Arcanaville

Yep. Arbiter Hawk can wave his magic wand and boost the ranges of all 40 foot single target attacks to 80 feet, and it will be so. He can't buff the range of cone attacks specifically, without being forced to increase their endurance costs and recharge times accordingly due to the increase in the AoE factor.

One combination gets dangerously close in my opinion: AR/Dark. AR has no Aim, Dark has no BU. AR has no 40 foot tier 3 single target attack. The only tohit in the combo is Soul Drain, which is a very good power if you're either a blapper or a hybrid blaster, but if you are primarily a ranged blaster, the ranged option for AR/Dark did not improve very much with the currently announced changes in I24.

I don't think the sniper changes are unfair, exactly. I think they are not targeted at blasters, but at snipes, and aren't specifically intended to help blasters more than any other archetype.

That would be, if not unfair, at least inexplicable if that were the only change coming on the offensive side of the ledger (sustain aside). Perhaps its not. And to be honest, even if the original plan was for that to be it, I think we have enough consensus to change the plan. Its not often you get this wide a consensus something is amiss, even if there is no agreement on what precisely is amiss. I believe the devs will take note of that.

The problem with Drain Psyche is that it combines hard to use with stupidly strong. That makes it harder to adjust. Lots of people aren't fond of DP, but lots of other people take Mental primarily for DP.

Having said that, I don't have a problem with shifting some of the strength of DP into a frontloaded component that affects the blaster without having to hit any targets. But that power is radioactive: I would do that all by itself unlinked to any other game changes.

I don't think everyone has to be exactly equal, but I don't think Blasters as a whole should have any strong disadvantages relative to other archetypes.

This may actually be a good opportunity to examine things like the totally inexplicably low blaster melee tohit buff modifier, and perhaps how buffs like tactics work with regard to ally vs self buffing.

Its only a sacrifice of damage if you can in fact hit more and you choose to hit less. But there's no reason to do that: you should hit however many you are capable of hitting with your playstyle: the tohit buff you get from that will be enough to hit the limit under the conditions I mentioned. But I'm not advocating deliberately trying to hit more than you would attempt to hit today, or alternatively deliberately trying to hit less. I'm only mentioning the threshold necessary to reach 22%, not advocating a specific target number to hit.

Of course, your point about melee does bring up the case where a player chooses to not take Soul Drain at all, because they don't *ever* want to be in melee and it thus has no benefit to them. That could be particularly problematic for, say, AR/Dark, and probably worth mentioning to Arbiter Hawk. Perhaps Soul Drain could be altered to provide its frontloaded tohit buff even if it hits nothing, or there might be some other remedy possible.

Slotted tactics and unslotted (for tohit) Soul Drain needs to hit three targets to reach +22%. Slotted tactics and Soul Drain 1-slotted for tohit requires hitting two targets. Slotted tactics and Kismet requires unslotted Soul Drain hitting one target.

Whether its a source of humor to you or not, its a fact worth mentioning to players that care about facts.

I'm probably generally far too charitable in these cases. And definitely in this case.

There's one other blaster that can theoretically get to perma +22%: /Dark when not combined with AR. But it requires significantly more effort than /energy because you need about +100% global recharge to pull it off, which is unlikely to happen in a leveling build.

However, it does not require perma +22% to get perma insta-snipe. It just requires the tohit buff be up when snipe is recharged, and /Dark can get there with a little less effort than that: still very high relative to energy and devices, but not impossibly high.

Which doesn't alter the fact that the blaster melee modifier for tohit buff is too low. But with the modifier reset to 0.125, Dark would be in the game without tactics and or the need to hit a high number of targets.

That concludes the level of assistance I am willing to provide in the area of dev communication.

I'm genuinely trying to help you out here:

This is a question, but the answer is very obviously: yes, what was announced on the stream.


This is not a question: this is a statement that in your opinion what was announced won't go far enough. Which implies your previous question was rhetorical. You know what the plans are, you just believe they are inadequate. Which is a fair opinion, but not a question. More importantly, it neutralized the prior question as being possibly rhetorical.


This isn't a question at all, but a suggestion.


Questions that Arbiter Hawk can answer would be questions like:

Do you have any plans to buff blasters beyond what was announced, if it turns out testing shows the announced buffs are not strong enough?

Which incidentally, the answer is "yes."

Do you believe your buffs will make blasters survivable against spawns with multiple bosses, and if not what level of difficulty did you test your changes against?

I'll let Arbiter Hawk answer that one, if he chooses. But I would say that the buffs won't take you from dying against an Lt and a minion to defeating two bosses simultaneously. But they might take you from being able to defeat one boss but not two, to being able to survive a fight against two. How high the buff will take you depends on where you are now.


