Obitus

Right you are. I don't know how I missed that. Apologies.

My argument wasn't based on Incarnate powers. That should have been clear. Blasters give up too much for their offense.

Power Surge is probably the main reason that I believe Unstoppable deserves a small buff. The two powers are nearly identical -- so similar, in fact, that Power Surge's AoE stun effect on expiration is an inexplicable advantage.

Power Surge has an effect that can help to cover the crash, in other words. Unstoppable doesn't.

The Judgement issue is only a symptom of the larger problem, which is that Blasters give up too much for their offense. If Blasters had more to hang their hat on than the dubious, "Team Artillery Specialist," tag, then the fact that everyone can pick up a crashless nuke wouldn't be a big deal. I don't see too many Controllers complaining about Destiny, for instance.

For what little it's worth, I don't even particularly care about Judgement except to the extent that it shines a big freaking spotlight on just how silly the huge and long-standing penalties for traditional nukes are and always have been. At the very least, I'd like to see those penalties revisited and reworked at some point, and not just because of Judgement.

As to whether or not people are giving the question of high-end balance a lot of thought -- my response is that they should, given the investment we're talking about here. It was valid to question which builds you'd concentrate on maximizing before Incarnates were even announced, because IOs alone could potentially represent massive investment and massive reward.

Blasters -- even before Incarnates -- are not particularly good at soloing or teaming. They're not even particularly good at delivering damage without support (because of the AI's tendency to scatter, because of obvious survivability issues). Are there outliers? Sure; a high-end, Rain-of-Arrows-spamming Archery Blaster is a sight to behold, but in terms of over-time AoE damage output it's merely competitive with an SS/Fire Brute.

On a personal level, the peculiar irony to me about the new Incarnate slots is that the one potentially meaningful advantage my Fire/Mental Blaster has over my Mind/Fire Dominator -- Drain Psyche's Regeneration buff -- is rendered moot by Rebirth Destiny even as Clarion Destiny potentially gives the Blaster full-time status protection. Those two things offset, with the Dom winning on the basis of Judgement and her innate, mag-6 controls. It's really not even a competition. The Blaster loses before she's laced up her cleats.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that Blasters should be turned into Doms, or even that Blasters deserve to be as good on a solo basis. But it does seem blindingly obvious to me that Blasters are the victims of an out-dated design paradigm that placed disproportionate emphasis on ranged damage potential. Doms and VEATs are, I would think, irrefutable evidence of that sea change in the development strategy. To a lesser extent, even newer (crashless) Blaster nukes are an implicit (or if you prefer, subconscious) mea culpa on the part of the Dev team. We're not likely to get sweeping AT-balance changes at this stage of the game, so the most relevant question here is, "What builds are you going to bother taking to the highest pinnacle?"

Some will undoubtedly choose Blasters. Most of those people, I contend, do it for sentimental reasons, though. If so, then that's fine, but it's also not relevant. And with that, I think I'm due for another break from this thread. I'm beginning to bore even myself with these ranting novellas.

Yeah, but on the upside, the boss-rank 9CUs that reinforce Siege -- and accrue outrageously high +ToHit and +damage buffs just for staying alive -- heavily favor Domination-fueled control powers. Bonus points if they're long-duration powers like Mass Confusion.

And in the Lambda sabotage phase (the most crucial phase of the trial, arguably), Mind/* Doms are spectacular, particularly if they have stealth.

And with all due respect, your entire post is unresponsive. Balance issues are not unimportant simply because teams generally don't discriminate. I'm sure most teams (including all of mine) are more interested in playing with fun people than they are in playing with spectacular builds.

Heck, I spend billions on my builds almost entirely because I want to maximize my chance to succeed even with terrible team support. Sometimes, making what should be a bad team good is the best part of this game, for me.

YMMV. None of the above has anything to do with the price of bananas, though. If you genuinely disagree that Blasters give up too much, mechanically, for their presumably overwhelming offense, then that's one thing. If you're handwaving any and all balance concerns on the basis that every AT can find a team, then there's no point in even posting in a balance discussion. It's like that Geico commercial where a woman calls into a car-talk radio show to ask about two different engines, and the host says, "You should pick the blue car."

