AM and weapon choice

Odd question I'm sure but, I'm trying to look at all angles here.

I've been playing around with mental AM and was wondering...

Do any of you out there favor one weapon style over another even though you're using an AM loadout?
Any overlooked advantages to one over another or does it just become a stat stick to you?

It may be fun to play exclusively from your tray, but you should always find a way to work in weapon attacks for the most damage.

That's going the opposite direction of AM's intention.

Yeah, analyzer shows that WM > AM. That's a given. However, I'm giving feedback on exclusive AM.

That's not a part of my question though, thank you.



edit: I actually take back the part about WM > AM (for mental). I don't agree with that actually.
However, that's an entirely different thread.

Analyzer usually shows that WM+AM is the best, if you want the best damage out you usually have to go with a hybrid playstyle that combines WM and AM.

Anyway, to your question, I like to go with a weapon I know performs well in WM even if I only plan on using AM most of the time because then I won't lose as much damage if I have to use WM. Certain powersets have weapon procs that work well with things like 2h and brawling because of the high hit counter those WM allow.

If you never want to use your weapon, just pick the one with the best stats or the one with your favorite model(s)

I think what undrline was getting at was incorporating weapon attacks with the AM. If what you're asking is if there's any benefit to having one weapon over another when you are using only tray powers and nothing else than I would have to say no, your weapon in that scenario is just for appearance and stats.

Do you have any results you can post to show this? This has been sort of an ongoing question of mine and I've seen results that contradict each other in this scenario. For accuracy I'd like to get to the bottom of this. Part of me thinks the inconsistency of Mass Terror might be skewing the results but I really don't know until I can get on test myself.

Honestly if you're asking about mental in particular, I don't know if my statement applies. I haven't tested mental very much, but, if I understand some posters correctly, it's not possible to WM boost your first res power and clip with psy res without losing the big hit like you can with gadgets and battle display.

You're right in that Mental can not get WM power crits and the big hit from Mass Terror. What I mainly meant though is there seems to be some different beliefs on whether it's worth it to do a weapon mastery combo at the start of the chain regardless of the loss of the WM crit.

Well I have issue with those that are using their live characters for testing. Their gearing isn't for full AM.
My other issue is we have might based and precision based power sets. Yes, a precision power set is going to get benefit from gearing and using a weapon.

However, what about a might based power set?

I've wondered if someone went all out with might on a might power set with an exclusive AM rotation what would happen so... I've been working on my mental alt to find out for myself. Well what do you know, someone published some results just a few days ago.

The short of it... 50k crits was enough to get my attention.

For Nature, the best non-Wolf loadout involved stacking/refreshing poisons and then using your weapon with a Carnage buff active. That loadout performs the best in a rotation where you end up using your weapon with no clipping at all. That rotation works best with 2H Arrow Storm because it does the best ranged DPS unclipped. That's because the Nature AM is excluded from WM crits. It also is a loadout where your options to clip add animation time to your attack and there's not enough damage in the might clip to balance out the added animation time.

Another non-Wolf loadout that's almost as good involves stacking/refreshing poisons and then using your weapon clipped with Voracious Plants. That works out best with DW Explosive Shot because it does the best damage when you clip the weapon mastery combo.

HB Solar Flame does a lot of damage when clipped. It goes down from 1.8s to 1.0s. The damage per second of that is better than any weapon mastery combo if you're crit excluded. That really should be your best option except that clipped animation time of 1s is too short for a cooldown of any single power to clip. You need at least two powers to clip with make that work. You'd alternate between them.

Artifacts of the Past

Damage out - 5744110
Mental Weaponless AM

I don't think that's all that bad, is it?

Without knowing your stats, and the the DPS and stats of the other players it's hard to say and even the it's not really an accurate way to evaluate anything, but that's also aside from what I was getting at. The question I have been trying to find an answer to is if adding a WM combo at the start of the cycle would do more damage than simply doing the AM, but I'm thinking that's perhaps off topic from what your actual question was.

No bother, this thread has derailed and that's okay.

I've had more luck weapon-less than WM at the start as you've described.
Which is fine with me. Using a WM combo with AM seems counter intuitive to me anyways.

Depends on time, wipes, the rest of the board, and etc. - I've gotten 6.8 in the old Breach, pre-health adjust, in a 30-ish minute no-wipe run, and slightly more in a run that ended up taking an hour where we died like, four times. It's a game of relative factors, being my point. Run it another time or two : then make a call.

Still, if YOU think it works for YOU, I'd say stick to it.

But on topic : if you're using the AM as your primary damage output, your Weapon becomes three things -

A.) The aforementioned Stat Stick, in which case 'six of one half dozen of the other'

B.) Supercharge Booster (which with the 4% SC Regen on the Mass Terror AM Finish is... arguable as non-essential) which suggests a high-return WM Combo or just a high-return Weapon (Brawl - > MA Combo or Bow / HB with no WM)

C.) Oh **** moment recovery tactic - in which case you want something hard-hitting (One Hand - > Dual Flurry WM, Two Hand, Brawl or MA) and / or with decent CC potential (knockdown, knockback, juggle) - which still recommends those four weapons.

One thing that works well with the Mental AM is clipping the rifle ' s grenade shot with each power in the AM cycle for added damage.

Exactly this^

Gadget AM + rifle = Most fun dps power I've played in a good while in PvE.

How are you doing that between each of the 3 AM powers before you get a chance to refresh resonance? (aka resonance wearing off)

Quite simply, tap triangle and clip the animation of the grenade with the power.

Unfortunately with Flame Cascade bug I can't use Fire AM to the fullest extent hence I'm not in the best position to give advice on AM.
However here are my thoughts: When it comes to AM there's no actual requirement of Weapon style but I guess in theory brawling or any other fast WM combo would be preferable as it would allow you a small bonus, a quick combo into AM again.