Obitus

I'm ashamed to say I made this very mistake on the first draft of my I-24 Blaster build. But! I have an excuse; I hadn't used Mids in a few months. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Heh. To clarify, Arcanaville created the crawl; I just turned it into a gif when she observed that people are generally too lazy to click on links.

* - And I include myself, by the way, in the too-lazy camp.

Yeah, pretty much. Seems like the very opposite of a quality-of-life buff; the snipe change is a quantitative, or if you prefer, a purely mechanical boost that requires special circumstances and/or build synergies to leverage. If you can leverage it full-time, then sure, it becomes a QoL improvement, but as an improvement to snipes as a whole class? It's an incentive to jump through hoops, an invitation to inconvenience.

So the question becomes whether it's worth the effort to jump through the hoops, and if it is worth the effort, then clearly the resultant boost to your single-target damage must be significant.

The problem is that those two concepts are inseparable. If the snipe change is to be a conditional buff requiring special effort to leverage, then the magnitude of the damage improvement must be large enough for the effort to be worthwhile. But if it's too large a damage buff, then it might get in the way of more generalized improvements that are otherwise justified. That's a difficult line to walk.

Nukes were sorta the same way for a long time. In order for Nukes to be worth the crash for a large portion of the player base, they would have had to be increased to absurd levels of damage. So the devs took the sensible opposite approach, removing the crash instead of raising the damage.

Drain Psyche is another good example. The devs have said that Drain Psyche in its present form is too powerful at the high end, but they've expressed a reluctance to change it (presumably due to potential player outcry) even in I-24, when all other Blaster secondaries are slated to receive a consistent survivability boost. So people who use Drain Psyche to its fullest will be happy, but everyone else -- the people who aren't interested in blapping, or don't farm large-spawn maps -- end up losing out. In the case of Drain Psyche, its high peak performance (as far as we know at this moment) stands in the way of an improvement at the lower end. Hopefully that situation will change as I-24 goes into Beta testing.

I expect blast sets to be improved as blast sets, not improved more or less for this-or-that AT unless there's a clear reason for the disparity. I also believe that Blasters are in a far worse position than support ATs are, balance-wise. Do you disagree with that?

It sure sounds like you do, what with your accusation that I want Blasters to have all the toys (as if Blasters already have more "toys" than support ATs). If you don't think that Blasters are worse off than support ATs; if, as you imply, you think that support ATs are worse off than Blasters, then we have an irreconcilable difference.

Thanks. I missed the part about the UI. I don't agree with all of his reasoning, but I appreciate your finding the quote for me.

Although it makes a certain amount of abstract sense that the snipe would become less cumbersome in a team setting, I'm still left to wonder why the less cumbersome version should be usable on a permanent basis for some ATs and not others.

Fair enough.

Yes, an unsupportable and irrelevant ad hominem. Do I preface my disagreements by saying that I think you're intellectually compromised? No, because it's enough simply to say why I disagree. That is the basis of rational argument.

So you agree with me in broad terms.

Then why set the ToHit barrier at 22%? Why not 10% or 50% or 70%? Why is it an amount that's just barely attainable by every Defender and Corrupter with investment in a particular power pool, and an amount that's unattainable to just about every Blaster build except on a temporary basis?

Either you think the fast-snipe mechanic was targeted (in part) at support ATs, or you believe that the developers didn't think it through. Either explanation is possible, but not both.

It's only a problem if Defenders/Corrupters can beat Blaster damage by leaps and bounds???

Blaster damage output should be compared with Scrappers, Brutes, and Dominators (and possibly VEATs), and Blaster damage should be unambiguously better than all of those ATs'. If there's even a hint of a ghost of a question about Defenders and Corrupters competing favorably with Blasters, then Blasters have a dire need of improvement.

What makes you think I'm not concerned about non-Snipe sets? That is exactly part of the problem here: the snipe change is so conditional, so reliant on varying build exigencies, that you can't possibly nail down a sensible compensation for non-snipe sets. The fact that the snipe change is uneven across ATs only compounds that problem.

The truth is that the conditional nature of the buff, if it is intended to be a major single-target-damage buff, is unfair to everyone involved, even Defenders and Corrupters. If the buff is supposed to represent a marked improvement to blast sets' single-target DPS, then it will potentially stand in the way of a more generalized improvements, improvements that would apply to builds that cannot (for whatever reason) leverage insta-snipe consistently or even regularly. For example, if the insta-snipe mechanic is supposed to give Devices a justified extra boost, then that's great -- but what about Devices characters without a snipe? I guess they're just SOL.

But Corrupters/Defenders still have an advantage with respect to leveraging that insta snipes. And I don't understand why.

The point is that a ranged attack posture was designed, from day one, to be intrinsically inferior to a melee attack posture. Perhaps aspects of that design were unintentional (we all know that activation times weren't on the original devs' radar, for instance), but the design speaks clearly for itself.

