OVWyx_EU

None at all, but if you're not going to take the leaping pool, I'd strongly recommend taking Hover. Kinetics tend to spend a fair bit of time in mele and as such you'll want something to help with knockback.

3 slotted swift, 3 slotted hover, and siphon speed gives you a pretty good speed on hover for combat purposes (and as Kinetics is quite a "slot friendly" set you can probably wangle spending those slots in travel powers). Inertial Reduction gets you around between missions fine (now with no rooting on the animation - YAY!)

Re: "You don't need stamina". Noone needs stamina if they're willing to make sacrifices on perfermance and build of their character, Kinetics does function better than most without Stamina, but I find it far more efficient with it.

It'd be good to see more of this sort of thing going on, preferably on the live servers, I personally much prefer zone PvP to arena PvP, and always prefer playing my characters at level 50. It'd be good to get enough people in there on both sides that one 3-5 person team using voice coms can't completely inbalance the zone.

RV on Union was fun for a while last night, a shame we didn't get more consistantly high numbers on the villain side. When we did, it was quite enjoyable.

Thanks for organising another raid.

Targetting and staying in the healing blanket in general was pretty hard work last night (and often is).

If I could make a suggestion, it would be immensely helpful if whoever is targetting can stand as near to directly under the Mito we're attacking as possible, particularly on the high ones. Firstly, the distance to the target is shorter, more people can hit the target while still staying within the healing blanket with their regular ranged attacks. Secondly Kinetics can give Inertial Reduction to Scrappers and Tankers (and anyone else who can't quite reach for that matter) without leaving the healing blanket.

Cheers,

Wyx

[I have a suspicion that more and more people are getting controllers and rads in range and bringing them along, hence the clearing phase is becoming slower, and the holding phase is becoming a lot quicker and easier - I had 18 lots of AM running through large parts of the holding phase last night. I am tempted next time to use a Blaster or my Kin/Rad for the clearing stage and bring a controller on for the holding stage.]

Possible? Yes.

Effective? Not particularly. You'll need to slot endurance reducers where you wouldn't otherwise, which will detract from damage potential. You will also struggle to run a lot of toggles. Even with all that playing at a good pace when conserve power is not available is going to require heavy use of blues, carrying a lot of blues is going to mean less other useful inspirations that you may want at higher level, most particularly break frees.

In addition to which although you'd free up three powers, you wouldn't free up a lot of slots, what would you take instead that wouldn't need slotting?

There is also the possibility that it was simply scaled on the Blaster sets. I don't know the endurance numbers on energy, but I can tell you for definite that the single target attacks from Fire Blast take less endurance than the ones from Ice Blast although obviously as a predominantly AOE based set Fire Blast actually uses, in practise, as much if not more endurance.

I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility that they simply scaled the endurance costs for the controller epics on the endurance costs from the blaster primaries without really thinking about balance within the context of the controller epics rather than the blasting sets they were taken from.

Fire/Kin/Fire is much endurance heavier than any Defender build you could realisitically make, it really doesn't give you an idea as to how Kinetic plays from an endurance point of view as a Defender primary.

Re: 3 slotting on accuracy. Tactics, Aim and Irradiate are all going to mean you have a very good tohit with only two accuracy slotted, I also have Power Build Up on mine, all these powers are well slotted with tohit, and for PvE you should have no accuracy issues at all. PvP is another matter. I have a couple of powers three slotted with accuracy, although Fulcrum Shift is not one of them currently.

Edit: Obviously, replied to the wrong person. Oops.

Yes, but surely if you have spare slots, slotting something with a useful enhancement would be more profitable.

I think it must be you, the link seems to work fine.

Will be there with Flamin' Nora.

I wouldn't put the endurance reduction in personally, I've never seen a need for it. I've always found 2 accuracy and 3 recharge rate are absolutely fine.

For a PvE Fire Blaster Flame mastery can be pretty good actually, basically because it gives you a good hold. You simply cannot overstate the increase in ease of survivability that a single hold gives you on a Blaster.

The shield is handy, and Rise of the Pheonix can have its uses on occasion (although I wouldn't view it as a must have, given you tend to have power picks free with /fire it's worth sticking in at 49 if you don't have anything else). The only real non-starter is Bonfire which is definitely not friendly to an AOE set.

Force Mastery (with the medicine pool) is also extremely good but from a different perspective. It still gives you no way of taking a mezzer out the fight at the start, which if you intend to do any soloing at all at higher level you really do need or you'll be carrying 15 break frees per mission. It does make you tougher, and PFF with Aid Self is an extremely handy panic button, but I find Flame Mastery allows me to avoid a lot of the situations where I'd need a panic button anyway. I've always had Flame on the live server (although I've tried them all on my Fire/Fire on test), it works absolutely fine, and I really don't die much.

If you intent to PvP, while you don't really have the best sets for it, Force Mastery would be a big help.

So, basically, either can work fine, you wouldn't be "gimping" your character for concept if you went with flame.

[ QUOTE ]
nah man maybe for acc dmg or acc mez!

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't have any Acc/Mez, I wouldn't swap any Acc/Dam, and I'm not a man.

Thanks for the reply though. Good luck on getting that swap.

Wyx.

[ QUOTE ]
+tohit,+defbuff endred

[/ QUOTE ]

Gargarinio, would you be interested in swapping that one for a Damage/Mez?

