LunarKnight

I'd be quite surprised if they can shut the Phase aspect off separately from the flight. The toggle nature of the power probably doesn't allow for it. In any case, that still leaves you with Energy Flight, which you can already switch to inherently. What do you do with the recharge timer? Do you have to wait from the time you stop flying for a minute before you're able to use the Phase aspect again, even though it potentially shut off 10 minutes ago?

You're making this way too complicated in an attempt to maintain the travel aspect of the power. It's simply unnecessary when you get Energy Flight inherrently at level 1.

I like them as pets, they just need to be smart enough to actually attack a target on their own.

Don't replace our Phase Shift. I'll take limited intangibility over 3 versions of Fly any day. If I wanted Stealth/Fly, I'd take Stealth at 6 and attach it to the Fly I got at 1.

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never got within melee range. I kept my distance.

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See, that's your problem. Blasters are much more affective in melee.

When it's fairly questionable who is doing more damage: Blasters or Scrappers, slotting anything other than damage is only going to tip the scale further in the wrong direction. If Scrappers can slot all damage, but Blasters have to slot range, Blasters are going to lose what questionable advantage they have.

I don't think you realize how much the late game foes outrange us either. Tossing a range enhancement on won't help. People have been fully slotting Dmg/Range HOs (prior to the nerf) and say it only gives a minor range advantage over the late game mobs.

Not even /Fire has 6 melee attacks:

Blazing Aura, Combustion, Fire Sword, FCS, Burn (unless you REALLY like that immobilze protection...), Hot Feet (what's it supposed to do again???)

Even then there's only 3 attacks. The rest are primarly for DoT... wait...

It didn't hurt that being ok through the 30's made you ok all the way up to the lvl 40 cap

Scrappers only sucked because they could only run one toggle at a time. Enemy HP was generally lower so Blasters could take out enemies much faster. There also was absolutely no post 40 game because 40 was the level cap.

Yup, Smoke Grenade was that broken. A toss of it basically gave the entire team 100% defenses because the enemies simply couldn't hit you. Add on top of that Caltrops that rooted enemies and Blaster AoE skills (namely Fire Breath or Flamethrower) and you had one severely broken powerset.

But that was just /Dev. No other secondary was that good and at the time when "City of Blasters" was such a big deal, Blasters were prevalient in two ways. Below 25 before SOs and /Dev that were 40 in a week or so. Most high level toons were Blasters, but almost universally PLing /Dev Blasters. Once those things were nerfed and people actually learned how defenses worked, things quickly turned around.

Man... City of Blasters...

It was really City of AR-Fire/Dev Blasters...

Half of it is enemies mez less in melee than they do range.
The other is that melee does more damage than ranged and in PVP, drops toggles.
The other half is that the melee skill (Total Focus) mez the boss so that they don't 1 shot you back.

How many halves is that?

Actually, the Boss patch made a few fights impossible for Blasters without holds. Since you have to rely on alpha striking, running and regenerating your HP lossed from the return fire, then returning to do another. The Boss boost gave them so much HP that they easily regenned faster than you could whittle down.

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They didn't forget. Statesman suggested in another thread that in his opinion, range *is* a defense because ranged attacks do less damage than melee attacks.

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That's my point though. I wonder what kind of difference range makes as a defense when you can truly outrange the opponents. If your range attacks have a better range then their range attacks, you can effectively take 0 damage until they get close enough to be in range to hit you. The rooting makes it impossible to truly kite then, because stopping for the attack duration lets them get within range (assuming range/attack animation is balanced correctly). This means blasters take FAR fewer hits overall due to range, which can justify the amount of damage they take per hit.

The only time this isn't true is when you're flying, at which point you can remain out of range indefinitely. Originally, quite a few mobs didn't have any range attacks at all. The problem came in when Blasters would hover, an exploit they fixed by giving everything ranged attacks.

And a better solution then what I said before. Don't give more mobs fly, give certain mobs GROUP Fly. How cool would it be to have an entire group flying after you, but knowing that if you take that one Lt out they'll all fall to the ground.

You know, I just realized something. I think somewhere along the line, the devs forgot why we were so frail, why we had no defense, HP, resistance, mez protection, etc. We had range. As long as we could stay out of the range of our foes, we were relatively safe. The rooting effect of our powers made it so that we couldn't stay at range forever, but smart use of immobilize, tanks, and other effects could negate our lack of defense.

What happened was Fly. Fly was an easy way to remain out of enemy range no matter what. To counter this, more enemies were given ranged attacks and much greater range.

What they need to do is reduce enemy range and put in more flying foes. Then perpetually outranging wouldn't be as big of an issue, and Blasters can actually have "range as a defense" again.

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The "illusion" is that blasters' comparative damage is supposed to be that much greater than everyoen else's. Blasters quickly feel like no one else should be able to hold a candle to them damage wise, a preception born from reality at low lvls. The question/problem is whether they should have ever experienced such a wide disparity to begin with.


