A friend said once:
I have never - ever - complained about the developer's vision of the game in principle, and I've never jumped onto the bandwagon when people were basically calling the devs uninformed idiots and worse just because of a change they didn't like. I don't always agree with the developers, but at least I can see their side of the argument, even if I disagree with it.
Not this time.
This statement is wrong in a lot of ways: here are the main three things this statement either says or implies that are impossible to support:
1. Scrappers in melee range are at exposing themselves to higher risk than blasters who stay at range.
Maybe at level 2. By the time a scrapper has any defenses at all, scrappers mitigate the risk of being in melee range by having sufficient damage mitigation to nullify the higher damage they expose themselves to. All scrappers get some sort of damage mitigation that starts to balance the higher melee damage by level 1. Is that damage mitigation numerically balanced against blasters being out of melee range? Perhaps not at level 1. It definitely is equal or superior by the time DOs appear, around level 15. It never gets anywhere equal or worse ever again.
2. The higher damage cap helps scrappers survive the higher damage/risk.
Err, no. No scrapper says "these foes are too dangerous, if I slot my attacks more I will survive better." All scrappers slot defense, not damage, to survive. This is coming from a SR scrapper that never took FS - I used MA knockback and disorient to suplement the lost damage mitigation, and the tactic of driving into melee range as quickly as I could. The very thing Statesman says is inherently riskier for scrappers.
Now, if damage SOs boosted damage by 100% per enhancement, maybe this would be a viable strategy. But scrappers get huge benefit from slotting defenses. They would have to slot twelve SOs into their attacks to reach their damage cap - and it would still not necessarily improve their survivability more than one extra SO in a defense power.
Meanwhile, the main damage mitigation blasters have is quick-kill - we kill them, they stop damaging us. We have the tools to increase damage. We have no defenses, so we are often devoting slots to damage in attacks as the best benefit to us. We are approaching our damage cap quicker than scrappers - and we need to - and then, wham, we actually get capped by the damage cap.
Almost no scrapper (solo) can get anywhere near the scrapper cap without HOs. Its virtually impossible to hit or be actually capped by the scrapper cap. So the scrapper cap is really theoretical, it has no effect on the average scrappers life.
But blasters can easily hit the blaster cap. 5+1+BU+Aim is over the cap. Its damage we could use and would help us, but we don't get to use it. It is the absolute worst situation for blasters because blasters, with low damage mitigation, require speed. We can tolerate low damage output when we are fighting minions, but we need more when fighting LTs, and even more when fighting bosses. At low levels, tools like build up work because blasters work very well when they have low damage sometimes, and high damage sometimes, and they get to choose when they get the boost. They choose to be stronger against stronger foes, at the price of being weaker when facing weaker foes - and it works. At high levels the damage cap means that instead of being strong when we want, and weak when we don't need to be, our damage is much more evened out near the cap. Meanwhile, we are still facing weak minions and strong bosses. With no way to "rise to the challenge" blasters have difficulty.
My sole ability to take on bosses rests with total focus, a high damage high mez first strike weapon. Without it, or some other way to slow the fight down (ice holds, drains, etc) my steady, even, near-the-cap damage output is simply insufficient to take on bosses most of the time.
Maybe I'm not supposed to be able to take on bosses solo, but that is a separate issue - the issue is the difference between the scrapper cap and the blaster cap, and what effect it has on each of us.
3. Blasters, having range, get to select which targets they fight, while scrappers are forced to fight everything
Well, first of all, if Statesman wants us in missions and not out street fighting, neither blasters nor scrappers get to pick who they fight. They can both pick when they fight. A blaster can theoretically use pulling to fight one target at a time, but you know what? So can scrappers. Every scrapper primary has a taunt, and you can pull with it just like you can with ranged targetted attacks. I know because my MA/SR took taunt, and at level 19 when Skyway was boring and Talos was a bit lethal to just jump into a bunch of +3s, guess what I did to even the odds.
Selective engagement is not an advantage of blasters over scrappers. Pulling is not an advantage of blasters over scrappers. Blasters and scrappers can both choose to face however many villains they want in exactly the same way with the same chance of success based on skill.
And actually, there was many a team where my MA/SR took over pulling from blasters who were not good at it and were consistently getting killed by the return fire after the pull attempt.
Blasters need high damage output more than scrappers. Blasters shoot for high damage and then slam head-first into the blaster cap when they try to boost damage temporarily against a powerful foe, or set of foes. We survive because we have other forms of damage mitigation we lean on, we've perfected the tactics to use them properly, and we practice a lot when no one's watching. We succeed in spite of the lower cap, but we could use a higher one.
Scrappers balance damage and defense. Actually, thats a lie. Most scrappers focus on defense over damage, because they learn good defense means you can take your time. Bad defense means your extra offense will be slotted into a dead body.
Statesman, you said you were going to look at blasters down the road. One of the things that is a problem for blasters is that it is very difficult to balance a low damage mitigation set, because it always comes down to a race between our damage and their damage. Just blanket increases in our damage mean we will either be granted a level of damage that allows us to kill everything all the time very quickly - faster than they can kill us - or quite frankly the extra damage won't be worth a lot. I've suggested ways to improve the situation (my accuracy vs defense suggestion and my suggestion for making range work for blasters is in my sig). Another thing I've suggested for blasters is to give us a scalable build up - so build up gets more powerful as we get higher in level (much like scrapper mez protection scales with level). This way, as the mobs scale upward in difficulty, especially in the late game, we will have a tool to help us keep up. Its more effective, and because it isn't a blanket damage increase, it allows us to be much stronger when we need to be, at the expense of being not as strong at other times. In other words, it doesn't blow our damage all out of proportion and turn us into continuous ranged killing machines.
But that suggestion is predicated on the notion that our damage cap goes up - way, way up, to a level higher than scrappers, even - so that we can take advantage of a scalable build up.
Understand that the current blaster cap does not reduce blaster damage output. It forces us to even it out which means minion fights will always be short (as we want), and LT and Boss fights will always be long (which are hazardous) and there is no way, none at all, for any blaster to change that situation, even temporarily. Scrappers don't care how long a fight lasts, only if they ultimately win. Blasters care how long the fight lasts, because that is ultimately what decides if we win.
Please, reconsider this position.
