Another_Fan

A billion times ? Really ? Sorry I refuse to watch the video chats. They are a fantastic way to take an hour, conveying 5 minutes of written information.


Sorry but now is exactly the time to talk about this. By the time these things are coded into a build they tend to get stuck there. This is the first time blasters have gotten serious attention since 2008. This time it would be very good if the fix actually was a fix.

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For instance, you herald /Energy, which I can agree with, as one of the top secndaries...but /fire does have some quirks to it that may be more enticing such as immobilize and sleep protection thanks to Burn and the HoT of Cauterizing Aura. [/quote]

Prior to going rogue I would have certainly given you the immobilize, even though a hold was available from several epics. Now, not so much. There are much better immobilizes available to all blasters through the patron powers.

You are trying to stack sleeps with frozen aura ? Or are you assuming an Sonic / Ice manipulation pairing ? Unless you are leading off with siren song in the middle of the spawn that hardly seems the best way to go even for that combination.

Regarding /Dark -To hit is very nice but there is only two primaries to stack it with and even there -To hit from the primary actually works better with /energy than with /Dark. Forgetting Power Boosted Blackstar or a Power Boosted Blizzard, dark blast/ energy manipulation lets you stack more -to hit faster than dark / dark.

There is an entire separate thread about the problems with using electric powers to sap. Just to encapsulate, to have sapping be as effective as a hold or a stun, you need to completely drain end and stop recovery on the target. /Electric can do this in two attacks to a single target, which is functionally equivalent to stacking two stuns from energy or powerboosted control powers from the primary.

Its more important to me to have the changes done well this time. I am not looking forward to some UBER pay to win secondary in the future.

As things stand these changes taken as an aggregate benefit defenders and corruptors far more than they do blasters. It's very hard to decide if the snipe benefit or the non crashing nuke benefit is the better but the combination of both of those for buffing/debuffing ATs certainly seems to outweigh the benefit of the combined changes for blasters. If nothing else they will be able to keep their debuff toggles going through nukes. Nothing like seeing a spawn that is radiation infected and under the influence of enervating field get hit with a blizzard.

Well with mental which has the problem of being sub par unless you tag 5 enemies with it,that is 3 out of 7 secondaries. It's pretty safe to say that the changes to devices aren't boosting it to top of the heap by any stretch of the imagination. Bringing us to 4 out of 7 secondaries, leaving /Energy competing with /Dark and /Ice


Do you have a redname saying toggles do not suppress when mezzed ? Because if the toggles do, that knocks out /Ice. All that is left is /Dark for /Energy Manipulation and it's pretty clear that /Energy Manipulation gets more from the changes than /Dark does if for no other reason than /energy magnifies the effects of the new non crashing nukes.

But really this should not be the case. The blaster secondaries needed more than just trying to slap a quick and dirty fix on them, and the poor way the snipe bonus is distributed doesn't help

I use powerboost continuously to increase my defense. That was just the best place to put it so it doesn't cut into the damage increase from aim and build up.

If you are cycling power boost to maintain defense now you will gain the 20 plus percent damage increase from the snipe change and perhaps more.

I can see I am not communicating this effectively so lets lay it out.

For the sake of argument lets look at an attack sequence with the I24 changes in mind.


Assuming an X8 sized spawn bosses on.

For any secondary with build up.

Aim->Build up->Crashless nuke->Other AoE attack

At this point you have removed the minions most if not all of the lieutenants and left the bosses very badly hurt. Next you shift to your single target chain to kill the pesky stuff that is still alive. You can get off 1 super snipe chain and then you are out of gas. You no longer have the plus to hit to keep things going. Its roughly another 15 seconds before you get your fast snipe back.

That is a giant gap where you don't get your bonus.

The alternative with Energy is you hit powerboost before the start and again after it is out of cool down. In the case of nukes with secondary effects that power boost will boost stuns, end drain, -recovery you are even further ahead of the other sets.

Energy simply better leverages the snipe changes than any other set besides devices, but the snipe changes aren't enough to bring devices up to energy's i23 level let alone take it past it. In either case at the high end high recharge level conserve power better enables you to run the snipe chains than the passive recovery powers.

There is also the matter of being able to fuel the attack chains. If you scroll up I have a sample showing what conserve power does for AR. In the case of leading off with a nuke that will cost 27 end, you pull even further ahead. It's going to be very hard for any secondary besides energy to actually run a snipe chain for an extended length of time without resorting to inspirations, with the possible exception of electric, which has its own issues.

