Arcanaville

Cold Domination is definitely a strong set, but I don't think its as versatile as some others. It has frostwork which is a relatively unique buff, but it lacks a genuine heal and Benumb and Heat Loss are on very long recharge timers.

Kinetics has mez protection, heal, damage buff, recharge buff, resistance buff, movement buff, regen debuff, damage debuff, recharge debuff, all usable often. I personally think its a more versatile buff/debuff set than Cold Domination. In fact, I think Ill/Kin and Ill/Rad are probably not too far apart. I'm giving the edge to Rad myself mostly because of Mutation, EMP, and Superior Invisibility.

In your opinion, what would make Cold Dominaton not a more powerful set than Kinetics or Radiation, but a more versatile one, in terms of being able to do more different things more effectively under different circumstances?

If the OP has the combat logs to prove it, I will follow up with the devs personally. However, if the OP has the combat logs to prove it, they will also be the first in the entire history of the game to prove a streakbreaker malfunction. Even I once fell victim to thinking I had a suspected streakbreaker bug that turned out to be a data collection bug instead.

Many have claimed it, but even though this is one of the easiest game bugs to catch in theory, no one ever has. I would actually love to investigate the first one that turned out to be real.

To miss eleven times in a row requires your net tohit on the target to be less than 20%. One of the most interesting things about the streakbreaker I've found is that not many people know its there, and it makes certain kinds of observations basically impossible. People who do not know this will sometimes post a made up observation they didn't really see, but think is reasonable when its actually impossible. I don't know if the OP is one of them, but I am absolutely certain many people do this, and severely damage their observational credibility in the process.

My advice to new posters has always been: never make up an observation you didn't actually specifically see. Never pass along a story you heard from someone else as your own without first hand experience. If you are not an expert at the game's mechanics, you will likely make up an observation that is either extremely unlikely or impossible. That never helps your cause. Never think the truth is not good enough to help your cause. You're just not good enough to make something up that won't eventually be uncovered as fiction. If you were, you wouldn't be asking questions. The truth is usually good enough, or bad enough, to make your case. And if its not, you have no case.

1. This was a marketing piece. Not even this game delved into the game mechanics in marketing pieces or turned them into question and answer bug sessions.

2. Do you have a question that in the past Castle or BaB would have answered that they could have answered? Something other than "why won't you admit you suck when it comes to PvP changes" for example. Honestly, we went through such a burst of knowledge transfer between '05 and '07 there aren't actually that many questions left *to* answer that aren't gripes in disguise.

3. We still have lots of sneak peeks about things coming in the future. Just not one per hour like everyone seems to want.

4. Nate's new. He's still not used to dealing with us. When it comes to our expectations for dev communication and the boundaries we seem to think are appropriate, we are a psychotic bunch.

Its not an oversight. In CoV beta the passives actually offered resistance to all types (for stalkers, of course) but were changed literally just before CoV and I6 launched with no testing or warning.

And also: the passives used to offer +25% resistance maximum, not +20%. So SR scrappers would have been able to scale up to the res cap in theory (at a sliver of health).

Someone looked at that and said two things: one, there's a design rule that says scrappers should not be able to get to the res cap on their own without power pool powers or buffs (or inventions, today). This is true. And two: there's a design rule that says toxic and psionic resistances are exotic resistances that have to be there by explicit fiat; in particular psionic resistances are only added to things deliberately strong against psionics and toxic is normally associated with healing. SR is not specifically strong against psionics and explicitly barred from having healing.

So the passives were knocked down from 25 to 20, and toxic and psionic resistances were removed. However whoever did that failed (in my opinion) to understand either the intent or the math behind the passives. First: the concept of the scaling passives was actually some kind of time dilation effect: as the SR scrapper got closer to being defeated, time would seem to slow down for the scrapper and give them more time to finish the fight. You obviously cannot manipulate time like that in an MMO, so instead it was incoming damage that was slowed down to give the SR scrapper more time to react to the incoming damage.

