Diellan_

There's a reason that green inspirations and self heal modifiers are based on a percentage of your maximum hit points, ditto Regeneration. The only case where it's "easier" to reach max HP is when you are getting healed by an outside source, like another player or a Lore pet.

My main is a DM/SD/Soul Brute and there is no way that the combo is lacking in survivability; I don't even use Darkest Night all that much - I don't need it. SD is an excellent pair for DM (and vice versa) because it brings the added AoE damage of Shield Charge and the combination of -ToHit and +Defense is always fantastic. And while Darkest Night is great, the real reasons I went for Soul were Dark Obliteration (amazing AoE blast) and Gloom. Gloom is one advantage that Brutes have over Scrappers: it has better DPA than any power in Dark Melee, meaning that if you can get the recharge to run it, Gloom > Smite > Midnight Grasp > Smite does amazing damage (it's actually one of the best chains available for ST damage for a Brute, period). And the added AoE of SD and Soul make up for Dark Melee's lack.

As for survivability... I'm not seeing any issues. I was soloing at +4x8 before Incarnate stuff hit without even needing Darkest Night or One with the Shield (I'd drop them, but the set bonuses I've got from them are good), and with them, I'm finding it hard to find things that can challenge him outside the iTrials (to the point where I'm starting to feel bad) - I tend to keep them around for when I decide to do something ridiculous, like tank all 8 AVs at the end of the LRSF at once (there's something where Brutes' higher Res cap makes a huge difference).

Part of the problem when talking about Blaster damage is that people look at different things when they talk about it (or damage in general), usually boiling down to Single Target or AoE. As an AT, Blasters are the AoE king and when people talk about how Blasters have amazing damage, they are almost always thinking about multiple simultaneous orange numbers (Fire Ball, Rain of Arrows, etc.). When it comes to ST damage, though, Blasters are basically just Scrappers or Brutes who get the option of doing it at range (a benefit which isn't nearly as useful as it sounds in PvE) - their ST dps isn't actually all that amazing, but whenever somebody starts to talk about it, the usual response is "Yes, but Fire Ball".

There's really a lot of reasons for Blasters to underperform, in my opinion, and a lot of them are general design flaws to the game that just so happen to emphasize the things that Blasters are good or bad at:

1) Inconsistent modifiers, especially when applied to pool and epic powers. For whatever reason, when Blaster ranged damage was increased, their melee damage was not, even though it actually matters to them; in fact, they and Dominators are the only ones who have both ranged and melee attacks in their primary and secondary pools and have different ranged and melee modifiers, but Dominators are the ones who have a more reasonable layout of having a higher melee modifier (because it's "more dangerous" in melee). One of the amusing/annoying little facts of the game is that the melee ATs (those with higher melee modifiers than range) use their melee modifiers for every attack, including ranged ones in their epics, while the ranged ATs are stuck using their weaker melee modifiers on the melee powers. This has never really made sense to me and partly skews the abilities of the various damage ATs when epics come into play: Scrappers get Blaster mods on Fire Ball, so why do Defenders have to have crappy modifiers on Thunder Strike and why does my Blaster have terrible modifiers on Charged Armor?

2) Speaking of Fire Ball, when it comes to the Epic Pools, it seems to come down to "everybody whose normal drawback is lack of aoe gets amazing aoe powers" (see Scrappers, Brutes, Tankers, Controllers, Dominators) while the ATs that already have good aoe powers get pretty meh epic pools (Blasters, Defenders, Corruptors). Dark Obliteration and Darkest Night for Soul Mastery, Fire Ball and Fire Blast and so forth... And Blasters can dig into Epics to get a wimpy shield (most of which are Resist, of all things) and a couple crappy utility powers (Bonfire? Char? Melt Armor with terrible modifiers?). Why not Flashfires or Healing Flames or, say, Healing Aura? Most of the powers available in a Blaster epic are actually not all that different from the type of stuff you can find in Blaster secondaries; I thought epics were supposed to let you branch out and fill the gaps in your AT? It's kind of sad that the best thing a Blaster can nab in their epic pool is a self rez.

3) Speaking of Blaster secondaries, the Devs have kind of painted themselves into a wall on these things. They were seemingly built without any actual design theme - mostly a "let's just give them a smattering of random abilities" - and now they've got their hands tied when making new sets in that they have to follow a roughly similar idea; yet, it's too late to change the existing sets to have them be more relevant to a Blaster. I would really like to see statistics on things like the damage auras, the non/low-damaging mez powers, Lightning Clap, etc. to see how often they're taken, used, etc. And poor, poor Devices...

4) Ranged sets are often terrible DPS sets. The standard 4 second, 8 seconds, 10-12 second blaster setup has a big problem in that you can't build a chain with it unless you have (a) extreme amounts of recharge, and/or (b) a very long animating tier 3 blast. This is the primary reason that Blaster ST damage isn't all that great compared to their Scrapper and Brute counterparts. Sure, Blasters have great ranged damage modifiers and can start off with those, but then they have downtime that they need to fill in with AoE powers (usually poor DPA and certainly poor DPE when facing single targets) or melee powers from their secondary (which have a lower damage modifier and wind up with extra high recharge times to give them good damage) or power pools (which suck). This is part of the reason that Fire Blast is so great: its T1 and 2 powers recharge in only 2.18 seconds and 4 seconds, which makes it easier to make the T3>T1>T2>T1 chain work (with the bonus damage offsetting the lower base damage). Out of all the issues on my list, this is actually the easiest to fix, since many sets have minor damage ST mez powers that could be upgraded to have decent damage.

5) Speaking of, the mez powers are ridiculous. Why do they need to be 20 second recharging powers that do minor damage and have only a scale 10 duration (11.92 seconds for a Blaster at level 50)? This would save a lot of headache.

The problem with putting in Pet buffs is that I haven't yet figured out a way to do it automatically - it keeps getting lost every time we create a new database. I have plans for doing an overhaul of the Pet system in Mids, but it comes after PVP DR and I21.

He asked me before posting this, actually, but I didn't have a good answer for him. The "Create New" buttons in Mids are broken right now, so the only way to do it is to do a copy-paste of the powers and to overwrite an existing powerset. I'm going to get this fixed for the next version of Mids, but that likely won't be early enough to help.

So it turns out that I21 is going to have Poison buffs in it, including making the two main ST debuffs into partial AoEs. I'd really like to say we had an effect on this, but... oh well. Mission sort of accomplished anyway?

We get this question way too much, so we know how much you want it. The problem is that Mids is way too huge and complex right now for us to convert from .Net to some other format, sorry. I'd love to do it, but I don't have the time.

So for the Titan Weapons set, can we get Jurassik's car-on-a-stick?