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The "illusion" comes from the fact that Blasters have given up all forms of defense and damage mitigation with the exception of a few weak holds to be the "damage kings". If Blasters are not significantly outdamaging other ATs, then the sacrifice is completely null. Take away scrapper/tanker defenses, controller holds, and defender buff/debuffs and then I'll say Blasters shouldn't do more damage than other ATs.

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A solution recommended by a friend is to signficantly increase everyone else's recharge times while upping their damage to compensate. Making it take longer for non-blasters to kill, should make b blasters more desirable.


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I can see the result of that immediately. A million cries of "I don't feel like a super hero anymore, I'm just standing around waiting to attack!" Frankly I wouldn't blame them (for once). Not doing anything isn't any fun. That's why holds suck so much.

Honestly, FixIt, very few posts on here have been demanding the damage cap be raised. It was the initial situation that prompted this outcry, but 90% of the posts have been geared towards better solutions to the Blaster problem. Improvements to the secondaries, better survivability, faster animation times, rooting problems, enemy range, enemy ranged damage, etc have all been the focus of the topics here.

The damage cap hasn't been the focus of the boards until yesterday when you made it so.

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I think my 50th level scrapper does 150 damage or so with six-slotted LBE. That's less than 4-slotted Smite.

Scrappers don't do a lot of ranged damage with EPPs.

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I felt kinda bad starting that little comment because I didn't have the APP damage multipliers on hand (and sadly, the planners I have don't seem to carry them yet). So it's likely that the Scrapper APP attacks were weakened, but I'm not sure.

Energy Torrent in the Energy Blaster set does 2.2222 times brawl damage and is listed as Moderate damage. I'm not sure what it does for Scrappers, but it's listed as Minor damage, so I wouldn't be suprised to see it be quite weak.

They get some and they get criticals on them too.

As much as I hate nerfs, I have to agree with Concern. The only way the game is going to regain any sort of balance is to bring everything down a bit. The game has been stretched to a point where it is no longer possible to fix things by moving upwards. An EXTREMELY basic example:

Character - Damage/Defense
Blaster - High/Low
Tanker - Low/High
Enemy - Med/Med

This works out ok. The blaster does a lot of damage, but takes a lot in return. It defeats the enemy because it can take them down fast enough. The tank is safe, but takes a little longer to take down. Now, we boost both players:

Blaster - Extreme/Low
Tanker - Low/Extreme

Now the Blaster is at no threat, because it kills everything too easily. The tanker is completely without risk, but becomes much too slow compared to the blaster. Balancing this is impossible because both sides have completely different problems. Since they fight the same enemy, we would have to boost both sides of the foe:

Enemy - High/High

Now the blaster is screwed because he can't survive the enemy damage and the tanker is screwed because he can't take the enemy out. Our only option is to boost blaster defense and tanker offense, but that breaks the concepts of both ATs and begins to blur the class distinctions.

I remember a REALLY long time ago, Positron mentioned that only 3 SO's of a single type would have an effect on a power. I think he was under the impression that you couldn't enhance past 100%. He was wrong, but it could be possible that that was the intention all along.

I don't think either is reasonable, but I understand the argument. Right now (on test) you have:

Move->Fly/Super Speed
Fight->Hover/Sprint

You can six slot the Fight power to get some decent speed out of it, but that's a waste for most people. I don't think you SHOULD but you CAN.

I still think the SS/SJ nerf is an attempt to boost ranged combat. Being able to close to melee range and attack faster than a ranged shot basically removed the few meak benefits ranged attacks enjoyed.

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And guess what, folks! Check the current training room patch notes. Super Speed and Super Leap have a -%50 accuracy, in PvP and PvE, the same as Flight.

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Hover doesn't have that large a penalty, and Hover gives the same vertical capability as does Flight.

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Hover may give the ability to reach the same vertical capactiy as Flight, but I don't think anyone will be escaping melee combat by hovering out of range...

(Note: You could six slot it, but that's a lot of slots to spend on Hover)

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Now, let me clarify the situation with Badges and Defeat tasks. As long as you or any of your teammates are within 200 ft. of the defeated mob, EVERYONE on the team gets credit. This is not a change in Issue 4; this is the way that it currently works.

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So a lowbie can sit in the safe area of a zone while everyone else goes out and does the hunting... as long as they have a defeat task (which is available on a fairly regular basis from contacts, even after they run out of door missions) so he gets the xp.


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That's not what he means. You don't get the XP, but you do get the kill credit. So if you have a kill 30 Council mish and someone on your team kills a Council 400' away, you still get credit towards mission completion, but you do NOT get XP. Similarly, a team member killing a Sorc 400' gets you closer to the Tracer badge, but doesn't give you XP.