Has the best 3 agents stats to run for DPS been worked out theoretically yet?
I say what I always say: Depends on weapon/build/critrate…
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This. Also i’m not sure if anyone is actually able to test with three agents yet?
Here’s a guideline for choosing the the best three Agents.
Pick the Agent that matches your Primary weapon:
- Mesilande Gwinyai (Assault Rifle)
- Victor Cromely (Blade)
- Aliya Zehhar (Blood Magic)
- Ann Thophora (Chaos Magic)
- Wekesa Ikande (Pistols)
- Mehmet Muzzaffer (Elementalism)
- Che Garcia Hansson (Fists)
- Queen Ranavalona IV (Hammer)
- Dennis Masuhlo (Shotgun)
From among these remaining Agents, pick two, starting from top to bottom:
- Oleg Yablokov
- Sarah Skelly
- Margot Crowley-Mathers
- Callie James
- Nassir (Assault Rifle)
- Montgomery de la Roche (Blade)
- Carter (Blood Magic)
- Hayden J. Montag (Chaos Magic)
- Deputy Andy Gardener (Pistols)
- Amir (Elementalism)
- Mihas Blaga (Fists)
- Petru (Hammer)
- Aurelie (Shotgun)
Callie James is worth considering if your build consists of a secondary weapon that makes up a significant portion of your damage; otherwise, Margot or a second Primary weapon Agent surpass her in power. But, regardless of which of these two Agents you choose from the list, the difference between them will likely be within fractions of a percent.
Finally, if your DPS build makes up a large percentage of its damage from your Basic ability, like it is for Chaos Magic, Virgil becomes essential.
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It really depends on more factors, like Leogrim said. Following any static list won’t most likely get you optimal agents.
At least Cveta and Volkov are not listed anymore 
For example difference between Oleg and Sarah is pretty big, considering Sarah won’t work for grenades, cr.blaze/flame, spirit blade.
Callie may for example be the next best thing really, if you do have secondary weapon that does at least some damage (which seems to be true for most combinations).
Margot is a very strong help for people with IP below 1k
(Other, rather personal thing from the endgame perspective, I chose +500HP over +0.3% damage from critpower.)
And so on. It all depends…
It’s why I called my post a guideline. Of the Agents we have available, these will be the ones you will most likely get the best results from.
I didn’t include Cveta Stojanovic and Aleksey Volkov because, individually, they ranked among the least effective Agents in my Chaos Magic spreadsheet: 1.78% more damage with Aleksey and 2.45% with Cveta. Whereas, Hayden, Margot, Sarah, Oleg, Ann, and Virgil increased my damage 3.14% to 4.45%. Aleksey and Cveta scale equally well no matter the weapons you use, giving me no reason to believe these two Agents would perform better with other weapons than the Agents I had recommended above. Furthermore, their critical hit procs depend on you maximizing your critical rating passives and glyphs to make the most of their support abilities (a weakness Margot shares, but at least her level 50 support ability grants 650 Attack Rating). Their support abilities are weak compared to an ample number of other Agents there are to choose from.
The major neck signets that increase Power damage also buff the damage of weapon specialties, which would include Incendiary Grenade and Spirit Blade. That Agents like Sarah Skelly don’t appear to do likewise I am assuming is an oversight on Funcom’s part and will be fixed in the future. If it is intended to ignore weapon specialties, then, yes, indeed, Sarah Skelly would be less desirable for many builds.
Dumbox, your list is missing Pierre Delacroix and Lydia. Pierre is pretty solid for most builds, and cheap on AH, and Lydia is decent for non-endgame builds that do not yet have 2 maxed out crit power glyphs.
He probably didn’t list Pierre Delacroix because he isn’t that good for most of the builds.
An example with Annihilate: 12.72 * 0.2 = 2.544CP, or 2.544/20=0.1272 CP/s. Annihilate is the 2nd best representative for big base damage elite abilities, alongside High Explosive Grenade being number 1. With Annihilate, Pierre Delacroix gives an additional total of 0.223 CP/s. For most of other builds though, it gives way less of an increase (with Pandemonium for instance, the 20% component would only give an additional 0.058 CP/s at best, and with Eldritch Scourge having base damage equal to 4.11 CP, it’s not even worth taking).