Soft-capping melee DEF just doesn't work as a singular goal. Ranged DEF works because, if you stay at range, the only attacks that can hit you are either ranged or AoE (with some few exceptions). Ranged AoE is comparatively rare.

When you're in melee range, by contrast, you're subject to attacks from all three positions. AoE is more common too, because almost every melee-skewed mob has at least one point-blank AoE attack.

So if you're gonna play hybrid/Blapper kind of build, Smash/Lethal is your best bet. Most of the melee attacks in the game are Smash/Lethal (swords/fists). Smash/Lethal will also cover you against a lot of ranged/AoE attacks. A lot of the DEF debuffs in the game are ranged S/L attacks, in fact (most notably machine gun fire).

And Smash/Lethal is easier to build around than melee DEF.

If you take Scorpion Shield from the Mace Mastery Patron pool, you may also be able to sneak up to the Energy DEF soft cap with fairly little effort.

TL;DR -- you don't know any of the numbers, but you're confident that they come out in Blasters' favor? That's real compelling stuff, man.

How's that for snarky?

More seriously, the Blaster damage cap is 500%. The cap for basically everyone else (except for Scrappers, who match Blasters, and Brutes, who have the highest damage-buff cap in the game) is 400%.

FWIW, the resistance-debuff cap is -300%, last I checked. So in theory, a Blaster/Scrapper at his damage cap fighting a target that's under the maximum resistance debuff can effectively deliver 2000% (500% * 4) of base damage. Unfortunately, neither Fulcrum Shift nor huge resistance debuffs are heavily featured in Blaster power sets. Ranged Blasters are unlikely to get full benefit out of Fulcrum even when there is a Kin on their team, actually.

Uh, what? Do you honestly think that because other ATs only have one attack set, that they can't construct seamless attack chains?

You also know that the Reactive Interface -RES proc amounts to a 10% debuff, right?

There's no question that the new Incarnate stuff improves Blasters. Arguably, the new Incarnate stuff improves Blasters most of all -- but that's only because Blasters needed more. The question remains: if I'm to put in the effort to kit out a character with all the best that IOs and Incarnate content have to offer, then why should I start with a weaker baseline?

Only you can answer that question for yourself. If you enjoy your blaster, then more power to you. I know that I will never exclude Blasters from my teams; in fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen AT discrimination of any kind in seven years of playing CoH -- but for my own purposes, after having spent countless hours and countless billions and countless respec tokens optimizing my Blaster, I'll stick with my Dominator, thanks.

I think more to the point of the thread (and to the original complaint that started this off-shoot discussion about DEF being unfairly penalized and/or too heavily emphasized by the player base), the Incarnate Trials specifically go after DEF, RES and Regen in different ways.

Regen debuffs appear to be rather plentiful. In Lambda, the Seers seem to have Drain Psyche, and the IDF mobs spawn Battle Orbs whose buffs can get out of hand if you allow too many of them to gather together. In BAF, the 9CUs (I think it's the 9CUs) have regen debuffs and they gain obscene amounts of +ToHit and +damage the longer they live. (I looked at my combat log at one point and saw that a 9CU was ToHit-capped against my Dominator when I was sitting on 100+% DEF.)

In addition to those things, we have the BAF turrets that ignore damage mitigation completely (both DEF and RES), and (to a much lesser extent) the artillery fire in Lambda that apparently does the same. Then we have the Blue Patches o' Doom in Apex, and heck (while we're at it), Hamidon has been ignoring mitigation pretty much since Issue 1, AFAIK.

And then, of course, all mobs in the Incarnate trials have an increased ToHit (64% versus 50% for basically all other content).

All of the above layer together to create a collection of encounters in which you cannot rely purely on passive (or if you prefer, numerical) mitigation of any kind. That is, I believe, both intentional and appropriate. The only problem (to the extent that there is one) is that the multitude of wildly disparate effects described above can and do affect people in different ways. For instance, some people were convinced that DEF is useless in Incarnate content after having fought (apparently) a few long-lived 9CUs, and/or having been tagged by BAF Turret fire.

Others get on a well-oiled team with copious DEF buffs and control and never see a problem (the 9CUs seem particularly to favor control effects, perhaps as a compensation of sorts for the control-immune prisoners in the same trial). The bottom line is that all mitigation is still helpful; you just have to know what you're up against and what to do about it.

