Obitus

And just to be super contrary*, INV/SS Tanker -- comparable-to-low-end Scrapper damage, much higher passive survivability.

(* - I don't want to be that guy -- you know, the one who creeps up in almost every thread outside of the Scrapper forum to give a smarmy answer -- but I honestly believe that the three melee ATs** have lots of cross-over among them, and so you almost have to take all of them into account when you're trying to evaluate what will best fit your latest build idea.)

(** - Yeah, yeah, I know, Stalkers are a melee AT too. Or are they? )

I was addressing your obvious disappointment about the Paragon Rewards' system. You say it's unfair that anyone with money can toss it at the game and get the equivalent of your Vet status, even surpass it. So I say, maybe you'll feel better about it if you don't think of it as a Vet program anymore. Because it isn't, per se.

In reading subsequent posts, it's become clear that you are, in fact, annoyed with any purchased perk -- which is certainly your right, and even understandable to a degree given that games are generally based on parity -- but it kinda ends the conversation before it starts.

As for the rest, Chad answered all of it better than I could.

Fair enough.

It's not exactly true, of course -- given that converting costs 50 merits and 20 million influence. Any task that doesn't result in a multiple of 50 merits diminishes your "double" benefit for choosing a pure alignment, and with all the alts we seem to be assuming everyone has, stacking 50 merits on any given toon in quick fashion may be a non-trivial task.

That's where the added flexibility of side switching comes in. Certainly, if Chaos is going to disclaim that the lack of Oroborous access in tourist zones - - and thus, slower travel capability -- may slow down your team's progress, it's not quite fair to handwave the 20 million influence conversion fee.

More to the point, Chaos addressed the reward in his/her own quote:

Entertainment. If I'm in a Tankerish mood and a friend of mine asks me if I want in on an opposite-side TF, I can still bring my Tanker. That's the trade off. It's well and good to say that rewards shouldn't be balanced against access, but what's the alternative? Rogues and Vigilantes should get access to both sides of the game, and Heroes/Villains should get ... a pat on the back?

Uhhh?

Yes, exactly. It's not a Vet Reward system anymore; it's a system of perks you get for buying stuff, specifically $15 worth of stuff. The new Reward Tokens are only related to time spent because a month's subscription happens to cost the same $15.

So with that in mind, I have to wonder whether you're just caught up in the wrong terminology (understandable), or whether you do, in fact, simply object to Paragon/NCSoft selling anything at all. The perks you get under the Paragon Reward system are no different, in principle, from the perks you might've gotten from a Booster Pack or an Expansion, in the past -- or from the various items available now on the Paragon Market.

Do you think all of the above perks are unfair because they're bought? Or are you just annoyed that the old Vet perks in particular can now be bought? If the latter, why discriminate?

Sounds like a bug.

The game has been running for more than seven years; launch was in late April of 2004. For nearly all of that time (with a couple of unintentional lapses) I've been a subscriber. I've bought every box set and most every Booster Pack.

If I were given full credit, under the new system, for all of the money I've spent on the game, I'd have something like 90 reward tokens, instead of the 36 I have now. Is that unfair? I suppose it is on its face, but I don't feel that way. See, if everyone like me had been given 90 tokens, then either we'd have turned the current Rewards system into a joke (~50 tokens at Freedom's launch to spend on nothing but consumables), or the entire Rewards system would have to be redesigned with ~90 tokens as the new Top Tier.

And if 90, instead of 35-39, were the new Top Tier, the Rewards system would be awfully intimidating for new players, much more intimidating than it is now. The bottom line, for people like me, is that we got what we paid for at the time. By definition, we can't have been deprived of something that didn't exist. And if some deep-pocketed new player wants to lay down the ~$500 it would take to equal my Reward Token tally in one go, then the game I've spent so much time supporting can only benefit.