If the presumption is that melee attacks are riskier by definition, then it is reasonable to assume that melee ATs were given their defenses as compensation. The design history of the game supports that theory; for example, all of the talk that, say, Unyielding Stance (from Invulnerability) was required for Scrappers and Tanks to do their job ultimately resulted in the developers changing Unyielding to a permanently sustainable and essentially no-strings-attached power.

And if the melee ATs were given their defenses as compensation for their having to close to melee range, the obvious corollary is that ranged ATs have been deprived of personal defenses for the very same reason. Obviously, most ranged builds have access to various defensive measures (usually proactive ones, like controls and debuffs), and obviously, the IO system gives ranged ATs access to high levels of personal mitigation -- but the over-arching design of ATs is pretty eloquent on the subject of range-as-defense.

Blasters were given melee attacks because they were supposed to be the paragons of damage dealing, and therefore it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd have a surfeit of attack powers.

But the main issue is that it's taken 8 years just to get the developers to admit that having Blasters attack consistently from 80 feet isn't a balance problem. Even though there was no good reason to believe that it would be a balance problem. So melee ATs were compensated twice for their supposed range disadvantage; they were given better pound-for-pound attack sets, and they were given defenses, and they were given (near-)comprehensive status protection.

I could easily accept the idea that melee ATs deserve better offensive sets (all else being equal -- damage scalars and whatnot). I could also easily accept the idea that ranged ATs shouldn't have defenses and mez protection. Both is a little much to stomach, though. But hey, it looks like we're slowly coming out of the dark ages.

See my response to Leo.

That's a very convincing rebuttal to an argument I never made. Here, let me bold the part you obviously missed:

Obviously, you must think I'm a giant FREAKING IDIOT, if you really believe that I would argue that players should never have to adjust in combat. The point here is that, short of monitoring your ToHit bonus constantly in the power attributes' window, there's no obvious way of knowing whether your snipe will be fast-cast or slow. The very functionality of the power can vary dramatically based on circumstances that are not only beyond the player's control, but that are also arbitrary and unintuitive.

(The difference between ToHit and Accuracy probably isn't even clearly understood by a large proportion of the player base).

I stand by my position that the snipe change as currently constituted is unnecessarily punitive from a qualitative standpoint. Feel free to disagree with that; qualitative issues are, after all, largely subjective -- but don't act like a gratuitous and externally-dependent qualitative change to an AT that has existed since launch is even remotely comparable to the pre-existing qualitative quirks of sets that were designed around context-dependent mechanics. You wanna know what Blasters' inherent situational awareness involves? Surviving.
So you reshuffle a few slots. Oh well. Lost in all of this is that fact that, even if Blasters were given Defender-equivalent access to perma-fast Snipes, the Blasters would incur a much greater average build cost, given that fewer of them are prone to take Tactics in the first place.

(And no, by the way, a Defender doesn't have to overslot Tactics and slot Kismet. Defender Tactics has a base value of 12.5%. At the ED soft cap, that corresponds to a +ToHit value of roughly 19%. Add 6% from Kismet, and you're well over the 22% barrier-to-entry for perma-fast Snipes. Corrupters on the other hand, do have to mildly overslot Tactics.)

Irrelevant, but thanks for sharing. I'm over-dramatic? Interesting you'd say that, after you said the following:

Personal attacks? Check. Melodrama? Check. Physician, heal thyself.

So on the one hand, I'm clouded by unreasoning bias because I think the Snipe changes should take into account the over-arching balance of the ATs in question -- but on the other hand, you're arguing that Defenders and Corrupters deserve perma-fast snipe more than Blasters because Blasters already have more high damage attacks.

Self-contradiction. For the record, I think the Snipe change -- really, any change that goes across ATs -- should be presumed by default to give even benefit to those ATs. If the idea is to buff the power sets, after all, then it should buff those power sets evenly.

But if there are extenuating circumstances, then obviously any balance change should take those circumstances into account. What I object to in this instance is the idea that Defenders and Corrupters deserve a bigger buff from Snipes than Blasters do, not because I believe it's impossible that Defenders and Corrupters need more damage, but because the reasoning for rationing the buff to Blasters isn't obvious to me.

You appear to be of the opinion that Blasters do enough damage as it is, and that therefore any damage buff that is proliferated to damage sets in general must be reduced (or packaged with qualifiers) for Blasters. If so, then fine; I'm not really interested in rehashing all of the obvious reasons that Blasters are the traditional red-headed step child of CoH. I've done that enough in this thread.

1. I have not repeatedly said what you quoted. I said it once.
2. You made a similarly absurd statement in the other direction, but I didn't use it as an excuse to harp on your credibility per se; in fact I used it as an illustration of how unproductive such discussion is.
3. The Snipe change is illustrative of the problems that Blasters face. It also happens to be the most obvious subject around which to discuss Blaster issues right now.

