Oliin

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Did anyone else get excited and read this as an upcoming patch for I8? Or was it just me?

[/ QUOTE ] I figured it was a bit too late into I8 for it myself. Was personally figuring I9, or possibly a patch in-between now and then.

Ya know, come to think of it, but switching out current secondary sets with defensive ones would be a pretty huge nerf to blaster's damage.

I kinda figured that that lumping both tanker and brute secondaries together was a mistake.

The bit about if they want us to be damage only then give the secondaries bit tipped me off. If they gave us defensive sets then we wouldn't be damage only would we?

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Increased EDIT:Maximum ranges for attacks like Blaze.

[/ QUOTE ] Oh thank you. Definitely a welcome change.

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Some improvements for */Fire (No, no powers were switched out. No Fiery Embrace, I'm afraid. )

[/ QUOTE ] Also something that's been needed, though I honestly think switching out some powers would be more of a help, but who knows mebby they're really good changes.

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Some improvements for Fire/*

[/ QUOTE ] Not that any improvements are a bad thing ... but out of all the primaries that could use help, why Fire? It's one of the better ones out there.

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A very minor improvement for Gadgets...I mean, Devices! (Yeah, it was a dumb mistake -- typing in haste and all of that.)

[/ QUOTE ] Pardon me if I don't jump for joy about this one before I see what the change is. Given the singular nature of that statement, it'd have to be a really nice change for me to get excited about it. Sure help is nice, but there's far more than just one thing wonky with the set. It's a start though.

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I have some ideas for other changes/improvements, but there is no ETA on when or if I'll get them in.


[/ QUOTE ] Ok, not to sound terribly pessimistic here, since you are trying and the like. Something I'm very pleased to see. However, I hope you don't mind if I don't hold my breath waiting for any other possible changes. That way I can be pleasantly surprised when they happen, and I won't be disappointed if they never show up. (Like almost all the other dev comments about 'looking into' blaster issues in the past.)

Well, it was one of the three, but they don't seem to like letting us know which one.

Kinda bugs me, I've tried PMing folks to get an update, but I don't get a response. <shrug>

How did any of that post of yours have anything to do with my post?

That said, on your proposed teams that fight +3 or less mobs, any of the AoE primaries paired with a non-devices secondary would be better than a devices blaster.

I mean, what's better, a /devices blaster hitting aim and their AoEs and doing good damage, but not finishing off all the minions. Or is it better for the secondaries with BU to hit that and aim, then use their attack chain to wipe out all the minions ... and then do it again 45 seconds or so later. (Also, I believe that blaster's Build Up provides 100% bonus damage, not 80%.)

For my money I'll take the latter.

I do find it odd however, that you're basically in this thread telling a bunch of folks who've played devices blasters and played alongside devices blasters that we don't know how to play the set well. You don't think folks haven't found as many ways as possible to eek out what effectiveness they can from the set by now?

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I'm saying that your focusing on single target a bit too much, the melee powers are good if your party is

a. missing scrappers

b. fighting AVs every mission, which is confined mostly to 40+

[/ QUOTE ] I guess I just don't understand where you're coming from here. I mean, why are the blaps only good if you're missing scrappers? Using /EM say, a blaster can meet or exceed a Scrapper's damage. That's good even if you DO have scrappers around.

Blapping's not bad solo no. It's also quite nice in teams. Heck, it's great in teams where there's a good controller, like your earth one. There's very little chance of getting hit with the various controll powers around, which means they can go wild with their high damage powers ... blaps. Higher damage means groups of mobs go down faster which means better XP.

Devices on the other hand is not so good for big teams. For one, most big teams I've found are fighting +3s. That means you're probably going to be wanting to slot your powers with an acc SO in the first place for one. For another you're not getting as much extra damage from the secondary. There's a little bit more hitting with your blasts. I guess if you waste 3 slots on SG your group gets hit a little less. You could try to lay some mines down, but they're fairly easily interrupted in my experience. CD keeps you unseen untill you actually attack.

