Arcanaville

No reason why it can't, but also no reason why it should. Blazing Aura is a derivative of tanker damage auras, and has the same radius by default. Lightning field, on the other hand, seems to have been intended to be a damage mitigator (drain) that happens to deal damage, and has a larger radius as a result. In fact, I believe its almost certainly the case that while Blazing Aura was borrowed from Tankers and added to Blasters, Lightning Field was borrowed from critters and added to Blaster at the beginning of time (to save time in the mad rush to create the powersets that archetypes required). its radius is an artifact of that, and because the two powers have different intentions there's no impetus to normalize them against each other after the fact.

You said what blasters *should* be doing, which implies you were commenting on how they are implemented now. Castle's opinion on that is definitive, becaue he was in charge of giving it to them in I11.

But the subject of the original intent has also been covered many times, and is documented. When the concept of archetypes itself was created, Blasters were conceptualized to be the pure damage archetype:

- Jack Emmert, City of Heroes Development Diary Volume 3

This is the Word of God definition of the Blaster archetype as originally conceived: does tons of damage. He called Scrappers the "hand to hand" specialist. If he thought Blasters were the Ranged specialist, there is zero question in my mind he would have said so there, because there's no reason not to: Scrapper: hand to hand; Blaster: ranged. He doesn't, because that is not what he is thinking.

In fact, Jack's brainstorm shows this in the same article:

Important to note two things. First, he's just listing things so you can't take order *too* importantly, but he does originally conceptualize blasters as Melee/Ranged and not the reverse. Secondly, his discussion of Defenders and proto-Corruptors actually hints at something that would become forum debate fodder years later. Some people suggest that because a powerset is *primary* that is de facto the whole purpose of the archetype: the secondary is just that: secondary. Clearly, Jack thought differently. If he actually *saw* a reason to emphasize the difference, he did (Scrappers and Tankers) but if he *didn't* see a reason to emphasize the difference, he didn't bother (Defenders and what would eventually become Corruptors). And that means its just as likely that Blasters have Ranged as the primary set for practical reasons, and not definitive ones. Because if the conceptual distinction was important enough to the developers at the time, there would be a Melee/Ranged archetype as well. There isn't, because they didn't think it was needed.


So, just to recap: Blasters were conceptualized to be the focused damage dealers dealing melee and ranged damage at the beginning of time (literally the moment archetypes themselves were invented), they were originally implemented that way, they were modified to add utility but were never claimed to be ranged only in beta (as far as I know), released as the focused damage dealer with both ranged and melee options, and have been balanced as such up to the last moment when the archetype was revisited, when it was declared to be the damage dealer with ranged and melee options and implemented on the assumption that both options were valid.

* ORIGINAL INTENT: Lots of Damage
* ORIGINAL IMPLEMENTATION: Ranged and Melee Damage
* RELEASED DESIGN: Ranged Damage, Melee Damage, Utility
* LAST ARCHETYPE BALANCING: Attempt to balance melee and ranged options, increase survivability through enhanced ability to deliver damage.

Was there ever a moment when the dev team either conceptualized, designed, implemented, adjusted, balanced, or declared the Blaster archetype as being ranged-focused or melee was not a valid option for damage dealing? As far as I'm aware, never, for any moment in time that the Blaster archetype existed at all.

Hail of Bullets is probably fine. However, Rain of Arrows does a bit more damage than I would normally think it would given its other attributes, and Full Auto a bit less.

If we naively balanced both as normal attacks and not tier 9 attacks (and this is only for guidence: tier 9's are not balanced in this way traditionally) then with an AoE spherical area of 25 feet of radius RoA has an AoE factor of 4.75. It should do about scale 2.1 damage to each target. It actually does closer to 3.6 (normalized for blasters). Contrawise Full Auto has an AoE factor of about 3.03 as an 80 foot radius 20 degree arc cone. It should do about 3.29 damage total to each target, and it actually averages closer to 2.854.

Actually, if you made the crit 50/50, it would basically land right on the target damage of a power with that recharge and area of effect.

