Arcanaville

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Hepheastus wasn't Zeus Son. Hera bore him without help from Zeus in revenge for Zeus bearing Athena without Hera's help. Sometimes this is said to be why Hepheastus was born Lame. In some stories it is Hera who tosses him off of Olympus because of his Handicap. Other stories Zeus tossed him off because he intervenes in a fight between Zeus and Hera.

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I'd be really interested in a cite for this one, because I've never heard of Heph being Hera's offspring. The intervention in the fight between Hera and Zeus as the reason for his tossing is familiar though.

Apparently there are at least 3 different versions of the story floating around just on this thread. I wonder how many have actually been published?

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This tends to be true for a lot of Greek mythology (and a lot of other mythology, actually). Consider the evolution of the Robin Hood story, or the Arthurian mythos. It doesn't take long at all for stories to get blended, embellished, and renovated as time progresses. Every time I read anything about Greek mythology, almost everything I read starts with the phrase "in some versions of the story..."

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Another explanation is, how can a controller, emp defender or non-brute player be natural? Well, if we use 10 percent of our brains, than perhaps we also use 10 percent of our bodies, Add up these two 90 percents = a big ol' blast of laser beam coming out me eyes!

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Nit: The 10% of our brains thing is a load of hogwash. Oft repeated idiocy. It might be /slightly/ closer to say we use a small percentage of our brains at any one time (and by that I mean that in any give microsecond, a small percentage of neurons are firing). But it has been well proven that just remembering things fire neurons all over your brain - we use it all, just not at once. Just like we use all our muscles - just not all at once.

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Based on our current understanding of neural networks, not even that sort of analogy tends to hold up. Asking how much of our brains we use, even over short periods of time, is roughly analogous to asking how much of the sand is the beach using at any moment in time. It isn't that the 10% number is wrong, its that the question is practically meaningless.

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Blasters are not supposed to be able to solo even level bosses, per the Statesman.


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To be precise, because its dangerous language, Statesman said that blasters are not necessarily supposed to be able to solo all bosses. Meaning, if you can't solo a boss as a blaster, that might just be because that boss is too difficult, or your build doesn't allow for it.

Remove the two italicized words, and it sounds like the implication is that no blaster should be able to solo any bosses, implying that any that do represent a game balance failure, and I don't think this stronger statement is true.


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I think one of the fundamantal differences I have with many of the posters is that i don't think my blaster should be able to solo all my missions or even half of them. If I wanted to solo, I'd play a scrapper or tanker. The fact that I CAN solo as a blaster or defender or controller is gravy.


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Statesman disagrees, though; he's stated many times that a specific design goal of the game is that everyone (meaning all ATs in general, we obviously have to exclude broken builds here) should be theoretically capable of soloing their own missions (set to the lowest difficulty level). Moreover, the original game manual specifies that its scrappers, tanks, and blasters that are supposed to be able to solo the most effectively.

Moreover, I cannot see how you could reduce blaster power to the point where most couldn't solo their missions, without making them totally ineffective. I'm already defenseless, so the only thing left is to reduce damage to the point where my damage output is comparable to pre-32 controllers. Even then a die-hard blaster could take the presence pool and get fear, giving them a single target hold, and turning themselves into effectively an illusion controller without the phantom army and flash.

You can make it so ridiculously hard that even someone like me, who liked the challenge of soloing Skyraider missions with jump bots with my illusion controller in the 20s, who is willing to die repeatedly to figure out how to kill not one, but two bosses simultaneously with my blaster, decides a game of minesweeper is more entertaining, but I don't see how you can make it an actual game design goal for blasters to be unsoloable, unless you make *everyone* unsoloable.

Scrappers are the natural soloists, but they are not implemented to match their AT class description. They should have no range, their defenses should be less effective than tanks under normal, not extreme circumstances, and they should be significantly outdamaged by blasters.

Right now I'm of the opinion that blasters probably do more damage than scrappers, but the problem is that its not *blatantly so* which makes it impossible for blasters to fulfill one of our original "roles" - to overshadow scrappers in the damage department while the tank is overshadowing the scrapper in the defense department.

Although I team more than I solo now, I started this game a soloist - with a blaster - into the 20s. If blasters turned out to be unsoloable for running missions, I'm not sure I'd be here now. Of my first three characters (the three 50s in my sig now) ill/rad is not a good soloer early on (although it can be soloed once you know what you are doing) and MA/SR at release was not stellar (although I didnt know that at the time). If my en/en was completely unsoloable, I might have concluded that the soloable claim made by CoH was blatantly false, and moved on.

It keeps being said that scrappers are supposed to be the best soloers, and everyone forgets that blasters are supposed to be "successful" soloers.

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In a sense, there is such a thing as too much logic for the game engine if the game is going to be fun. At a very fundamental level, players can only play the game if the game engine makes a fundamental mistake in villain AI: a villain should only attempt to fight what it thinks it has a reasonable chance to defeat, but they consistently fail to perform this basic judgement.

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I can't argue with that!

You're sidestepping my main point, thought.

CoV Villains are going to make value descisions about what they can and can not fight, so these "ranged vs melee" and "AI vs Player" questions aren't nearly as pie-in-the-sky as you seem to think.

I think we're getting seriously off topic about PvE Blaster balance, though, so I'm not going to worry about it here....

Thanks for the discussion!

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When we get to PvP CoV battles, yep, there will be a problem, insofar as the arena is a good preview. "Pure" conventional blasters, one on one, have problems unless they are very well stocked with breakfrees, and have some form of good control - at high levels. Its a bit more fair at lower levels.

I agree, though, that is more of a PvP balancing issue, and not specifically a PvE issue or a blaster damage issue, per se.

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Except scrappers aren't actually faster than all of their foes, unless they use yet another exploit - using travel powers in combat.

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What about sprint, hurdle and swift? So far the only enemies with fravel powers are those with fly, and hover 6-slotted can be plenty fast, and all scrapper primaries have a ranged ST taunt power.

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Sprint, hurdle, and swift (and quickness, and elude), and hover, and combat jump do allow scrappers to catch some, maybe even most villains. But my point was that there are still villains that outspeed most of that unless you have 6-slot swift on top of 6-slot sprint - my specific example was illusionists.

But while there are some things blasters outrange, and some things blasters don't, there is *nothing* in the game that deliberately uses its ranged advantage against a melee fighter to play constant keep away. They may attack from a distance, but they do not tend to run away from a scrapper to keep that distance - which is what "proper" AI ought to do. This is in reference to the original subject of the discussion, which is is it fair to claim blasters are "broken" because they only way they get by is with "game exploits" and "broken AI."

Scrapper challenge is a game invention that allows scrappers to both draw aggro, and partially nullify their range disadvantage by drawing foes to them, or at least cancelling their desire to run away. There is no opposite power available to blasters. Moreover, a power that did the exact opposite - caused a single targetted foe to run away - wouldn't actually be the point, because it wouldn't offer the analogous benefit. If challenge causes a single foe to not run away and turn to attack the scrapper, the blaster equivalent would be a click power that caused a villain to run out of melee range, stop, and then cease attacking for a while. Essentially, single target terrorize.

