Another_Fan

There's a real problem here.


If you take a look at the melee powers that are in the mitigation via damage category and compare them to the blaster equivalents, the blaster equivalents aren't doing all that much more damage

If you look at full auto as an example, it has a 20 degree arc, does 178 points of damage base to a max of 10 targets, its doing that as DoT for 4 seconds all the while the enemies can reply.

If you have a secondary with build up and max out the damage you are at roughly 520. That's enough to take out the minions by the third second if you have managed to get them in the cone.


You compare that to footstomp or shield charge, shield charge can do 113 base, It does it in a second and a half has an 80% chance to knock down. With buildup and saturated against all odds that is a little over 400 points of damage to as many targets as you can get in close, so from a practical both are killing all the minions, but the shield charge is also providing KD and is layered over shields incredible mitigation (easily exceeding 90%).

So in one case you have over 90% inherent mitigation, which then has enough damage to kill all the minions in a pulse, followed up by 80% mitigation of anything still standing. In the other you have have an attack that does a little over 100 dps for 4 and half seconds while it roots you and you have to deal with the return fire.

For full auto to have infinite mitigation from damage it would need to do 5 times the damage it does and not do it over time.


I believe there is a problem in your calculations. If blasters have an average of 15% popularity, (taken from your numbers) but have a 30% creation rate they have to have an enormous drop off somewhere in there, otherwise the average is not the average. The best I can take away from that is that somewhere very early in their careers blasters are dropped and dropped hard. (given their average number from the devs and observed rates of play)

If the devs are planning on new people playing the game and converting from free to sub or spending money on it, they might want to think about making a pick that 30% of the people choose (yes I know it could be 1 guy making all the blasters and deleting them) be something other than a hot potatoe they drop as fast as possible,

Not dying on a blaster is trivial, hang back let the team get the aggro, watch your buff bar be a pain in the rear to the buffers when the icons drop.

The question is are you contributing ?

Just how are blasters meant to be played ? I find every combination I have played has required its own approach.

Very good question, wish I had a really good answer. I know I wouldn't define it in terms of enemy groups in the game, there is just so much variance in the typing of their attacks (in terms of type and position), their resistance to attacks, and the nature of their attacks. If somebody said the CoT or even the Council was the baseline, I am sure I could find a combination and build that was reasonable that did poorly against them.

I think you are going to need multiple levels of performance criteria, does so well against non mezzing generic damage opponents, does so well against generic damage mezzing opponents etc etc.

My thinking is that I would want the baseline performance levels high enough that their leading cause of death wasn't teammates with ADHD, or general complete lack of comprehension.


I have kind of a Chinese menu of a wish list. You can pick 1 or two things out of the list and they get to be your meal.

1. Folding the damage bonus from defiance 2.0 into the base damage. It would have to be averaged and dropped, but blasters overwhelmingly derive benefit from bonuses at the beginning of fights. Nobody waits till the end to hit aim and build up.

2. Improved pool/epic numbers for blasters. There are other things that could go with this, maybe adding an additional IO set in the ranged pool that provides decent defense bonuses for something other than just ranged defense maybe something with defense and recharge, like obliteration has, but for ranged and/or targeted aoe.

3. Some sort of bursty mezz protection. I like Strato Nexus's idea of tying it to aim and buildup, but that would mean that Assault Rifle, Dual Pistols, and Devices would need a little specialty work.

4. If blasters aren't going to get a genuine mezz protection, upgrading the protection defiance brings seems in order. Make it the Tier 1,2 blasts, and 2 picks that the player gets on their own. Playing a /EM ranger and and you think energy torrent will let you ride out the mezz better than trying to punch someone that isnt in range ? go for it.

I laughed like the devil at the OP and the rest of the thread, I even get to feel a little smug at being able to predict the behavior of the forum posters, not that its hard.

You might as well be congratulating yourselves for being admirals in the Swiss Navy.