The data doesn't back you up. If it did, when Castle datamined blasters prior to the Defiance 2.0 changes, powerset combinations with a lower number of melee attacks would have been dying at a far lower rate, and it would have almost certainly showed up in his statistics. Ranged blasters were pretty much dying at a rate comparable to blasters as a whole.

Not everyone has the skillset to be a blapper. And the nerf to total focus made it harder for energy blappers in particular, which were among the more common types. But they self-selected themselves in or out of the lifestyle: if you find blapping keeps getting you killed, most players switch to another style. The ones that continued to do it were the better ones by attrition.


And I have to repeat this, because it seems to not be clear. I specifically asked Castle if blasters were explicitly intended to stay at range, and he said no. I amplified this by asking an additional question: was the intent of the ranged modifier increase to signal that range was the "correct" style for blasters, and melee was secondary? His response was that the exact opposite was true: the evidence suggested to him that melee attacks were *so* good that a lot of players were thinking that it was *melee* that was the "correct" style for blasters, and ranged attacks (except AoEs) were the lesser option. The increase in ranged modifier, he said, was to *equalize* the options, not to make range supreme.

I asked him one more question just to pound the point home: if the ranged modifier increase actually caused people to actually *abandon* blapping altogether because the ranged option was now far better than the melee option, would that be acceptable. He said no, that was not the intent.

As far as I'm concerned the question of whether blasters are *intended* to be ranged only is a settled matter as of Issue 11. There's simply no wiggle room in Castle's answers, and that's deliberate on my part because I asked him if I was allowed to repeat the answers. So I made sure the questions were unambiguous. Short of someone else overriding those decisions, they are very clear.

Whether an individual player *prefers* ranged or melee, or whether an individual player *is better* at melee or ranged is a separate issue. Players are supposed to choose their playstyles individually, and different people can come to different conclusions in that regard. You might personally think the powersets are easier to leverage purely from range, and melee range is for suckers. That's your prerogative. But they are definitely not designed that way: someone who thinks the exact opposite might be wrong in your eyes, but they are making an entirely valid decision in the *devs* eyes.


And will people stop saying Total Focus is a defensive power? Its really getting weird. Energy Punch is an offensive attack. Total Focus is an offensive attack. They are both designed explicitly to be offensive weapons. That's why Total Focus still does 3.56 scale damage, but no longer does Mag 4 stun. It had too good of a defensive side-effect for something that wasn't intended to be a defensive power.

It was done that way specifically because most people still don't know how things like endurance reduction and especially mez resistance work. The problem is that at the beginning of time the devs starting calling everything "percentages" that aren't percentages, and that creates confusion. "50%" end reduce isn't 50% of anything in particular: its just a number: 0.5. What it *does* is reduce endurance consumption by 33%. That percentage means something.

Its not that its an intermediate calculation, its that its a representation of the *final* calculation. And when Real Numbers was being created, it was explicitly *changed* to do it that way to be less ambiguous: its not doing it by accident.

Speed buffs are in a grey area: some people think of them in terms of recharge reduction, some people think of them as activity acceleration. A "50%" speed buff reduces recharge duration by 33%. Or it increases activity by 50%. Neither mental model is clearly overwhelmingly more common. But in the case of things like Mez Resistance, one of those two mental models is overwhelmingly far more common, and its the one that runs *contrary* to expressing those numbers as percentages. So from a user interface design perspective, its better to either show the numbers as calculated percentages, or remove the percent sign altogether and use absolute numbers. Of the two, the former is more understandable to the masses than the latter in my experience because it matches their mental model far more often.

Apparently Quick Reflexes is buffing Cur, when it should be buffing Str (the devs will know what that means).


Heightened Speed is buffing run speed strength. It won't make you move faster, it should improve run speed buffs themselves. Meaning: if you are not using powers like Sprint, and you don't have movement-buffing powers in your build, Heightened Speed will have nothing to buff.

