Fulmens

Dark might cause you trouble with the Aggro cones. I don't know the details of the mechanics, but enemies hate people who do the following:

Debuffs
Damage over Time (keep reminding them why they hate you!)
AOE

What do the two Dark cones do? AOE, debuffs, damage over time. As a bonus, because you're doing damage over time, even if you have done "enough" damage to kill them, they still have a plenty of time to take you with them.

I would not recommend soloing on a FF defender. I actually counted on an FF/Rad and it took some ridiculous number of attacks to take down the Midnighter arc Rikti boss (Ci'don?) I think it was 58 attacks.

Generally Rad/Sonic is still Best at Everything.

Minor weenie notes:

Trickshooter: Rain of Arrows on a defender is level 38, not 32 .
Shadey: When do they get the redside pet, level 38? 41?

Relevant to both points: Soloing through the thirties on a Defender feels like it takes half of forever.

My "old school" memories (I'm not through the 20's yet on my blaster/scrapper pair) are of blasters are starting to fade around 21 (everyone does, but I think Blasters fade more), then at 22 SO'd damage keeps their heads above water for another 5 to 8 levels. By 32 nearly everyone else is fully powered up and Blasters are well behind.

I know at level 21 I went into every fight on my new Scrapper paying attention, but went into every fight on my new Blaster wondering how I was going to survive.

To the people who are commenting on playing "higher than the Blaster can handle" and suggesting -1/x8 and things like that:

* If it's not your team, you don't get to set the difficulty.
* If it IS your team, and the rest of the team is underchallenged, they will get bored and leave.
* I haven't checked this for years, but +1 gives [or gave] twice the XP/inf of -1 . Level -1 slows you down- and everyone else down- just as much as permadebt, compared to a "fairly normal" +1 difficulty. You're punishing people for teaming with you.
* x8 will not increase the "virtual team size" beyond 8, so for a 6-person team x8 looks just like x3 .
In short, -1/x8 is not much of a solution in most cases.

Last, I would like to make a point that may come out more hostile than I wanted. I have played and enjoyed several "understrength" characters- I am a huge fan of Force Fields, for pity's sake. That does not mean I require everyone else to share my enjoyment. That does not mean I pretend my characters are NOT understrength.

The worst of the original five AT's, eight years later, is now the worst of fourteen AT's. By a large amount. Not "one or two powersets"- all sets. A few combinations of primary and secondary are much more survivable than other Blasters. Still worse than other AT's, but closer to acceptable.

One powerset had a moment of bugged excellence in issue 1, when Smoke Grenade was self-stacking and gave -50% To Hit, but after that it's never been the same. ("City of Blasters"- yeah, it was, for about four months. SS/Inv tanks lasted longer than that.)

Fire blast, but I don't count that because it's normal.
Sonic blast, but I don't count that because it's so good.

Force Field defenders. Those are an addiction. I don't consider myself to really be on a server until I have a FF defender there at "capped defense for the team" level [17+].

I'm probably having search fail, but I can't find anything about why all the heal IOs are suddenly heal/absorb IOs.

Someone on a channel mentioned it was going to be a new mechanic... ?

I apparently should get back in the habit of reading patch notes.

Did they change anything else when they changed the heal powers to be "heal/absorb"?

I'd be happy with Blasters that were twice as tough as what we have now. See, one of the problems with "more damage" is that the Blasters on a team give the entire team the XP, while keeping the debt for themselves. I mean, everyone here could volunteer to play Force Field defenders an hour or so a week, thus fixing the problems with both Force Field defenders and Blasters in the immediate case, but I don't think that solution scales.

Winterminal: The problem is not power creep with time. I was here in 2005, when the scrappers were twenty times tougher than the blasters and the tanks were two hundred times tougher. I don't remember whether I was actually on the team where someone asked "What's that AT with a black skull symbol?" Maybe I just heard the story told here. The problem is power creep with level: when you're trying to threaten a guy with mez resistance 15, you throw in enough mez to flatten a blaster 15 times over. What kills a level 35 Scrapper in 60 seconds kills a level 35 Blaster in ten.

I have had worse luck at least one time: Some White Wolf game, I picked up 14 damage dice (7+ is a success on a D10) and didn't roll a single success. That's something like a 0.07% chance.

Sorry for your run of crappy luck.

There's a workaround for that. The bad news is, I saw it once, applied it on one character, forgot it and couldn't find it again. It may have had something to do with getting the windows right, saving that setup [?] and applying it to all new characters.

This post isn't 100% useless... you know a fix EXISTS, at least.

MeanNVicious has, in fact, burnt or caused to be burnt 750 billion inf. He made that inf somehow. His claim is that he's changed the price floor on low-supply objects, so a "buy at 8, sell at 15" item becomes "buy at 20, sell at 35" or whatever his buy point is. Logically, competitors would then come in and buy at 21, sell at 34 and so forth. When he left the niche, it would stay at 20/35 for a while (and as supply went up, it would probably collapse a few weeks later. )

I tried it a couple times, and those were almost the only times I've ever lost money in this market, but that's not exactly proof of impossibility. That was probably back in 2005.

The "ratchet the price up" schemes that I watched, back around then, collapsed under the weight of supply. There's presumably clever ways around that, and apparently they work well enough to make 3/4 of a trillion inf.

Ah yes, good old dungeons and dragons. I remember it well, DrGemini.

How were fighters and paladins balanced in second edition?

Or, give an actual specific explanation of the mechanism by which Blasters are balanced against, say, Crab Spiders with three ranged AOEs, mez protection, Defense and Resistance built right into the class.

