Obitus

Then you'd be boned by the flavor text. Which is kinda the point.

The user interface is very clunky. Yes, you can make do with it, but once you get past a certain point it becomes ridiculous to click back and forth from this-or-that recipe screen, referring constantly to your salvage window. Meanwhile, the reward screen looms large behind everything, reminding you that you should hurry up.

Consider a tier 4 recipe. You have to look at your salvage screen to see what you already have, and then, one by one, compare what you have to the T1, T2, and T3 options available. Then you have to refer to several different T4 recipes to figure out which T3 is the best to craft given your available salvage. Then you have to click over to the crafting menu and to convert threads into the relevant components that you're missing. If you're short on shards and (like me, at least prior to this patch) overflowing with unnecessary Uncommons and Rares, you have to keep a running tally of which is safe to breakdown or not. All of this, just to decide which reward to take at the end of a trial that you have to repeat dozens of times.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying that it's needlessly complicated. And yes, it's much, much easier to write out a list ahead of time. That in itself is a failure of the design; the fact that there's no functional purpose behind the different types of same-tier salvage other than punishing players for picking the wrong item is just insult added to injury. Or injury added to insult, however you wanna look at it.

Hey, it's time travel. It's inherently confusing, and it inherently requires a hefty dose of disbelief suspension. We all get that, I'm sure.

The problem with causal loops -- quite apart from the immediate paradox they imply -- is that they're a cheap plot device. In Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the causal loops were intentional jokes. In Doctor Who, they're fine up to a point, but there's a very serious danger of their being over-used. It's just too easy to say, "Ok, I resolve to go back in time later on and fix this current, seemingly impossible predicament." And poof, it's fixed.

In the words of Zombie, it's ego ex machina. I think that's a very apt term.

You're waiting 1.848 seconds on each Blast activation, once you account for Arcanatime (server ticks). The animation itself remains as short as ever (AFAICT), but if you're looking for it, you'll notice a dead space at the end; if you're not hip to the difference between animation and activation time, that dead space may appear to be just general sluggishness (like client-server lag or whatever).

And btw, you'd need ~527% recharge in Fireball to buzzsaw the above-quoted attack chain. The cap is 500%, so I don't see that happening. If you are going to include Fireball in your attack chain (which is a good idea if the situation permits it), then you're looking for something more along the lines of Blaze-Blast-Ball-Blaze-Blast-Flares.

It's nice to have a slotted Chilblain just so you lose less damage when you want the immobilize, but as Strato noted, Chil ain't no Ring.

Ice does seem to be the APP of choice for Doms these days, but I'd have to give up Fireball and Rain of Fire to get it. There is an advantage for the Blaster in this comparison; it's just absolutely trivial when weighed against all of the vast disadvantages the Blaster has relative to the Dominator.

Fire/Mental is also one of the better Blaster damage dealers, so it's hardly a great argument in the AT's favor that Fire/Mental can beat out a Dominator on straight damage. I'd be shocked if my Dom didn't beat out other Blaster sets rather handily.

But all of that is off-topic. Back to the point: Blast is worse than a lot of people think, but its DPA is roughly the same as Flares'; if you prefer the way Blast looks, then go for it. (Edit: And for most Fire/* Blasters, it isn't an either/or proposition anyway, so the whole comparison is sorta overblown.)

Yeah, I actually liked the Christmas Carol episode more than the premiere

Still, glad to see the Doc back on the job. The causal loops sorta bother me in retrospect after various episodes, but while I'm watching it's just turn-your-brain-off fun for 40-odd minutes. For all the flaws, Moffat's a better writer than Davies, IMO. (Which came as no surprise to me, because Coupling -- though crude and very silly -- really did have a lot of very witty dialogue.)

Don't forget Tankers and, perhaps most galling, Dominators. (Note the damage as well as the cast time.)

As Rigel noted, the first and second-tier attacks in Blaster Primaries were normalized for activation some time ago, in large part (I think) as a response to persistent complaints that Ice and Fire had an enormous advantage. Oddly enough, tier 3 attacks and Secondary attacks remain un-normalized, AFAIK.

So if you're playing Fire/Fire, your best ranged attack chain heavily features Ring of Fire, which -- in contrast to Fire Blast -- is much better for Blasters than it is for other ATs. It does Fire Blast damage in ~2/3rds of Blast's activation. Toss in the fact that stacked immobilize is enormously useful against AVs, and the allegedly melee-focused */Fire Secondary becomes one of the very best options for ranged specialists, too.

