Miladys_Knight

All it does for me is save an occasional breakfree and once I have clarion I just forget about it.

Once I9 and inventions hit I often wished for the original defiance. Softcapped defenses are the way to go for a blaster and that would have meant an almost constant damage buff.

Nope just the mez protection. They should still be squishy. Since damage is a blaster's mitigation they need to be able to keep slinging pain full time.

I actually tend to think of that as cottage rule #2. It's ok for the devs to give blasters a power that produces a cottage when cast if it previously produced a mansion instead.

This.

Fire is still awesome the problem is (was, before converters) that permdom with the fire primary was quite a bit more expensive because you wanted purples that were more expensive and couldn't get away with the cheap sleep and confuse ones.

Converters have changed that though.

Why do we care? If the defender rocks the aura they get an increased recharge buff that lets them... rock the Aura.

A bubbler that keeps bubbling just wastes their endurance for a recharge buff. Dumb on their part.

Those 2 examples are examples of the bad defender that we want to penalize anyway they aren't really doing anything for their team or themselves.

A buffer like a bubbler will bubble the team to get their recharge buff going. Then they will enter the fight. Firing attacks from their secondary will increase their endurance discount. If they add in mitigating attacks from their primary like Force Bolt and Repulsion Bomb they can keep both their recharge buff and endurance discount maxed out until the end of the fight.

At the start of the next fight the defender will rebubble to start their recharge buff again (no forgetting to bubble the team this way) and repeat the cycle.

A defender that is built to be clicky with their primary will get increased recharge which potentially leaves them more time to use secondary powers. A non-clicky defender is going to have a higher endurance discount but secondary powers are the ones that use the most endurance anyway and that's what they'll spend the majority of their time doing anyway. It's a 2 pronged solution to a 2 pronged problem.

The beautiful thing? The primary that needs the most help gets it. TA/? is going to be the big beneficiary here since they will spend an equal amount of time doing both things and should be able to keep both buffs maxed out.

Lets leave the the completed overpoweredness of mental out of the discussion for now since we know it's an outlier.

I'm not talking about cherry picked situations. It's not all that hard to consistently set up 3 mines in such a way that you destroy or damage a majority of a spawn. All you have to do is place caltrops in such a way that the spawn bunches up enough that the mine detonations catch most or all of them. That's a trick that you can learn pretty quickly.

I can pop out from cover and use an AoE or 2 to finish off what is left with perhaps the exception of the boss. Some of the mobs will be running because too many of them took too much damage too quickly and I can assess that and either use ranged attacks to finish off runners or let them run while I deal with a more serious threat and just finish them off when they get back.

Even after my mine field is gone I can still keep what is left (including the boss unless it's immune to slows) at range indefinitely simply by backing up and dropping caltrops again (and again if need be). Which iirc you have said that keeping mobs at range is like reducing damage by ~40%.

Since blasters are usually defeated by taking too much damage and being mezzed I see a lot of potential value in the 3 mine field. I can greatly reduce the enemy alpha by eliminating a large portion (or all of it) before they ever launch their Alpha. I reduce incoming mez the same way. Trip Mines and Caltrops still function even if I mess up my pull and get hit with an Alpha mez. That gives me time to use the tier 1 & 2 primary and tier 1 secondary without the remainder of the spawn reaching melee range or perhaps until the mez wears off and I can move again.

No actually, I'm asking a serious question especially considering the other threads where we have been discussing blaster weaknesses. We know that the "players" have a perception that blasters were "fine" or "ok" and the dev's data mining showed that perception to be far off the mark.

Could our perception of /devices be off as far as it is with blaster weaknesses? Is that the reason devices has languished so long without an update other than gun drone? The player base thinks it "sucks" but dev numbers and data give the lie to that perception?

Is the safety and burst damage from Devices actually worth the trade off for the time it takes to use it? Does it save enough return trips from the hospital to equate?

You needn't and "offended because I chose one of your favorite sets" is an oxymoron at best.

I just believe that you will be back again in a few weeks looking for a new pairing simply because this combination won't provide the challenge you seemed to be seeking in your first few posts unless you purposely play it badly which also appears to go against your first few posts.

I could be reading you incorrectly.

I'd have to differ on that.

No other secondary has a PBAoE attack that can be stacked multiple times that can deal 400-500 damage per application. No other secondary has a built in crashless, half strength, nuke that can be placed with near perfect safety using the tools that are in that secondary and detonates with the blaster potentially out of line of sight of the mobs or even entirely out of range of the mobs.

On SOs alone a /devices blaster can layout 3 mines in 51 seconds (without hasten) that will deal 1137-1461 damage in less than 1 second to a 16 mob spawn without the blaster being subject to even a single return shot (if the blaster properly uses the terrain).