Because I keep mentioning the snipe buff, it doesn't follow that I require the Blaster to benefit as much or more from the snipe buff as other ATs do. It is not inconsistent to object to the snipe buff given the surrounding context as we currently understand it, while at the same time acknowledging that a hypothetical, supplemental buff might moot my objections.

If you're convinced that I'm biased, then feel free to demonstrate through argumentation that my position is irrational. It is an ad hominem -- a distraction from the discussion at hand -- to continually harp on my bias as such. Incidentally, it also makes you sound patronizing. As the saying goes, "Show, don't tell."

No, it is only given your fixation with personal bias that the above-quoted paragraph even begins to make sense. A balance change must be rationally defensible on its own merits. More specifically, if a balance change is designed to improve sets or powers, across ATs, then there must be a solid rationale for deliberately applying that improvement unevenly. Simply pointing out that the balance change isn't aimed at Blasters is pointless; the question is why the balance change appears to be aimed at support ATs.

Allow me to remind you how this entire line of discussion started: Eldagore popped into the thread and had absolutely nothing else to say in his first post, except that we were all idiots for failing to understand that the snipe change isn't aimed specifically at improving Blasters. Which, apart from his tone, would be a fine point to make in combination with an argument justifying the snipe proposal, but no such argument appeared in his original screed. My only point is that his original post assumed its own conclusion, justifying a proposed balance change on the basis that the developers proposed it.

Nevermind that the change isn't even in open beta yet; nevermind that the change -- and the underlying reasoning for it, whatever that reasoning may be -- presumably isn't set in stone.

No, I believe that Blasters need a buff the most, not necessarily that they need to benefit most from the snipe change. That is a critical distinction. No one, that I'm aware, has gone to any effort to argue that Defenders and Corrupters should benefit less than Blasters from the snipe change, per se. Everyone who objects, as far as I can see, is objecting to the fact that Defenders/Corrupters benefit more than Blasters.

I'm sure you can play word games to make it look like someone is actively promoting the idea that Blasters should benefit more from the snipe changes specifically, but you and I both know that isn't the issue at hand.

I suppose we should wait another eight years for an engraved invitation to discuss Blaster issues, rather than bringing up the issue in the midst of a discussion about a Blaster-relevant balance adjustment set to occur in the same patch with a long-awaited Blaster balance pass?

This is sophistry. The developers went out of their way to make sure that the power remained situational for Blasters, but not for Corrupters and Defenders. In other words, the devs went out of their way to place a conditional limit on the Blaster's portion of the generalized buff. In other words, the devs went out of their way to moderate the buff for Blasters.

Why did the developers do that? We don't know at the moment. The explanation could be as innocent as you seem to believe. Then again, the explanation might echo the historical trend -- which is that the developers are typically possessed of an irrational fear of unconditional buffs for Blasters.

Now! On to brighter talk: Roy will pitch at least 8 innings tonight, and he will give up no more than 1 run. So it is written.

It depends on how often you plan to use the proc-enhanced powers. And after the procs-per-minute change goes through, the matter will be further complicated, because long-recharge powers will theoretically give you as much as a 90% proc rate.

In a pseudo-pet powers like Oil Slick, the proc should have a chance to fire once for every 10 seconds that the power is active, on each target affected.

But yeah, basically it boils down to how dedicated you are to -RES debuffage. There are diminished returns on adding extra Achilles' Heel procs, but if all you care about is maximizing RES, then it doesn't hurt to have more procs. On the other hand, your Achilles' Heel debuffs will not stack with your teammates' Achilles' Heel debuffs, so if your goal is team support, I'd question the decision to sell out on AH procs.

From a qualitative standpoint, the idea that anyone should have to alter their single-target attack cycle on the fly based on something as volatile (and opaque) as external ToHit buffs (or debuffs) is -- well let's just say it's less than attractive. There is virtually no precedent for such developer-enforced convolutions; you might be capable of a better attack chain with Speed Boost, for example, but your attacks function the same way regardless of your team's recharge buffs, whereas a Blaster who accidentally activates a slow snipe when he intended to activate a fast one -- well he ends up losing DPS, which is his presumed specialty, because he has to cancel the lengthy animation or get interrupted by his opponents.

And as far as Inspirations go, Blasters are already the most Inspiration-dependent (and support-dependent) AT in the game. To say that we can use yellows to achieve fast snipes on a temporary basis is technically true, but it's also extraordinarily unconvincing.

Ironically, the Dominator -- which generally cannot achieve fast snipes even on a temporary basis unless s/he makes huge build sacrifices (to take the generally sub-optimal Psionic Mastery APP) -- is a bigger winner than the Blaster. For the Dominator, there is no middle ground; you either skip the snipe entirely, which is fine because Dominators are already preposterously strong as it is, or you sell out to make the Snipe work consistently (or you take the Snipe as a set mule, and basically ignore the power otherwise). If we needed a clearer example as to why Blasters shouldn't be given heavily context-dependent buffs, this is it in a nutshell: like the computer in War Games, the Dominator understands that he wins the snipe sweepstakes by refusing to play in the first place.