(You're looking for either Blaze-Ring-Blast or Blaze-Ring-Flares, depending on which aesthetic you prefer and how much +recharge you can muster. Both are noticeably superior for pure ST DPS to the classic Blaze-Blast-Flares chain, which despite belonging to the presumed damage-specialist Primary set on a damage-specialist AT, is really not all that impressive in the grand scheme of things.)

For what little it's worth, one of the kind of silly reasons I prefer my Dom is that I just can't get over the fact that the Dom version of Blast is markedly superior to the Blaster's. The Blaster still does more damage overall (better Blaze, better recharge on Fireball, Defiance), but it's the principle of the thing, man.

Yes, I should have been clearer. When I said that WP has "sporadically decent resistance to other types," I mean that Strength of Will gives WP decent resistance, but it's not reliably available. It wasn't my intention to imply that Shield has worse RES across the board; in fact, WP's generally inferior resistance is another strike in favor of Rebirth Destiny, because Rebirth basically covers WP's glaring area of strength relative to Shield Defense -- namely, regeneration. That's especially true against Marauder, because you're unlikely (in my experience) to have reliable RttC fodder for that fight.

Rebirth does more for Shield than Barrier does for WP, in other words. The way I see it, Rebirth is just flat-out superior to Barrier, in terms of its numerical benefit over time. Barrier's buff is, in comparable IO-or-power terms, truly massive at the beginning but it quickly tails off into near meaningless territory (unless your build nears the DEF/RES cap without Barrier). Rebirth's buff, by contrast, is very significant even at its weakest point, relative to comparable bonuses in IO sets or powers (getting +200% regeneration from IO bonuses alone is difficult near to the point of implausibility). Some builds will benefit more from Barrier, and multiple Barriers in team situations remain extremely powerful, but Rebirth is almost unreservedly the better solo option if you already have significant mitigation.

I also didn't mean to imply that your taking Darkest Night would be an unreasonable build trade off. It sounds like an excellent idea for you to take Darkest Night, which is a very nice supplement to almost anyone's mitigation because of the damage debuff alone. The ToHit debuff is not exactly equivalent to an equal amount of DEF, though, because the debuff is both resistible and limited by area. It's very likely, for instance, that you'll come under attack by foes that are nowhere near the toggle anchor in the Lambda looting phase.

Not the Blaster version.

Ok, so you're happy with your WP's performance and unhappy with your SD's performance. Leaving aside the obvious game-balance wrinkles involved with that comparison, let's just look at the defensive assets of each set:

• WP has high HP, mid-high S/L RES, sporadically decent RES to everything else, a good deal of exotic DEF, and most of all, a large scaling regeneration rate.
• Shield Defense has some +HP, low-middling RES, and very high DEF to all positions.

Your approach to the trials on the SD has been to plug the healing/RES gaps in your set by carrying lots of orange/green Inspirations and to kinda-sorta plug the Incarnate soft-cap hole with Barrier. My approach would be to replace most of the greens and some of the oranges in your tray with purples and use the absolutely spectacular heal/regen of Rebirth Destiny. As a bonus, you don't even need the purples to be higher than tier 1.

You're not likely to spend more than about 8-10 minutes playing isolated in the trials. You say yourself that you expect support during the AV fights; obviously you acknowledge that relying on support is a necessary evil, at least some of the time.

None of the above is to say that you shouldn't try to improve your stand-alone mitigation as much as you reasonably can. Darkest Night is a very good idea; I wouldn't hang my hat on a long-activation toggle debuff on a Brute/Tanker, but DN nice to have, especially in AV fights. (-DAM is one of the exceptions to AV debuff resistance, with minor caveats; -ToHit, unfortunately, is not.)

I just don't think it's worth it to make significant trade offs to retune specifically for the Trials. You obviously agree with that. All that remains is to determine the most efficient way to deal with the short-term lapses in mitigation during the trials. YMMV, but I think you're short-changing yourself by prioritizing oranges over purples in a situation where you're sitting within a small luck of the soft cap (and likely nowhere near the RES cap to the relevant damage types in the trials). Layering is good, but it's not always the best option.

I think Uber's post bears emphasis.

The trials are designed to present different problems to different builds. The soft-cap for DEF is higher in general -- and it does help to shore up any defensive shortcomings -- but you're never going to get a build to the point where it can deal with everything. In the case of BAF and Lambda specifically, there are a couple of mechanisms designed to favor control (or just flat-out coordinated burst damage), and to trivialize passive mitigation of almost any kind.

