Flavour of the Month: 4 months in stats

[Ibarra]

Invuln/SS still going strong I see.

[RubberDougie]

Fix Wormhole!!

[XaoGarrent]

Interesting insights being revealed on Sentinels in particular:

 

The fact the AT isn't meta for much of anything means you see some pretty unexpected choices rise the list. Seems most people who are looking for performance just go to another AT altogether, and this is reflected organically in the statistics. The people who play Sentinels do so for concept in the way the people play Brutes or various types of Kins for effectiveness... Which also impacts the overall number of Sentinels played.

 

Sentinels having the best version of Regen is now more or less statistically confirmed. You'd expect this to be lower on an AT that needs damage from its secondary to really shine, but no, the tweaks to Sent Regen are making a strong showing and keeping it up there with the Scrapper version... Which I actually find the popularity of more strange. *Proceeds to check the powerset combinations* ...Actually nevermind, makes perfect sense.

 

People really like their edgy Pistol toting heroes, lethal resists be damned.

 

More insights in general:

 

Titan Weapons is a less popular set than expected even if it's still very popular. I see it so frequently I kinda expected it to be closer to Spines.

 

Masterminds are still every bit as prolific as everyone thought. Maybe it's time to retire the purple cave map, yeah?

 

Martial Assault maybe didn't need the nerfs it got, lol. Starting to think we all vastly overestimated that one.

 

People *still* haven't caught on to how strong the control of Earth Control is.

[autographedcat]

Given the general reaction I've gotten to playing Katana/Regen Scrapper (which are mostly variations of "why are you playing that? It's awful."), I'm astonished that it's the 7th most popular Scrapper combo.)

[Lazarillo]

Really kind of interesting that if you pull out all the Spines/Fire farmers, that particular secondary on Brutes still ends up being the second most popular, but Spines drops to being the second least popular.

Edited August 31, 2019 by Lazarillo

[XaoGarrent]

6 minutes ago, Lazarillo said:

Really kind of interesting that if you pull out all the Spines/Fire farmers, that particular secondary Brutes still ends up being the second most popular, but Spines drops to being the second least popular.

...I never thought about this before, but Spines gets more from Fire than Fire gets from Spines.

 

Synergistically, most primaries have a have a one way relationship with the secondary they're paired with. Fire can do the things it does for many different sets, but Spines especially doesn't do much for any secondary. Most of the time your defensive primary is keeping you alive so you can continue doing damage, or actively helping you deal damage through buffs, while your primary is doing very little to help your defense or synergize with whatever attacks you rarely find in your secondary. 

 

The only time you see this the other way around is with primaries that do things like give defense or debuff to-hit, ergo why Dark/Shield melee ATs use to be a FotM.

[ZeeHero]

1 hour ago, honoraryorange said:

I don't think I've ever even seen a Psionic Assault Dom

What game are YOU playing? 50% of all doms I see are Mind/Psi.

[Cix]

This is so cool.  I wonder how this will influence forum goers.  Will people go try the oddball sets, or decide everyone else is onto something?

 

Also...I may be addicted to Dominators.  I really thought they would be less common than Stalkers, given they take a bit more finesse at the beginning.  Do these stats include characters made in the past couple weeks?  The August 27th patch gave some doms a lot of love.

 

Third thing, Ice powers in general seem to be somewhat unpopular compared to other sets, especially Ice Armor and Ice Melee.  Is that indicative of its being out of balance?  Maybe people don't like the graphics.  I know I can't find a look for Glacial Armor that I don't hate even with minimal FX.

[Snarf]

This is fascinating data, thanks! -- I would really be interested in seeing the same stats across just level 50s.  I am quite surprised to see the "meta" combinations that I encounter all the time merely strongly represented rather than overwhelmingly represented.  I suspect that if you were only looking at "mains" you would see more of the combos that I can't throw a rock in Ouroboros without hitting (fortunately they're too smug to consider rocks a threat).

[summers]

Here's some breakdowns you might find interesting:

 

/Regeneration is the most popular secondary, with 41625 characters having this secondary.

Fire Blast/ is the most popular Primary set, with 30219 carrying it as their primary.

The most popular powerset of all, regardless of being primary or secondary, is Willpower, with 47913. 