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Target selection is based on what threat that target represents vs the effort required to kill it. To make tanks the primary target on these grounds they would need to be far and away the most dangerous AT on the field. I’m talking damage output an order of magnitude higher then blasters. If this were the case there would be no point in anyone every playing anything but a tank, nor would there be any point with anyone teaming with anything but a tank. You would have tanks and spectators, nothing else.

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Oh, I agree completely. I don't think that proper Tanks are possible. The issue is that improper Tanks can't be balanced in PvP.

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You seem to be suggesting that blasters, at least the conventional CoH definition of one, is inherently impossible (and any attempt to make them possible is almost a cheat by definition) and tanks aren't either. Are we converging on the claim that the only thing that "makes sense" are ranged scrappers?

In a sense, there is such a thing as too much logic for the game engine if the game is going to be fun. At a very fundamental level, players can only play the game if the game engine makes a fundamental mistake in villain AI: a villain should only attempt to fight what it thinks it has a reasonable chance to defeat, but they consistently fail to perform this basic judgement.

If all villains thought that way, well, they could sometimes guess wrong, but by in large players would be forced to engage only things that stand a good chance to kill them, because all other things would flee, tank or no tank.

Over in burn-tank land, there is debate going on about the logic of having villains run out of burn patches. Yes, its perfectly logical that villains would not want to stand in a burn patch. But really, its illogical for them to stand next to any tank, whether the tank is surrounded by flames or not. As I put it, and others have also stated with equal eloquence, given a choice between standing in a ring of fire, or standing next to a really massive guy that wants to hit me with a giant stone hammer, I'm going with the fire.

But really, I should choose neither. I should run away, get PLed by a group of level 48 Master Illusionists, and then come back to Talos looking to start some sh*t.

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I should point out that, but for another exploit of villain AI, tanks and scrappers have no offense. If we are going to claim that pulling and other examples of taking advantage of villain AI are exploits that invalidate the blaster class, then essentially, tanks and (most) scrappers are also broken classes: but for the stupidity of villains, melee classes ought to, on average, be running around constantly while the minion, if he had any sense at all, ran away while his friends shot you in the back. Even a four year old can play a good game of keep-away.

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You'd have a point here, but for the fact that Scrappers are....
1. Faster than mobs
2. Can attack Mobs in the back (post I3 change)
3. Have some ranged attacks.

Smarter mobs won't make Scrappers useless, they will just add a (needed) penalty to Melee attacks.


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If scrappers were faster than all of their foes, that would function analogously to blasters outranging their foes.

Except scrappers aren't actually faster than all of their foes, unless they use yet another exploit - using travel powers in combat.

Would smarter foes make scrappers useless? Well, lets start with scrappers with melee-only attacks. And then lets force them to not attack while using a travel power; specifically flight, super jump, or superspeed.

Now put my brain into an illusionist.

So actually, improving the AI, combined with removing all of the exploits of the game engine in the same manner as you suggest for blasters, can in fact make scrappers useless, or to put it more specifically: melee-only fighters.

Which was my original point: if ranged, low defense classes are inherently broken, then so are melee, high defense classes.

You're right, though, some scrappers have range, and tanks can buy laser beam eyes later in the game. But that only serves to amplify the point: the same argument for claiming the ranged/low defense concept is broken can be used to claim the melee only/high defense concept is broken.

But that is an extreme point of view; its not one I personally subscribe to. This is, after all, a game. In a certain sense, to claim blasters are broken is roughly analogous to claiming that knights are broken in chess, because their movement is inferior to the other pieces and a single knight can't force checkmate like a queen or a rook can, which is the whole purpose of being a chess piece in the first place: to give your player the ability to beat the opponent.


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Taunt and villains charging into melee range are both examples of game engine side effects and exploiting enemy AI that give melee classes an advantage they otherwise ought not to have. And what the heck is punch-voke anyway? In terms of game mechanics, its a suicide pact: the more you beat up on my friends, the more I want you to be able to hit me also.

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Taunt exists becuase Tanks Aren't Scary. Every 4 year old in the Arena knows to kill the Tank last....Taunt in the arena is nothing more than taking control away from players.

If Tanks did enough damage to one-shot most minions and lieutenants, then they'd get attacked more by Players and the AI alike.

The Devs have an innate resistance to long recharge, high cost, high damage attacks, so we will never see a proper "Tank", even though the XP/hour for such a class could be easily "balanced".


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Even if you give a tank these capabilities, it wouldn't eliminate the completely arbitrary benefits of taunt. In fact, if a tank could actually do that, taunt becomes even more essential. Because in the absence of taunt, anything with a ranged attack would be better off standing far away and shooting at the tank, preferrably in a wide circle separated from his partners in crime, and those things with only melee attacks should run in, use it, and run away while it recharges. They should never, ever, for any reason stand next to the tank. Even other tanks in the game are effectively squishy next to an actual (high level) player tank; even freak tanks are idiots for going toe to toe with a tank. If tanks had the damage you specify above, anything lower than a freak tank would have to be uttery insane to approach a tank, unless the AI was smart enough to use tactics: have the hardiest member of the party approach and get the tank to expend its attacks, then while they are recharging, everyone else rush in, attack, and run back.

That's what proper AI does to a tank in the absence of taunt. But we give tanks taunt, so they can draw villains to them at the push of a button, because their job is to draw villains to them. A blaster's job is to keep villains away from them, and prevent them from shooting at the blaster until she dies, but we do not get a power that lets us make that happen at the push of a button.

A ranged, low defense class like a blaster could be made extremely effective if we outranged everything. But everything that actually outranged us would be (and is) a potentially serious threat. In my opinion, this is exactly the same thing as saying a melee, high defense class is extremely effective as long as it can get into melee range, anything that can keep away from it and still attack is a potential threat, and somethng that potentially can't be killed. If the game allows a lot of things to outrange a blaster, but few things to keep away from a melee-fighter, the game is inherently unbalanced to favor melee, and in a way that is just as much an exploit as a game engine that encouraged hover-sniping.

Finding and adding ways to give blasters tactical advantages they can use to compensate for their inherent weaknesses isn't, in my opinion, just looking for ways to exploit the game engine. Its simply acknowledging that the game engine already gives huge, arbitrary advantages to melee/defensive classes in ways that are equally "exploitive," and allowing blasters to even the scales with equally arbitrary, but balanced advantages is perfectly reasonable under those conditions.

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This is true. As the game is currently, Blasters are helpless.

Once side effects of the game engine and AI is taken out of the equation, it's clear, even to you, that Blasters have no defenses at all.

This is my entire point. This is a problem, actually.


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I should point out that, but for another exploit of villain AI, tanks and scrappers have no offense. If we are going to claim that pulling and other examples of taking advantage of villain AI are exploits that invalidate the blaster class, then essentially, tanks and (most) scrappers are also broken classes: but for the stupidity of villains, melee classes ought to, on average, be running around constantly while the minion, if he had any sense at all, ran away while his friends shot you in the back. Even a four year old can play a good game of keep-away.

