Beauregard

The primary value of Afterburner is that it provides a slot for LotG recharge and it's one of the better 'panic buttons' for personal defense.

If I'm going to take Fly at all on a character, I also take Afterburner. If I'm not going to get Afterburner, I won't take anything except Hover (if that) in the Flight pool.

A good way to think about the alpha slot is to ask yourself: if I cared so much about it, why didn't I slot for it?

Almost none of your powers are remotely near ED limits for endurance reduction. So if you want endurance reduction, you can simply add some slots and fit them with end red IOs.

Most builds are that way. Which is why you generally choose your Alpha slot based on things you can't just slot for - because you're already pushing the ED limits.

The reason resist-based melee take Cardiac is because they're pushing the ED limits on resistance - the endurance reduction portion is merely icing on the cake. Most builds go for either Agility or Spiritual for recharge because almost everyone is pushing the limits on recharge.

Or consider an Ill/TA. Presume we won't be going for recharge. Why choose Cardiac over Vigor? If you've got 45% end reduction from Cardiac, nothing else it gives is particularly worthwhile. If you've got 33% end reduction, you're combining it with damage resistance (not useful), range (marginally useful) and fear/stun/intangibility.

But at 33% end reduction, Vigor gives healing (not particularly useful) combined with accuracy, fear, confuse and sleep (all of which range from somewhat to exceedingly useful).

The best single target rotation for Fire requires perma-Hasten levels of recharge. Tar Patch and Rain of Fire are both abilities that you want available every battle and you can never have enough recharge for Howling Twilight. Even Fireball tends to fall into the "it can never recharge fast enough" category.

Given your slotting on Twilight Grasp, you might be better off with Agility for recharge (since it will probably give you another 5% or so defense from the toggles).

Of the 9 powers in Dark, four of them (Tar Patch, Fearsome Stare, Petrifying Gaze and Howling Twilight) will stop a runner. One of those 9 Dark powers happens to be a pet that has the ability to cast most of those runner-stopping powers. And you've got Rain of Fire (which also slows). So I'm not seeing where runners would be a significant problem.

Fire Blast also tends not to have a runner problem because if they're low enough to run, you can probably just kill them with a single nuke.

The shield is definitely better. Conserve Power is the same. Really the only exceptional feature of Power Mastery is Power Boost giving you a Build Up. If you're not going to use it, then there's no reason to take Power Mastery.

Against large spawns, you don't need all that much time. Against single targets, Kinetics takes up an enormous amount of time. As for other power sets, the only power sets that are remotely comparable to the time investment for Kinetics are the healing sets - and that's only if people are taking damage. Most of the other sets throw a debuff or two at the beginning of a fight and then do nothing but nuke.

Against a large spawn, a single Kinetics easily caps damage. Against a single target, a dedicated Kinetics Defender will also cap damage. Adding another Kinetics doesn't help.

Fire Imps at cap will generate ~180 dps. Against a single target, there's nothing a Fire Controller can do that will come close to matching that performance.

The Corruptor needs to spend more time since their buffs are at 80% power.

On a single target, a Corruptor will generally only be able to muster around +280% (5 Siphon Power, 3 Fulcrum Shift). The Kinetics Defender would generate +350%.

Solo, this becomes particularly noticeable since Siphon Power will constitute a dps loss. As a result, while a Defender easily caps their damage and still has plenty of time to nuke, the Corruptor can either cap damage or nuke - but can't do both very effectively.

Kinetics is one of the best debuffing sets. It can debuff damage, end, slow and recharge better than any other set in the game.

And I don't know anyone with any sense that would ever take a Cold Dom over a Kinetics unless they already had a Kinetics on the team. People can fix their own defense problems pretty easily. It's incredible hard to cap their +damage and effective self-healing is rare outside of a small number of buff/debuff sets.

Kinetics already provides significant mitigation (as I noted above).

In terms of Dark, the reason it doesn't synergize particularly well with Kinetics is that you can simply wipe out most of the spawn before it gets a chance to do serious damage - if you take a power set that has significant AE damage (ie: not Dark). Couple this with the lack of a heavy attack in Dark to exploit the limited time frames you're using, and Dark isn't a particularly good match.

