Test Discussion GU97: Weapon Combat Update

The weapon tested was Bow into full auto mastery at one point for a 1.8M crit damage on sparring targets in the watc tower have a base prec of 25k. running stone, venom,legionnaire artifacts for prec..
video below: (note will test out HB, Brawlers and other weapons post the updates here ) thanks!

That change was made for a reason. Can't undo it without other elements of weapons being changed as well.

Flying Fox --Yep! That was a decimal point error on my part. It was indeed doing 10x the damage that it should have been doing. Fix coming soon.

Ully -- I looked into this one and the damage is a little high. I will pull that one down a bit.

I will be looking into the combos that are under-performing on Monday.

Thanks for the feedback! Keep it coming!

Autymn

thank you i have tested other weapons some are doing the same damage!! i will post em today when i can for you or pm me

They were changed because people were falling onto blocks in 4s and 5s too often. I was here for the change. I didn't agree with it. It's a crappy change. Now everything is a tap fest. People can just tap without any recourse. People shouldn't be able to do this on on uhm bosses.. Yeah! It would make PvE more challenging to actually have to counter correctly instead of tapping through the blocks

The community voted it as a lesser of two evil's. It's done.

Things can be undone. It was a huge mistake.

Can you look at buffing up some of the ranged options? Also... A lot of the weapon damage is still underwhelming or seemed bugged.

Martial Arts; many of the combos down later in the weapon chain do the same damage as a 2x tap hold melee. There is no reward for going deeper in the combat chain.

Only 2x tap hold and 3x tap hold should be getting compared for single target. 4tap hold and 5tap hold are aoe and have different formulas for how their damage is calculated. The same dip happens for dual wield and other similar weapons that switch between single target and multi-target for their end combo damage.

Damage going further into the chain has always been higher. Now it's not. Doesn't make ANY sense. Dual wield and MA are mainly the culprits. If someone is tapping for 6 times, versus a 2 tap... the damage should be higher. Right?

Compare elbow drop to spinning punch. It doesn't make sense.

Right? -> No. Doing 1 or 2 more taps shouldn't magically make an AoE combo hit more than a single target combo. That's a revamp rule that applies to weapons as well as might-based moves.

Weapons still abide by the rules of the revamp. A single target weapon combo (elbow drop) will hit harder on single target than an AoE combo (spinning punch) would, even if it's a longer combo. You need to test ST combos on single sparring dummies and AoE combos on multiple dummies, otherwise you'll get skewed results.

Umm, thank you some range aoe and single target r underperforming, and aoe melee

Looking at some of the hold-hold range combos on 3 targets. I also did Brawling>Shuriken Storm mastery as well even though it is tap-hold because the Brawling hold-hold is single target. I did 20 repetitions. DW>Explosive shot still comes out on top. The Double Throw is AOE unlike all of the other hold abilities. It nets 75% more damage than Hammer Throw and Focused Blast and over double Focused Spin Mastery because of the AOE. Is this intended? Shouldn't all the combos be closer in damage?

2H isn't terrible but not as good. The Hammer Throw is on par with Focused Blast but it makes up damage on the Arrow Storm Mastery. But surprisingly Brawling>Shuriken Storm is on par with Staff>Mortar Mastery and 1H>Solar Flame despite those appearing to be slightly longer combos. I just don't see people really moving away from Dual Wield cross combos for ranged DPS.

I did test DW>Flurry Shot vs Brawling>Enhanced Shuriken as they are both single target only. The Brawling combo nets more damage as Stomp Smash Mastery is a lot higher damage as it is a longer range hold as opposed to Phantom Slash Mastery. The damage from Flurry Shot and Enhanced Shuriken are on par.

