other powers that do in fact have a pseudopet) works pretty well, but the big thing about it is that it's a one-time copy, which can sometimes lead to strangeness for pseudopets that have some duration.

 

But Spring Attack is not a pseudopet and you are directly the entity that executes the effect, so I don't see a reason to imagine that it wouldn't work like you'd expect.

 

I have not tested, however.

[ZemX]

22 minutes ago, aethereal said:

There is no entity, now.  Maybe this power was once implemented as a pseudopet?

 

I don't know about Spring Attack, but I don't think Savage Leap was ever a psuedopet and it works this way too.    So does Radiation Melee for its Contaminated AoE damage.   All of these "Apply 'Execute Power'" effects include the Copy Boosts to Entity attribute, so despite the name, it probably just works the same way on an executed power as it does a created pseudopet.

[aethereal]

Just now, ZemX said:

 

I don't know about Spring Attack, but I don't think Savage Leap was ever a psuedopet and it works this way too.    So does Radiation Melee for its Contaminated AoE damage.   All of these "Apply 'Execute Power'" effects include the Copy Boosts to Entity attribute, so despite the name, it probably just works the same way on an executed power as it does a created pseudopet.

 

You're right that Savage Leap never used a pseudopet.  I nevertheless think that the "copy boosts to entity" thing is irrelevant on a power that you execute yourself: it was probably copied there somewhat extraneously because people used older pseudopet power effects as a template.  It's possible that that's not true!  The powers code is complicated, and maybe an "execute power" thing normally cuts you off from your own global effects, but that seems very complicated and unnecessary, so I suspect that it's not what happens.

 

Just because I love nattering about this:

 

The Reason for Pseudopets

 

The basic powers code for City of Heroes contemplates two origination points for area-of-effect powers:  the caster (a "point blank AoE" like say Fire Sword Circle), or a target entity (a "targeted AoE" like say Fireball).  There is no concept of an AoE emanating from a point on the grid, it has to come from an entity (again, the caster or a target).

 

So when they wanted "location-targeted AoEs," the powers code did not support that.  In order to simulate the idea of an AoE emanating from an arbitrary point on the map, what you do is target a point on the map, summon an invisible, untargetable entity on that point, and then that entity executes a point blank AoE power, then destroys itself.  Boom, location-targeted AoEs.

 

At the time that pseudopets were created, there was no way to execute another power on demand, so the way that the pseudopet worked was that it had an auto-power that was the PBAoE, so it just fired as soon as the pet was created.

 

This approach worked, but as you might imagine for a fairly complicated scheme, there were a variety of little bits of strangeness about it.  For our purposes, the two big ones are:  1.  it's a different entity, so if you have some global effect on you, the pseudopet didn't have that global effect on it 2.  because what you think of as the "location targeted AoE" is an autopower, it procs like an autopower (also: it has different max values than you, it doesn't do things like break Stalker stealth, etc).

 

So they created the "copy boosts to entity" flag to solve the first problem, where basically when they create the pseudopet, it goes through and copies all global effects that are on you onto the pet as well.

 

Teleport Attack Powers and Power Execution

 

You may be looking at the above and saying, "hang on, there's nothing there that requires teleport attack powers to use pseudopets.  They're PBAoEs that emanate from the person using the power."

 

But if you naively make a power with two effects: a PBAoE attack and a teleport, what will happen is that you will do a PBAoE from where you START, not where you LAND, which wasn't the effect they wanted from Lightning Rod, the original teleport attack.  A power checks all of its targets at the time that it executes.  That means that it finds targets who are X distance from you at the point when you activate the power, ie, from your original location.  This is true even if you apply a delay to the PBAoE effect, so that it happens after you land -- it still checks targeting at the time when you activate the power, not when the effect happens.

 

So their solution with Lightning Rod was to code it as a location-targeted AoE (with a pseudopet) and a teleport.

 

But then they invented the power execution effect.  When the effect of one power is to execute another power, it is importantly the case that that's a separate power, with a separate activation time, and separate targeting criteria.  So this allows the modern implementation of Spring Attack and at least some other teleport attacks: instead of teleporting you to a grid location and creating a pseudopet that attacks at the same location, they teleport you to the location, wait long enough for the teleport to happen, and then execute a PBAoE power on you as well.  Since the PBAoE is separately activated, it checks targets from your position at the time it activates, not the place where the first power activates, and thus you get the desired "PBAoE at destination" effect.

 

Part of the reason to get this effect is exactly to remove the pseudopet indirection.  You don't need to copy boosts, you use your AT's inherent maxes and scalars and everything,  secondary effects like breaking stealth work normally.  I generally believe that the "copies boosts to entities" flag does nothing here, though again I could be wrong.  But the entire point of coding the power like this is to not need things like "copies boosts to entity."

[Auroxis]

So from my tests the Teleport+Attack "Redirect" powers proc in a quirky way. The PPM calculation seems to be using the origin power's recharge and area factor (which is none) rather than the executed power's recharge+area factor, making Spring Attack and a few other similar powers have a 90% proc rate. I'd love others to test it themselves to see if they get similar results.

[Onlyasandwich]

52 minutes ago, Auroxis said:

recharge and area factor

That's excellent news for spring attack lovers if so 😄

[Frosticus]

3 hours ago, Auroxis said:

So from my tests the Teleport+Attack "Redirect" powers proc in a quirky way. The PPM calculation seems to be using the origin power's recharge and area factor (which is none) rather than the executed power's recharge+area factor, making Spring Attack and a few other similar powers have a 90% proc rate. I'd love others to test it themselves to see if they get similar results.

I think some behind the scenes changes have been happening with some of the power redirects/executes in the last couple months.

 

I can't put my finger on exactly what though.

 

It's my pet theory that redirects/executes will be what eventually paves the way for future proc changes.

Edited Friday at 06:07 PM by Frosticus

[aethereal]

16 hours ago, Auroxis said:

So from my tests the Teleport+Attack "Redirect" powers proc in a quirky way. The PPM calculation seems to be using the origin power's recharge and area factor (which is none) rather than the executed power's recharge+area factor, making Spring Attack and a few other similar powers have a 90% proc rate. I'd love others to test it themselves to see if they get similar results.

What procs did you try with?  Enemy-affecting ones like damage procs or self-affecting ones like say Force Feedback?  I'm pretty sure that there are some cases where different procs look at different powers for their PPM.  (Reason number 9,482 why PPM is a terrible system that should be destroyed).

 

By the way, more nattering on copies boosts flag:

 

We were focused on global bonuses like fury, which I continue to think do not need a flag in order to apply to an executed power.  But the other kind of boost that does need to be copied to both a pseudopet and an executed power are local powers enhancement: ie, if you put a damage enhancement in the Lightning Rod (using a pseudopet) or the Spring Attack (using execute power) power, you want that damage enhancement to affect the power use that actually damages someone.

 

In the case of a pseudopet, it's all the same: both Fury and damage enhancement need to somehow get moved over to the pet in order to work.  In the case of an execute power, you (probably?) don't need any special flagging to get Fury to work, but you still (probably?) do need special flagging to say, "the damage enhancement from this power should affect this other power that actually does the damage."

[Auroxis]

@aethereal I tested with damage procs:

 

 

[aethereal]

Cool!  Well, if damage procs go off at 90% in Spring Attack, that certainly makes it a lot more compelling as an attack.