PleaseRecycle

Katana may perhaps have "fallen to average" in the esteem of some players, or even many players for all I know, but it still does everything that it ever has. It still has strong ST damage and excellent AOE plus a powerful defense buff as well as tons of -def which allows you to slot as many Achilles heels as you want. I can't stop you from regarding that as bad but I can deem you to be wrong.

I was pretty worried that street justice and particularly titan weapons were too strong. Titan weapons probably is too strong. My concerns have mostly been allayed by reality: where's the overwhelming TW majority? It lasted for the same amount of time that any new set craze does and now we're back to the status quo: most brutes are SS, TW is in there with "the rest." Does it matter if it's unbalanced if it isn't overrepresented?

Since we're on the subject, I feel that there are two major factors limiting the use of TW. The first is that it is conceptually very narrow. How many CoH players knew they wanted to make a character with a comically oversized hammer before that option was made available to them? The second issue is that the momentum mechanic is kind of annoying in my opinion. In reality it is the set's strength: even the slow versions of the attacks are very good, with momentum the set is ridiculous. In spite of that, it feels to me roughly equivalent to a set where I had no choice but to redraw every other attack. Assuming I'm even right about these flaws, does that mean it's fine that the set is numerically broken? That's a question that datamining can answer.
One of the features of modern sets that you skirted around is their versatility. Mace does decent damage with an essentially random array of control effects attached. That was one of the initial design strategies. Another set that was created using the same principle is martial arts. Martial arts may have been worse than mace, but over the years it has been buffed to the point where that could no longer be called the goal of its design. Now it is a high end single target set with good AOE (cool kid ATs only, sorry stalkers) and control that you can take your pick of and usually rely on.

Speaking of reliable secondary effects, let's look at katana and TW again. "TW makes katana look like junk," you may say, "it even appropriates its previously special trick of having a defense buff!" Yes and no. Defensive sweep is less plausible to fit into a good attack chain than divine avalanche. It has abysmal DPA if you use it to build momentum, but if you use it when you have momentum you're basically wasting a big chunk of your momentum. It is not desirable. Assuming the GC-GD-GC-SD chain, just replace one of the GCs with DA: the chain is fine, no annoyance incurred. More tellingly, though, DS simply has a much smaller defense buff than DA does. What that says to me is that the devs actually spent quite a bit of time working on the balance of a set that raised the eyebrows of many, myself included, with respect to the fact that it was pay-for.

Now, take staff. Does it have a "heavy hitter?" That depends on what you mean. Sky splitter hits plenty hard, but it does so relatively slowly. It's comparable to eviscerate. Rather than being a cone it has a slew of potential other effects tied to it. A good trade? I don't think it can be considered a trade. The set already contains a very good cone and pbaoe, plus a defensive cone that's closer to DA than it is to DS in terms of real utility.

The trade, if there is one, is losing build up in exchange for the forms. That's a trade I'd make any day of the week: I know how to get more damage on my scrappers. Starts with M, ends with usculature. The forms seem tailor-made to shore up the same kind of weaknesses as the alpha slot. You may be tempted to cry foul here; if you can build sets with BU to be fine with musculature, staff gains nothing at all! I don't think that's true.

First I will note that once you factor in the up-time and the animation time, BU isn't actually that much better than just running assault. At the high end the tohit bonus is its more unique trick, yet as we know that is often extraneous. For evidence that the devs agree, see recent sets: SJ an TW both get BUs that have token nerfs to their damage buff in exchange for something much more useful than that. Even if you like BU though, what are you getting instead?

Quite a lot! You have, at any time, the option of choosing an assault-style damage buff, a quickness-style recharge buff or far and away the most powerful, a global endurance discount. That effect is huge. It's huge while leveling, but it can also be huge at the high end depending on what you choose to do with it. The thing to note is that the level 3 buff is basically as powerful as cardiac or vigor. Try and sneeze at that.

Of course, those buffs aren't perma, are they. You cash them in by using one of the key powers in your single target chain or your best aoe. Again, yes and no. You only cash in your perfection if you're already at level 3. If you're already at level 3 then not only do those key powers benefit from the level 3 buff, they also gain additional damage and additional buffs or debuffs. If you're any lower they themselves build perfection and you can then fire the finisher that you hadn't just used as a builder, or you can continue with your chain and enjoy the full strength buff for its duration. That right there is staff's best trick and it is completely opaque unless you dig through the guts of the powers. It has versatility unlike any previous melee set in the game in a way that unfortunately means most people will probably never really understand it.

tl;dr: TW is overrated, staff is destined to forever be underrated. Those in the know will find a lot to like about it.

First step upon creating a character: /bind c "powexecname Ninja Run$$powexecname Combat Jumping"

I can't even use either power at level one but I respect the primacy of their eventual roles in my builds. If you just keep ninja run on all the time not only do you waste a huge amount of endurance, you have severely reduced combat mobility compared to switching to CJ due to the four second suppression upon attacking. I'm not saying it's impossible to make that workable, but life is a heck of a lot easier when you have both. The above bind has made switching between them such second nature to me that I don't even think about it. If I'm attacking anything I'm running CJ, if I am moving rapidly I'm running NR. Works like a charm.

I dunno, it clearly isn't going to be a top tier ST set but I guess that doesn't really bother me given its quality AOE and the fact that the forms give you all kinds of other benefits other scrapper primaries don't even attempt to compete with. It's also a very low EPS primary even before considering form of the soul which should be refreshing coming off of titan weapons. Part of my excitement for it comes from the fact that it'll be the first damage aura scrapper I'll have made in over a year which has little to do with staff itself, but it does synergize very well with the resist sets in particular.

Ah, my mistake for not thinking of that. I just felt like I'd gone crazy for a moment, heh.

Reppu is correct to say PPM instead of SBE if we're talking about the proc imbalance problem. ATOs have the same issue. Performance shifter PPMs were actually "nerfed" in today's patch, though they still perform better than regular PS procs. I'm not the forum's foremost expert on the subject but basically if you put a PPM of 4 or better into a power like AS, it will proc 100% of the time because the base recharge is 15 seconds, regardless of how low you've gotten its actual recharge. Some of us have a problem with that, oddly enough. How PPMs work in damaging aoes is somewhat hazy, but when I saw that putting the will of the controller proc into shadow field made it proc with something like a 95% rate on every possible check my eyebrow wasn't raised, it was ejected at escape velocity.