Because I can't disprove any of the following assertions:

To add to what Stealth_Bomber said: It's "enormously effective" vs. knockback. It's "slightly effective" against Holds. (Isn't there a 100% cap on mez resistance, so you're always affected for at least half the duration?) It's "completely ineffective" against Sleep, Disorient aka Stun, Immobilize, and ... I feel like i'm missing a couple forms of common mez. Bueller? Bueller?

As far as not dying on teams? To steal a quote: "If the Blaster screws up on a team, the Blaster dies. If anyone else screws up on a team, the Blaster dies." As I measured recently for another thread around here, a +1 Freak Tank hits for 60% of a Blaster's HP in melee at level 34. And if you're on a team, you WILL be seeing +1 bosses.

Re range vs. melee "tankmages": I have relearned from the Blaster experiment that it's a lot easier to get ten people into Energy Torrent than five into Shadow Maul. Blasters can hurt more people, more. I have also relearned that it doesn't make up for being six times more delicate. (From my Force Field days, I can promise you that a Blaster without the fear of death does a HELL of a lot of damage.)

Re "ED" and other pieces of the good old days: we can get close to one SO of damage from new Defiance, and we have the damage cap to actually USE all of BU + Aim + slotted damage now. Used to cap at 400% instead of 500%. Also they HAVE increased Blaster HP once. And I believe they increased the ranged damage modifier to 1.125 from 1.0, but I could be wrong about that. Blasters aren't all that far behind issue 4 damage; they just lost the issue 4 ability to hit 200 critters at once with that damage.

Re mez protection: They added knockdown to CoT crossbows. It was good, that day, that I didn't live near the studios. The amount of mez in this game is utterly stupid. And 90% of the blasters, for 90% of their careers, duck less than 30% of the incoming mez. "It gets better"- bull. Before a blaster gets any meaningful safety from mez, it is given to half the minions AT RANGE. And unless you're playing the "Skip the first 49" plan... you have to survive level 49 to get to level 50.

Mez is something that Defenders and Corruptors have to deal with, in the sense that a small percent of the attacks with mez may land on them. It's something Blasters have to deal with, in the sense that every punk with a swordgun has a chance of mezzing them every shot. Every minion in Crey power armor, half the Malta... freaking level 25, you can get stuck in a slugfest with a CoT boss and have no escape. It's straightup "who runs out of HP fastest" and that's no way for a Blaster to win a fight.

Edited: "No escape"? Well, what about Break Frees? I'm sorry, I used most of my limited stock of inspirations to try and cover the lack of Defense and the lack of combat heals. I ran out of Break Frees in fight #6 and I forgot to put ten in gleemail. How many inspirations does your Scrapper use in a fight?

There I was. Trapped. Outflanked. Outnumbered a trillion to one.

I would describe it as "terrifying", myself.

There was a market sploit that I only ever saw used once (plus the time I discovered it) where you could buy 10 crafted enhancements even if you didn't have the inf to buy ONE. The inf would get delivered and not subtracted from your account. I found it live, tried it on Test and reported it to everyone I could think of. They fixed it the next workday.

I could have had 2 billion in every market slot on every character I owned in an afternoon.

Clearly we're supposed to get PL'd through the first 49 levels, Ad Astra, and never exemplar.

With zero IO's, that's going to be rough. I would recommend for *every* Blaster some form of Stealth and a certain amount of KB protection. You can get those with power pools but you generally do better getting a KB protection and a Celerity:Stealth (or Unbounded Leap: Stealth. You can put that in Sprint and it's a lot cheaper.)

What will keep you alive isn't so much the build as the playstyle. Being a big fan of Fire/En and Fire/Elec, and having played them a long time with minimal self-protection, I will tell you that your main synergy is HUGE FREAKIN DAMAGE.

I don't remember the exact number, but Fire/En has something like five powers that do as much or more damage than the second-best power a Broadsword scrapper gets. Ever.

My basic technique goes something like this:
* BU or Aim as needed
* Fireball
* Fire breath almost all the minions are dead now
* Blaze while jumping in
* Bonesmasher and Energy Punch (generally on different nearly-dead people) you should have eliminated two lieutenants by now
* Fire Bolt while jumping out
* check to see how many limbs you have and how many you started with
* Bury the survivors.

This is safer than it looks, which is to say still extremely dangerous. The key skill here is wiping out the minions. You have to do the lab to learn the skills.
1) Go to Wents, get about eight medium purples.
2) Find a good-sized group of even or +1 or +2 enemies.
3) Put on the safety equipment. Take two purples.
4) Pick what looks like a good starting place. (this is where stealth comes in handy.)
5) Pick what looks like the right amount of damage boost. FB/FB will wipe out even-con minions with NEITHER Aim nor Build Up, generally.
6) Boost, Fireball, Fire Breath.
7) See what's still causing trouble. Apply Blaze and big melee attacks until they're disposed of.
8) Run more experiments with different groups, different placement, different amounts of boost. Don't forget your safety equipment!

Once you feel like you've got it down... try it without the purples.

As far as your build questions:
* Conserve Power is OK. I don't generally have end issues but I frankenslot (at least) with cheap IOs. And I carry a lot of blues because I nuke EVERY TIME IT'S UP.

* Rain of Fire: I generally consider a Blaster like this to have a four second half-life in melee range, and maybe six seconds outside it. A power that scatters people and kills them fifteen seconds from now is no use to me. Many people's opinions differ. Also, most of the builds you'll see these days have high Defense in one or more crucial ways and just power through the fight that way; Rain of Fire is not really much of an additional defense there.

* Aid Self is a considerable advantage- but more between fights than during it. In the time it takes Aid Self to fire, you're likely to take enough damage to cancel out the effect.