Lolblaws

I wouldn't say we are at that point either. The difference between archery and fireblast compared to the other blast sets is daunting.

I'm in the same boat as you, I greatly prefer fire and archery (I like my rad/fire as well, but only as a combo as rad alone doesn't do it for me). The other blasters I've tried largely sucked at aoe damage and had to lean heavily on their secondary to do decent st damage. To me that's a big sacrifice to not be as good as many builds in the game that don't make the same sacrifice.

I keep all buffs up all the time when I play my buffers. I'm the kind of guy that will laugh at people that whine about having to apply speed boost so often. Buffing isn't very difficult. My rad/therm corr is my main 'buffer'. When I join a team we usually quickly increase difficulty because the baseline survivability goes up considerably and we can hit everything so easily. However, few blasters scale well to that increase in difficulty like other AT's do. As a result yes, I find myself needing to keep a very close eye on their healthbar. New defiance doesn't help because you used to be able to watch their buff bar and when it loaded up with icons you knew they were under attack.

On the other hand, if we didn't ramp up difficulty then we can usually get by with me only buffing the blaster(s) because everyone else is self sufficient enough.

Either way the blasters require extra attention from me. That's time I'm not launching my own aoe's, which to me means they now need to make up for my damage being lost in addition to clearly being more damaging than anyone else. I can't say I've seen many blasters clearly succeed in that task, but I don't think I'm being unreasonable in that demand.

That's just it though, my buffs allow the team to take it up a couple notches. The blasters which probably needed support before I arrived still need more support than anyone else and my shields aren't enough, but usually are enough for most everyone else (with the occassional spot heal). On my corrs/trollers/mm's I like to buff up before engaging (usually while running to the next spawn), those AT's all have support as a secondary and as such I like to make sure I get ample use of my primary during fights. If I ever play a buffing def I will likely focus more on self sacrifice.

Blasters need absurd amounts of buffing before they are no longer a concern for the support. Unless of course the team just keeps playing well below what they can handle so the blasters look good.

When the decision to roll a blaster automatically generates a tanker with two fast cycling 15ft aoes then yes blaster survivability will no longer matter. But this is almost full circle back to why a blaster is often more desirable than a scrapper on the STF. The presence of a superior agro holding tank makes the game quite a bit different than when they aren't there.

Just like when the decision to roll a blaster automatically adds 4 defenders to your team so that survivability is no longer an issue we can start saying things like "survival is not an issue, due to various things"

The thing about this game is that no AT is intended to be required. Cool design principle, but what it results in is frequently encountering team compositions that are far from optimal for a blaster to perform at their peak. Having a degree of self sufficiency is a very valuable asset in this game and is likely why 13 of the 14 available AT's range from decent to excellent at it.

FWIW I'm not saying blasters need an increase in survivability. Not at all, but they should (imo) do clearly more damage than anyone and everyone else. If a scrapper can do anywhere approaching the same damage as a blaster then the blaster has already lost. Which on that note, the comparisons that keep getting tossed around keep saying "see the blaster does more damage" yep it does, but I don't see doing 20% more damage (from one of the last aoe chains earlier) works out to being balanced when the scrapper is well over 20% more survivable.

No worries, my initial phrasing was convoluted anyway.

151 dps results in ~14min take down of the pylon.

If it took you 24 min that would have been 134 dps

At any rate if you lost around 20 dps (from 151) due to the new changes it would increase your time to ~28 min (or double the time from before).

If you were banging on it for 38 min and had it ~half dead that would be around ~118 dps.

I'm going to guess english isn't your native language because this is exactly what I said in the passage you quoted...

If the game focused on facing 3 or less enemies at a time you'd probably be right.

PA is not very good against more than a few enemies at a time. In terms of a "control" power (which they are first and foremost) they give up quite a bit of utility (like aoe stunning entire spawns) to excel at controlling singular foes.

In terms of being a damage power they are pretty weak if they are focusing on multiple targets because of the healback. If they focus on one target (like a lut, or boss) they can do some solid damage.

Based on SO's they aren't even remotely OP'd let alone "broken", as they allow you to take one alpha every 2 min. After that you have to drag them in to the spawn for them to take the alpha (which isn't a huge issue thx to invisibility, but invisibility isn't automatically taken when you pick PA). At the upper limits they are certainly very strong, but there are lots of very strong powers when you throw a lot of recharge at them.

