Dechs Kaison

Vanguard.

Any mob where a build up AoE wipes the entire spawn of minions.

Except it's not clear by just about any measure. For your statement to be true, there has to be a drastic difference between the survival tools of a blaster and everyone else across the board. There are many situations where a blaster has much more survivability than the scrapper, and can defeat more foes with much less danger.

First, non sequitur is two words.

More importantly, however, my reply did have relevance to what I quoted. You state that blasters don't have the tools to stay within their envelope. I submit that they do; you just have to play intelligently to make use of them.

Yeah, and it's a real shame that blasters don't have any way to proactively mitigate incoming damage, like stun or knockback.

This.

A slot machine will "eat" 15% of the money put into it, but you can hit the jackpot three times in a week. That 15% is taken over the lifetime of the machine, which is something like a billion plays.



Put another way, I was soloing last night, and got three criticals in a row on one enemy and he died. Is that a 100% crit rate while soloing? No. I just got lucky.

You need a huge sample size before you can accurately know the results.

I can say that I believe you. I mean, it was hyperbole on my part to say it's always the scrappers. I have seen every AT die in the tree room, but on Mo's, it's predominately the scrappers.

Full disclosure here: I have a tactic on Mo that I ask people to follow. First, we clear out the Mages. I usually stay one mob ahead of the team to bring them behind rocks as we work our way around the front of the tree. This is the easy part.

For the vines, I tell everyone to stay watch their map and stay strictly between 9-3 o'clock on the top and hit every vine they can, even the ones outside that zone as long as they stay in the zone. While they do that, I kill the vines in front of the tree. If there is a scrapper I know, he can help me while I do this. I monitor my defense, and when it drops I duck behind a root and Dark Regen.

Invariably, on the failed attempts, some scrapper had an inferiority complex when I told him to stay out of the tree's range and decided to follow me around the front of the tree.

Ooooh! Great idea.

Hell, you could put them both on an Ouro team and leave the stalker to auto attack overnight.

Stalkers get a base 10% chance to crit against anything now, but each teammate nearby grants you an extra 3%.

I'm pretty sure that also counts pets.

I'm also pretty sure it caps somewhere around 35%.

Couple quick things:

If a team of 8 blasters can do an MoSTF with +4 AVs, I'm sure defenders/corruptors will do just fine. If the team has some balanced buffs and debuffs, all the defs/corrs will be sitting comfortably over the softcap and likely riding close to the resistance caps as well. If one of them dies, I'm sure there would be a vengeance, a fallout, and a howling twilight, mutation, rise/power of the phoenix waiting for it.

They also won't need to rotate their high tier holds to deal with threats. Some will have fearsome stare, or lingering radiation to be laid on an incoming group. Blast powersets have group controls as well, be them sleep, knockdown or otherwise. Ice patches and rain debuffs can likewise delay an entire ambush.

The tools are there, and competent players will use them all. The Repeat Offender network doesn't have it's reputation for nothing. Our devs have gone on record saying that those people have taken stupidly difficult tasks and made them trivial.

There's no doubt that adding a tank, brute, or even scrapper into the mix will make the team more reliable. (The scrapper would require a strong taunt aura, be it invuln or shield) It gives you room for human error, but don't mistake that for making the team better. You take out buffs and debuffs to add a sponge that hits things.

EDIT TO ADD: This is why I most often play my tank on teams; he makes any team reliable. Almost invariably, however, I end up feeling like I would be "doing more" as my warshade, my MM, or my defender. Some teams are truly awful, and in that case, a tank that holds his aggro is more of a boon than anything else. It turns the game into a war of attrition that the enemies can't win because the tank won't let go.

Not that I'm aware of. It does have defense debuffs, however. Even if it did, the level 54 AVs have a 2.1 accuracy modifier, doubling their chances to hit you. Against a softcapped character, that's still only a 10% chance.

I'm sure the blasters could find places to fire at vines from cover of rocks if they really were that worried about it.