The above quote, by the way, is exactly the opposite of the truth: by investing billions, I can craft a Blaster build that reduces the downtime on my Aim/BU cycle down to 5 or 6 seconds. By investing billions and using my imagination, I can do that while maintaining my previous levels of IO-conferred defense too. IO Snipe sets are, in fact, quite attractive in their own right; if I'm trying to wring every set bonus I can out of a build, then a Snipe becomes fairly attractive just as a mule, before we even consider the utility of the power itself.

Through a combination of expensive IOs and Incarnate powers, I can benefit quite well, thank you very much, from the snipe change on a non-Devices (and non-EM) Blaster. It'll be annoying to maintain BU and Aim religiously just to use a relatively consistent ST attack chain -- but in principle, I can work around the limitations of the snipe change on a heavily IOed Blaster.

What I can't do is justify the power and slot investment in a Snipe for an SO Blaster build, and certainly not for an SO Blaster build that isn't yet in the high level range.

It is on the low end that blast sets are weakest. Without IO-enhanced recharge, it is not a given that a blast set can even construct a seamless single-target attack chain (sans perma-fast Snipe), whereas melee sets usually achieve that goal by the 20s at the very latest. That is just one of the arbitrary disadvantages with which blast sets have been saddled since the launch of the game, and Blasters have been most heavily penalized by that design flaw. Instead of making a ranged attack posture competitive, the devs have repeatedly contradicted themselves, insisting on the one hand that range is a defense comparable to melee-AT defensive power sets, but insisting on the other hand that ranged ATs should be required to use supplemental (usually melee) attacks to flesh out their attack chains.

(Support ATs obviously don't have secondary-set attacks, but they have other powers to activate during lulls in their attack strings. Still, it's telling that the best damage buff in the game, Fulcrum Shift, is melee-slanted -- both requiring a squishy support AT to incur extra risk to leverage on his own, and naturally benefiting melee ATs most in teams.)

Hell, tier 3 blasts originally had a range of twenty feet. Then they were upgraded to forty feet. Now, finally, eight years later, the devs are increasing the range to the standard eighty feet. They finally admit that a ranged attacker shouldn't have to incur extra risk just to use their best single-target ranged attack.

In any case, historical grievances aside -- support ATs can have perma-fast snipes with just one IO (Kismet). This isn't a matter of haves-versus-have nots.

Tactics is not an off-the-wall power pick for a Defender or a Corrupter. Support ATs have the best scalars in the game for the Leadership pool, after all. With the possible exception of VEATs, support ATs are the most likely to have already selected Tactics, or at least to have already bought into the Leadership pool.

Or maybe your point is that Defenders will have to give up a more worthwhile power pick to select their snipe? That is probably true, but it's only true because support ATs generally have a much larger selection of compelling powers than Blasters do. That's not a disadvantage.

And you think the Blaster version of Electric Blast is less deserving ... why, exactly?

In order for a proposed balance change to be objectionable, it doesn't follow that it must be game breaking. It doesn't even necessarily follow that a given balance change must be objectionable in a vacuum, because no balance change occurs in a vacuum.

Fulcrum Shift has a 60 second recharge time and a 45 second duration. Not only can Fulcrum Shift be up full time; double-stacking Fulcrum Shift on a fairly consistent basis isn't difficult to do.

It is a context-dependent buff, though. And it is only one buff available to one set; that much I'll grant.

Ascribing unflattering motives to your opposition -- an excellent way to demonstrate the superiority of your position.

Fine, I misstated. I've also said the following, or some variation on it, multiple times:

"The Blaster Secondary buffs are a welcome change, but we have no reasonable expectation that they will be sufficient, in and of themselves, to correct the existing balance problem, which is that Blast sets (yes, sets) have been unduly penalized since day one, relative to their melee counterparts. The reason that Blasters are particularly injured by that design flaw is that Blasters don't have the supplemental resources of other blasting ATs. Blasters deserve special attention, and an Energize-style regeneration buff ain't gonna do the job by itself."

The fact that you'd spend so much energy ascribing bias to me on the basis of one sentence, pulled from a sarcasm-laced paragraph that was posed in response to a purely emotional appeal -- well let's just say that I spent some time last night trying to show you how unproductive your line of word-game argument is, but I guess I wasn't clear enough.

So let's leave it at this: my supposed bias is irrelevant. It would be trivially easy to accuse you of bias, as I showed last night, but it serves no purpose.

The more relevant argument here is one that you've glossed over entirely. What you're calling a counter is not a counter at all; it's gotcha-game nonsense. So the snipe buff isn't aimed particularly at Blasters. Making that observation says nothing about the appropriateness of the snipe buff. At best it's a tautological truism: "The Snipe buff shouldn't give equal benefit to Blasters because it's not intended to give equal benefit to Blasters." Scintillating. Now explain why.

