Mechano_Flea

Great job on the revision Mystic. Way to continue spreading the Elec^3 love.

One thing I'll add just for and FYI. EM Pulse for the Electric Epic has a pretty hefty endurance drain effect. I slotted mine for the drain and it rips off a pretty good chunck of Endurance from the bad gusy. Though I'll freely admit I hardly ever use it except in big teams when things go really south, it makes for a great panic button

I was just curious on the Hover. I like flying around with my characters, and I've got plenty of concept builds that aren't anywhere near min/max, but just fun to play. I say, if you like it, take it. And Hover with 3 flightspeed makes for a good tactical movement power, especially if you take swift and slot it with flight speed enhancements. Something to think about.

CB vs Zapp. For my money, I take Zapp. Others may disagree, but I prefer to have the upfront ability to take down a minion or Lt right at the start as opposed to plinking with CB. BU+Zapp will down a minion, and AIM+BU will take out and even con Lt. If you slot and Attack Interupt Whatever it's called you can even get a shot off in combat if there isn't a ton of AoEs flying about. Just stay away from the tank when you try it.

Everyone has their own perceptions about what is enough accuracy. For most of my run up to 50 I was playing on Invincible and had two accuracy enhancements in all my attacks, minus Zapp and Short Circuit. If you are going to PvP you'll probably want the extra accuracy. But my opinion on Aim is that the slots are better spent somewhere else. 3 Recharge is good, but the to-hit buffs are somewhat wasted in the overall course of the game. You are already getting a +100% to hit for 10 sec, then its back to normal for 45sec. (~35 with Hasten). If you've got some respecs stocked go try it on test and see what you like.

Overall powers look pretty good.

One important thing to note. With the advent of Enhancement Diversification, ED for short, you see a hugely diminished return for slot investment past 3 of one kind once you reach SO enhancements. That in mind you can drop 3 slots from both Hasten and Stamina. Take one damage out of your attacks and slot for recharge.

As far as the endurance drain goes...I would recommend slotting for recharge or endurance redux not drain in attacks except for Short Ciruit and Power Sink.

Short Circuit is variously slotted 3 EndMod/3 Recharge or 3 EndMod/3Damage.

Take some of your slots you are saving from Hasten and Stamina and slot up Tesla Cage. 1 acc/2hold/2rechage is what I've got on mine (I think) Anyway you can slot this so it will recharge before it wears off, allowing you to keep on Lt or Minion out of the fight, and it has a bonus of applying a nice -recovery to opponents as well.

Unless this is a repec build I would take Build Up and Aim sooner. They make a huge difference in you damage potential and you want those buffs early and often.

You also might want to swap Hasten and Havoc Punch. HP is a great melee attack. Hasten is nice but not as, or at all necessary, IMHO.

Slot up Shocking Grasp. It's the Tier 9 power for /Elec and it is awesome. Fast acting melee attack that also is a hold. Yeah Baby! I'd recommend six slotting it as soon as you can. I've got mine slotted for hold and damage and I love it. It stacks with Tesla so you can one-two a boss then beat the heck out of him with your blaps and drain him dry with PowerSink and SC.

I've got to ask why on Hover? In any case if you take it, only put 3 slots for flight speed.

I would move up Shocking Bolt in its place and slot it for holds and recharge. Then you've got two ranged holds and one melee one. At this point you are a total boss killer. As an Elec/Elec I hunted Nemesis in PI with impunity. Muuuuhahahahaha.

Slot up Static Discharge, at least 1 acc/3 dam. This makes for a nice AoE complement with Ball Lightning. Add in SC and you've got a really nice AoE chain that puts out some pretty good damage, even if it is DoT, especially if you are chaining Aim and Build-Up with them.

Above all else...have fun. Elec/Elec is one of the most versitle blasters builds out there. You can blap, control, blast...just a little jack-of-all-trades, whirlwind of destruction.

Enjoy.