This means the resistances aren't "resistances" but a form of deceleration of incoming damage. And that should be type-blind. Whoever decide to remove the types didn't understand these were not normal resistances, but just a game mechanic used to simulate something else.

Separately, reducing them from 25% to 20% maximum was not really necessary. Testing suggested the original values would have been fine, but someone decided to enforce the "do not cap automatically" rule, even though to reach the cap you'd have to have less than 1% health remaining. And the rule about capping resistances should really apply to static resistances. They have the same strength all the time, and are far stronger than resistances that scale with health. Both analytical analysis and numerical discrete calculations (simulations) suggest that the three passives combined offer, on average, and also averaged across all possible incoming damage situations, the equivalent survivability strength of having about 25% resistance. That doesn't mean they actually deflect 25% of all incoming damage (for the appropriate types). In fact, they actually deflect *even less*. But the important thing to note is that at full health, you don't *need* resistances as much as when you are at half health or quarter health. By working harder when you're more likely to need them, their effect is magnified (in one scenario I analyzed, the passives averaged deflecting about 3% of the total incoming damage and outperformed 20% static resistance).

In either case, they should have treated three stacking 0-25% resistances as about 25% total average resistance, and not 75% resistance, when thinking about game balance. This one is more of a judgment call than an actual error, but I consider it an error because it could have gone either way, but someone changed it without allowing the change to be tested. Such changes should only be made when there is an overriding critical reason to make them, and there wasn't one.

Which also suggests to me that there are only so many possible reasons why this change went in.

The devs are aware of the fact that allowing players to run existing content while highly level shifted would be a bad thing.

The entire starting UI is crap. How many people in beta thought there were less costume options that there were, thought there were less colors than there were, though there were less power options than there were simply because they couldn't locate the scroll bars in the interface. It got better, but only slightly, before launch.

Its like they designed the UI to look cool in a preview video, not actually be functional. Our character creation interface is simple, flat, boring, and usable. Theirs is noisy, flashy, animated, busy, and more confusing than the flight deck of a 747.

I've been beta testing software for 22 years. I'm not embarrassed to say I was one of those people that couldn't figure out how to quit the game in beta and had to search the forums for the answer, after using task manager to get me out the first time. WTH, UI designer?

The question of how useful the scaling resistances are has come up lots of times. This is a table I used to use to help explain what was going on back in I6 and I7 when it was more hotly debated:

This table shows, given a particular level of health, how much resistance you'd have if you have all three passives, how much damage, relative to a full bar of health it would take in one hit to kill you at that level of health, and the same numbers if we assume slotted tough is added (and the damage is smash/lethal).

We can see that, for example, a single hit that would normally hit you for 1/3rd your health is survivable all the way down to about 20% health, 1/5th of a bar. That's not bad. 1/3rd of a scrapper bar is about 450 points of damage, which is a very large hit which the passives are making survivable all the way down to about 270 health. That's significant.

If you stack tough, the results can be even stronger. When you are down to 25% health, it still takes a smash/lethal hit of over half your base health to defeat you. That's surviving a 670 point attack while at less than 335 health.

Sometimes the passives mean a little, and sometimes they mean a lot. For some reason people get hung up on examining the corner cases, where either you are being pelted with peanuts for 2 points of damage or being hit by a giant monster for a thousand points of damage. In reality, most damage comes in packets of a hundred, to a couple hundred points of damage. Against those attacks, the passives do have time to scale up and work. Interestingly, one corner cases in which an SR scrapper can see those passives scale up and work is while trying to solo a pylon. Pylons do a lot of damage, but not enough to outpace the passive resists. You can actually see them fight against the damage, and make consecutive hits look a lot weaker than they might have been otherwise.


PS: missing from the screencap is the fact that the scaling passives have no resistance to toxic either. They are smash, lethal, fire, cold, energy, and negative resistance only. No toxic, and no psionic resistance.

