MP DPM capability and "best" setups

[McKnuckleSamwich]

So here we see an awesome McKnuckleCalc, woudln't though 1hb be better? Like you guys suggested, creation with poison proc + abandonment of xan.

Thanks.

I can't answer this right now with a calculation; but the proc on Asp isn't good enough to really make a big difference. Basically you got a decent proc chance so you can assume a 100% uptime for continuous fighting - the problem is the frequency of hits (395 damage/4 seconds) - which I assume can't be stacked but overwrites itself - at 24 seconds duration it's likely that it's almost never possible to reap the full benefit of a single proc in a short or long fight.

So you end up with 6k dmg/min which just isn't groundbreaking by any means.

Other problems with melee is that you pretty much have to do a mixed crit/add dmg set up to get anywhere near "good" DPS. crit conflicts with add dmg in several slots which will inevitably result in less damage on nuke damage (which I only learned today, was so spammable on MP), accounting for 30 hits/minute is actually just as significant as normal damage for a 2h weapon.

Other issues with 1hb is that I'm not sure what kind of recharge on fast attack an MP can get (I think you need 1400 fast attack to cap recharge on AoX), and misaligned damage types between weapons+nukes.

The reason why the rapier+superqueen setup has serious potential is, simply, the alignment of energy damage dealing paired with getting the maximum number of contacts with opponent (nukes/procs/bullets/specials etc) per time. (note that it's the same reason why NT's using candycane+pistols can do such insane damage).

[Cratertina]

You are right, but candy cane nt is quite lame to play... and after dd nuke not so good damage.

I feel MP in allout setup would be unplayable and stil not as good as alternative classes.

At 150 1hb setup works out as best DD, how much DD do top pets make st 220? What buffs you run on them?

[JustinSane4]

What could one hope with 1hb + top pet + top notch gear?

Could we see 250, 280? Maybe even 300? Depending on content...

What about nukes? How can those be buffed? Kinda lame to see same nuke from 120-220.

Nukes can be buffed primarily through add damage. You can make an argument for a nano-targetting helper in HUD1, but other than that nano-damage modifier isn't worth gearing for because our nukes casts quickly but has low min damage, meaning that add damage is usually a better bang for your buck. I'd guess that 280 probably is possible on an a low AC target in a suicide DD 1hb setup, though I'd be slightly surprised if 300 is achievable.

As soon as the testlive patch goes live, assuming no drastic changes to MP nanos, 1hb will be the clear weapon choice for MPs from the time you outgrow Neleb's rod to endgame. But that has more to do with flexibility and defense than raw weapon damage. This isn't scientifically proven, but so far as I can tell, 1hb tends to slightly outdamage 2hb and do a bit less damage than pistol.

And lainbr, sorry to hear that on the gloves. They dropped on the 3rd AI ship I boarded as a 220, and no one else on the team needed them. Now I feel guilty.

[Psikie]

Any ranged setup that relies on Burst and FA I would not trust to hit consistently, further more I would not invest the IP usage to cap or max those skills either. Pistol with add dmg I think is better base dmg, dual asp is really close. The main question comes from pistol perk dmg (and how often they hit or miss) vs asp poison procs + increased attack pet buff + whatever perklines you use instead of pistol mastery and champ lt arty.

Test server is still giving me the stupid textcolors.xml error so I may have to do a full AO reinstall to get it to work. I can do a live server DD dump with dual asp, but I am not 1hb setup yet so my numbers will not be maximum efficiency but at least a good idea.

[JustinSane4]

+ increased attack pet buff + whatever perklines you use instead of pistol mastery and champ lt arty.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I had thought that SoZ and 2hb quest staves set the flag allowing the pet buffs but that the 1hb creation clubs, including titaniush, did not. That seems to be confirmed by a quick aoitems search, but I could be mistaken. My recollection was that the pet AR buff was what allowed the aggressive staff to post DPM comparable to dual Asp.

[Psikie]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I had thought that SoZ and 2hb quest staves set the flag allowing the pet buffs but that the 1hb creation clubs, including titaniush, did not. That seems to be confirmed by a quick aoitems search, but I could be mistaken. My recollection was that the pet AR buff was what allowed the aggressive staff to post DPM comparable to dual Asp.

On live any quest staff, zset, and the APF creation nanos set the flag for pet buffs. On test its changed a little bit around. So depends on where you do testing. Also on live u can cast pet buff and swap off weapon and buff stays for duration on pets. On test you must have weapon equipped to keep buff running. Since I cant get on test atm im going to do it on live where asp does set flag.

[Esssch]

To help with your calcs, here's the pet damage numbers I got when testing in 2010:

Buffed pets with:

• Evocation of the Enraged
• Improved Instill With Malign Intent
• High Chant of Effortless Strikes
• Healthy Manifestation

Fighting Guard, lvl 200, Tir backyard 4 times each.