To put it another way, Sprint buffs you. Heightened Speed buffs Sprint.

Real Numbers doesn't break down all of these kinds of buffs. Looking at a test character I have that has that buff right now, I see this in the Combat Monitor:

Running Speed: 20.08 mph
Base: +14.32 mph
Swift: +5.76 mph

Swift is adding 5.76/14.32 = 0.4022, or 40.22% to my run speed. But Swift is actually a base +35% run speed buff. What's happening is that Heightended Speed has a 15% run speed Strength buff - it works like an enhancement. So Swift is basically slotted with +15%, so its +35% is increased to 35% * (1.15) = 40.25. Which is basically what the numbers above show. Heightened Speed is buffing Swift, and Swift is then buffing my run speed.

+15% is probably a low buff, given that.


I think same problem again: Acute Senses is buffing perception strength, which means it doesn't buff your perception, it buffs *powers* that buff perception. So if you were not running tactics or something like that, there's nothing for the power to buff.


Its definitely working as designed, and not accidentally doing that. I'm presuming its WAI, because they had to do it explicitly.


My tests can confirm that if you have a buff, and you use Secondary Mutation, if the random mutation is a copy of a buff you already have, that new buff will simply fail to buff you. You can, however, get the full set if you are willing to try long enough.

I haven't drawn it yet, but the effect should turn you into a Rikti monkey for 60 seconds and then expire, and it also instantly recharges the Secondary Mutation power itself so after the 60 seconds you can redraw a new random mutation (you don't have to wait the normal 20 minute recharge).


You know what would be cool is if you draw this mutation, it unlocks a toggle that lets you do it voluntarily from that point onward. I don't see the harm in it, and it makes the act of getting that mutation actually somewhat rewarding in an odd way.

Yep, that's the one. You should be able to reactivate Secondary Mutation about a minute later when it wears off. It must be a very rare effect, because I haven't drawn it yet in approaching a hundred casts. I was beginning to think the devs chickened out of putting this effect into the reward table rotation.

Although Brawl Indexes were a perfectly acceptable stepping stone to figuring out how the powers actually worked, among its many faults is that its a pain in the neck to do pencil and paper calculations with them. Power Bolt is a scale 1.0 attack. Life is good. Its a 2.7778 Brawl Index attack. That sucks. All those repeating decimals in the Brawl Index were due to the fact that Brawl is a scale 0.36 attack, which meant in effect almost all attack powers were having their damage divided by some multiple of 9 when converted to Brawl numbers.

This was so obvious that the actual maintainers (at least, some of them to my recollection) of the Brawl Indexes realized - or rather assumed - that the devs were clearly either in love with setting powers to a multiple of 100/36, or it was Brawl itself that was set to some multiple of 36/100. The scale system then made it obvious which was which.

Not really. Its similarly riding the edge of what seems reasonable to me in a perk buff. But the combination of the two makes the mutation buff power itself even more powerful.


But also, and I don't mean to single out Adeon Hawkwood personally, but when I hear someone reply to a comment on the oddity of defensive type splitting, and without skipping a beat suggest converting accuracy to tohit which is an unrelated component of the power, my spider-sense goes off immediately and I think people in general are seeing an opportunity to hand-craft a far better buff than it was intended to be.

Which is probably subconsciously being signaled by the devs making a buff far stronger than any they have ever claimed would be reasonable before. Its certainly not game-breaking but it is certainly surprising to me to see the strength of this buff. Before I saw it, I would have laughed at any player suggesting it.


Put it this way: if the mutation buff did any *one* of its buff types with 20% uptime, I'd think it was pretty good for a perk power. Instead it does all of them randomly with 100% uptime. Makes it hard for me to quibble about typing when the problem isn't that some players are disadvantaged by the split typing, but rather that each will 20% of the time have a buff that is usually going to be less useful than at other times (there will still be some cross-over benefit for most players: SR would benefit from psionic defense for non-positional psi, and many typed defense players have psionic holes in their typed defenses).