Please don't bring up the mythical "City of Blasters" as a line of evidence for a lack of development attention to Blasters. A bugged power in one secondary shouldn't be used to argue for or against the development looking into Blasters.

As many in Congress are fond of saying...I'd like an Up or Down vote on how the developers feel Blasters are preforming.

Up - They are happy with our performance and nothing else is need except quality of life tweaks.

Down - There are issues with the AT that still need to be addressed to bring the AT into line with how the development teams envisions them operating.

So which is it? Up or Down?

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Has anyone ever considered that Defiance isn't for us forum users? As a general rule of thumb, the forumites tend to be better players overall than the average population, with all the number crunching and strategy sharing and such. The stuff we complain about doesn't always get looked at because, frankly, we're the minority.

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This comes back to a thought I've had, that bascially the devs don't think there is anything truly wrong with Blasters. While they admit that things get tough in the post-40 world, they don't believe the set underpreforms.

My hat is off to you Arcanaville for the "Cushion" theory. It makes sense and maybe explains alot of attention or lack there of.

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Or the implication could be that I am a perfectly competent blaster, and that this power is designed for those oh so rare occassions when I for some reason bite off more than I can chew soloing or manage to yank aggro off a good tank when teamed.... both of these events are few and far between.... in which case it is, again, an awful power.



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I think this is exactly what the power is designed (and apparently working properly) for. The Development team by and large is apparently of the opinion that Blasters are working as intended and don't really need anything other than minor tweaks. Therefore the inherent for the AT is fairly situation, as it would be overpowering if it were useful all the time.

One of the best avenues of evidence for this belief is to look at Defenders. Another AT that the devs seem to be generally happy with, and by all accounts another AT with a almost universally percieved poor inherent. The equation seems to be, working as intended = crappy (situational) inherent.

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On top of that, after making an elec/elec brute at 40, the endurance drain caused on heroes was laughable.

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Endurance drain in gerneral is laughable in PvP. The devs pretty much cut any endurance drain power off at the knees when they introduced PvP, by making cutting it down to 25% effectiveness compared with PvE. Heck on an Electric Blaster you almost drain as much Endurance from yourself settting off Short Circuit as you drain from your opponent.

Have to agree with those on the ELM is better for PvE than PvP. After messing around in RV last night I was really struck by how much better I did versus the NPCs (not the signature heroes mind you) than the heroes. ELM just doesn't seem to have the high damage burst powers to really really make a difference quickly.

Well I wasn't having any problems getting Aid Self off last night with two interputs, standing on an Auto Turret pounding away.

And Powersurge is awesome. Who wouldn't love being a nigh invunerable electric gremlin for 3 mins. The crash really sucks when you aren't watching for it though, like say when you are fighting a heavy and Inv tank.

In the blaster set, and I haven't seen anything to make me think that the brute set is any different, you only get endurance back from your single target attacks. Therefore, Jacob's Ladder would not return any endurance to the user. Nor would I expect to see any from Chain Induction or Lightning Rod. I can't remember ever seeing Thunderstrike give any back as a blaster (might have missed it too), which might be due to the single/AoE aspect of the power, so it probably won't return any as a brute either.

3) I2 was introduced with the Ralaruu invading Pargon City. Portals would open in all the zones and Ralaruu would pour out.

4) I3 saw the overthrow of the 5th Column by the Council. There were huge street fights, with 5th and Council soldiers duking it out. I especially remember large ones in Bricks.

1) There was a bug with the cape mission when it first came out. The mobs would start attacking the monument when you first got onto the upper floor...sometimes when you first started the mission...making it a real race to try and get there in time. Lots of folks grabbed an upper level hero to team with so they could run to the monument and save it just to get a cape.

2) The Hydra in Perez used to be farmed for xp. 8 man teams would be constantly hydra hunting in the lake.

