Mental AM bugged and over-parsing?

Completely agree. I would never say X power is completely equal or better to Y in every way, time, circumstance ,etc. But if you have your base mods, your colored mods, a handful of SP...most times you will be fine regardless of power choice. Shame about E and nature too...again...completely agree...

Thank Goodness...another delay for our E DPS friends. Would not want them getting a paid for power worth having...or Hope...or a Future...

Man...what they could do for Rage..if only they would

No one uses AM with invisibility besides doing PVP with it. Mass terror is just fine cause thanks to the amplified resonance waves it hits hard cause it works like a Geiger beam where you have to initiate a new cycle so you can keep your damage up with others.

Having invisibility, even if it works like gadgets, is just a shortcut where you find yourself in middle of the battlefield ready to die. I would appreciate retrieving some feedback from a "mental no invisibility loadout" so you can make numbers relations.

It's risky because if you fall out of Resonance, you have to wait for Invisibility to be off cooldown (30 seconds), during which time you're doing no damage.

Yeah I was actually thinking about this while I was testing. I will say though that it is risky to use but in my honest opinion not that hard to use. I run with players that always run with both shortcuts and the only time they struggle is when they have to pick up or if they die. But other than that, they usually have no trouble keeping their AM up.

But you also bring up another good point....what is Mental exactly being balanced around? Is it Rotation 3 for the baseline level of 35.5k or is it the maximum rotation. Because if it's supposed to be around 39k-40k in parser average than the opens up a whole new level of potential that 99% of the powers can't reach realistically. Imagine the perfect scenario where each power does their maximum sustained DPS from 35.5k and around 5% of that....but then Mental is also doing it's maximum at 39k-40k.....then there's no chance to catch up. Like it adds another layer to reach in terms of baseline damage. Because at the end of the day, somebody s going to perfect that double shortcut rotation and maximize it's damage to the best.

Yes this is what I'm saying. I think the base damage of Mass Terror compared to it's cousin EMP is considerably noticeable in difference. When they have similar AMs. And I agree it's not that bad once you master the two shortcuts.

Hey there. Thanks for commenting. I would say that I disagree with your assessment in that no one uses it. There's plenty of high end players who use the two shortcut method for Gadgets and Mental in SM, Elite raids, and tier end content. It is of course risky but not short of impossible when it can be utilized in the right situation and at the right time. And with the new cycle portion, that pretty much applies to all 1234 powers even with their differences since it's essentialy 1234....1234....and so forth.

Again thanks for the feedback but it's not as super risky as you may think. It just has to be used at the right situation and at the right time along with a good awareness of the instance and threats. I actually do have feedback on that, just check out my rotation 3 and rotation 4.

Yes, that's a good point. That would be the downfall to using that method. But when perfectly executed, no other powerset can compete. So it's a tough line to walk. I think that a good baseline for the two shortcuts would be around 37k and the normal rotation at 35.5k.

I my opinion, must be balanced just the rotation 3 and the HL/Rage melee could receive the same treatment on Rotation 1 since the risk-reward by Rotation 1 and HL/Rage melee are the same.

Just wanted to remind everyone to please stay on topic regarding Mental. This is strictly a discussion regarding baseline level damage for Mental. I would like for other users to try and replicate the tests to get more data. If you would like detailed rotations, I will gladly give those out.

105% of 35.5k would be 37275, so 37k would be within the +/-5% range of the 25.5k target.

Exactly that's the 5% highest value for melee. Though I think that's a typo 35.5k right? What are the +/-5% for midrange and range again?

EMPIII hits about equally high too. Averrage of 39600/s (using full testing specc) at close-range. EMPII 32125/s at mid-range. Both >5%. Running more later.
Edit: added ranges...

Gadgets has a similar risk with putting Battle Display within Stealth. The only difference is we can continue to deal AM damage but will lose power regen. Resonance does auto 50% PI buff on specific burst powers while Battle Display doesn't.


Even if it is risky, or slightly riskier than gadgets just because of how resonance activates the AM, damage has to be within 5% of the baselines. I think 6% should be ok. Same with 7%. Gadgets EMPIII nets around 37 to 38k. For Mental to net 40K+ damage average with Mass Terror III, that's like 14 to 15% more damage than the baseline.

35,500 plus 5% is 37,275
30,000 plus 5% is 31,000
25,500 plus 5% is 26,775

If averages are very close to those, then I'd say they're fine. That includes using risky loadouts but, again, I think 6 to 8% would suit it. That's my opinion. But 10%+ damage defeats the purpose of "balancing" with these baselines regardless of risk.

Stop using Menace in your Loadout = basically the only method to keep them from running.

Establishing a baseline level of damage for Mental has to bear in mind that it varies a *lot* between the rotation variations and also just between occurrences parser report in the same rotation. Or, 'unless you literally ran through 100 or so parses, you may have ended up with an artificially 'hot' parser result, even after running through a couple dozen'.