(Of course, I'm not asking you in particular to explain why the snipe change is good, because you've already gone out of your way to disclaim that you don't have a strong opinion on the matter. Sure am glad you stuck around to detail my raging bias, though. The insults flying around from the other side weren't worthy of comment for some reason. Huh.)

That's an extraordinarily easy thing to say, but it rings hollow in the midst of a thread where we have people insisting at the top of their lungs that Blasters require nothing further than the sight-unseen survivability buffs proposed for I-24. In case you missed the point: This whole debate serves the purpose of shining a light on Blasters' need.

I've stated repeatedly that the Snipe changes in particular are not important to me. But unless someone says something here about Blasters' need, there's a chance that everyone will just shrug their way through I-24 and call it good. Just as Defiance 2.0 was called good, lo these many years ago.

Your sermonizing speculation as to my state of mind is irrelevant.

Eureka. That is exactly the point -- but it's not like I've said that very thing like seven times already or anything. If the developers came out tomorrow and assured everyone that additional single-target damage buffs for Blasters aren't off the table, then I'd zip my lips. Until that happens, it is worth pointing out that I (and others) don't believe the AT is finished. We've waited a long time for this balance pass.

History's on my side, here. You're telling me that I shouldn't be suspicious when, after eight years of the developers treating Blasters as if they're radioactive, the developers seemingly go out of their way to moderate the Blaster's benefit from a buff aimed at Blast sets, with basically no indication that other offensive buffs are on the table? After eight years, I can be forgiven for a little skepticism.

Very few ATs have a distinct role, but almost all of them (with the notable, glaring exception of Blasters) have distinct strengths that aren't necessarily offset by corresponding weaknesses. What makes the Blaster unique is that the Blaster is explicitly penalized as if Blaster damage is undisputedly the best, but in fact Blaster damage comes nowhere close to that lofty standard.

So when I say that support ATs have a distinct role or niche, I'm not saying that Defenders are necessarily well off as compared with, say, Corrupters or Controllers, or that Defenders cannot be outperformed at their role by any of the above ATs. What I'm saying is that at least Defenders are within a subset of ATs that are supreme in teams. Blasters are neither particularly good at teaming nor particularly good at soloing. As you point out, Blasters basically exist at this point to boost support ATs' egos. The Snipe change, incidentally, only serves to reinforce that stereotype.

I have no illusions that Blasters will suddenly be given a unique role that separates them clearly from all of their peers. That would be unrealistc. What I do hope is that Blasters will stop getting penalized for an advantage they do not unambiguously have -- or that the developers will find a way to improve Blaster's supposed advantage such that the corresponding penalty is no longer so glaringly unjustified.

A note on bias:

(Emphasis mine.)

I could very easily take the bolded clause out of context to argue that you're clearly biased against Blasters. After all, if you are (at best) indifferent to the idea of Blaster-specific buffs, then you are clearly not familiar with, or unwilling to acknowledge, the AT's manifest and myriad weaknesses. Or, I could look at the thread linked in your signature, in which you ask for huge Defender buffs, to demonstrate that you're biased in support ATs' favor.

But I don't believe you really think that support ATs deserve buffs as much or more than Blasters, in I-24. I'm familiar with your post history, and I'm capable of reading between the lines of your post, which is clearly intended to take a tepid if not a neutral position on the topic at hand.

Now that we've gotten the personal-credibility attacks sorted, let us return to the topic: You're right; the fast-snipe advantage for support ATs, relative to the standard non-Devices, non-EM Blaster build is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. In that sense, all of this discussion is much ado about nothing. But the fact that the Snipe buff explicitly precludes most Blasters from benefiting as much as Defenders and Corrupters says something about the direction of the Blaster Balance pass. In the absence of any evidence of other offensive buffs, the snipe change implicitly tells players that Blasters deserve a single-target damage buff less than Corrupters do. Moreover, the character of the snipe change suggests to me that the devs are prone to fall into the very same trap they've fallen into in the past -- that they're unduly afraid of Blasters.

"Oh noes, what will we do if this still-brittle ranged AT clearly outdamages ATs with superior utility and/or survivability! Quick, rein in any buffs that might apply to Blasters!"

That idea couldn't be more wrong, in my estimation. If the Snipe change were simply designed to give Defenders and Corrupters an additional 'job,' if you will, an additional perk that they could provide to (Blaster and/or Dominator-laden) teams, then that'd be fine. But no game-balance change occurs in a vacuum. Give the Defenders/Corrupters their extra raison d'etre, sure, but also leave the door open for supplemental Blaster buffs.

Because I gotta tell you: even with the absorb/regen buffs upcoming in I-24, Blasters shouldn't be outdamaged, even if only in a single-target context, by Nightwidows, Scrappers, Brutes, Dominators; hell even some Tanks can make certain Blaster builds look downright anemic. Everyone seems to handwave the high-damage non-Blaster builds as outliers, while simultaneously pretending that either Fire or Archery (depending on the context) are the only Blaster Primaries in existence.

