Arcanaville

Speaking as someone who has championed build diversity for just about as long as I've been here, I'm pretty sure I got the point fine. But lets say for the sake of argument I missed it somehow. Having acknowledged that build diversity is important, my reply now is:

You don't have to take it if you don't want to. Just like Regen scrappers don't have to take Integration. Conversely, if the buff is something the devs perceive to be necessary to improve the set, then if its spread out among many different powers only the players who take *all* of them will get the intended buff. Everyone else will not. That's often a worse problem.

My main's build will change in I24, by choice. Not because I need to change to get access to the buffs in I24, but because I intend to build to maximize the value of those buffs. That's my choice. There's no such thing as being forced to min/max.

Build Up itself is situational in that it can't be up all the time. Is Build Up worth taking and slotting?

You don't have to take it if you don't want to. Just like Regen scrappers don't have to take Integration. Conversely, if the buff is something the devs perceive to be necessary to improve the set, then if its spread out among many different powers only the players who take *all* of them will get the intended buff. Everyone else will not. That's often a worse problem.

Isn't that what I said?

To the very complex "use the snipe, then go back to what you were doing."

Yes, and its going to open a discussion on those powers. Those snipes are not as good as blaster or other snipes, but perhaps more critically it seems some use the melee damage table and others use the ranged damage table. If all of them used the ranged damage table, I might be more ok with that. But the ones that use the melee damage table were already cheating before: to give them insta-firing would in my opinion be bordering on amplifying an exploit.

And before anyone notes this: I'm fully aware of the cast time differences. My concern stands.

Dominators potentially have the most to gain by this change, but they have the least ability to trigger it on their own. In teamed situations with ally tohit buffs in play, it'll be more available but reliability will be an issue. Defenders with their higher tohit modifiers have a better chance of genuinely leveraging the buff to a better extent than Blasters, which would suggest Blasters still need a little something extra to give them more distinct benefit.

The sniper-ranged AoE attack that shows up in Munitions Mastery.

If the primaries with no sets were left unchanged, yes. But Arbiter Hawk stated in the stream that those three primaries were being examined separately, to improve them independent of the sniper blast changes.

Supposedly all sniper attacks that aren't LRM.

Blasters do not need to make any special slotting or enhancement changes to gain the benefit that sniper shots will get in I24. Unless they want to min/max the benefit. In which case, as with all min/maxing, you're on your own.

The only powerset combination that is unlikely to have either Build Up or Aim and thus may not be able to gain this benefit in some measure are AR/Dev blasters who have neither BU nor Aim. But their build burden is tiny and for that teeny change they end up with the best sniper option of any blaster, by a large factor.

AR paired with Devices has a relatively easy path to an (almost) always available scale 3.0 DPA attack that hits from 150 feet of range. That's a higher DPA than any current attack any blaster has access to by a very large margin.

It is somewhat unfair, but I'm willing to let AR/Dev keep it.

When you say "situational" when would you not want to use an attack that has a higher DPA than all of your other attacks and fires in about one second?

Because you believe you need a lot of defense and resistance to get any benefit from regeneration. Which is false, but its your right to believe it.

Also, some sets are getting absorb instead of regeneration, and energy manipulation is getting energize. The changes will make every blaster I've ever created more survivable: that's obvious. Whether it will make them survivable enough is a judgment call that will require actual testing to know for certain.

The intent of the changes described by Arbiter Hawk was to improve snipes for everyone, because they are universally reviled, and that helps blasters to some extent, and to improve blaster secondaries by adding more survivability benefits to them.

I've placed a blaster-only snipe suggestion into Arbiter Hawk's suggestion box specifically to address the issue that the sniper changes, while beneficial to blasters, are at the least diluted by benefiting lots of archetypes besides blasters.

Electric has a snipe: the sets without snipes are DP, Ice, and Sonic.

As to Fire, here's something to note. These are the cast times of the various snipes with the interrupt window removed, along with their arcanatimes and arcanatime adjusted DPAs, sorted in descending order by DPA:

Its a coincidence, but probably a good one, that Fire and Archery, with the highest single target DPA and best nuke respectively, have the lowest DPA insta-snipes, and the primary that lacks Aim has, by an enormous margin, the absolute best insta-snipe. Its not perfect, but its not a case where the good tend to get better at the expense of their peers.

For blasters that used to try to build for extra survivability in the first place, the challenge may not be all that bad. Looking at my current (Energy/Energy) build, I take the fighting pool for tough and weave: that's three powers. I'm thinking about dropping them and replacing with maneuvers and tactics. I lose some defense and some resistance, but I'm being handed Energize. Plus I have a high recharge build. Plus I already take Power Boost. That means I should be able to cycle BU/Aim/PB and have perma insta-snipe, plus get Energize, plus I now have an extra power choice.

In a leveling build I would probably not bother initially with tactics and just rely on BU and Aim. Slotted with SOs it shouldn't be too difficult to reduce Sniper Blast's cycle time to under 10 seconds, meaning you can get two shots off during one BU window. So the attack chain might go BU->snipe->other stuff-> snipe->other stuff->Aim->snipe->other stuff->snipe->other stuff. Even though BU and Aim are not collectively up all the time, you could actually buff every use of sniper blast as it became available if you simply waited until snipe was available or about to become available before using BU or Aim. The actual "penalty" for not being able to buff snipe "all the time" might actually be almost non-existent until you get to builds with very fast cycling snipes.

You'll only have to wait until Issue 24.

You know, people have been saying this since I first started posting my scrapper secondary comparisons. If you can explain what this actually means, you will be the first in seven years.


The averaged damage benefit of unslotted Build Up based on 1.95 damage slotting is about +8.4% damage compared to Assault's 10.5%. Slotted with three recharge SOs its approximately +16.7%. With just SOs, Build Up's damage over time benefit exceeds Assault. That's on top of its burst damage qualitative benefit.

When players worry about Blasters becoming overpowered, I just hear the song from Oliver.

I'm happy that we're getting improvements, but ... please, sir, could I have some more?[/QUOTE]

Probably because you're looking in the Effects tab which I'll bet a lot of people don't. If you only look at the misc buffs in the view totals option it shows as +22% because that panel rounds off. The effects tab of the power info area is accurate to two decimal places and shows the value with more precision.

You can make blasters good without having nukes at all. Conversely giving them good nukes doesn't automatically make blasters good. They are neither necessary nor sufficient, so they cannot be fundamental. What they are is a generally not good option that could be made better.

Be careful. Mids rounds off. According to my calculations, 3 level 50 IOs would get to you 21.99%. If the game is accurate to the same two digits for the purpose of this calculation, you'd be off by 0.01%.

You need to get to at least 58.56% tohit enhancement strength in Mids on Targeting Drone. Three 50 IOs is 58.48%.

My spawns have Lts and Bosses in them, and my nuke doesn't perform a guaranteed kill on either. It does take away all my endurance to make life especially interesting when facing off against the critters that aren't one-shotted by Nova, which I think should count for bonus points in the problem area. So, somewhat more than 75% for me.

I take build up and Aim which are two powers not available all the time and not usable when mezzed just to improve my damage.


No one is arguing that Drain Psyche is overpowered. Its eye-rollingly ridiculous. You can try to make a case otherwise, I'm just not sure who you'd be making that case to.

I made that assumption once before in another game that just happened to be written by a dev team related to our dev team, and was surprised like you wouldn't believe to find out logic had no bearing on the situation whatsoever.