That's starting to sound like piling on to the buffs. Even +7.5% res(all) is getting up there, for a random buff in a perk pack.

Also, the only resistances I'm aware of in the mutation buffs so far are mez resistance buffs (meaning: "reduce duration of mez" buffs, not magnitude protection).

Been saying that since literally Issue 5 beta, when Sonic was first created (said it in this thread also). If you haven't actually seen or played Sonic Blast, and you tend to dismiss sleep as mitigation, you really can't appreciate this combo.

I dug up a level 19 Sonic/Energy on test that I left there long ago. No inventions. No SOs. Siren's Song itself only has one slot, and its slotted for accuracy. I just found something simple for her to take on, because I'm a bit rusty on Sonic/En: a spawn with two +1 minions and a +1 Lt. This is something any blaster can take on really, but the point is that Sonic/Energy can take on this spawn with literally *zero* risk. It can take on spawns three times the size practically like a controller once it has any sort of decent slotting. But the point was to show what this combo can do practically out of the box, and for its entire leveling career. More importantly, it suggests a reason for a player to invest heavily in blapper attacks: with Sirens, you're heavily rewarded for leaning towards high DPA single target attacks, regardless of range.

The silliness that is Siren's Song is here. At the end you can see the slotting on that character, or lack of slotting as the case may be.

That's a Real Numbers quirk. EndReduce and Status Resists are quoted as "percentages" but neither really are a percentage. The power provides 0.3 endred and 0.5 status resist. That's often quoted by both players and the devs as "30%" and "50%" but the way EndRed and Status Resists work is different than Resistance, say. Your end endurance usage is:

End Use = Endurance Cost / (1 + EndReduce)

and status resist also works like that:

Mez Duration = Base Duration / (1 + Mez Resistance)

So a 0.3 end reduce will reduce your endurance costs:

End Use / Endurance Cost = 1/(1+EndRed) = 1/(1+ 0.3) = 0.7692.

Real Numbers is quoting that as a 0.2308 reduction from base, or 23.08% (round off error on the last digit). Same for mez resistance. So this is weird, but probably WAI.

There are five buff powers at the moment (the five mentioned in this thread). So far as I can tell, each buff has about the same chance to be received, although there's an inside the margin of error chance that Pain Tolerance is slightly less common and Quick Reflexes is slightly more common (but I've only tested 62 draws so far).

Also, there is in fact a sixth buff that is, well, less than beneficial but I have been unable to draw it. I think maybe someone chickened out at the last minute and removed it from the reward table, or its so rare it only comes up 1% of the time or something. I won't spoil the surprise, if the devs are keeping that one close to the vest.


I mentioned this in the bug thread also, but the buffs have a 20 minute in-game lifetime. Meaning, they will last for 20 minutes of actual in-game time. If you log out they will still be there when you log back in. Which creates an exploit opportunity - you can in fact get all five buffs active at the same time (granted: it will take a long time to do it: you have to wait 20 minutes between buffs and if you randomly draw a buff you already have, you will not be able to stack it with itself).

The devs also fought against changing MoG for years. And this is a more complex situation than is useful as an example, because while MoG has always had a weird reputation, its original incarnation was actually much better than it was changed to over time. Perma-MoG was actually a legitimate, valid defensive options (and a really powerful one) so long as you didn't use superjump too much. The devs were certainly not going to spend too much time trying to "fix" a power that many players said was broken, but many others thought was good enough to keep running forever.

(The problem came down to recharge: at 90s cycle time MoG's inability to heal was compensated by its effective heal to full on every cycle: when its duration *and* recharge were increased, the power was no stronger but its heal to full was severely diluted.)


I can't prove my assertions about the dev intent either: I can only state what the sum total of all the information I know about the development process tells me. But I am basing that not just on documentation, like the dev diaries, but also dev conversations about and tangential to the subject, going back to when I first started communicating with the devs directly for more than QA around the I3/I4 time period. And some other stuff. Its still my judgment, not cold hard facts.