Rihwen: 123,000 damage/min
Zhok the Abomination: 100,740 damage/min
Ettu the Cursed: 88,500 damage/min
Urolok the Rotten: 82,080 damage/min
Biazu the Vile: 69,360 damage/min
Tormented Revenant (lvl202): 60,960 damage/min
Transcendent Enmity Personification: 54,360 damage/min
Revenant (lvl160): 49,260 damage/min
Demon: 45,240 damage/min
Fiend: 45,180 damage/min
Cacodemon: 44,700 damage/min
Lemur: 42,300 damage/min

This time on ely hecks/ado hecks (switched once the pets stopped hitting min damage)

Rihwen: 82,080 damage/min
Zhok the Abomination: 76,020 damage/min
Ettu the Cursed: 68,400 damage/min
Urolok the Rotten: 66,600 damage/min
Biazu the Vile: 60,180 damage/min
Transcendent Enmity Personification: 57,960 damage/min
Tormented Revenant (lvl202): 55,200 damage/min
Cacodemon: 48,000 damage/min
Demon: 44,880 damage/min
Lemur: 44,460 damage/min
Fiend: 44,040 damage/min

Sorted by damage numbers, not level/requirements.

[Dancingrage]

My own experience with MP over 2 levelling sessions (220 on Solitus MP, and since breed reset hadn't come out, rerolled and dinged 220 on NM MP) with all sorts of options wound up being like such for DD:

1hb tends to have a higher damage at base than pistol, making up for the lost range with higher damage. Pistol has some nice specials for combat, but it's murder for MPs to get up high enough, and my big mistake doing pistol (before LE) was assuming a higher level Burst pistol would be better for me for levelling towards endgame than the Fling. I think I got clued in by another pistol MP at like 217 on my Solitus run.

Rerolling, I've decided to aim for maximum flexibility in my build, and that means ignoring anything that isn't a creation weapon. Part of that is because with a set of scouts I had a stupidly great AR even at low TL5 with creation weapons, the first time I've seen my perks land on anyone, actually, and since creation weapons don't have a max AR, any weapons I use will have an excellent lifespan. I caught a trox shade with their pants down and completely OD'd him in a few Inferno missions, though I had to be on the utter top of my game, and that shade stopped slacking once I put down the dumper that showed me cleanly ODing him by a good margin. IIRC I was like 205-210 on my second run.

My experience has been that if one is going with regular weapons for pvm, the biggest pain is getting them on and secondly making sure they hit. Critscopes of many types really hose down your inits, and MP inits aren't terribly hot to begin with. Looking at trying for a crit setup on Tigress or the Redfire staff runs into the issue, for example, of the MP having trouble getting it up to a respectable level to counteract the massive slowdown or risk of getting aggro in larger setups (I have gotten myself killed on a few raids trying to get my crit numbers up by going more AGG than DEF and getting mob interest as a result. Rare, but there.) There's more CriticalIncrease stuff now than when I was trying to get the numbers up years ago, but the issue behind it remains that you have to really consider the tradeoff and if it'll be worth the slowdown.

For creation weapons, which is where I decided to go, AR isn't much of an issue at all, we even buff it by huge amounts. The crits on most creation weapons are okay, but not enough to consider making an entire critical setup like you would for the Tigress,etc. To really squeeze the most out of those setups I tended to go with pouring on as much +poison dmg as possible, instead. Going with Scouts makes this a less suicidal setup, as you're getting evades added alongside your AR on this, and with 1hb you always have the option of popping a shield on if you're catching too much heat. At last check, I had enough IP floating at the moment to be able to bring bow up to about 1k in anticipation for creation bows that hadn't even been conceived of yet, let alone put on the drawing board like later, but I would suspect it wouldn't be terribly much different if they were put into game than working with a Tigress that had an AR that could be useful instead of an AR that made the bow useless for anything apart from AS. I was shooting for as flexible a setup as I could possibly get, and the idea was to be able to hotswap stuff around so I could shoot for +dmg for raids, evades or AAD for soloing/pvp, and so on. So far as I could tell, I was pretty successful in that regard.

[Psikie]

Just wanted to throw something up so Ill let the number crunchers make out of this what they will...this is not in optimum setup. It is vs ado hecks with dual Asp.

vs 1 with spike perk dmg

Player (Damage/Damage per Minute/Hits/Crits/Crit%/highest hit)
You ( 122.179 / 222.120 / 45 / 7 / 15% / 8.516 )

vs 2 over period of time without perks recharged

Player (Damage/Damage per Minute/Hits/Crits/Crit%/highest hit)
You ( 243.569 / 187.320 / 97 / 9 / 9% / 8.060 )

Damage could have been pushed if i had gone all out DD setup but this is using standard MP ofab, no acdc, MoTR, Dchest etc.