Time's Juncture reduces hit by 12.5% and damage by 20%.
Darkest Night reduces hit by 15% and damage by 30%.
Fearsome Stare reduces hit by 15%.
Siphon Power and Fulcrum Shift both reduce damage by a stackable 20%.
Radiation Infection reduces hit by 25%.
Enervating Field reduces damage by 20%.
Hurricane reduces hit by 30%.
Heat Exhaustion and Benumb reduce damage by 50%.
Poison Gas Arrow reduces damage by 25%.

The only power worse by the numbers would be Flash Arrow (5% hit debuff), but Flash Arrow doesn't aggro mobs, reduces their visibility and can be used from long range.

So apparently you're the one who needs to "do the homework" since - as I indicated - Time's Juncture has poor values compared to similar debuffs in other sets. Couple this with a heavy endurance cost and the need to stand continuously in melee range... well, you get a not-very-good power. Now, if you had some other reason to be in melee range, it's a power you'd take because it's the best option you've got.

But you don't have any good reason to be in melee range. Your offensive powers work from range. You have no other powers in Time Manipulation that require melee range. Indeed, most of the time when you actually use Time's Juncture as a Time Manipulation Corruptor you're going to increase the damage you take because you've got enemies unimpededly swinging their highest damage attacks without interruption and the -hit isn't markedly changing their chance to hit you.

You need one slot for the hold proc. What else are you putting in it? A 25% chance for 71 damage? That's a whopping 1.775 dps.

Even if you didn't slot it for slow at all, you still don't need Time's Juncture because either Rain will cap slow in conjunction with Distortion Field.

If anything, Mid's overstates Inferno and understates Blizzard.

Inferno does an average of 316 damage. It has almost no chance to Scourge - and even if it did, Scourge adds only trivial amounts of damage (since the only part of Inferno that can Scourge is the guaranteed 42 upfront damage that you're applying to a previously unengaged spawn). Throwing an Inferno will leave most of the lieutenants and all of the bosses still standing.

Blizzard does an average of 508 damage. It is almost guaranteed to Scourge since the damage occurs over time. It carries with it a -hit debuff significantly better than your beloved Time's Juncture. It also keeps anything without knockback resistance flopping around. Even without any significant boosts beyond just slotting it for damage, it will wipe out all of the minions and lieutenants - while crippling the boss's ability to act.

If you actually boost both attacks up to the point where Inferno has a decent chance to wipe out all the lieutenants, Blizzard reaches the point where it will annihilate all of the bosses as well (something that Inferno won't do even at the damage cap).

No, it's an awful power. It does perhaps 60% of the -hit/-damage debuffing that any other set (which can debuff those factors) does. The -speed debuff is almost trivially small in a set which already gets the far better Distortion Field for that purpose. And it delivers its minor benefits via an end-heavy PBAoE toggle.

What you're overlooking is how much more protection you'd receive if you simply stayed at range. Not only could many of the -defense debuffs not hit you in the first place, but you could have taken all that +defense you wasted slotting for melee range activity and dump it into your ranged defense.

There are reasons to go into melee. But your only reason to enter melee is so you can debuff them to the point where you can potentially survive at the range at a much lower rate than if you had simply not gone into melee in the first place. You aren't any more effective because you foolishly decided to step into melee range.

This is one of those statements that makes me believe you don't really play the game much in the modern day. No one 'herds' like this any more due to target caps.

The only reason to 'herd' is when you've got ranged-only enemies and a convenient wall. But actually running around the room? Why would you waste the time (and put yourself at great risk)? Even Tankers have ranged AE these days. Just blast them with a ranged AE or two and take two steps behind your wall. If you've got a Rain, you don't even need to step out from behind the wall.

The ranged-only enemies will run to the corner you're ducking behind - and smack into your Distortion Field, which condenses them as tightly as you need.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that eeking your way to 45 S/L confers some sort of invulnerability. It doesn't. There are spawns that 50+3 Tankers leap into and have to stay on their toes to survive. Virtually every high level spawn can rip through merely soft-capped defense like it isn't even there due to accuracy buffs coupled with defense debuffs.