I was running tests earlier just to see if Mass Hysteria was worth a Loadout spot versus Grandeur (spoiler alert : it's not. More damage for a bit is nice but it's not enough extra damage to make up for the fact that 'Grandeur is an aggro-dropping shield) - not as a Tunso test, mind you, as a max damage moonshot with a 162 character and 181 assigned SP, as opposed to all 126 gear and 160 SP : still, regular 10 second parsing for results.

I mention this because, regardless of 'final amount', it allowed me to track something important about mental's rotation output - how much it fluctuates.

Discounting an initial rotation for 'warmup time' (considering that Phantom Flame incorporates a DOT, which DOES alter your final damage potential from a non Phantom Flames rotation) I was getting a regular variation of upwards of 14K damage between a 'low' and 'high' amount using the 'same' rotation, Mass Terror I, no PK, no Grandeur (melee range).

Adding Mass Terror II caused that high and low to fluctuate even more as the testing went on, so... I dunno. I do know that in Raids, which I've been in 3-4 of in the last couple of days, Mental's performance seems about right where it normally is - I posted high against a group of people at my CR in PBR earlier and low against a pair of higher CR Ice DPS using the Ice Elemental exploit in BBS, which was yesterday using a 160 (I finally got my purple stuff from PB today)...

Or, even if Mental's parser readout is a little hot, it's still behaving fairly consistently compared to other high damage dealers in a Live Play scenario.

Also, sidenote : if you're crazy enough to use the Invisibility / Grandeur 'Mass Terror Trio' loadout, you deserve to be doing the extra damage. I don't think it's good or fair to demand that specific loadout be tested to 35.5K.

This I can agree with. But it shouldn't be anything crazy like 38k-40k. A respectful baseline at 37k is fine IMO which is right around the 5% that the developers are looking for.

I appreciate the feedback. Mass Hysteria is only worth it for the pets because at the moment it only buffs weapon cits and only weapon crits. Even so, not useful IMO. I get what you're saying with the sample size but regardless...most of the time the one parse test is usually spot on and if you wanted even more samples or even more accurate numbers, you could just use a longer time instead of 5min but instead 10min and so forth. Even so, no fight will ever last 10min unless it's a high level SM run. But regardless you are correct that more samples wouldn't hurt....it's just a lot of work as you saw on my first post. That post and tests alone took me 3-4 hours to do.

That's why like you stated there is a variance between tests that I'm pretty aware of. Things could change like crit percentage, number of crits, player timing, and number of hits per second. I have those in mind for sure. I'm hoping people can replicate the exact tests (Please no cr160+ tests or raid tests, that doesn't help the developers at all in terms of measuring and comparing data)

35,500 + 5% (1775) = 37275, which is already above your low-end result (Mass Terror + Pyro), and I would assume by default also above Mass Terror I. The Mass Terror II loadout as tested in your above results is 2.4% more than that 5% baseline (and I think I may be expressing that incorrectly, but it's not much) which really isn't all that much, especially with how much the variation in two singular executions of the Mass Terror Rotation can be.

I would assume that the spot between Mass Terror II and Mass + Pyro is the range to aim for balance-wise, since Mass III is an obvious risk-reward rotation, and the spot between those two is 37385, basically 'the range cited earlier as 35,500 +/- 5%'/

As for my results, yeah, I'm not pushing the numbers themselves as an example because they're not in the same ballpark, but the variance in rotations is... I've seen literally a 20% difference in two back-to-back parses of a 10 second duration, in the Mass Terror only rotation alone.

I could probably artificially create that 5-7% difference in rotation outputs by using a Nitro or a Compound O, and it would definitely fluctuate over time simply via the occurrence of criticals in the Mass Terror station of the rotation.

With an effective 21 second cooldown, you'll only be getting the second Mass Terror in Mass Terror II three times a minute, max, and the third Mass Terror from Mass Terror III twice a minute, max. Plus if you screw up the rotation or lose Resonance in Mass Terror III, you're waiting 20-30 seconds before you can restart Resonance; also, all of this assumes that you're against an opponent that never ends up outside of your range.

As a regular Mental user, the occurrences of 'Grandeur - > Mass Terror' doing 3-5 K against an on the move opponent are ... frequent, to say the least. So since 'risk v reward' is a common cited complaint here, I'd say Mental is the one place in the game where, currently, risk versus reward actually functions as such - most other things are either the Hard Light 'Use The Force Luke' method of diving in and hoping to hell that you don't die to get maximum output, or absolutely no-risk propositions that produce results 100% of the time - like, oh... Ice.

You can DIE in the middle of an Ice rotation and be outputting 90% of your max damage potential again in 0.5 seconds after revival.

At any rate, I'd obtain independent verification before you get torches and a pitchfork because although the Mental rotation output is usually 'good', it's usually not 'consistent'.

Well 38-39k should be fine imo. Otherwise theres no point running the III loadouts anyways. Balancing said powers around IIIs (baseline) would create issues also. In their current form, given their great functionallity, (3s grace/ only finisher vulnerable to counter?) they are probably to strong though. Muni should be above 37k too btw (if I remember correctly) with an all-range loadout and SC available.