You are of course entitled to your opinion, but a term like "broken" is pretty strong. I know I wouldn't mind hearing your justification for such a powerful accusation.

uh what?
So?
Earth has 5 two of which are immobs that really don't need domination to do anything that they can do with domination.
Elec has 5, but 4 actually because domination doesn't jump with synaptic. Again the immobs really don't need domination so 2
Fire has 5, two of which are again immobs, so 3 really.
Grav has 5, two of which are immobs
Ice has 5, two of which are immobs

So unless ones argument is that illusion's lack of immobs is so detrimental to dominators that the set would be drastically underpowered and cease to function for the AT then there is no leg to stand on in saying that illusion would not work for doms.

In actuality arguing against the lack of immobs is far more detrimental to controllers as it is such a readily available source of aoe containment, which illusion lacks.

What illusion does have is the ability to perform well regardless of domination (or containment). That is actually a huge boon to the set considering no where near the majority of players run anything remotely near perma-domination.

The baseline performance is terrific (just like the other pseudo-pet heavy sets). It can be surpassed in raw control by sets that gain more from domination and subsequently high recharge. However, illusion gains its own huge benefits from additional recharge. Yes a high recharge ill dom wouldn't have the aoe spawn lockdown ability of a domination powered stalagmites, but it would be hands down the strongest dom at handling difficult enemies and would also be the highest (or second highest) damage option available.

The only bad idea I see presented is the idea that you are ever right. I have read what you said about illusion for doms. I'm not even sure Dr. Cox could describe how wrong you are...and he is pretty good at pointing out how wrong people can be.

At any rate the devs have already said that if/when illusion is ported it will go to doms and that the port is a likely occurrence.

The sooner it occurs the sooner we can add another thing to the list of things that you had no clue about, but decided to state with absolute authority on the subject.

I apologize, I didn't mean to suggest the work you did was flawed as I'm sure looking at each attack set in a vacuum yielded the exact results you achieved.

But in terms of what actually happens in the game with actual builds the measuring stick that players have adopted suggests that the attack set chosen is only part of the equation.

The top 2 brutes even employ the superior gloom and still fall well short of scrappers.

409 Illusion/Cold/Ice Controller - Frosticus
321 Bots/Storm Mastermind - Frosticus
317 Illusion/Cold/Ice Controller (no -regen) - Frosticus
294 Bots/Dark Mastermind - PettyTheftz
291 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Gaidin
289 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - _Mojo_
286 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - BrokenPrey
283 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Eva Destruction
282 Fire Control/Radiation/Fire - Dave P
281 Unknown MM combo (bots?) - Simak
278 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Santorican
276 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Iggy Kamakaze
270 Crab Spider Soldier of Arachnos - Krogoth
267 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Igor The Mad
264 Mind Control/Fire/Fire Dominator - Fiery-Enforcer
262 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Machine Man X
262 Dual Blades/Electric Armor - Shadowsylph
262 Bots/Dark Mastermind - Lord Thanatos
260 Illusion/Radiation/Psi Controller - Reverence
259 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Norse
255 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Besserwisser
255 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Fury Flechette
254 Fire Melee/Shield Defense - MunkiLord
252 Fire Melee/Shield Defense - Effy On Malibu
249 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - SkylineGTR
247 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Enots
243 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Primal Dark
242 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - MrLiberty
242 Fire Control/Radiation Controller - Dave P
241 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Powerforge
241 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Reverence
241 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Psyoxic
241 Illusion/Radiation/Ice Controller - Vernichterhelge
238 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Iceboxer
237 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Nihilii
236 Broad Sword/Shield Defense - Chaos String
236 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - BrokenPrey
236 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Fiery-Enforcer
233 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - doyler
233 Cold Domination/Sonic Defender - DSorrow
232 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Hejtmane
232 Fire Control/Fire Dominator - Silas
228 Claws/Super Reflexes - Iggy Kamakaze
226 Katana/Electric Armor - Reverence
226 Fire Control/Fire Dominator - Terror1
225 Fiery Melee/Shield Defense - Dougnukem
224 Dark Melle/Shield/Soul Brute - Enots
223 Dual Blades/Super Reflexes - Shred Monkey
220 Katana/Super Reflexes - BrokenPrey
220 Katana/Regeneration - Iggy Kamakaze
220 SS/Shield/Soul Brute - Enots
219 Katana/Super Reflexes - Laevateinn
219 Fire Blast/Energy Blaster - Santorican
216 Dark Melee/Invulnerability - jshmoe
215 Dark Melee/Super Reflexes - MunkiLord
215 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - Thedarkeone
209 Dark Melee/Super Reflexes - Reverence
209 Dark Melee/Shield Defense - pyrite
209 Dark Melee/Invulnerability - Jshmoe
205 Claws/Super Reflexes - Powerforge
204 Ice Blast/Mental Manipulation Blaster - DSorrow
198 Claws/Super Reflexes - Iggy Kamakaze
198 Katana/Willpower - Wuigly Squigly
196 Dual Blades/Invulnerability - Nihilii
195 Kinetic Melee/Fire Armor - TommyTrD
194 Claws/Super Reflexes - Bill Z Bubba
194 Katana/Invulnerability - DSorrow
192 Traps/Sonic Defender - Bubblerella
191 Katana/Regeneration - Elegost
190 Dual Blades/Willpower - Myriad
190 Dual Blades/Dark Armor - Iggy Kamakaze
189 Fiery Melee/Super Reflexes - Gaidin
186 Martial Arts/Regeneration - SpiderTeo OC
186 Katana/Super Reflexes - Doman
185 Katana/Regen - Werner
184 Dark Melee/Super Reflexes - Larac
184 Dual Blades/Super Reflexes - Eva Destruction
183 Fiery Melee/Willpower - Reverence
180 Dark Melee/Super Reflexes - Werner
177 Katana/Dark Armor - Werner
175 Katana/Willpower - Iggy Kamakaze
175 Katana/Fiery Aura - Mortal Prey
175 Martial Arts/Super Reflexes - Moonlighter
174 Katana/Willpower - AgentMountaineer
174 Martial Arts/Shield Defense - Broken Prey
174 Katana/Invulnerability - DSorrow
170 Claws/Regeneration - Iggy Kamakaze
170 Traps/Sonic - TRTerror
167 Martial Arts/Super Reflexes - American Dynamo
166 Claws/ELa brute - Dealtimus
165 Broad Sword/Invulnerability - Hopeling
160 Katana/Fiery Aura - Iggy Kamakaze
160 Dual Blades/Willpower - Soul Fane
160 Martial Arts/Super Reflexes - Shadowrush
160 Claws/Super Reflexes Brute - Granite Agent
159 Shield/Superstrength Tanker - Iggy Kamakaze
158 Broad Sword/Invulnerability - Gaidin
155 Dual Blades/Super Reflexes - SnakeRogers
153 Dual Blades/Willpower - BrandX
153 Katana/Regeneration - ScrapsFTW
152 Dual Blades/Regeneration - BrokenPrey
152 Willpower/Superstrength Tanker - Iceboxer
151 Stone Melee/WP/Soul Brute - TheBruteSquad
150 Katana/Dark Armor - ShadowBeast NA
148 Dark Melee/Invulnerability - Aliana Blue