Builds that start at the normal, 45% DEF soft cap are still much better off, all else being equal, than builds that start at very little DEF.

Hey, different strokes for different folks. Judgment doesn't seem to gain anything particularly interesting at Tier 4 to me. You're basically looking at a little extra damage (up to ~1/3rd more, 20% of the time), or a 25% chance for this-or-that proc. In the case of Void (which is probably the most mechanically complementary of Tankers), you get an increase in the target cap from 24 to 32, which is nice, but how often that distinction will make a practical difference is an open question.

I am perhaps biased because the first character I'm running through the Trials is a Mind/Fire Dominator -- who is neither desperate for AoE damage, nor particularly interested in a stun proc. For theme reasons, I'm giving her Pyronic, which is for my purposes maxed out at Rare (Partial Radial -- 32 targets, 40 ft radius).

Then you have Lore, which at Tier 3 gives you a Boss-tier pet and a support lieutenant, and an Incarnate level shift. Tier 4 gives you ... either a heavier-damage lieutenant or an invincible support lieutenant? Meh, they're still only available for 5 minutes out of every 15, and as the forums demonstrate, a lot of people find the Praetorian-themed pets conceptually problematic.

The tier 4 of Reactive, for all that I've downplayed the RES debuff in this thread, at least gives you a consistent upgrade over tier 3. Whether that upgrade is noticeable through most content is another question, and I suppose some people (those who like soloing AVs, for instance) will find it a compelling option. If I get another couple of lucky drops, Reactive Radial Flawless will likely be my first priority after Destiny.

And then there's Destiny, for which the tier 4 is the difference between 3/4ths uptime and ~100% uptime, and the difference between a 30 ft radius and a 60 ft radius (that's four times the floor coverage). Or, the radius stays the same (60 ft), and your uptime goes from 1/2 to 100%.

To say that T4 Destiny is the most immediately obvious and noticeably beneficial upgrade of the bunch is an understatement. Happily, I've already lucked out on a Very Rare reward table, so now it's just a matter of grinding the threads for Rebirth Radial Epiphany.

Then, it's time to start on my Tank, for all that anyone cares about my own personal plans. Just thought I'd throw in the long-winded reasoning behind what I said earlier. YMMV.

I haven't crunched the numbers, but the last estimate I heard was that the DoT itself adds 40+ DPS assuming you attack at a reasonably fast rate. 40 DPS is 10% of 400. There aren't a whole lot of builds that can muster 400 DPS. Maybe with the Lore pets we'll see more builds in that stratosphere.

The DoT helps against everything from minions to Arch-Villains. It provides, at a glance, more additional DPS than the RES proc is likely to give any single build. That's all I was saying.

If you wanna go for the Very Rare to get some -RES on top of the DoT, then that's great. It's good to have long-term goals. I'm not gonna bother unless I have nothing else to spend components on.

Like Bruising, the Reactive debuff procs are (IIRC) supposed to bypass the Purple patch -- because they actually make the target the caster of the debuff. Unfortunately, and by the same token, they don't stack beyond 4x even with a full League of people all spamming the same proc. (Just as Bruising doesn't stack even with multiple Tankers.)

Still, I would go (and have gone) with the DoT over the -RES debuff. It's just more helpful in more situations. Personally, I wouldn't even bother with the Tier 4. Because the procs don't stack with each other in team situations, and because -10% RES is generally insignificant in non-teaming situations, I figure any encounter in which I'm likely to miss the RES debuff will already have the RES debuff covered from other sources.

Destiny seems to be the only truly compelling T4 option for me. YMMV.

Yeah, except that I'm also getting a lot of Rares, probably about 1/4 as many as I do Uncommons. Considering that Very Rare is a comparatively minute boost over Rare, I'm swimming in yellow and orange components I don't need or even necessarily want at this stage of the game. (or would be, if I hadn't started breaking them down on occasion out of sheer impatience.)

Later down the line, if and when I start to worry about upgrading everything to Very Rare? Sure, maybe I'll appreciate having fewer Commons. Frankly I don't see myself pursuing Very Rare on anything except Destiny at this point. You yourself say you're only interested in Very Rares on one character.