The word you are looking for is careless. I can afford to be careless, because the things I wanted to see happen and repeatedly said should happen have. Players that don't like the market can now nearly completely bypass it.

I even get to watch marketeers desperately try to keep their relevance by doing stupid things to grief other parts of the game.

What after the crazy 88s ? Going to try and bribe pvp teams to rig the ladders ?


The goat has had more threads pulled because they wound up being personal attacks directly on him than anyone else I can think of. Gotta say I miss him though.

I chuckled at his goat rule thread for weeks, The Indians must have had the same reaction to Columbus discovering their country. His last thread was truly a thing of beauty. I mean how many people would be willing to claim ownership of the greater fool theory and then use themselves as the example fool ?

Interesting, how do you compensate for the decrease in time spent by characters in the various levels resulting in smaller sample sizes ? Also are you checking for uniques, because otherwise the number of an at at a given level range becomes a proxy for the amount of time the AT spends in a level range more than the number of that AT that were created and played through.

I had to laugh that is very well done. But no I never proposed it as a baseline.

This one wins though

Where are you getting the creation rate broken out ?

Well blasters as far as I can make out seem to be in continuous decline. That would be off the numbers that Arcana uses in her popularity analysis, the rankings the developers just put out, and my own on again off again surveys of various servers.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. MMs if they want have as much or as little protection as they want irrespective of powersets, the other ATs can have both status protection and the ability to shield themselves.

I used to solo or dual box original positron before the rewards got hammered and they started implementing the pay for reward rate vs play with skill for rewards. Anyway I don't see how the observation that the AT performs well where its arguably at its peak of relative advantage.

Fire/En btw was one of the favored combos for running old posi for merits, so it really isn't surprising that it holds up on the current posi.

Sorry you don't get it. Its not the hats, the capes, etc its out and out selling I win buttons for the competitive parts of the game.

I have taken them on with my arch/ment using just break frees. You need many of the control tools to do it. Stunning shot, the aoe kb from explosive arrow, the aoe stun from psychic shockwave, and the heals from hoarfrost and hibernate. Really wasn't considering incarnate powers in this, but that should tilt the balance even more in the favor of avoiding mezz.

Taste is an individual attribute. I really don't enjoy being effectively paralyzed and having nothing better to do than just lean back and sip a drink while I watch a character go to its reward.

Its especially painful when I know if I weren't mezzed I could win through. The carnie boss example above is the perfect example of this. Mezz is that things I win button.

Welcome to F2P

Where you can break the game all you want if you are willing to pay for the privilege.

Really trying not to drop this to the level of well "I did this that and the other thing", that is why I provided examples that stand on their own. Range from my experience comes most in to play for blaster because their attacks have a crazy assortment of ranges and its needed so you can freely overlay the attacks.



Yes defiance really works best when you don't need it

I think your view of actual gameplay may be a little narrow and characterizing as actual gameplay would be painting with an overbroad brush.

A few examples will clarify this

An arch/ment blaster should make provide a good test case, as they can be made to blap well, and range well and also demonstrate why for most blasters defiance is actually very weak.

For the power selections the ranger takes in no particular order

Aimed shot
snap shot
Subdual
TK thrust
Aim
Concentration
Psychic scream
Fistful of arrows
Stunning shot
Rain of arrows
+Whatever they need for travel (hover if applicable) and whatever they need to get ranged defense

The blapper takes

Aimed shot
Snap shot
Subdual
Tk Thrust
Aim
Concentration
Psychic Shockwave
Drain Psyche
Rain of arrows
Explosive arrow
whatever they need for travel, and whatever is required to get melee or smash/lethal defense.


The ranger when attacking from range is going to use a sequence something like this
Aim
concentration
Rain of arrows
Psychic Shockwave (psychic shockwave goes here for timing considerations fistful would prematurely alert the spawn)
Fistful of arrows
(aimed shot -> snap shot)* on whatever is still standing.