The st dps testing of builds seems to suggest that something was happening that resulted in a huge shift that displaced brutes from the top of the st dps to well below what scrappers actually achieve in the game.

Certainly shield is that awesome, but there are non-shield scrappers out ranking shield brutes, which is pretty impressive imo.

Vacuum testing of the attack sets is exactly like the vacuum testing that was done some time ago of the controller primaries taking out a single boss. It is valuable, but paints an incomplete picture. Once the full picture is complete what you have sitting in front of you may look decidedly different than what was originally laid out. Which is exactly what happened with pre i18 brutes. Perhaps less optimized scraps/brutes are more representative of the work you put forth. I can't say one way or the other. At any rate all debate of them approaching and even exceeding scrapper damage should be put to rest post i18 on paper and in actual game scenarios (which was largely true before as well).

The best way (ime) to make GW a pushover is by bringing two high recharge /cold controllers. Double benumb makes her heal pathetic and makes her mag 11 trillion hold last like 2 seconds.

If we have a couple well built colds on the team then I have no reservations about bringing as many scrappers as we want.

The ability of the tank and the support tends to determine what the rest of the team will consist of in a MOSTF

I know there are softcapped fire/mm and arch/mm that can survive against +2's of easy farm mobs, but anyway...

I"m sure if you asked a good farming brute they'd happily turn down the difficulty to whatever a farming blaster can handle and still do it faster.

I don't know. Honestly my /therm doesn't define itself by following around a blaster with cauterize on auto in addition to all my other buffing duties. I feel I get plenty of opportunity to support in almost all team configurations and personally the times that pop up where I need to focus almost entirely on support aren't very fun for me because I have an entire primary largely being neglected.

With regard to tanking, my fire/ss/pyre honestly can't tell the difference one way or the other because I attempt to hold all agro regardless of team composition. I see that and doing solid aoe damage as my main responsibilities. I don't turn off gauntlet (even if I could) on fireball and footstomp just because the team may have more self sufficient toons on it. I can't imagine it being different on even tougher tanks.