In any case, Ice/Time can hold AVs - hardly 'superfluous'. And it debuffs hit.

Blizzard does over twice the damage that Inferno does, it does it from range, it knocks down and hit debuffs everyone in the radius. So while I can understand not using Inferno, it makes almost no sense not to use Blizzard.

Especially as Time. You have zero toggles from main sets (that you'd bother taking) and ~20% defense before you add in the primary -hit debuffs. Once you've dropped Blizzard, you've essentially paralyzed/killed the entire spawn so you don't really need to do much but watch.

The Hold allows an extra purple and/or Basilisk's - not a small consideration in a build that requires massive amounts of recharge. You can slot additional proc options into the various Ice attacks as well.

The power you save is the fairly weak Time's Juncture that Fire needs for survivability but Ice does not.

Compared to what? A Blaster isn't going to match a Brute, Scrapper or Stalker for single target dps. The pets from Mastermind/Controller can easily outperform a Blaster on a single target.

On the survivability end of the scale, a Blaster will never be remotely as survivable as archetypes with armor or certain buff sets.

So what you really seem to be saying is that Blasters can be built that aren't completely gimped in those categories. Which is certainly true. But hardly the point.

I'd argue this list asks all the wrong questions. You're trying to figure out how to build the 'least bad' Blaster for the things you want to do rather than trying to build the best possible Blaster for the things a Blaster does well.

Blasters are primarily about burst damage, not sustained dps or survivability. While you can debate the utility of this specialization, trying to build a Blaster for the tasks you really should be doing on your Brute is a bit like trying to build the best Scrapper for healing others.

Huge piles of influence are only necessary if you need enormous amounts of recharge. About the only real benefit you'll see defense-wise is the ability to slot the PvP global.

For Dark, you've got a small defense buff (Shadow Fall) and about twice the -hit that Time has. So you're probably going to not going to bother soft-capping all positionals, but instead try to get relatively close.

For Kinetics, you've got neither a defense buff nor -hit debuffs. But you do have rather significant -damage debuffs. So you're probably going to want to get within a purple's reach of soft-cap and then just concern yourself with surviving the hits (and healing up from them) rather than trying to dodge them all.

Any time a question involves the phrase "more damage", the answer is "Kinetics".

For Dark, you don't get a whole lot for being a Defender. Tar Patch is basically the same and it's a control-heavy set, so the Corruptor version performs just about the same as the Defender version. And, yes, Fire Blast does a lot more damage as a Corruptor.

For Kinetics, the better buffs/debuffs coupled with the sheer busy nature of the set means that a Kinetics Defender will generally be both more survivable and harder hitting than a Kinetics Corruptor. Once you get the Lore pet, there's really no contest.

Solo'ing AVs/GMs tends to be more about incarnate abilities, inspirations and temporary powers than anything else. While it's possible to come up with completely dysfunctional builds that can't solo an AV/GM, you have to work at it.

That being said, Dark is not one of the better "solo an AV/GM" sets because the primary damage increase (Tar Patch) is often negated by AV/GM simply running out of it.

Kinetics doesn't so much solo AV/GM as it watches the hyper-buffed Lore pet solo the AV/GM. Something to remember about Kinetics is that it's pretty much the only Corruptor secondary that has absolutely no buffs related to personal survivability (and even its debuffs related to personal survivability take some setup time). So any time you have to deal with anything unanticipated or spur-of-the-moment, you tend to get crunched.

If you claim that Fire does more damage because it has additional damage rather than debuffs/control, then the only set balanced against Fire is Ice. All the other sets do markedly less damage even if you ignore the additional damage from Fire's burn effects.

The only set where the debuffs potentially make up for low damage would be Sonic. Even then this is only really true for the Defender version of the set, it only works when you have a low involvement buff set (such as Force Field or Sonic Resonance) and then only against a single hard target in a team/league setting. If you're willing to accept all those tradeoffs, then Sonic Blast can be fairly useful.

The issue is less a matter of survivability than a rebuttal to the argument that Corruptors get a support secondary without acknowledging that armor sets provide plenty of support as well.

But this really isn't about "Scrapper vs. Corruptor". It's about the fact that the various blast sets aren't remotely balanced.

