Miladys_Knight

It's all about how you use RoF.

If you Aim > BU > RoF The mobs will scatter before they are defeated or spread out far enough to limit the effectiveness of your other AoEs.

The trick is to Aim > BU > Fire Breath > Fire Ball and THEN RoF where you are standing. The mobs will be trying to close to melee range to smack you. The slow effect means they'll get one shot at you and then the Avoid + Damage effect will have them turning tail and running but by then it will be too late and they will have spent most of the duration of the RoF in its area of effect.

To answer your other question: 5 slot Posi Blast and a HO micro. Some players consider this an exploit and the Devs, both old guard and current crop, have been known to go both ways on whether its an exploit or whether it is working as (un)intended.

I like my Arch/Dev/Munitions but I rarely play him any more. He's really only good for soloing and he's safe but very slow for that. He's not all that good for teams since almost all of the secondary powers with the exception of Web Grenade and Caltrops have excruciating Activations/Interrupts/Endurance costs.

Some caveats and information on Arch/Dev. What I chose, how I slotted it, and why I see it that way:

Web Grenade -This is your have to take power from the secondary. It's actually quite useful since even targets that it doesn't immobiilized will be slowed and suffer a massive recharge penalty.

Caltrops - One of, if not the, best power in devices. With enough recharge you can have 3 patches out at once. Nothing is going to be getting into melee range with you. I gave it 4 slots with the End/rech/slow enhancement from each of the slow sets.

Taser - Extreme Short range, standard duration stun. If you are using the above 2 powers properly nothing will ever get close enough to use it. It can be useful combined with Stunning shot vs bosses but most likely the bosses will be dead before they get into taser range. I skipped it.

Targetting Drone - For an Arch/Dev I don't recommend taking this power. There are several reasons.

1) Archery has a higher base accuracy than any other blaster primary. You get more mileage out of your accuracy enhancements.

2) High endurance cost especially considering how few powers in Arch/Dev that it helps. (This power does nothing for Caltrops or Cloaking Device)

Targetting Drone does nothing for Pet and Psuedo Pet powers. These powers will need accuracy enhancements to function effectively:

Rain of Arrows (psuedo pet based rain power), Trip Mine (psuedo pet), Time Bomb (psuedo pet), Gun Drone (pet).

3) Supresses when mezzed. While you are mezzed you get no benefit from Targetting Drone but blasters get to fire their tier 1 and 2 primary powers and tier 1 secondary power even while mezzed. That means that Snap Shot, Aimed Shot, and Web Grenade will still need standard accuracy enhancement so that you can hit your targets while mezzed. In the late game (especially against Carnies) you'll spend most of your time mezzed and only get to use these 3 powers though pre-laid trip mines and caltrops will keep you relatively safe enough that these missions are still soloable.

Adding all that up only 8 out of the 18 powers in Arch/Dev, get any benefit from the drone.

The benefits that you do get from Targetting Drone can easily be simulated by other means. TD gives + to hit, +perception, and resistance to tohit Debuffs.

You can get + to hit from slotting a Kismet Unique in Combat Jumping, using Aim, and from using yellow inspirations which fall like rain while playing.

You can get +perception from slotting a Rectified Reticle Unique in Aim. Granted it's not as much + perception as TD provides but it is still enough to see through Night Widow smoke grenades and fire at disappearing targets like Ghosts and Ancestor Spirits.

You can't get tohit debuff resistance from any other source but you can avoid the worst of the debuffers through smart play. The time this is most useful is in the mid 20s to high 30s when you run into CoT ghosts. You have alot of tools to use at your disposal to prevent being debuffed in the first place:

Ghosts will fly over your caltrop patch but web grenade gives them -fly and solves that problem. You can also use stunning shot to detoggle them and if all else fails you can use Aim or a yellow insp to counter the debuff.

On top of all that you can slot several +accuracy set bonuses by using sets like Positron's blast and Scirroco's Dervish.

All in all I found TD to be of little utilty for my Arch/Dev and respecc'd out of it early on.

Smoke Grenade - The to hit debuff is minor and the -perception can be worked around by using some combination of stealth powers such as Super Speed, Cloaking Device, Stealth, and a Stealth IO. All in all this power is entirely skippable. The only reason I had it was as a mule for a Dark Watcher's set. I respecc'd out of this power early on.

Cloaking Device - A decent power as there is no movement penalty and it provides a slighly higher defense boost than it's pool equivalent, how ever I recommend skipping this one too and taking the Stealth Pool instead. The reasons being that you can slot an LotG +7.5 in Stealth, Grant Invis and Invis and one of the things you'll need as a blaster and won't get until very very late game from your APP (if it has one) is a rescue power for when you get over whelmed. Phase Shift is available at level 20 and I highly reccomend the pool route to get this power at level 20. Since you can't use Cloaking Device and Stealth at the same time I recommend skipping Cloaking Device. You can compensate for the -speed in Stealth by using it in combination with Super Speed.