It's hard to say. The more my support toon needs to focus on a blaster(s) the less opportunity I have to contribute direct damage and/or put out timely team multiplying debuffs/buffs. That means the blaster now needs to make up for my lost damage that I would have retained playing with a self sufficient toon.

So the way I see it they have to do a lot more damage than a scrapper to make up for my lost damage due to extra support time and due to the fact that they are intended to be the highest damage AT. I can't say exactly how much faster the team should be killing as a result, but it should probably be a tangible shift in performance*

*which it certainly is for archery (omg RoA) and fireblast, but aoe spec scrappers/brutes seem to keep pace with most other blasters on the team front ime.

The problem is GW is pretty dangerous and if you plop yourself into melee range you are likely making the encounter have an extended time. That's additional time and risk where something from the list of 1000 things that can go wrong can go wrong and the MO run can fail.

GW is considered one of the main bottlenecks on the STF, if you can't beat her you can't proceed and she has the potential to be more of a team hurdle than most/all of the encounters leading up to her.

While a team certainly can beat her with multiple people standing in melee range she is one of the few encounters where gang rushing her isn't the best method to defeating her quickly and safely.

But it isn't just GW that encourages MO runs to steer away from additional melee toons. Most MO runs focus on directing all aggro to a single focal point while all 7 other players attack from a safe location. Adding additional melee range characters puts additional strain and chance for failure at the aggro focal point meaning support now needs to be watchful of more players.

Truth be told it is one of the few scenarios where additional melee can actually be more of a liability than adding a blaster(s). But it isn't entirely a result of something being wrong with the additional melee toons, but a conjunction of using an aggro sponge of a tank making ranged toons as safe as possible. The vast majority of encounters don't have such extreme tanking as found in a MOSTF run and as a result aggro happy blasters can easily pull attention back on to the other squishies they are standing near, while scrappers tend to keep it off of them while being sustainable enough for the job.

MOSTF is an example of multiple variables combining to make a blaster generally a better pick for speed and success than a scrapper, but as far as CoX is concerned it is an aberration across the majority of encounters.

The game doesn't work the way you are imagining it to work. If there was a steady stream of spawns without pause then the ability to seamlessly string together aoe's would be of more value. But that rarely occurs in game.

What does occur is spawns set up nicely for a burst aoe. All you need is enough aoe to defeat them and then have that aoe potential ready to go again for the next spawn.

The fact that a fire/fire blaster has 83 aoe's is meaningless if a ss/fire brute can put out enough aoe damage in the same timeframe up to and including the point that the spawn is defeated and then repeat it again by the time the next spawn is engaged.

It is the quality of aoe's that matter, not the quantity. We know this because even a fire/fire blaster will quickly start eliminating their 'weaker' aoes by adding additional recharge to their build so that can use their 'stronger/quality' aoes more frequently.

Quantity of aoe's is of increased importance to MM's because their pets are recharge locked, but even then it's not like quality of them takes a back seat as something like assault bot's incendiary missile is still way better in one shot than all the merc's chaining together their pew pews.

What does that say if a blaster lacks the survivability to dispatch the easiest mobs in the game that are specifically designed to be quickly and easily mowed down by high aoe damage output?

At any rate, that isn't the case as their are plenty of higher end blaster builds that easily have the survivability to take on large spawns of weak enemies like those used in farms. And yet they still aren't the fastest even when survivability isn't an issue.

As for pylons, they really aren't hard to survive against. Def insp do the vast majority of the leg work, but sure, take your blaster and ask in the thread, I'm sure someone will happily taunt or support you to find out how well your toon does. I'm very confident you won't beat the best scrapper times, let alone come near some of the toons at the top of the list. The result will be them outdamaging you and out surviving you because they didn't need support to do the task.

As for doing it as a team, sure why not. Given the blaster apparently can't do it on their own and requires support (not the position I hold as at least a couple blasters have done it, but anyway) how much faster should the team with the blaster kill it compared to subbing in something else that CAN survive the task without support? What's a reasonable increase in kill speed given the increased support needed?

I'm not denying that people use those builds to farm. I've also seen people use /sr scrappers to farm. I am denying that they are anywhere near the best at it, which if they are indeed such better damage (especially aoe as claimed) than anything else they should be the best at it shouldn't they? I mean farming is about killing as many foes as you can as fast as you can. Shouldn't the aoe kings excel beyond anyone else at it then?

"Pretty good" at killing the weakest spawns doesn't equate to being the "best" aoe toons in the game from where I'm sitting. And if they are just "pretty good" at it against push over mobs, I don't see things getting better against harder mobs, but I guess anything is possible.