I don't disagree with anything you say LH, just saying that there was a perception in the community that has taken root and no amount of weed-B-gone seems to get rid of it, and I wonder if the devs aren't leary of doing something that might be perceived as recreating that mythological time.

That said, the dev team has pretty much painted themselves into a corner with way they have handled melee classes, and I think that to truly fix blasters would require a whole lot of work, and probably more melee tweaking that they are unwilling to do. So we just get more "we're looking into it" and "...after we get finished with Controllers..." type statements.

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Hell, I'd take one that mildly gives a [censored] about the AT.

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Well, _Castle_ meets that standard at least:

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RE: Fix the Blaster in the fewest possible moves
I like a number of the ideas you present. Many simply won't happen, for a variety of reasons, but some are quite doable. When I get out of my current mountain of work, I'll re-read this and try and implement some of it.

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Not just an acknowledgement that change needs to happen, but an announcement of an intent to actually implement some suggestions. That's more than Tankers and Defenders have gotten so far, and they're both clearly hurting as well (albeit, not as long).

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The thing that pisses me off about this is that here we have a brand new AT. It's brand new! and it's getting all this work done on it (don't get me started on whether or not the whole AS thing is getting "looked at", 'cause clearly it ain't) and here we are, almost two years later, with nothing.



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I sort of wonder if Cryptic isn't hyper sensitive about doing anything with Blasters due to the preception that "fixing" Blasters will lead to (and this is still a misperception) a new "City of Blasters"

Nice write up. Enjoyed the number portion and the compare and contrast with the various damage outputs.

Side note: Deceive is great fun against Malta. Sappers just beg to be deceived into zapping their buddies, and Engineers are great fun to have their Auto Turret blast them after they put it down.

Good luck Artic. I've enjoyed the write ups and all your hard work.

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Now, page 6. I ask you, my fellow Co*-ites, [censored]? Am I just misunderstanding panel 3 on page 6? That's Numina talking, not Sister Psyche!

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Ah yes, well we all know that Sister Psyche is really a manipulative [censored] so of course she wouldn't want States to get all pissed at her, so she just mind controls the others to say what she wants to say.

Mind controllers...don't trust em!

Just can't resist bandwagons.

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Well done, although I will always harbor a hope for a WWI super hero!

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If the Web of Arachnos book is to be believed, the odds for a WWI hero are pretty slim as States and Lord Recluse kind of opened the genie's bottle so to speak after WWI, ushering in a new era of superheroes, 'the likes which had not been seen since the Golden Age of Greece.'

Edit: Doh...Leech beat me to it...by a loooong shot...gotta actually start reading "all" the posts before I reply.

Agreed. The first thing I did when I saw it was come back to the CoH/CoV site and look at the updates. Then refresh thinking maybe my cache wasn't updated.

Inconsistencies aside...I really enjoyed the right up. I've always started my heroes in Galaxy...just like it better than Atlas, and I've always enjoyed seeing the statue of Galaxy Girl. It's my two-year olds favorite thing in the game. He always wants to see the statue whenever I'm online and he's around.

Anyway nice write up. Hope you don't have change much, cause the ending was kinda touching.

Sorry to hear you couldn't work it out. I haven't really seen all that much change on my Elec/Elec. I still run solo missions on Invincible, just have to be a little more careful. Things are a bit more on the edge with SC being cut back in effectiveness with ED, but it just adds to the fun. (At least for me)

As far as I'm concerned, blapping is still alive and well for Elec/Elec.

Bravo!

Two thumbs up for the video. That was some of the best syncing to music I've seen in these videos. Awesome.

And I love the Freaks. Just one more reason they're my favorite Villan group.

Actually it should be green++ enhancements will make perm-Haste. It just comes up before it wears off.

Hello? Yes this is Mechano Flea. Our question is for the Clockwork King. We would like to know why it is that your minions seem to have a fascination with TiVos? Specifically, our TiVos! We have lost 14 of them to your little menances so far this month, and we want them back!