Pulsewave_mark1

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Pulsewave, for all intents and purposes a sleep is the equivalent of a stun as long as it prevents the enemy from continuing on its current course of action.

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A stun prevents you from doing anything until you the stun timer expires. A sleep prevents you from doing anything until the timer expires or you are hit by another attack. A stun is VASTLY superior to a sleep effect.

In niether case will either effect stop you from making an attack. Once you start an attack it will execute unless you are defeated or are interrupted during a Sniper Shot. What either WILL do is prevent you from executing a toggle, since toggles are shut off when slept OR stunned. The toggle still will be executed, but then is immediately shut off again. I think you are confused about that.

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Occassionaly is an understatement Pulsewave. Call it what you will, if the enemy is unable to attack me back and if i can stop them from, say performing a long animated move, then by all intents and purposes it is a stun. Simply re-labeling it to something you can accept easier is pointless.

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I simply dont agree with you. I've attacked many foes and they dont pause for 2 seconds every time I hit. I wish they did. They occassionally get the shaking animation. It's definitely not happening 100% of the time. I get hit all the time hunting Freak stunners and I dont shake from the effects either.

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"With Power Boost all secondary effects are magnified and if you were right Id be stunning enemies for 4 seconds every time that power was active. That's not happening"

Perhaps my arguments were understood differently /sigh

The effect of the actual shocking process that an opponent undergoes when they are being shocked IS a stun.... What the opponent is actually experiencing is not categorized as a stun, rather they are being shocked and drained of some endurance, but it IS stunning them, is it not?

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No, it's not. If it was stunning them, the following effects happen:
1) All active toggles would drop
2) MOB would wander aimlessly
3) MOB would be unable to attack
4) I could attack MOB without breaking his stun

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So Obviously power boost is not going to boost the duration for which they shake, because thats an endurance drain component, and power boost displays: Disorient, Hold, knockback, and immobilize.

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Power Boost actually effects almost all secondary effects. It increases endurance drained as well as boosts your flight and running speed. I've tested it extensively; feel free to do a search and you'll see my experiences with it in this forum.

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Again, your nukes have the side effect of stopping an opponent of its movements, which is what i am referring to here as a stun.

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I disagree on that. I think there may be an occassional sleep effect from electric attacks but definitely not stun effects. There are tangible differences between the two. The game engine makes use of 5 basic forms of crowd control: Sleep, Hold, Immobilize, Stun, and Knockback. They all operate differently.

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In addition to the "it does not interrupt crowd"... If you are unable to continue on your current course of action, have you not been interrupted of something? Present OR Future?
Thus, you cannot deam the term interruption as inappropriate for the consequence that takes place every time an enemy is hit with an electricity nuke (cept maybe charged bolts which is too small.... unless enhanced)

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I just dont see that effect. I dont recall ever being interrupted while fighting Freakshow electric blasters unless I was hit while making a sniper attack or killed while activating intangibility.

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When any electricity attack hits an opponent, it drains endurance. The process of the draining IS the stun. So pretty much EVERYTHING but charged bolts is a 2 second stun. So if you would actually make the blaster and level him to a decent amount, you would see that ALL of your attacks, while draining the enemy, make him shake in place... meaning hes not attacking you.

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My level 31 Electric blaster disagrees.

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So please stop denying this FACT. You obviously have no first hand experience, and are like the many other posters who cannot conceive of such being true, therefor it must not.

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Electricity definitely does not stun. I'm 100% sure of this. Electricity may have a sleep effect that happens occassionally but thats much different (and less effective) than a stun.

With Power Boost all secondary effects are magnified and if you were right Id be stunning enemies for 4 seconds every time that power was active. That's not happening.

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<begin rant>
wow. imean.. just wow.
rob puts up a PL guide and of course all the RPGers start complaining that PLing is dumb. If you don't like it, DONT DO IT!!!

and then all the elec/whatever people start talking about "im not inferior! i refuse to believe i chose wrong for PLing!". how can you even pretend that end drain is "just if not more" effective as knockback. when you knock a mob back, they're down for the 2-5 sec's they're alive whereas with end drain, they lose a miniscule % of their end and shoot at you 1-2 times... see how it matters pie?
<end rant>

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All I can say is I played with all the sets in Beta and the only reason I chose Elect in release is because I like the graphics and sound. No one in his right mind would opt for electric otherwise. Its far inferior to all other blaster sets. It works fine for someone who just wants to have fun, but realistically its not as effective as any other blaster powerset. Yeah, it does the job. ITS NOT BAD which is what the author has said several time. We have it easier than almost any other archetype. I have fun with my electric blaster. But to say its at the same level as the other powersets would be crazy.