On the other hand, the other sets have build up. With the AoE sets, I've noticed that folks seem to be fond of saying that with BU and Aim their Archery blasters can take out a spawn of +3s in 3 attacks, and do it every time the powers recharge. Which is great, wouldn't be quite as fast without build up ya. And heck, when those powers are down, there's also a not inconsiderable amount of damage you can find with some of the blaps.

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and as you said fire/ and elec/ pull it off with AoE, ice can too if you use the rain and breath, AR does it fairly well, and ive SEEN archery do it consistantly. oh and nobody likes nrg/ apparantly so i actually havent gotten to see that one in action.

[/ QUOTE ] I could have sworn I said that /fire and /elec can both do AoE MELEE damage. The good AoE primaries are AR and Fire. They're good off the bat with AoE. Archery gets a lot better once it hits 32 for AoE. The rest of them don't quite come near the AoE damage of those sets. For the record, that's Electricity, Energy, Ice and Sonic. That's just a bit more than half the primary sets.

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this has been nagging at me, where on earth do you people get the idea trip mines define the powerset?

[/ QUOTE ] It didn't define the powerset. It was part of it though. I mean, you'd throw the SG 'till the mobs were all covered, then run in and lay down a mine while stealthed with CD (or alternately skip the grenade and just take superspeed). Or you could lay down some mines in a caltrops field near the enemies (while stealthed), then put down a turret to aggro the mobs and draw them in to their doom. Then you could repeat the process with the next spawn and port your turret in instead of waiting for it to recharge.

To me the devices powerset was all about the ability to set up traps of one kind or another, a good number of the powers in the set mesh(ed) very well to allow traps to be set with ease. Traps are most easily used solo, and as such in teams all you really saw devices blasters do was use their drone and blast from range, which is what you seem to think the whole set's about. Sadly both the methods for setting traps when solo, and the use of the drone when in teams have been reduced in effectiveness over time.

Yea, that first post made like no sense to me either. I tried to muddle my way through it, but it's just a confusing jumble of comments.

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And the other part was him saying TD allowing less slotting for even cons to +2s not being strong enough for teaming was kind of odd, since blasters/scrappers get the biggest hit to effectiveness from the level gap.


[/ QUOTE ] Honestly, from a personal level, I find TD alone inadiquate for even even cons, but then, that's remembering the pre-nerf (AKA ED) strength of the power. I just seem to recall some numbers saying over +2s. Or perhaps it was over +2s, I forget honestly.

Also, granted, I don't go into large teams terribly much, but usually when I am on the larger teams I fight things higher than +2 quite regularly.

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and it has paragraphs, i just didnt use a full line in between

[/ QUOTE ] Yea, but that makes it look like one long jumbled mess though. The seperating lines add a bit of clarity to a post.

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focusing on the secondary gave birth to scrankers, offenders, blappers, and scraptrollers. all which sacrifice overall effectiveness for specific situations..

[/ QUOTE ] The problem is that blappers don't give up effectiveness at all. The primary focus of blasters is damage, and blapping actually increases their effectiveness, since the melee powers surpass the primary set's damage.

I mean really, in your fast group melee blaster powers aren't useless any moreso than a scrappers attacks or any tank's secondary attacks. In fact they're more usefull than tanker's attacks since they do more damage, and blapping's the only way to reliably outdamage a scrapper. And heck, /electricity and /fire can do that in AoE form.

You seem to be blinded to the fact that not every blaster's an AoE one, as a matter of fact most blaster sets aren't set to be AoE blasters ideally.

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9% tohit debuff heavily slotted?

[/ QUOTE ] You realise that's like slotting dark melee powers three times for -acc. Actually worse than that in most cases.

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I think people need to realise that the "big numbers" from the secondaries arent what you need to focus on, overall damage benefits a team,

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your concern is your damage, and making sure not to accidentally pull a second mob, but mostly the damage.

[/ QUOTE ] Um ... the big numbers the secondaries other than devices can provide (well, more readily than the 'big numbers' of trip mine and time bomb which don't work well in teams at all) increase a blaster's damage, and thus their benifit to the team yes? If a blaster's supposed to worry about doing damage shouldn't they take sets that allow them to do the most of it? Those sets end up being almost anything but devices in teams. Devices is good for looking out for your character and soloing, things that you've said blasters shouldn't be worrying about. I seriously don't get your arguments, they don't make any sense.