This, I believe, is evidence of the flaw in your view on blasters. Blasters shouldn't be the ones reacting to things trying to kill them. They need to be proactive about their mitigation. This does, however, require forethought.

I was not personally involved, but I had a lengthy conversation with the "tank" of the team, and NRG/NRG/Force blaster who runs tough/weave in his standard build.

He said most of it was trivial until AV fights, which actually required intelligent play. His team was mostly IO'd to the gills, and they stacked a few instances of maneuvers. The four patrons were handled by single pulls, and Recluse was tanked pretty much through PFF for the ten seconds or so it took to knock down the towers.

That's just one example, of course, and the only one I can speak for.

Ahhh, back in the day, when Arcanaville was just as smart but didn't have the audacity to speak up and make our game better.

Hold on now, you made a claim that the player base at large determines the worth of a character through min/maxing.

You made the claim, burden of proof is on you.

But you're right, you can't find enough posts/threads about it because they don't exist. Assuming we've got 100k active subs, you better find over 50k people who agree that a character's worth is solely determined through min/maxing. Good luck.

If your claim was remotely close to accurate, there wouldn't be any players using the sub optimal sets or non-synergistic combos. We wouldn't see FF/NRG defenders. We wouldn't see Peacebringers. We wouldn't see stalkers, or SR anythings, or a whole list of the commonly berated sets that have "better alternatives."

Please, though, allow me to be the first in the line to tell you that the min/max potential doesn't mean a damn to me when making a character.

Oh reeeeeally?

Sonofa... I think I might have to try this with my Dark Armor tank. Fire melee puts out respectable damage, but it was never enough to consider taking down an AV. I didn't think bruising would make that much of a difference, but if you could do it with KM, I'm sure it's something fire could do comparably.

Most people are, but it's not impossible to handle. The real crux of this hypothetical situation is the 45 minute timer.

I started a Master's of ITF once with what was very much a "sub optimal" team. I even got a few unkind words from the brute I begrudgingly allowed to join because I also accepted a level 36 scrapper who wasn't IO'd. Counting myself, that's already more melee than I like on any Mo TF. Add to that two warshades, and realize there's only room for three buff/debuffers. We found a rad controller, dark defender, and I think a dominator.

Then we started the TF and realized I accidentally left my settings on +4.

Somebody asked if we should reform. I said "We're all here. Might as well try."

We only did the first mission on those settings. It wasn't all that hard to do, but it certainly wasn't fast. We stayed together, we took our time and made it through.

What I'm trying to say is that almost any team could handle +4s if the players know what they're doing.

If you want to do a TF like this on +4 quickly, however, you need a somewhat optimized team. You can't rush through without solid buffs. The AVs will likely be huge time sinks without debuffs. Exotic damage types help, but with enough /sonic blast defenders, their resistance will be floored anyway. Damage buffs are nice, but stacking -res is far more effective. The best teams will have both, along with -regen for the AVs.

I tell you truly, nothing in this game compares to all defender/corruptor teams. If you're going to handicap me with melee, then fine, I'll bring a pair of scrappers or brutes with my tank. They can watch as the defenders and corruptors do most of the work.

Are you aware that there have been multiple successful all blaster MoSTFs?

I just want to take another minute to stress to you that my warshade was, hands down, the most fun I've ever had playing this game. Defying the Curse was the most enjoyable ride to 50, the most enthralling min/maxing, the most on the edge insane fun playstyle, even the best RP storyline I've come up with... everything about that character was incredible. He's one that I will never tire of.

That's just me. You might find warshades not your thing. I just want to emphasize how awesome it was for me, and hope you can enjoy the same.

I've been told that as you read that guide, you will get a glimpse of how much I enjoyed my experience.

Maybe your definition of base differs from the norm, but I use it to mean "foundation."

He is playing a resistance based set, much like my DA (softcapped to S/L/E/N) tank. DA's heal is the best in the game, but the set itself survives more because of the resists.

Layers on top of the base are just that. I don't care what's doing the most work, what you start with is your foundation.

Meh, he added defense on top of the resistance, so no matter which is the larger portion of mitigation, the base is still resistance.