Actually, he was talking about the debuffs on the blasts. And I pointed out - twice, no less - that even accounting for those debuffs doesn't justify the disparity between various blast sets.

That's not actually the discussion. The actual discussion is "why is Fire Blast so out-of-line with the rest of the non-Ice Blast sets?"

None of those statements are 'anecdotal'. We're not basing our opinions on "I play a Fire Blast Corruptor and I like it". We're basing them on the raw data - available in-game, on Mid's and on City of Data.

If you have a rotation you believe is competitive with Fire Blast for a Corruptor, we'd love to hear what it is. Maybe we missed something. But there really isn't any reason for someone to write a complete guide to every blast set available just so you can be spared the bother of looking it up.

They lag behind Ice Blast if you consider everything.

Ice Blast doesn't have an continuing burn effect. It has -hit/-recharge/-speed instead. Is -hit/-recharge/-speed such an abysmal secondary effect that it justifies doing double the damage of a set with -defense?

A Martial Arts Scrapper has a rotation of Thunder Kick (49.8 dpa), Storm Kick (78.2 dpa), Thunder Kick, Crippling Axe Kick (71.8 dpa). The total is 63.9 dps.

An Energy Blast Corruptor has a rotation of Power Bolt (35.1 dpa), Power Blast (37.0 dpa), Power Bolt, Power Burst (39.4 dpa). The total is 37.1 dps.

The Corruptor averages 30% from Scourge while the Scrapper averages 16% from criticals. The result is that the Scrapper does 53% more damage than the Corruptor.

Note that Energy Blast and Martial Arts are fairly 'stock' sets with no exceptional features (germane to our discussion) here. They both fall in the middle of the performance spectrum with regards to single target damage.

Fire and Ice are relatively balanced with one another in the manner you believe. Subtract the burn effect from Fire and you get Ice Blast with different options (Hold vs. Snipe/Targeted AE).

But everything else lags way behind. It's not so much an issue of raising the damage so they're competitive with Fire - they're not even remotely competitive with Ice.

Originally, you could argue that this was balanced due to recharge and endurance use. Fire and Ice burn through end a ton faster than other sets do. You need perma-Hasten levels of recharge to actually run their high dps single target cycles or make good use of their Rains.

In the modern game, these 'limitations' aren't really limitations at all. You've just got two sets that dramatically outperform the other sets - and one of those two sets that performs the core task of a blast set (dealing damage) a lot better than the other.

Three caveats to this principle:
1. It's only with single hard targets. If you're running a mission with an AV, Fire will bring dramatically more damage to the table throughout the course of the mission since the bulk of damage being dealt is AE (where Fire does 4 - 5 times the damage of Sonic) to minions and players independently engaging the stray targets without piling on a single target. Only once you hit the AV will you be able to stack the debuffs and gain an advantage over Fire.

2. It only works if you have a low activity secondary. Every time you stop nuking to do something else during that AV fight, the impact of your resist debuffs is hurt. That's why Sonic/Sonic is such a popular combination - Sonic Resonance requires you do almost nothing during the fight, so you're free to endlessly lay in with nukes.

In contrast, Fire Blast doesn't suffer all that much from interruption since it merely skips the worst part of its rotation. A sequence of Blaze/Fire Blast/Something Else is nearly as damaging as Blaze/Fire Blast/Flares.

3. A Sonic Attack Corruptor is almost always a poor choice because while the actual damage dealt by Sonic Attack is less for a Defender, the debuffs are 33% larger. If a Sonic Attack Defender and a Sonic Attack Corruptor are both independently chain-nuking a target, they'll reduce the target to 50% at approximately the same speed (past 50%, Scourge gives an edge to the Corruptor). Coupled with the fact that the buff/debuff set is also going to be better for the Defender version, if you want to play Sonic Attack you almost always want to do so as a Defender.

In terms of other power sets, Ice Blast is a solid option to Fire. You'll have lower single target sustained dps, relatively similar AE dps in most situations (since both Rain of Fire and Ice Storm are overkill) and will be better solo/picking off runners due to BiB's superior Scourge performance.