PPS: those holes are contrary to the powers' intent, but someone somewhere overrided that objection in CoV beta and they were changed at the last instant. Whoever did that was wrong, but I never found out who that was.

There's no team in existence that can take that feeling away from me without my consent.

I mean, hypothetically speaking if you want to feel useful by spamming heals and the team stubbornly refuses to take damage, you might have a problem. But no matter what the team does, no team can do everything and leave me with nothing. I find what the team isn't doing and I go do that. If I don't feel like doing that, and I only feel like doing what I want to do, I don't team at that moment.

My first up-yours moment on sappers came in I2. I was about level 41ish and playing my perma-elude SR scrapper on a team running at level 48 when my mentor quits and I have no SK. So what, who cares, I'm eluded. I can wait for a new mentor to join. So we're running a Malta mission and the tank gets sapped and down he goes. I immediately jump on the sapper and start attacking him, while the rest of the team regroups and quickly dispatches the spawn. I'm still there beating on the sapper when they come by and finish him off. I'm congratulated for having an impressive build that didn't get killed but they wondered why even at +7 I couldn't finish off one minion in all that time.

The reason: he actually did hit me with his sap gun several times, so I had no endurance to attack him with most of the time. Which, for Perma-Elude, is like just another day at the office: I had no endurance half the time anyway. I was like "shoot me again, right here, come on, give me your best shot. Oh, you want more of my non-existent endurance, come and get it."

Sapper vs Perma-Elude is like deploying the phantom army against dancing blades.

You're correct: I was thinking about the Malta Lts but for some reason I typed "minions" in the colloquial sense: the non-bosses.

Also, while checking on something else, I looked up Malta armor. They are actually said to have significant technology in some of those. And of course some of them can teleport. They look like guys in outfits purchased at the local military shop, but supposedly according to the lore some of that simple looking vests and outfits are actually advanced armor. Sappers, for example, are not just packing the advanced sap gun, they also wear energy resistant armor. I actually knew they were energy resistant (playing an energy blaster for years) but I didn't know until just now that sapper armor makes them immune to endurance drain. Next time I punch one of them in the face, I'm taking it from the punk.

Learn something new every day.

The fact that mez doesn't cancel forward momentum, or the fact that an enemy group at standard difficulty has minions that possess a 30 second mez?


It was funny, though.

For blasters I think those are the most important ones. Obviously, breakfrees help melee characters less (although they are good for breaking terrorize if you lack that protection) and sturdies are probably better for regen scrappers than respites. Also, if you are a brute or tanker, a combination of lucks and sturdies can make you temporarily indestructible by almost any threat, even STF Recluse.

Also, those are the best to keep as a blaster. When reds drop, I tend to just use them immediately. They help, but there's no point to keeping them to help later. Damage is useful now. Heals and Breakfrees are more useful reteroactively. Lucks are most useful to use proactively when you know you're about to enter a tough fight, or if you find yourself suddenly getting jumped by unexpected aggro.

You're not required to pay attention to everything, but if you elect not to pay attention to the insp tray that is not the fault of the inspirations: their value in the game is not based on the degree to which the least attentive person chooses to exploit them.

Inspirations can help, and can help to a degree virtually unmatched in any other MMO I'm aware of. More than many people think is even healthy. If a player doesn't actually use them properly, then of course they'll get less benefit, but that is presumed. Its not a valid argument against the utility of inspirations. They will often save your life if you choose to manage them, if you choose to use them, and if you don't run out of them.


Here's an example of a case where inattention got me killed in a highly novel way. Because I've done so much blapping, I'm used to jousting on the ground in superspeed or maybe sprint. I now hover blast a lot. I was in a Malta mission shortly after respecing into the ranged build when I got held by a Gunslinger. So I popped a break. Problem solved and I kept fighting. At some point, I got nailed by a flashbang. I didn't notice, because I had a break free still running. Then it expired, and the stun took hold. I *still* didn't notice because I was shooting: while shooting tier 1/2 attacks, you don't appear to be stunned because you are playing the attack animations, not the stun animation. When I killed the last guy, I suddenly realized I was stunned. Flashbangs last a long, long time. In the old days, I would have just been detoggled and fell to the ground. Now, toggles don't detoggle and flight doesn't suppress while mezzed. So I just kept floating up there.