It's in my interest that the game continues to thrive. Money is what tends to decide whether businesses thrive. I understand people's reservations about certain aspects of the new business model, but as long as the devs aren't handing out obviously massive mechanical advantages in return for $$$, it should work out just fine -- and maybe much more than fine.

It's not about the content on the opposite side; it's about flexibility. A Rogue is effectively a Villain who can cross over and team with Heroes. A Vigilante is effectively a Hero who can cross over and team with Villains.

Whether you prefer pure alignments or grey alignments comes down to personal preference. For me, it's a matter of time investment: I'll never be the kind of person who will regularly grind A-Merits on more than one character, so I park my Dominator (for whom Frenzy is perhaps more helpful than any Alignment Power on any other AT) in the Rogue Isles, and the rest of my characters eventually move grey so that I can choose to use them on most any team running most any content. (My time spent planning, earning for, and equipping builds is exposed to the broadest opportunity.)

Those who argue that they can play an alt to run with non-aligned teams certainly have a point. Those who prefer not to have to switch to an alt have a point, too. All in all, things seem pretty well balanced. It'd definitely be cool if the Rogue/Vigilante experience were deeper than it is, but that's a whole nother kettle of fish.

Eh, there is at least one other game where crucial build features are flat-out denied to non-subscribers -- build features that are far more important than Incarnate powers, btw, build features that prevent you from even logging in your old character as a freebie player unless you consent to change the character wholesale.

When I looked over that game's F2P features' list, I considered the no-open-framework-builds thing a deal breaker because it limited my ability even to come back and decide whether I wanted to stay. Combine that with the fact that the other game is much younger than CoH, and that therefore returning players are likely to have fewer developed alts, and it's no contest: the CoH system of try-before-you-(re)-buy is far more effective.

(I'm not familiar enough with some of the more prominent F2P games to understand exactly what is and isn't available to freebie/preebie players, so I'll happily accept your reading of the "traditional" F2P model.)

Incarnates are icing; they happen to be very compelling icing for a lot of hardcore MMOers, but even if you're really into the game you can very easily make do without Incarnates. Even people who really like the end game could plan out dead periods in their subscription during which time they can concentrate on lowbies.

We can sit here and nitpick dev quotes, promotional materials, specific prices on the store, but the over-arching model of Freedom is sound. And generous.

Well said.

Can't really add anything here, but just for the sake beating a dead horse: As far as I know, Incarnate content is presently the only thing left in the entire game that is VIP-exclusive. With my Veteran status, I could play everything else for free until the game dies. Though it's true that my Vet status cost a lot of money over the years, it's also true that NCSoft would have to be crazy to tell all of their long-term customers that they should stop paying for the game.

And though it's true that my Vet status cost a lot of money over the years, it was money I happily handed over in return for the privilege of playing the game at the time. I don't deserve anything now for having paid that money; it's nice that I've gotten some rewards, but Paragon/NC didn't owe them to me.

On some level, it's understandable that people would be annoyed that this-or-that perceived privilege is barred to them after (in some cases) years of brand loyalty. When you take a step back, though, it really makes no sense to complain about a free game. A Premium player with a minimum, one-time investment (enough to get access to tells/SG chat, $5?) actually gets much more, forever than I got at the game's launch for my $15 per month. That's pretty stunning, and pretty cool.

Ah, didn't realize they were already back up. Thanks.

They discovered an issue that ... caused them to bring the servers back sooner than planned? Does that mean they had to abort the hardware upgrade (and therefore that they'll do it another time), or does it mean that somehow the upgrade turned out to be easier (faster) than they'd thought?

Just curious; it seems like an odd way to phrase a good event.

Good point, and it's nice to be reminded that Castle at least recognized the problem and tried to address it. I think all of the above (and one of your subsequent posts) only speaks to the main point, though, which is that the entire Archetype is basically an accident of history, and one that the devs either don't know how to fix or don't care about (probably both, at this point).