But there are Blaster sets that put out underwhelming single-target damage. There are Blaster sets that put out mediocre AoE damage, too (although that will change somewhat with the nuke buff). Even the really good AoE Blasters may find their practical kill speed hampered by scatter, whereas many of their competitors have an innate abilities to stop runners (taunt auras, Aoe controls).

The Blaster has no role, and no bona-fide specialty. The Blaster only has penalties for a presumed specialty. And although it's nice that I-24 will soften those penalties a bit (with the addition of a regen/absorb power in every secondary), the penalties will still persist in broad strokes, and the justification for those penalties will likely remain unconvincing.

Defenders and Corrupters? Say what you will about 'em; they have a distinct role that is well rewarded by the game. If they need help, they need it less than Blasters do. And as it happens, they're due to receive whatever generalized buffs the devs see fit to lavish on blast sets generally.

I'm grateful you finally admit that your arguing so strenuously that Blasters don't deserve a single-target damage increase is a pointless endeavor.

You didn't read my argument. You latched onto my sarcastic remark about Energy Transfer and totally glossed over the real point, which is that you can't simultaneously argue on the one hand that single-target damage doesn't matter, and on the other hand that Blasters don't deserve a single-target-damage buff, or alternatively that the single-target buff to Defenders/Corrupters is important.

Regardless of rewards/time, you honestly believe that the developers don't care about the relation between different ATs' single-target damage? I guess that must be why they gave every set in the game copious AoE damage. Oh wait.

(Whether you think it's important or not, if Blasters are to be the damage specialists, then they should be great at both AoE and single-target damage. And they're not obviously great at single-target damage, across the board. Fire's performance should probably be the baseline. And yes, any buffs that would bring other blast sets up to Fire's single-target-damage potential would naturally have to be proliferated to other blast-set users. Ranged attack sets as a whole class have been unfairly penalized in this game since day one; it's just that the non-Blaster ranged ATs happen to have other perks that diminish the practical influence of that penalty.)

If you say so, it must be true. I'm glad you're here to preserve me from the idiotic ramblings of forum posters, though. Thanks!

I simply posed the logical extension of your argument, which is that Blasters definitively don't deserve a damage buff (even a single-target-damage buff, even though single-target damage doesn't matter) because Blasters are getting a defensive buff in I-24. My point was that Blasters are vastly outclassed defensively right now, and only have a marginal damage advantage, which means that clearly you expect the defensive buff in Issue 24 to be massive.

But now you assure me that Blasters have a massive and unconditional kill-speed advantage over every AT in the game. Good to know! Oh wait. You said, "outside of a few select builds?" Bummer. I guess some ATs do deserve Scrapper/Brute/Dominator-level survivability along with Blaster-comparable damage after all.

Do I really have to go back and requote my list earlier of Defender/Corrupter powers that boost damage and/or debuff resistance? To say that support ATs' lack of Build Up is the definitive factor in the Snipe changes is to admit that the snipe changes are short-sighted.

Also, Energy Manipulation: it has Build Up, and it can achieve perma-fast snipe.

And now I really am done. Feel free to take the last word.

First, your feelings are irrelevant. You are not the arbiter of truth or a moderator on this forum. Your assertions, based on nothing more than your subjective impressions, are not facts.

(I'd be a little less critical of your arguments, though, if you were less pompous and abrasive in expressing them.)

And no, I'm saying that if a Blaster can't get perma-fast snipe by using the same team-based pool power that the Corrupter/Defender uses, a power that the Blaster is less likely to want to take in the first place than the Corrupter/Defender, then the Corrupter/Defender shouldn't be able to achieve perma-Fast snipes either.

There is no obvious reason for that disparity. If the developers explain their reasoning, then I'm open to correction, but your simply saying things like, "IMO Blasters don't need damage," or the classic, "Corrupters/Defenders are team ATs and therefore they should get better solo performance out of team powers," isn't a rationale for the snipe changes as they've been proposed so far.

We are discussing inter-AT balance. Why the hell wouldn't single-target damage be relevant in a discussion about a buff to single-target damage, shared among different ATs?

Seriously, you either need to think more carefully before you make your arguments (and I use the term loosely), or you really need to reign in your condescending attitude.

If a support AT is already unrivaled in a team setting, then why the hell would the support AT need a single-target damage boost in that setting? I'm doing you a favor by ignoring the team setting; the team setting argument is deleterious to your case.

Do you expect the new defensive powers in Blaster Secondaries to be competitive with the defensive powers in Scrapper or Brute secondaries? Do you expect those Blaster defensive powers to rival the damage-mitigation potential of a Dominator's Control Primary? Will we perhaps see some comprehensive status protection added to Blasters, according to your crystal ball?