And moving: forward momentum isn't cancelled by mez either, and I was moving towards my target at the time the stun took hold. So I just hovered right over his dead body, hovered right across the room, and hovered right into the next spawn about a hundred feet away. Who promptly killed me while I remained stunned the entire time.

I honestly barely had the presence of mind to start shooting again when I got in range of them, because honestly I had never seen that before. I was actually mesmerized into just watching it happen. It was like what being a pinata must feel like.

I now have a two break free rule.

In teams like that I just burn anything that's not a luck, respite, or break, and let the continuous hail of insps eventually fill me with the right ones. And then, I start burning all the small ones until eventually I have nothing but medium and large lucks, respites, and break frees.


True story from the distant past. When I first started playing this game, I really didn't feel like teaming. I was a dedicated soloer. But I did try a few times to team when someone threw me a tell or invite. The *first* guy that ever threw me a random invite that I accepted was in Skyway. He never once said anything in chat that could be considered english. At one point he stopped fighting and said, and I'm quoting here, "+?"

So there's no confusion, it was:

+?

I said (because I didn't and still don't speak gibberish fluently) "I'm sorry, could you explain please?" (I still use punctuation in tells. I'm weird that way).

He said:

u +

I said "Do you need something?"

ya insp

"Oh" I said, and gave him all my insps, which at that moment was three reds and two blues.

no +

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you need."

He just stopped talking and went back to fighting, and eventually I said thanks and left. I didn't accept a team invite for weeks afterward, because honestly I assumed all you MMO players were illiterate. It was only months later when I was thinking back on that day that I realized he must have been asking for respites.

Here's what my original build had that my current one doesn't have that I think is significant:

1. Air Superiority
2. Stealth
3. Aid Self

These were originally put in there to support a blapper lifestyle, particularly leveraging Defiance 1.0. I believe the difference between having them in combination and not having them is an order of magnitude in difficulty. This gets to Venture's claim about a well designed game not having wild differences in potential power level. I'm not sure how you do that with a power system that allows for relative freedom in picking powers and has heals anywhere near the strength CoH allows. Most CoH heals swamp even the resting rate of out of combat healing on games that support that mechanic.

That, and combat is designed to be far faster in pace, which means bosses become critical to take out quickly. You usually can't kill them quickly, so effective counter-mez becomes important if you don't have high personal defenses. Stealth plus AS used to guarantee me an almost 100% chance of nullifying a boss or mezzing LT within the first few seconds of the fight, long enough to stack stuns on him.

A game that was designed to be slower would have greater latitude to tweak power levels and effective offense and defense. But speed forces the devs hands in many ways that are not trivial to solve. Even if they do it wrong, there's no obvious way to do it right without eliminating the specific characteristic of combat speed in the game, something that cannot be changed at this point in its lifetime. At least not I think in the standard game.

Nor do I think it was necessarily a mistake, it was just one of those decisions we will have to live with. One of the very first posts I ever made discussed my concern about combat being so fast in this game, a concern most people believed ran counter to the very reason the game was liked by its players. They were probably right, but so was I.

So far, I'm only learning things I already suspected to be true. Defense and resistance are not worth much without mez protection. Blapping is as much about mez as damage. Enemy mez kills. The insp tray works like a ram jet. All these things work against ranged blasters. I'm hoping for a non-obvious revelation at some point.

Yes and no. I considered that possibility and even discussed it with Castle. However, the population statistics independently released by BaB painted a picture that tended to soften that objection, which I discussed in the "archetype popularity" thread to some degree.

My experience tells me heals are very important, not only in combat, but because they tend to guarantee you always start from full. And when solo, there's no such thing as a weak heal. The rad PBAoE heal is huge for a soloer.