If Blasters aren't supposed to be rewarded with extra damage for risking melee range -- then why even have the melee attacks? Ranged attacks work just fine in close quarters, after all.

I'm happy to accept that the individual Blaster melee attacks aren't better than ranged analogues by the attack-balance formula. A casual glance at, say, Power Burst and Energy Punch shows that they aren't, in fact -- if you're going by recharge timer versus damage. However, Energy Punch does have significantly higher DPA. But let's say Power Burst is a bad example; even if we use Blaze instead, we find that though Energy Punch is inferior to Blaze on a one-to-one basis, Energy Punch still has superior DPA to either of the two first-tier Fire attacks; ditto Bonesmasher -- so a high-end Fire/Energy Blaster, on paper, will have higher single-target DPS if he uses melee powers.

That's the crux of what I was talking about with PleaseRecycle, and I think it's similar to a point you were making earlier. Whether we're talking the extreme low end (no Hasten, no IO recharge bonuses) or the extreme high end, ranged Blasters have a tangible disadvantage relative to, say, Scrappers with respect to constructing an attack chain. It's the equivalent of forcing an SS Brute to use Jab for his entire career.

And I think all of the above is an artifact of the original design theory that overvalued range, among other things -- the same design theory that made Blaze 20' long. Now whether it's OK for various Blaster sets to be mediocre at dealing ST damage is another discussion, but to me, the Blaster AT is too narrowly focused on the niche role of damage for us to gloss over any deficiency in that area. When we're comparing, say, Scrappers and Brutes, it's one thing to note and then dismiss outliers, but Blasters are different, and not in a good way. It's already a niche AT; it doesn't need its constituent sets to splinter off into even more narrow niche specialties.

My Fire/Mental Blaster, based on Pylon runs I ran a few months ago (before the missile attacks were changed from ranged to AoE), weighs in at about 13% more single-target DPS than my Mind/Fire Dominator (neither of which uses melee attacks). I will grant that I'm not the best Pylon runner in the world, and I'll grant that the Blaster's build wasn't entirely comparable in the sense that I spent more resources on defensive bonuses for her. That said, if the best Dominator blast set compares that favorably with the best Blaster blast set, then it's pretty clear that the best Dom blast set could actually out-damage some of the lesser Blaster sets.

Given that the Dom can also toss out mag-6, AoE controls and achieve permanent and comprehensive mez protection from her inherent, that comparison is a problem on its face. And yes, it's true that my particular Dom build isn't nearly as good as the Blaster for AoE, but part of the reason she's not nearly as good is ironically for the same reason that the Blaster isn't (in practice) quite as good as a Fire Brute: Mind Control doesn't have a whole lot of options to prevent scatter. Swap out my primary for Fire Control and guess what? The Dom would be better, in practice, than the Blaster at AoE damage. (Until and unless the Blaster has a teammate on taunt/lockdown duty.)

But like you said, this discussion shouldn't devolve into a Mids' war. The question is what the design principles are or should be. For my money, there's no good reason that a ranged Blaster using any primary shouldn't be capable of putting out top-tier DPS against a single target. AoE damage is not, to me, a specialty unto itself, worthy of all of the significant trade-offs Blasters are forced to make -- not in a game where minions tend to fall like so many blades of grass, anyway, and especially at the high end when everyone and their mom is packing two or more AoE powers (not including Judgment), thanks to Ancillary/Epic pools.

(BTW, this response isn't entirely aimed at Arcanaville; I just sorta got going and rambled a kinda-sorta response to the sum of recent posts by everyone.)

No problem.

I'm not appraising average Blaster ranged DPA; I'm questioning why average Blaster ranged DPS shouldn't be allowed to be as good or better than average Scrapper melee DPS. I think we've been talking past each other to some extent here; the fundamental question I've been circling around is whether the game's current design justifies penalizing ranged attacks as a class.