Taunt and villains charging into melee range are both examples of game engine side effects and exploiting enemy AI that give melee classes an advantage they otherwise ought not to have. And what the heck is punch-voke anyway? In terms of game mechanics, its a suicide pact: the more you beat up on my friends, the more I want you to be able to hit me also.

Once the side-effects and AI issues are removed for blasters I expect them to be removed for all classes, or alternatively, I expect comparable deliberate (so as to be immune to the charge of being an "exploit") effects be put right back in.

Take out the "pulling exploit" but then give me back selective aggro control in a deliberate fashion that functions for blasters just like taunt and punch-voke does for tanks. Or conclude its really 6 of one and half a dozen of the other, and just sanction pulling as not an exploit. Ditto all the other stuff.

The only class that really would function well in a game engine "with no exploits" is the controller class. In a game engine modelled on the real world, controllers would rule. Blasters would get hit in the head with a thrown rock and die, scrappers would have to run faster than me or I'd run around in circles around the nearest tree, and tanks would be standing in the street yelling "you wanna piece of me!" to nobody at all.

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You know, I just realized something. I think somewhere along the line, the devs forgot why we were so frail, why we had no defense, HP, resistance, mez protection, etc. We had range. As long as we could stay out of the range of our foes, we were relatively safe. The rooting effect of our powers made it so that we couldn't stay at range forever, but smart use of immobilize, tanks, and other effects could negate our lack of defense.

What happened was Fly. Fly was an easy way to remain out of enemy range no matter what. To counter this, more enemies were given ranged attacks and much greater range.

What they need to do is reduce enemy range and put in more flying foes. Then perpetually outranging wouldn't be as big of an issue, and Blasters can actually have "range as a defense" again.

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They didn't forget. Statesman suggested in another thread that in his opinion, range *is* a defense because ranged attacks do less damage than melee attacks.

This, of course, fails to take into account that raw numbers like that don't really matter, what matters is if you can be killed. Ranged attacks can kill blasters easier than melee attacks can kill scrappers, so while range might be a defense (against melee attacks, certainly), it is clearly not as good a defense as actual defense appears to be. Of course, the real point is not whether range is as good a defense as scrapper defenses, but just whether range is good enough of a defense for blasters. In and of itself, it doesn't appear to be.

More interesting, my main offensive alpha strike option against bosses is a melee attack - total focus - so I'm actually encouraged to enter melee range. In fact, I'm significantly more survivable if I choose to do so initially, than if I attempt to stand at range the whole time.

Hover-kiting is highly over-rated. Staying out of range is perhaps easier while hovering, until the villain attempts to run away. It is much easier to keep your distance and shoot at something on the ground. In the air, the villain AI at some point gives up trying to reach you and runs. On the ground, they'll keep chasing almost indefinitely.

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They don't seem to mind giving us 100% damage mitigation in the form of an ice hold, but 25% defense is probably way too high.

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It's 100% to one guy. If there are four guys, it's 25%.

If there are twenty. . .that's a problem.


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Which is why I tend to disagree with people who believe the proper direction to go on balancing blasters is to make them AoE monsters. AoE is only good if its "AoE-kill" ala fire blasters. But there is nowhere to go once you give blasters AoE alpha strike kill capability.

Single target capability balances well with single target damage mitigation, and blasters become very good at killing small numbers of targets, and eventually get swamped if there are too many to handle - which would differentiate them from controllers who would be able to handle more, but kill them slower.

Because we have lower defenses, and scrappers have higher defenses, it actually makes more sense for blasters to be the boss killers, and scrappers to be the gazillion-minion killers - if we had enough control to handle the single boss. It makes much less sense the other way around, unless blasters become walking nukes. The problem is that tanks can kill minions just fine; but if scrappers had more cones and AoEs, I think they would be much better equiped to out-kill both blasters and tanks in settings with large amounts of minions.

It doesn't preclude AoE blasters, just like "scrappers are melee only" is also a fiction. But I think AoE blasting should be the carefully crafted exception to the rule, not the rule.

Just a thought:

Blaster: high-extreme single target damage/low-high AoE damage, low defense, high single target control
Tank: medium single target damage/low PBAoE damage, extreme defense, aggro control only
Scrapper: medium-high single target damage/medium-high PBAoE damage, high defense, medium damage mitigation control
Controller: low-medium single target damage/low AoE damage, low defense, extreme single target control/high AoE control
Defender: medium-high single target damage/low-medium AoE damage, medium defense, low-medium control

Its overly simplistic, to be sure, but it seems to be an easier jumping off point for balance to me than the current model.

In a team, the tank grabs aggro, the scrapper begins wiping out clumps of minions and LTs, and the blaster (at least to start) focuses on the one nasty target, i.e. the boss. In and around that, the controller is adding more control where needed - AoE control to assist the tank and scrapper, single target control to help the boss. The defender is dropping buffs on everyone, or debuffs on everyone else, and possibly helping with offense.

Take any one of them away, and the others can compensate. The scrapper might not kill the boss as fast as the (protected) blaster, but he'll kill the boss all the same. The controller might not be as efficient as the tank in control - because controller control keeps the villains scattered, while tank control clumps the villains more, but the villains are controlled all the same. The scrapper is also a kill-faster, but not absolutely necessary killer. The defender is a general team-accelerator.

But even though none are necessary, all are useful, at least in theory.

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I'll take freebee resistances no matter how small, but its worth noting that even the resistance of tough, which is higher than most suggestions for adding resistance to blaster secondaries, isn't enough of an incentive to get even a sizable minority of blasters to take it.


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Blasters have nothing to stack directly on top of tough. See, what makes Resistance juicy [aside from the Regen advantage] is that it works with Tough. Tough alone allows you to take 50% more S/L damage: Resistance and Tough allow you to take 100% more S/L damage. 66% resistance would allow 200% more S/L damage.

Right now, Blasters [correctly] judge that they can't get enough damage mitigation to be worth the colossal investment in powers, power pools, and slots it takes. You can try to build a "pool power Scrapper defense" but it really, really just doesn't work.

However, due to the cumulative nature of +DEF, if you had a power that gave just a LITTLE more defense- 7.5% unslotted, in that range- you could then choose to build a Blaster that would have 50% +DEF - yes, it would have large holes [Area of Effect, probably toxic/psi, possibly more] and cost a lot of powers, but it would be an option for Blasters who want to be less Black Widow and more Thor. (spoilered gawdawful pun follows) [yeah yeah, you're plenty thor now.]

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Actually, this is an argument for granting defense instead of resistance - since there are more defense powers in the power pools to stack.

Except, and this is tricky, right at the point where it starts to work well, the devs are likely to pull back on it.

My objection to adding resistance isn't that resistance is always going to be too weak, but rather that the devs are going to shy away from making it strong enough to matter, almost by definition.

They don't seem to mind giving us 100% damage mitigation in the form of an ice hold, but 25% defense is probably way too high. This points to thinking about damage mitigation in terms of the notion that it isn't how much we get that matters so much as the perception of how we go about getting it. Getting it by being forced to attack things seems more palatable than anything "passive."