And really, you didn't just tell pretty much the entire blaster forum that we don't know how to play blasters did you? Good lord.

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Funny, up until ED everyone said it was bar-none the best blaster secondary out there. Suddenly after ED everyone's saying it wasn't that great before...

[/ QUOTE ] It was great before ED and the GDN hit, most definately. However, the bar-none best blaster secondary was Energy Melee. At least after the first couple months in the game when SG and Caltrops (deservedly) got fixed.

The really great things about devices (in my opinion) were the whole TD allowing you to not slot for accuracy (and therefore more damage or really, whatever), and Cloaking Device. CD could not only pick up a fairly respectable amount of defence if you slotted it, but since stealth didn't supress you actually could throw SG after SG to get all the mobs in a spawn without fear of them suddenly seeing you and aggroing. Now in order to easily toe-bomb like before you're pushed into pool powers (super-speed) that don't actually work quite as well as before I don't think since I swear a lot of mobs got perception increases at some point (could be wrong though, just feels like it).

Even when it was up there in the secondaries (and after the SG and caltrops fixes), it wasn't all that great a set in teams. Not like EM which brought both good damage solo and in teams (and the insta-stun TFing of bosses once you get that high).

... I'm not really sure what we're going back and forth about. As we both seem to basically be saying the same thing here.

Yup. Just saying that it's still possible, once in a blue moon, to one shot things with trip mines. The other 99.999999% of the time they're left with a bit of life.

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Post ED trip mine (with three SOs) has never one shotted whites (I'm pretty sure, I could go check it out)

[/ QUOTE ] The only ones I know I've one shotted post ED are carnies, and only then sometimes. Dunno about any of the other enemy groups off the top of my head.

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And, yes, I was dropping even cons with 2-slotted tripmines. *shrug* Dunno what you're doing wrong if it's not working for you....

[/ QUOTE ] Doing wrong with my mines? Nothing.

Now, perhaps you could take out even con mobs that were very weak against fire, I suppose that would work. Currently however, I can very rarely take out even cons with a full 3 +3 SOs of damage. There hasn't been any decrease in the power of the mines themselves, so I fail to see how taking out whole mobs with only 2 SOs in there on a regular basis is even remotely possible.

Also, now that I'm home from work.

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Trip mine's still effective even without toe-bombing (which is still possible, you just can't rush in immediately after throwing the SG). Never had a problem getting it to detonate with a handful of caltrops (which are another immensely useful power in the set) and pulling the mob straight over it. AOE snipe level damage more than makes up for missing BU. CD is a great stealth power. SG with its -perception and minor acc debuff is useful even without using it for toe-bombing purposes. TD may not allow you to 6 slot damage into attacks anymore, but it DOES open up another slot in your attacks for other enhancements. Go ahead and throw in recharges, end reducers, or whatnot. Might be surprised what one more slot in each power can do for you. I hear taser s a decent stun.

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Ok then. First, trim mines aren't terribly effective without toe-bombing. Without caltrops the mobs can run over the mines before they blow up. With caltrops mobs can oftentimes run over the mines before they blow up. With TP foe sometimes the mine doesn't go off at all.

Sure, you can SG the group of mobs to -per the guys and then go in and toe bomb them, but then you have to wait and make sure everyone's hit with the SG (since it's not a auto-hit power in PvE) and then you wait 10 seconds, and then you can start to lay the mine. This method is oh so hiiiighly useful in groups .... (And annoying solo as well)

If trip mines are supposed to make up for not having BU, then what do we get for not having any melee attacks, like bonesmasher, total focus, havoc punch, thunder strike, fire sword circle, frozen fists, and other assorted goodies? I always figured we got our mines, bomb and auto turret in place of those attacks myself. Silly me ....

CD is an ok power. It was great before when it actually provided worthwhile amounts of defense. Now it's just a pool power you can take at level 6 without the -speed effect.

