Miladys_Knight

Well it IS a legacy from Jack Emmert after all.......

Yeah, I've mentioned that. Just about any other blaster that has decent AoE can mow through spawns at easily triple the rate and with IOs that provide defense set bonuses nearly as safely. Dropping Time Bomb and Trip Mine's cast time to just 1 second would solve much of the problem both solo and teamed. Dropping Time Bomb's delay to 5 seconds (or making it triggerable at will) would make it usable on a team instead of a wasted power pick while teaming.

KB is NOT radial. KB radiates from the source (ie: the caster) at the time the KB occurs. When explosive blast hits a spawn they ALL travel away from the caster. (This can be especially humorous if the caster moves while casting the power but before the KB is applied.)

You can easily prove this. Target a mob in the back of the spawn. Fire Explosive Blast. If KB were radial all the mobs would be knocked TOWARD you and they aren't, they are knocked away from you.

Repulsion bomb is the same way. If you slot it for KB the mobs travel away from you whether you drop it in the front, middle, or back of the spawn.

The ONLY time KB is Radial is if the source of the KB is PBAoE or simulates PBAoE. Trip Mine, Time Bomb, Bonfire are all "radial KB" because the "caster" is the pseudo pet. Nova is radial because it's PBAoE. Explosive Blast can simulate radial if it is used at melee range.

Here's a fun little experiment to try:

Super Speed (with combat jumping) toward a spawn. Target the front mob and launch Energy Torrent and at the same time jump over the spawn. You will land behind the spawn, the Energy Torrent graphic will PASS you, but the mobs will all spray away in the opposite direction (back the way you came from) because YOU are the source of the KB and the KB direction is determined by the position of the caster at the time the KB is applied.

I did that with my Psi/Nrg (now deleted) and my Elec/Nrg (also deleted). They were single target focused and they were hideous to level and I had absolutely no desire to keep either. They both hit 50 with the 1st debt badge and were the toons that took 1/5th the time of the Arch/Dev.

My build is a recharge focused build and I play on +2/x8. It has Perma Hasten with Alpha Spiritual and no purple enhancements. (It just isn't good enough or fun enough to waste purples on.) I also have Rain of Arrows 6 slotted with 5 Posi blast (all but the proc) and a HO centriole.

At level 50 my usual play is:

Spawn 1

Caltrop patch near the spawn > Trip mine at the edge of the caltrop patch > Trip mine at the edge of the caltrop patch > Caltrops on the other side of the trip mine > Super speed back to max range for ROA > Aim > ROA.

Boom, pointy sticks, Boom, Boom. Pick off any stragglers with single target attacks.

Spawn 2

Caltrop patch near the spawn > Trip mine at the edge of the caltrop patch > Trip mine at the edge of the caltrop patch > Caltrops on the other side of the trip mine > move back to max RoA range > Aim > LRM > RoA > Wait for the remainder of the scattered spawn to step on trip mines > Move in to mop up with single target attacks.

By the next spawn Time bomb is ready again. 2 Spawns in about 100 seconds (my S/L soft capped Rad/Fire easily finishes the same number of spawns in about 30 seconds)

I have enough recovery that I get back all the end I spent on trip mine (its slotted with Oblit) in less than the time it takes to set it and have it recharge.

Oddly enough my recharge on Trip mine is 5.26 seconds and the impressive thing about 20 trip mines is that (including criticals) each one is doing about 450 damage on average. So that stack is doing about 9000 damage and you risk getting hit with, at most, one attack. (None if you are pulling with ranged shot)

I usually start out with about 4 red insps in my tray. After one spawn my tray is full and while trip mines/time bomb is animating I'm combining insps into reds which I eat while I'm backing into max RoA range.

I don't have any defense at all (well actually I have about 12% vs range that is more or less accidental) and I rarely take any damage let alone risk dying. I do about 2000 damage to each spawn and it all occurs in the span of about 4 seconds from the time the damage starts until it finishes. The cost for that is 45ish seconds of set up per spawn.

Depends on what your idea of optimal is I suppose. I only use web grenade, caltrops, trip mine, and time bomb from devices since I can simulate all the other powers with single IOs/set bonuses (the mobs never get close enough for me to worry about taser and I have stunning shot anyway which rarely sees use, Gun Drone messes up setting mines/bombs so I don't have it either.)

Again, it depends on your concept.

