Test Discussion GU46: Rage Advanced Mechanic Update

I'm comparing my WM DPS and AM DPS to the numbers you got. Your number are basically the same, mine show the AM is much better than WM.

The difference between your WM and AM rotation is 100 DPS or less, mine is a little over 2K DPS. Both WM and AM should be boosted by max damage and penetrating strikes the same so the percent difference between someone's WM and AM should not change. The percent difference for your numbers and my number are definitely different.

And we're using the same loadout, not the same rotation, you're clipping every DB with Retch, I clip DB with DB and then with Retch; there's not boost to might damage with this AM so clipping every DB with Retch is not effective.

Yeah that's what I thought, I'll try a double DB rotation and see what kind of numbers I get.

I honestly don't have that many problems with this AM now that I've tested it and compared it a little bit more, it's fairly balanced with everything and the melee is better than most (not quantum but quantum is way better than everything atm) and the melee doing better than most kind of makes sense from a risk-reward stance. I'm still curious about the power back since I've not tested how the recent change affects it that much; however, I want to reiterate what the others have said about Galling Eruption in requesting that GE be changed to a full range AoE.

Making GE full range would allow for better range rotation for both the AM and WM. Since you can't really move while you're doing the DB combo, you have to be mid range at all times to keep up GE and WM without GE is very bad and the AM range rotation I've found suffers if you can't use GE, not as much as the WM does but it's still significant. Staying in mid range doesn't always work since adds and bosses can move quickly and if you break your rotation to adjust you're going lose a lot of damage. Gadgets has to be mid range for emp but gadgets has considerably more mobility while doing it's rotation, even ice has more mobility in mid range than rage currently does.

Making GE a full range AoE won't really affect the melee dps or the tanks as both are likely to have something in melee range of them targeted when they use the ability, and if they are precasting GE to cover an area, they can do so by just not targeting anything, much like Sorc dropping a circle around themselves.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but, while GE is a large AoE, I don't think it's any larger than Circle of Destruction so it wouldn't really be unbalanced if it was made full range. If it's the largest AoE in the game, I would honestly be fine with the AoE being reduced, even if that means the AoE doesn't match the animation of the plasma field (since I assume you don't have time to adjust the size of the animation and the AoE at the same time).

Exactly. When I do the AM, I spec for full precision and I clip every DB second combo with DB. I use Galling Eruption instead for the quick clip with Blood Lust but if you need to be at absolute range than use Retch for the PI. For the Range rotation...when I'm not specced into Retch, I spec into Ferocity. I gotta compare the numbers with Ferocity vs without Ferocity. And GE vs Retch. Doing the following:

1) Galling Eruption>Blood Lust>Ferocity
2) Dreadful Blast>combo>combo clipped by Dreadful Blast
3) I would clip any Dreadful 2nd combo with Ferocity when it comes off cooldown and when Blood Lust is active to take advantage of the 5k precision for 5 seconds.

Yielded me these results with 3951 precision base:



And a melee rotation consisting of:

1) Galling Eruption>Blood Lust
2) Outrage>combo clipped by Dreadful Blast>como>combo clipped by Outrage

Yielded me these results (with one small hiccup around the 45 second mark, I lunged with my weapon):



I alternated between Dreadful and Outrage because of Outrage's cooldown. I will have to test later Frenzy with Outrage but I'm afraid it might be too slow. Revenge and Outrage don't sync up well due to the cooldown but alternating Revenge, Outrage, and E-Chain might be ideal but I'm not sure. I wonder if alternating two powers is better than alternating three powers?

Things to test:
Ferocity vs without Ferocity
Retch vs GE (Ranged)
Melee combinations

Yeah I'm kinda falling under the same consensus because the fact that GE can be clipped by Blood Lust and Retch is a channel...is what makes GE a better PI applicator to get back into DB spam. The faster you get back to combo spamming and clipping...the better your DPS will be. Retch you would have to jump cancel it and then cast Blood Lust. I'm gonna run tests but I'm sure you will lose DPS when you do that.

