Cyber_naut

You seem to be a proponent of player based power research, so take a look at bills set statistics threads. With rage, SS is a mediocre damage dealing set. Even when using outside powers that rage buffs, there are still several sets that do better damage than SS, and those sets don't have to waste a power selection to achieve that damage, nor do they have to deal with the end crash and ten seconds of impotence every two minutes.

So within the SS set, rage does not provide a 'massively untoward benefit', even when outside powers are used, and that is the only analysis that is necessary since rage is only used in the SS powerset. The fact SS drops more severely in performance in one of bills studies when outside powers are excluded simply speaks further to the fact that many of SS's powers are underpowered, even with rage. As I mentioned earlier, you can't look at an individual power within a unique powerset and balance it with powers inside of other powersets without taking into account the powers native powerset, because SS is clearly not balanced like other powersets.



I was using the numbers in mids, I'm aware there is always a 5% miss chance. If that did not exist, however, one SO would be more powerful than base rage, according to mids. But even with the 5% miss chance, you're at 95% to hit with either situation, that's not 'roughly as accurate' that's 'as accurate'.



Again, according to bills studies, with similar slotting and rage running, SS is mediocre in dmg dealing ability vs. competing sets, so if you skimp on damage enhancements due to incorrectly thinking rage creates some sort of damage advantage vs other sets, you're going to further weaken your damage output vs competing sets. Yes, rage's damage bonus is equivalent to 2.5 dmg SO's (roughly), but SS is starting out behind competing sets in terms of damage output without rage, rage simply bridges this disparity.

Again, I don't agree with your damage enh savings when a SS toon requires rage's damage bonus to compete vs other sets. So you end up with an accuracy advantage in exchange for a nasty end crash and ten seconds of impotence every 2 minutes. Again, in a game where hitting isn't exactly difficult 99% of the time, not only is that not overpowered or imbalanced, it's not very impressive.

First of all, just looking at statistics, I'm not seeing any end advantage whatsoever. If you look at bills study, you'll see that SS's end usage is mediocre to poor. And again, it's doing mediocre to poor damage vs competing sets.

Secondly, when you experience it in game, you quickly realize getting hit with end crashes all at once is far more problematic than end costs spread out over time.


Again, rage's damage bonus only makes SS competitive vs competing sets. If SS could compete damage-wise with competiting sets without rage, then touting its damage bonus as an advantage would make sense. Of course that is clearly not the case, without rage's damage bonus, SS would be in the basement in terms of damage dealing ability.

In terms of endurance, I've made countless top-end melee builds, and SS builds give me the most difficulty in terms of end management for long drawn out fights, by far.

And again, even utilizing outside powers, SS is mediocre to poor in terms of damage vs. competing sets. It's evident in bills study, and I believe Starsman also did an extensive study as well.

And yeah, there are a lot of powers in SS that you can skip, and should when a pool power like boxing is better than one of your sets attacks, but that simply supports my argument that SS is balanced differently than other sets, in that it has some ridiculously poor powers balanced by some really strong powers. That is why you shouldn't try to balance SS's strong powers to powers in other sets that are balanced more evenly, or you end up gimping SS, because it needs those strong powers to balance out the weak ones.

And your argument that SS is somehow superior to other sets because it can take outside powers that would be buffed by rage, simply does not match up with the information we have. Again, if you look at bills study, even in the study where sets could take outside powers to create a 'best' attack chain, SS came in mediocre to poor in damage dealing ability.

With side switching and the ability to start off neutral with any at on the horizon with GR, I'm not so sure they still plan to proliferate all the sets anymore anyway. Having said that, to those who think the set is 'borked', I guess that is simply an opinion I don't share, assuming borked means providing pefromance well above other competing sets. That certainly is not evident in bills or starsmans studies, or from my in game experiences.

Love the always up rest idea. That would fix the problem right there, imo. I'm pretty sure allowing players to 'spam' rest can't be equated to an 'i win' button.

It's fine once you're in your mid 20's and have slots and SO's to work with. I'm currently leveling a brute and the end use is BRUTAL (no pun intended) from 1 to (currently) 18. There's not much you can do build-wise with limited slots and training to do enh.

I'd love to see them ditch training and do enhancements and just start SO's from level one, and perhaps scale back end use for the early levels until you have more slots to work with.

Since rage's dmg buff only allows SS to do dmg on par with competing sets, I would hope there would be some sort of advantage to the power since you have to use a power choice and slots on it, and the power has some nasty negatives to it, including an end crash and ten seconds of impotence every two minutes. Without the to hit bonus, rage would offer no real beneficial effect, you'd get the end crash and no damage for 10 sec/2 min in exchange for being able to do damage on par with other sets, while wasting a power choice and slots.