Which, despite all the other statements about blasters and scrappers, might be their true fundamental difference. Its acceptable for scrappers to get passive defenses (even toggles), while blasters should generally get active defense, in the form of damage mitigation through attacking.

If this psychological point is true, then it tells us what to ask for. Ask for resistances, and we might get them, but they will be weak because of the perceived notion that we ought not to be able to just "take it." Ask for enhanced knockdown, ranged disorients, immobilizes, or other forms of active mitigation, and short of asking for too much overlap with controllers, we might get a lot more net mitigation capabilities that way.

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Tactics are great. I'd like to see an environment that rewards this even more- more places to snipe from concealment, more "I can shoot you off tall places and then you have to run and get me" situations, pits full of angry crocodiles, whatever.

But requiring people to push the bleeding edge of tactics just to survive, that's. . .well, it's expecting an awful lot from your players.


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That is why my opinion is probably a lonely minority: blasters aren't broken, because skilled players can make them work, but blasters need help, because the skill to make them work can be substantially higher than other classes in most cases in the late game.

Blasters (to my mind) are in a grey area that makes tweaking them something to be performed carefully. It wouldn't take much to make them excessively powerful in the hands of someone with any skill, and it wouldn't take much to break them so no one could play them well.


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And I don't think "Blasters Shall Never Have Defenses, No Never" is a core of the Dev philosophy- look at the Epic pools . Level 45 is just too late for Temp Invuln to help.


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Conversely, level 15 is too early - it turns us into scrappers. There is a fine line there. Or rather, temp invuln is probably too strong to give at any moment other than the absolute end game.

Lets not forget, the devs sometimes do contradictory things. They might still believe blasters, as a class, should not be getting +DEF and +RES, and then turn around and say "EPPs should give blasters what they can't get normally to make the EPPs cool" and then give us powerful +DEF or +RES.

That would be comparable to believing that "the tier 9 scrapper defenses should be situational and not be perma-able" and then deliberately give SR a perma-able elude for "scrapper balance" and then deliberately give regen a perma-able MoG, for "regen balancing" - and then taking them both away later to reassert their original belief.

They actually did, in fact, do exactly that - witness the evolution of Force of Nature.


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A *small* defensive in the secondaries can have a distinctly useful effect: there's a Regen power that gives 7.5% S/L damage resistance. It adds up, with Tough and lots of slots, to about 50%. Doesn't suck. 10% Defense, it could add up.


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You need to be careful, though, when pulling out one element of defense from a scrapper set, because they have a tendancy to combine in ways that stack the benefit.

Tough, for example, benefits regen scrappers a lot more than the resistance numbers imply, because of the ultra-fast healing they have. Tough lowers incoming damage, and thus buys time. But buying time means something radically different for a regen scrapper as a blaster. Buying 10 extra seconds means the regen has healed over half his total health. Buying 10 extra seconds for a blaster means he might be able to pop a respite if he has one.

I'll take freebee resistances no matter how small, but its worth noting that even the resistance of tough, which is higher than most suggestions for adding resistance to blaster secondaries, isn't enough of an incentive to get even a sizable minority of blasters to take it.


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If that's too "ranged Scrapper" for ya (I don't see it as such) . . . maybe something more active, the equivalent of Smoke Grenade. 30% Acc Debuff isn't dogchow. (Drops 75% to hit down to, like, 52%. Don't know how it scales with enemy level, though.)

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I think the devs realize they are walking a fine line when giving blasters mitigation powers, and I think that in general, they are much more likely to hand them out to one set at a time, so that they can balance the set internally, rather than give out blanket debuff/control powers. Thus, devices has caltrops and smoke, but its missing Build Up. Ice has holds, but its missing a snipe. That sort of thing.

Given that, I think its actually more likely that we will get control in the primary and secondary sets (of a sort) rather than defense in the secondaries (although that doesn't preclude getting both). But I think the devs will want to experiment with small things first, not big things like giving everyone smoke grenade.

Changing power thrust into repulsion field, for example, fits in real well with the "range is supposed to be a defense" idea they have, and its a small change that basically turns a targetted power into a PBAoE (but I would miss that punch). But there is no /fire power you can turn into rep field naturally. But you could turn hot feet into a (maybe better) version of ice patch. Its tier 9, so maybe its bigger in area of effect than ice patch. A 40 foot ice patch would turn hot feet from crap to cake in one swoop.

I think changes like that are much more likely, and certainly much more likely than straight +DEF +RES +REGEN.

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Thanks for proving my point!

So, You spent your 20's using an AI exploit...
You spent your 20's and 30's using a specific ability that only 1 set has (I'm not sure if KB is an exploit, but players sure hate it!)
You spent your 40's using a Travel Power exploit.

How do I know that this isn't the dev intent? Because of the Arena.

Travel powers now have suppression.
Stealth powers can be seen through.
Good luck "pulling" or otherwise messing with the AI of another player!
I have no doubt that Knockback will be "adjusted" in a further issue, as Players don't want to be denied the possibility to react.


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By extension of that logic, controllers were not meant to be able to control (holds have suppression), tanks were not meant to resist ranged damage (blasters get unresistable damage), toggle defenses were meant to be fragile (the number of detoggle powers is now pretty extensive).

You aren't supposed to extrapolate from the arena like that. I can't pull in the arena, but neither can a tank taunt - at least, not like they can in PvE. A large percentage of the changes in the arena were made either because players react differently than the AI in the game either does, or can, react, or because players have substantial advantages in PvE that the devs did not want to carry over into PvP.

Or sometimes they wanted to give the players an advantage. Defender debuffs are unresistable in PvP, but not in PvE. Why not make them unresistable in PvE, if the arena is supposed to be a guide to "how things ought to be?"

BTW, as to jousting, the -acc in superspeed did not prevent jousting, at least for blasters. Neither does suppression. And it affects me not at all with regard to using stealth+SS as a first strike enabler for total focus. If you think the developers believe that is an exploit, and are working to eliminate that, they are doing a really bad job at trying.

You'd also be wrong: they specifically stated that they added the -acc, and subsequently movement suppression, to force players who use travel powers in combat to have to "stick around" if they attack, so that there is at least the possibility of counterattack - in the arena.

Unless you are a warhulk, there is no possibility of counterattack if total focus lands in PvE, but not because of movement, but because of the mag 4 disorient. If you think something is wrong with stealth+ss+tf, its problem lies with the mag 4 disorient in TF, not in stealth+ss.


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The Arena shows us that if AI isn't involved and exploits are removed, Blasters are a binary AT, just like Regen is a binary set.


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Well, at least regen is a really good binary set.

But seriously, you almost seem to be coming from a position that states any tactic that doesn't involve pushing a power button and seeing what happens is by definition an exploit. Its a circular argument that says blasters are supposed to be completely defenseless, thus, anything that mitigates damage for a blaster is by definition an exploit, and when we remove the "exploits" that mitigate damage, blasters are helpless.

It equates defenseless with helpless, to prove blasters are helpless. But the premise is false: blasters are not supposed to be defenseless = helpless, they are supposed to be defenseless = little or no +DEF and +RES.