Just curious, cause, you know, it's not unambiguously true that Blasters have a marked damage advantage over those ATs. It is unambiguously true that those ATs have a freaking enormous survivability advantage over Blasters.

So clearly, if you believe so strongly that Blasters don't deserve an offensive buff, you must also believe that Blasters will be given a bleeping ton of survivability improvement in I-24. Of course, the statements I've seen from Arbiter Hawk point to only a moderate survivability boost, but surely you know better.

No, I said that Corrupters and Defenders are the best teamers, and that they solo more safely than Blasters. At the high end, they can arguably solo more difficult stuff. To say that Corrupters and Defenders are unreservedly better soloists would be an oversimplification, because a Blaster has a higher kill speed. Assuming the Blaster doesn't die, s/he will tend to progress faster than a support AT.

But the support AT has an undeniable and unrivaled specialty. The Blaster is unique, because it simultaneously pays the highest price for a presumed specialty (damage), but in fact the Blaster doesn't have a specialty worth mentioning; Blaster damage isn't unambiguously the best in the game, and in any case, everyone is capable of doing damage. In a team scenario, a Blaster can certainly be useful, but it needs team support way more than the team needs a Blaster, or really any damage specialist.

Your point about ST damage scarcely deserved a rebuttal, frankly. You said, basically, that "IMO" the developers don't think single-target damage is a major issue. Whether your statement has or hasn't any truth to it, it's not a point you made any attempt to support. I'm not terribly impressed by your vague attempt to read the developers' minds, given that their actions in the past tend to contradict your ESP-derived assertion. The developers do go to some lengths to balance single-target attack powers.

The snipe change is clearly a single-target-slanted change.

So you say. It must therefore be true.

It is only illogical if you assume that the Snipe change is not intended to buff Blasters as much as it buffs Defenders and Corrupters. We've been over this. If the devs came out and said, "Hey, we think support ATs deserve more damage from snipes," then that would be one thing. If the devs came out and said, "We think it's important to put the snipe changes through as-is, but we're also going to add something else to aid Blaster single-target offense," I'd be cool with that too. There are any number of things the developers could do or say that would be great.

But proposing, sans reasoning, a supposedly generalized snipe buff that arbitrarily benefits buff/debuff ATs most when Blasters are the red-headed step child of both blast-set constituents and the game in general? Not so much.

A lot of us got by just fine for years without even taking those powers. In principle, sure; it'd be nice if all powers were attractive -- but if the proximate problem is the performance of blast-set ATs, and especially one blast-set AT, then it doesn't make any practical difference how you go about buffing those ATs.

Teaming is irrelevant for the purpose of this conversation. The support ATs in question are already miles and miles ahead. Who gives a crap if the Defender can do 20% more single-target damage on a team? Or even the Blaster, for that matter? This is, and always has been, a discussion about self-contained performance.

That is not an obvious extension of the logic. The snipe change is quite clearly designed to give temporary and/or context-dependent benefit to most Blaster secondary sets (except for Devices and Energy), which is fine. The problem is that the snipe change is also (whether intentionally or not) quite clearly designed to give support ATs relatively easy access to permanent and/or context-independent benefit.

The proposed snipe change is, in other words, inherently slanted towards support ATs. The nuke change, by contrast, is only circumstantially uneven; you could argue that support ATs get more benefit out of nukes because they have less damage potential to begin with, or because some support ATs have high-order damage buffs (Fulcrum Shift) and/or high-order resistance debuffs. Incidentally, you could also argue that Blasters see the most benefit from the nuke change simply because their higher damage modifier gives their nukes more raw killing power.

But in principle, every party is receiving roughly the same proportional boost from the nuke change. There is no arbitrary line in the sand, beyond which new-era nukes will work a certain way for X AT, and work a different way for Y AT using the same power set.

With all due respect, you're going to have to do a little more to explain your point here. It isn't self-evident that those two quotes are self-contradictory.

And I disagree that a proper buff to Blast sets must necessarily include a buff to Snipe powers. It really doesn't matter to me whether they buff the Snipe or buff the first two tier attacks, or buff the relevant ATs' damage scalars -- whatever the solution, there's no rule etched in stone to declare that Snipes must be a part of it.

You yourself have championed the so-called distinctiveness of Snipes as they currently exist. That distinctiveness has, historically, not been terribly popular among the player base (or at least among the segment of the player base that cares about performance). But since I don't care about Snipes as they currently exist, I'd just as soon let you keep the powers the way they are and find other ways to buff the relevant ATs. I don't see what's controversial or self-contradictory or biased about that.

Oh, and by the way, the implication that I believe the Blaster changes are more important than the Blast-set changes is incorrect. Feel free to reread what I actually said, which is that all blast sets deserve buffs, but that if any blast-set-constituent AT deserves to get more from those buffs, it's the Blaster. Not the Defender or the Corrupter.