Eh, I really don't *need* anything in Energy Manipulation. I've always found it to be the best exemplar of a well-rounded blaster secondary. Not the best secondary: the best well-rounded one. Great melee attacks coupled with nice self buffs. I'd rather the devs stay away from that, actually.

Scrapper secondaries, sure, they were tweaked a lot, but that was both up and down. SR was actually changed more often - and nerfed more times - than Regen, actually, although a lot of that is only evident in hindsight. The devs were basically shooting in the dark on defensive powers in general, which is why SR, Invuln, and Regen were one step away from being randomly set in every issue. The question for me is less about what things were touched the most, but rather which needs were addressed by which changes. Blaster secondaries may have been rushed, but most of them aren't really demanding more attention. /Energy, /Elec, and /Ice I think most people would rather the devs leave alone. /Fire and /Devices people have been asking for more attention to, but the requests for attention aren't all consistent in what they want, and many just want the entire sets to be changed beyond recognition, which isn't going to happen.

So I would expect that since scrapper secondaries were broken every which way (too high, too low, sometimes both at the same time) but blaster secondaries are less so, its entirely logical that scrapper secondaries would have gotten more attention, keeping in mind lots of that attention was unwanted. Blasters as a whole have had as much attention as any other archetype, though, and probably more than most.

Web Grenade/Caltrops + Ignite. For some reason I don't recall anyone really harping on Ignite until I mentioned a couple years ago that Ignite has scale 5.0 intrinsic damage. Its smaller, but makes Burn look like Power Push.

People don't like it because of its long cast time, but Ignite deals a ridiculous amount of damage if you can just keep the target from running out of it. Like, Nova levels of damage.

I believe that all happened in beta before launch, and while according to the dev formulas that is all that would have done, in actual fact it made melee attacks into extremely powerful attacks due to their ridiculous DPA. The devs' balancing formulas would not have detected that, but it would have turned up in actual playtesting. They wouldn't exactly know why, but they would have seen that the current Energy Manipulation numbers were vastly superior to the original ones.

The main thing that the increase tells me is that the devs intended them to do massive damage, and increased them when the perception is they did not. The devs pattern was (and still is) to be more inclined to ascede to player requests when they are consistent with their initial intent, and resist them when they are not. If the devs intended melee attacks to be secondary to the primary function of blasters, and not terribly important if they did a lot of damage or not, they are not likely to have increased their damage just because players complained. But if they intended them to be valid offensive options and the players were saying the perception is they were not reasonable options, the devs would have been far more likely to increase their damage explicitly to make those powers appear to do what they were intended to do.

The truth is the blaster secondaries were rushed. The devs were working against the clock and tried to reuse whatever they could. Blasters were supposed to be Ranged/Melee originally, so they were given secondaries that were highly derivative of existing melee sets whenever that was possible, and to the best extent possible. That doesn't mean the devs thought that was *all* blaster secondaries should do: the time they saved copying tanker secondaries gave them time to make /devices which was totally different.

But whether blasters can function in melee or not is not subject to a vote. Back in the day, there were two camps: the "blasters are meant to be in range" camp and the blapper camp. The mere existence of the blapper camp mostly invalidated the position of the first camp, without them having to say a word. The fact that the devs said blapping was a valid blaster playing style nullified it completely. The fact that players still believe it is a question of perception, not design.

Jack never actually said blasters were supposed to stay out of melee range as far as I recall. He said blasters were given the ability to leverage range as a defense - which is actually true: deliberately staying out of melee range tends (not always, but often) to expose you to less mez and most (not all) critter ranged modifiers are lower, exposing you to less damage. But that's not the same thing, and doesn't mean there aren't *advantages* to getting in melee range: the melee attacks tend to have higher DPA, for one. And since melee and ranged attacks are not exclusive, blaster secondaries don't have to be *full* of melee attacks to legitimize melee range offense: they just have to have enough attacks that have advantages over the blaster's ranged options. Energy Punch, for example, has an (unadjusted for ArcanaTime) DPA of 2.36 DS/sec - higher than essentially all ranged attacks. Adding it to your attack chain is going to significantly improve your damage. It *used* to have a DPA of 2.93, which is practically cheating. If you can leverage melee attacks, either situationally or continuously depending on playstyle and build, you'll end up dealing a lot more damage most of the time (the exception: AoE-focused Fire and AR builds without corresponding AoE potential in the secondary).