The fact that you think my experience proves your point only demonstrates that we see things differently. But, if you really believe what you are saying, that these blaster techniques are really exploits, in the proper sense of the word, then you really ought to be petitioning them whenever you encounter them.

In fact, I will do you one better. I'm going to log my blaster this evening, execute all of those tactics, and then petition myself.

Let Cryptic make the final call: exploit, or reasonable tactic. If Cryptic doesn't think its an exploit, that would be authoritative.

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I wouldn't mind at all if blasters required the most skill to be effective - I just want ways to use skill to level the playing field enough to make the difference not worth bothering about. Personally, I don't think we are really all that far away from that, in the grand scheme of things.

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Interesting. So you're stating that less skilled players should be denied the ability to play one AT, but not others?

Or am I misreading you?

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Denied? Anyone can play anything they want.

Defenders are harder to play than tanks. Is that also a problem that needs fixing?


Perhaps that is just a sidestep of the question. So rather than take the coward's way out, I'll say, yes, if the ATs are going to be different in a meaningful way, those differences are going to mean that some people will not want to play some ATs. That may be because the sets don't appeal to them - specifically how they *think* the sets ought to work. That may be because the play-style doesn't work for them. It may be because of leveling speed, or dependence on teaming.

Or it might be because they just don't have the skill to make the set work.

I don't see anything wrong with that at all.

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I’m not sure what you are trying to get at here, are you really suggesting that because other borderline exploits of game mechanics exist that other should be created?


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Actually, yes. The only difference between an exploit and a tactical option in CoH tends to be "is this what we want to have happen or not."

When I stand outside perception range and shoot a mob, then run around a corner, and the game mechanics cause one guy to run after me like an idiot, and the rest of his friends to stand around, also like idiots, that situation either is, or is not, an exploit based solely on an arbitrary judgement: is pulling reasonable as a tactic or not.

Should a blaster be allowed to use his melee attacks as a first strike weapon, which *requires* stacked stealth. If your answer is "yes" then stacked stealth is not an exploit. If your answer is "no" then it is.

I'm not saying exploits are good. I'm saying what we define as acceptable tactics defines what are exploits and what are not.

Range means nothing, to accuracy, to damage, short of being out of range. That means, to a first order approximation, moving while fighting is - or is supposed to be - a meaningless exercise (for blasters). Cover means nothing, because the game allows you to shoot at anything with any part in line of sight. This means hiding behind things is - or is supposed to be - a meaningless exercise.

When you really start to wind it down, on paper, there are almost no tactics to speak of that the game engine directly supports. Its Risk, with health for armies.

Most of the tactics - for blasters - take advantage of oddities in the way the game works. Pulling takes advantage of the fact that the AI is brain-dead. Its only two steps removed from the inert Terra Volta villains. Kiting is actually less of an exploit: it takes advantage of the fact I outrange them, and I intend to keep it that way. That cannot be an exploit, and kiting cannot be removed from the game so long as I do, in fact, outrange them.

Without tactics, blaster damage mitigation quickly converges on status effects the devs don't want us to have too much of, the defensive powers the devs don't want us to have at all, and massive offense that we simply are never going to get. And those tactical options tend to come from, for lack of a better word, "deficits" in how the game poorly mirrors reality.


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The problem with your logic is the situations where you could sit beyond a mobs range and attack it with impunity have been systematically removed from the game, so the devs are not in fact saying “if you want to be virtually unhittable and unkillable for 30 to 60 seconds, while standing perfectly immobile and shooting at things, thats fine” In fact they are saying just the opposite and the fact that they have not bothered to remove a handful of unprofitable cases doesn’t change this.


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So long as I outrange the foes, I can stand far away and shoot them, if I want to shoot at them slowly. This has always been true for a slotted snipe, and always true for boost range. Neither has been touched since the game was released. I'm actually unaware of any instance where blasters originally outranged a foe and they directly changed the game to cause us to no longer do so. I'm not sure what you are referencing when you say the devs have been actively trying to prevent kiting or out-of-range sniping, because while some AI has changed how the foes try to run away from you when you do it, they've never interfered with me actually doing it, that I can remember.

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All that aside, do you really think kiting is a good or fun thing to have in this game? Do you really want to see blaster play devolve into running away from something for 5 min while you fir an occasional shot and eventually bring t down? Would this really be fun to you?


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You could say that about any singular activity. It would be deathly boring to stand and fire, forever. It would be deathly boring to joust with total focus, forever. It would be deathly boring to hover-snipe, forever. Or to run up to foes and nova them, or permanently assist the tank with single target fire, forever.

But its nice to have the choice to do any or all of those as I see the situation warrant it. And sometimes one or the other is the best, or only good option available at the time, even if it would be boring to use it exclusively at other times. I still shoot single targets, even though total focus hits harder.

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Pulling, in a very real sense, is the ultimate exploit. What possible justification is there for allowing blasters (or anyone else with a ranged attack, actually) to single out one member of a group and get him to run over and attack you, while the rest of his buddies stand around like turkeys staring up at the rain?


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It seems to me what you are really saying is that range should have some sort of importance, and it does. Unfortunately that is mostly look, feel and style. There are a number of other minor benefits as well. There is also the potential to make AoE’s into an important differentiation but this isn’t universally the case now as three of the five blaster sets feel the need to label themselves as single target.


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Not so much range, as isolation. The way range affects aggro, combined with los issues, creates the actual opportunity for pulling.

If I said that what blasters need is a power that dimension-shifts everybody, and allows us to let them out one at a time, that would be laughed off the boards.

Except, thats what an expert puller does. We (most of us) think pulling is ok, but uber-dimension-shift is not ok. I think that is because we tend to think "tactics" are allowed to have final effects that just a straight (unskilled) application of a power should not grant automatically.

Problem is, once we venture too far into the realm of "what can I *do* to make *this* happen, we start to enter the grey area of "exploits." The question is, should there even *be* things that are "tricks" without being actual "exploits" and should blasters be allowed - even encouraged - to use them to compensate for lack of defense.

I tend to think yes, they should be so allowed; that tactical application of offense (and just plain tactics) should have some bearing on how blasters survive. The question is where to draw the line, and it would be helpful if the devs drew it for us, to eliminate endless debate on what is, and is not, fair game.

So far, they have done so (somewhat inconsistently) by example, but not by rule. That makes "tactics" discussions a veritable mine field of tangential debates.

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Making ranged damage meaningfully different then melee damage does not mean that difference needs to be as large as the current difference between scrapper and blaster defense, all you really need to do is insure that the benefit is suitable to the advantage it actually it actually brings. The play style will still be so different that there is no danger of a scrappers and blasters blurring into one.


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I agree completely, and its tactical concerns, and skill, that will be able to bring about and amplify that difference. Blasters are not, despite all the number crunching, hopelessly far behind scrappers. We are not 100x less effective, or whatever some raw number suggests. With just a small amount of (sanctioned) tools, blaster skill can take us the rest of the way.

