Obitus

Please clarify. I have no idea why you conclude that I-24 will make a ranged attack posture so much better than it is now.

I think we can all agree that balance isn't the only goal of good game design, but unfortunately that's a truism. It doesn't lead to a useful conclusion or even an interesting discussion. There's a huge, gaping chasm between the premise that balance isn't everything, and your apparent position, which is that the existence of a singularly disadvantaged AT makes the game more fun.

The latter statement doesn't proceed from the former, in other words. The latter statement is, in fact, unsupportable -- and is therefore unworthy of discussion except as a vague point of subjective interest, "Strato prefers that Blasters be team-dependent." Ok. I don't.

Once our subjective preferences have cancelled each other out, what we're left with is the obvious fact that there are no other ATs with Blaster-like dependency, and so there's no obvious reason that Blasters should be uniquely saddled with that disadvantage, unless you want to give Blasters an obviously massive and unique advantage as compensation -- but clearly, neither you nor the developers are interested in doing that.

Locking your door is a good idea; it increases, but doesn't guarantee, your security. To say that security isn't the goal of locking your door, simply because locking your door isn't a comprehensive security measure, would be a fallacy, no?

To be a little less flippant, I agree with your reading of the situation; it's doubtful that Blasters will ever be truly equal to Doms, Brutes, Scrappers, et al. I think if you pumped the devs with truth serum, they'd tell you that a good number of Dom/Brute/Scrapper builds are overpowered, and that the current dev team would never have allowed them in the first place. But even if the developers have no intention of making Blasters truly equal with their peers, it doesn't follow that the developers aren't concerned about the balance of Blasters versus other ATs.

Ranged-attack sets shouldn't be intrinsically inferior to melee-attack sets simply because the Blaster AT has poorly designed secondaries with a surfeit of melee powers. That goes for all ranged-set users; given equal AT-damage scalars, a ranged-set user should be on par with a melee-set user, because the design of the game already gives melee-set users (generally) massive benefits in return for the superficial disadvantage of melee range.

And keep in mind, I'm just talking single-target damage here. For the most part, AoE damage still favors melee-range combatants, including melee-biased Blasters. Some Blaster primaries can output immense AoE DPS from range, but even at that they'd put out more with the help of supplementary PBAoEs from a Secondary like */Fire. Hell, if you want be strictly literal, even the I-24 Nuke buff is aimed in large part at PBAoE powers. There are fewer ranged (crashing) nukes than PBAoEs, last time I checked.

Your (offensive) advantage as a Blapper is that you have a wider selection of attacks from which to cherry-pick the most heavy-hitting repetoire, both single-target and AoE. That advantage isn't going away, and wouldn't even with an as-yet-unannounced comprehensive buff to ranged-attack sets. (We're getting a boost to snipes and a vague boost to non-snipe sets, but as far as I know the developers have not announced an across-the-board buff to ranged attacks.)

Even a pure Blapper would benefit from having a better selection on the ranged-attack side of the menu. And a pure Blapper will certainly benefit, perhaps moreso than a ranged Blaster, from a survivability boost to the AT. If your problem is that content development has increasingly disincentivized blapping, then you should direct your complaints toward the power creep of melee ATs, not at any proposal to make ranged Blasters competitive damage dealers.

In theory there's room for an AT that's heavily dependent on teammates -- but there should be a significant upside to mirror that disadvantage. Blasters never had that worthwhile niche specialty, and over the last 8 years it became obvious that the developers were scared of giving Blasters enough damage to make their speciality truly worthwhile in a team environment. (In part, I imagine, because giving any singular AT enough extra damage to constitute a bona-fide team specialty would also require either a revamp of buff/debuff stacking mechanics, or a wholesale increase to the difficulty of PvE encounters, or both.)

Instead, every other AT has steadily gained ground, damage-wise. No other AT has given up anything else of note in return. Hell, even the ATs that do have a genuine, worthwhile team speciality (support ATs) have been given damage bumps to allow them to solo better (Containment, Vigilance 2.0).