Look at the questions Arbiter Hawk actually answered:

They tend to be direct questions allowing for direct answers without the need to have a specific presumed perspective. The only actual post I saw Arbiter Hawk reply to that wasn't a direct question like that was the one about mitigation, but that's because once you get Arbiter Hawk talking about damage mitigation, yak yak yak you might as well get comfortable.

But seriously, you're not being ignored. You posted something the devs tend not to respond to: a question that was part challenge. Perhaps you did not intend it that way: if so I hope pointing out the fact that there are ways to better direct the question will help in the future.

My interpretation of what's going on in those cases is that those are cases where the devs were actively trading off different effects from the perspective of making sure the sets were not too good at too many things. That creates the opportunity for one effect to be traded off against another for a design purpose. And they are comparing one set against its peers. But sustain and non-sustain effects aren't in competition like that in the blaster secondaries, and comparing to peers would be irrelevant to manipulation buffs if you were going to buff all of them to a higher level of value.

As a review of the manipulation sets is something I want, if I thought sustain would hinder that I would be pointing that out to Arbiter Hawk already. But I believe the critical problem inherent in any review of the secondaries is the huge amount of effort it would take to do that within the context of the cottage rule. By comparison, sustain's effect is negligable. Certainly not high enough for me to encourage the devs to either split up the effect (which would not really help, since the sets would still be just as powerful overall) which would be an inconvenience, or reduce sustain just to make room for future buffs, which is an attitude that I believe actually a lot of us including me promoted over the years which helped put blasters in the state they are now, or delay any changes until manipulation sets are on the table, because in prior discussions with the devs my belief is that that is something we should not hold our breath for: the devs want to do it, but there are serious impediments to it getting off the ground.

Simpler, more direct questions would help in this specific instance.

I don't think buffs are fungible in the way you're implying. I think whether or not we have too little, too much, or just enough sustain will have little impact on whether or not Frozen Aura can have more damage (or any damage) or Fire Manipulation gets more utility. Only when things get egregious do I think the devs start thinking that way. But for remotely reasonable levels of sustain I don't think having high sustain "steals" away opportunities for other buffs.

Specifically, I don't think the devs look at Ice Manipulation and say "Ice is weak, we can buff Frigid Protection or we can buff Shiver, but we can't do both."

It may place some limits on manipulation balancing, but I don't think the situation is all that analogous. The amount of sustain we're getting is closer to what the devs feel compelled to add, not the maximum amount we could credibly get. And that means sustain doesn't really reduce the options for buffing manipulation sets by more than a small amount.

For example, I would feel perfectly comfortable asking the devs to buff Frozen Aura to not be ridiculous. I would be genuinely surprised to hear them say that they'd like to, but they'd have to nerf Frigid Protection if they do. The manipulation sets have enormous room for improvement and I don't think sustain took even a third of the room available to buff them, particularly on the damage and offensive mitigation side of the fence.

Yeah, the timer would still be there so that the bomb would behave just like the current one does, and the detonator would be an added feature. So people would not need to use it if they did not want to, and anyone unaware of the change would not be negatively affected.

While we're talking about time bomb, here's another change that would be useful to combine with the previous one. Instead of having a gigantic 9 second cast time, have time bomb have a 1.67 second cast time, but for the first five seconds after activation its damage is reduced. It starts off at half damage, and gains 10% more (base) damage for each second that elapses until it reaches full strength. Any detonation that occurs after that happens at full power. Any detonation that happens earlier than that happens at less than full power, but that detonation would have been happening during the original cast time of the power - in effect, you can have it go off faster than it does now if you're willing to accept less damage, but either way you will be rooted for less time and anyone that ignores the detonation mechanic gets basically the same power as now just with a vastly shorter cast time.

One set has a heal/regen click (Energy). One set has a regeneration toggle (devices). Two have regen/recovery clicks (dark,electric). One has a heal over time toggle (fire). One has an absorb shield (ice). Mental is still mental.

I don't know if that's possible because of the issue of range and target type. But taking Time Bomb could automatically grant a separate power called Detonator which, when clicked, sent out a wide PBAoE pulse that killed your time bomb, causing it to detonate on command. You could set this power to only affect your pets, so it would not detonate other players' time bombs.

No matter how fantastic the secondaries were, if blasters were still insufficiently survivable there would still be a need to add survivability somewhere, and the devs believe that is in the secondaries. That's completely independent from any perceived lack of utility of the secondaries.

That survivability would either come in one power or be split up into more than one power. I would prefer it come in just one, to the point of advocating changing it if it was split up.