Trip Mine - A good power if you don't mind SLOOOOOW. 5 second cast and a 4 second interrupt and a recharge speed of 20 seconds means this is a power you won't use on a team. If you are soloing as a trapper this will be a staple power. A slotted up stack of 6 will wipe out an entire spawn including the boss in one large explosion. It will also take you 2 full minutes to set up.

The best use that I have found for trip mine is to drop a mine between me and the spawn and put caltrops on it. Drop one or 2 of these Caltrop/trip mine patches depending on spawn composition and then unload your AoEs. Aim + RoA > Explosive Arrow > Fist full and anything that's left will get stuck in the caltrops and run afoul of the trip mine.

I slotted it with 5 pieces of Obliteration (every thing but the proc) and a Multistrike Dam/Rech.

Time Bomb - A good power if you don't mind excruciatingly SLOOOOOW. 9 second cast and a 8 second interrupt and then a count down to detonation of 15 seconds all on top of a 360 second recharge means this is also a power you won't use on a team. If you are soloing as a trapper you can place a time bomb, back up and drop a trip mine, throw caltrops on it, you then have a couple seconds to wait, but if you hit Aim as the light on the time bomb starts blinking faster and immediately fire RoA onto the Time Bomb both powers will do their damage simultaneously and you'll wipe out the spawn. Anything that gets missed will be easy to finish off with your other attacks or the Caltrop/Trip mine patch.

I took this power and slotted it the same as Trip Mine.

Gun Drone - This power is a huge disappointment. It has a 7 second cast, 6 second interrupt, and a 180 second recharge. It only lasts 90 seconds and can be destroyed by enemy fire. It costs 39 endurance, does just a little more damage than Snap Shot each time it fires, and it moves at standard speed which means you'll consistantly out distance it even if all you did was put one run enhancement in Swift.

Gun Drone will interfere with trapping as it is not stealthed and will begin attacking the spawn you are setting up for spoiling the set up.

The only thing it is really good for is soloing in a high mez environment (like Carnies) as it is unaffected by mez.

I skipped this power.

I agree with Vanden. I ran hero stats on my Fire/Fire Dom for awhile and much to my surprise my highest total damage powers were consistantly Combustion and Hot Feet (and in that order too) I hate the long animation of Combustion and the inherent risk that results but it puts out too much of /Fire's damage to skip.

Fire/Elec, Fire/Nrg, Psi/Elec, or Psi/Nrg are going to give you the best potential for single target damage.

I have one toon that I marketeer on consistantly but I marketeer on every toon I play. I go to the market before I start playing (which ever toon I'm in the mood to play) and at the end of the play session I finish up at the market.

For massive PBAoE damage a Rad/Fire/Mace blaster soft capped to S/L.

I just want to be able to buy my gun drones from the same weapons store that Malta get theirs from. The Malta version is what gun drone for the players should be. It's time for an update.

You can get another 60 seconds of FoNish style survivability with the Eye of the magus accolade.....

Mind/Ice/Fire is an amazing combo even using SOs alone.

You get several exotic damage types (Cold, Fire, and Psi) and you can layer soft controls (slows, fear, sleeps).

Ice has power boost in the secondary so you can increase the duration of your AoE controls by using both Power Boost and Domination. When solo this can be quite handy as power boosted controls will last long enough to defeat the spawns.

I went with /Ice over /Energy for 2 reasons, Energy doesn't have a good ranged AoE, and /Ice has the fastest animations of all the Dom secondaries. It is a bit light on damage but the Fire Epic makes up for that quite nicely.

Once you see how much better the Dom is when Domination is up you may be tempted to go for Perma. It makes a world of difference and it is most definately worth the effort.

Blasters exist so that buffing defenders have something to do on a team.

Post invention system and Going Rogue there was no reason to roll a defender instead of a corruptor. The incarnate trials have changed that. The better Defender buffs are again useful (but only in that part of the game) and can be useful for the entire team and not simply for the squishy blasters.

Certain corruptor combinations can both outdamage and out survive a blaster.

Scrappers significantly out survive blasters, many of them can out damage a blaster too especially if you figure survivability into the equation. A defeated blaster's damage output is zero.

Slotted up teleport with Boost range from the blaster secondary /nrg and cardiac alpha thrown in for giggles is the fastest travel in the game.

Don't forget that Alpha Cardiac will also increase your range.

Your problem with your build will be surviving long enough to utilize all those cones.

A suggestion along that line would be to switch to Mace mastery. Yes I know there are no additional cones but using hover and Web Envelope (a base range 80, AoE immob) along with Scoprion sheild can solve your problem.

Web Envelope applies a -fly, a -jump, and an Immob to the targets keeping them where you want them. If you use Hover this can, in theory, keep them where you want them and potentially out of their range while still in yours.

Slotting your secondary powers with Kinetic Combats can boost your S/L defense to reasonable levels. This combined with all the extra range should solve the survival problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

Lots of ideas here for generating heat with gravitational forces.