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... For the record though, 4 slotted for damage at level 28, pulling out all the stops I dealt capped damage (as the values were the same versus white and yellow mobs) of 301 with my Defender using Zapp. I rather suspect that a Blaster would deal considerably more. . .but maybe I'm wrong.

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Not sure what you mean by pulling out all the stops. Sounds like you buffed yourself all the way to your cap and it's 301. That sounds pretty good to me at lvl 28. Add 25% on to that and you'd have about 375 total damage for a Blaster.

I'd still rather calculate based on base damage since the caps are different for each archetype. Scrappers had a much higher cap than Blasters for example. This was recently changed too but I believe all archetypes have different caps, just like they have different damage multipliers.

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And to the person above who asked the question why not just play a blaster? The answer is simple but probably beyond your FOTM mind to comprehend. It's because I want to play a scrapper but at the same time don't like to play an archetype that's gimped relative to Blasters. Wow, wasn't that simple!

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The point is that no one is forcing you to play a scrapper. If they are SO bad, why are you playing one? Since its a choice whether to pick that archetype and continue developing it, IT CANT BE THAT BAD IF YOU KEEP PLAYING A SCRAPPER. Your actions dictate it. Are scrappers worse off than blasters? Maybe, but they arent so far off that you wont play one any more, so things arent that bad.

Get real and realize that you are just some schmoe who has very little to contribute to this game. If you think that blasters have it so easy just play one and be happy. It's like voting. If everyone would just play a blaster the devs would have to make the other archetypes better. It would be obvious in their data mining. But you keep playing a scrapper, and reinforcing with hard data that scrappers in fact arent so bad. They whine a lot on the boards because that's the scrapper mentality right now, but the data just doesnt support the kind of changes you want right now. Deal with it.

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I think the developers made a bit of mistake towards the end of beta when they added so many improvements to what was certainly already the most popular archetype with almost no beta testing.

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Were you in beta? Blasters were not the most popular by any means. Axe tankers were a big issue for much of beta, followed by Reflex scrappers which were out of hand. Then Dark Melee scrappers, and after that Fire and Illision controllers. Blasters by comparison were relatively weak. The scrappers, tankers, and controllers were constantly at the top of the charts for levelling rates and kill acheivements. If you were in beta I dont know how we have such different recollections of things, unless its because you were only in the last few days or so.

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To me this seemed to be a bizzarre move and I had a feeling this may turn out to be a problem later. Lo and behold the first level 40 character came to reality in 2 weeks and he/she was a blaster. That was only the beginning, in the next few days more level 40's appeared and they were all blasters! As you can imagine this is not one of those times I enjoy getting a prediction right.

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Just play a blaster and get over it. Seriously. I recommend this to all whiney scrappers out there. Come back to your scrapper when they "fix" everything for you.

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Blasters were pretty much the same. I played Defenders through most of beta but I went with a Blaster at the end once they got the HP boost.

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I thought they got:

1) Hp boost
2) Damage boost
3) Endurance cost cut

That's a lot of things coming together. Mind you, I'm not calling for a Blaster nerf or even remotely hinting at suggesting it, just exploring some of the reason for Blaster envy.

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Blasters always had the endurance break as far as I know. The developers never announced any reduction in Blaster endurance to my knowledge. I think it was always in their concept of the Blaster from the getgo, not an add on for balance. I noticed it right away when I made the switch from Defender to Blaster.

So the hit point boost was about 5-10% like I said. That really wasnt a big deal as it let you survive a single hit extra at the most by the time you hit the 20ish levels. The damage boost was also nothing special. Someone above posted it was 25% but it was more likely around 10% again. We didnt even notice it.

The whole point of the extra damage was to balance with DEFENDERS who were considered better in a lot of ways. You could build a defender that did comparable damage to a Blaster and had better peripheral abilities. This was what I was doing most of beta anyway and it was viable. The biggest advantage that Blasters have over Defenders (other than the unannounced endurance break) is they could put all their enhancements in attack powers while Defenders allocate to both powersets more. That and the fact that they get Build Up or Targetting Drone. So people were concerned that you could build a better Blaster using a Defender archetype. I didnt agree but try convincing Scrappers they arent gimped right now. It's like banging your head against the wall.