So specifically building a character with the idea that you'll have Incarnate-compliant mitigation seems like a waste of time and resources. With respect to the soft cap, you might consider building for 46.5% DEF, which will put you within one small Luck of 59% without undue sacrifice in all other content. One of the advantages of the Trials is that they're short enough that Inspirations go a long way. Liberal use of Inspirations (and Accolades, for that matter) in the trials is, I think, even more worthwhile than it is elsewhere.

And all of that is before we even consider the contributions of teammates, who are more than likely these days to be packing stacked Destiny buffs.

I'll look it up later on my Dominator and we can compare notes if you like. 18 with a 20% RES debuff sounds about right, for what it's worth (15 damage unmodified). Haven't gotten around to running my Tanker through the trials yet (He's next on the list). Given Positron's most recent post, I may just wait on that for awhile.

If Reactive follows the conventions of every other Incarnate power, though, it shouldn't be modified by AT damage scalars.

No, -RES is one is one of the exceptions to AVs' blanket debuff resistance. RES debuffs are resisted if the AV has damage resistance to your damage type (or in other words, the extraordinarily awkward cliche -- "Resistance resists resistance debuffs." ).

The same thing applies to -Damage debuffs; they're unresisted by AVs, unless the AV has damage resistance to its own damage type. For instance, if you hit an Enraged Marauder with a damage debuff, he'd be unaffected because he has 100% resistance to Smash/Lethal damage, and (AFAIK) all of his attacks deal Smashing damage.

Call it a quirk of the system. On a related note, if you could slot damage enhancements in resistance powers, then you'd get 33% (schedule A) enhancement instead of the normal 20% (Schedule B) for a resistance enhancement. It's for that reason that Enzyme HOs can buff your defense powers by 33%. They're typed as DEF debuff enhancements, but the system doesn't recognize debuffs as separate and distinct from buffs. They both modify the same attribute.

TL;DR: Damage and Resistance debuffs are the only widespread exceptions to AVs' absurdly high debuff resistance (85% at level 50).

So on the one hand, you're saying that Blasters' damage advantage isn't marginalized by buff/debuff in high-end teams, and on the other hand, you're saying that Blasters' damage is marginalized, but no more than than the damage of other ATs? Isn't that precisely the point? Blasters' schtick is damage. Other ATs have other things going for them, after all.

If everything's dying that fast, then the Blaster is superfluous. If things aren't dying that fast, then Fulcrum Shift becomes far more important than the Blaster. The problem here is that people are assuming that their Blaster's offensive contribution is not just superior to everyone else's (which isn't necessarily true) -- but rather, that Blaster damage dwarfs the damage output of everyone else. That, I'm afraid, isn't even close to true, except perhaps when you're fighting trash spawns that'd die promptly regardless.

And the second you do run up against something that's tough enough to warrant exhaustive DPS comparisons, the Blaster's best practical advantage is nullified -- that is, burst damage, especially AoE burst damage, provided you're not playing an AoE-light Blaster build, like Ice Blast. As demonstrated earlier in the thread, there comes a point, surprisingly quickly, where even excellent Blaster AoE burst damage begins to pale, even in situations where it does apply. To add insult to injury, Blaster AoE becomes less efficient against tough spawns, unless the team has a way of dealing reliably with scatter. Sure, I can take Web Envelope (the most wide-area AoE immobilize available) on my Blaster, but it has a glacial animation time, with a bonus redraw penalty. Oops, there goes my ranged first-strike advantage.

You know what melts tough spawns, because you skirted around the issue yourself: bursts of damage from everyone, preferably debuff-enhanced burst of damage by everyone. Even relatively anemic Patron/Epic AoE powers get really strong, really quick, when multiplied by 8 teammates and enhanced by buff/debuff support. Notice I haven't even mentioned Judgement.

Are Blasters generally better suited for high-end teams than Scrappers? Sure, I'll buy that. I never said that Scrappers are especially good at teaming. What I said is that Scrappers are great at soloing, which just happens to mean that Scrappers don't care particularly about team composition. In situations like the one you posted above, for instance, I frequently see Scrappers go off and solo whole spawns by themselves as an indirect help to the team.

By contrast, Blasters are not great at teaming, and they're not really even good at soloing, relative to the alternatives. What was your list for ranged first-strike ability again? Oh yeah -- Blasters, Doms, Defenders, Soldiers of Arachnos, etc. The two bolded ATs are better at soloing than Blasters by a wide margin, and they have more general team utility. Defenders, needless to say, are tops when it comes to teaming.

