Diellan_

That's pretty close to what I wanted the Blaster revamp to be. The biggest problem I've always felt Blasters had was that their primaries and secondaries rarely synergized (Boost Range and Power Boost being a rare example).

(Late response, just got back from vacation in Italy)

Yeah, you should've asked me...

Mids development is one of those things that has always been slow because of my own lack of time (I do have a full time job as well as university courses, and that full time job is managerial, so... no time), but on my official list of things to do when I had the free time were, in order:
- PvP DR
- Entity modeling (e.g. view a pet in a pop-up and see its powers and such)
- Attack Chain generation

Anybody who bothered to look really hard at Mids would've seen the super-secret project I'd been working on, which was to split up the Mids DB from the program itself and provide people with an API for interacting with the DB. It's actually really close to useable (all the pure data itself is already available in MidsBase.dll, but without any power usage and totals and such), and probably would've been done some time around Q1 of next year. Then we could've handed people that in order to make their own random suite of tools.

And then, of course, there was Mids 2.0 aka the Titan Planner, which CodeWalker mentioned above. We never had enough committed resources to make it more than a pipe dream (I've estimated that I could produce it with somewhere between one and two month's work full time). I had actually been contemplating doing a Kickstarter or something for it.

Back to some of the discussion on hand:
One of the things I'd been doing was, in addition to converting Mids from VB.net to C#, to change many of the mechanics to closer match the way they worked in game/in PIGGs. I'd already modified a lot of things, and was almost done with Enhancements, and I'd already altered Grant Power to be slightly more normal (I had to do that because of how heavily it was abused and repeatedly changed in the Incarnate powers). The only real limitation was that Mids doesn't have a time element, so there's no real order to apply things... that would've gone when I'd gotten to doing attack chain modeling.

In the pipe dream in my head, that would've been a stretch goal for the Kickstarter for Mids 2.0.

I'm already sitting on a beta I24 Mids release. It's still buggy and had several more optimization changes (like finally fixing the issue that causes enhancement loading to take forever upon starting the program up)... maybe I'll put that together before I go on vacation in a week-and-a-half.

THERE ARE WORSE PEOPLE TO SOUND LIKE.

The fact that critters have combat chat texts in their powers has always amused me.

Yeah, I remember doing that, now that I think about it, but I'm not used to it happening unintentionally. For some reason I remember them having a longer timer than that.

For fun, I decided to try this out again, ArcanaVille, with a real +4 mob: aka without any Incarnate powers. Man, it's been a long time since I faced Carnies at +4x8 (I run at that diff all the time, even solo DA, but I've got Incarnate powers with level shifts, so it's never actually that high) and I've gotten rusty. Just my luck, given what I said before, the first spawn I encountered had two Dark Ring Mistresses and I faceplanted. I can't count on one hand the number of times I've actually had to use Darkest Night in the last year, but when running this +4x8 Radio Mission, I had to use it in order to stay alive. The next spawn had both a DRM and an MI, and I managed to wipe the entire spawn, including the DRM, then died due to running out of endurance and having all my toggles drop; I actually could've prevented this, but I wanted to create the exact test we were talking about, so I let it happen.

The fight itself was basically: A) set Darkest Night on the MI; B) kill the Dark pet as soon as it comes out, because the Chill of the Night debuff is devasting; C) ignore the Illusionists, letting AAO, Dark Obliteration's -Tohit, Shield Charge's knockdown, and Darkest Night turn them into whimpering babies; D) wail on the MI. The MI's pets actually would despawn after a set time, which is something I don't remember them doing in the past, and the Illusionists simply couldn't land their mezzes in the time they were around. I used blue pills and a large yellow, and no other.

