Umbral

Blasters. It's a Blast set and the secondary effects, while diverse, were weakened so that you can't really rely on them to contribute noticeably. Yes, you get the choice between -dmg, DoT, -def, and -spd, but none of them are particularly strong, so you might as well focus on the damage, however mediocre it is.

Well, since DP is cursed with a painfully long redraw time (over a second), you're going to want an AT that doesn't need to tap into other powers all that often. DP's animations are low enough that Blasters are going to want to tap their secondaries for more effective attacks, so you've got to choose between Corrupters, which will actually be able to capitalize on the blastiness of it a bit, or Defenders, which will get to ignore it as much as is normal for Defenders to ignore their secondary. Corrupters win out, imo.

Soloing is all about a combination of personal survivability and damage. Corrupters win, hands down. Blasters need more help to survive in melee and if a DP blaster is dipping into his manipulation set left and right, he's gonna have horrible DPS thanks to redraw. A Defender is going to suffer from the low damage that defenders always have to deal with. Corrs strike the best balance.

While that's not really a question concerning Dual Pistols, the Defender will. Team functionality is based around support more than anything else because everyone deals damage and support can make everyone unkillable. Defenders also get the biggest -res value from Piercing Rounds, so you're contributing more additional damage to your team than the additional damage that a Blaster would provide against the same individual target.

For support sets, I would avoid any set in which you have to redraw a lot. The redraw on DP is killer. My personal suggestion would be powersets that require a solid block of support every couple of minutes with solid blocks of blasting afterwards. Forcefields, Sonic Resonance, Dark Miasma, and Radiation Emission are probably the sets that I would most recommend. The shield sets just buff up every 4 minutes to provide a vast majority of their functionality, and the debuff sets generally spend 5-10 seconds at the beginning of combat setting up their killzones and toggles and spend the rest blasting away. Reactive support sets with low cycle time powers would probably be the worst to go with (i.e. Emp, Kin, TA).

As long as the new knockback is lower proc chance and the existing secondary effects are all universally weakened to account for it, what you're saying here actually makes sense!

Dual Pistols isn't getting the ability to choose between 4 full strength secondary effects at will. It's getting to choose between 4 secondary effects roughly 2/3rds as effective as a normal secondary effect. You're paying for the ability to choose by having to choose between 4 weaker effects.

The Dual Pistols secondary effects are nowhere near as strong as their counterparts in sets that don't get to choose. Acting as if DP has some inordinate advantage when the options are all weaker is simply stupid. Sure you can choose between -dmg, a bonus DoT, -def, and -rech, but none of those are going to be as strong or last as long as if the set were designed to only have one of those.

DP's secondary effect is the ability to choose between 4 weaker options. It doesn't provide anything more to the powerset than the secondary effects of other powers does and, in fact, costs something that other sets actually get additional functionality for: Aim.

Don't be so blinded by the shiny newness and prettiness of Dual Pistols to ignore that there is a definite, known numerical disparity between it and other sets. The damage is lower (Standard Ammo and Incendiary Ammo are the highest damage options and only just equal to sets like Energy) and the secondary effects and utility capabilities are lower (no Aim, shorter durations and smaller debuff sizes).

Attractive aesthetics and balanced performance are not mutually exclusive concepts. Most of the changes that people have been suggesting to improve the sets performance would have no affect on the aesthetics of the set while allowing the set to compete in the powerset numbers game without having to rely on the attractive animations in order to draw in players. If you only care about aesthetics, you shouldn't care because the aesthetics of the set are pretty much guaranteed to remain as is. If you care about the numbers, then you already realize that something is amiss.

There's also the same chance that the power does no damage which is even more underwhelming.

Personally, I think that HoB could stand some hefty powering up because it's lacking two things that RoA and FA don't: range and reliability.

FA and RoA can both be used from well away from their targets, allowing them to be used to initiate an attack rather than forcing you to run into melee. Precedent for powering up PbAoE nukes already exists: just look at Thunderous Blast compared to all of the others (all numbers are based off of use by a level 50 Blaster).

The PbAoE nukes deal 15% more damage than Thunderous Blast while having the exact same recharges. Rain of Arrows deals 225.21 damage and Full Auto deals 178.47. Hail of Bullets deals 166.62 damage. FA deals 7% more damage, and RoA deals 35% more damage. Something should immediately seem off when the targeted AoE "versions" are doing more damage than the PbAoE.

