Infernus_Hades

No slight but I know how to do what you want and I know why I can level faster than most players solo. Solo at low levels knockback and mez slows your advance.

So I developed this strategy to level without defeats:

1. level 1-5 in Atlas street fighting Hellions
2. Head to The Hollows and level to 8.
3. Go to Perez Park and fight Hellions or Skulls (I usually go with Hellions) Collect all PP badges.
4. At level 12 do the Midnighters arc and collect all Steel badges.
5. Exit Midnighters arc at completion at 13-14ish and head to Boomtown.
6. Straight back from the Boomtown door you can find large groups of Lost without Bosses.
I level from 14-20 fighting these and collect all Boomtown badges.
7. At level 20 I finally team and usually do both Positrons and maybe a Synapse and in some cases I have never been defeated all the way to level 25-27ish.

This work especially well for those high AoE power sets. For Single hitters like Energy i instead run mission arcs at +1x1. Slower but safer than the large groups but also you can cruise Perez hunting solo/duo Hellion bosses.

I have played blasters since day one of this game and have seen the changes that caused the issue. Mezzing became so common it really permeates everything. Issue 1-2 I was godlike on my Fire/Fire blaster - I would get people sending me tells to please join them within 30 seconds of logging in. Now blasters are sort of in limbo - you will take one but its nto because you WANT one like a buffer/debuffewr or aggro magnet.

Castle did say the things Arcanaville has mentioned and more.

Blasters are damage dealers. If they are mezzed before Defiance 2.0 they did no damage. Since D 2.0 they do a little damage.

I personally don't think it is enough damage and would like a way to fight out of a mez.

When you realize that blasters in this new world of barely any debt were significantly underperforming enough to rank dead last as leveling speed behind Kheldians who were thought to be the worst - you understand.

Blaster get defeated and regularly so and they do so because the game changed and they did not change with it. Mez is commonplace now with even minions stunning, slowing and holding you. Once held or mezzed - you are helpless except for low damage attacks and you get whittled down and a free trip to the hospital for green jello follows.

Hence my suggestion that could be worked 2 ways:

1. add a point of mez resistance for each time you use a level one or 2 power
2. 3 uses of a 1 or 2 level power in a row grants you 5-10 seconds of breakfree and this is very similar to the Momentum power.

I prefer number 2 but one works as well.

You are correct Chyll!

Blasters in my opinion aren't broken - they do just need a few minor tweaks. Hence my solution for mez escape using your current powers. In fact you could have each one of your tier 1 and 2 powers add a stacking point towards mez protection and that would be good too.

I enjoy playing blasters but it isn't an equal playing field even within the same AT. Fire/Fire blasters are the game on hard mode. Sonic/Ice is easy mode - lots of damage/-resistance and control everywhere.

So the mez issue rarely harmed me on my Sonic/Ice but really hurts on a Fire/Fire. So mezzing is a variable issue.

Damage - well if they say we do the most - we should.

Sniping - I rarely take the power because it has limited use. Adding a secondary effect like Energy has of a knockdown would be great.

But as you say the word "broken" is a little over the top. I would say in need of adjustment to the current game.

It is an old joke: What follows a blaster activating both Aim + Buildup?

Answer: 15 seconds of slow death to the blaster before he gets an attack off.

Swan.

Chyll I have no idea if you are trolling or really asking and so I will reply as if you really want to know.

Blasters in the early release of the game when the level cap was 40 - were the most powerful characters in the game. The Fire/Fire and Fire/Dev the most powerful blaster sets (the Fire/Dev due to broken smoke grenade).

Prior to ED and the changes it brought - 6 slotting things for damage made most groups trivial to fight. The fixes were several to try and level the game out. The Purple Patch which basically limited you to only being able to hit +6 enemies.

Then with the raising of the level cap to 50 they added a ton of mezzing to the game. In the early game only Bosses had holds, Lts had immobilize only and minions just attack without status effects.

Now in the game most minions have some slow, stun, hold or status effect. In recognition of this the Devs allowed the tier 1 & 2 to work while held. Data mining showed that blasters were dying in droves and it did affect their leveling speed. So for your nformation players who have a long history in the game know that blasters are fun and yet have some issues. If you don't think so, great! It doesn't change the fact that some players do feel a few small tweaks need to be made to help blasters.

Would it be possible for you to say that in English?

I honestly have no idea what you just said.

Please understand in the general powers thread each subject was being discussed and the wandering ideas mixed until it does give the Devs the type of focus similar threads in the Beta forum does.

