City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

What DOES Eagle's Claw do, anyway?

Arcanaville

By Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2011-05-21 14:02 in Scrappers

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
This comes as a surprise to me. I don't know why, but I recall Eagle's Claw being a fairly weak attack at a damage scale of 2.2. Scratch that, I do know why - City of Data lists it as a scale 2.28 attack. As a point of fact, it's closer to 2.62, which is the damage of Head Splitter. So I agree with you, that's a serious attack, and I'm not really bothered by its animation time. Not worrying about quick attacks is why I left Blasters
City of Data hasn't been refreshed in a few issues, unfortunately. A good place to check for in-depth mechanics information is Mids -- the database editor lets you see the raw power data, albeit in a processed form, but the numbers at least are accurate.

Eagle's Claw uses the new tech for dynamically changing the chance of a particular power effect to go off, that IIRC was first used for Dual Pistols' ammo types.

Here's exactly what Eagle's Claw does:

PvE-only effects:
  • Scale 2.28 Melee_Damage dealt with type smashing. (23.37 at level 1 -- 142.64 at level 50)
  • Magnitude 3 stun for Scale 4 Melee_Stun seconds. (3.2 at level 1 -- 4.768 at level 50)
  • 15% chance of CRITICAL, Scale 2.28 Melee_Damage dealt with type smashing.
PvP-only effects:
  • Scale 3.36144 Melee_Damage dealt with type smashing. (34.45 at level 1 -- 210.30 at level 50)
  • Magnitude 3 stun for Scale 2 Melee_Stun seconds. (1.6 at level 1 -- 2.384 at level 50), with the usual PvP mez suppression
  • 15% chance of CRITICAL, Scale 3.36144 Melee_Damage dealt with type smashing.
Common effects:
  • 0% chance of Scale 0.23895 Melee_Damage dealt as fire damage. (2.45 at level 1 -- 14.95 at level 50)
    [ Fiery Embrace raises this to 100% chance while active ]
  • Adds 33% to the chance of all effects flagged as ECCritMod for 2 seconds. That affects basically all crits in the martial arts set except for Eagle's Claw itself, not that it would be possible to activate it again in time anyway.

You're correct that once you factor in the flat 15% crit chance, which applies regardless of target rank, the average damage is closer to scale 2.62.

As Arcanaville noted, the effects from this power kick in at 1.3 seconds into the activation, which takes 2.53 seconds total. The crit buff lasts for 2 seconds, which only leaves you with 0.77 seconds to use it after the power finishes activating, and that's without adjusting for Arcanatime.

EDIT: There appears to be an inconsistency in the data for power customizations. If I'm reading this right, and it's entirely possible I may be mistaken about how it works, the "time before hit" for the 'Bright Face Smasher' and 'Dark Face Smasher' alternate animations seem to be set at 1.5 seconds instead of 1.3. If that's true, then selecting one of those customizations may buy you an extra 0.2 seconds to use the crit buff...

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by MTS View Post
Scale 2.28 Melee_Damage dealt with type smashing. (23.37 at level 1 -- 142.64 at level 50)
Well, poopy! I honestly thought it was more, but you're right. I was reading the average damage of the power, which is listed as 15% higher than the power's direct damage thanks to the 15% chance for critical that it has. It's kind of disappointing to learn that it's not comparable to, say, Head Splitter. I guess the rest of the set is solid enough, especially with single-target attack, but it still kind of bums me out to not have the truly heavy hitter that I thought I did. Mine wasn't fully slotted for a while, so I couldn't tell, but... Well, it's not bad, suffice it to say.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.