Population numbers wouldn't directly affect averages.


Before the devs said what the datamining was telling them, the smart money on the forums was that non-debuffing defenders would solo the slowest of all heroside powerset combinations. Turns out that was false. I would *guess* non-debuffing defenders would start to edge into the same territory at high enough difficulty, but I'm not certain.

Also, when the devs did their datamining, they specifically looked at solo vs teamed performance, not just aggregate averages. So they could compare solo blasters vs solo defenders when they soloed, across all powerset combinations.

Whether I'm doing it right or wrong is a subjective opinion I don't really concern myself with. The fact is that blasters die, and the forums thought the devs must just be mistaken or datamining incorrectly. I know now with certainty they are not, and what kills them is capable of killing me, albeit at much lower rates.

If we're all doing it wrong, we're all doing it wrong. I can accept that, but that just means this game cannot be balanced around the extremely few that are capable of doing it right, because they are in the very small minority that doesn't even include me as an edge case. And I'm already way out past the edge of where the devs are supposed to be balancing around.

PS: If I want to creep around and pull each spawn apart, and never engage with less than near full health, I can pretty much guarantee not dying. But if I do that, I find my rate of progress in the game drops below what I believe the devs have as their target for average game progress. Which would mean by their definition I would still be broken and requiring corrective action.

If you think the devs just have too high expectations of progress rate, that's your prerogative. However, I'm not arguing that issue at all: I'm just examining the issue of *what* causes Blasters to die, not *if* they die or *if* its all their fault.

Except for not being a blapper, I used everything at my disposal at maximum ability. That included *converting* into a blapper when the critters themselves entered melee range. The only change I made to playstyle was not to aggressively pursue engaging immediately as a blapper. I handicapped myself in no other way. In that sense, I used every tool at my disposal *except* for the skill of initiating combat as a blapper.

With all of that, I perhaps died once out of every two or three missions, but particularly against mezzers like Carnies. One out of two missions for me translates into a lot of deaths for the average player I believe, that does not have my experience playing a blaster, nor a nine billion inf build backing them up. My build has combat jumping, tough, weave, temp invuln (all of which become worthless while mezzed), virtually unlimited endurance, practically non-stop firing ability while mezzed, and I can engage targets from outside their range initially with range boost.

Knowing my build, in theory I could buy a full tray of breaks and just keep them active throughout each mission, buying a new tray at the start of every mission, which would make me permanently mez protected, and that would then keep all of my defenses up continuously which would help a lot. But I don't think that's anything but a degenerate playstyle. If I'm trying to find out what the upper limits of what a typical player might ever expect to see, I can only do what they do as well as humanly possible, not do things few would ever think of doing.

Every time two illusionists home in on a blaster that does not have hard mez, I find that its a matter of luck or lots of insps that allows you to survive. Or rather, a matter of not getting unlucky. Between blind and phase, if you can't mez them, and they get you, you have to decide whether to take out the other minions that are likely to run up to you and attack from melee range or take out the illusionists first to break the mez and allow you to use things like respites (assuming you're out of break frees at this point). In my experience, you only get unlucky about one time in ten or twenty under these circumstances, but they come up a lot in a Carnie mission set to 0x2.

And incidentally, keep in mind I'm testing at 0x2 not 0x1 because I'm not testing the theory that 0x1 is too easy, but 0x2 is just right. Because if 0x2 is too hard, then it doesn't matter if 0x1 is too easy, because you can't jump up (theoretically speaking you could go to -1x2, but when I first thought about doing this sort of testing long ago -1 didn't exist, and -1 has other issues that make it an option, but not an option to balance around).

And as I said, even *I* can't figure out how you die with a combo like Ice/Ice, or if you have epic holds like Cryo from Munitions. But people do, which means I just don't understand what they lack in terms of using those powers to maximum effect.