Even if RoA is intended to be an outlier and FA is the "average", HoB should still be doing at least 205 damage to keep with the existing pattern.

FA and RoA both deal a reliable amount of damage; what little variable damage FA has is a rather insignificant portion of it's total output (just 6.27 damage on average out of 178.5). HoB is completely unreliable. The damage exists on a perfectly normal curve so that you're just as likely to do well as you are to do poorly. When you're dealing with nukes, doing well means it's dead: doing better than that doesn't really do you much good because the target is already dead. Doing poorly, however, is substantially worse because doing poorly means the target survived, which isn't particularly good for a blaster in melee. The variance hurts Hail of Bullets more than it helps because upward variance results in overkill, which caps functionality. If anything, the variance should be skewed upwards a bit to account for that, though, rather than simply increasing the damage, the best way to handle this would be to increase the chance to 55-60%, so that chances are more likely that you'll hit, but that's just preference without much ability to compare to existing powers because HoB is kinda unique in that aspect.

The closest comparison I can make for the numerical precedent of balance is between Thunderous Blast (targeted AoE crash nuke) and Blizzard (area target crash nuke): Blizzard deals the damage over time, allowing targets to run away, and encourages them to do so by causing enemies in the zone to be Afraid. Blizzard can deal up to 507.68 damage to a target if they remain in the area. Thunderous Blast deals an average of 265.88 damage. This means that, if the powers are intended to be equitable, Blizzard is assuming to deal only 52% of its damage to its targets (90% more damage). Without immobilization effects, the damage tends to be much lower (roughly 28.5% factoring in Ice Storm), but the ability to manipulate that chance with the relatively common AoE immobilization effects is probably the balance (which HoB doesn't have the advantage of).

Essentially, presuming these precedents can be applied, HoB should have a max damage of 1.9 times what FA is capable of while having an average damage 1.15 times higher. The max damage should be 339.1 and the average damage should be 205.24 damage. Based off of these numbers and assuming that the number of damage attempts should remain the same, HoB attempts should have 12 60% chances to deal 19.78 lethal damage and 12 60% chances to deal 8.48 damage of your ammunition type.

Interestingly enough, the damage numbers for each proc aren't altogether that much different than those listed (19.44 and 8.33 damage respectively). The primary difference is an increase in the chance to proc of each tick to 10%. Increasing the proc chance by that much and reducing the recharge time down to 1 minute would put it almost exactly in line with every one of the existing nukes and nuke precedents we've already got.

You can only get 5 of the same set bonus. It doesn't matter which sets you get them from. All that matters is the name. The same applies to any other bonus you get from IOs.

In your first build, you're stacking 5 5 piece Crushing Impacts, 4 5 piece Doctored Wounds, a 5 piece Obliteration for 10 5% +rech set bonuses, so 5 of them are getting eaten by the Rule of 5. In the second, you're stacking 11 and getting 6 eaten by the rule of 5.

If you want to see how your set bonuses stand, click Window>Sets & Bonuses. This will bring up a window that shows you your totals and the individual bonuses you're getting. If you're over the cap, there will even be a warning for you and, as you scroll down the list of individual set bonuses, it will even tell you which ones are breaking the Rule of 5.

No, that's the reason for lower DoT and secondary effect numbers and durations.

There isn't a decent reason for lower overall damage. Swap Ammo does not provide a reason to not have Aim since Swap Ammo is the set's gimmick (though, it would be more proper to say that Swap Ammo does nothing but give you access to the toggles that provide access to the set's secondary effect gimmick; look at the power, it literally does nothing).

The secondary effects (ammo toggles) should be balanced against the secondary effects of the other sets (i.e. the ability to choose secondary effect should create a diminished benefit in the suite of effects you get to choose from). This is pretty much true.

The ability to modify your damage type is pretty much simply a token change at the levels it currently is (30% variable) that doesn't necessitate a decrease in damage output, especially since you're losing out on the ability to deal a good bit of your damage when you change out of Standard Ammo because of the loss of PR's -res. Incendiary is the only viable exchange for Standard because you're sacrificing a debuff for additional damage, though, honestly, you're not making out that well because the advantage isn't all that stellar thanks to lacking PR's -res. The only time Standard isn't better is when you're going for AoE damage, and, even then, Cryo and Chem aren't worth it because you're not getting additional damage and the debuffs aren't large enough nor do they last long enough to have a substantive effect.