It's like you said originally: If you (as a Blaster) retreat from melee range you're assuming a fallback posture. You may have meant that literally (as in "move back") but it's also true that Blaster ranged DPS is no great shakes in the grand scheme of things. Given what Blasters give up otherwise, and given that range is supposed to be their inherent defense, I just don't see why the devs are so afraid of allowing a Blaster to deliver high-end ST damage from 80 feet away. Oddly, the devs historically seem less opposed to allowing Blasters to deal high AoE burst damage from range.

I understand, of course, why Blaster melee attacks should deliver more damage than Blaster ranged attacks. I don't understand why a ranged Blaster should be congenitally incapable of matching the ST damage of a comparable (comparably expensive/well-tuned) Scrapper build.

I had a whole bunch of other stuff written, but I was beginning to bore even myself with the novella, so this'll do. My positions on the rest are pretty well summarized by other posters, anyway.

It has been an interesting and polite discussion thus far; it's unfortunate that you've decided to be so contentious. Sorry, but if you read for context none of what I said is self-contradictory:

I was commenting on a bias against ranged attack sets baked into the original design of the game. If you weren't in such a rush to dismiss disagreement, you would clearly have seen that, as I know you to be an intelligent person. The point isn't that Blasters as a whole have a lack of attacks; the point is that, without supplement, many Blast sets are designed not to have access to a contiguous attack chain from range. Or, if they are designed to provide a contiguous attack chain with three ranged attacks, that's only because the attacks in question have terrible DPA.

There were no IO sets at the launch of the game, and though it's true that the range on third-tier attacks was justly boosted, their range is still very short, a tangible and revealing reminder of the devs' original premise that range is an end in itself. It was intended, originally, that using Blaze would be an extra and significant risk -- and by extension, that the ranged characters who want fully to leverage the positional advantage you think is so important should be content with chaining two low-tier ST attacks.

To put it another way: A Scrapper Primary will typically have access to a continuous attack chain without Hasten or IO bonuses. A Blaster is expected, per the underlying design, either to seek +recharge elsewhere or to use both Primary and Secondary to create an attack chain, usually an attack chain that requires melee range. Without melee range attacks, Blaster offense -- certainly single-target offense -- was not designed to be particularly impressive,

And then they (the original devs) went ahead and gave melee ATs compensation for the very same melee disadvantages for which blast sets were already penalized, in the form of defensive power sets. That's a double compensation, or a double penalty for Blasters, depending on how you choose to look at it. Oh, and sorry (your word), but I defy you to find a quote of me complaining that the devs have only ever catered to melee ATs; read back through the thread and you'll find I've explicitly acknowledged areas where Blasters were buffed. It's very easy to accuse someone of self-contradiction when you distort what they say, though, isn't it?

As opposed to what? Stacking +recharge on a Scrapper and then cherry-picking the best attacks to chain from among a collection of choices? You're highlighting melee sets' advantage and yet you act like I'm an idiot for pointing it out. Shall we go to the Scrapper forum and decree that all high-end MA Scrappers must use Thunder Kick from now on? Do you really think the regulars there would regard that as a buff? Oh, oh, I know! Let's force Super Strength Brutes to use Jab! They'll be so freaking happy!

Yes, I think that if a fight is specifically and exceptionally designed to ignore game mechanics (IE damage mitigation), that fight isn't particularly relevant to a discussion about game mechanics. Bizarre, huh? The better question to ask about those encounters is why the devs feel they have to resort to such tactics in the first place. Or at least it's an equally valid question to ask. In any case, there's no contradiction; I'm allowed to question your assertion that Blasters "especially shine" in Battlemaiden's fight without also tacitly agreeing that Battlemaiden is a great measuring stick.

In the above quote you acknowledge that I don't believe the Battlemaiden fight is terribly relevant, and then in the next breath you respond by challenging me to an exhaustive point-by-point debate about that very fight? Given the tone of your response here, what makes you think I'd be interested in doing that? Why should I help your insulting-dismissive position along by allowing my original arguments to get drowned out further by the minutiae of one encounter?