Its never necessary to give anything an overpowered anything. However, I don't see where that was done in any of the secondary changes slated for I24. The survivability levels being added are entirely reasonable, and in fact within the limits I calculated should be added in the past.

Arbiter Hawk tells me that to prevent needing to go into melee, ToB aka ToF is going to be a ranged attack in I24.

I don't think that was necessarily 100% deliberate. The only thing I really think about TD is that Arbiter Hawk wanted /devices to be able to perma this effect a lot easier than most other blasters to give it an advantage.

If we increase the blaster melee tohit buff mod from 0.075 to 0.125, that would make them the undisputed King of Aiming (that's the same mod value Defenders use for the ranged modifier, making them King of Helping Other People Aim). Build Up would increase from +15% to +25% and be over the limit without tohit slotting. Targeting Drone would increase to 23.1% and be over the limit without even slotting it. Slotting it would make it protect against tohit debuffs better (and it has tohit debuff resistance). Soul Drain would increase to +15% for the first target and 2.5% for each additional target and be over the limit with four targets total. But Tactics would be unaffected.

To me, those all sound like good things to have happen.

That is true. But energy manipulation's change in I24 is that Conserve Power is going to be replaced with an Energize variation. It will have less heal and more regen than Electric's Energize, but it will still have a heal according to Arbiter Hawk. Which means power boost will synergize with energize in energy manipulation if you take it.

One potential source of improvement was on my list of blaster issues from before he announced the I24 changes: for some odd reason Blasters have the worst melee tohit modifier - basically the one that is used for self-buffs. That's why BU is +20% for scrappers but only +15% for blasters. Increasing the melee tohit buff modifier for blasters from 0.075 to 0.10 (the value that scrappers, tankers, stalkers, and brutes have, plus defenders) would bring BU up to +20% and make it far easier for BU to trigger insta-snipe, and it would make it trivially easy for targeting drone to do so without going to 4 slots. And premium players without access to the invention system won't be as disadvantaged from not having kismet accessible.

Note that this has nothing to do with buffing, and wouldn't impinge on Defenders at all: Defenders use their ranged tohit modifier for ally buffing powers, and that's set to the highest value of any archetype: 0.125. Blasters, along with Scrappers, Tankers, Stalkers, and Brutes currently have a 0.07 ranged modifier. That's what affects tactics' strength in particular, and it can be set independently of the self buffing mod.

You can increase the range of single target attacks at will, but increasing the range of cones increases their AoE factor, which increases their endurance and recharge.


Without seeing the changes being contemplated for Dual Pistols, Ice, and Sonic, its impossible to judge those with anything other than wild guesses likely to be wrong. However, for the sets we do have information on, AR/Dev has both an easy way to make the insta-snipe perma and the best snipe in terms of DPA - approaching 3.0 DS/sec adjusted for arcanatime, which is the sort of number that you simply don't see in this game for normal powers.

Darkness Manipulation may have come out a little bit ahead, depending on your point of view. On the one hand, its sustain effect was added to Touch of Fear, which has to hit a target: its the only blaster sustain effect that actually has to hit a target that is being added in I24 (Drain Psyche has to hit a target, but its not a new effect being added in I24 and is also not being touched). The good news is that Arbiter Hawk is going to make it a ranged attack so you do not need to be in melee range to use it, so its getting a free buff in that regard. And Soul Drain has higher uptime than BU and is in a better position to make insta-snipe perma or near perma (an ultrahigh recharge build can make SD perma, but it takes +300% total recharge; Soul Drain and Aim have opportunities BU and Aim don't). But Soul Drain is a PBAoE.

Energy Manipulation also appears to come out a bit ahead. Its getting a variant of Energize instead of a sustain toggle or a power like ToF. That means unlike most sustains, it will be able to benefit, at least to a degree, from high recharge. And Energy Manipulation has power boost, which buffs healing powers. And it also buffs tohit, so Energy Manipulation also has a path to perma insta-snipe: build enough recharge so that the combination of BU, Aim, and PB collectively are up all the time, and you can get enough tohit constantly to make it work.

Besides Assault Rifle, the other primary with a better than average insta-snipe is Psychic Blast. AR's snipe has 2.99 DS/sec. Psionic Lance is 2.32 DS/sec (for comparison, Blaze has a DPA of 2.29 DS/sec).

I thought more sets would get absorb, but it seems only one does: Ice Manipulation. Its very difficult at this point to judge absorb, but I can say this: absorb is going to be numerically stronger than regen and heal over time because its inefficient: you can't use all of it all the time usually. But that means Ice Manipulation's absorb shield might be a wild card for min/maxers to attempt to leverage.

You could say that about everything the devs have changed over time. But I would rather play improved blasters than eliminate the archetype or wait ten years for a completely redesigned one.