What is the Current Highest DPS Melee Power?

hemslord · November 2017

I'm a big fan of "high risk - high reward" styles of gameplay and whilst I have made a couple of melee dps characters in the past, I can't help but feel that I could be pushing the dps further.

So basically, what I'm wondering is: What is the current highest dps single target power to build around? I mainly play Cosmics so I was thinking Dragons Wrath with Night Warrior?

spinnytop · November 2017

The Fist AT o3o

chaosdrgnz43 · November 2017

Well, the Fist AT is the favorite melee dps AT atm because of its unfixed Diminishing Returns.

But quite frankly, Ego Blades, MA set, Bestial with Focus form DEX stacking can get you very high dps. You can practically achieve high melee dps if you stack DEX. Stacking STR can still work, but it's close to second compared to DEX.

If you're interested in NW, you can try this burst combo:
Shredded>Imbue>Mind Wipe>Shadow Strike>Vorpal Blade>Spam Dragon's Wrath

blockwave · November 2017

Shadow Strike > Vorpal Blade > Reaper’s Embrace > Dragon’s Claw with Ego Primary focused on Dex is pretty strong atm

legendarylycan · November 2017

...why would you be using ego primary with non-ego blade-based melee powers?

hemslord · November 2017

Thanks all for the replies! Pretty much what I was expecting but wasn't sure if there were any powers clearly out classing the others, nice to see it's somewhat balanced.

blockwave said:
Shadow Strike > Vorpal Blade > Reaper’s Embrace > Dragon’s Claw with Ego Primary focused on Dex is pretty strong atm

I'm also quite confused as to why you would use Ego primary. At a guess I would have thought that it would be because of the Exploit Opening spec, but I can't imagine this being more beneficial that having Dex primary + Specs?

nacito · November 2017

shadowfang240 wrote: »

...why would you be using ego primary with non-ego blade-based melee powers?

you get all sources of damage/crits, dex or str by themselves have lower sources, so anything with ego pss + dex stacking is the best for melee

kamokami · November 2017

hemslord said:
I'm also quite confused as to why you would use Ego primary. At a guess I would have thought that it would be because of the Exploit Opening spec, but I can't imagine this being more beneficial that having Dex primary + Specs?

Exploit Opening is not a great spec to invest in. You'd use Ego primary to get access to its spec tree, which has the largest best-scaling buffs for the severity damage bonus layer: "Follow Through" and "Sixth Sense".

If you are min/maxing, the choice of your primary superstat is based more on which spec tree you want. Not which stat you want to maximize. If you want more details on this, hit the "Endgame DPS" link in my signature and go the "Advanced" section.

blockwave · December 2017

Ego Prim gets higher crit chance which end up being alot more DPS than Str or dex prim, my Ego Blade toon is at 51.3% Base Crit Chance/100% Base crit severity

kamokami · December 2017

Here's a quote from a thread discussing Exploit Opening:

sanguineviper said:
I think the real first question should be: "Does exploit opening actually give a multiplicative bonus, or is it additive, and therefore subject to diminishing returns?"

If it's the latter, and you're playing a freeform, you're getting less than a 10% bonus to damage from that 30% bonus at level 40.

Time to test with sniper rifle! :J

Okay tested it out:

I have 114.4% severity, not using a passive or any damage boosts, this is just from ranged stance and stats/specs. So at rank 2, my bonus from EO should be 34.32% damage increase on a non-crit.

Sniper rifle base, no crit, no EO up: [16:26] [Combat (Self)] Your Sniper Rifle deals 2919 (3211) Piercing Damage to Test Dummy.

Sniper rifle base, crit: [16:29] [Combat (Self)] Your Sniper Rifle deals 6261 (6887) Piercing Damage to Test Dummy.

Sniper Rifle base, no crit, EO up: [16:31] [Combat (Self)] Your Sniper Rifle deals 3795 (4175) Piercing Damage to Test Dummy.

34.32% of 3211 is 1102 so I should be getting 4313 with EO active.

In predictable cryptic math fashion, the numbers come out wrong in practice! YAY!

Update: It's the strike of the badly worded tooltips again! The spec says : "Whenever you Critically Strike a foe, your next non-Critical Strike deals additional damage equal to 30% of your Critical Severity."

In reality it means "Whenever you Critically Strike a foe, your next non-Critical Strike deals additional damage equal to 30% Critical Severity."

Your actual critical severity score has absolutely nothing to do with the calculation of the spec.

So hey, if you have less than 100% severity, this is the spec for you. If you have greater than 100% severity, this spec will actually do less than advertised and depending on your Crit Chance would lower your DPS overall if sixth sense is pushing you far above the soft cap on Crit chance (greater than 40%).

Notably, see that last paragraph to understand when it would be better for you to take Exploit Opening. If your severity is below 100% and you don't crit much then go for it. But if those things are true then you're better off not taking Ego primary at all.

Here are some parses that compare Exploit Opening to Sixth Sense using Chest Laser.

pantagruel01 · December 2017

I would think it would vary based on how your secondary superstats are set up. Given crit chance c and severity s, the damage bonus from crit chance is c * s / 100%, The damage bonus from exploit opening is c * (100%-c) * 0.3 / 100%; it has hits maximum value at c=50%, at which point it is worth 7.5%, but this isn't terribly variable, it's 7.2% at 40% or 60%, still 6.3% at 30% or 70%. The damage bonus from sixth sense is (s/100%) * (bonus from sixth sense).

I don't happen to know the scaling on sixth sense, though. This is also assuming lack of other bugs (for example, does exploit opening apply to attacks that cannot crit?).

kamokami · December 2017

pantagruel01 said:
I would think it would vary based on how your secondary superstats are set up. Given crit chance c and severity s, the damage bonus from crit chance is c * s / 100%, The damage bonus from exploit opening is c * (100%-c) * 0.3 / 100%; it has hits maximum value at c=50%, at which point it is worth 7.5%, but this isn't terribly variable, it's 7.2% at 40% or 60%, still 6.3% at 30% or 70%. The damage bonus from sixth sense is (s/100%) * (bonus from sixth sense).

I don't happen to know the scaling on sixth sense, though.

I don't remember sixth sense scaling either but the parses I posted are for an ego primary PA geared entirely for ego. With none of the mods buffing sixth sense. So in those examples sixth sense is at its lowest. Meanwhile the crit rate for Chest Laser during the Exploit Opening parses is at 45% and 48% - pretty close to the best value for Exploit Opening. Despite that, sixth sense still results in higher dps...tho by a marginal amount.

pantagruel01 said:
does exploit opening apply to attacks that cannot crit?

Regarding this specifically, per the parse screenshots, it looks like exploit opening does not apply to attacks that cannot crit.

pantagruel01 · December 2017

Looking at the parse, it appears to have been giving about 7% without AoPM (probably Justice gear?), which in combination with severity of 106% or more would beat the predicted 7.4% bonus from exploit opening.

What is the Current Highest DPS Melee Power?

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