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Can Darkness and Archery hit 5000 DPS?
selphea
Posts: 1,229 Arc User
Recent adjustments to ranged powersets seem to revolve around getting them to 5000 DPS on a regenerating dummy, so I'm wondering if anyone has managed to hit 5000 DPS with these two powersets.
If not, what should be done to help these powersets reach 5000 DPS?
If not, what should be done to help these powersets reach 5000 DPS?
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Darkness I am not quite 100% sure, but if ebon ruin is going to be used for that, it should probably lose trauma.
Archery
Archery is designed as a 100ft, high mobility, low energy cost, good CC powerset. Almost every Archery power reaches 100ft and allows for movement while charging or maintaining. Something has to give though, and it ended up being DPS.In addition, its native Energy Unlock is parallel to Munitions, giving energy on crit. That kind of mechanic rewards hitting often. Munitions typically hits every 0.5 seconds, while the fastest Archery maintain is an AoE with a 1 second interval and poor single target damage. The bulk of Archery attacks: Straight Shot, Taser Arrow, Sonic Arrow, Torrent of Arrows, Focused Shot and Explosive Arrow without advantage are all charged attacks. Even Keiko's old Archery guide recommends Molecular Self-Assembly instead of Hunter's Instinct.
Snap Shot has decent DPS on paper at 0.5 seconds, but input lag kills it in practice. Where's the Kaboom allows for a single, gimmicky high damage hit off a tap, but suffers from multiple issues including input lag as a tap and lack of synergy with Archery's main damage type, being Fire instead of Piercing. During the delay, there's little that Archery can do to maintain DPS.
Archery's Blast attack, Straight Shot, has below average DPS even for a Blast, while its 0.67s animation means the 1.33s charge time benefits less from Avenger and Guardian Mastery than 1.5s charge Blasts like Ice Blast.
Archery - what to change
I'll be making suggestions for Archery to achieve the following objectives:
1. Better synergy with Hunter's Instinct
2. Oriented towards the underused Blast specializations like Avenger Mastery to allow for 5000 DPS @ 100ft with a different tradeoff - instead of being self-rooted but survivable like a Lightning Arc build, it retains mobility but sacrifices Guardicator.
On to the power by power:
Straight Shot
- Add a new advantage, Right Between The Eyes (2pts). Increases Straight Shot's critical chance by 30%. This will help trigger Hunter's Instinct more easily
- Add a new advantage, Double Shot (2pts). Add 1 second to charge time and double the energy cost to fire two arrows at once. Each arrow's damage is reduced by 15%. This creates two chances to trigger Hunter's Instinct.
Snap Shot- Add a new advantage, Armor Piercing Shot (2pts). Applies the same Armor Piercing debuff as Burst Shot with no mutual stacking.
- Reduce its damage by 5%. This is so that a 100ft debuff power doesn't outdamage the 50ft Burst Shot, but an Archery character with Straight Shot's debuff will still be better off using this vs Burst Shot
Focused Shot- Increase damage by 10% and critical chance by 30%, making this better at assassinating mobs in Ego Surge, but more inconsistent without 100% crit.
This should give Straight Shot a 2.33s charge time, with Avenger Mastery cutting it down to 1.165s. An innate +30% critical and two chances per Straight Shot will give it a very high chance to proc Avenger Mastery - practically guaranteed during Ego Surge. With Armor Piercing, it should hit comparable DPS to Lightning Arc while having a unique playstyle.Darkness
Darkness is a paradoxical set. On one hand, it's oriented towards survivability with Fear reducing enemy damage and many ways to heal itself. Its energy unlock even scales with Con. On the other, Shadow Form is an Offensive passive and its main DPS powers are 100ft rather than 50ft or less,.Its main hard hitter, Ebon Ruin, is a popular PvP power due to having Trauma built in, but outside of PvP, Trauma's uses are niche at best. Ebon Ruin also has Paranormal Paranoia to debuff enemy resistances, but putting a 2 point debuff advantage on the main hard hitter that increases DPS less than going for R3 is counter-intuitive.
On the bright side, Shadow Blast applies Fear at 100%. It also has Dark Transfusion, which is powerset independent, so should not factor into Darkness itself.
Darkness - what to change
I'll be making suggestions for Darkness to achieve the following objectives:
1. Creating better synergy between Shadow Blast and Ebon Ruin
Shadow Blast
- Add a new advantage, Paranormal Paranoia (2pts). As per current Paranormal Paranoia.
Ebon Ruin- Increase damage by 20%, no longer applies Trauma
- Remove Paranormal Paranoia
- Add a new advantage, Traumatic Ruin (2pts). Applies Trauma.
And that's all Darkness really needs IMO, just shuffling two things around - the real R3 damage that it never had due to Trauma built in, and ParaPara on Shadow Blast instead of Ebon Ruin.Also some 15% added damage resistance is not nearly as important as full mobility at 100 feet range, even less so with the control stuff you can use on lots of archery attack. If archery wants a dps approaching 5k dps, it needs a much more significant tradeoff, and depend less on stuff like Ego Surge.
On a fast hitting power designed for sustained single target damage like Snap Shot, it might make sense, but then a finisher type power would need to be added.
Sidenote: Darkness+Archery works pretty darn well together.
And I will always be @DZPlayer122.
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Except Might can't strike at range of up to 100 feet and remain relatively safe like darkness can. This is a slippery slope argument since you are trying to compare the more dangerous position that Might is in and the fact it can't pre-charge powers versus Darkness where it can kite around and avoid the brunt of most dangerous attacks.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Not to mention a tank that has to kite is a tank that both fails against 200ft boss attacks and lowers the DPS of every melee character in the party. Either way, instead of being a hybrid, it fails in both intended functions. I got Infernal pretty close a couple years back with Infernal Blast/Defile chargetap + Av Mastery + Fire Snake, pre-Onslaught gear, but that needed dual AOs back when they had almost perma uptime. Earth isn't in a good place for sure. Maybe with Burst Shot? Although it would be pretty off-theme. HW can do MA's groin kick + Annihilate x 2 but that falls short last I looked, though again that was pre-Onslaught.
But this is about Darkness and Archery because their DPS was so low that years back I had to change powersets on two of my characters just to be competent! Go make your own thread about other sets
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
As for CC and healing, if they're isolated to single powers like Lifedrain and Storm/Torrent, then those individual powers should be balanced by themselves, and should not factor into how their pure damage-dealing powers perform. Otherwise the argument could be made for all Martial Arts sets to have lower DPS because Masterful Dodge gives them the best survivability out of all ADs in the game, even though the latter is a single power.
Ok Infernal's going to be in a bad place too.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.