 

The four most popular powersets (either primary or secondary) of all are:

Willpower - 47913

Fiery Aura - 44945

Time Manipulation - 41731

Regeneration - 41625

 

The four least popular powersets (either primary or secondary) of all are:

Plant Manipulation - 2464

Radioactive Assault - 2511

Icy Assault - 2680

Martial Assault - 2855

 

The four least popular primary powersets of all are:

Traps - 881

Trick Arrow - 1138

Poison - 1542

Thermal Radiation - 1984

 

The four least popular secondary powersets of all are:

 

Katana - 951 (Tankers only)

Claws - 1186 (Tankers only)

Sonic Debuff - 1276 (Controllers only)

Martial Arts - 1370 (Tankers only)

 

If you are looking to be a special snowflake, you can pick one of these and go from there, or you can aim for the rare unique combinations, which are:

 

Defender - Trick Arrow/Rad - 3

Corruptor - Psychic Blast/Trick Arrow - 4

Defender - Trick Arrow/Energy Blast - 4

Corruptor - Dark Balast/Trick Arrow - 5

Defender - Trick Arrow/Electrical Blast - 5

 

The most popular combinations of powers are:

 

Luminous Blast/Luminous Aura - 14452

Arachnos Soldier/Training and Gadgets - 14421

Umbral Blast/Umbral Aura - 13423

Brute - Spines/Fiery Aura - 12769

 

If you think Spines is popular, it might be interesting to know it is heavily concentrated in a single build: 12,769 Spines/Fire Brutes out of a total 24,083 Spines characters. Amongst Brutes, that's 12769 out of 17211 Spiney Brutes, with there being only 1027 Spines/Firey Aura Scrappers and a meager 60 Spines/Fiery Aura Stalkers.

[summers]

Here's another interesting quirk

 

Street Justice appears to be internally called "Brawling" for Brutes, while on Scrappers it is "Street Justice"

[Luigrein]

1 hour ago, Cix said:

Third thing, Ice powers in general seem to be somewhat unpopular compared to other sets, especially Ice Armor and Ice Melee.  Is that indicative of its being out of balance?  Maybe people don't like the graphics.  I know I can't find a look for Glacial Armor that I don't hate even with minimal FX.

I think it may be for a few reasons taken together rather than any one huge one. In no particular order:

1-graphics, as you said, the ice armor graphics are pretty hit or miss.  I think some people may have issues with the melee graphics too but I think it's more an armor (or buff for cold) issue.

2-sound, maybe it's just me, but I find the icy wind sound thing accompanying the ice melee powers on my brute to be irritating after a bit.  It's not so bad in combat they just...linger.  I think ice armor has an issue with this too but it's been a long time since live when I had an ice tank.  (I liked my Ice/DB tank back on live, I've just been trying not to repeat power sets/combos)

3-ice melee makes some fairly significant tradeoffs for extra mitigation (although not as much as it used to)  Don't get me wrong, ice patch is about the best mitigation you can find in a melee set, but it takes enough of a damage hit that it's probably not going to be in any farming builds.  As an added aside, ice melees slow and hard CC effects have anti-synergy with brutes fury mechanic. And brutes are really popular.

4-ice armor is fairly all in on defense, not quite on SRs level but getting there.  This isn't a problem late game (although it does have the less favored typed defenses instead of positional,) but early game the RNG factor to defense can make ice armor feel unreliable on defense.  Sure it averages out over time to be equivalent to resist or hybrid sets, but it's got higher highs and, perhaps more memorably, lower lows.

5-finally, related to number 3, it doesn't age terribly well into IOs.  Most of the people focusing on builds will be trying to get enough mitigation going that they don't need ice melees non-static mitigation.  If they're going to almost always miss anyway do I really need to spend endurance/time on this knockdown patch?  And it's a lot harder to make up a damage loss with IOs than it is to shore up your defenses.  This is by no means an issue exclusive to ice melee (stone armor says hi!) but it's probably plays a part.  On the armor side the set has typed defenses instead of positional, and additionally has resist instead of defense for cold and fire.  The cold resist is high enough you probably won't really mind not dodging cold attacks, the fire can be an issue.  Plus it has the classic tank set psy hole.