[JustinSane4]

Interesting... that's basically even with (slightly behind actually) my 226,020 DPM with the 2hb red staff on an inf heck. I wonder why? I'd thought dual Asp OD'd 2hb.

[Esssch]

Interesting... that's basically even with (slightly behind actually) my 226,020 DPM with the 2hb red staff on an inf heck. I wonder why? I'd thought dual Asp OD'd 2hb.

I wonder if he's using Rihwen?

[Psikie]

Mainly im not really setup for 1hb on live, I wasn't able to get on test for this. I don't have optimum 1hb setup on live. You can use those numbers as an "avg" not maxed out 1hb MP using dual asp. If I had a full 1hb setup (im 2hb/bow) then those numbers would definitely go up. I would guess 225k-235k looks about right for spike dmg with perks if you add in at least 250 dmg per hit I know im lacking.

[JustinSane4]

That feels right.. I didn't have an optimized DD setup, but I did have 5x DB armor including combat chest, as well as motr and electro gloves, so the extra crit and add damage should account for DD numbers being as good as your dual asp figures there. I'd guess if we'd both been using the same setup, dual asp would be (as you suggest) 5-10k dpm better.

[Esssch]

I guess one thing that I'm totally clueless about, is how much nano adding armour is *actually* needed at endgame?

If you're fully buffed do you need any nanoskill adding armour?

I don't think anyone actually answered this, so here you go:

I can't log in at the moment to check, but I think I could cast all my buffs without any CS at all. Some weapon setups will have it even easier, I need most of my perks for weapons, while I know that bow and creations can devote more perks to nano lines. I'd say to keep in mind that the Scourge pet will require 2500 MC/TS, which I actually can't cast in my current setup without a swap, but lol like we're ever getting that.

[JustinSane4]

The 2,500 reqs on Notum Scourge were meant to include 100 to all nanoskills that were going to be added to Ancient Knowledge. I'd hope it'd be 2,400 if we don't get the extra nanoskills.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

how much can you swap on though?

I'm sure it's not directly comparable.. but here's what I use on keeper to cast top nanos:

1. swap RH phulak for pride of xan
2. left hand phulak
3. Nano research device
4. infused nano device (alb one)

And I have perma equipped Right/left/backpiece collatz bastion stuff, and this is with full alphas except brain which is an alert support brain I think and ConC perked, and a bit of trickle from DB covering.

with that gear on I am at about 1880 nanoskills (only 1844 needed I think but it's what I use).

If you had to swap some gear for scourge... would you use phulaks?

[Mountaingoat]

I can currently self 3002 TS with 2892 MC or 2902 TS with 2992 MC (phulak swap). I know there is a little more room to twink out of few more points. With swaps I can actually NSD myself and continue casting NSD... My everyday normal setup gives me 2719 MC and 2728 TS and I am missing bastion shoulder for 10 more points. I wear six pieces of scouts ai armor. I don't think 2500 nanoskills is unreasonable for MP's.

[lainbr]

how much can you swap on though?

I'm sure it's not directly comparable.. but here's what I use on keeper to cast top nanos:

1. swap RH phulak for pride of xan
2. left hand phulak
3. Nano research device
4. infused nano device (alb one)

And I have perma equipped Right/left/backpiece collatz bastion stuff, and this is with full alphas except brain which is an alert support brain I think and ConC perked, and a bit of trickle from DB covering.

with that gear on I am at about 1880 nanoskills (only 1844 needed I think but it's what I use).

If you had to swap some gear for scourge... would you use phulaks?

In my current setup I need to swap: Nano research device, Infused Ancient Nano Enhancer and Nano Controler Unit to cast Scourge. I cannot check exactly values atm :/
Only the Nanocontroler Unit is the dificult item to get and you can do it with phulaks instead.

[Cratertina]

1. Ninomp ( 165.424 / 78.720 / 85 / 3 / 3% / 2.495 )
2. Ninobeast ( 118.407 / 56.340 / 105 / 7 / 6% / 1.904 )

Here's a tiny damage dump from smugglers den... few den mantis breeders. Skull of Despair +Premium Arctic Metaplast Mace, lvl 194, 185 pet. Whop whop.

Ever since I equipped metaplast mace... damage is transformed. Atleast TL5/6 wise MP is actually quite great damage. Many professions would struggle to keep up. Especialy 2 second nuke is just epic.

[Psikie]

I wear six pieces of scouts ai armor. I don't think 2500 nanoskills is unreasonable for MP's.

I would disagree with the fact that AI armor should be considered reasonable equipment for the avg MP to cast "proposed" new pet.

Avg Mp should have at least 2200 ts/mc. 2400 end game would be reasonable. With swaps phulaks, nano controller, research device hud, alba nano device + infused nano device, I could easily see 2600 no problem.