Archery is also a possibility, but you'll only really outperform Fire in scattered AE situations (where you can't fully leverage Rain of Fire) and with Trick Arrow.

You're spiraling into ridiculousness right now. Aside from the fact that you cherry-picked a single, pointless fight to demonstrate the superiority of your ideas, you didn't even pick one that did.

Let's review:
1. The Fire Corruptor can stack mag 16 control even better than the Widow can because he's got access to the same ability (Dominate) and better recharge.
2. The Widow's defenses are ignored by the mitos. In contrast, the Fire Corruptor can still debuff them to reduce the likelihood of being hit and amount of damage.
3. The Fire Corruptor can self-heal. The Widow can't.
4. The Fire Corruptor can do more damage even without Blaze than the Widow due to the combination of buffs/debuffs.
5. If range is a concern, the Fire Corruptor also out-ranges the Widow due to the ATO and snipe.

A ranged Fort receives (over a melee Fort):
1. A poor single target nuke that also has -recharge.
2. A poor single target nuke that also has knockback.
3. A poor single target nuke that also has immobilize.

That's it. That's the complete list of everything that goes into your attack chain that you'd be skipping. A set of powers that players generally skip unless forced to take.

Is there value? Yes. Is that value particularly great? No.

You like your build. We get it. But don't try deny the facts. You do poor damage and there are very few fights in the game where you wouldn't be far better served by closing into melee and dishing out 50% more damage.

Well, that explains why you never see Brutes, Stalkers and Scrappers in incarnate trials. Oh wait...

What makes your position particularly silly is that the bulk of high level encounters require collapsing on the AV for buffs and heals. Antimatter, Marauder, Malaise, Shalice - all these examples of the 'superiority' of a gimpy ranged rotation - they're all fought at point-blank range.

You're jumping back and forth here. First of all, you're replying to a comparison against Corruptors - who operate entirely at range and can do far more damage than the ranged Fortunata build. So it's not a comparison against 'melee focused'.

Second of all, if you're talking about ranged-only vs. melee on a Fortunata, you're not bringing 'competitive dps'. You're bringing a third less dps. Nor have you managed to come up with any of the 'slew of other things' you're talking about. The only difference between ranged-only and melee Fortunata in terms of 'other things' is that you've decided to use an array of fairly weak ranged attacks with poor secondary effects instead of much higher damage melee attacks.

Everything else is the same.

I'm not claiming dps is the only thing that matters. What I'm pointing out is that you're not getting anything worthwhile by trading away melee dps in a Fortunata. A melee Fortunata has all the same capabilities as a ranged Fortunata in 99.9% of the game, but does 50% more dps.

Fire Corruptors have plenty of range and soft control.

No one is making any statements whatsoever about the survivability of our Fire Corruptor, because we're not discussing the secondaries. You made the claim that a purely ranged Fortunata did competitive damage with all but a few archetypes. I just pointed out that you were wildly overestimating the actual damage that could be done with a ranged Fortunata.

For our Fortunata, we need to reduce the 12 sec recharge on Gloom to the sum of the activation times of Dominate (1.32) and Subdue (1.848). So 12 / (1.32 + 1.848) = 3.79, or +279% recharge.

For the Fire Corruptor, we need to reduce the 10 sec recharge on Blaze to the sum of the activation times of Flares (1.19) and Fire Blast (1.45). So 10 / (1.19 + 1.45) = 3.79, or +279% recharge.

I was comparing the best one archetype could do against the best another could do. What would be the point of comparing the best possible performance from one archetype against a gimped performance from another? If you want to do it that way, you could demonstrate that Tankers outdamage all other archetypes.

Fire/Rad Corruptors are often considered the best hard target solo build in the game.

No, I'm not wrong and no I didn't apply better buffs to the Corruptor than the Fortunata.

Indeed, let's review the factors I didn't bring into play:
1. Fortunatas have +15% damage over Corruptors from Assault. The weakest Corruptor secondary for increasing personal damage is Thermal Radiation, which debuffs resistance by 22.5%.

2. Fortunatas can't both increase damage and get a high damage rotation via epic pools. Fire Corruptors use their primary entirely for their damage rotation and then can get buffs like perma +40% damage (against a single target) from epic pools.