Now, you could argue that since the devs clearly didn't factor in activation time or DPA on paper that this isn't a good indicator of intent. Which is fair. But what would be a good judge of intent is the raw damage of the powers, which usually indicates the *intended* value of the attack. And Energy Manipulation's damage starts at 1.96 scale for the lowest attack (energy punch), then 2.6 for bonesmasher, then 3.56 for total focus**. In fact, what a lot of people used to not be aware of (and probably are still unaware of) is the fact that Power Thrust - often considered a throwaway power by many /energy blasters - actually does almost as much damage as thunder kick and other tier 1 melee attacks (0.8). Its telling that a melee attack that is only as good as actual tier 1 scrapper attacks isn't often considered a "legitimate" attack by blasters - because they are used to far higher performance in their melee attacks.

Also telling: the melee attacks in energy manipulation look on the surface like they were borrowed from energy melee, but actually in two cases their damage was radically improved (EP and BS). The only reason they probably didn't do that to TF is because TF already runs up to near the damage design rules for attacks. If they were meant to be primarily "emergency use" powers to deal with things that wandered into melee range, the devs would not have increased the damage, they would have increased the mez or soft control instead. By increasing the damage, those powers don't get very much better at dealing with critters entering melee range directly, but they do get *slower* in recharge, making them less available.


** Sad but true: every single energy manipulation melee attack except power thrust was either equal to or did more damage than Eagle's Claw at release (technically, EC did 0.04 DS more than energy punch and could crit at 5%), and every single EM melee attack except power thrust had better DPA than every single MA attack at release. Meaning every single EM attack was better than every single MA attack at release. But of course that is just the margin case: the best EM blapper attack chain including ranged fillers from *any* blaster primary beat every possible scrapper attack chain for single targets at release, regardless of primary and secondary selection. That's just how good those attacks were - and still are.

The last I checked Thunderstrike had a 50% chance to stun and a 100% chance to knockback the target, and an additional 80% chance to knockback surrounding targets.

Having trouble keeping a straight face here. Energy Manipulation has always been the #1 all time acknowledged blapping set. In my opinion, it actually has does so to a slight discredit to Electric Manipulation, which is also a very good blapping set. But the notion that the intent, purpose, or usage of Total Focus is to get out of melee range is, as far as I can conceive, inconsistent with reality.

Which is another way of saying I almost spit my drink out when I read it. I'm not deliberately trying to be offensive: this is as irreconcilable to me as someone saying they primarily use invincibility for the tohit buff.


Sam:
Blasters can be built to stay out of melee range at the player's choice, but that's not how the archetype was designed or is currently maintained. The blaster archetype was originally conceived to be the Ranged Damage/Melee Damage archetype. It was intended to be the damage-focused (to the point of sacrificing protection or team utility) archetype, so it was conceived to have damage and more damage. The presumption was giving it two damage sets meant it would deal a ton more damage (because of course activation time didn't exist back then). It was changed to be Ranged Damage / Utility to soften the focus of the blaster secondary, and also (I believe) to expand the concept to include sets like Devices explicitly. At that point the Blaster became Ranged Damage / (Melee Damage/SelfSupport/Utility) in terms of the powersets it possessed.

But the blaster was never actually stated to be a ranged-focused archetype. It was said that the Blaster had ranged advantages but that's not the same thing. Anyway, that's history.

Word of God (or rather, the closest thing to it) comes from Castle, who I've had lots of discussions about this very topic. During the Defiance 2.0 buffs from circa I11 I specifically asked Castle for permission to relay the result of those discussions, and summarize his take on the blaster archetype, especially within the context of the question "what should blasters be able to do" which was relevant to Defiance 2.0.