I wouldn't mind at all if blasters required the most skill to be effective - I just want ways to use skill to level the playing field enough to make the difference not worth bothering about. Personally, I don't think we are really all that far away from that, in the grand scheme of things.

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Something to think about: the risk associated with confronting something like a mezzing boss (as a blaster) is very close to infinite; blasters typically take these things on by using tactics that essentially drop the risk associated with the boss itself to zero - the risk the blaster faces is that the tactic, whatever it is, fails to work at that time. If it does work, risk-free. If it doesn't, extreme, mostly fatal, risk exposure.

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Then, as I suspected, Blaster can't work as an AT.

Too much damage = 0 risk.
Too little damage = Infinite risk.

How can that ever be properly balanced? Am I missing something?

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Whats missing is that some people make blasters work in spite of this. How they do that should offer a clue to how to make blasters work in general.

I spent the 20s perfecting the art of the pull.

I spent the 20s and the 30s mastering knockback.

I spent the 40s jousting.

I would have been in deep trouble in the 40s in my solo missions, with Rikti Magi, Nemesis bosses, and the like (heck, just a pair of Mentalists would be death) without total focus.


Pulling, controlled side effects, tactical use of speed and maneuvering, combining melee and ranged attacks, and situational alpha strike mez.

The problem is that so many of these things seem to be opposed on ideological grounds as being exploits, or out of archetype definition, or in some weird cases, its argued that they wouldn't actually work, an interesting theoretical argument to make to someone who uses them.

There are even people who make fire/fire work, God bless them. How they manage that trick should offer clues to how to improve those sets. Look at what they do, and either change the sets so they don't have to do some of the crazy things they do, or, just the opposite, improve the sets so that the crazy things they do are not so crazy, and actually more practical.

Hot feet and ice patch are soooo close to being alike, yet the differences are critical to their usefulness. That's a huge hint for anyone balancing blaster sets.

I love the idea of turning the energy secondary melee attacks into PBAoEs, or short range (10-20feet) in-your-face attacks. But warning: those are serious buffs, and teeny tiny balancing changes that seem small to the devs can destroy the usefulness of the powers completely. Take thunder kick, from the MA set. Used to be a 100% mag 1 disorient. Now its a 20% mag 2. Mag goes up so it can actually stun things, percentage goes down so it can't stack effectively with other MA stuns. If the same thing happens to total focus - we get range, but the stun drops to 50% - its now useless (at least to me, for the primary purpose I use it for). This sort of thing is sometimes unobvious to the very people who don't like the powers, don't use them, and therefore aren't fully familiar with why they actually work.

So, how might you improve things? Here's a thought, explosive blast is a tier 8 energy blast power that hits weaker than torrent, has longer recharge, longer activation time, and doesn't even have a 100% knockback percentage. Lots of blasters don't even take the thing.

So, add a disorient to it, and lower its damage slightly. Torrent becomes the cone-kb, and explosive blast becomes the AoE-disorient. A short duration 75% mag 3 stun would work - good chance to stun LTs and minions, and good AoE damage mitigator to give to an otherwise heavy single-target set.

Whats nice is that almost no one would object to the additional effect (the KB scatters anyway, the disorient just helps with the not-shooting-back part), and any "balancing" the devs might decide to do is unlikely to hurt energy blasters (reduce the damage of EB? ha ha, ooh that stings).

The blaster class isn't hopeless. It doesn't even require radical changes. You just have to weed out all the "blasters suck, maybe with 10x damage they might be ok" stuff, the "blasters are fine, I solo invincible missions set for 8, and I only use power pool attacks, you losers" stuff, and look for the "I can make blasters work, but this might be helpful given how I play" stuff. Average all of those out, and you'll probably get some good stuff in there somewhere.

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That isn't true for any other AT - no one else is told, when facing a boss, that they are supposed to die and if they don't something is wrong.


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To be fair the current goal for the devs is that when you face a boss one on one you need to be on top of your game to come out on top. This may only be true for blasters and some defenders who can actually have it much worse, but the breakdown isn’t what blasters are being told they should be able to do but what other AT’s do in practice.


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I wasn't referring to any specific dev statement, but rather other statements (by players) in the forums. The progression (and it is a loud but minority position to be sure, but elements of it are often quoted by a larger majority) goes something like this:

Stealth stacking with superspeed is an exploit, because it allows blasters to attack from melee range without being attacked first.

Why shouldn't blasters be able to do that?

Because they are squishy, they shouldn't be able to attack from melee range without taking damage.

But ranged attacks can't deal with a mezzing boss, unless your ranged attacks happen to have a mez (elec, ice). The stealth/TF strike is the main tactic some blasters have to attack and defeat an mezzing boss.

Who said you should be able to defeat a mezzing boss? You're a blaster, if you can't, tough.

I'm generally on top of my game. When not half asleep, and I haven't walked under any ladders recently, I can take out two mezzing bosses. But I find it interesting that - for some people - any time you are doing anything other than standing-and-fighting, you are probably gaming the game.

By that definition, my blaster's entire career is a thousand+ hours of exploits, in between struggling to find other exploits. I just always thought of them as tactics.

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I know I've missed chunks of this thread - what's the scalable build up idea?

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My scalable build up idea was to start build up at 100% of base damage like it is now, and starting at at about level 20 slowly increase that to about 200% by level 40. That way, all through the 20s and 30s our burst damage keeps creeping upward to help us deal with things like mezzing LTs (in the 20s) up to more serious threats in the 30s and into the 40s. The idea is that we typically have more than enough damage to deal with a couple minions here and there, and the average non-mezzing LT is also not a problem. But build up would buy us a temporary boost to strike at the troublesome targets - and since its inherently non-perma-able, its a situational boost, unlike increasing base damage where you are giving blasters enough damage to deal with troublesome targets, but they get to keep that damage level all the time, which makes it harder to balance.

I hope it kinda evens out blaster life: TOs to 15, DOs to 22, SOs at 22, scalable build up kicks in and keeps adding incremental benefit until 40, and then EPPs kick in.

This won't work unless the blaster cap goes up substantially, or build up ignores the cap. But it is in keeping with the way scrapper mez protection, works, say. Actually, it would be comparable to scrapper damage if build up ignored the blaster cap, just like criticals ignore the scrapper cap.

The alternative I've heard is to allow build up to boost total damage, or what some people call increasing base damage. I'm not a fan of that mainly because I'd like the boost to be independent of slotting: there are so many ways that alternate slotting gets penalized from the classic 5+1 slotting, that I don't want to add yet another reason why not slotting 5+1 is stupid.

Devices would needs some alternative, but devices might get an equivalent benefit by simply improving the bombs (the bombs are a unique advantage of devices set in terms of alpha strike capability, so it makes sense to balance a better build up in other sets with better bombs in the devices set).

I also wonder if build up is too short. I wonder if doubling both duration and recharge wouldn't make it more effective: 20 second duration, 180 recharge. Fully slotted, you'd be using it 20 seconds out of every 50, instead of 10 seconds out of every 25, but right now the activation time inherent in build up acts as, in my opinion, an unwaranted penalty for some users.

