Player99

wasnt the game rather silly pre-ed?

with all the fire tank shenannigans and /devices being the FoTM secondary for all blasters?

the "best" AT in my opinion is the Mastermind, and if you wanna be specific, the Bots/traps mastermind.

MMs can essentially do anything you want in the game: Damage, tanking, Buff/Debuff, Crowd Control, etc, etc.

their only drawbacks are that they mature a bit slowly, and are a bit slow overall, and are hard to play. This can make them an intimidating AT to play for new players, but given some practice there is honestly nothing you cannot do with an MM.

hmn, think a new thread should be started about the blaster vs damage AT issue?

@shredmonkey:

allright, you may have a point there as I dont run teams all too often, but dont scrappers also usually get PBAoEs with decent enough range in their primaries?

but anyways, the point of this blaster discussion went out of hand a bit:

The concern here is that other ATs are regularly producng builds (or just the AT in general) that can approach blaster damage by a significant amount, while being either MUCH tougher, or bringing more to a team than a blaster does. For example, a fire/shield (insert melee AT) can do some pretty damn impressive damage, and can even outdo some Blaster combinations, while being 5-10x tougher to take down...

as I said earlier, Blasters dont seem to be providing enough Cannon for their Glass as opposed to other damage-centric ATs

so, you are suggesting blasters are fine compared to other Damage ATs because an 8man team of blasters all running leadership is fine?

the question is, how much damage should they be doing?

for example, say their damage mod was made to be 1.25, a rough geustamate would be that Umbral's theoretical fire/elec/elec blaster build will jump from doing 320dps, to 356ish dps.

that is enough to solo anything in the game with raw power alone, and probably enough to make content trivial alltogether as you go around 2shotting everything, this is without BU or Aim considered...

another option would be to nerf the "glass" part, but then what makes them different from the melee ATs then, besides that they have range and more attacks?

another route though could be to simply make defiance more rewarding...

All the top end damage builds from other ATs that come close to blaster output take time to warm up to that level, whether through Fury, AAoA, Dark Melee's BU (name escapes me...) or summoning multiple pets or stacking buffs/debuffs.

The point is, they all usually dont do it out of the box, but they are capable of approaching the output while having other benifits that far outweight the gap. What I propose is a buffed defiance, so that blasters can emulate this effect that their competitors posess to reach them. Perhaps either a global buff (say a slightly higher mod of how the buff is applied, making the 7.7% mod from the tier 1 into 8.8 or so) or a situational buff to a few powers in each set that would make each blaster more effective (for example, flamethrower would give a huge defiance boost for AR's other AoEs, etc)

EDIT: another thing could just be to let the Defiance buff last longer so it stacks better per attack..


thoughts?

the more I look at it across different threads, the more it seems blasters need more tweaking:

they dont provide enough "cannon" to counteract their "glass", i mean if a blaster can do 280 DPS, a scrapper could do 230 while being 5x as tough. Thats just plain disproportionate....

In teams they apparently dont even contribute damage anymore is everyone makes everyone else do more damage, meaning a team of 8 can outdamage a blaster on the team...


what the heck is the point of blasters nowadays?

...how did this guy even get to 50 without ever learning that its an "enhancement", and then phail at making a tank tough?

yeah, CoH is a bit more shoehorned with ATs by the premise that back in the day, people wanted stuff kinda-similar to other MMOs (even tho CoH was still drasticlaly different) thus Tankers/Defenders came into play to fill MMO roles of Tank class and buffer/etc class.

Blaster, Scrapper and Controllers are more unique (well, not so much blasters) in that they are more like Superhero classes, and not MMO classes. They rep the Wolverine, Cyclops and Xavier kinda dudes, not the cleric or Warrior types.

CoV took what the previous 3 ATs represented and ran with it for all 5. Not only do the CoV Ats rep various kinds of supervillains, but they dont rep the MMO class system in that each one has a specialty, but can easily do other stuff, albeit not as well as the guy who specializes in it.

/sillyrant

brutes were meant t be able to tank, yes, but MMs do it better in that they have meatshields that they can buff and kept healed, allowing other ATs to do their thing...aka tank for the team

this was brought up in a different thread in regards to damage contribution, but:

who else provides AoE damage like the average blaster can?

im not looking for the "I win" button (if so id just play WM/Eng brute...), Im simply trying to figure out if there really is a "best" build out there.

well, it seems my example of the ill/rad builds fall short with farming/aoe...

and bot/traps only falls to swan when she does FS?

no offense to anyone who's posted before this, but im starting to think bot's traps may be the best, as only 1 enemy so far has been said to give it trouble (swan), and it *can* do all of the things mentioned above, albeit it farms slowly...

ok, so with my new info, im gonna do some math out loud...

55.61 = scale 1 damage attack

55.61 x 1.2 (squid mod) = 66.73 ( 62.56/100 = .6256...66.73/.6256 = 106.7)

Weird, at a basic level, the highest damage mod in the game only does about 6.7% better than the blaster level.

and this would be correct, no?

cool beans, but then how do I factor the damage scale posted by City of Data in regards to their #'s?

for my example with CB: Red Tomax lists's it's damage scale as "1", and LB as "1.64"

this would essentially make the damage for about 75% of tier 1/2's for blasters: 112.5 and 184.5...

so the question is, where can i find the base data for the damages powers should do, and not their scale?

just to bring up a point for the ill/rad controller's side (seeing as I kinda pushed Bot/Trap a bit there):

The account where the ill/rad soloed lusca was pre-Io's, he/she/it/potato did it i think even before CoV, but post ED

kind of a simple question, that i got really no helpful hits from search on:

How do you factor in damage mods when it comes to determining the damage a power will do?

for example: Defender vs corruptor Charged bolts:

.65 x (lets say 1.0 for CB here) = 65 damage for the def?

.75 x 1.0 = 75 damage for the corr?

I am most likely doing it drastically wrong