Arcanaville

You won't mind if I cut the range on all of your attacks in half, then.

So what you meant was that after the changes there will be two kinds of ranged sets: dual pistols, and the ones that aren't dual pistols.

Because I don't think Sonic is really hurting either. Ice is up in the air: it also doesn't have a snipe, but its getting 80 feet range for Bitter Ice Blast, and BiB's DPA is essentially identical to the average insta-snipe. That might be good enough.

I've already suggested to Arbiter Hawk that sniper blasts grant a short duration range boost. Specifically to Blasters.

How you build depends these days on what your goals are, and how much you're willing to spend. And influence is not hard to come by, so don't be frightened by the numbers. There are million inf simple builds with just a couple IOs, there are ten million frankenbuilds with mixes of inventions, hundred million IO builds where you are now trying to optimize your build but generally staying away from purple (very rare) inventions and some of the more pricey IOs, and billion+ builds where the sky is the limit.

There's a couple of basic blaster strategies. KB protection is easy to buy with IOs, so blaster builds often tend to have at least one or two of those. A popular strategy is to build for 45% or more ranged defense and stay at range (aka 'ranged soft-capped" builds). These tend to use a lot of thunderstrike sets because of their ranged defense. And more recently they tend to use the archetype-specific IOs or ATIOs: the current blaster set has significant ranged defense if you six slot it. An alternative is to try to build for 45%+ to smashing, lethal, and energy (at least) which will make you less dependent on range; if you intend to mix it up in melee range this might be the better strategy. Why those three? Because combined they cover the widest amount of the most common attacks you'll likely face with the least amount of defense (smash, lethal, energy, and psi would be better, but also much more difficult for a blaster). If you are Ice/Ice/Cold you already have a smash/lethal defense toggle (frozen armor) so going s/l/e defense might be the better choice.

Don't bother with Hoarfrost. The blaster health cap is too low. You're better off getting the health accolades and building a few +MaxHealth invention bonuses into your build. My energy/energy/force blaster is basically health capped with no power like hoarfrost at all, so its not hard.

Try to build your build to leverage Ice Bolt and Ice Blast. Always take both. With the current version of Blaster Defiance, you can use both attacks (and chilblain) when you are held.

I'll try to whip up an Ice/Ice build in Mids later today; I was busy last night testing blaster builds on beta.

Yeah, because Water Blast really sucks right now.

MC could really use boost range. Ki Push can shove things right out of blaster range, and so fast it can almost outrace some blast projectile speeds.

My best one so far I bounced a critter off a truck, then onto a fence, then down the side of the fence, then flipped up and over another critter, and then into a tree.

To be specific, they are on the Beta server. City of Heroes now has three server "clusters" - the live servers, the test server, and the two beta servers. Live is live. Test is test - its a server players can use to test stuff, and patches for the live game are usually tested there first. Beta is generally used specifically to test new issues or major updates to the current issue, or things like new powersets.

Issue 24 is currently being tested on the Beta server cluster. It is not on live, and it is not on test.

Holds are almost always mag 3. But other mez like stuns and sleeps are sometimes mag 2. I'm not entirely certain why this is, although I suspect an informal rule at one time was critter rank should influence critter mez: minions deal mag 2, Lts mag 3, etc. Hold is rare for a minion to possess, but everything and their dog is packing stun.

Whatever you think about the changes, I think the one thing you can't say is that they are trivial.

That's a one-dimensional way of looking at things, though. If a hypothetical SR tanker or scrapper managed to get huge resistances to everything (especially psi) it would be Fiery Embrace vs 95% DDR. That's not an automatic win for Fiery Aura, and that's also another thing you can't really buy from the invention system. You can rent it from the incarnate system, but not all of it and only part of the time. And while the Fiery Aura tanker was doing that, the SR tanker would be spamming Rebirth and neutralizing much of the advantage of Healing Flames.

Actually, high on my TODO list is to figure out what the scaling resistance invention does, so I can see how it would stack on SR. That should be interesting.

Conserve Power is Energize in I24, and I'm planning on slotting five Panaceas in there, which will be 7.5% more global recharge. You could also do the same thing to Health.

If you can steal slots from somewhere, you should consider at least five-slotting both Blaster ATIO sets into two different attacks. Each offers 7.5% recharge buff, and if you can catalyze the sets that rises to +10% recharge. That's +20% recharge. Those sets offer better bonuses than, say, crushing impact or decimation, and are stronger slotting also. If you can six-slot them you'll get significant defense bonuses as well.

Well, its funny you should ask that. Today just happens to be the first day of beta test for Issue 24. Issue 24 has, shall we say, somewhat dramatic changes in it, particularly for blasters although many of the changes affect lots of things.

Here's the quick summary of changes that might be noteworthy to your blaster:

1. All blaster secondaries are getting something called a "sustain" power. Its a power that either has powerful regeneration, or a new effect called Absorb which is like ablative armor. Ice Manipulation is getting chilling embrace buffed so it has +recovery and absorb shields. Oh, and its radius is increasing from 10 feet to 30 feet.

