DanZero

Originally Posted by Zemblanity

*Zemblanity survives with 1 hp (no one-shot-kill rule) and safely beats the cr@p out of the endurance-drained Dan. That should teach him to use a useless nuke in a real, well, hypothetical, forum fight*

Originally Posted by Zemblanity

This is the reason there's so little progress in this game, the overly vocal minority desperately searching for a reason to quit.

*Should* they revamp nukes? Hell yes! Will they? No, because Dan will quit if they do.

Originally Posted by Jophiel

Dear Sister Psyche,

Totally thinkin' 'bout your underwear. Whatcha gonna do about it?

Originally Posted by Irish Fury

That is frustrting for me too. If I am looking for and am invited to a TF, I assume, unless otherwise stated, that it is not a speed run. I get frustrated when we ge to the first missions and the team leader says, everyone wait here while "X player" ghosts to the objective. I feel that I've commited myself to the team, so I can't bring myself to quit, even though I know I am in for exactly what I tried to avoid by not accepting invites to advertised speed TFs.

Originally Posted by Stormfront_NA

Mmm...

I will make a stand and simply say I oppose Sister and lowbie TFs being part of WST.

I understand that, maybe, just maybe, WST is not only about Incarnate; and in fact it may be only a temporary measure to acquire notices of the well until I20 kicks in.

But as of now, Notices of the Well is a key ingredient for level 50s progessing through out the incanate system, and they can only be acquired via the WST.

Now we can play coy all we want, but lets face some obvious observables:

1. Level 50s progressing in the incarnate system: Needs Notices of the Wells.
2. Level 50s progressing in the incarnate system: Needs lots of shards, and I mean lots!

Why would a level 50 intent in doing the new incarnate material, have any interest in doing lowbie material?

Again we can play coy in this and come up with some lame excuses, but frankly, there is no good reason to do this from an incarnate progression perspective. Today with my 36 level 50 alts, I have no use for low level material, I need shards, shards, shards, and more shards.

As Wendy said, if we take a level 50 incarnate minded player and force him into Sister, what you think that player is gonna do?

"Duh, lets kill all mobs, because some whinny lowbie wants exp"

No, they are going to device and practice the most expedient way to complete a very boring TF to get the only thing of value from it: Notice of the well.

I have expressed my concern in other threads about mixing 50s with lowbies in TFs, and the week of Sis its going to get very very ugly.

The problem is that 2 very different set of goal minded people are going to collide head to head, I predict lasting enmities between players is going to occur from this.

What are the 2 main set of goal minded people?

The first, the obvious, lowbies using the TF to get exp and level. To these folk, nothing but a kill all mobs would be acceptable, plain an simple.

The second, and just as obvious, are level 50s hunting for Notices. To this folk, doing anything beyond what minimally is needed would be unacceptable.

Now I do point the finger at the developers for being "irresponsible" enough to set a clear situation "Sister TF" where these two frames of mind are guaranteed to collide.

Sheesh, and I thought this game was about having fun...

Stormy

Ps: Fortunately by the time Sister comes around I would have accumulated sufficient notices, to not need to bother with Sister at all! After all I need to gain lots of shards from 50s content. Frankly, Sister is plainly a 100% waste of time. Incidentally, does Sister drop any decent recipes? Certainly no chance for purples...

Originally Posted by Obitus

So basically your secondary build is exactly the kind of build I was advocating. The only true difference in your approach, then, is that you feel comfortable doubling your investment for a balls-to-the-wall offensive build too -- and not even a balls-to-the-wall offensive build that doesn't have a good deal of DEF (20% is more than incidental on a Blaster).

I don't know what power sets you're using; if you've mentioned them earlier in the thread then I apologize for not remembering, but mine was a generalization, and not a controversial one either. Your apparent, initial premise -- that going for mondo recharge is equally rewarding as going for DEF -- is an on-its-face falsehood for most players and most builds, but only because there is literally no build that can't have some measure of both, and from a purely numerical standpoint, the available IO +DEF bonuses are more beneficial, point-for-point, than the available +recharge bonuses beyond a certain, relatively easy-to-achieve, level.

That is even more true on a squishy AT with no mez protection. The ability to avoid anything that could, even for a split second, delay the delivery of more offense is not to be under-rated or under-sold.



How much faster, exactly? If you're including the Musculature boost for the recharge build, then you can't ignore the Spiritual boost for the DEF build.



That much is true.



It's proportional mitigation. Factoring in the inherent miss rate is a misleading way to evaluate DEF. 30% DEF is 60% avoidance. 15% DEF is 30% avoidance.

It's half as many hits, whether we're talking about mezzes, debuffs, or just generic damage powers. That's a significant difference.



And this is where the conversation gets really interesting, for me, anyway. At what point does the extra DEF actually improve your practical damage output because you're spending less time on proactive defensive measures like single-target holds and the lovely but still rather time-consuming (3+ second activation) Bonfire?

Honestly, I think we're all talking around in circles here about the DEF versus Recharge issue. All I take from your post is that you love your Blaster more than other people might love any one particular build, which is great.

Originally Posted by Obitus

You're wrong in the general case. This isn't a shades-of-gray issue unless you engage in the wild flight of fancy that pits +recharge against DEF as if they were mutually exclusive.

You can have 60-80% in global recharge on top of soft-capped DEF to one position or two types (generally ranged or Smash/Lethal, sometimes both if you're very very crafty). That's before we talk about Hasten. If your content with some reasonably high DEF number below the softcap, then your recharge can go a good deal higher.

Without making fruit-loop build sacrifices, you're not going to get much more than about 100% in global recharge (before Hasten) on a build that concentrates on +recharge exclusively. Leaving aside for a moment that high-end +recharge sets tend to be very expensive on the market, this sort of build pays a high-premium opportunity cost for a very small practical benefit with respect to offense. And anything above 100% (which is the mark for perma-Hasten with three recharge IOs slotted) is even less valuable.

Your point about Task Forces is frankly mystifying. Yes, you're more likely to have your DEF buffed in a TF, but you could also have your recharge buffed. And though it's certainly true that you shouldn't have to soak aggro in TFs, it's nice not to faceplant instantly when things go wrong too.

Blasters are already specialized enough. They need every scant bit of general improvement you can give them to perform at the highest level. If dual builds are your preference, then that's fine, but most people don't want to bother with multiple IOed builds. In any case, you border on contradicting yourself when you talk about having a cheap build for DEF, because if it's truly cheap then it has balls for +recharge -- which means that you have two builds that are less effective than one build that mixes both together.

Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards

Just did a speedy LGTF with a pickup group in 35 minutes.

Originally Posted by Silencer7

Damage per second goes to zero when you die.

Most blasters get a ton of damage out of their secondary abilities, which means spending a decent amount of time in melee. Being in melee without having solid defense means you're likely to die.

OP's question isn't about cheap builds; it's not a decision between having a softcapped build with no recharge and a high recharge build with zero defense. And as OP discovered, moving from "high recharge blaster" to "recharge monster" doesn't deliver a ton of benefit. So why would you want to?

Originally Posted by Silencer7

I'm closing in on softcapped s/l/e and perma-hasten on my DP/MM. I doubt if I can get hasten to true perma, but being six or eight seconds off isn't a big deal really.

If it's a choice between rech and def, though, I think you're foolish to go for +rech as anything other than archery (and maybe AR.) Most blasters are going to spend significant time either in melee or with things shooting at you, and as OP notes, you can add a lot of defense at the cost of a small amount of functional recharge time.