I am done with Brutes

[SomeGuy]

4 hours ago, aethereal said:

 

First of all, a note of self-correction: there are "only" 49 Scrappers whose times are better than the best Stalker on your list.

 

Second:  There are 55 Stalkers on your list, from a wide variety of players.  It's not like there was zero interest in validating Stalkers.  And again, people here are claiming that Stalkers have strongly superior ST DPS to Scrappers -- of 55 tries from dozens of players we are saying that despite Stalkers actually being strongly better than Scrappers at this, none of them could get into the top, say, 20?  Does this actually pass the sniff test?

 

Third:  What actual affirmative evidence does anyone have that Stalkers have better ST DPS than Scrappers?  Like, I think that the pylon times are pretty good evidence.  I'll also say that my own experiences with Stalkers -- I like Stalkers and have played a bunch of them -- have never suggested to me that holistically they had superior ST DPS than an equivalently-optimized Scrapper (I have also played a bunch of Scrappers).  I'm seeing a lot of people assert that Stalkers outclass Scrappers here, cite no evidence, and then try to come up with elaborate theories for why the other evidence shouldn't count.  But is there any affirmative evidence that Stalkers in fact have better ST DPS than Scrappers?

 

Fourth:  I think the relatively larger number of people interested in optimizing Scrappers for pylons than Stalkers is a pretty straightforward story:  people tried both, found that Scrappers were superior, and then the kind of player who wanted to post a really good pylon time focused their efforts on the AT that was best for the job.

 

Fifth:  I mean, are you willing to apply this kind of logic to any other combo of ATs?  Maybe Brutes actually outclass Scrappers in ST DPS!  Yes, okay, Scrappers post better pylon times than Brutes, but aren't all of your above arguments equally valid if you plug in the word "Brute" for Stalker?

 

 

I actually did make a EM/FIRE stalker out of curiosity. I didn't realize the stalker version of Fire Armor was so neutered DPS wise. With that said, I'm not sure how to simulate the 7x teammate boost without multi boxing. I do suspect the AT would noticeably pull ahead after X amount of teammates. How many? Not sure.  I'll start with three total and see where it goes.

 

1/2/3 I'm with you quite a lot regarding "stalkers do better ST DPS then scrappers"? I haven't seen enough empirical evidence. Only a lot of anecdotal. And...considering there are still a lot of people claiming certain sets are really good I don't necessarily have a lot of faith in the opinions of a lot of players (to be fair, some of those sets have recently gotten some really good attention).

 

4 This was legit my reason to gravitate to scrappers. I just like the scrapper class more. I LOVE the stalker playstyle, but lack of taunt aura for almost all of them, the lack of AOE, and paper thin health pool pushed me over to scrappers. This is why I am really sad about the current state of brutes in comparison to scrappers and tankers. The AT doesn't bring enough to the table for me to choose them over a scrapper or a tanker. Stalkers at least can play quite differently then scrappers. That's a big difference for someone like me. 

 

5 bwahaha 

 

I know some people think this is wildly off topic since this is a brute thread, but I really do believe stalkers are a good example of being different enough to justify certain aspects of the AT. Maybe brutes need something like that.

 

[skoryy]

[tidge]

From a dusty corner of my memory, I want to say that long ago one of the primary reasons 'performance time' measures focused on Scrappers over Stalkers was that the optimization of the Stalker ATOs (to yield increased DPS) was both narrower (in terms of choices) and more difficult than leveraging the Scrapper ATOs. I believe it was Brutes (with Fury) and Scrappers (leveraging ATOs) simply have more design space (in attack chains) to work with.

 

And FWIW, this doesn't mean I think the Scrapper Superior ATOs are over-powered.

[aethereal]

6 hours ago, SomeGuy said:

I know some people think this is wildly off topic since this is a brute thread, but I really do believe stalkers are a good example of being different enough to justify certain aspects of the AT. Maybe brutes need something like that.

 

Totally agree.  That was why I brought it up.  I think that Stalkers are, numerically, as bad off as Brutes are or worse, but they play differently than Scrappers, while Brutes play largely the same as Tanks and Scrappers, and I think that makes all the difference in terms of people's overall satisfaction with the AT.