Rakeeb

Yeah, I did. Basically it was a .95 multiplier on the average Defiance level to account for performance over the long term.

Cautious optimism.

I still don't think they have the stones to fix what needs fixing and to do it right, and I won't believe it until I see implemented fixes on the beta server.

Still bugged in latest Beta push.

It's a great set in the current meta. I'm sure that Synapse and Arbiter Hawk have a quick and effective fix in mind for it to match up with the i24 buffs, such as removing the invisible cooldown on Water Jet's enhanced version.

In the current meta, numbers-wise, Water Blast is really good.

I rather suspect that the developers are aware of Water Blast's potential competition against existing blast sets where i24 is concerned. Whether they'll do anything about it is a question worth asking.

Water Blast is a very good set. Strongly suggest you taking Mental Manipulation as a secondary, though.

This is a fascinating quantification challenge, because the folks who have chimed in here are right - Scourge isn't something that is quantified easily in a manner that's applicable to the game environment unless you're talking about high-health AV's.

I'll have to think about this. There's probably a way to show the cascade, and then a way to demonstrate its effects on a practical level, ie, does it help you kill that minion with less attacks.

I'd tell you both to knock it off, but this thread ran its course about five pages ago after the Drain Psyche. Think it's lock time.

Strato - Yeah, I couldn't believe I was typing that either, but in the elder game Devices is pretty good if you have a strong primary because it does what it does without getting in the way.

The thing with taking it as a whole, Void, is that Scrapper secondaries (and most other secondary sets in the game) complement and strengthen the AT's ability to complete its primary tasking. Take controllers, or Masterminds, or the HEATs: each has a secondary set that complements and enhances the primary sets in various ways throughout the combinations available.

Blaster secondaries, with certain notable exceptions (Drain Psyche being the obvious one, but /Devices does a bit of this too) largely exist alongside Blaster primaries but do not enhance them beyond Build Up. Take /Elec, for instance: 6 of the 9 powers in /Elec are melee powers that don't do anything to help out the primary set. One is a boost to Endurance drain that is melee range, one is Build Up, and the final power is the single target immobilize, which is only useful in the x0 world, otherwise known as toons that suck solo.

The "good" secondaries - Mental, Energy, and Devices - are good because they make your primary set more effective somehow, either through survival or raw power upgrades in the case of Energy.

Blasters' current implementation is that of a character in WoW who's trying to spec two talent pools at the same time, and the scattered, ineffectual build has a scattered, ineffectual result. Unfortunately, the devs don't have the stones for the cottage-rule-breaking overhaul that would fix the core issues.

DS blasters who build for defense don't have any issues surviving the 1.3 seconds of aggro they need to get the full benefit and, typically, they get the ability off before mobs realize that a Blaster is about.

I'd say nobody, but people don't like that.

So in that case, the "bottom" AT should have enormous value on teams - I'll go with Defenders / Corruptors / Controllers in no particular order. Maybe Kheldians as well, if Cosmic Balance and Dark Sustenance were actually baseline multipliers rather than additive damage and resist bonuses.

Thanks for pointing out the calculation errors.

Thinking defense was a 95% reduction vice 90% is a clear error in both math and mindset.

I'm sticking to my guns regarding base Health versus a fully slotted Drain Psyche. That sort of thing happens in games because folks use Health to carry things like Miracle +Recovery IO's.

The comparative context is perfectly valid because the first Blaster takes 100 DPS in a lot of situations - two +1/0 spawns can generate and sustain that kind of damage, for instance, assuming you've got a LT in there. Ergo losing 6.25% of your life as a Blaster per second happens quite often.

Regen as an effect is just more amazing if you have less incoming damage and therefore the comparison becomes wider if you're taking less damage than that. I would agree completely with the 70x number if you're using as the comparative the value needed to damage the first Blaster at all, which incidently is about 9.78 DPS. It'd take well over 800 damage to damage the second guy.

I think we'll quibble about the numbers because I get there in a different way - you build the numbers abstractly and I try to figure out the absolute damage required to do 1 damage to the build - but I think we can both agree that the endstate numbers are absurd.

One thing we haven't talked about is that Blaster AOE will rapidly reduce the incoming damage number in a large spawn. Blasters do good AOE typically, Mental Manipulation itself is pretty good at it, so the spawn with the numbers necessary to actually generate damage against the DP blaster will die rapidly, whereas the Health guy will evaporate before he can take most of 'em out.

I do.

10% defense with 140% regen vs 45% defense and 1600% regen. That's a very easy call.

