Fulmens

Hmm. My views are not what I thought they were.

I've rewritten this about five times trying to figure out what I think and how to put it. It's still not going to be clear, but it's "Ship it" time.

I can look at almost every power in a set and figure out what I think the Devs wanted it to do. Many of those, especially for Blaster secondaries, don't do that, but I can imagine the thought process.

You should be able to individually justify all those powers. Why does Elec have a hard hitting power with a decent chance of Sleep? Well, if you don't drop the guy you might be able to take him out of the fight for a while anyhow. Why does Elec have two hard hitting powers with decent chance of Sleep? Umm... in case he brought a friend? I don't know.

Why does Scrapper Martial Arts have both Storm Kick and Thunder Kick? To round out the attack chain.

Why does Blaster Martial Arts have both Storm Kick and Thunder Kick? To... umm... round out the ... attack chain ?

To put it another way: Under what circumstances would a Blaster take and use all of Crane Kick, Thunder Kick, Storm Kick, Crippling Axe Kick AND Eagle's Claw in a given session?

I'm coming at this from the viewpoint that "a Blaster in melee range has a half-life of four seconds." It's a good rule of thumb from the old SO days. You're both apparently coming at it from some other viewpoint.

What am I missing?

Mental is more effective (as far as I can tell) than any secondary before it; I haven't tried Dark so I can't say anything about that. But it does look like they're aware of the problems and try, within reason, to solve them.

Warfarin, Stratonexus: Six or seven attacks in the secondary seems a little ... excessive to me. Am I crazy for thinking that?

Got to put some time in on this today. Finally got to my first formal goal post:

Both are L20. Both took about 10 hours to get there.

Initially, the blaster (Spindizzy) was 20.0 while the scrapper (Contemplative) was 19.6 and I "thought I'd played about the same time on each." The scrapper actually had about 9 hours (both measured by "M" name pedestrians) and at 19.9 , after 15-20 minutes of play, she was at 10 hour. Goes to show: data beats gut.

Obviously this is a pretty rough measure, at this level, but I *think* the Blaster is still slightly ahead and gaining.

Some other measures (from "Acheivements"):
Scrapper took 71,876 damage vs. Blaster, 46,883
Scrapper had burnt 3,960 debt vs. Blaster 4,920
Scrapper mezzed 63 sec. vs. Blaster, 92 sec.

The first one was quite surprising to me- Contemplative is running about 25% range/melee defense AND Dark Melee on top of it- but I guess melee really does hurt that much more than ranged.

The difference between the first and second number probably shows the advantage of getting healed for free by your big hitter attack; Spindizzy got Aid Self eventually, but that's not exactly free or easy, as heals go.

It's hard to tell, but even with the extra debt (neither ever logged out with debt, so patrol XP didn't give a disproportionate advantage to either) I think Spindizzy's still levelling faster.

Current plan is to interleave tips and Monty missions through level 20, join teams (possibly a Sister P) to get past Level Suck, then once we're through that... I'll see what level 22 looks like.

Fine. I've been trolled. Pat yourself on the Superdine-enhanced back.

A_F, you bring up the same tired dung about once a year in the belief that it will get you farther this time than it did last time.

Unsourced statement that "most" people agree with you about the market? Check.

Moving the goalposts when called on your spurious statements? Check.

Claim that people playing on SO's are doing badly ? Check. When called on that, "doing badly" in ever-narrowing sets of circumstances? ... well, let's see about that.

I have several level-locked support characters - L30 to 33- and at least two of them are on either SO's or generic IO's. These are characters made for Midlevel Crisis back when I was making midlevel IO's by joining big teams and doing TFs. I recently made a fair bit of money auctioning off batches of recipes gotten by doing the Signature arcs.

Which I, generally, soloed. On such famous buttkicking soloers as a L33 sonic/dark defender, a L30 emp/sonic defender (SO's _and_ no vet attacks!) and a L35 ff/sonic defender. I can imagine you might have some trouble soloing on SO's if you kicked your diff up higher than +1/0 and you were playing a weaker soloer than those, though.

I've never been bothered that you were short on inf; more that you were stubborn, stupid and incapable of addressing other people's actual points, so you lied about what they said.

... Would you like me to go back to your previous attempts to make these claims, all of which went more or less the same way? We have a several-year archive here, it would be a shame not to use it.

The usual reasoning I use against it is "a direct port would be worse at everything than any other meleecentric support set."

Those attacks are slow and low-damage compared to anything else Blasters throw in melee range.

... so what can we do? Maybe take four really good attacks from Martial Arts, Street Justice and Superstrength, throw in Build Up, add a couple support powers as good as Drain Psyche or Shiver, and put in ... umm, an immobilize in tier 1 and fill-in-the-blank useless POS... you'd have something.

Anyone got any ideas for good MA-themed support powers? Something based on Iron Shirt technique? A focussing power that adds regen, recharge, and recovery? AOE Fear ("intimidating technique" or something?)

Gah. It was dark/traps. Bad brain, no neurotransmitters!

My most deliberately support-y build is a sonic/dark ... defender. Yes, I built it backwards. I also have a dark/sonic, which is much better in damn near all ways. But a sonic/dark with nearly the entire Leadership pool is absolutely the perfect +1 for a team. I threw in the Medicine pool for maximum ridiculousity. It does a little bit of everything and nothing well... but it stacks with everyone.

It makes me smile, unless I want for some strange reason to solo anything ever.

Without actually looking at what your build DOES:

what did you plan it to do?

Every once in a while I get in a thread that reminds me why I put someone on "ignore."

There's no class in this particular smug self-congratulatory thread, but good job, Me Of Several Years Ago.