A bit of both. I know that part of the reason I survive the +4 MI is due to the fact that I know how to prioritize targets and will take down the Illusionist pets the moment they are summoned, which really doesn't take very long on a DM/SD/Soul Brute with its ridiculously high single target damage. Throw in tohit debuffs (relevant to non-positional attacks), knockdown from Shield Charge, and the self heal from Siphon Life on top of soft cap to all three positions, and that's a force to be reckoned with in a manner that I'm not sure Blasters can reach (Blasters have to choose so much between Primary Sets with good damage versus Primary Sets with good survivability, whereas Dark Melee gives up good AoE damage in order to be top tier in every thing else).

Yeah, I'll freely admit this. This is also why I stare boggle-eyed at the people in the Bio-Armor thread claiming that Shields isn't a top tier set and that Bio-Armor should necessarily have better survivability than it, even in Offensive mode. And Dark Melee is ridiculous for the damage it has (why oh why can't I say the same for Dark Blast or Dark Manipulation).

I really hope this is the case. I really do. I'm not sure it will be, as I'm highly skeptical that a single Sustain power will be sufficient, for various reasons, including (but not limited to) the fact that heal/regen/absorb mechanics do not scale with mob damage like debuffs, controls, defense, and resistance do (which are the things that every other AT has in abundance in one combination or another, and is why Defenders and Controllers perform so much better in the same environment). This is a similar problem to Electric Blast's endurance drain, which gets hit very hard by the purple patch (which combined with being binary makes it very tough to use in the +3/+4 environment that I'm used to running in).

Now that I'm thinking about it, the "scaling with the mob" issue is pretty key to the issues Blasters have, in general. It's the reason that Damage as Mitigation hasn't worked for them: it becomes less useful as mob difficulty goes up. Defense and resist scale very well, with Controls being slightly behind them (mez duration is reduced, but the Control ATs have enough duration that it doesn't normally make a difference). Debuffs are hurt quite a bit by the purple patch, but often the debuffer ATs have overwhelming and stackable debuffs that they can still significantly reduce and maybe even floor mob offensive power. Also, most debuffs are AoE and are often just as strong in AoE form as in single target form, whereas damage is significantly lower in AoE form. Heals and Regen don't scale at all, meaning that the Devs often give you an amount that is overwhelming at low difficulty, and insufficient at high difficulty... whether or not they scale with mob size varies, but usually they don't (Rise to the Challenge and Dark Regeneration are the few excepts I can think of). I currently don't know if any of the Sustain mechanics will vary based on spawn size, though I suspect Blazing Aura will.

The Dark Ring Mistresses are usually more of a threat due to the -Max Endurance. The MIs have a hard enough time just hitting my soft-capped Dark/SD/Soul Brute in the first place, let alone standing up to the offensive power long enough to break through with a combination of mezzes and debuffs. It's a very strong Brute combo with fantastic synergy, and neither Willpower nor Dark Armor.

My Brute is definitely on the bleeding edge of the curve, though, I'll freely admit. The sad part is just how far that is from the bleeding edge of the Blaster curve, and how much simpler it is to get there (in terms of build investment and player skill).

Ugh... unresistable -res debuffs... hurt so much.

Something my Brute doesn't bat an eye at, even at +4. This makes my Blasters sad and jealous. And me more than a little annoyed.

You can trigger the suppression through the Configuration settings.

Hm, good catch. I'm anticipating I24 beta heavily.

This.

After you register to the gills, you should register to the Titan Network. :P

You register on the main titan page.

Bizarre. I'll check it.

Nope.

The discussion of a "New Planner" is something that has come and gone in the Titan Network, and it's mostly an issue of time - all the people with the knowledge don't have the time to do it, myself at the foremost. It'd have to be a sabbatical or a job change or something, as I truly don't have time to do this on the side of my current job for more than I do now - I'm a busy, busy team leader/manager these days.

If a "New Planner Kickstarter" ever went further, yeah, we'd totally be hitting up the Devs for incentives and trying to work things out with them. Sadly, there aren't a whole lot of "rewards" we could offer beyond "put your names on x" and "beta access to New Planner" and possibly "demand a feature".