2. You don't have a snipe, but I should mention all ranged attack snipes are being changed so that if you have a net +22% tohit or higher at that moment, the snipe "fastcasts" where it no longer interrupts and fires immediately, basically betwen one and one and a half seconds, more or less. Its being referred to as "insta-cast" by some.

3. The short ranged 40 foot blasts are getting their range increased to 80 feet. In particular this includes Bitter Ice Blast which used to be 50 feet.

4. All mez resist invention buffs in the invention system are being increased *and* actual damage resistances are being added to them, plus all damage resist bonuses are increasing. Basically, it is much easier to build for resistance with inventions now.

5. Many power pools are getting a fifth power, and those are pretty interesting. Also, there's a new power pool for purchase in the Paragon Store called "Sorcery" which has various attacks and ally buffs.

Which reminds me: if you've been gone a long time, you may not know City of Heroes is now a hybrid free to play model: you can play without subscribing and you get a subset of the game, or you can still subscribe like normal and get all of the game. Except for stuff they sell in the Paragon Store, which you access from within the game client. They sell things like new powersets in there, among other things.

6. Crashing nukes don't crash anymore. This includes Blizzard. Blizzard's base recharge has dropped from 360 seconds to 170 seconds and its damage reduced to about 83% of the original damage. Its end cost has increased to 27.72 end, but as I said it doesn't end-crash in I24.


There's a ton of other stuff, but enough has changed (or will change: this is just the first day of beta) that build advice will probably be a bit dated and evolving over the next month. I'd recommend play it as it is now, and aim for catching up in I24 unless you're in a big hurry, because the options for building blasters will be a lot better in I24.


Edit: I should also mention that as a VIP subscriber which your orange name seems to indicate, you are entitled to access the beta server and check out I24. You can also copy live characters from the live servers to the beta server to see how they perform under I24 or to test respecs. The character copy tool is accessed from the forums here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/charactercopy.php

How does possession of Fiery Embrace assist a powerset in benefiting from resistance bonus buffs?

I think Electric Armor will benefit more, but I need to look at the numbers more carefully.

Its fine if the Battalion is a stonger foe than what we have now. They should be, to be an appropriate challenge for incarnates that lasts more than one issue. The problem is more the lower non-incarnate game where the gap between invention and non-invention builds is getting huge, and a problem with powerset saturation where regardless of how powerful the enemies are, specific advantages different sets are supposed to have over other sets are being saturated away by the huge power in the invention system and incarnate power trees.

There's still a difference between a Regen, an Invuln, and an SR, no matter how much power you infuse them with in inventions and incarnate powers. But that difference is getting smaller all the time, and that's not a good thing at all. When power starts to escalate, homogenization is very easy to induce and extremely difficult to reverse.

Blasters were never going to be a melee archetype. They are the primary ranged damage dealer in the game.

The thought process Jack had at the beginning of time (or at least the beginning of 2003) at least as he documented it in his dev diaries was that first he thought it was obvious that a melee/defense archetype should exist, and then he decided that some focused on offense with some defense and some focused on defense and had some offense. But that "focus" should have always been a player build decision, not an archetype boundary. Because he (and the other developers presumably) arbitrarily decided that you could focus on range or melee/utility and still be a blaster, you could focus on control or support and still be a controller, but whether you focused on melee offense or defense determined if you were a scrapper or tanker, we have the melee proliferation we have today.

That one conceptual error, and it was an unforced error, created a lot of problems.

It reminds me of what I said in I9 beta that there was too much defense in the invention system and it would trivialize defense sets and cause a runaway defense stacking arms race and then the devs would eventually be forced to make critters with defense counters just to counterbalance that and then moderate defense sets would get caught in the crossfire and disemboweled.

If I had said back then "and then Cryptic would sell out to NCSoft and spin off a dev group called Paragon Studios that would hire a developer that would pick the red name Synapse that would eventually become the powers team lead and decide to flirt with the same problem with resistance buffs" I would have only been slightly more accurate.

Even though I know what he sounds like, when I read a PM from Synapse I often hear his voice in my head sounding like Vincent D'onofrio:



No, not that Vincent D'Onofrio (not usually), this Vincent D'Onofrio:



See, I think your idea has a lot of merit. If we just change most of the numbers and all of the mechanics, your idea could really work.



In my head Arbiter Hawk sounds like Robert Loggia:



I gave Blasters a crap load of regen: what'r you gonna to do about it, huh? Huh??

That's interesting.

Well, I play SR so I'm always either praying to the RNG or swearing at it. Anyway, beta is up, theory can wait. You really want to play around with Ki Push before someone realizes its probably a tiny bit bugged.

I know who he is. He's still going to lose to Corona in the forum title poll by at least twenty percentage points.

I remember the complete implementation of the first enterprise integration project I ever did, twenty years ago, including the IP addresses (the firewall was at 10.12.16.84 and the DMZ segment was 192.168.17.X, for example).

Not sure which side of the building I parked on today. Ergo: Mids.

Its a bit like regen in that regard: high enough regen can erase *all* damage. Regen's weakness is that you have to take the damage first.

A weakness Absorb does not have.