Stat Revamp 1.7: Weapons

I don't know much about stats revamp as I haven't played on the test server. I am hoping that after the revamp it will still be viable to play in PVE without a weapon at all. I mean, as a superhero, I just want to use powers (which is why I chose ICE to begin with). Anyway, whatever happens, thanks to all those putting in the time and effort on the test server and good luck getting things ready to roll out.

To get caught up, in my Sig there is an Overview detailing every change they made in Revamp Testing.

What youre describing is the Play from the Tray (PftT) Playstyle which is the spiritual successor to the Advance mechanics. Just use your Loadout rotation and you dont have to use your Weapon because youll be speccing into Power Mastery.

Wow!...I have a LOT of reading to do! Thanks for the link and the info...I am likely going to go with that PftT playstyle.

K, so, taking Moja's wonderful advice, here are the numbers for most HB combos against 3 targets.

25 Solar Flame (53.4 secs) 199,787 – 3744/s = 60 seconds – 224,640
25 Scissor Kick (62.4 secs) 220,097 – 3512/s = 60 seconds – 210,720
25 Fist Slam (45.2 secs) 182,053 – 4030/s = 60 seconds – 241,800
25 Meteor Blast (48.9 secs) 198,817 – 4062/s = 60 seconds – 243,720
25 Uppercut (55.4 secs) 218,392 – 3942/s = 60 seconds – 236,520

Now, you can see that there's a difference of 15% between Scissor Kick and Fist Slam and Meteor Blast. But part of that is because the ranged taps for Scissor Kick is single target only. Here's the difference for single target.

25 Fist Slam (47.5) 201,521 – 4244/s

25 Scissor Kick (66.7) 283,712 – 4254/s

So the moral here (at least with HB) is that Scissor Kick is single target only. Also, that you might as well use short combos all the time because the risk of multiple inputs is not going to be rewarded at all.

Now, regarding the idea that for longer combos (in HB) the final hold move needs to be penalized because of clipping, keep in mind that all combos are clippable (except mastery ones). So here are the damages when clipping each combo with a power. I used taser pull to clip because it was available with the right cooldown, lol. And again, this is with 3 targets, so expect SK to underperform.

20 Solar Flame (44.9) 373,993 – 8332/s 60 secs = 499,920
20 Scissor Kick (53.5) 350,858 – 6554/s 60 secs = 393,240
20 Fist Slam (36.5) 324,422 – 8894/s 60 secs = 533,640
20 Meteor Blast (31.3) 251,042 – 8026/s 60 secs = 481,560
25 Uppercut (40.9) 299,601 – 7325/s (this is also melee just like fist slam, but way less dps.) 60 secs = 439,500 (20% less than FS)


As you can see, there is absolutely no reason to ever use a longer input combo (at least with HB) while playing the game, unless you like the pretty animation (which you can't see because your clipping it anyway, lol).

I respect what the devs decide, but I think the numbers show that multi-input combos need a small buff to make them worth the risk. Otherwise there's no point to them.

If you run the numbers on all weapons and combos you will see that there are discrepancies like this up & down the board in between all weapons. From single taps, ranged taps, lunges, short & long combos. The numbers are just plain bad. There is not really any balance and it's a joke if you ask me.

why not as it was with natures wolf form currently on live server? if you hold for the uppercut, you can clipp emediatly away the attack, however: if you wait for the animation, you would land a second hit that does additional dammage... just a thought...

Ive seen the #s and im surprised more people havent looked into this. So i agree with ya. There are major discrepancies. Hope it all gets sorted out or we are gonna have 1,2 weapons that are way OP compared to the rest. Just like the days of 1h focus blast being so OP that you were a fool if ya didnt use it. And its certainly not balanced like that either.

And when this happened in the past people would buy a certain weapon because its OP and then 2 weeks later it gets hotfixed and now it under preforms. So people have to grind for a new weapon. Not looking forward to any of this. Hope it all gets sorted out. I agree about the longer combos too. There isnt a point to even bother doing them, not with the current build. The risk vs reward doesnt line up. And this has been a problem with weapons in the past.

don´t worry it´ll all be "balanced" when it hits live.

I'm not sure on bow right now, The damage feels like it's all over the place for me. Arrow storm does decent DPS overtime through constantly spamming it, Explosive shot is quick; but damage is meh, same with the default block breaker.

Melee Combos are okay, but from what I've noticed the damage is all over the place with bow and not in a good way. In some ways I feel like Bow is like shield, and in some ways it's worse.

I can't really show it or describe it any-better than that, you'd really need to get on test to get a feel for it.

Can you post numbers for 100 of each move on bow? Something like this.