Sorry but you have missed it. They aren't exclusive. Powerboost bridges the gaps that aim and build up leave you with. So when you say 9% it isn't always 9%, it can be as little as 2% and that is at your discrection.

Personally I do power boost continuously on my AR/Energy blaster and my Fire Energy blaster. It's really something of a no brainer to me to trade the dead time for a 50% to 100% increase my mitigation from defense.

You see I view the net 11% bonus from fast snipes as a free side effect from power boosting my defense.


Edit to be clear: If you don't feel the need to boost your def with power boost, you can rotate aim, build up and powerboost so you only use it once every 30 seconds

It's a Click every 15 seconds and winds up costing you 7% of your available time in exchange for minimally 20% additional damage on you ST chain.

The important thing to remember is that all these clicks can be clicked before entering actual combat.

BR->PB->Aim->BU->AOEs->(Single Target Chain+PB)^N

Even in long combats the loss from power boost is more than made up by having permanent fast snipes and build up.

I would guess that's because it does more damage than the blaster version and they aren't that concerned about stacking the sleep effect.

Oh no doubt you will have to work for your performance but at least the performance is there.

Why do you assume that I24 changes are needed for those comments to be valid ? Energy currently does things that Devices does not this is still true in I24.

Click Method

15 seconds per click

Damaging sleeps are just sad. Having one is like being the victim of somebody's practical joke.

Well I think you are missing what was the original point which was energy manipulation as a set is going to be the best seconday choice to pair with all the primaries.

This is based not on the relative strength of the recovery/regen powers which I thought would all be of roughly equal strength. (Mutters about drain psyche(too awesome my foot)). Rather /Energy can provide perma fast snipe and it can greatly amplify the secondary effects of the new crashless nukes.

Examples.
PB + Thunderous blast = Everything that wasn't killed now has no endurance and no recovery.
PB + Blackstar = -65% to hit on everything that didn't die.
PB+ (Overcharge/psychic wail/Atomic Blast/Dreadful wail/Geyser)= Greatly enhanced stuns all of which can be stacked with stuns from /Energy Manipulation.

Also /Energy Manipulation gets its end management and regeneration in a single click power that does not require the presence of enemies. This is inherently superior to having it in a suppressing toggle or multiple click powers that require enemies.

I was under the impression you were tossing out the absorb mechanic in frigid embrace as being sufficiently superior to energize as to offset the other advantages that /energy manipulation enjoys.

Frigid embrace may well be that much better but not for the reasons you or I thought. Seeing as the absorb pulse is twice the size of the amount of regeneration you could expect from the regen benefit in that same period this implies you would need hits that were 20% or bigger of the blasters hit points and and happened no more often then every 2 cycles of the Absorb shield (assumes absorb shield max at 10% of hp). Now you spoke of leveraging frigid embrace by building for resistance. That is exceptionally painful currently and likely impossible to get 50% resistance across the board on a blaster let alone get the high levels mitigation blasters get from defense now.

What you can do is build an ice blaster for defense to space out the hits and leverage Frigid Embrace by taking Aid Self. I am assuming that the Absorbed message for an attack doesn't produce an interrupt for the player if that is the case Frigid Embrace effectively removes the interrupt that makes aid self near useless in combat against enemies with large amounts of damage over time.

Also as a note the greater regeneration that is coming in I24 dovetails very neatly with the ability to get very high levels of defense using power boost. /Ice Manipulation would likely do better with regeneration as well simply from all its minus recharge. Unfortunately frigid embrace's -damage which would be helpful only applies in melee range when the enemies in general have higher damage attacks.

Well you must hate the entire system for nukes then. All of them violate the damage/recharge rules and still will even when they are made crashless..

So in this case it's which discontinuity gets fixed.

I am sorry but this has been in the game since what I1 for defenders ? Have the developers ever so much as said this might be wrong ?

Is it a known issue ?

At what point does it stop being the player's responsibility to intuit what the developers are going to think is wrong and becomes the developer's responsibility to provide timely notice ?

If they change it now they will be moving the cheese. At least with the Hami Os they always said it was a known issue, even so I am certain that a good number of people just threw up their hands and said time for something else when that change was put in.