I am not the driving force to make changes, I just consolidated the most popular issues people were discussing.

I personally only have issues with Mez as the game has evolved. Not being able to do damage as the most damaging AT seems a bit..........rude.

So you think a thread that meanders all over the place covering 4 different issues is easier for the Devs to read?

Have you got access to Beta?

Should we lower the damage - increase control from a nuke in exchange for less of an endurance penalty?

Do blasters need more damage?

What ideas do you have making snipes more useful.

In general AT discussions we have had a few ideas passed around this forum seems more fitting.

As the game has aged the NPC's have had a power creep and what was once rare - mezzes - are now common. So how do we help blasters without creating a tankmage.

My suggestion cut from the other thread:

I think it is now down to only one solution some form of mez escape for a blaster.

They need to be able to attack their way out of being held. I will return to the ability to use the lower tier attacks to allow for a small window of freedom. Not a 30 second breakfree - but a 5-10 second window to either finish the fight add defense, health or run.

I like being able to use my lower tier attacks and in fact it has often let me win a fight I would have lost otherwise. So I would use what they have given to us now and add the subtle twist of us breaking out by fighting. In most cases you can get off 3 lower level attacks prior to defeat. The soul destroying fight is where you are chain mezzed.

This would not happen with this solution - you get held and keep pouring on damage with your low level attacks and boom you shake free for 5 seconds - enough to eat a purple or green and try and win or beat feet to escape.

I was comparing the 2 sleeps - Siren's call and Frozen aura one day and I can consistantly sleep and entire group with Sirens. When I use Frozen Aura it misses many more than Siren does. I guess I am saying if 75% is the base then make it 90% as it misses far too often for a Tier 9 power with no secondary effects.

Hell, Sirens even does damage! I would have had a slow added to this or a -recharge.

Frozen Aura has one HUGE issue in my book - accuracy of the power.

For some reason I can pop aim+buildup and hit Frozen Aura and miss 50% of the spawn - my sonic sleep does not miss anywhere near as much. You would think using the sonic sleep + frozen aura would get everyone but it doesn't!

Golden Girl, Agent White and several other filled 30+ pages with posts on how the trials are harder and deserve a larger reward than solo content.

Trial content is NOT hard.

Thus my point of it and Golden Girl comes here and says its not hard and so contradicts dozens if not hundreds of her own posts. The reward for the iTrials is far out of whack compared to solo content.

This is my point and is not a straw man arguement. I explained how I have NEVER done one and yet died once to lag and figured out how to aid completion in minutes. Ignorance is not stupidity and being ignorant of the "script" doesn't make something hard.

A few short runs and people have the trick employed and it is simple. I showed how there was content that WAS hard. Then GG falls exactly into my point - saying well once we figure it out its not hard.

So iTrials are hard for a week.

Then they are completed at a high rate of success and very fast. Yet because you can stealth one arc on the solo content she and others feel all rewards should be balanced by that metric.

I have never done a Raid on WoW could not stand the game.

I am a very long time gamer - literally from the day of 300 baud modems. I played text adventures, Elite, Dungeon Master, Half Life, TFC, Soldier of Fortune 1&2 and a ton of games in between.

I have a squad of cheerleaders constantly reminding me that the reason DA solo missions have terrible rewards is because Trials are HARD.

In the Baf in 20 seconds I figured out how to slow the prisoners to a crawl and I had never set foot in the zone. I figured out that getting on the boxes means I am away from the blue AoE splash and never died - I was spamming my attacks as a good blaster should and only needed 3 greens to heal even though I was outside of the healing shield area.

In the Lam I mostly had to battle the lag inside and died when I froze in the middle of a large group. I again reply these are NOT hard. They require an orchestration that says do this now - and in fact they scream at you in huge letters what to do. I was there the first time on Champion that 150 of us defeated Hamidon.

I help plan and work for MONTHS to figure him out. Marut was the genius and we were the grunts. I died literally hundreds of times on my tank as we studied Hamidon. It was research and it was HARD.

The untyped damage and no protection from it.
The monster spawns and our SG - Sin - running monster duty.
The sniper squads.
The healing shields.
Learning the order of defeat and the damage required to overcome the Mitos.

On the day we defeated Hamidon without gimmicks in a straight in your face fight - I became Incarnate. The game can hand that out now if they want to but when me and 149 of my friends kicked Hamidons *** after months of planning - that was hard.

Marut, Dynamite, Acemace, CC, Addie, Zarok and so many others who worked so hard for so long - on that day we became gods. I didn't need a level shift to know it and those first Hami O's - even though I gave away my first one because of the poor delivery system and some were shorted - was sweet.