As it stands, DP loses out on Aim in exchange for full access to the secondary effect it has that is balanced against every other set's. It also deals damage that is below par because it's "pure damage" choice is only just barely on par with every other set with a debuff secondary effect. Hail of Bullets has twice the recharge of the other mini-nukes for no substantive reason since it is neither bursty or particularly reliable (24 50% attempts at dealing damage rather than having the bonus damage be chance).

Eh, we don't really care about Blasters around here.

Rad Blast wasn't out whenever I did the analysis the first time around (which is actually in this thread). I didn't bother doing Rad Blasts calcs because the question was about Dual Pistols and I didn't want to increase my workload just to increase the number of comparison points from 8 to 9.

BABs was working on a fix that would prevent the redraw animation while you're in combat, but he ran into a problem with the Shield stance that forced him to redo it from the beginning. I think it got backburnered, but the devs have been giving removal of redraw animation time a good looking at.

You're confusing yourself. The redraw time used to be incorporated into the animation time of powers. Players complained about always paying the redraw penalty so BABs fixed it so that redraw and normal animation are separate, thereby speeding up sets that have weapon redraw.

It's not that it's "horrible". It's that it's just not "good". "Mediocre" is probably the best way to describe the damage and that's only when you're using the damage ammos (Standard for -res from PR, Incendiary for DoTs). When you use Toxic and Chem ammo in order to take advantage of other secondary effects, your damage drops down because you lose the -res in PR and you don't rolling DoTs to buffer your damage. When you focus on dealing damage, DP is dealing roughly similar damage to all of the other power sets (though it's actually a rather painful drop off in the top tier recharge set) as long as you don't care about secondary effects. If you do start caring about secondary effects, the damage is going to drop down to only barely above AR, which is too big of a cost when every other set gets full strength debuffs and that same level of damage.

I understand both sides as well. It just really bothers me when people dismiss balance and good game design because of the cosmetics of the set.

Personally, I believe that cosmetics and balance should be completely separate. This is one reason why I like CoX's costumes: in virtually every other MMO, what you look like is a very strong indicator of how strong you are and you can often find incredibly ugly items that are incredibly powerful (or vice versa). I'd much rather just have the two be separate.

The fact that animation times are so fundamentally tied into the effects of a power grates on me a bit, especially when you're dealing with powers with very long animation times (Total Focus). The current damage formula heavily penalizes long animation time attacks because you have such a proportionately longer recharge time after them. I'd actually be satisfied if there were some kind of standardized activation time, which, while a bit boring, would be much more balanced.

I have no problem with a set being both pretty and powerful. I just really don't think that either of those should be sacrificed for the other for any reason.

I don't expect it to be too much of an issue. The claws redraw isn't too bad, iirc, so you should be able to go click crazy and not completely kill your effectiveness. Essentially, it will just add a little less than half of a second to all of the clicky animations, which isn't too bad in the scheme of things.

Except that we don't agree on both of those. DP only underperforms with qualifiers, nor does FSC beat out Shield Charge except under incredibly limited viewpoints

I keep forgetting... It takes so much skill to take on AVs with an unkillable perma-tank and a power that automatically floors their regen! Gah! So much skill involved!

Let me repost the analysis I did for the open beta.

Standard Ammo Attack Strings:

SO (65% +rech): PR>Pist>DW>Wait(.66 sec)>Pist>ES>Pist>DW>Wait(.66 sec)>Pist
Blaster DPS: 111.68

SO w/ Hasten (135% +rech): PR>Pist>DW>Pist>ES>Pist>Wait(.396 secs)
Blaster DPS: 125.95

IO (250% +rech): PR>Pist>ES>DW
Blaster DPS: 130.44

Incendiary Ammo Attack Strings:

SO (65% +rech): PR>ES>Pist>DW>Wait(.66 sec)>Pist>Wait(1.188 sec)>ES>Pist>PR>Pist>DW>Pist>ES>Pist>DW>DW>Pist>Wa it(.924 sec)
Blaster DPS: 116.70

SO w/ Hasten (135% +rech): ES>Pist>DW>Pist
Blaster DPS: 133.18

IO (250% +rech): ES>DW>Pist
Blaster DPS: 135.13

Straight Comparisons between Blaster pure primary optimal attack strings:

SO:
Sonic 144.46
Fire 137.48
Archery 118.49
Dual Pistols Fire 116.70
Psychic 113.54
Dual Pistols Standard 111.68
Ice 110.37
Energy 110.25
Elec 100.94
AR 85.07