I would love to make Galling a full ranged AoE and possibly reduce the area of effect if it's too big. On a side note....if we do that then we have to make Retch viable for something other than WM rotations....the channel is what hurts it. Either buff up the DoT or take away the channel.

When I looked at the affect of Bl on the combo while in Savage State, I was seeing no increase of damage, I don't know if ferocity is going to do much other than buff the first combo you go into. I was finding that Bl was only boosting the crit chance on the might ticks of the rotation, so the galling and retch DoTs and the Might tick of the combo. All prec combo damage seems locked at a certain level once you enter savage state, only thing I've found that will boost the savage state damage is a supply drop and a trinket, but Bl and, I assume other prec weapon buffs don't seem to boost it at all. I've not tested with a Flex yet, but I assume that the soder will result in increasing the damage of the Savage State combos.

I also wasn't really seeing much of a DPS increase using ferocity when I tested it with WM either, it's just not a long enough buff to really be useable.

I did one test where all I did was set up galling and Bl and then did nothing but DB in savage state, it was 19 125 DPS; which is still more than WM but only about 1000 DPS less than the rotation where I kept GE, Bl, and Retch up. I honestly expected more return for the more complicated rotation over pure Savage State combo'ing.

I think a better rotation to use when you can't use GE, is something like: Retch, DB/DB/BL/DB/Retch/DB/DB/BL. Basically you alternate clipping DB with Bl or Retch depending on Bl CD and you only need Retch every other DB or so to keep PI up. If you do DB/Retch, BL, DB; you just end up spending too much time casting and lose DPS.

Edit: Also, making the same change to Retch that Fan got during one of the Hl updates might help the AM but I have a feeling that JC'ing Retch in a WM rotation will be faster than a Retch that has a cast time since if Retch wasn't a channel you'd be forced to have at least a 1s delay before going back to WM and I think you can go slightly faster than 1s on Retch with the current JC. Not entirely sure though, really don't mess with timings that small most of the time.

I'll try that thanks. I wonder how much DPS you lose without a PI though? And without BL?

The damaged is capped at 890 return on test currently.
Precision hit for 15 k return a relentless anger tick of 890.

Relentless anger like benediction allows instant movement mode ability access after cast, so you can move but are not rooted in place.

As we are revisiting the designed intent of edge to be a more melee high risk high rewrdd DPS relentless anger needs to be working correctly as it and couplers with remorseless recovery are your primary survival tools.

Like I said, when I tested an almost pure Savage State rotation of DB it was only 1000 DPS lower than the rotation where I incorporated GE, Bl, and Retch. The PI and Bl buffs only seem to affect the Might damage and the first combo, once you're in Savage State your Prec Damage from the combo's seems to be "locked in" at a certain level that only is affected by supply and prec boosting trinkets.

I redid some of my tests because I noticed that I forgot to spec into the +3% crit chance iconic innate and here are the effective DPS results from using 2x DB and then Retch.

No white mods

Precision & Might VI Expert
Precision & Power VI Expert
Precision & Health VI Expert

WM rotation: 13,392 Effective DPS
AM rotation: 15,076 Effective DPS

Precision VI Expert
Precision & Power VI Expert
Precision & Health VI Expert

AM rotation: 15,384.6 Effective DPS

Using clipping DB with DB is definitely better and specing into full precision gives a bit more damage than being mixed. Overall 2k increase in effective DPS.

I wish the might damage on abilities was boosted by the AM and not just the combo precision damage. If plasma retch got a boost from the AM it would make range rotations a bit more diversified at least.

Was asked to post this by Legendary Sorcerer as is on PS and doesn't have access to these forums:

Has anyone run a melee DPS rotation parse? Based on these parses I'm seeing Rage isn't going to be nearly as good as Celestial and Quantum. At only 2k dps above its WM rotations thats not very good. I have a feeling the Melee DPS rotation will do much better. Since the devs are hell bent on not giving more ranged options maybe we can get them to do something to mechanics that will allow melee dpsing again. A good Melee Loadout for Rage would be Relentless Anger - Outrage - Evicerating Chain - Revenge - BloodLust - Beserk Since the PI doesn't seem to be affecting the combos because of Savage state this should be enough. My Combat Log has been broken ever since the last test center. It's not repopulating. I'm going to try and just make a combat.log file and put it in the folder and see if the game writes to it.