Blasters can be fun to play, and I think there's even some room to argue that their mechanical weakness actually makes them more fun to play, for a lot of people. But there's no good reason that they couldn't be thrown a bone or two. Sorry for the ranty ramble, which wasn't entirely directed at Krouget.

Heh, which part is patently untrue? That buff/debuff characters rule in a teaming environment? Castle himself would support me there.

Yes, a buffed Blaster will deal more damage than a buffed Defender. That's true. The problem is that there comes a point after which the Blaster is superfluous. A buff/debuff that increases the whole team's damage output tends to trivialize any advantage Blaster's have over the next highest damage dealer within that team. And on the subject of Scrappers, they're usually in a better position to receive the best damage buff in the game (Fulcrum Shift) because they live in melee range.

The point isn't that Blasters suck on teams. The point is that they're not very good at soloing or teaming. Most ATs/builds are at least very good at one or the other. Some excel at both. (Edit -- Bottom Line: Blasters have the same if not more team-reliance that buff/debuff ATs do, but without the enormous upside on teams. They need support to perform at their peak, but support doesn't need them.)

*shakes head* Dude, I don't even know where to start. If you honestly believe that melee damage is intrinsically less impressive than ranged damage, then you're even less well-acquainted with how the game works than I thought. Hell, Blasters themselves do much more damage in melee than they do at range.

Blasters don't unreservedly have the highest offense in the game. That's kinda the point here. Even if they did clearly edge out every single other build in the game, it's a question of extent: If Blasters were obviously better at offense, by let's say 5%, then would that justify a 200% survivability and/or utility advantage for (nearly) everyone else?

I'm talking about this: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...67#post3485867

There is an element of skill to the game, but there's only so much skill or experience can improve your damage output. This game is about numbers. 244 DPS is an impressive number even among Blasters. And before you rush to create a justification for your frankly ignorant pre-conceptions about the game's mechanics here, keep in mind that those numbers were posted before Issue 20 brought us Lore pets that can basically kill the Pylon alone.

Balance discussions interest me. I'm quite happy with the game the way it is, enjoying the hell out of my Dominator in fact. But it has always been true that the devs' place undue weight on the ability to attack from range.

There's nothing to counter. You have pre-conceived ideas about the game that you are unwilling even to try to substantiate. You just keep repeating the same tired platitudes that are either outright and obviously false, or heavily over-simplified.

Based on the post you referenced, the highest-tier recharge bonus Umbral used was +250%, or 350% total, which isn't that difficult to reach:

100% base + 70% Hasten + Enhancement + IO bonuses. At the ED cap for recharge enhancement (~95%), we're looking at +95% or so in IO bonuses. With Spiritual Alpha, that number drops by at least 33%, down to 62%ish.

+300% (400% total, which is still 100% shy of the cap, btw) would be difficult to reach. That's what you need to make Drain Psyche close to permanent (ignoring activation time).

Oddly enough, I think IOs help Blasters as much or more than they help everyone else. Even before IOs, Blasters at higher levels were disadvantaged. Their offensive advantages (when applicable) were clearer, but that was never a particularly high priority. Buff/debuff always overshadowed damage, and other ATs (notably Scrappers) were capable of similar-to-Blaster offense without having to sacrifice survivability.

IOs give more to Blasters (really everyone) in terms of defense than they tend to give to everyone else in terms of offense. That's a win, but it doesn't change the fact that Blasters were working at a disadvantage to begin with. The design paradigm that values ranged damage so much more than melee damage, even when the former is numerically inferior to the latter, has been out-dated from about Issue 2 onward.

The idea is (appropriately, I think) to reduce the desire for a specific league loadout now that the game is so heavily emphasizing multi-team events. Incarnates are supposed to blur the lines. That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself.

The problem with Blasters is that they've always paid too much for their allegedly supreme offense. This really isn't a subject for debate; simply parroting over and over again that Blasters are the best at offense doesn't address Blasters' unique lack of other assets, even if we accept as an article of faith that Blasters are clearly superior to every other option in offensive potential, which isn't self-evident. Quite the opposite, in fact.

This is a discussion about capability. AT lines blurred by Incarnate content, but Blasters remain a weaker base on which to build with Incarnate powers.

Again, you're presenting the Dom's extra capability as a weakness. Are you seriously saying that the Dom's damage is so inferior to the Blaster's that there's no way he could survive using the same playstyle? (Edit: To put it another way, are you seriously trying to say that the Blaster's damage is so much higher that his damage advantage constitutes a replacement for the Dominator's vast control ability?

Do you dispute that your Fire/Fire Dom is a more capable soloer overall?