Um, yeah. I use 5 pieces of Oblit in both time bomb and trip mine. Time bomb is just a power I use while I wait for caltrops and trip mine to recharge.....

I still seem to have better luck in the 30-34 range. I usually get at least 1 Kin Combat per 3000ish tickets though I've only gotten 1 regen tissue proc ever. I can usually count on a few Reactive Armors which sell very well, some Thunder Strikes, Crushing Impacts, Red Fortunes, and the occasional Decimation Acc/Dam and other mid value stuff that may not sell for oodles but they sell for enough and they turn over quickly. Having open sell slots available is usually more of an issue for me.

In the 10-14 range you either hit it or fail. There is no middle ground. Its a good pay off or its junk. When I was rolling in that level range too much of it was junk for my tastes so I went back to 30-34. I only roll 10-14 now if there is something specific I am looking for in that level range that has 0 available in the market.

Then we simply disagree. The only reason I see to maintain imbalance for the "sake of balance" is to annoy your long term customers that still pay to play. Let's face it the players that plan builds to use lots of enhancement sets are long term metagamers that like things to either balance out without messy remainders or are goal focused and want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of every thing.

Our current invention system is not really conducive to either goal that metagamers want to use it for. Also the more different types of sets introduced the harder it is to complete a set even using the market. We may need a different type of invention system that is more universal and takes us completely away from the concept of "sets".

So you are in favor of maintaining the devs status quo which amounts to "enhancement balance of sets should be skewed to maintain game balance" a fallacy on the level of "villains will be unfairly harmed if the markets are merged"

I see absolutely no reason for the devs to create sets that have unbalanced enhancement values. Of course I also see no reason to have 3 non-purple/non-pvp TAoE sets compared to the number of TAoE powers in the game, 5 snipe sets compared to the number of snipes in the game, and 10 non-purple/non-pvp single target "ranged" damage sets yet have RANGE as an enhancement in only one of those sets and one which exists from 10-25 at that.

I tend to file those things in the "makes no obvious sense" section of my thought processes.

I believe that Oblit was dev designed with crashing nukes in mind. It was released BEFORE non-crashy was the design model. I believe that PLAYERS use it in everything regardless of it's dev intention and then complain about endurance management. I personally use it in crashing nukes and PBAoE powers that are either light on endurance costs or have extremely long recharge. If I'm building a melee defense capped toon or an S/L defense capped toon I mix and match with multistrike until I get the balance of recharge, endurance management, and defense that I want.

As far as obtuse goes, that's the politest term I can think of when outlying examples get repeatedly sighted as PROOF of a point. Using the fringe cases and ignoring the heart of the issue.

The game is changing, ALOT of change is happening since F2P started. There are lots of things that are happening now that would not even have been dreamed of in terms of power levels at the time I9 was released.

I personally see no reason why a rare set should not have both balanced enhancement attributes AND good set bonuses especially considering the time it takes most players to amass enough of a particular bonus to make it meaningful. Since the bonuses are still not as good as those given by purple sets and the bonuses are still lost if you exemplar more than 3 levels down, any claim that they better than purples, is disingenuous at best.

Depends on your play style a bit. If you regularly team with a kinetics player having the higher damage cap means that you at at it all the time. The Brute's taunt aura means that you'll be getting the maximum number of mobs hit with fulcrum shift each time.

Solo, if you are playing a primary that has a decent variety of and/or fast recharging AoE and you choose an epic with fast recharging AoE you can keep yourself at (or near) the damage cap by munching and converting insps especially if you write macros to convert the insps quickly. A brute with lots of AoE can (if you are a power gamer/farmer and practice) self damage cap this way because insps drop faster than you can eat them.

It's pretty clear that Oblit is custom designed to be used in a long recharge, end crashing PBAoE nuke where end reduction is almost completely unneeded. Were you unaware of that or are you just trying to be purposely obtuse?

I thought we were talking about a ranged Oblit?

Or is there some reason that a set can't have useful bonuses in all positions and reasonable enhancement values in all values that need enhancement.

Let me also point out that a toon with SOs and T3 incarnate powers is nearly as good as an uber IO build and no incarnate powers and incarnating to T3s from scratch took me a fraction of the time that it takes to IO out from scratch and I'm a dedicated marketeer.

IO sets shouldn't have to have a sucky side when compared to incarnate powers when the time it takes to get that power is so vastly skewed.