Overall, Delacroix can be slightly better or worse than Volkov depending on crit chance / power, same goes for Lydia. The best moment to use Lydia and/or Volkov would be when one maxes out crit chance glyphs but not crit power yet, otherwise their added DPS has to be calculated case by case, which is what most of the people won’t ever do.
Did anyone find out where Sarah Skelly drops yet ? I can’t find any info about her thus I suppose she did not drop at all.
No one has discovered (or at least divulged) how Sarah Skelly’s dossier can be acquired.
It was not an oversight that I did not include Pierre and Lydia on my list. Like Aleksey and Cveta, they fail to perform well compared to a number of other Agents you can choose from. If you’re interested in what the best Agents there are theoretically for DPS, the only reason to consider Aleksey, Pierre, Cveta, or Lydia is if you do not have any of the better Agents available. And if you have no choice but to choose among these Agents, Lydia is the best one.
Another question, why didn’t you list Warlawurru in the second list ? Can’t he be listed at least among the last ones of that list ? He only misses 325 attack rating in comparison to Sarah Skelly and it does not sound like that big of a difference, expecially if you are at middle/end game.
Now let’s just hope they will fix him so he will buff grenades and other special skills …
I shouldn’t have included Sarah Skelly on the list without an explanation. Her placement was done under the assumption that her Level 50 Support ability should buff weapon specialty damage (like Doppelgangers and Incendiary Grenades), and that Funcom would fix it in a future update. Considering that no one even knows how she can be obtained, her potential is only worth considering in theory. It may be that Funcom had no intention of allowing Sarah, Terry, or Warlawurru to buff weapon specialty damage, in which case there’d be no point for anyone but tanks and healers to make use of the latter two Agents. That Terry and Warlawurru lack an Attack Rating bonus makes their Power ability bonus less beneficial compared to Lydia or Margot unless you have low Critical Hit Chance.
There is a Special mission called “I Don’t Want to Believe”, regarding a female FBI agent and her unsolved cases she calls the W-Files. The whole thing is an X-Files reference. That’s probably the mission which starts the chain that leads to her dossier, since Sarah Skelly is also a reference to Dana Scully.
Obviously the Special missions are a weekly reset and mission chains are bugged right now, so it’s very unlikely anyone will be able to confirm or deny this for a while.
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There is also a “Trust No One” mission, but title aside, it seemed less obviously X-Files themed.
I just received the lv1 quest “Greenhouse of Horrors” and Sarah Skelly is a potentional reward. A fellow Cabal member got the same quest/potential reward yesterday.
Anyone know if Sarah works with weapon specialty damage yet?
Given she only affects Power abilities, I doubt she ever will - get the 7% agents instead, who do.
(Yes, I know, the text reads like the neck signets, which do affect gimmick damage, but that’s just another example of the “simplicity through obscurity” policy.)
Or rather a mistake on their part. It really sounds weird for Sarah to buff hammer’s specialty through Demolish just because hammer has the chance to use its specialty through a power ability, and not buff the specialty at all for other weapons. As it stands, i actually heard she doesn’t buff the damage of Swallow Cut, which is a power ability here.
It actually doesn’t strike me as all that weird - she’s not buffing “hammer’s specialty”, she’s buffing Demolish; she doesn’t do anything for an Enraged Eruption, which also benefits from hammer’s gimmick.
I think the sticking point is that they stuck the gimmick buff into neck signets (which makes some sort of sense, given that there are no X% [Weapon] damage signets) but they used the same (misleading) text on neck signets and Power ability-buffing Agents (I mean if we take the tooltip text at face value, a Commando signet buffing Incendiary Grenade is a bug.)
It’s just really poor interface design. (If you want to take it further back, you could blame the decision to have some weapon gimmicks buff abilities directly while others do their thing separately and independently, but that’s getting off the subject a bit.)
[quote]As it stands, i actually heard she doesn’t buff the damage of Swallow Cut, which is a power ability here.
[/quote]
If true (just got Sarah the other day, still leveling her, can’t test) that’s absolutely a bug. Her not buffing grenades, chamber match damage, or Spirit Blade hits is no more a bug than her not buffing Eruption or Crystallized Flame, though.