So on the one hand, you're arguing against cherry picking. On the other hand, you pick the only Blaster set with a regeneration debuff and frame the debate around soloing a Giant Monster. A regeneration debuff, I might add, which is both melee-ranged and not easily rendered permanent without heavy IO investment.

Are you seriously disputing that Scrapper damage is Blaster-competitive in the general case? Or let's use your word -- "overall"?

Cherry picking is valid in this particular case. If Blaster damage is just compensation for their dire and unique lack of utility/survivability, then it follows that all Blasters should be at the top of the damage charts. Heck, they should be blowing their competitors away, as an AT.

Oh, if it were just a matter of one or two Blaster sets that don't perform, or one or two non-Blasters putting out exceptional amounts of damage, then I guess you could make the case that cherry-picked examples are fallacious. But that's not what we're looking at here, not even close.

We are discussing the flaws of an entire AT.

The truth is that Blaster single-target ranged damage is nothing to write home about. At the risk of sounding intolerant, I have to conclude that anyone who's truly excited over the prospect of, say, an Ice Blaster's ranged ST damage has never played a properly built Scrapper, Brute, VEAT, or Dominator. Hell, even some Tanker builds can match your average ranged Blaster's ST DPS.

Blaster AoE damage potential is often spectacular, but it's also heavily situation and support-dependent, more so than the AoE damage of almost any other AT. Blaster single-target melee damage is impressive; that much I'll grant. It's kind of silly to hang your hat on that, though, given that most of the targets against which DPS really matters can kill a melee-ranged Blaster in an eyeblink just with splash damage.

Yes, layered mitigation is layered mitigation -- doesn't matter whether we're talking about DEF + RES or DEF + controls. Capping DEF is only inadvisable on a Dom to the extent that it interferes with your achieving perma-Domination.

Which isn't really an issue when we're talking about Smash/Lethal DEF. Ranged DEF is a little harder to juggle with perma-Dom, but it can be done. If you do go for ranged DEF, then you can add significant RES (from APP/Patron shield) to the layer cake.

Dominator controls may make DEF less attractive to some players, but they also, oddly enough, increase the mechanical value of DEF. My Mind/Fire/Fire Dom is nowhere near as passively resilient as my Tanker is, but she's arguably more situationally resilient. What gets through her controls is likely to be deflected by her ranged DEF, and what gets through her DEF is likely to run into 50+% Smash/Lethal RES.

I basically have to be fighting something that absolutely cannot be controlled before the Tanker clearly pulls ahead in practical survivability.

That's a good point, one I may have glossed over in my bemusement over the OP's position. MA may quite possibly be the most-buffed single set since the game's release. There've been some small nerfs here or there (like the change to Thunder Kick's chance to stun way back when), but the net change has been overwhelmingly, even implausibly, positive.

Just for kicks, I was just reading over some old text files of forum posts I either made or admired back in the day, and it really is amazing how far the playerbase has come. All the acrimonious arguments about whether it was an advantage to have animations that were so long you rarely had to pause for a recharge timer seem downright absurd in today's game -- but they happened.

Heck, I'd forgotten just how long Eagle's Claw's activation used to be until you just reminded me. I'd forgotten that Cobra Strike at one time did less than 70% of Brawl damage, and it had a 3+ second animation. These days, any animation (no matter how potent the attack, no matter what effects it carries to however many targets) that even flirts with 3 seconds is considered glacial. For original MA, 3 seconds was short. It's no wonder I was so unsympathetic (and perhaps unjustifiably so) when people defended Total Focus' former mag-4 stun.

My subjective idea of what constitutes good damage or even good control is forever influenced by the formative experience of playing release-day MA. The first, major animation overhaul happened like six months after release, and yet even seven years later my brain processes anything but the original animations as new, somehow.

All of that is just self-indulgent rambling though. Apologies. The thing that I'm trying to get at here is that all of the great strides MA has made manage to be, at once, both uplifting and discouraging. In my experience, it's almost impossible for any dev team on any MMO to lavish so much (comparatively) on one power set and still manage to leave it mediocre. Usually there's at least a little over-buffing somewhere.

Yes, it can be hard to read, but Mids' generally displays the base value in parenthesis next to the modified value in the info window. Usually, at least on my laptop, the parenthetical is cut off, but the first part of it is there.

Anyway, you should see something like this: 101% (48%). Your build, in other words, has enough +Tohit/Accuracy to hit vanilla +3 mobs with only the forced 5% miss rate.

If the mobs have DEF or Tohit debuffs, then your chance will drop, of course.