---------------------------- Part 1: random information about scoundrel ------------------------------------
I just spent some time shooting a training dummy to figure out how viable debuff scoundrel is and here are some of the interesting things I found out during testing
- damage empowerment increases debuff duration and increases damage of all cards by the same amount. This means that you benefit a decent amount from damage empowering things like light, flint, and ice. I also think it is funny that despite (dmg empowerment + flame) being the most iconic card combo, it benefits from it less than every other card in the game. This is also the reason why you don’t really need to empower your flame to 1-shot people in pvp because the empower only really accounts for about 6k of the 50k damage shot.
- spread empowerment decreases the duration of debuffs
- rank shot debuffs and weaknesses don’t improve the shot that applied them. This means that if you want to hit a big damage flame card you should curve shot and then flame. This applies especially to pvp because there is absolutely no incentive to curve your 1-shots because they are either dead, close enough to dead that you don’t need the rank debuff to finish killing them, or they don’t die and can heal themselves and you probably should have curved first and then flamed them. The same applies for rank shots but not weaknesses for poison. For some reason rank works like positive player buffs where it is factored into the on hit damage calculation that determines the poison’s base tick damage rather than while the poison is ticking. basically curve shot and then poison if you want the poison to benefit from the rank debuff.
- unlike what the talent says break shot is a 8% buff not 5% and stacks with the weaknesses
- flint weakness stacks 2 times globally shared between all scoundrels. It works the same way as weaknesses for every other class where additional scoundrels can’t add more weaknesses past the 2 but they do stack with weaknesses from other classes
---------------------------- Part 2: Support Scoundrel ------------------------------------
why is it good: permanent almost bart ult is good
What support scoundrel is: you shuffle flint cards back into your deck in order to keep the enemy weakened. Its basically Scott’s build but shuffling flints instead of poisons.
Through some testing a good support scoundrel can keep pretty close to full up time on the weakness. They can stack their deck before a fight so roughly the first 45 seconds of the fight they can keep that full 18% buff up and after that they probably keep up closer to 16% on average.
its easier than Scott’s build for reasons that really require a comprehensive breakdown of how to play it to explain. Its harder than lavawhale’s build but not by that much. very importantly though it is much more beginner friendly than lavawhale’s build because it allows newer players to buff the damage of the better DPS players in their party.
comparison to Scott’s build:
fully potted, with tiles, rank shot etc. poison does about 20k dps.
on average Scott’s build maintains about 2 poison stacks and does not apply weakness aside from break shot while support maintains a little less than 1 poison stack and keeps up close to 2 weakness stacks(keep in mind that those weaknesses buff yourself too)
The main question just comes down to is 10% weakness better than 1 poison? If the combined dps of your party is more than 200K then the answer is yes. my numbers are a bit optimistic and for dungeons support would perform pretty comparably to Scott’s build as 200K is roughly exactly what you would expect a good dungeon party to do. Raids however basically should always have a support scoundrel. if you have 7 DPS and each are hitting for 70K after accounting for all non scoundrel buffs, those weakness effectively give 49K extra DPS
Scott parsed about 90k on the Cindy leaderboard. From that I would estimate that an extremely good support scoundrel could hit about 65-70K.
---------------------------- Part 3: Hybrid Scoundrel ------------------------------------
I think even if you are using Scott’s build you shouldn’t be burning your flint card
Basically you shuffle your poison exactly once every deck rotation with the ash card and just use your flint card whenever you get it. Normally with Scott’s build if you are lucky you sometimes got to shuffle twice in a rotation (maybe optimistically could be counted as 1/3 of a poison on average as it happens less than 1/2 of the time when playing with realistic strategies and makes your deck 1 card longer to cycle through when it happens). Hybrid is easier to do than Scott’s build for the same reason support is. I just don’t think that that occasional extra poison is worth it outside of maybe when soloing and even then its very close.
Overall I think hybrid is better in dungeons and support is better in raids
I will post a video at some point explaining how to do both strategies soon but I have finals right now that might delay that a bit. I’m also planning on making tiles for both (they will be similar to Scott’s tiles most likely) but again probably after finals are over.