The way I see it we have two strong and quantifiable tests floating around that focus heavily on testing ones damage dealing abilities. While it would be nice if we had more tests for more data points and possibly a more accurate picture that doesn't necessarily mean the existing tests are easily dismissed.
When it comes to aoe damage dealing farming is about as good a test as they come. Deliberately easy spawns, designed to be mowed down with aoe damage while putting a minimal strain on survivability.
When it comes to st damage dealing the current measuring stick is rikti pylons. They are pretty equal to everyone in that surviving isn't particularly difficult (w/ insp) and your outgoing dps is very easily quantified.

Blasters aren't the best, or anywhere near the best, in either case, which leads me to fail to see how anyone can thus make the claim that they are the best damage dealers.

It's not the quantity of your aoe's it's the quality. Case in point SS brutes can do terrific aoe damage and easily outpace Mace brutes, yet SS brutes only have 1-3 aoes (depending on epic choice) while Mace brutes have 3-5 aoes (depending on epic choice).

Your understanding of attacks is questionable. Attacks are governed by two main things:
1. cast time
2. recharge time

Faster recharging attacks can do better dps (but isn't always the case) out of the box, but once you start throwing additional recharge at the powers the 'faster' attack quickly hit a wall.

Having extra quantity of aoe's is important up until you have enough recharge to no longer need them. That point is rarely where you can seamlessly string aoe's either, but rather the point where you have enough aoe's to kill whatever you are facing and then have them available again for the next encounter.

Thus having 100 aoe attacks that all do low damage each sounds impressive, but really isn't in actual practice. In the actual game we more often see the 'best' aoe damage dealers leaning very heavily on a very limited number of superior aoe's.

Case in point a ss/fire brute can move through spawns considerably faster than any blaster (from some of the farming threads 500k inf/min is not unheard of) yet you can count their aoe's on one hand. If what you say was true and sheer number of aoe's was what mattered then a fire/fire blaster with double the aoe's should be waaaaay faster no? But they aren't for some reason. I was thinking the reason was survivability, but it isn't hard to make a blaster survivable enough to handle 'farm' mobs.

Anyway, I'm confused by the information presented in this thread. People keep saying blasters are the best damage, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the actual game, or with some of the simplified models shown in various discussions, or in any of the quantifiable tests that are used as measuring sticks on the boards.

For clarity, I'm not saying my arch/em blaster doesn't do a lot of damage. Neither is that the case for my fire/ice. I personally think they do great damage. However, if I define their damage as great then I also feel my ss/ela brute and my fire/sheild scrap also do great damage and can both survive way better. That said, I don't feel like my elec, psy, or energy blasters that I played did 'great' damage. They all felt well below many of the scraps/brutes/corrs/doms I've played.

Do they kill the fastest?

I mean they aren't the best farmers are they? and farming consists of wiping out easy spawns which if their damage is as high as it sounds shouldn't they be the best at this?
They certainly aren't the best st damage dealers judging by what evidence we have on the boards.

They may do the most damage out of all the AT's when teamed. Numerically it looks like they probably do given the high target cap on their AoE's and the fact that that is their only role while most other AT's have multiple useful jobs on a team, but that is also a double edged sword. They are the first AT that will need babysitting and thus the first AT that will hold back if they don't feel entirely safe because they have such large area aoe's.

Likely in a survivability doesn't matter scenario they are the king of damage (at least aoe), but from reading this thread people were poo-poo'ing the idea of frequently being on teams with several defs and/or corrs. If that isn't common then it also isn't common to encounter scenarios where survivability doesn't matter because most of that scenario coming true is dependent upon the defs/corrs making it that way.

Is this a trick question, or are you seriously asking because you don't know? If you know the real answer already and you are just being fallicous then is that necessary? Anyway, the answer is: Ghost...wait for it...Widow.

An alternate suggestion is to do ice/x/dark (defender app).
Between slotting (~97% +dam), aim (42.5% +dam), assault (15% +dam), some decent IO bonuses (~20% +dam), and saturated soul drain (102% +dam). = 276% +dam
You'll be a small red away from damage capping blizzard/icestorm. At that point the /x/ part of your build probably has a -res power like sleet, freezing rain, tarpatch, EF...etc, which will make you even more damaging. Not to mention that the debuff sets usually have an easier time ensuring things stay within the kill zone of the rains for their duration compared to /kin.

In fact, using dark mastery with decently high recharge (base 120 sec rech, 30 duration) has many of the benefits of fulcrum shift to the user while still allowing you to pick up a superior survivability secondary.

Personally, I was looking at a near-perma soul drain fire/storm/dark corr and the damage looks pretty ludicrous.