And again, how beneficial is an accuracy advantage in this game, pve-wise? In the vast majority of situations, it's ridiculously easy to hit just about anything. And you noted that with no accuracy enh, rage gives you a 95% chance to hit an even level opponent. While that is true, it's also true that a single accuracy SO gives you a 100% chance to hit. So rage is letting you skip a single accuracy SO, which you're probably going to want to slot with an end reduction to deal with the end issues rage creates, which kind of mitigates that 'advantage'. Then when you get to IO sets, the advantage becomes even more irrelevant. The only place it provides a real, tangible advantage is in pvp, so I'm sure the ten people who do that are pretty excited.

I'd rather them create new powersets than trying to 'balance' sets that are already all in the same neighborhood ability-wise.

Unless you want to do more damage, then it's easy to be happy with many other scrapper primaries.

Katana is a great primary, but mostly due to DA, which can be less effective with other combos.

Well, damn, I don't know how anyone could counter such a comprehensive argument. Victory IS yours! Well played.

Exactly, sm wipes its butt with em, but only when there is no other option because sm doesn't want something as lowly as em touching it's butt.

Nonsense. Bare bones, it does above average damage compared to other melee sets with great aoe abilities and mitigation. With improved recharge and epic powers added in (with the same being available to em), it surpasses em, even in terms of long term single target dps. Then take into account stones attacks animate faster than em's big hitters, and in real game performance, stone cleans em's clock in just about every category, except corpse smashing.

LOL, yeah, you'll lock down one minion or lt with your stuns while the guy with SM locks down the entire spawn. Single target mitigation is a joke compared to aoe mitigation.

Or, just improve em's aoe abilities a bit so it's more competitive. You'll never have perfect balance, but em is far and away underperforming vs. competing sets.

Nonsense. Teaming was and is absolutely considered by the devs - the very at descriptions display that, and it's a good thing, considering the fact this game is an mmo, lol.

Secondly, even if you solo, you're fighting more than one enemy at a time, and with the new difficulty settings, you can fight a lot more than that.

So again, overall, em is a massive underperformer vs competing sets. The only thing it is competitive at, is sustained single target damage vs hard targets like av's or gms. On teams, the big time single target damage is nearly useless thanks to ridiculously slow attacks. The mitigation of the set is pitiful because it's single target, while most competing sets have aoe mitigation - the more enemies you are fighting the more painfully obvious this becomes. And the set has pitiful aoe damage as well, in a league all of its own in aoe futility, yet there are several competing sets that are in the same league as em in terms of single target damage (that are also more capable of effectively delivering it, in in-game situations thanks to faster animating attacks), that blow em out of the water in terms of aoe ability. That's not balance, that's a massive disparity.

But if you think that's balanced and 'ok', that's fine. You can think the sky is filled with cotton candy too, but you'd be wrong about that as well.

And the argument of 'if you don't like it, roll something else' doesn't negate the fact that em is an underpowered set. So many players are noting this hoping the devs listen and take a look at the set, and perhaps improve it. If you don't like hearing us talk about it, then don't come into these threads, or complain about it, whatever floats your boat. But telling people to just go play another set sure sounds like the last resort to a failed argument to me.

Ha, I've got one at 45ish - got a link to any good builds?

This would make sense if single target ability was equally valuable vs aoe ability, but it is not, especially in a game when you routinely fight more than one enemy at a time.

Then you have the balance problem in terms of several em competitors doing close to the same single target dmg and mitigation, while completely blowing em out of the water in terms of aoe dmg and mitigation.

Then on top of that, em's single target abilities are rendered nearly useless on teams, thanks to how the set plays. When you fire off the sets best single target attacks on a team, good luck getting them to land before teamates kill your target with their much faster hitting single target and aoe attacks. EM users routinely end up wasting thier single target strength pummeling corpses, and when they use their sets best power, many times the only one taking damage is the EM user, lol.

EM is clearly an underperforming set in this game.

Listen to Gaiden. If you're s'uper poor', SR is the cheapest secondary to make your toon av-proof. And it provides all the mitigation you'll need in most cases, so you can concentrate on damage with your primary, and for pure damage, you can do a lot worse than fire melee. But if you don't like popping green insps, you'll need to fit in aid self - or go with dark melee, which does similar damage to fm, but has an attack that heals you, pretty much eliminating any need to pop greens, outside of ridicucrazy situations.

I can understand stopping exploits like the one where people were going 1-50 in a day or two killing MM pets, but they went too far with the recent nerfs, and they even admitted it in several posts.

There's no question that the economy and other external factors have contributed to the decline in customers, but what they've done, or not done, recently has had a pretty big impact too. They need to release new things to do more often, rather than focusing on large releases. And rather than eliminating things players enjoy, focus on creating more things for players to enjoy. Who cares if some dimwit is getting to 50 in a couple of days, that's not hurting any other players. Why worry about players farming purples or pvp io's, aren't the ridiculous prices in the markets high enough as it is anyway? Hell, I've been a fanatic of this game and I don't even think about trying to get pvp IO's due to their ridiculous prices and drop rates. And speaking of pvp, how can any reasonable person look at the changes done there and consider them a good move?

In short, stop messing with things large segments of the playerbase enjoy, fix the things that nobody likes and release new things to do in a more timely fashion.