I'll indulge you just enough to cut to the chase: Do you really think that there aren't more useful ATs than Blasters in the Apex Battlemaiden fight? If you answer yes, then there's no point in discussing anything with you, because we have irreconcilably different experiences.

Yes, the design is all over the place; I'm not blaming the devs for that mind you, just observing that the game has gone through various paradigm shifts over the years that make some of the original design decisions seem mystifying in retrospect.

Blasters are perhaps the most obvious example of that, still shackled to a design wherein things like cast time were ignored (and thus, having access to a dozen situational attack powers might've seemed an advantage), wherein range was considered such an end to itself that even the supposed glass cannon AT has (relatively) uninspiring damage potential outside of melee range, wherein Blast sets don't even allow for continuous attack chains without outside supplement (you often need global recharge and/or Hasten; blast sets tend to come with ~3 bona-fide ST attacks, whereas melee sets usually allow you to pick and choose which of the really good ones you want to use), wherein (originally) the best damage available to a single-target ranged attack was constrained by a 20 foot range (now 40').

Anyway, the thing that strikes me about the passage you quoted is the phrase, "fall back on a ranged [attack] chain." In the game's current state, why is a ranged attack chain by default a fall-back posture? Though it's true that range is a defense of sorts, and though it's true that there are situations where range is most definitely an advantage, range is not so spectacular an advantage on its own merits in today's game that it cancels out an entire defensive set. (In fact, and as noted previously, melee ATs with taunt auras can have a sizable offensive advantage relative to Blasters because they don't have to deal with mobs scattering out of AoEs.)

Nor is it precisely true that Blasters "specifically shine" even in contrived ranged-biased situations like the Apex Battlemaiden fight, because Blasters aren't the only or even the far-and-away best AT at delivering ranged damage. The fact that the devs have started designing high-end encounters with gimmicks that bypass defenses completely is not an argument that melee ATs are having a hard time, these days. You could easily take the same evidence to argue the opposite. Encounter-dependant designer fiat is not a substitute for, or even particularly relevant to, game balance.

Melee attacks are given, apparently, a bonus because of the extra risk that they require, but melee ATs are also given massive defensive bonuses because of that extra risk. And ironically -- in part because of those massive defensive bonuses ladeled out to melee ATs -- Blasters are perhaps the only AT for which the melee-attacks-are-high-risk-high-reward concept stands up; the content has been balanced around melee-range characters with significant defenses and near-impenetrable mez protection. Which would be fine, except that the AT whose entire purpose is to deliver damage, and who explicitly gives up access to personal defenses in return for that lofty specialty, also needs to be in melee range to start pulling clearly ahead in DPS comparisons.

Regardless, it's not like Blasters as a whole AT are in an especially good position to dictate the range of their engagements. Even if you perma-Hover, a lot of the mission maps simply don't allow you to float above the fray. Controllers/Dominators/Corruptors/Defenders are much, much better off in that regard, which is just one of the reasons that all of the lovely IO +DEF bonuses that Blasters can get are actually more valuable on other ATs; the DEF might represent a larger tangible leap in performance for a Blaster because the baseline for Blasters is so low, but as with melee ATs, mitigation is more valuable if you have something else with which to layer it. In the case of melee ATs, we usually mean layering DEF with RES and healing/regen, but the same principle applies when layering DEF with more proactive tools like control/debuff.

My understanding is that the technical limitations set the standard for Super Speed, and Fly was set lower than that because flying has inherent advantages over SS/SJ. Or as Socorro says:

Yes, exactly; that was the original design theory, and it's a good one in principle. If we were just comparing travel powers in a vacuum I'd be more than fine with that rationale, but travel powers in this game have been progressively de-emphasized over the years, to the point where now it's trivially easy for anyone to get Fly's safety and maneuverability from a Jet Pack. Zone ports are common as dirt, too (which is why the Tier 5 Teleport power is getting panned; if it had been released in 2005 it would have received rave reviews). Hell, if I wanted to, I could fly around with speed-capped Hover, nearly full time, just by alternating the GvE and Steampunk jetpack powers.