What difference does it make that Tactics is a team-based power? I could just as easily say that the putative damage-specialist AT should get perma-fast snipes from solo-based powers. Whether you realize it or not, you are only reinforcing the idea that Support ATs are getting fast snipes by using a pool power (Tactics) that they're likely to have already.

What you're really saying is that Corrupters and Defenders should get a solo benefit that Blasters do not, even though Corrupters and Defenders are already markedly better (the best) in teams, and already capable, on average, of soloing more difficult challenges in greater safety than the average Blaster. You're saying that Corrupters and Defenders should get that extra solo benefit as a natural consequence of using a team-biased build, too. Your tone suggests that you've just found some sort of trump card in this discussion, but if you had a convincing point to make, I'm afraid it got lost somewhere in the translation.

Energy Transfer would like a word with you.

More to the point, you can't have it both ways: either the buff to single-target DPS is insignificant (either in magnitude or simply by virtue of its single-targeted-ness), in which case you shouldn't be arguing so strenuously that Blasters don't deserve it, or the buff is significant, in which case you can't argue that it's an unimportant addition to support ATs.

With all due respect to the current development team, which I believe to be comprised of earnest and hard-working people, vague assurances of future buffage might carry more weight if the balance problem we're discussing weren't eight years old. A lot of players have understandably looked forward to a balance pass of Blasters, and we (also understandably) would like to see it done right (or as close to right as is reasonably possible) in I-24.

We've had enough of long-term half measures like Defiance and Defiance 2.0. How long ago were those again? I honestly can't remember.

You keep using the word, "Objectively," as if your invoking the concept of objectivity automatically renders any disagreement subjective. That's not how it works. You brought up a point that is only tenuously relevant to the topic at hand -- namely, that the snipe changes are not explicitly targeted at Blasters in particular -- and then declared everyone who doesn't like the Snipe changes an irrational fool for not understanding the blindingly obvious. The problem? Your point does nothing to address the appropriateness of the Snipe buff. And even now, you seem to be arguing from the almost laughably tenuous position that the developers' thought process is unassailable by default

My disagreeing with your argument by assertion doesn't necessitate that I'm not objective. If anything, my prodding you to refine your argument into something resembling relevance is the very opposite of unreasoned subjectivity.

The remainder of your post rests on the assumption that the proposed buffs to Blasters and blast ATs will be subject to revision going forward, in Beta and whatnot. All of that is true, but it's worth pointing out any flaws we see now, if for no other reason than to refine our own reasoning before the upcoming testing phase. Or, you know, maybe we'll even give the devs food for thought. Kinda like that giant proc changes thread.

NB: Time Manipulation is also unusually well-insulated against ToHit debuffs, due to its obscene +DEF values. Likewise, support ATs in general are less likely to get hit by fast-snipe-disabling ToHit debuffs than Blasters are.

A Blaster? Three-slotted Build Up only gives you about 24% in +ToHit, so it isn't inconceivable that a Blaster could have even his temporary, burst-phase fast-snipe disabled on a fairly consistent basis by enemy debuffs. Of course, if the Blaster also takes Tactics and/or Kismet, he'll have more of a cushion -- but if the Blaster must concede from the get-go that he can't achieve perma-fast-Snipe, if he accepts that he will only get the benefit during BU/Aim cycles (which are sufficient, by themselves, to offer fast snipes on an albeit temporary basis), then what's his incentive to take Tactics?

Seems like a waste of build resources.

One would still be prompted to wonder why the Snipe changes are practically tailor-made to benefit Corrupters and Defenders more than Blasters, when the former ATs are notoriously too good (per Developer statements over the years), and the latter AT has been riding the short bus for lo these many years.

Unless you can explain why the Snipe changes should benefit support ATs more than Blasters, your point is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the change is explicitly aimed at Blasters or not; the change should still make sense within the context of the existing balance framework.

The Blaster Secondary buffs are a welcome change, but we have no reasonable expectation that they will be sufficient, in and of themselves, to correct the existing balance problem, which is that Blast sets (yes, sets) have been unduly penalized since day one, relative to their melee counterparts. The reason that Blasters are particularly injured by that design flaw is that Blasters don't have the supplemental resources of other blasting ATs. Blasters deserve special attention, and an Energize-style regeneration buff ain't gonna do the job by itself.

You correctly identified the nuke changes as a general buff for blast sets, not particular to Blasters. So if the rest of us really are just too stupid to understand the difference between a blast-set buff and a Blaster-specific buff, then why aren't people complaining about the nuke changes? I'll tell you: because in the case of nukes, the general buff is generally and evenly applied to all relevant ATs. Huh. Maybe people not named Eldagore can identify the blindingly obvious, after all.

Baseless insults are an excellent way to emphasize your intellectual superiority. Bonus points if you make an unsupportable, doom-crying prediction after accusing other people of irrationality.

TL;DR: Simply stating that the snipe buffs aren't aimed specifically at Blasters does nothing to address the appropriateness of the Snipe buffs.