Have Dam/Mez, open to offers (for trade, not sale).

@Wyx

Cheers.

[ QUOTE ]
I even had a discussion with someone who argued that it wasn´t possible to be a blasting kinetic

[/ QUOTE ]

They'd love Buffem.

Ahem, normally I'm the first to admit that the search function on these forums is a bit rubbish, and tend to expect certain topics to be frequently repeated over the space of the months.

However, on the front page of the Blaster Forums in the first ten threads at the moment, in addition to this one, we have:

1. Elec/ and End Modification;
2. Elec/Elec/Elec build - sugggestions please (Also containing links to several other recent similar discussion);
3. Short circuit;
4. Power sink.

I think one of those could probably give you at least some of the information you are looking for.

I'm sure if you have additional questions someone will be happy to help you, most people in here tend to be.

Only Short Circuit really drains enough to merit slotting for Endurance Modification, and even then, only if you're combining it with either Power Sink from the Electricity Manipulation pool or Power Boost from the Energy Manipulation pool.

If you have a different secondary it's probably not worth slotting for endurance modification at all. By the time you have drained the bad guys either you could have killed them, or they will have killed you.

[ QUOTE ]
The one problem you may find with EM Pulse is that it stops your endurance recovery. I usually use Conserve Power to mitigate this but you won't have that as an option. Just something to bear in mind.

[/ QUOTE ]

Plus the local friendly x/kin 'troller with transferrance.

Manouverability is as important in zones as in the arena.

If you're taking aid self, health is a bit of a dead power, if you can spare slots for hurdle and CJ (I have to admit I always struggle on my blasters) they're very handy. 3 slotted hurdle and CJ combined give a very nice degree of precision bouncyness.

I'll be there with my Controller, Flamin' Nora, no prizes for guessing the primary, although I'll probably be a bit late next week. I will definitely make the holding stage.

Just a couple of suggestions if you don't mind:

It is extremely helpful in the holding stage to have a couple of bubblers running Big Bubble with the main group. It doesn't add majorly to the lag and it makes a noticable difference to the speed of clearance.

Using the raid channel to have only a limited number of people on there talking seems to be a good idea, as it's the only channel which can't be spammed by everyone, it would make sense to me to keep non-raid related chatter off there - it defeats the object of muting most people if it's going to be used to chat to friends.

Finally, when we pulled aggro in the holding stage people were getting thrown around something 'orrible. It'd be an idea if that happens again, particularly when he's below 50% health, to get everyone who has it to put acrobatics or hover on until the Tanker regains the aggro. There may be a small amount of lag, but losing the hold on him while sitting on our [censored] would probably be worse.

Thanks for organising another raid.

Wyx.

I have a Dam/Range which I would like to swap for either:

Tohit/Recharge/x

or

Tohit/Endred/x

Please drop me a PM or a global tell to @Wyx if interested.

Cheers.

Looked like it should have been fun, unfortunately the totally irrelevant weather meant I just walked through the door not long ago after a well over four hour journey from work and missed it.

Would be nice to see something similar again soon.

I can't see any reason not to take both either, I'd definitely get the main AOEs and the single target attacks and hold from the secondary.

I'd personally probably take the leaping pool for a PvE build, rather than Superspeed and the Medicine pool. That really depends on what you're after.

I'd probably also take Rain of Fire in at some point, although it might be quite late on, I like it a lot more than most, but then I probably team with a lot more controllers/dark defenders than most people do in your average pick up team. With lock down, Rain of Fire is the dogs nads. If you're relying on a Tanker to hold aggro, it's not a good idea to use it.

Prior to SOs it's really not worth slotting for endurance drain because of how long it'll take you to drain, but as already mentioned the extra AOE damage can be nice, so if you're going to slot it, I'd put damage in first.

Personally I wouldn't slot it for endurance drain until I had Power Sink too, even slotted with SOs for end drain Short Circuit alone takes multiple applications to drain anything, I tend to feel that if I can kill something quicker than I can drain it, it's not worth the trouble.

With Power Sink as well, and combined with holds, you can use it to keep higher level bosses pretty much incapacitated while you kill them.

I'm also of the two accuracy's school of thought. Even prior to ED I have always slotted some of my single target attacks with two accuracy, I do notice the difference in how much I'm hitting, particularly when fighting significantly higher level mobs. Why would you want to do that? Well, I'd say more why wouldn't you want to do that if you can? It's more fun if it's a challenge in my opinion.

I prefer Stimulant to Aid Self, and I don't slot it (I simply never have spare slots on my blasters). The reasoning is quite simple. I don't want something that I'll feel like I should use much in a fight, that is definitely not what I'm there for when I'm playing a blaster. However with the sort of teams I usually play in (which are frequently of the squishy variety) I find putting it on toggle running Defenders (eg Rad or Dark, who I really don't want to be asleep even briefly) prior to the fight starting can be helpful. I very rarely use it mid-fight.

It also gives people plenty of opportunity to make smutty and occasionally amusing remarks on teamspeak.

I don't really feel that stealth is worth a power pick for Blasters any more simply because there are too many other pools that can be useful (leaping, fitness, medicine, speed, flight all have powers that I'd rate higher than stealth), however I don't tend to stealth missions (I like to bash stuff, lots) so that's not a consideration for me.

However me and Energy Blast in general have never really seen eye to eye, so I'm not really in a position to advise what might be the most useful powers to keep/drop from that.