SGs -acc ability is laughably small. I don't know about other folks, but I wouldn't bother throwing it as an AoE debuff. I tried it for a while, but quite frankly, a 3% accuracy debuff just doesn't do terribly much. Heck, fire controllers don't like their version of the power (smoke) and theirs is an auto hit power.

As to TD allowing you to slot something other than accuracy? No, no it doesn't. At least, not if you're fighting outside of the even con to +2 range of things. AKA if you group.

Taser's still a rather viable power. It's sad when one of the usefull and good powers in a set's basically the oft skiped 'stun' power (from energy melee/manipulation).

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In the end, it may not be on top anymore, but it's certainly not bottom of the barrel. That'd be fire manip.

[/ QUOTE ] Honestly, I'd put them around the same level or so myself. <shrug>

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All this griping about not being able to TP AT anymore, thing is, I've only ever seen one person using it at all before. Ever. You'd think they just crippled the best power in the set or something.

[/ QUOTE ] That's part of the issue. They took a power that was pretty much only taken by players in conjunction with recall friend, and generally considered only usefull if you port it around ... and got rid of what was considered the only usefull way to use the thing.

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Before ED, but it was wiping packs of evens with only 2 SOs.

[/ QUOTE ] Ok no. That's never happened to me, before or after ED. Not in the 2+ years I've had my /dev blaster.

I have gotten the mine to take out some even cons on occasion three slotted post ED however. It's when you get a lucky extra tic though, not a reliable method of taking out a pack of even cons.

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Wait a second here ... <shakes head in disbelief > ... let me get this straight. So not only did Devices not get the help it needs (which every */Dev has been asking for since I3 or so)

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Before ED, /dev was unparalleled as a blaster secondary. WHo in their right mind thought it needed help?! ED hurt it, but now it's about average. Definately not sorely in need of help.

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Are you serious?

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Completely.

[/ QUOTE ]How do you figure? As a whole the set seems pretty down there to me, especially in teams.

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Perhaps we should PM the red names as to when blasters are going to get a real loo

[/ QUOTE ] I tried something vuagely like that rather a while ago. I got a couple read recipts and that was it really.

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[censored]!! I haven't seen a Thri-Kreen in ages!! and its been longer than that since I've even heard mention of a Remorhaz.


[/ QUOTE ] Bah, tohr-kreen I say! Athas ftw and whatnot.

Also, some of you folks's 'old school' stuff's so much better than my current stuff it's almost depressing. Ah well, eventually yes.

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I probably should've posted this at a more convienant time. But wouldn't have any way of checking after I left work. If this batch goes good I will try another one and will use as many of those that didn't make in this time. Heck if I work fast enough some of you might make it this time.

[/ QUOTE ] Hmm ... well, in that case I'd like to point out that the links in my sig go to nice webpages with pictures and stuff on the them (Well, Worp's still goes to a static picture but &lt;shrug&gt

Bah, I'm never fast enough on the uptake for these things.

Of course, I'm not exactly 'high profile' either I suppose.

I guess one's a symptom of the other though eh.

Well you know ... pairing 'The Incredibles' and time with kids ... time well spent if you ask me.

Me, I had to work. A friend logged my characters on for the contest, but from what I gather I didn't even make it to the semi-finals I'm so fond of Magnetic Zhen's costume too ... I guess that's what I get for having her on Virtue though.

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Ya know I think I like the other one better to be honest but thats just me. Her arms in this one look a little skinny this time.

[/ QUOTE ] Really? Personally like this newer one more myself. Though the ears are still a bit lynx-ish I thinik. But what do I know, it'd take me tons of practice to draw something that looked half as good eh

I think that currently they're planning on doing it by total amount time played. Which is basically the amount of time your account's been active, to include any and all free months.

I could be wrong though.

Well, if you could do my electric melee/electric armour brute that'd be spiffy.

The Magnetic Zhen

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I'm currently listening to the Final Fantasy Tactics soundtrack. Yes, I'm weird.

[/ QUOTE ]Not really. It was a good soundtrack. Not quite as good as Xenogears, but hey what can you do eh.