Well if that is the case, and given the lack of blaster access to meaningful levels of resistance to anything but smash/lethal, it just helps make my initial point "Energy Manipulation or you are doing it wrong". Energy gets regeneration and has the built in means to leverage it with defense.

If I understand the Absorb mechanic correctly its a pulsing virtual hit point shield. Every cycle you get a refresh of a fixed size hit point buffer. In the worst case that looks slightly superior to an equivalent fixed amount of regeneration per time.

It should be especially powerful for characters that have been hit with DOTs because they will be impacting the shield without causing an interrupt.

I see where you are coming from but the incarnate abilities tend to overwhelm non incarnate build problems. Personally I spend most of my time playing exemped below the incarnate levels. A fully incarnated blaster really doesn't need fixes, its just a different flavor of incarnate.

Forget that the upset over Blizzard would be Super Colossal

The situation is a very limited one. People that are using those highly optimized builds can have their play style broken by adding people to the team. If they are deprived of their insp flow they wind up with a much more restrained play style.

Well if /Ice gets a much larger HP Recovery/keep tool and its get a similar recovery tool that implies a few possibilities, /Ice was thought to need more ,it is a bad balance decision or it was meant to mess with people.

I don't know how you arrived at that, here is what I have for my planned AR/EN in I24



This is running the snipe attack chain and using 59.6 % for the end reduction from energize and assuming energize has no cost to activate. The actual attack chain is a little faster than what I am using here so the benefits of end reduction are actually a little greater.

I was using /Dev as the baseline for the combination or regeneration and recovery. Dev has the end management with the new cloaking device.

Well simple balance reasons. /Ice is hardly a bad secondary to begin it hardly needs a larger HP recovery/loss avoidance power than everyone else.

This is a really big problem with many of the changes. Endurance recovery/management powers that don't need enemies or can be left toggled on are significantly better than those that need enemies and require combat time to use.

I don't know if its deliberate but it seems like much of the changes are meant to upset people's apple carts and leave them dissatisfied with the blasters they already have.

If we use cloaking device as the baseline, then it would be reasonable to think that it would be getting considerably less. I don't consider this a prediction because it is pretty clear that the buffs to the blast sets/blaster secondaries aren't being done all that well.



To truly perma yes, to get up to 90% + levels of availability not so much. Just looking at my Ar/energy/mace I get +6% def to everything, and roughly 14% def to s/l when it is active.

Boost range is a gem for those that leverage it. Prior to I24 I used to give mental the edge over /Energy because it had a cone with good range and the only health/endurance recovery power available for blasters. Energy always made short cones into long cones but didn't have a health/recovery power.

Multiples ? I was only thinking in the range of 25% to 50% but on a very steady and consistent basis. Perma fast snipe, end management to run the snipe chains, best use of the nuke changes. In the cases of devices or possibly /mental it might very well be more than 100% as effective.

I don't know how you are playing it, but standing in the middle of a spawn and firing off a two and a half second soul drain is going to need considerable levels of defense to ride out. Especially true when you are following up with a 3 second cast nuke. Even if you can consistently max out soul drain you are missing the synergy of power boost and stunning melee attacks from energy with radiation's stuns.


To say /energy just improves on other sets is to damn with faint praise. /Energy also has the advantage its offense is also its mitigation as well. Stun+Total focus = neutralized boss.

Energize will also be providing /Energy an incredible end management tool. Is the extra benefit from absorb, outweighed by easily softcapped defenses and the ability to fight at extreme range ? For enemies that have more melee attacks than ranged you would think so.

/Energy already has that very nice ability to softcap defenses by leveraging power boost. I think you are missing just how strong the new secondary effects it has to play with. 20 second mag 3 stuns, 20 Second holds, -60% to hit for blackstar, and powerboost and Thunderous blast give electric blasters what they have been asking for, a meaningful way to sap an entire spawn.

/Energy was already a top two contender before the changes, I just don't see anything that got enough boost out of them to come from behind and overtake it.

Don't get me wrong either other secondaries won't be unplayable anymore than they are unplayable now. Energy is just getting a triple/quadruple play that puts them to shame.

Even with your example of Sonic, Sonic /Energy now has a non crashing power boosted AoE mag 3 stun that also is a nuke and reduces the resistance of everything it hits. Then you can just stack a stun on anything not yet deceased.

The new nukes really solve energy's old problem of the lack of that extra AoE and then goes even further for those with secondary effects.