Bow

100 ranged taps ( 45 seconds ) 409 average damage = 908.8888 dps

Bow still seems lackluster to me. Flurry Shot does the same DPS as just spamming range taps now which makes it completely pointless, especially considering that range taps can be clipped for zero time and Flurry Shot can't be clipped at all. Just take away the cast bar from Flurry Shot and it may finally be at least mediocre.

Arrow Storm is kind of alright now I guess if you're using a weapon focused build and just want to spam Arrow Storm back to back without casting powers in between. Explosive Shot seems to not be changed at all which means it still does less DPS than range taps do, even on multiple targets when you clip the range taps.

I don't understand why simple taps do this much damage now at all. Just this week pretty much all trinkets were declared "harmful" with the intention that we can't "clip offensive abilities with offensive abilities" yet range taps that can be clipped completely for absolutely no animation whatsoever do significant damage now. Clipping basic taps in between PFT casts should not be better than clipping full combos, not even short combos like Explosive Shot.

I don't understand why simple range and melee taps are doing so much damage. Some of the melee taps are doing more damage then the actual hold inputs. Doesn't make any logical sense at all.

Yeah taps should not at all be balanced around their full animation time. It's one thing for cast bar combos that can be clipped midway or something but taps are effectively zero animation time and should do insignificant damage. Combos should be much stronger than taps and multi-input combos should be even stronger because of the increased counter vulnerability. Seeing my taps hit for 1500 while Explosive Shot does 1000 is just lame.

You say lackluster, I say only slightly less sucky than before. It's full of single-target melee attacks and under powered ranged ones.

Rifle is still totally over powered.It has many very strong moves. Just holding range yielded better damage than trying to clip mortar attacks, which seems wrong. Clipping range taps trumped both though.

Dual Pistol is filled with crappy moves, except for full auto, which can keep up with most simple clipping rotations of other weapons.

On the brighter side, buying weapon mastery for a weapon no longer seems to decrease any of the attacks.

TLDR: Weapon balance is a complete disaster right now. Taps are way too strong and combos aren't balanced by any practical standards.

I just say go right back to the drawing board. Whatever they did clearly didn't work lol.

For me the 2 most important things about weapon balance is time needed to get to main damage move and what kind of variety of melee and ranged weapon combos weapon has. Some weapons should exceed at Ranged damage and others at melee.

I almost like the way ranged weapon attacks currently are at Test.
Shield seems to be the strongest ranged weapon followed by MArts, which seems fair since Shield's melee combos are all bad. MA has a nice variety of melee and ranged attacks but is master of none.

Hand Blaster's Scissor Kick and Staff's new ranged attack should be buffed.
Rifle seems quite nice and I really like stronger but slower Grenade taps, its almost like in old days.
Bow needs a lot of work.

Melee wise all seem to be a train wreck.
Melee attacks should be significantly stronger than ranged ones and
weapons that have close to no ranged options like Brawling and 1 Handed should have all of their melee attacks buffed by a lot.

Martial arts feedback(used hybrid)

Like with other weapons, the Damage is all over the place. Just tapping alone does comparable damage to something like Spin Punch, which I'll touch on in a moment.

MA is flawed, quite flawed.

• Okay first of all. I used Spin Punch and Smoke Bomb with a Hybrid Nature DPS build, and to say the least their damage was lackluster. I only saw about 4100 damage from Spin Punch, and 5000 damage from smoke bomb. Spin punch requires 4 taps, one hold; and Smoke Bomb Requires 5 taps, one hold. Yet the DPS difference is marginal, this makes using combos like Spin Punch and Smoke Bomb Obsolete. As a DPS damage to speed is key, and as it stands Spin Punch and Smoke Bomb aren't worth it at all. There was a number of times I also got interrupted in the JSA/US raid while using Spin Punch and Smoke Bomb, that also makes the low DPS numbers quite annoying.
• Ranged Martial Art combos like the Shruiken Storm ones also suffer from being long combos, but without any proper reward: I can get about 2500 damage from Shruiken Storm's aoe combo(on multiple mobs that is, don't wanna get started on single target) The thing is though, I can use shield's ranged throwing abilities that are all AOE and take less time than these martial art combos.

I just feel like compared to PFTT that using Martial Arts the entire time I was nature, it was hindering my DPS. I feel Like I would've been better off just going straight PFTT versus using Hybrid here, and that shouldn't be the case. Hybrid should be at least on pair with PFTT.

This^ I have to 100% agree with you here. Not considering how long it takes to achieve or get to a certain combo that involves a long chain of taps and holds is hindering weapon dps.

I agree weapon damage is pretty messed up right now. How the formula for weapon dps works on live is what they should be using not whats going on now. All that needed to be done from live to test was buff some and maybe tone 2 combos down but again here we are tying to invent the wheel again. No disrespect to them but this trying to fix things that aren't broken stuff is wasting so much time and making more work then necessary.