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All the different LoS-breaking tricks used by blasters for pulling, or just plain shooting, are a form of damage mitigation. If its considered cheating to use them, and blasters aren't supposed to have actual defenses or resistances, then we are really left with saying the game is designed for blasters to get killed, and if blasters aren't getting killed, something is wrong, which to my mind is insane.


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My impression was that Blasters are intended to kill all of the Mobs in a spawn before they can return fire.

So, yes, if offense = defense, then ducking around a corner is an exploit.

There isn't ever intended to be any survivors from a high-level single target blast, or lower level attack chain.

That's how I imagine that this game was originally balanced. Now that mobs have gotten tougher, and more levels exist than when the game was released, this is no longer the case.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the exploits aren't being fixed because they are acting as a band-aid to the solo Blaster game.

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I do not believe there was or is ever a time where all blaster alpha strikes were consistently lethal, and in a very real sense if that were ever made true, we'd have no need for defense because if there "isn't ever intended to be any survivors from a high-level single target blast" then by definition we are fighting risk-free again. Death is the ultimate damage mitigation.

But pure offense cannot be blaster's sole damage mitigation, because if blaster's sole damage mitigation is kill-speed, then you have only three real possibilities: build in an enormous amount of downtime in-between attacks, or turn blasters into unstoppable killing machines, or if the kill-speed isn't good enough, force blasters to commit suicide when they attack things.

I suggest scalable build up because it does act to use "downtime" of sorts to balance better damage, but that alone can't be the sole method of balancing blasters, because alone it is too knife-edged in its balance - too easy to give too little or too much damage. Other mitigators, like knockback or disorient, act to slow combat down enough to prevent runaway offense from taking over.

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Basically, what I'm saying is that the exploits aren't being fixed because they are acting as a band-aid to the solo Blaster game.


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My point was that if the game engine didn't allow for what some people are calling exploits, I'd be advocating actually adding them in as explicit features.

Pulling, in a very real sense, is the ultimate exploit. What possible justification is there for allowing blasters (or anyone else with a ranged attack, actually) to single out one member of a group and get him to run over and attack you, while the rest of his buddies stand around like turkeys staring up at the rain?

But without pulling, there absolutely must be some way for blasters to isolate members from a group, because they are simply not designed to take attacks from the entire group. So if the game engine didn't allow for pulling, we'd have to just build it, or something like it, right back in.

So maybe some things aren't being "fixed" simply because, intended or not, it just makes sense for them to be there, given how the game currently works. Necessary evil, or unexpected bonus, its all the same, if it works, at least until something better comes along.

Something to think about: the risk associated with confronting something like a mezzing boss (as a blaster) is very close to infinite; blasters typically take these things on by using tactics that essentially drop the risk associated with the boss itself to zero - the risk the blaster faces is that the tactic, whatever it is, fails to work at that time. If it does work, risk-free. If it doesn't, extreme, mostly fatal, risk exposure.

The way I deal with them is by using what a lot of people consider an exploit: stacking stealth and superspeed, and using total focus to disorient the boss without giving him any chance whatsoever of getting a shot off.

The problem is that, at least for me as an energy/energy blaster, I don't really have much in the way of alternatives. I've been told that there aren't supposed to be any - I'm supposed to die, basically.

That isn't true for any other AT - no one else is told, when facing a boss, that they are supposed to die and if they don't something is wrong.

Its not necessarily a common perception, but its out there, and its probably one of the most important things that needs to be addressed: the notion that just because blasters are supposed to be "defenseless", in the sense of no +DEF, they are also supposed to be "defenseless", in the sense of "helpless."

There's offense capabilities, and defense capabilities, and if defensive capabilities are going to be restricted, and offense is not going to be allowed to run rampant, then what blasters have left is tactical application of offense. The game engine is not a FPS; tactical options are extremely limited and what can be added is extremely limited. We shouldn't be dismissing off hand the few we have, just because they might be "unintended." The game engine itself might be giving us hints we ought to listen to.

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1)remove rooting. This is perhaps the single point I agree with most


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This is a bad idea. The only thing this would do is allow kiting of mobs that have shorter range then blasters. Kiting isn’t what blasters should be looking for. It isn’t fun it isn’t strategic, and it’s barely more then a exploit. The devs tried to keep kiting out of the game for a reason and I would not want to see them deliberately introduce it now.

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Perhaps, but actually, removing the roots would only affect kiting in the very tight range of situations where the blaster outranges the villain(s), but only by a very small amount. We can't kite if they outrange us, the extra maneuverability we would get by not being rooted would be much more tactical and fair under those circumstances (it would be used to stay out of melee range, for example, but we'd still be in ranged-range). When we significantly outrange the foes, we can kite with or without roots (hover-sniping is really a lazy alternative to kiting; almost anything that can be hover-sniped can be kited).

In fact, there are very few "tactical" options available to blasters that aren't, in fact, actual "glitches" in the game engine. There are two ways to look at that. One is to say that things like pulling around corners or jump-shots, are unintended by the game engine, and defacto exploits. But an alternative point of view that I tend to subscribe to is that if blasters are intended to actually *have* and *use* tactical options, to make up for their gasoline-soaked gauze-like defenses, then the important issue is whether such options exist, and are they relatively reasonable for blasters to have, completely separate from whether they were originally intended by the game engine.

All the different LoS-breaking tricks used by blasters for pulling, or just plain shooting, are a form of damage mitigation. If its considered cheating to use them, and blasters aren't supposed to have actual defenses or resistances, then we are really left with saying the game is designed for blasters to get killed, and if blasters aren't getting killed, something is wrong, which to my mind is insane.

I think what elevates something to an exploit is when the net consequences are out of bounds with what we want or expect (in this case) blasters to have.

I used to kite trolls in Skyway. Took forever to kill them. Was that an exploit, because I did it "risk free?" If it was, why, why, why do range enhancements exist in the game? Because range means diddly squat to both accuracy and damage, the only purpose to slotting for range is to be out of range of the villains - to shoot at them risk free. To my way of thinking, its a fair trade - less risk (zero risk, in fact) for slower kill speed (damage goes down). But if all actions that allow people to kill with low or zero risk are "exploits" then range enhancers and boost range (the power), among other things, are exploits. 5 lucks gives a better net benefit than kiting, so if kiting is an exploit, perhaps hunting around contacts is a form of exploit as well. It could be fixed by capping the number if inspirations you can buy per hour, say. But do we want to actually do that? And if we don't, what does that say about kiting, hover-sniping, corner-pulling, etc. What does it say about allowing blasters to maneuver while firing?

Because it seems odd to me to say "if you want to be virtually unhittable and unkillable for 30 to 60 seconds, while standing perfectly immobile and shooting at things, thats fine, but if you want to run around, jump around, maneuver all over the place, and be significantly less unhittable and unkillable while doing that, that is unacceptable."

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How do you make me feel like having a blaster is nearly essential when I form a TF? Increasing your damage won't do it. I can already kill all the mobs quickly.


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This is both trivially easy, and never going to be implemented.

Change the AI so the villains are not stupid enough to stand next to scrappers and tanks while getting killed.