Now, finally, it's the Blaster's turn. If Blasters aren't to be given a true artillery specialist role, then the obvious answer is to make them better generalists. Even with the changes in I-24, I'd say Blasters are still a fair amount more squishy than any other AT (as a general rule, not counting the odd exception like, perhaps, Kinetics Defenders/Corrupters); I-24 Blasters are just less more-squishy than they were before.

The bottom line is that if you're going to have a game without enforced team roles, then you can't single out any particular AT as team-dependent. I grok that you like Blasters as a hardmode AT; it's understandable that you would enjoy the extra challenge or the seat-of-your-pants play style of the average Blaster build -- but you must realize that your arguing against Blaster buffs on the basis that you like weak Blasters isn't very compelling from a balance perspective, yes?

I'm not going to quote the whole thing, because it'd be silly to spam the thread when the post is just above mine -- but that's a dayumn fine post. Reminds me of the now-famous (to me) "damage exclusionists" speech given by Churchill in 1939. Oh wait, that wasn't Churchill. It sure does feel like Blasters have waited since 1939 to be given a purpose, though.

A ~30% nerf to Corrupter Rain of Fire? Oh, the rage would be epic.

Hopefully Drain Psyche will get nerfed at the edge-case high end, so that it can be buffed significantly for the general-case Blaster (low-to-mid-range builds with less recharge and DEF, and range-biased builds of all stripes).

Otherwise, the peak performance of a power that requires heavy IO investment and nearly full-time maintenance to exploit will have prevented Mental from receiving its due share of the I-24 Blaster buffs. It will have become a boutique set, the go-to choice for farmers but heavily sub-optimal for everyone else.

All of your bluster aside, you must realize that the AT isn't, nor should it be, balanced around multiple-billion-inf blapper builds. Regardless, I'm sure Arbiter Hawk will come to remember that even if you don't.

Ditto.

You can't evaluate Tankers without considering how they relate to Brutes and Scrappers. All three ATs are inter-related. What you consider a marked digression from the thread's topic is scarcely a digression at all.

And on the subject of digressions, it's worth pointing out that this thread is now on page 23 (under what my Control Panel assures me is the forum-default view; your mileage may vary). Most threads die long before they even reach page 2 or 3.

You can't, in other words, assume that on-topic discussion would continue apace in a very long thread but for the distraction of off-topic discussion. The most obvious alternative to off-topic chatter is, in fact, thread death. And if the thread dies, then on-topic discussion is finished regardless. So when you complain about off-topic chatter in a very long thread, your problem is either that of self-appointed forum moderator (bemoaning that off-topic chatter is misplaced) or you're making an unfounded and self-serving assumption (that your topic of choice is getting displaced). Regardless, there's a vague air of arrogance about the complaint.

TL;DR: Even if we stipulate that this thread has veered off-topic, most threads die long before they reach the prodigious length of this one, so why do you assume that your pet issue is infinitely interesting or discussable whereas others aren't?

Is the new recharge going to be 3 minutes exactly, as in 180 seconds -- or are you just approximating here for the sake of casual conversation? For some reason I thought the new recharge was going to be more like 220 seconds. Too tired to look now.

In any case, I'm with you. In order for me to consider a power usable on an every-spawn basis, the power has to recharge in (about) 30 seconds or less. Of course, that's largely a matter of preference/play style.

From my point of view, you're assuming your own conclusion here. I'm objecting to the Snipe change because it buffs single-target damage significantly, but also unevenly. You're now saying, as a rebuttal, that the single-target damage buff must be irrelevant because it's applied unevenly. So basically you're agreeing with my take on the particulars of the snipe change, but you're here arguing tirelessly that the snipe change is not important enough to talk about, because if it were important enough to talk about, the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.

If the difference between perma-fast Snipe and no fast snipe is, say, 15% extra single-target damage, you really think that the developers will not take fast snipes into account when they're evaluating the balance of the various snipe-capable power sets?