Instead of doing repetitions, set up your combat log to look at the dps statistics and do time intervals so that animation time vs. damage out is factored in, which is in the damage formula and explains the "But surprisingly Brawling>Shuriken Storm is on par with Staff>Mortar Mastery and 1H>Solar Flame despite those appearing to be slightly longer combos." I got around ~50% DPS increase spamming Double Throw compared to Hammer Throw, so there's a small change that can be made there. Focused Blast is Single Target and Focused Spin Mastery is single target taps into AoE WM. Focused Blast in itself isn't going to be comparable to Hammer Throw/Double Throw. Single Target and AoE moves have different formulas/calculations so trying to compare them would be like comparing Flurry to Explosive Shot for DW Use. Buffing Flurry to do the same damage as Explosive Shot on AoE would create a problem on single target, which is the situation it was originally meant for. The combos get grouped based on their functionality and not just the inputs for them. As for Focused Spin Mastery, it's one of what I call a "confused" weapon mastery as it falls in the middle. The WM end is coded for AoE so it doesn't perform well on ST, but the tap ranges are single target and thus make it lackluster in AoE situations during that time period which hurts its overall on AoE. Ideally, it's for mixed situations where you want to focus on boss damage but also do add damage, but that isn't necessarily useful in current content. Ideal example I could give would be healer drones constantly spawning. Trying to kill brainiac while having tanky healer drones to kill still. We have similar situations, but the adds don't respawn frequently/the healing isn't strong enough with a debuff on so most players just switch to full AoE, burn the adds, and then go back to boss instead of trying to "hybrid target" dps. Outside of content design, the only way I can see to solve the problem is for the devs to pick a side in terms of if its going to be buffed to meet ST standards or if its going to be buffed to meet AoE standards.

And hopefully, meeting AoE standards doesn't cause it be a problem on ST, otherwise it forces it to being ST standards and just lacking on AoE. Setting up generic formulas for these type of combos don't work. Another example would be Bow's Flurry Shot into DP's Magnum Round. The only workaround that's currently in my head is breaking the meta slightly to adjust the splitting of the AoE section on adds. As in, having it perform up to ST standards, and then having the WM aoe portion split less on adds like how Elec does and then see how it performs on 3 targets compared to full AoE combos. You'd have to break the standard protocol for the sake weapon variability.

As for " I just don't see people really moving away from Dual Wield cross combos for ranged DPS." Agreed. I've only found one other combo that matches Flurry's damage, but it's currently a little overperforming in AoE based on Might based DPS standards on live. So might have to pick a poison there to have a 2nd weapon choice to Flurry that's competitive, beats it on AoE, and is easier for the community to use. Tbh, I was hoping for new/different weapon masteries to allow other weapons to match the convenience of Dual Wield, but we may have to settle in some aspects.

Is there anything you can do about weapons lacking viable single target DPS? Lacking meaning diversity across weapons to do single target dps combos. This is within base combos of weapons as well as their weapon master combos.

For example:

• Arrow fling and explosive shot for HB range weapon mastery combo, they both do the same amount of damage and do the same exact thing, why not make one of them strictly single target?
• HB Uppercut is single target, can we also get the WM combo haymaker strictly single target as well, since the other Brawling WM combo is AoE.

These are just two examples out of all the weapons. A lot of weapons suffer from this, there are a lot of similar attacks in every weapon tree, being mostly almost all of them do AoE damage. This sucks because it requires us to invest into more marks to buy different weapons to do different functions. There needs to be more diversity between combos for weapons both in base combos and WM combos.

As Fatal Star said, Single Target should be compared only to Single Target, etc. HB, Shield, DP and Rifle all have AOE Holds but they also have range WM combos which require more user input. I'm not worried about them right now.

DW Double Throw is the outlier for the for WM hold-hold combos as it is the only AOE. This automatically skews it when comparing it to other range-holds in similar WM combos. So I'm calling for Double Throw to be changed to single target because it makes the entire combo better, parser or not. But yeah, it runs really high in parses, right around what I get for ranged HB combos which require more user input.

Also, MA>Meteor Blast Mastery damage seems really low.

Handblasters Solar Flame -> Bow Explosive Shot - full aoe ranged
Two Handed Hammer Toss -> Bow Arrow Storm - full aoe ranged
Dual Double Throw -> Bow Explosive Shot - full aoe ranged
Shield hold ranges -> Dual Pistols Magnum Round - full aoe ranged
Bow Explosive shot -> Full Auto - full aoe ranged - subject to bug fix.

^ That's a group.

Another group is (confused):
One Handed Focused Blast -> Solar Flame - st into aoe ranged
Bow Flurry -> Magnum Round - st into aoe ranged
Staff Focused Spin -> Mortar - st into aoe ranged
Brawling Tap Range -> Shuriken - st into aoe ranged

This shows perfectly how little ST damage weapons have that's viable. We need more weapon combos that do Single Target Damage, both in Melee and Ranged attacks.

Only got through testing martial arts, brawling, and two-handed so far. I'll post comparisons when I'm done with the rest, but so far the long martial arts aoe combos are underperforming by a decent margin