Ok so I did the crit testing and my theory was right. Blood Lust is buffing up the Savage State combo. Blood Lust gives 15% of your precision, 10% Crit Chance Ability, and 10% Weapon Crit Chance. Those combos are considered weapon attacks so there should be no way the developers lock out that aspect from Savage State combos. If they crit then they are being affected by this. And the prec increase isn't incredibly big compared to a trinket but it all adds up over time so it's not bad to use Blood Lust and plus it extends Savage State.

I used Eviscerate as the combo that I was going to test since it's a simple and one single number combo. I used Dreadful alongside it to alternate and keep up Savage State. Every Eviscerate combo was a Savage State combo and the Blood Lust rotation always had Blood Lust on at all times.

To complete these crit chance tests I took off gear that give me crit bonus on the mod sockets, didn't spec into iconics, specialized on the tree with 5% crit magnitude, and didn't spec into skill points but only my weapon to equip it. There should about 5% crit chance still on my toon after all of this. Here are the results:

With Blood Lust:



Without Blood Lust:



That's roughly a 10.2% difference between both. And innately I should have about 5% crit chance just on my toon which is correct as shown above with 4.9% crit on the second graph.

Sidenote: I also had an extra 8 Eviscerate combos on the second graph...yielding more total damage but the min/max were not as high thus yielding to lower effective DPS over time.

Melee Rage can keep up with quantum on dummies and in actual content that you can melee. I was getting like 20K dps with range Rage and like 23-24K DPS with melee ragee.

Ran a three man of nexus and dox with another quantum dps and a gadget troll earlier today and was ahead of the other dps in nexus and only got behind him in dox because I had to range on the Sentry. The difference between me and the quantum was like 300K or less most of the times I checked the board during the runs. I was using GE, RA, Chain, DB, Outrage, Zerk, if I used Revenge instead of DB I might have actually done better damage than what I did in the test.

On the dummies I get about 20-21K DPS with every AM I've tried other than quantum and melee rage. I've looked at Ice, Nature, Cele, Quantum, and I compared to the numbers a leaguemate got for Gadgets. I'm still not even sure that I've maxed the potential of a range rotation, though.

Thanks for taking the time to check my statement, actually glad I was wrong about Bl affecting the Savage State as it would've meant that the rotation for Rage would be very, very boring. I think you're right that I was thinking the 15% buff would give more a difference than it actually does and that's why I only saw the difference with the trinket since I didn't really analyze the data properly.

It's kind of odd that DB only got about half the crit boost that chain, did, though. Maybe it's just an RNG thing with the crits, though.

Just wanted to add from earlier....so running Ferocity won't make a difference on your rotation. The buff only lasts for 5 seconds and the cool down is long since it's a breakout. You might as well make room for the Robot Sidekick or something else in there. For Melee rotations....it would probably be better to have either 2 or 3 combos, Galling Eruption, Blood Lust, Berserk, and Relentless Anger or Robot if you are really daring. You can't really put Ferocity in there with the melee stuff, there's not enough power points and it's best to have your crit iconics as well. Neo-venom would probably be useless as well IMO.

Good look out! That was because I was only using DB to setup Savage State for Chain. There were times where Blood Lust wasn't up during DB. I always made sure I setup Savage State first and then do Blood Lust and then do Chain to make sure every Chain in my rotation had the crit boost and Savage State all times. If I had one Chain without Savage State then my test would have failed.

The hamster in the test was the Chain and the food was DB + Blood Lust.

I figured it would be. 24k sounds more like what I'm seeing with Quantum, Celestial, Nature, Gadgets, and Electric. But it doesn't seem like its going to be that viable in current content which is a shame.