Again, you cannot take the developers' words over the developers' actions. It's meaningless to say that he only intended to increase the "fun," when the "fun" directly relies, at least in part, upon the mechanics. Presumably, all balance changes are made with the ultimate goal of increasing fun. By the way, did Arbiter Hawk explicitly say that the Snipe change isn't intended to be a single-target-damage buff?

If Arbiter Hawk boosted Blaster damage by some extreme amount, let's say 200% across the board, and his only commentary on the matter were that he planned to make Blasters more "fun," then would you be here insisting that the damage increase is irrelevant because it's not what he said he intended to do?

Yes, we are, because obviously anyone who insists that only AoE damage matters in a balance discussion isn't interested in having a balance discussion. Single-target damage may not upset the rewards/time apple cart, but there are more builds in the game that aren't AoE specialists than there are builds that are AoE specialists.

AoE is, in fact, too powerful across the board for too little downside, but that ship sailed years ago. Regardless, the development history of the game shows that single-target damage matters.

Ice Blast doesn't have access to a snipe.

Heh, well I'm sorry if this comes off as over-critical, but your idea sure would make Brutes distinct from Scrappers and Tankers -- and by "distinct," I mean substantially and unambiguously better. Brutes already have Scrapper-comparable defenses by default; to give them better defenses, without outside help, would be a massive buff to the AT as a whole animal.

If the Tankers in this thread felt threatened by what a Brute can do with copious team support, then any straight-faced developer support for your idea would set the Tanker forum ablaze with frothing-at-the-mouth hatred.

And although I can understand where you're coming from, although I get that you're trying to moderate the buff by nerfing Fury generation, the fact is that Brutes build for sustainability; even if it takes twice as long for them to get up to the effective Fury cap, they would get there, and they would stay there for prolonged periods. Or you could make Fury so freaking hard to generate that even the best of the best Brute builds have no hope of maintaining it, in which case all you will have accomplished is to make everyone, including Brutes, angry.

Anyway, I hope the above criticism of your idea isn't too harsh. At least you came at the issue from a novel direction, and you should be encouraged to keep thinking that way. Hopefully my criticism will head off (or attenuate) what might have been a much sharper emotional response from others. (Yeah, I'm naive, but then again it's questionable that many people are even still reading the thread, at this point.)

You are, of course, entitled to build and play your characters as you prefer. I wouldn't try to tell you you're wrong about something that's entirely subjective; hell, I won't be taking the snipe on at least one of my snipe-capable characters either.

But the tier 3 attack and the snipe aren't mutually exclusive options. We cannot, for the purpose of evaluating balance, pretend that the newly ranged-boosted tier 3s replace (or render moot) fast snipes, because many builds can and will make good use of both.

Another way to look at it is that the developers have effectively given snipe-capable builds (uneven) access to what is potentially a second, supplemental tier 3 attack power.

Look, Aura, I'm really not interested in making an emotional argument about whether or not we can trust the developers to be truthful. To say that the devs are lying is a personal attack, and one I'd never make.

It is, however, demonstrably and irrefutably true that what the developers say isn't always synonymous with what the developers do. Or perhaps more accurately, what the players assume from developer statements doesn't always turn out to reflect what the developers ultimately do. Plans change, and statements can be misinterpreted (or miscommunicated).

The snipe change buffs single-target damage. Full stop. You cannot argue that a major buff to a high-damage single-target attack isn't designed to be a buff to single-target damage. It's questionable whether the developers even could change snipes such that they're more fun without also buffing the relevant builds' single-target-damage capability. And that's part of the problem with the quirkiness of the new snipe mechanics; if players are to view fast snipe as a worthwhile reward for the inconvenience required to make use of it, then the buff to snipes must represent a non-trivial mechanical boost to performance, which means that future balance evaluations must take the snipe (quirky conditionals and all) into account.

I suppose the devs could add to snipes something wholly different from damage to make them more appealing -- perhaps an area-of-effect control to go along the same thematic lines as the fear that is (or used to be) attached to Assassin's Strike -- but it is undeniable that the currently proposed snipe buff boosts single-target damage.