We don't even need to take pre-requisites for travel powers anymore, so in a sense Afterburner isn't just one extra power pick; it's two extra power picks. Obviously, some builds will already have/need Hover or Air Superiority, but some builds won't. Some builds will take advantage of Afterburner's ability to mule DEF IO sets; some builds won't find that advantage compelling. (Like, say, my Tanker who already had five +DEF powers and didn't want Hover or AS.)

I don't mean to blow the complaint out of proportion; I love Afterburner. As far as I'm concerned, it's far and away the best of the new travel pool powers. The fact that I find myself compelled to sit in front of Mids and shoehorn it into all of my flying builds is a measure of how attractive the power is. It's just ... frustrating to have something so iconic and superhero-y introduced for such a high build cost so late in the game's development, when we'd already reached a point where any travel power, even at the old investment requirements, was arguably sub-optimal. As always, the inner struggle between the powergamer side of the brain and the concept-player side of the brain rages on.

I've never been particularly good at remembering the specific timing of events in the game's history, but the trend towards making everyone at least damage-capable has been going on for years (see Containment, new Vigilance, and so on), and as a matter of principle I think it's a good thing; the idea is, as you yourself advocate later on in the above-quoted post, to smooth the leveling curve for everyone.

Unfortunately, Blasters' designed schtick is supposed to be damage and very little else. So the devs are in a bit of a pickle: do we homogenize the ATs further by making Blasters into generalists, or do we blow up the leveling curve by vastly increasing their damage so that it truly is a worthy specialty?

The problem with the latter option is that it wouldn't just affect Blasters; it would move the goal posts for everyone. With respect, I think you underestimate just how much difference extra damage makes; Blasters would still be squishy, but their practical death timer (that is, the length of time they have to survive to kill the opponent) would be cut drastically.

A 100% buff to Blaster damage wouldn't just double their kill speed, in other words; it would effectively double their hitpoints and provide them a kind of pseudo mez/debuff protection to boot (because they'd only be exposed to those effects for half the time). And in teams? Blasters would be desired, all right -- desired to the point where they'd be mandatory. And groups with Blasters would skyrocket through levels (and Incarnate/Invention rewards) even faster than they do now. The game's content just isn't designed for that kind of damage output; eventually the content itself would have to adjust, and soon enough you'd find the same cries from all the other ATs' advocates for boosts to their damage, and ... well, the endless cycle of inflation would continue.

As much as I like to bemoan the seemingly obsolete design paradigm that handcuffs Blasters, Arcana's right: you can't get around the fact that killing stuff is the only activity that directly earns rewards. Once damage starts significantly to outstrip the average encounter's hitpoints, all other considerations become almost irrelevant. And as fun as it may be to point to all of the damage increases lavished on all ATs over the years, the fact remains that every one of those increases has been constrained by a pre-existing upper bound -- namely, Blaster/Scrapper damage. Heck, even the increase to the Blaster damage scalar/cap was counter balanced by Enhancement Diversification. There's no precedent for vastly increasing the upper bound on all player damage.

You seem to prefer a design that minimizes strict AT roles. Giving Blasters the kind of damage buff that they'd realistically need to compensate for their weaknesses would do the opposite. If Blasters are ever to see significant improvement, the answer lies in broadening their capabilities, not in narrowing their speciality.

None of the above has all that much to do with nukes, though; given all of the current inflation, it's fair to say that nukes could be given more damage to compensate for their penalties -- or, as I prefer, nukes could have their penalties (and damage) reduced a little bit to make them more regularly useful. Either way, a nuke buff could boost Blaster offense in a viscerally appealing, but not-balance-threatening kind of way. I don't for a minute think that a nuke buff would be a final and equitable solution to Blaster balance, but it'd be a nice gesture.