Hardly overpowered. Don't you realize why ALL the TAOE sets have problems? Because, unlike melee powers, there are 6 aspects (Acc, Dam, End, Rech, Range, secondary effects) that need enhanced rather than 5. To give similar power enhancement values when compared to melee sets it takes all triples.

You are right about the enhancement values though. It should probably be more like this to be reasonable:

Acc/Dam/Rech
Acc/Dam/End
Dam/End/Rech
Dam/Rech/Range
End/Dam/Range
Proc 2% chance per target hit to cast a 10 second break free effect on the caster

That gives pre-ED level 50 enhancement values of:

Acc - 42.4%
Dam - 106%
End - 68.6%
Rech - 68.6%
Range - 25.2%

Why are the set bonuses bad when compared to Oblit?

* Two enhancements reduces the duration of Stun effects on you by 2.2%.
* Three enhancements improves the Damage of all your powers by 3%.
* Four enhancements improves the Accuracy of all your powers by 9%.
* Five enhancements improves the Recharge of all your powers by 5%.
* Six enhancements increases Melee Defense by 3.75%.
* Six enhancements increases Smashing and Lethal Defense by 1.875%.

set bonuses

2 - 2.5% recovery
3 - mag 3 KB protection
4 - 5% global range increase
5 - 5% global recharge
6 - 3.5% defense to ranged, 1.75% defense to energy

With AR as the only outlier (and lets face it, it needs some help) the most any blast set will be able to slot is 3 sets of Castle's turrets.

2.5% recovery is a fairly normal set bonus as is 5% global recharge, 3.5% defense to one position is less than that provided by Oblit which has both recharge and defense.

As for the other 2 bonuses? a 15% global range increase is going to raise powers with 80' base range to 92'. That's 2 feet longer than Burst and 8 feet shorter than Slug and I can't recall hearing anyone say that those 2 powers are OP because they have a tiny bit extra range. It still leaves the short ranged problem powers (Shout and Power Burst as examples) at a still too short range of 46, and medium range, 60 foot powers, (like freeze ray) at a still miserly 69 feet.

As for the mag 3 KB protection. If you play squishies much you'll know 2 things. That mag 3 doesn't protect against enough KB powers in the mid to high level game (mag 4 does, mag 3 doesn't) and anything greater than 4 but less than 10 makes absolutely no difference in protection as there are no mob KB powers (outside those +level mobs that are affected by purple patch) that have KB values higher than 4 and less than 10. The only time that a KB protection value between 5 and 9 makes a difference is those extremely rare cases of when you get hit by 2, mag 3-4 KB attacks at nearly the same time.

Mag 3 KB protection is also found as the 4th bonus in Kinetic Crash so it's not truly out of bounds either.

* Two enhancements improves your Run Speed by 3%.
* Three enhancements increases Smashing Resistance by 2.5%.
* Four enhancements provides 3 points of protection against Knockback effects on you.
* Five enhancements improves your Regeneration by 6%.
* Six enhancements improves the Recharge of all your powers by 7.5%.

Red side is pretty much dead. This is the only way at the moment to get some population red side for how ever long...

I've never been of the opinion that blasters should have more resistance/defense.

A blaster's mitigation "should" come from staying active and from the secondary effects in their power set(s). The problem point here is the staying active part. Mez stops you from staying active (ie: not letting a mob close to melee where their attacks really hurt you), it stops you from activating any powers which prevents any mitigation from secondary power effects, and (with the exception of Body Armor from Munitions Mastery) all defense/resistance toggles suppress when mezzed which is exactly when you need them most.

Being mezzed for a blaster is a huge "you lose button." You lose everything that makes you a blaster for the entire duration of the mez (which is longer than it takes to kill you a majority of the time.) All the new defiance means is that you've been neutered down to a level 1 when mezzed. My blasters have never needed more defense, more resistance, or more damage. They've always needed what you can only get as an incarnate from your Destiny slot (Clarion).

One caveat to that. If you are under level 50 you'll need 12+. My Fire^3 tank had 12 points of -KB slotted, I was level 48 and was tanking on a Hami raid with PSL Animal.

Hami hit me while we were retreating (yeah it was a long time ago back when we were still doing retreat raids) and I got knocked down (not back, just down). That happened to me until I hit level 50 and 12 points of KB protection was enough then.