Whether the snipe buff ultimately turns out to be the only single-target-damage buff to the relevant sets is an open question, and a different question. But please, can we lay to rest the absurd canard that the design of fast snipes is purely to increase "fun," and that therefore the obvious design implications of the change have absolutely no relevance?

For everyone, to a greater or lesser degree. The game is currently balanced around toggles costing endurance, so if (most) toggles were suddenly made free tomorrow, something else would have to give -- whether it's the cost of attacks or the magnitude of the recovery bonuses available.

Or to put it another way:

Yeah, probably the most end-intensive character I've played for any length of time is an Ice/Storm Controller -- and I do manage her most expensive toggles situationally. (That is, Hurricane and Arctic Air needn't be on full-time, for example. Hurricane is barely used at all these days, in fact, but spamming Tornado/Freezing Rain/Lightning Storm gets pricey.)

Still, we can agree with Starsman's point in principle without stipulating that his resulting conclusion is totally accurate. I think it's fair to say that melee characters can kneecap themselves at the low end by spending too much of their endurance on toggles -- which incidentally is why I always prioritize attack power picks over passives over toggles on a lower-level melee build. But I don't think it's necessarily true that as a matter of AT design, melee archetypes are intrinsically more endurance-limited than ranged ATs.

In any case, if toggle costs were to be reduced near to zero, various other costs would have to be adjusted to compensate.

Good point, but sacrifice bunting is clearly overrated.

This is just a wording disconnect. If you have a hat, with every AT's name inside, mixed up on tiny little pieces of paper -- and you pull from that hat any AT's name, you should be able to compare a Blaster with that AT and find clear advantages for the Blaster. You should be able to repeat that process (draw a name and compare) until the hat is empty.

But yes, you're probably right that I didn't phrase that clearly; obviously the most relevant analogues to Blasters are Scrappers, Brutes, and Dominators. If Blasters are balanced against that sub-group of ATs, then they'll be balanced against all ATs, outliers in other sub-groups notwithstanding.

Well, like you said, it's a tricky issue. Blasters don't get uniform access to melee attacks, and the attacks to which they do have access vary from spectacular to lame. You could choose to do a balance pass on Blaster melee attacks to help Blappers, but it seems more efficient to buff ranged sets because those affect everyone (ranged Blasters, Blappers, Defenders, Corruptors, to a lesser extent Dominators).

The devs really dropped the ball at the beginning, by failing to take into account activation time. There's a limit to how many attacks you can realistically use, and so there's a diminished return on the offensive benefit blappers can derive -- unless, of course, the developers buff Blaster melee attacks to absolutely preposterous levels, in which case a new problem arises: the blaster's whole secondary set, and arguably the source of the damage advantage that gives the Blaster purpose, can be effectively nullified by the circumstances. (Like that AV encounter you mentioned.)

Some of those powers (AAO, FE) are the equivalent of a Blaster using Build Up from his secondary. For the purpose of this conversation, we don't consider a pure-ranged Blaster who uses Build Up to be "using attacks from his secondary." Or I don't, anyway. Do you? If Build Up is off the table for the purpose of comparing ranged Blaster offense to Scrapper offense, then the ranged Blaster is even more screwed.

The fact that AAO/FE are perhaps better than Build Up doesn't mean that they should be considered as a class apart. Damage Auras? Yeah, they're directly analogous to damage auras in Blaster secondaries, except that damage auras are intrinsically more useful to ATs with high defenses and with mez protection.

To clarify: When I commented on the Pylon thread, I was ignoring support-build outliers. Regen debuffs are equivalent to DPS in a long-term solo fight, but their value isn't fixed; it scales with the HP and regeneration of the target. And if you're in a team that's already capable of flooring the target's regen, your regen debuff is pointless.

At the risk of invoking an appeal to authority, I'm just going to post a link (concerning the potency of Blaster melee attacks) and invite you to read it. I've been over this Blaster debate here til I'm blue in the face and I have no expectation that I can describe the matter better than Arcanaville:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=162

Notice for amusement's sake that she's replying to an assertion, by me, that's very similar to your objection above. The following links might also be of interest, with respect to the general AT-balance debate here:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=141

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...&postcount=195

(It's also worth disclaiming that my quoting A-Ville here isn't an attempt to argue that she necessarily agrees with my position in this particular thread; I'm just using her posts as a convenient summary of some of the more generalized Blaster issues that keep coming up tangentially.)