 

Balance wise I think ice melees issues are mostly just the set showing it's age.  Ice armor I think is more or less fine, it's probably not AS durable as some of the other set's but it gets the job done and has a few nice tricks up it's sleeves. Phenomenal aggro control is a solid strength, slow immunity is pretty nifty too.

[Cipher]

53 minutes ago, summers said:

Here's another interesting quirk

 

Street Justice appears to be internally called "Brawling" for Brutes, while on Scrappers it is "Street Justice"

The internal name for it on all ATs is Brawling - I just forgot to switch it out in the parser until after I did the post for Brutes 🙂

[nihilii]

Sonic/Ice sentinel here. I feel so speshul. 🙂

[Derek Icelord]

I'd be interested to see how these graphs shift if you exclude characters under level 5.

[justicebeliever]

2 hours ago, Derek Icelord said:

I'd be interested to see how these graphs shift if you exclude characters under level 5.

Why would lvl 5 matter?  Create the character, do DFB a few times and boom you are lvl 15-20...

 

For most people grinding Alts just isn't an issue...Not suggesting people don't still drop them pretty quick, but 1 hour of DFB is going to blow past lvl 5...

[ZeroXephon]

I dont know why more people dont play widows, they are so under rated.  I main a fortunata and its absolutely devastating. 

[nihilii]

1 hour ago, ZeroXephon said:

I dont know why more people dont play widows, they are so under rated.  I main a fortunata and its absolutely devastating. 

If you think about it, Widows have only 2 powerset combinations, Fortunatas and Night Widows. Compare it to a regular AT where you have ~100 combinations of powersets. In a way, widows (and soldiers, and kheldians) aren't underplayed, they're wayy more played than other choices. Their popularity rivals with some of the most popular farm builds.

[theDarkeOne]

Well, most of my favorites are in that bottom tier of popularity but can do amazing things. While my spines/dark/dark brute doesn't farm as fast as say my spines/fire/elec brute I can waltz onto a carnie mission, forget I had my settings at +4/8 and my /dark can still mostly waltz through the mission whereas my /fire faceplants within a couple groups. 

Also, if you haven't rolled a stone/shield (proc monster) brute . . . Do it. . . so much fun.

Vet level 1000?!?!?! Someone does not share my ADHD!

[PaxArcana]

4 hours ago, Derek Icelord said:

I'd be interested to see how these graphs shift if you exclude characters under level 5.

I'd like to see a breakdown that was split up into ...

• Level 1
• Levels 2-19
• Levels 20-39
• Levels 40-49
• Level 50

[raverbane]

Thanks for posting this.  I was wondering about some of these statistics recently.  Now, my curiosity has been sated!

[Heraclea]

Astonished to see so many Super Strength characters.  Apparently the word has not gotten out yet.  It would be interesting to see how many of them made it to 50.

 

Likewise surprised to see so many characters choosing Regen as their defense set, especially now that Bio, Rad and Willpower are available and do regeneration better than Regen.  They are fun to play at lower levels.  I made one knowing what I was getting into, for the specific purpose of running lowbie TFs.

Edited August 31, 2019 by Heraclea

[ZeroXephon]

2 hours ago, nihilii said:

If you think about it, Widows have only 2 powerset combinations, Fortunatas and Night Widows. Compare it to a regular AT where you have ~100 combinations of powersets. In a way, widows (and soldiers, and kheldians) aren't underplayed, they're wayy more played than other choices. Their popularity rivals with some of the most popular farm builds.

While true you can mix and match to an extent.  I have a mostly melee single target stalkerish widow and I have a nuke tuna.  I have seen some tunas sporting a lot of melee and I have seen some widows with a lot of ranged.   

[Hedgefund]

Dang MMs, let me be the one to tell you that Cold Dom is really really really good for that AT.  I mean really good, certainly on a tier way beyond TA and Sonic.

[Cipher]

2 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

I'd like to see a breakdown that was split up into ...

• Level 1
• Levels 2-19
• Levels 20-39
• Levels 40-49
• Level 50

Extracting data and creating graphs for every AT is a significant amount of work, and probably not something we'd want to do for so many level brackets. That said, I'm happy to do a 32+ series if people want to see how the data changes at that point 🙂