So please when you tell me something is hard - have a little perspective. These trials are trivial. I ran with our Sin SG a nightly Respec team that would Guarantee anyone they would get a Respec even when it was bugged and could randomly spawn +6 Freaks in the reactor room.

I decided to run a few Raids as the solo content is not out yet and I wanted to get my 50 Blaster up to tier 4 Alpha.

First of all the raids aren't Hard. They have some gimmicks that if you have run the Apex trial you have seen before. Glowing spots on the ground - check - unresisted damage DoTing you to death - check.

The BaF I ran last night and the prisoner escape sequence is flatout silly. I found within 20 seconds they ran a pre-determined path. I stood at the end of the path where they turned - with Chilling Embrace on and using Shiver and Shockwave and not a single prisoner escaped.

It wasn't even close. Then the hard part take down 2 AV's at the same time. Well since we herded them together and we were spamming them with AoE's it wasn't until they had 25% health left we even had to worry about it. Then it was figure out which one we were killing easier and kill the other one first.

Bingo - done in less than 15 minutes.


Then a nice stroll on a Lam - in which the only threat was lag - I died once due to a lag death otherwise we had zero problems - except due to not enough debuffs we had to use a couple grenades. So no badge since we used 3.

If you can read - the trials are easy. It says in big letters - this is now happening - then it happens. I was actually interested in seeing what everyone found so hard, I don't see it. They were not even in the same realm as trying to solo a Purple level Proton. He is far harder and requires some planning.

Color me not impressed. I would prefer a larger critter with a few effects that make the fight interesting to power spamming.

I have to say the so called Random Number generator is not random.

I have characters that I can get on and EVERY SINGLE TIME get good drops - I swear they are blessed by the Devs. I had one character that I got so used to getting good drops I started giving half away for free to keep the karma rolling.

Try this for rolling 5 rare recipe tries:
1. Celerity +stealth
2. Numina +
3. Celerity +stealth
4. Steadfast Res/Def
5. Steadfast Knockback

Yes, those were all in a row. During a Synapse TF after those rolls I gave away the Numina to one of the players and when I rolled again with my 60 merits 58 + babbage -2. I got another Numina +, LotG +7.5% and the leap +Stealth forgot what its called.

I also got 20 shards dropped in an ITF kill most. I have several characters that are similarly broken and some that don't get jack. I have one on an ITF kill all with a Windfall active that got 2 shards - that's it for the entire time. No enhancements or recipes just 2 shards.

I know for a fact on some of my characters the RNG is flatout broken. I can repeat it every time I play that character. So yes, I use that character as my bank and supply everything else my others need. Rolling 3 traps of the hunter after playing my "lucky" characters is very disheartening. So I really wish I could transfer merits lol.

The trouble is the old Hydra xp was severely nuked from space.

So many people were doing the Hellion/Hydra and ding 7-14 in an hour that they completely nerfed Hydra XP.

Now Hydra are one of the most ignored creatures in the game. Many of my favorite things the Devs in their infinite wisedom have nerfed so badly they are unplayable.

Abandoned Sewer trials - Nerf Kraken XP and stop you from Mezzing the Monster = Dustbowl.

Perez Park - nerf Hydra XP = Dustbowl

Respec trial reduce difficulty to -1 or less on the spawns and it becomes a snoze festival = Dustbowl and one of the most boring things in the game now.

Eden - never fix the walls enabling 10 minute trials and thus some of the most epic maps in the game become Dustbowls.

You know so many things that were FUN have been nerfed to suck the life out of them. I really have to wonder if sometimes they even play this game.

I would make a BS/WP scrapper and make sure in parry you add the Chance to knockdown IO.

It is amazing how often it works and it will even knockdown AV's if it fires.

I set Parry on auto fire and the 17% defense added to willpower is extremely nice! I just saw you don't want Will Power then take electric instead.

Doc from everything we are seeing that is what they want for this content.

It isn't really a very viable path solo wise and what Eco did in 7 days would roughly get you one T3 solo wise.

I tanked the ITF last night on my Sonic/Ice blaster.

I doubt I could solo an AV as my damage isn't high enough but I can withstand basically anything they put out. I died once in a mission when I forgot to watch my blue bar and dropped my shields! Whoops.

Otherwise I watched as the 2 Brutes on the team faceplanted 4 or 5 times and I didn't. I was able to finish off the computer when both Brutes were dead and only myself and 2 defenders were left.

It is a bit slow at first but once you have some tools it becomes a lot of fun