SO w/ Hasten:
Fire 166.13
Psychic 156.1
Sonic 144.2
Archery 138.12
Elec 134.59
Ice 133.81
Dual Pistols Fire 133.18
Energy 131.0
Dual Pistols Standard 125.95
AR 101.34


IO:
Fire 182.4
Sonic 166.32
Psychic 163.86
Ice 155.26
Elec 145.87
Archery 144.13
Energy 137.17
Dual Pistols Fire 135.13
Dual Pistols Standard 130.44
AR 114.25

Yet as soon as they attack they become a target because they're tanks. Like I said before, the only potential "I don't want threat" screwery that would occur would be damage Tankers asking for another Tanker to be brought on team to take agg from them, which likely wouldn't happen because the Tanker is going to steal agg from them by simply dealing more damage.

Threat and damage are intimately related. If you get bonus damage for not having threat, you're going to get threat eventually if you keep dealing damage. Hell, the only way you can outthreat a Tanker as it stands is to outclass both their taunt aura and their damage, which only ever happens with Brutes (that have full powered taunt auras and punchvoke anyway) and Shield Scrappers (because AAO is friggin' crazy).

Keep in mind, you're also saying this is a bad idea because there are a few outlier idiots that don't want to do their jobs. These are the same people that take all of their attacks and none of their shields on their Tankers because they want to deal damage, even though they'd probably be happier (and more productive) simply rolling Scrappers.

People are idiots and will continue to be idiots. Acting as if that's a reason not to do something that will benefit the AT as a whole because the idiots will just be idiots about it is idiotic, in and of itself. A change that allows Tankers to increase their damage against targets that are not currently targeting them will give the AT a good deal more functionality and limit their redundancy no matter how the idiots deal with it. If a Tanker refuses to do his job just because he wants a little bit of extra damage (or, hell, if he refuses to jump in because he doesn't want to take the alpha), I can find another that's not an idiot. Maybe the idiot tank will learn that way.

20% is not "a mile". When you consider that SC has a 400% larger area of effect. FSC has to put forth some amount of work to get 10 targets into its area of effect. Shield Charge just hits everything. FSC is probably better overall, but in top end AoE scenarios where 3 seconds of herding is actually an issue you have to address, Shield Charge closes the gap relatively easily.

AoE isn't just about number of targets and damage. Area of effect and ease of target acquisition matter too (which is why I value spherical AoEs a good deal above radial AoEs).

Actually, it doesn't. That was kind of the point. When you begin factoring in recharge (which you kind of have to because I've yet to meet anyone with a decent build that doesn't slot their AoEs for recharge at least a little), FSC begins losing ground pretty quickly, to such an extent that the fact that SC can hit 16 targets with very little difficulty whereas FSC can take time to bring enemies in that close begins to have a substantive effect on the numbers.

No, Shield Charge does. You're thinking of Lightning Rod, which has multiple concentric AoEs that each deal a portion of the power's damage. This is one of the reasons why Shield Charge is so much better than Lightning Rod.

Btw, nice job -repping me so much with your farmed up rep. I might not have so much to say about you if you weren't outright wrong so often, though it's nice to know that you care enough about what I say to try to peel off by green dots.

I wouldn't really call it "decent damage" since damage is rather worthless without a timetable.

The fact that it's got a decent debuff doesn't really carry much truck with me because I'm already running at 95% chance to hit not to mention that, if I'm going Body Mastery, I've got the endurance to run Tactics, which is going to give me 13+% tohit buff which is better than a defense debuff because the purple patch and debuff resists aren't going to eat it all up.

Acting as if turning it into a set mule is some kind of incredible advantage, recall that this is a discussion of the power if it were going to be used. A set mule is pretty much, by definition, a power you don't ever plan on using. It wouldn't matter if it had a .5 second animation time if you're planning on slotting 6 piece Shield Breaker into it.

As an attack, LBE sucks, mostly thanks to the long animation. As a set mule, it's decent, but, honestly, there are better set mules out there in my opinion (Confront).

Nothing that it gets really explains why the attack takes so long to animate other than Cryptic not friggin' caring about animation times when they were designing the power. It's got a 1.67 sec base animation time because that's how long the animation was designed to be. I don't really expect this to be addressed much because there has to be some reason not to take Body Mastery if you're not an AoE farmer (at which point you take Fireball).