Heh, damage exlusionists; I like that. You're right; what i should have said is that there aren't damage specialists here in the same way there might be in other games. Generalists can have as much damage as Blasters can, and even (relatively) low-offense builds can have enough to get the job done -- certainly enough when combined with buff/debuff support, which is the real mover and shaker when it comes to defeating hard targets.

Blasters seem to be a holy-trinity AT in a game that has gone out of its way to deny the holy trinity.

Yeah, and even Fulcrum Shift tends to favor melee characters. Blasters obviously can take advantage of the buff, but a ranged Blaster will have to go to some effort to do that, whereas a melee character will basically receive the buff as a matter of course. It's always struck me as kind of amusing that the largest damage buff in the game -- the buff that is always trotted out when people discuss the damage cap (and particularly Blasters' high damage cap) -- is melee-biased. Not a big deal, just mildly amusing.

Almost as amusing as your tidbit about Against All Odds. Very interesting.

Whether the power is worth it or not is subjective; in a game where travel powers in general have grown progressively less attractive for the last several years, I certainly wouldn't tell you you're wrong to skip out on Afterburner.

But it's more like a 50% increase in max Flight speed, and if you use IOs (at level 50), you only need to put two slots (and the default slot in Fly) to cap out at ~88 MPH.

Yeah, Afterburner has me a little conflicted, FWIW. On the one hand, Afterburner is really attractive from a conceptual standpoint. Afterburner's visual/sound effect alone is maybe one of the more superhero-y things I've seen in 7 years of CoH.

On the other hand, I almost resent the power's existence, gated as it is behind two other power choices, at least one of which I may have no interest in. I've been staring at builds over the last few days in my spare time, trying to find ways to shoehorn Afterburner into them, because otherwise I'm not even sure Fly is worth it to me anymore. Afterburner is simultaneously that conceptually pleasing, and that expensive.

All of that said, Afterburner is a lot faster than a jetpack. We're talking ~88 MPH here, versus the old flight cap of ~58 MPH (that's at level 50 with one IO in Fly and two IOs in Afterburner). The problem is that the game has been de-emphasizing travel power picks for years now; picking up Fly itself was arguably sub-optimal before, and now you need an extra power pick to make it truly feel like superhero flight.

On the upside, Afterburner apparently accepts the Luck of the Gambler proc*, so depending on your build you might wring a numerical advantage out of the deal.

That about sums it up.

The thing that's funny is that CoH is one of the few (only?) MMOs out there that doesn't have high-end boss fights where DPS is heavily emphasized. So the damage-is-the-only-rewarded-attribute thing holds true for most of the game, but there's really no content that emphasizes damage as a specialty. I tend to think that a huge boost in Blaster damage, a boost that corresponds with and compensates for Blasters' defensive shortcomings, would break the leveling curve in typical or low-end content, but it would still only make Blasters competitive with buff/debuff in terms of team attractiveness at the high end. It would even be unlikely to make Blasters (unreservedly) the best soloists, though they probably would be the fastest to level.

Anyway, yeah, I agree with your assessment and understand why Blasters are unlikely to get a significant offensive boost anytime soon. What I don't understand, though, is why at this late point in the game's development -- when we have Dominators and VEATs and whatever else running around at comparable-to-Blaster levels of damage output on top of massive advantages elsewhere -- it's somehow forbidden to give Blasters some sort of defensive/utility/whatever boost.

I also don't understand why ranged damage still pays such a high premium. Blaster ranged DPS is by no means uber; depending on what set you play, it can be rather anemic in the grand scheme of things. It's only when you consider things like AoE or melee attacks that Blasters really begin to shine offensively, and those aren't strengths universal to the AT -- nor is the AT, ironically, particularly well-suited to leverage AoE damage even ignoring survivability, given Blasters' general lack of options to prevent scatter.