EDIT: I'll work out the math right here and get a real number for you.

Question: How much damage will it take to damage blaster #1 by 10% of his health versus blaster #2? We'll assume for the moment that each Blaster has base health - 1204. So the question becomes, how much damage does it take to deal 120 damage to the Blaster.

Well, the defense bonuses mean that both have some survival ability. The +10% defense of the first blaster means he gets hit 40% of the time vice 50% from a minion, so we'll go with him taking 20% less damage than he would otherwise. The +45% defense of the second blaster means he gets hit 5% of the time by that same minion, so he's taking 95% less damage than he would otherwise. So the first blaster has to be hit for 150 damage' worth of attacks to lose 10% of his health... not a huge difference, but noticeable. The other guy has to be hit by 2400 damage' worth of attacks to lose that same 10% of his health. That's a pretty drastic difference!

Now, let's look at the effect regeneration has on the blaster. At 1204 health, normal blaster regeneration is 5.04 health a second, which gives us a full health bar after 4 minutes (240 seconds). So the Blaster who has Health is at 140% regeneration as Health gives you 40% additional regeneration... he's healing 7.03 health per second. The blaster who runs Drain Psyche buffed out will heal at 1640% health per second - he has Health too - or 84.39 health per second. That's a huge difference! The second Blaster is healing at 12 times the speed of the first blaster, and will have a full Health bar every 15 seconds.

Now, how do we express this in a way that makes sense? The best illustration, I think, is to take the the same value of damage and see what it does to the Blasters in question. Let's take 100 damage a second, because it's a fat round number. The first Blaster's defense reduces that number over the long term by 20%, so he's taking 80 damage a second as opposed to 100. He's also healing back 7.03 health a second, so that number is now down to 72.97 damage per second. The two types of mitigation, defense and regeneration, work together to have a greater impact than either one of them would have alone. Is it enough to keep our Blaster alive? No, it is not. The Blaster will die after 16.5 seconds. Assuming he doesn't get locked down, 16.5 seconds is often plenty of time to defeat a normal spawn, especially if the Blaster is smart and locks down the more dangerous members of the mob somehow, be it through a hold, a knockdown, or what have you.

What about the second blaster? Well, the second Blaster will reduce that 100 damage by 95% over the long term, so he will take 5 damage a second from that. He will also heal back 84.39 Health a second, which brings that damage number to -79.39 health per second. Is that enough to keep him alive? Not only will he live, he'll actually end up with more Health than he lost almost 16 times over. In fact, given that the second Blaster heals 84.39 Health back, it will take (84.39*20) damage per second, or 1687.8 DPS, to deal one damage to the Blaster. To kill this Blaster in 16.5 seconds, you'd have to maintain 3147.8 damage on him per second, or a total of 51,938 damage. That is doable by only the most powerful villain groups and requires large numbers, and notably is sufficient damage to kill the first blaster in less than a second... in fact we'll lose 43.1 of the first Blaster before the second Blaster dies. And frankly, we haven't talked about resistance buffs, max health increases, or any of the other tools available to the second Blaster, all of which will get more mileage out of the Drain Psyche regen buff than they will on the first Blaster.

As we can see, the first Blaster will die relatively easily to 100 damage a second of incoming damage, but the second Blaster will hardly notice it. That's a pretty absurd difference! What's even more absurd is that the kind of damage to do a little damage to the second guy is enough to instantly kill the first guy.

A few caveats: first off, the second guy is pretty vulnerable to debuffs. If his defense is debuffed somehow his survivability will drop like a rock (of course, the same -Defense debuff will spell doom to the first guy). Second, defense only works in a percentage sense over the long term. In the short term, unlucky rolls can conceivably whack the second guy pretty good... but of course the same thing can apply to the second guy, who doesn't have 84.39 health per second to fall back on as a safety net. Also, less damage will kill both more slowly, but the volume of damage it takes to do kill the first guy in 30 seconds will do exactly zero damage to the second guy. The volume of damage it takes to kill the second guy in 30 seconds (2491 DPS) will kill the first guy outright in one second with some damage left over.

So after doing the math, I'd say that our Drain Psyche guy is 43 times as survivable as the normal Blaster if each is taking 6.25% of their life at a time. If taking less than that, the distance between the first Blaster and the second only grows wider. The second Blaster has an effective health that depends on the amount of damage being dealt to him at one time, but is ~52,000 if taking 6.25% of his health at a time. Very few Scrappers can hit that kind of mitigation.

I hope that clears things up.