DPS is raw damage; it's just raw damage averaged over time. Although it's true that an extremely long-term fight like a Pylon (or I should say formerly long-term, because the addition of Incarnates has made the fight pretty short for a lot of builds in that thread) doesn't exactly reflect a build's short-term damage potential, it's also true that there is a correlation between short and long term damage potential.

To use an over-simplified example, unless you're talking about jousting, there's no inherent advantage to a single 3 second attack dealing 1,000 damage, as compared to a pair of chainable, 1.5 second attacks dealing 500 each. Both approaches do the same DPS, but both approaches also do the same burst damage. In any case, I often hear the objection that DPS is overrated as a balance metric -- and I agree with that, in principle. But in this particular instance, I have to ask: Ok, so DPS isn't everything, but is there any particular reason that Blasters shouldn't have great DPS? Are we simply to discard a whole huge chunk of the quantitative analysis we have on the subject of single-target damage and declare that Blaster damage is unconditionally elite based on anecdotes?

Yes, the design is screwy. No, that doesn't mean that ranged attack sets should be penalized versus melee sets. Personally and given the limitations of the design, I think that Blasters should get a supplementary damage boost for using melee attacks, but given their lack of other advantages, a pure-ranged Blaster should still be as good or better than a given Scrapper, all other build considerations being equal (IOs, Incarnates, etc).

After all, the Scrapper has an undeniable advantage from his secondary (defenses). As things stand now, the Blaster needs both Primary and Secondary to be competitive with the Scrapper's offense. If there's to be an equitable balance between the two ATs, then they should start in the same vicinity, damage-wise, if both use only their Primary sets, and Blasters should have a marked advantage if they use their Secondary to boost their offense.

In other words, the Scrapper is given defenses in his secondary set to compensate him for having to fight in melee range. The Blaster is given inferior ranged (single-target) damage from his primary, on average, to compensate for the Blaster's ranged advantage. So a ranged Blaster is penalized twice for the same asset (range). A Blapper has to turn the whole comparison on its head by giving up that asset, in which case the Scrapper is still ahead by virtue of having huge honking defenses, which were given to him in return for the very disadvantage that the Blapper has now assumed by closing to melee.

And incidentally, an improvement to ranged blast sets will also naturally improve Blapper DPS. This isn't a zero-sum game; even the most stubbornly melee-biased Blapper will tend to use at least one, probably two, ranged attacks in his attack chain.

1. Yes, the main problem with Blasters, as I see it, stems from an inequity in the design of ranged sets. I have never denied that. All I'm asking for is that those ranged sets be buffed equally for the relevant ATs. Since Blasters rely on attacks moreso than other ATs, they would naturally benefit more from generalized blast-set changes.

2. Def/Corr do have other tools, tools that make them better ATs in general than Blasters are. Those tools just aren't necessarily attacks.

The AT's capabilities are wanting. How or whether you personally choose to use those capabilities is irrelevant in a balance discussion. I offered two possibilities for buffage. The first option is higher survivability (above and beyond the relatively modest survivability boosts that have been proposed so far; and keep in mind that supplemental survivability buffs could take the form of proactive measures like control). The second option is higher damage. (And that's higher average damage, by the way; it's not necessarily an invitation to buff Fire Blast into the stratosphere and leave Electric gimpy by comparison.)

I'm not married to any particular solution, believe it or not. You can pick one or the other, but unless you wish to argue that Blasters are well-balanced in the grand scheme of things (which would be fine, but I'm not interested in having that debate here), you can't say neither.

As a point of interest, though: is your experience with blasters limited to any particular primary sets?