So the /devices blaster can layout a field that will wipe out entire spawns except for bosses (which should go down with a single application of the tier 3 blast after the triple boom) without being exposed to a single point of return damage.

That sounds like both huge offense and huge defense to me (and that's the way that it works for my Arch/Dev). By your own estimate you could wipe out 2, 16 mob spawns (without using inspirations) in the time it takes for any other SO'd level 50 blaster to return from the hospital once (actually you can start doing that at level 31 as soon as you have trip mine 6 slotted).

The only time I die on a /devices blaster (post trip mine) is when I get sloppy because I've gotten impatient.

So I don't follow your reasoning.

Well since you also wrote this:

And this:

And this:

I was confused as to why you selected a high offense, high defense, easy mode secondary.

Except that devices isn't weak. It just trades agonizingly slow for its strength. If you play slowly and carefully as a trapper with devices you can almost completely ignore your primary.

Actually its very survivable especially with a +rech build. Dark's -to hit self stacks. You can slot 5 posi in the Cones and a to hit debuff enhancer and using just the 2 cones and Shiver (and a convenient object or hovering) can keep a 10 mob spawn at -25% to hit, -rech capped, and out of melee range. YOu can add in Electric mastery for a 3rd damage cone.

The only problem you'll face is the same that every blaster faces against a 10+ mob spawn, alpha survival and mez.

Yep, well aware. Problem of course was that the star holder was a friend of the bad grav player. Had I not been mentoring a n00b I'd have been gone less than halfway through mission 1.

I'm reminded of the old adage that goes, "conceit is self respect in someone we envy."

What part are you appalled at? That I mentor n00bs? That I have correctly assessed a bad power set and no matter how well it is played will at best be mediocre and at worst will purposefully grief the team?

There are 3 offending powers in the set. All 3 are set defining powers.

Propel - leaves the propelled object behind (when the set first came out this was not the case) some of the objects are large in size and even though you can shoot and target around them you can't see around them. For toons that rely on positional awareness (like blasters) this is very bad.

Dimension Shift - as previously discussed there are only a couple of situations where this power is adequate and in most of them any other power from another player or power set is likely superior but using this power prevents or interrupts the use of those better powers.

Wormhole - used improperly (and sometimes properly) it is worse than having an uncontrolled energy blaster on the team. At least the blaster will do damage while spraying things willy nilly.

People have/take these powers to use them and they will use them which is usually detrimental to a good or even average team though they just "might" save a horrid team.

When you are freezing to death jumping into a bonfire may seem like a good idea but there are some kinds of stupid you don't have to be twice.

Since you and I are both VIPs we both still pay to play. Since the name on the credit card that pays for my account is not yours I am appalled by your sense of entitlement. My time to play CoX is limited. I play (and pay) to have fun. Grav is not fun to play nor is it fun to have on my team no matter how good the player is. I give back to the community by mentoring new players. Your role is what exactly?

In any case you should go back through the thread and actually read my posts for comprehension rather than skimming. Your comments show that you've pick out only the parts that you find offensive and glossed over all the other parts.

Lastly, you should know that the n00b I was mentoring quit the game over that particular ITF, that is just how bad the player treated the team, and how badly the star holder allowed it to happen.

You and the other 12 grav players are welcome

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In any case none of this has anything to do with the OP at this point so you all can continue your mud slinging at your own leisure.

You are running group flight while you do that aren't you? Otherwise you aren't doing it right.....

Indeed, he was the worst ever but like I said I've never seen a "good" one. I've seen Amazing tanks, Amazing Doms, Amazing Blasters, Amazing Scrappers, etc.

I've never seen an Amazing grav anything. Even the "best" ones are mediocre and anything not the best usually griefs the team even though it may be accidental. I think its baked into the power set to be honest.

Actually that's a pretty common issue with most Dom pairings. Perma Dom is part of the answer because you have enough recharge to skip the AoE attack that doesn't play well with the rest of your choices.

Elec/, Ice/, and Fire/ are designed to be played in melee range primaries. That means that I skip the cone. For all the other Primaries I skip the PBAoE.

So to answer your question..... Option 4 with Perma dom and I'm replacing Nightfall with Spring Attack from the leaping pool.

BTW Preemptive is a nice Interface power to use with Elec/

Yep. In fact the Grav/FF previously mentioned was a 5 year vet that had PL'd his Grav toon. He thought he was supposed to Dimension Shift every thing and then anything he missed was supposed to be Detention Fielded. He ran Force Bubble constantly so any melee focused toons couldn't benefit from Dispersion Bubble and he made sure that he pushed stuff off of all the debuff patches. He was really fond of Worm Holing stuff all over the map because he was "saving" everyone.

He single handedly flung everything except the squid nicti off the temple platform in the first mission of the ITF. We literally had to clear the entire map to find all the romans that were in the spawn guarding Sister Solaris. The TF went downhill after that.