Also, I seem to be getting better at it. The death rate drops slowly over time as my twitch instincts take hold and start doing things automatically, like rapidly rotating targets to spread knock around while mezzed. When mez locks out all my other attacks, particularly AoEs, I'm now simply rotating bolt, blast, and thrust while cycling targets, making sure to match the cycle to have thrust coincide with a melee range target. I really don't think the average player does that. I also have to deslot Alpha or shift up to +1x2 while testing, because level shift is just too powerful an effect in my experience to just factor out while testing. Even so, I'm not ashamed to admit 0x2 is not easy for me on a ranged blaster, and I don't think I'm on the low end of performance in that regard. I think the soft control that Energy has is average for a blaster: it isn't as effective as the hard controls some sets have, but its not completely lacking in mitigation like Fire. Its probably in the same ballpark as AR actually: maybe a little better in mitigation, a little worse in absolute kill speed. At least at the skill levels and difficulty settings we're talking about (I would probably do a little better with AR because I know how to manipulate Afraid).

Besides giving me a rare opportunity to vent unabated without generating too many casualties, there's lots of generally valuable and interesting things to come from this thread. Even things I disagree with in total have kernels of truth in them that are much more universally agreeable and I think represent valuable critique of the game in general.

I don't agree with EvilGeko (and Venture to an extent) that the game would arbitrarily benefit from being just plain harder. But having the option to have more difficult and more complex play does make sense, and it does make sense for difficulty to ramp up in certain parts of the game. The end game, for example. And you can't have an easy game, followed by an easy game, followed by an easy game, followed by a nightmarish slaughter. The players have to be eased into the more difficult and complex play, and the 1-50 game doesn't do the playerbase any favors by making it too easy consistently. It does get harder to some degree in the late game, but it doesn't get more complex in its difficulty, and that is a potential problem.

I don't agree with Venture that the game difficulty has to be completely homogenous to be well designed, but I do think that wild variations on the level of entire missions is something that should be very uncommon. Right now, we have whole missions of psionic foes and whole missions of high tohit foes and whole missions of debuffers. We don't throw the occasional kryptonite bullet at players, we randomly throw them onto that kryptonite island from Superman. And no one wants to be reminded of that.

Ambushes should do one of two things. Be a surprise threat the players have to deal with and dispatch, or be a controlled time sink in which instead of the players running through the mission defeating foes, the foes come to the player. Weak but continuous ambushes, or one or two strong ones. Not ten strong ones each capable of defeating the player at low levels. I know this, and yet the devs took long strings of ambushes away from me in the AE because I might abuse them, and gave them to the mission editors who went completely nuts with them. They need to put fearghas on this one.

And the devs need a crash course in how to create low level content. They haven't done it in so long, they forgot how many powers low level critters are supposed to have, how strong they are supposed to be, and which ones are the most problematic.

And seriously, Praetorian DE.

That was one of the first innovations I discovered about Drag Coefficient Online's power design, after figuring out how to get out of the character creator that is. City of Heroes pioneered the theory that the small disadvantage of not having range should be compensated by the small advantage of being completely indestructible. Champions Online decided to overturn that rule and made the penalty for not having range be having other players laugh at you for not taking range. DCUO decided to settle the matter once and for all and made everyone ranged, except your range is often zero.

I expect that when Marvel Universe Online comes out, they will settle the matter by making everyone melee. And have claws, high regeneration, and indestructible skeletons.

I should point out that I've been conducting an experiment. I've been revising some of my main alts' builds to money-is-no-object-no-seriously I19 builds incorporating inherent fitness and the gross national product of Italy. That means my MA/SR scrapper is now reaching the limits of SR survivability, and my Ill/Rad is approaching I4 power again. With my En/En Blaster I decided to perform a very very expensive experiment. We know that blasters fail your assertion for the current playerbase. Blasters, at all levels, under all solo and teaming conditions were vastly underperforming the average performance of the average player for all powerset combinations, primarily because they were being defeated far more often. Even at standard difficulty. Now, perhaps the average player is just so incompetent that they just don't count as legitimate players at all under your assertion that standard difficulty is not appropriate for "anyone." But among our players, standard difficulty kills blasters, teamed or solo, low or high level, DOs or SOs. How does an Ice/Ice blaster die at level 30 on standard difficulty? I'm not actually sure.