Except that fast snipes do offer more damage, specifically more single-target damage. And at least theoretically, the boost is significant, which means that the developers have to take it into account when they look at rebalancing snipe-capable blast sets. Check out the following link:

Breakdown of Blaster i24 Performance

The snipes are important, whether we want them to be or not. I keep saying this, and it keeps getting missed or misunderstood or misinterpreted: I don't want the snipe buff to be the end-all be-all single-target damage buff, but I'm concerned that the developers will treat it as such.

I couldn't agree with you more in your assessment of snipes. The very reason I'm annoyed is that I feel like the developers are using the quirky fast-snipe mechanic to make an end run around the issues that are important. If the snipes need to be more attractive on their own merits, then that's bleeping dandy, but we've played the game for eight years, most of us, just fine without using Snipes at all. Why the devs would decide suddenly to tie long-awaited blast-set buffs to a power very few of us care about, and in any case a power that is only tenuously relevant to the question of generic-combat performance -- and then tie a quirky conditional trigger to the power that arbitrarily favors certain builds' use of it -- is freaking beyond me.

But I'm sure that my above commentary will simply be construed as an expression of myopic prejudice against improvements for snipes.

If the AT's specialty is damage, and the AT pays demonstrable and significant penalties for that supposed status, then shouldn't the AT be great at both single-target and AoE damage?

Exactly my point.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

I see your point, but it strikes me as semantic objection rather than a substantive one. When discussing balance, if you (or I) say something like, "middle of the pack," you needn't be referencing a strict heirarchy of ATs, from least to best. In other words, and although I think it's clear that Blasters are on the bottom, I can't assign strict numerical ranks to every AT on the list, and that's a good thing; balance should dictate that the various options aren't so cut-and-dried. The balance heirarchy is, and should be, more like a milling crowd than a leader board; all or most of its constituents should be occupying more or less the same space, with this-or-that AT perhaps having a small advantage at any given time.

So bringing Blasters up to the "middle of the pack" doesn't even necessarily mean that they'll be obviously and holistically better than any other AT. It just means that they should be in the same general area occupying the middle of the range, with clear areas of strength and clear areas of weakness relative to their peers.

The last statement means that if you pick any AT out of a hat, no matter how strong or weak, you should be able to compare it to a Blaster and find that the Blaster has a clear advantage somewhere. Because of the underlying design, it's most likely that that advantage should be damage.

And without comparing numbers, I'm just going to go ahead and disagree with your assertion about Scrappers. It is my experience that the average single-target damage of Blasters is heavily overrated both on the forum and in the game. And yes, I also mean that blast-set DPS should be competitive, all else being equal, with melee-set damage. Ranged attackers have been saddled with too many disadvantages for too long. In the case of Blasters specifically, you should be able to pick any powersets and make of them a ranged build capable of putting out elite DPS.

I know you're big into Blappers, and therefore you're unlikely to agree with me here, but think of it this way: melee ATs have one attack set, from which they derive all of their offensive clout (with some small exceptions like damage auras or Burn). Why shouldn't a Blaster (or any other blast-set AT) be able to achieve to do the same thing with just their ranged attack set? Why should the presumption be that Blasters, if they're capable of competing with a given Scrapper at all, should have to use two attack sets to the Scrapper's one? Are we simply to ignore that the Scrapper's Secondary gives him many times the survivability of the Blaster? In any case, the Rikti Pylon thread in the Scrapper forum demonstrates quite well that even the best Blaster builds, using optimized attack chains combining Primary and Secondary powers, are only in the conversation for best single-target damage. They're not the winners, not even by a slight margin.

No, I don't care about snipes in particular; that's been my problem from the very beginning. Based on what we know now, it seems like the snipe is being used as the catch-all single-target DPS buff for blast sets that have access to a snipe.

And that would be fine, if it were a consistently applicable and evenly distributed bonus, or if it were clear that the snipe boost won't stand in the way of other changes to various sets that need attention. But the snipe change fails the first test, and the jury's out as to whether it will fail the second, and if so, for how long.