If I had any influence over the devs, I'd just tell 'em to either remove the ranged attacks because they're so weak they're not even worth taking and replace them with support powers or to buff them up so that taking the APP attack actually amounts to an increase in damage dealing ability. As it stands, they just kind of sit there waiting until the melee AT they belong to can't get into melee with something they need to kill.

I'm not sure what Mids' number's you're reading, but FSC is listed as having 126.7 base damage for me. Of course, this number isn't correct because Mids' doesn't handle the rolling DoTs correctly. Assuming even distribution of minions and upper rank targets, the damage should actually be 119.04 ((48.5 + 48.5)*1.075 + 6.26*.8 + 6.26*.8^2 + 6.26*.8^3 + 6.26*.8^4) damage.

Shield Charge also has a base damage of 200.2 damage (remember the Shield Charge damage increase for Tankers and Scrappers?), but it doesn't have the ability to crit.

Shield Charge is 16 max, not 17. The largest number of targets for any attack (except for a few like Repulsion Bomb that got missed when max targets were added) is 16. The aggro cap, however, is 17.

You're forgetting the fact that powers don't start recharging until they are finished activating. FSC has a 2.67 sec (2.904 sec Arcanatime) animation whereas Shield Charge has a 1.5 sec (1.716 sec Arcanatime) animation. The base cycle times on the both are actually 22.904 and 91.716 seconds, respectively, which hurts FSC a good deal because its animation accounts for more than a tenth of its cycle time.

Now, assuming the proper base values and factoring in cycle times rather than recharge times and no additional recharge values, the info would look more like this:

damage * targets / cycleTime
FSC: 119.04 * 10 / 22.904 = 51.97 DPS
SC: 200.2 * 16 / 91.716 = 34.93 DPS

Now, if you add in some +rech (66%, 133%, and 200%), the fact that FSC has a substantially longer animation time starts to hurt it.

66%
FSC: 119.04 * 10 / 14.95 = 79.53
SC: 200.2 * 16 / 55.93 = 57.27

133%
FSC: 119.04 * 10 / 11.49 = 103.60
SC: 200.2 * 16 / 40.34 = 79.41

200%
FSC: 119.04 * 10 / 9.57 = 124.39
SC: 200.2 * 16 / 31.716 = 101.00

The conclusion is still the same (FSC generates more damage over time assuming that you are dealing with target saturation and ignoring wait times), but it's substantially closer than you calculated. If anything, it starts getting close enough for the fact that Shield Charge has 4 times the area of effect as FSC to start making a decent difference. It takes some manipulation to get 10 targets into a 10' radius circle around you. It doesn't take much manipulation to get 16 targets into a 20' radius circle around you. The fact that Shield Charge is so much bigger gives it a substantial practical advantage (which is why it the AoE formula penalizes larger AoEs), which could probably offset the lower damage by a fair amount.

Well, you do want softcapped melee defense. The question is simply how many application of DA do you want to have up at any one time in order to be softcapped to melee. In general, you want to have only 1 on a top end build because DA hurts your DPS a bit. This means that, depending on the slotting, you want between 28-30% +def(melee).

For AoE and Ranged defense, it depends. You can softcap to ranged and AoE, but, in order to do that, you're going to sacrifice slotting and +rech set bonuses. I'd simply suggest going for about 30% +def for ranged and AoE damage and emphasizing +rech set bonuses.

Here is a reasonably cheap (i.e. no purps, no PvP) Kat/Regen build that should work quite well for you. It's designed for PvE, rather than PvP, so, while it might do well in PvP, it's not going to excel. I know that for PvP, defense set bonuses and powers like DA are definitely not particularly useful because you need to hit hard and fast, rather than staying around for the long haul.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.621
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Yes.

For all attacks except for Pistols, which only benefits from the knockdown chance and -def of standard ammo.

Here. It also comes with a decent comparison with the secondary effects of other similar powersets.

The statement you're quoting was evidence that it's possible for the game to determine target of target. It was never meant to be an indication of how the system would operate. The suggestion is that whenever a power deals damage to a target, it would first check if that target has the tank targeted. If it does, the extra damage is applied. Pseudo-pets would not benefit from this effect for obvious reasons.

Target an enemy and then use a buff power. The power will target that enemy's target. You can do the same thing to target through your target. It shouldn't be too hard to create a function that returns a binary that simply verifies that the target of the target isn't yourself.

He's not dead. He simply falling down so that he can attack them when they're least expecting it.