"Making range a defense" is a solo-blaster issue, mainly. Making range an offense is a team issue - do you need something that can kill at range or not.

Although there are advantages to blasters having range, in the sense of comparing the situation to blasters not having range, it is much less of an advantage when compared to scrappers and tanks not having range, because not only are villains not running out of melee range, they are often doing scrappers and tanks a favor by running into melee range saving scrappers and tanks the trouble of running around much.

This is especially true in teams, where the alternative to chasing a runner is to simply switch targets; the first 70%-80% of villains can generally be killed without chasing anything - even if villains run they often come back.

The twist to blasters is that when your team doesn't have a good tank around, scrappers can stay alive much better than blasters can, on average (great blasters always look better than stupid scrappers, but good scrappers tend to do better than good blasters). But when your team does have a good tank, the tank not only draws aggro, helping blasters, but also puts the villains into a nice pile, nullifying any scrapper range disadvantage a blaster might have looked better against.

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HO's, Aim, Assault, and (Almost all) Defender powers will raise your damage from 400%......to 400%.


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My point is that the vast majority of blasters will never reach that damage cap, let alone have any real reason to need to exceed it, so why make such a huge deal about it?

You have one ENE secondary, one uncommonly taken pool power, something you only get at level 47+, and a conditional teammate that can actually put you over the cap as it's been set. Explain to me how this helps those blasters who have anything other than ENE secondary, aren't interested in the Leadership pool, are too low a level to raid Hammi, and won't have a defender nearby with Siphon Power/Accelerate Metabolism/Fortitide. In a nutshell, you have six whole rare conditional events that could possibly get you above that cap, and that's assuming you already have all your attacks six-slotted with damage, yet a lot of people are taking this as the end-all, be-all of blaster damage solutions. It isn't. It would benefit a very small minority of situations.


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Uhm...

I have no idea what you are referring to. Aim is in every blaster primary except AR. The energy secondary has build up, something every blaster secondary except devices has. Even blasters that don't have Build up and Aim know how easy it is to reach the blaster cap.

Blasters are generally 6-slotting their attacks, and the most common slotting is 5 damage, 1 accuracy. Lets assume that all those slots are white enhancements. Thats 266% of base damage. Build Up is 366%, and Aim would be 426%, which is over the cap.

Only AR doesn't have Aim, and only devices doesn't have build up, so of the 5x5=25 types of blasters, 4x4=16 of them, or 64% can run into the cap all by themselves.

A devices blaster with targetting drone might not need to slot accuracy. Any */dev that is not AR/Dev (4 of them) has Aim in the primary, and can get to 360% of base with 6 damage slotting. That's white enhancements. Its 370% with +1 enhancements, 380% with +2 enhancements, and 390% with +3 enhancements. Assuming that the blaster only reslots at the "7s" and "2s" then 40% of the time, the blaster will be at 380% or better - which is one damage buff away from the cap. Any kinetics, radiation, or empathy defender or controller can give you damage buff that would run you into the cap.

An AR/* (not dev) blaster has access to build up, and thus they start with 5+1 slotting, 266%, and then add build up to get to 366%. Again, that is with white enhancements. 40% of the time, those enhancements will be +2 and +3 (382%, 391%) and just as close to the damage cap as the */dev blasters.

So 16 of 25 blasters (64%) can hit the cap all by themselves, and 24 of 25 blasters (96%) cannot benefit greatly from team buffs at least some, if not all, of the time.

"My point is that the vast majority of blasters will never reach that damage cap."

In fact, the vast majority of blasters will be capped by the blaster cap a significant amount of time. Or more to the point, they will have to juggle to avoid it if they can.

Its actually difficult for blasters to avoid the cap. I haven't even mentioned inspirations yet.

It still amazes me that the blaster cap is completely misunderstood. It does not reduce net damage output over time, except in teaming situations with a lot of buffage. What it does is cap burst damage, and that is nasty for blasters. Without defense, blasters have to fight fast - there is no long-term blaster fights. The cap doesn't lower our damage output to be lower than scrappers, because it doesn't lower our damage output at all. It forces us to deal damage over a longer period of time, and time is the blaster enemy. Simple algebra proves this.


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Anyway, back to the original point. Yes, the damage cap is there. So what? Until the majority of situations make that cap an actual inhibition to anyone outside of a few more vocal 50-level folks with too many Hammi raids under their belts, I'm not too concerned about it. If we get a boost to our damage ability in anything more than a rare coincedence, then yeah, I'd be a lot more supportive of the argument.

Who's for Blaster Build-up getting 200%!

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It is precisely because I favor a scalable build up that I favor increasing the blaster damage cap. Without an increase in the blaster cap, there is absolutely no benefit to a scalable build up at all. Of what possible benefit could there be for blasters to get a 200% build up, if only the first 100% will actually do anything?

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As of 5/20/2005, it looks like the Issue 4 Update changes to Elude are here to stay.
(The change getting rid of perma-Elude is perma )

That makes this guide a little outdated, so I will be working another character up the ranks for an updated guide, one that explores a toggle build, which is what SR has left.

Now let me see how long it takes a non-perma-Elude character to get up to level 50. (gonna need some coffee...)

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Presumably, not that much longer than a perma-elude SR scrapper.

Levels 1-40 should go just like before, pretty much; perhaps faster, if, like me, you originally ran with a toggle-lite build to 38 and then perma-elude past 40, and perhaps faster yet if, like me, the EPPs didn't originally become available until you were deep into the 40s.

The irony of ironies is that the lack of perma-elude *might* steer you away from activities that, while fun, were not xp-efficient. Fighting AVs, for example, or doing a lot of shard missions (I say *might* - these activities are not impossible, and scrappers being scrappers, that which does not kill us is hardly worth fighting, for many).

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Trip Mine gets replaced by Grenade: change it from a drop to a ranged drop (ala caltrops) so you can lob it at range, its still triggered like trip mine.

Time Bomb stays time bomb.

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Actually I would make it the other way around and decrease the damage on Time Bomb. TBs flaw is you must be completely stealthed to plant one, and can't stack them. Adding the ranged drop would be cool and would give Device Blasters a power we can use without holding up the rest of the team while we either stealth in or stack mines.

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My rationale for making trip mine the ranged drop and time bomb the local drop is that trip mine is triggered immediately if a villain is nearby. Its better if you aren't required to be around when that happens. Time bomb is on a timer, so its more flexible about how and when you plant it.

Stacking time bomb is more a question about its activation and recharge times - you couldn't stack them even if they were ranged.

If trip mine was the ranged drop, during combat a devices blaster could throw them all over the place in and around the villains even after the fight was underway, and they would still be triggered normally when villains walked over them. Throwing time bombs all over the place during combat - when stuff is constantly moving around - seemed less useful overall.

But on the other hand, changing time bomb into grenade with a shorter timer would also work; it would simply tend to eliminate the original time bomb tactics, which I wanted to avoid. Making trip mine the remote drop meant people who liked the bombs the way they are now could still use them that way, since I wasn't changing their damage or primary methods of trigger.