The fact that the devs appear to be making Spines' animations faster to improve its single-target damage only reinforces my current suspicion. There was actually a comment in the Scrapper forum last night that made me laugh when it shouldn't have: someone noted that Spines would probably get a 0.83 second attack to match Shadow Punch and Storm Kick. Do blast sets have any attacks that fast? Nope. And you know what else? If blast sets did have an attack that fast, it might actually be a detriment to the design of those sets at the low end, because unlike melee sets, ranged sets aren't necessarily given the tools to form a seamless single-target attack chain with generic enhancements.

It's interesting that Spines, which has always been regarded as a great AoE and bad single-target Scrapper set, is getting single-target buffage, but when I bring up single-target damage for Blasters, I'm told I'm short-sighted because all that matters is AoE.

(That last is not directed at Strato; it's just a general observation.)

I have considered the other buffs to Blasters and blast sets that I know about. I think the misunderstanding is that I'm separating the buffs into categories -- survivability, AoE, and single-target damage. Or perhaps the misunderstanding stems from a difference in our expectations: I don't account for the prospect of buffs that haven't been announced yet. I can only evaluate what's in front of me; I'm not going to accept the argument that I should shut up because the devs might do something more, later, that renders my complaints moot.

(That last statement was not directed to you in particular, but I see the sentiment a lot: "Just wait! I-24 could change based on our feedback in BETA," or, "Arbiter Hawk could be working on any number of things that make you look stupid in retrospect!" All of that is true, but it's not relevant to a discussion that is taking place right now, except to the extent that our feedback could also change things before BETA. )

Yes, this is a matter on which we have an irreconcilable difference. You either disagree with the premise that Blasters are worst off now, or you believe (seemingly) that the sum total of the I-24 changes, other than or in addition to the Snipe change, will be enough to bring Blasters back into the middle of the pack, balance-wise.

I consider the first position obviously false; it's not even worth debating here. And based on what we know at this moment, I consider the second position false. A regen/absorb buff of roughly Energize's strength is not enough to raise Blaster survivability to the point at which Blasters have an equitable arrangement, relative to their damage-dealing peers (Scrappers, Brutes, Dominators), with respect to the ratio of damage to survivability.

And since I doubt very much that the devs have any interest in giving Blasters significantly more survivability than they've already hinted, the obvious solution is to buff Blaster damage. Not by a huge amount, but by enough that the worst Blaster's single-target damage is at least on par with the average of a hat-picked other AT's.

The nuke change is great, but it's not enough on its own to address the offensive side of the equation. It's strictly an AoE damage buff. So what's left, as far as we know right now? The snipe buff, and a few as-yet-undescribed tweaks to blast sets that don't have a snipe.

That last sentence is the critical point here. If the snipe buff is being used as the catch-all single-target buff to every set that has a snipe, then it is idiotic to make the buff conditional or uneven. Keep in mind here that I'm talking about blast sets here, and not just Blasters; Cosmic Burst's activation time is just as bad on a Defender as it is on a Blaster. Cosmic Burst matters more to the Blaster, but that's incidental.

Oh, and to address your prediction in the quote above -- Blasters should be unequivocally better soloists than support ATs, because support ATs are the best at teaming. Blasters are currently mediocre in both categories. They should be at least in the same soloist league, generally, with Scrappers/Brutes/Dominators.

I'm a big fan of Arbiter Hawk, but if he truly doesn't think that Blasters are designed from the ground up to be the premiere damage dealers in the game, then he doesn't know what he's talking about. If he plans to give Blasters Scrapper-comparable (or even just Scrapper-analogous) defenses, or Dominator-comparable control powers, then that's great, but unless he does plan to do those things, the balance of the game demands that Blasters be the best damage dealers, even if it's only by a margin of 5% or 10% above the next-best competitor.

We can accept that there will never be a 1-to-1 relationship in the cross-AT ratios of damage and survivability; for instance, if a Tanker is (conservatively) 10 times more survivable than a Blaster, no one would honestly expect that a Tanker should do 1/10th of the Blaster's damage -- but come on. We have ATs running around that are several times more survivable with the same or a very similar damage potential. In some cases, those other ATs have better damage.