The only reason range is needed here is so that the cones can cover the spawns. It offers no great benefit in and of itself. More range than is needed to keep this character out of melee and in the area where it actually has defense is wasted. If Fistfull of Arrows and Psychic Scream were powers called arrow bomb and psychic bomb, targeted aoes with a 15 or 20 foot radius there would be no need to have more than 20 foot range on any of the powers.

What you get from range is the ability to stealth the spawn which can be compensated for by having more and better stealth and the ability to engage more dispersed spawns, the baf is an example.


The blapper shows very well how the range isnt really needed and it also provides a nice setup for the counter example on mez effects.

The blapper stealths to the center of the same spawn
Seeing as its in the center of the spawn it then hits
Aim
Concentration
Rain of arrows on his own head
Drain Psyche
Psychic Shockwave
Explosive arrow on the closest target standing
(Aimed shot -> snap shot->(Tk Thrust if things are close and threatening))

Range is completely counterproductive here except for the case where you are shooting at runners, and that is only a problem for blasters because they don't have the luxury of ignoring them


Now lets look at the Mezz case, at this point I think we are talking past each other, so I will restate what my position was first even though I am certain you are aware of it just to place things in context then I will present what I am reading your position as and you can correct any misperception of it I may have.


As a blaster levels up defiance becomes proportionately less useful. It initially convers all the powers they can pick and as they gain levels it doesn't cover an ever larger proportion of their available powers. The lack of utility is multiplied by the fact that as they level up they face more and more attackers that can apply status effects to them.

Now if I understand the case you are arguing, this is not the case because the blaster still has a solid single target attack chain and can concentrate on the target that mezzed them until its eliminated.

Well lets take our blapper up there and see how this works in actual game play. He is on a team and for whatever reason he has aggroed a spawn without setting up for it. He may have been following a crazy tank, the scrapper may have dived in before he was in place and triggered a bunch of aoes that broke his stealth whatever.

1. The spawn becomes alert to the blaster
2. an opponent lands a mezzing attack on him
---- At this point he has only single attacks assuming no breakfrees in the insp tray he has no insps
3. He now has only aimed shot, snap shot, subdual to deal with the spawn until the mezz runs its course, in the case of malta, arachnos or carnies this can be a very long time.

His big forms of mitigation are all gone. If he is S/L defense that means likely 1/2 the defense or more is gone, if he is melee a good third of it is gone. Explosive arrow, drain psyche, and psychic shockwave his active mitigation are taken out and he is left with a tiny fraction of his potential damage output.

This is considerably worse than the simple counting method, and illustrates why I went with loss of degrees of freedom as the criteria. Endless numbers of cases can be created, but in general if I am facing just a mezzer and minion defiance can handle it, but when you get into larger spawns with multiple mezzers and more abilities at their disposal it becomes much worse.

The Carnie master illusionist is a good counter example of how the lack of coverage of defiance harms the blaster. If you start in on a master illusionist at full health and they mezz you, you are going to be held for a very long time and before you can say jack robinson she will have burried you in an army of pets, one of which actually heals the other pets, and another pet that summons even MOAR PETS. While you are trying single target her to death she will be going intangible while still attacking you. This isn't a cot dropping -to hit and a sleep or a short hold on you and it really provides a great example how defiance is very good at low levels but is not nearly as useful at high levels.

There is very minimal value to range in this game especially in comparison to the real world. In the real world having a range advantage implies the ability to kill in near complete safety, here that is not the case. What range does buy is the ability to engage in combat faster and depending on circumstances a period where the enemies may be doing reduced levels of damage.

The figure of merit for combat units is usually expressed as survivability*lethality in this games case you would need extra terms in lethality to account for force multiplication based on team size. For the claim that blasters have the maximum theoretical performance to be true, they would need to gain enough survivability from delivering damage from range to offset their numeric lack of survivability and do so without incurring a time penalty for setup. That doesn't seem possible except perhaps in unusual circumstances.



From the strict point of view of how many powers you have available its exact. You lose a greater percentage of your potential choices when mezzed as you level up.