(Yes, I've considered taking Provoke on my Fire Blaster. )

This is all barely relevant though. Apologies for the tangent. Nukes obviously pay too high a price for the damage they do. The fact that they basically force you to be detoggled, on top of the 6 minute recharge timer and the 20-second recovery debuff, seems gratuitous in an age when mezzes no longer even detoggle player characters. Personally and for what little it's worth, I'd be happy if the crash were simply reduced to 99% of your end instead of 100% -- but there's no good reason not to see nukes improved more than that.

I think the point isnt that the Defender necessarily has a huge advantage when solo; it's that whatever advantages the Corrupter might have (burst damage, potentially) are insignificant when compared with the Defender's rather immense advantage with respect to the set's strength (heavy RES debuffing, particularly in a team setting).

After all, if you're looking for great up-front damage, high-DPA attacks, and/or AOE carnage, Sonic Blast isn't really even in the running. If you want what Sonic Blast does have to offer, then you might as well go whole hog.

Assuming ED-compliant slotting and no other damage buffs, an SO's worth of damage buff (30% on top of 195%) is equivalent to the Corrupter's base-AT-mod advantage (~15%). That's almost certainly intentional. Scourge remains an advantage for the Corrupter, but then the Defender may have better buff/debuffs to compensate.

On the whole, the comparison favors the Corrupter, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Defenders aren't in the same ballpark with Corrupters, or that solo Corrupters stomp all over solo Defenders.

As for your latest question, Defender Sonic Blast is generally considered superior to the Corrupter version. The Corrupter gets the AT's innate 15% damage-mod advantage and Scourge, but the Defender's -RES debuffs are 33% stronger (-20% per hit versus -15%). Whether a particular Sonic Blast Defender will outdamage a particular Sonic Blast Corrupter will vary depending on the situation and on the specifics of each build, but it seems pretty clear that if you want to roll a sonic blast support character, you might as well go for the Defender.

Personally, I would roll a Corrupter if I were interested in any other blast set, these days.

No, you replied as if to correct my post, in which I said that one shouldn't rely on Drain Psyche's recovery buff. I was clarifying my position; I wasn't criticizing yours -- though if you wanna pick nits, your comment about endurance stability was ambiguous, which is why I tried to qualify it.

Now we have a different semantic issue: define "sufficient." For the overwhelming majority of situations, Drain Psyche's recovery buff is much more than sufficient even with no recovery slotting at all. Most people won't even notice the difference except after a nuke, and even then there's a fairly high situational threshold (number of targets in a fairly small area) you have to cross before the difference becomes apparent.

And that's why you can't make any categorical statements about the ease of frankenslotting the power; every build has different goals and a different tolerance for tossing away 5-6 slot IO bonuses. Drain Psyche is not a power (like, say, Siphon Life) for which enhancing all of its attributes is clearly desirable, and so there's a limit to how much a given build should bend to accommodate your comprehensive slotting scheme.

The fact is that even under ideal circumstances, Drain Psyche will not fully mitigate a nuke crash. You will still get hit with a 100% endurance drain. You will still likely lose most or all of your toggles. What DP can do is to nullify the 20 second recovery debuff that persists after the initial crash. If you wanna slot around that situation, then more power to you; I certainly can't tell you you're wrong. It's a valid tactic and one that several posters swear by. All I can say is that DP's interaction with nukes is a fairly minor point in the grand scheme of things, a minor point that is often blown out of proportion on this forum. (Not necessarily by you, just generally; a relatively new player might, IME, understandably conclude from reading this forum that Drain Psyche is a get-out-of-nuke-crash-free card.)

My point was just to caution people against some of the counter-productive build/combat strategies that a power like Drain Psyche tends to encourage. If you disagree then that's fine, but it doesn't even appear that you do differ in any significant way. We're splitting hairs here.