(Edit: Also, and more to the point, I may not be able to make Uncommons out of Commons, but I can make Uncommons out of threads. And since I'm spending the bulk of my threads on Commons, there is a practical correlation between Uncommons and Commons. The problem here, to the extent that there is one, is that Common components are worth 20 threads, whereas Uncommons are only worth 8-10 instead of the 60 you need to make one. Why? Because I'd never need to make an Uncommon out of threads; I might very well need to break an Uncommon down.)

Handclap doesn't appear to be typed as Smash/Lethal. A lot of AoE mezzes are, though. Most any grenade, for instance.

That said, you're never going to get past mez effects on a Blaster; they'll always be a problem, even if you soft-cap to Ranged and Smash/Lethal/Energy (which is possible, but not exactly easy), and take Acrobatics. The ability to spam first-tier attacks -- without the benefit of Build Up or Aim, without access to whatever utility/mez powers of your own -- is little more than a parlor trick to be used against tiny spawns in low-difficulty solo missions. Better to pack lots of Break Frees. (Edit: Of course, nowadays, you can take Clarion Destiny for near-perma mez protection, but then you're missing out on one of the other great Destiny options that other ATs can take with a clear conscience.)

More to the point of the thread: S/L is easier to soft cap because you can rely largely on Ancillary/Patron powers to do it. The downside is that you can't layer S/L DEF with meaningful RES because (obviously) you're using your APP/Patron Armor on DEF. So over the full course of the game's content, and assuming you hover, Ranged DEF is safer than S/L. It's not necessarily better, though.

Yes, the amusing thing is that, after you've run a few trials, the Uncommon table becomes functionally worse than the supposedly worst option (10 threads), because no one could possibly use as many Uncommons as seem to drop, and because Uncommons only break down into 8-10 threads.

Now whether that's actually a problem or not is another question, and I obviously can't speak for anyone else -- but it is interesting that Common components are far and away the biggest bottleneck for my own progression through the Incarnate system.

On the first day of release, I went on a couple of doomed Lambda trials using the Queue. Those were discouraging. Even when we seemed to be up to the challenge, there would inevitably be a few Metabolic Acids that went missing, and Marauder would end up with an almost infinitely self-buffing horde of IDF around him. Temp power distribution is a bit counter-intuitive. (You tell people to have a slot open on their power bars, and either they don't listen, or they understandably assume that clearing a spot on their fourth or fifth bar will do, but temp powers only seem to auto-equip when your first three displayed bars have a slot open.)

By the second day, we (and by "we," I mean, loosely, the Triumph server) seemed to be over it for whatever reason. Ever since, every run of either Trial that I've been on has been a near joke. As time passes and people get better equipped with the Incarnate hotness, the trials only get easier.

For what it's worth, I haven't seen anyone recruiting for this-or-that AT or build, but we haven't been using the Queue system either. Basically all of the recruiting on Triumph seems to be in Pocket D, and it's on a first-come, first-served basis. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't know (or know of) half of the people who end up in each League, but that's just a natural consequence of Triumph's relatively low population.

My Leagues haven't exactly been PuGs, but they haven't been pre-set teams either. More like haphazard collections of the usual suspects.

There's no guarantee that every build will be able to solo every Elite Boss, though most any build should be able to solo most EBs given intelligent use of Inspirations.

The OP was complaining about an AV, though. If he can reliably get the AV version of Siege down to 20% health, as he said, then he should find EB Siege trivially easy.

Yeah, for some reason, telling people where to stand (BAF) is about six thousand times easier than getting people to check their temp powers. To be fair, though, the power-window interface is kind of a nightmare. You basically have to have space on your power bars for Lambda.

That said, once most people have the level shifts (and the high-DPS pets and huge stacking buffs that come with them) and Judgement nukes, it ought to be easy to beat Marauder even without using the Acid temps.

Uh, you do realize that crafting recipes and selling the IOs for a markup is how marketeers make money, right? Pure flipping generally doesn't yield worthwhile results over time (and per ounce of effort). There are exceptional cases -- flipping purples, for instance -- but the purportedly populist complaints about flippers or market manipulators most often arise from the wild variance of very low-value items, most often common salvage.

I'm not denying that some marketeers do occasionally play games with those low-value items, but they ain't making worthwhile money doing it over any considerable length of time. Not these days. To the extent that it happens, it's most likely an ego-stroking exercise (or something done out of sheer boredom).