If someone could do a study now and see what a how lvl 20 heros hit for damage it would be interesting. Blasters use their primary set vs the Defender secondary set, so that should make for about 15% difference. Anything more than 15% would be the "extra" bonus that Blasters got. I'd be surprised it it was more than 25% total, indicating that Blaster "got" a 10% bonus at the end of beta. It should be right around 1 SO enhancement.

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I bet the developers looking at their data mining are shocked to see a huge discrepancy in levelling rates pre- and post-release. Either lots of beta blasters were fudging gimpness or simply never reported exploits or the developers didn't listen to the right people.

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Or Blasters really did suck during beta (I didn't play one) and at the end, with too little time to test, they were adjusted and improved a hair too much, with more pressing things doubtlessly coming up after release than rebalancing
Blasters.

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Blasters were pretty much the same. I played Defenders through most of beta but I went with a Blaster at the end once they got the HP boost. I can tell you that at the time AoE attacks were looked at as worthless by many testers since they drew so much aggro. I remember reading another post saying basically the opposite, that the whole point of being a blaster was to take advantage of big AoE affects. But my impression was that people didnt think to much of AoE. I played it out and totally disagreed.

Stuff like that happens. Stamina was once considered worthless. Geko had to defend it to the players. Now its considered a must have power. Hasten was at first considered awesome, then it was changed and it was considered useless. The power was still great, but players got it into their heads it worked one way and when that changed just cried about the difference. It didnt matter that the power was still awesome, it was different, and there were a lot of people complaining about it. So that colored a lot of players opinions on it before they even judged it on it's merits.

Honestly, a lot of what goes on these boards is colored by perception from other posts. Scrappers are crying now because they see other scrappers crying and together they all feel worthless. It's a spiral and there's really nothing the devs can do to fix it. Scrappers arent SO bad that they are unplayable. Fortunately the devs pay more attention to data mining than they do to personal opinions of the boards. The fact is that scrappers are viable right now. They may not have things as easy as Blasters, but they have it much easier than Controllers and Defenders overall. Scrappers can solo easier than either class, and soloing is better XP than grouping anyway. Scrappers just feel bad and think they arent wanted in groups. The devs can't change that. If you feel worthless there's not much that anyone can do to help.

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I'm really beginning to wonder whether or not the people who played in beta are just plain idiots or devious or both. Lots of beta blasters whined that they had too little HP or did too little damage and now post-release we have blasters publishing how-to guides on achieving 40 in 2 weeks.

I bet the developers looking at their data mining are shocked to see a huge discrepancy in levelling rates pre- and post-release. Either lots of beta blasters were fudging gimpness or simply never reported exploits or the developers didn't listen to the right people.

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The developers raised Blaster hit points because Blasters were getting KO'd the most. It wasnt even close. The order went:

Tanker (defeated the least)
Scrapper
Controller
Defender
Blaster (defeated most often)

And they didnt really raise hit points that much. It was only 5-10%. Controllers got a bigger boost.

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Blasters now are seriously overpowered compared to other archetypes its not even remotely funny. All of this exploit XPing and overpowered combos have got to be nipped at the bud.

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You mean like the burn tankers exploit that was addressed or the Caltrops hold that was fixed? Or maybe Ignite? Seems to me the devs are working on things.

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Its bad enough that a /whoall in any zone yields about 90% blasters, 10% everything else. Must they wait until every single player is playing a blaster?

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Do you really think 90% of heros in the game are Blasters?

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I'm really worried about this game. The devs claim they are watching the datamining information carefully. And yet nothing has been done about fire/fire blasters getting a bub of XP at 35+ every 15 minutes. Something is wrong, the last time I earned a bub in 15 minutes as a scrapper was the low 20's. This is unacceptable, I hope they do something about this soon because the game is becoming rather silly.

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Well frankly you can't do squatto about it. Why dont you just build a fire blaster if they are SO Uber? Why be such a whiney tool and stick it out with your crappy scrapper?

Either you are having fun with your scrapper or not. If he is so frustrating that the game is becoming silly, and you know all about the exploits that make fire blasters uber you should just restart and play one. That way everything can work your way for a little while, and rather than being frustrated by the devs poor management you can take advantage of it. What are you waiting for?