There should be some advantage for the squishiest damage dealer, by far.

Look, this isn't important, but you shouldn't have to dig through all of your posts. Just reread my post and look at the last two quote boxes. Read the bolded sections. My word-game snark doesn't deserve all of this attention, but rest assured that I was not using other people's quotes against you.

See previous reply.

Fair enough. Perhaps I read too much into that comment.

See, that's the thing: we're talking past each other, and have been for awhile. You've asserted (or at least implied, and perhaps understandably) that I think the snipe buff will overpower Corruptors, at least relative to Blasters. And then when I've responded to clarify my position, you (perhaps understandably) assume that I'm accusing you of advocating for Corruptors or some such. It's all downhill from there.

As threads like this one go on and on and on, they inevitably devolve into increasingly frustrated repetitions of the same positions, which leads to increasingly wide-ranging analogies and digressions, which lead to distortions because the various participants lose track of the various sub-threads of discussion. For example, I might make an offhanded comment about Freezing Rain in response to one particular argument, and then pages later someone might attack me because they only have a vague recollection of my mentioning Freezing Rain, and they (perhaps understandably) assume that I had an agenda in mentioning it.

And keep in mind, I'm as guilty as anyone of falling victim to the above-described trap. I've participated so actively here in part to pass the time, and in part because the subject interests me -- but, despite appearances, I'm really not interested in fighting a rhetorical war. No grudges, etc.

All of that said, and at the risk of inviting further controversy, I have no interest in discussing the overall power of support ATs, and I have no agenda for or against any potential balance changes to Corrupters (or Defenders). I believe the support ATs should receive any blast-set buffs that are applied to other ATs that have access to blast sets. I also believe that Corruptors are in a better place than Blasters generally, but that comment is a digression, and it has very little to do with Corruptors, per se; Blasters have been in (or tied for) last place on the balance food chain for pretty much forever.

To the extent that support ATs are relevant in this discussion at all, it is only because they are getting a larger relative boost, if they choose to take advantage of it, from the proposed fast-snipe mechanic. There is a fundamental difference between my saying that Corruptors get a bigger relative boost from one specific balance change, and my saying that the snipe change will make Corruptors vastly more powerful on the whole. As noted previously, I believe that blast sets are in need of boosting for all ATs that have them. And if blast sets are boosted equally, Blasters will naturally (and rightfully) benefit most, because they have fewer advantages apart from their attacks.

That is the extent of my pro-Blaster bias for the purpose of this discussion. In my view, Blasters also deserve survivability buffs -- and they're getting survivability buffs specific to them -- but as far as offensive buffs are concerned, I'm not asking for affirmatively Blaster-biased adjustments; I'm asking for across-the-board buffs to blast sets, because the reason that Blaster offense is not as high as it should be is that the developers have been historically biased against ranged offense, in general. The fact that other blast-set users (primarily Defenders/Corruptors, and to a lesser extent Dominators) have been better insulated against that design flaw is merely incidental.

If the developers also wanted to throw in a small boost to Blaster offense specifically, then I wouldn't object, but I'm not holding my breath. To date, and as far as I know, the only supplemental single-target-damage changes the devs have mentioned are to blast sets (Dual Pistols, possibly Ice) that don't have snipes, which leads me to believe that this convoluted context-dependent snipe change will prevent many blast sets from receiving the attention they deserve.

Now I understand that I will never get you to agree on the snipe change. We have a fundamental difference there, but I wanted to go on (rambling) record here that all the rest of this stuff is just noise. It is entirely possible that I have miscommunicated all of the above in the past, and I do not blame you for misinterpreting any of it.

Heh, don't get me wrong; I'm glad for the reassurance.

As I understand it, the AoE factor counts area, not targets. I also vaguely remember some commentary about the cone formula having been screwy; the number having been designed for degrees but the game having been set up to use radians (oops!).

Anyway, it sounds like it'll be a good change. Perhaps more complicated, but fairer to slower attackers. I've wondered pretty much since Issue 9 introduced slottable procs whether or not the developers would normalize proc rate.