So I set out to find out. I've been a blapper too long: more than six out of the seven years I've played blasters. Blapping requires significantly more skill than the average player likely has, but it pays significant dividends especially and ironically when it comes to surivability, because blappers build for and use the highest levels of mez blasters possess. They sort of have to, or else they'd be dead while consistently in melee range.

My new I19 build is not a blapper build. It is a complete sell-out to the concept of the ranged blaster. And because I13 basically said "your defense against mez is you can use your tier 1 and tier 2 attacks (plus tier 1 secondary) I went all out on global recharge, so I could use those powers as fast as possible even when mezzed. I still have bonesmasher and total focus, but I don't use them often because I'm shooting from range. I do have range boost, so I can engage from maximum range. And its perma in theory, so I can attack from that enhanced range indefinitely. The theory in I13 was that being able to attack while mezzed would save ranged blasters and blasters in general. I have nearly a full attack chain while mezzed with just bolt and blast: very few blasters have higher damage output than I do while mezzed, so if this is supposed to be a game changer, I will see it if anyone will.

What happens when you become an all-range blaster without air superiority and aid self? You die. Even at standard difficulty accidents happen and you die, or your health slowly whittles away and you either have to wait for Rest to recharge, or you start a fight with less than full health and you die. At standard difficulty with bosses off, it doesn't happen often to me, but it does happen, and with my older circa I9 blapper build that cost less than what one pretty good drop sells for these days it was literally *impossible* to kill me on standard difficulty. Set me to 0x1 and no bosses, and I would have to be asleep at the keyboard. I normally played at the equivalent of 0x2 with bosses on with that build. Which is low for the average level 50, but high for a blaster. Ranged blasting with partial mez immunity is so hazardous that even several billion inf cannot save the tactic.

And I'm not the average player. If 0x2 can kill me, it will kill over 90% of the players in a similar situation. I'm sure there exist players that are better than me at ranged blasting, but I'm pretty sure anything that can kill me occasionally is going to kill the average player constantly.

Now, having said all that, I can prove "standard difficulty is total crap" is not true for blasters. The question is whether blasters are the sole exception. And I believe anyone that doesn't logically conclude that blasters are the exception without having to have it demonstrated may be overestimating the skill level of the average MMO player, or at least the average City of Heroes player. Which means blasters may not be the weird exception to that statement. The same datamining showed that no other archetype was similarly afflicted so universally, but the devs did not say what the average difficulty setting was. If everyone had to play above 0x1 from the 30s on, its not certain that other powerset combinations or other archetypes might not become similarly problematic, which means even if 0x1 is easier than they can take, 0x2 might still be more than the average player can always handle.

Before anyone states what the average player can do or what all players can do, I believe they need to make sure their theories of player performance can account for players having difficulty with *all* powerset combinations of blasters at *all* levels including past the point of SOs, solo and teamed. If they can't they need to revise their understanding of the average player.

In the old days, some tank who didn't know any better would say "I'll herd them up" in a DE mission, and before I could say "stop" there they were: forty or fifty of them all in one spot.

Buffed to the tohit cap, the resistance cap, and the regen cap.

In the days before aggro caps and eminator suppression (at the moment, only one of each type can spawn within a single spawn grouping) "I'll herd the DE" was the closest CoH came to a Leroy moment. In those days, cairns buffed each other which meant just two spawned in the same place not only made the entire spawn go unstoppable, they couldn't be easily destroyed either. Let five or six drop in the same place, and the entire spawn stays at the res cap until you manage to cut down all but one. While the entire spawn has instant healing and is essentially autohitting you on every shot.

There was usually no way to deal with this except to either try to pull the group apart, or more likely wait till aggro dissipated and they dispersed on their own.