The rest of you, carry on.

I don't remember the exact numbers... I think drain psyche gives you "so much end you can't burn it" and is also better than 3-slotted Health even if you only hit one guy. I'm not at my home computer to check it, though.

I ran into some issues with a dark/ff corr: the dark cones are aoe, debuffing, DOT. They're the trifecta of aggro collectors and they focus that aggro onto the only person on the team who doesn't have the little bubbles.

Lemme go see if the link in my sig still works... it works, but the first link in it is broken.

Here's the guy I was arguing with:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=123118

Also consider Cold instead of FF . You don't get the "Nobody loses ever" effect with Cold, as per this explanation, but it's a LOT more soloable and versatile.

Edited to add secondary advice: I've done /ice, /elec, /rad, and /sonic to high levels. /ice gives your team slows and holds... more protection, which is totally overkill. /rad was low damage with a lot of jumping into and out of melee. Don't jump around, you'll move the bubbles away from delicate people and they will die or suddenly find themselves mezzed. /Sonic is good, but you don't want it. /elec is sortakinda low damage.
One advantage in the late levels with /ice is Blizzard. Full blaster damage nuke that you can fire from around a corner. You might get a similar effect with Rain of Arrows, but I don't have a FF/Arch above, like, level 17.

I may have been making different assumptions than you about HOW you're going to play this blaster. I do a lot of mid30's content in general and so I consider "how it looks at level 50" to be a small subclass of "how it looks". Many, maybe most, people here think quite the opposite.

Are you ever going to exemp down? Are you going to be playing all 50 all the time? Dark Astoria?

Another reason Pareto may not apply: we have a two-tier system where you can SO out for far, far less inf than a "basic" IO build. So you might have 80% of the people using SO's and only 20% even in 'the market' at all.

Stratonexus: you can send an email to your own character [not your global] explaining what you're bidding on and why. I don't know if that's more trouble than it's worth; in a post-scarcity game like this one, you can always make more inf.

Fourspeed's assuming 10% of 500K accounts; Uberguy is assuming 15% of 100K accounts. Someone's misunderstanding someone there [possibly me, misunderstanding both.]

10% of all accounts with fifties being active seems like a plausible bet to me; a LOT of my old friends from the game no longer play (and those were people with a big batch of fifties each.) Five of the core eight Viva Las Vegas players aren't around any more, for instance. Most of my global friends list is nothing but memories. It's been eight years, and if most people who get a 50 stick around for a year or so... 10% is a decent approximation of that.

EDIT: Slow hands. Fourspeed got there first.

I would like and use the Deathbomb far more than I like and use Timebomb. It makes Barb Swipe look like a well balanced power.

I've met a lot of people who, when I ask, are happy to learn how to market. I don't think that there's a lot of RESISTANCE to learning to market, they just don't know where to go to learn.

Of course I'm mostly helping people who have SG's and want prestige, so I'm self-selecting my audience.

I have to say that fire/NO COMMENT is still pretty damn good damage.

Eenteresting.

We're now in second, and we are now FIFTY billion out of first place. We may have rattled 'em.

Replying to 4's "I don't disagree" post above:

If we have 100K current players (I used to think 50K but my reasoning may no longer be valid in the brave new F2P world) and we have 8 million characters being played [43M-35M] each player is playing 80 characters ON AVERAGE.

I'd be surprised if we have more than a million characters being played in any given week.

I have no problem with 4's "headscratcher" numbers for inf. They don't make me scratch anything.

I'm not sure, but I have maybe 100 alts scattered around the place. Most of them are, like, "that ff/archer on Guardian at level 12 I made to play with a friend's 50" or "those three Luck Charmers below level 20" or "the Paragon City Power and Light char at level 16". The LC's might have a million or two each, but by far most of my alts are below level 22, and have less than a million inf each. Most probably have less than 100K each. Even my beached 50's are sitting on only a few million each. (For me to bring them back to regular play, I'd have to start by respeccing into inherent fitness...)

I ran into someone the other day who probably had never seen 15 million inf in one place at one time. They had a new SG that was in the negatives for prestige (some people had quit the SG) and had no idea how to fix that. I made a donation. So there really are a lot of people who are just ... not like us.

I have no idea how the supply of, e.g. "generic level 20 intangibility enhancements" that drop, and what they sell for at the vendor, compares to the amount of DO's and such that used to drop. Looks like a L20 IO recipe sells for 3-4K . If they haven't changed it, DO's sell for similar amounts and drop MUCH less often from L12-19 enemies. (I remember hunting for those occasional Family L20's that used to hang around by the Independence Port gate, because they dropped like 30% DOs instead of like 0.5% DO's . Ah, the bad old days.)

It feels like, if I soloed a level 16 character for X time in I22 vs I7, never touching an auction house, the I22 character would have more inf at the end of that time. However, the I22'er will also have made more progress towards needing their pricey SO's.

I honestly think you're looking for "not a blaster".

Yes, you can make a high-Defense blaster. Most builds I've seen do this one of two ways:
1) Wait till the late 30's, heavily slot about nine powers.
2) Wait till the late 30's. Build for 32.5% Defense, carry a lot of small purples.

There are a lot of threads here about "So, is there anything we can do to keep Blasters, as played by normal humans, from dying all the time?"

Fire/Mental has a couple of relatively good tricks: you've got that cone in Mental which slows recharge, so if you survive the alpha you live twice as long. You've got an outbound alpha that can get rid of all the minions (as long as you're playing at +1 or even.) But still... blasters aren't safe. They can be made safer but they're not safe.

Claws: Eight years after "Healing Flames", and you want to start being reasonable NOW ?