3. Corruptors have a 20% higher +damage cap than Fortunatas.

4. I didn't even use the highest damage Fire Corruptor rotation (Flares/Fire Blast/Blaze), but I did use the highest damage Fortunata rotation.

5. Corruptors have a +107 damage ATO proc. Fortunatas have a control-oriented proc. That's about a 30 dps advantage to the Fire Corruptor.

6. Fire Corruptors generally gain more from both IO procs and Interface because their attacks cycle faster.

7. I lowballed Scourge by averaging it over the entire life of an enemy when Corruptors tend to abnormally weight their attacks towards the low end of the hit point bar in the actual game.

Go borrow a friend's Fire Corruptor who has equivalent slotting/Incarnate to your Fortunata some time. You'll immediately notice the huge gulf in damage output.

Only if you define 'squishie' as 'everything that isn't a resist-based Tanker/Brute'. Fortunatas have essentially the same defenses as most Scrappers and Stalkers do.

At +100% damage, a Fire Blast Corruptor with a Flares/Fire Blast/Flares/Blaze rotation will do ~140 dps over time (compare to 104 dps for the Widow with pure ranged). Blasters will generally be able to muster similar dps. Both Corruptors and Blasters also have a higher +damage cap.

Brutes do similar damage to Scrappers.

Pet archetypes (Controllers and Masterminds) can normally muster the highest single target dps of any archetype if they can keep the pets alive and active.

So our ranged Widow is only competitive with Tankers and Defenders for dps.

If you're talking about completely abandoning the idea of a single target attack chain in favor of taking all sorts of AE hold/confuse/whatever, that's one thing. It's a philosophical choice about the direction of your character - one I don't happen to agree with - that isn't directly comparable with numbers. No matter how you slot Lunge, it isn't going to end up as a 25' radius AE Hold.

If you're instead talking about a taking a purely ranged single target rotation, then I think you're really cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Given that virtually any reasonable Fortunata build is going to soft-cap all positionals as a matter of course (and then have extra melee defense on top of that), staying at range offers you no significant defensive benefit. Indeed, in most teams you join you're probably within the top 3 players that the team most wants targeted by the enemy. It's far better if enemies are beating on you than trying to kill your Empathy Defender.

Nor are you ranged attacks particularly inspiring. Aside from their low damage, their secondary effects just aren't all that useful. TK Blast is actively counterproductive, Subdue just means that your opponent can concentrate on attacking rather than moving, Electrical Blast isn't going to do much without any other end drain powers, Gloom is superfluous with the massive amounts of +def you have and Mental Blast is pretty much just a (bad) straight nuke.

So the only single target ranged power you'd actually want in your rotation would be Dominate. You can do FU/Lunge/Strike/Dominate just fine as a single target rotation. You don't really lose any effects you care about and you do a ton more damage than you would trying to operate purely at range.

I don't have precise numbers for the redraw, but the relatively minor redraw penalty once per cycle isn't going to substantially narrow the big gap in dps between a hybrid ranged/melee and a purely ranged attack chain.

I just borrowed the various attack chain analyses from a thread covering them. But we might as well run some quick numbers. For those two specific attack chains:

Follow Up/Swipe/Lunge/Swipe will deal 50.72 + (44.49 + 3 * 4.45) * 2 + (101.43 + 4 * 5.56) = 290.07 damage in 4.224 sec (68.67 dps). Your +30% from Follow Up will apply to 5 Swipe, 3 Follow Up and 2 Lunge. That's 191.39 additional damage, so ~114 dps.

Follow Up/Lunge/Strike/Swipe will deal 50.72 + (101.43 + 4* 5.56) + (79.93 + 4 * 3.89) + (44.49 + 3 * 4.45) = 327.72 damage in 4.488 sec (73.02 dps). Your +30% damage will apply to 2 Swipe, 2 Strike, 2 Lunge and 2 Follow Up. That's 196.63 additional damage, so ~117 dps.

The first chain would burn 5.59 end/sec while the second would burn 6.44 end/sec (both before any endurance reduction). So unless I got the math above wrong (entirely possible), your attack chain will generate slightly more damage than the one I mentioned above.