In the general case considering potential utility its even worse. For every person that derives their damage from a tier 1/2 power in a single target situation there are many situations that involve multiple targets attacking the blaster. In the cases where you have more than one attacker the loss of AoE powers results in a greater loss of damage, and or the associated mitigation. In your case of the energy/energy blaster you have lost the mitigation from explosive blast and energy torrent also their ability to damage multiple targets. The above isn't even considering that you don't have aim or build up which push your accrued single target damage way up after the first attack.

Look, from this post I can see you aren't just lashing out like that other poster so when I say you need to put a little thought to what I am about to say take it to heart it isn't meant to be a belittling statement.

I have no doubt that there are people who have taken blasters to level 50 without dieing, I have no doubt your claims are accurate. I know this from my own experience. I have soloed or dual boxed task forces at speed running a blaster. Matter of fact I will usually say the leading cause of death for blasters are team mates. When I say that things start to break bad for a blaster in the 20s and get really bad after 30, its from my personal experience of what has to be done to achieve performance. I am not saying blasters can't perform, I do say it takes more effort to reach a given level.

Now your post 1 prior to the one I am now replying to doesn't make the case you think it does. The title of the thread is hyperbolic but it does hit the concept of are blasters pulling their weight as a team choice. Your statement that a blaster should wait 4 seconds before engaging on the team fight is so piercing and indictment of the idea that they are contributing I can't think of anything better. Against non EB or AV your fights are going to be over in 15 seconds or less, if its a good team 10 seconds or less. If a blaster waits 4 seconds they have done nothing for 40% of the combat.

Why do I care ? I like blasters and I would like to feel better about bringing them to teams. Its a little bit difficult for me to do so when I am well aware I could be helping the team more by bringing just about anything else.

Speaking of which




I didn't want to point this out at the time because well, i actually enjoy seeing people learn things for themselves, but you managed to be singularly insistent in both that thread and this thread on a topic by your own admission you don't know the first thing about.

Talk about a lack of understanding

26, so you almost made it through the easy part of a blaster's lifecycle. I suppose for some people almost getting to the starting line is a great accomplishment.

At least you tried.

This is interesting from the perspective of how the decision to put in defiance 2.0 was put in.

Let me give you a different scenario. A formula 1 racer will outperform a family sedan on almost all metrics you can think of except maybe fuel economy, how many people it can carry, and how easy it is to drive.

If I sit a typical commuter behind the wheel of a F1 racer, they might not even be able to figure out how to start the car, let alone drive it safely. If they can manage to drive it they likely aren't going to do very well with it.

Now if you had thousands of regular commuters trying to drive F1 racers, from the statistical results, you could very well think that the F1 had very poor performance.

Now don't get me wrong, the performance numbers are clearly against blasters. They give up survivability for ranged damage, not a good trade.

Sorry missed the initial.

The more powers a blaster can pick the less effective defiance is as protection from mezz.

When you only have 3 powers defiance is great, when you have 10 its 30% as great, when you have 20 15% as great. The other problem is that the damage a blaster does ramps up slower than the hitpoints the enemies have.

When you hit your 30s you have enemies that have lots of mezz, more hitpoints, and take longer to kill when mezzed.

Sorry I wrote my reply quickly, wasn't trying to present those as mutually exclusive or in opposition.

Interesting it does illustrate just how hard it is to ask these questions so you have an answer that is useful.

The problem is once again even measuring login time you don't specifically capture popularity.

In my case, which may be an edge case I have no way to judge, I log in my marketing characters first, and I log them all in every time. These are the characters I actually like the least and I almost never actually play them in terms of doing missions, task forces or trials. 4 Happen to be blasters, it turns out all ATs are equally effective at wentworths. If you looked at my data you would come to really poor conclusions about which AT I was playing because I enjoyed the AT.


Edit Something better might be, the max rewards piled up by AT or max badge count.

Edit: to be clear anything short of solid modeling of at performance will yield dubious results on actual performance.