I'm paraphrasing for simplicity, but the word from Castle is: Blasters are designed to deliver Damage. They are not explicitly designed to deal Ranged Damage. Its deal damage, period. To that end, some secondaries are designed to provide a very strong melee damage option (i.e. Energy Manipulation) while others are designed to provide very strong melee inhibitors to keep foes either at range or less effective in melee range (Ice). So to answer your other question:

I did answer this question lots of times during the Defiance 2.0 days. The answer is: no one thing. Since blasters are intended to be the damage archetype, not the ranged damage archetype or the melee damage archetype or anything more specific, secondaries are intended to provide the means to deal more damage in some fashion. Melee attacks do that. Damage buffs do that. PBAoE damage auras do that. Within the range of what's reasonable for blasters, just like blaster primaries run the range from almost 100% damage focused (Fire) to damage with soft controls (Energy) to damage with heavy control and debuff (Ice), secondaries run the range from heavy melee and buff (Energy Manipulation) to melee + PBAoE (Fire), to melee-defensive (Ice).

This isn't a unique situation for Blasters. Controllers have a similarly wide range of "control." Gravity control is not Illusion control is not Mind control. In fact, Illusion "control" has one single target hold and one AoE hold. Heck I have Ice blasters with more mez potential. But Illusion sits at the far end of a spectrum of control: Illusion has very novel powers: it has traditionally been called the "chaotic control" set due to having spooky (the Spectral Terror) and the phantom army (also known as the ADD brigade).

That's fine, because City of Heroes isn't about five pins pushed into the powers landscape: the absolute blaster, the absolute defender, the absolute controller, the absolute scrapper, and the absolute tanker. Each archetype has a continuum of possibilities within a range that sometimes strays very close to (or sometimes even slightly over) the boundaries between it and the other archetypes. Completely separate from whether or not /Devices needs to be improved from a performance perspective, its entirely valid for there to exist Blasters with gadgets like /Devices, or blapper tools like/Energy, or melee keep-away powers like in /Ice. That's entirely intentional.


Now, as to general comments about how long blasters can or should remain in melee range, and what is or is not mitigation, that's mostly a question of player preference and skill. But I will say that I spent a couple of hours testing some things yesterday and this morning by doing laps around the portal courtyard and my blapper instincts seem to still be intact. Taking on two level 50 death mages with an En/En blapper with offensive but not really defensive inventions is no big deal if you know what you are doing. I don't know if I'm "intended" to be able to stand toe to toe with a pair of DMs, but I do know it is well within the capabilities of the archetype, and its actually *easier* going blapper than doing it all from range. And as to whether sleep is actually strong mitigation for a blaster, ironically Siren Song works better for *blappers* because when targets are asleep, its better to be using hard-hitting single target attacks than AoEs. Sonic/Energy is actually almost cheating its so ludicrous. Its an ironic example of the ranged set being used as a "support" to the melee attacks rather than vice-versa. And also, I should add, perfectly consistent with the blaster archetype.

I shoulda recorded that morning session. I'll try to do another. My blaster might have like 3% defense due to some set bonuses, but I don't think that'll be critical. I do have the Cold epic at the moment on that character, though, so I do have Frozen Armor. I suppose I could run with it off, though.


Mystic_Cross:
That sounds less like any version of the manual, and more like the Issue 6 version of the Prima Guide. Those statements would not necessarily reflect the intentions of the archetype designers themselves.


Non-blaster stuff:

FunstuffofDoom:
Toggles can still be detoggled with endurance drain. And those powers are not all identical either. Active Defense has defense debuff resistance and also protects against fear, confuse, and repel. Kuji-in Rin has psionic resistance. The problem with Kuji-in Rin is, of course, the lack of KB protection.

Castle is The Powers That Be for powers that be. Castle is not The Powers That Be for powers that not be, or The Powers That Be for that which be not powers, or The Powers That Be for The Powers That Be for that which be or not be powers.