Samuel_Tow

Most of mine can't. I slot for accuracy to be about as much as it takes to hit even level or at best +1 enemies. +4 enemies are significantly more difficult to hit, tend to hit through a lot of defences if you don't "softcap" and are harder to kill while being simultaneously more dangerous. +4 enemies are purple, that's outside the "con" system.

And while I may or may not be able to clear a single +4 mission, is that going to earn me a level shift? Because the way I see it, I'm going to have to clear a whole lot of these missions to get any progress, and that simply isn't acceptable. That's NOT better than Trials.

I think the disconnect here is how this is achieve. You can force people to move in at least two separate ways. I like to call them "Press X to proceed." vs. "Press X to not die." In both case, you have to press X, but in the former case, it's the players who are in control and this gives a much greater sense of power, at least in my opinion. An early Atlas Park mission has you face off against an invulnerable Eidolon. You can boss-fight him until the cows come home and he won't budge until you destroy the machine that's making him invulnerable. This puts the onus on the players to act of their own accord, rather than having to react to what may as well be quick-time events.

I don't know what it is, but almost everything I've seen since Freedom and, indeed, since Going Rogue comes off like the development team can't trust us to think for ourselves and can't trust our attention span to last more than a minute, so they're constantly throwing flashing lights and quick-reaction objectives at us, yet never letting us actually play the damn game free-hand. You enter the Destroyed Galaxy City tutorial and the game starts as it means to go on by yelling at you to jump over a pit, then go stand over there, then kill three of these, then go click that, then go click this, then kill five of these, then shoot at that AND HURRY! Why? Are you worried that my brain will shut down if it's not constantly being stimulated with ground coffee dissolved into a can of Red Bull? Are you worried I might find a way to stack boxes and climb out of the game if you let me think for myself?

It's honestly not just Raids any more. The whole game feels like it's being designed by that Raid leader yelling something about Whelps on the Onyxa raid that went around YouTube a few years back. The whole game feels like someone's looking over my shoulder and constantly telling me where to go and what to do like a back seat driver.

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And you know what's really funny? Getting players to move about isn't that complicated. Pull a large herd of enemies and have someone toss Rain of Fire over them. Mission accomplished. Your enemies have scattered and your melee folk will now have to move to catch them. This isn't just a bad tactic, this is how large groups of enemies behave naturally. One of the reasons AV fights feel static is you're fighting one guy who's mostly glued to the tank who doesn't move because he's running permanent Granite Armour. Have more of them - and not necessarily as strong - and people will have to move around.

If you have to use gimmicks, turn those into mandatory objectives, as opposed to instant death sentences. Make players have to leave the fight and go kill something else before they can continue like in the Winter Trial, make players have to coordinate the destruction of specific items like in the Hydra Trial, make players have to go press a button or just plain make the AV run away ala Captain Castillo and force people to move forward to find him again. There are ways to make people move that don't involve instantly killing them if they don't.

This is almost word-for-word one of the arguments I've always had about Snipes having range as one of their perks. They don't. They have range, but it's not a perks. At best it's wasted, at worst it's counter-productive and in only very rare, very specific situations where you're forced to take the slowest, most unwieldy route does it actually help, and even then not by that much.

Sniping at full range is pointless unless all you wanted to do was snipe once and then leave. If you actually want to defeat a spawn, you need to attack more than once, and the only attack with Snipe range that you have is your Snipe (and possibly Long Range Missile Rocket, occasionally). If you want to use your other powers, you need to move closer, and while you're moving closer, your enemies are already in range to attack YOU, potentially stun or hold you at this long range and keep you out of range of your Defiance attacks but within range of their attacks.

The only other thing to do is to move in close so you're within range of your other attacks, which is what I used to do before sniping when I still played Blasters. I'd snipe, queue up Aim and Build Up and use their activation time to approach to within 40 feet, then continue on with Blaze and Fire Blast, then usually Fireball and Fire Breath if I'm not dead or held yet. But here's the thing - that makes range pointless. So pointless, in fact, that I'd often forego Blazing Bolt entirely and move in directly for Blaze, because under 40 feet is where the bulk of my damage was.

If I had to answer "How many attacks do Blasters have?" I'd say they have far more than they ever really get to use. And that's the big joke on them - Blasters have amazing potential for damage - more than any other AT, I still insist. But they don't ever get to realise that. A Fire/Fire Blaster using Combustion, Fire Sword Circle, Fireball, Fire Breath and Burn is HIDEOUSLY impressive. Or would be, if mine had ever been able to get farther than step three regardless of the order of attacks.

Blasters have more attacks than they need, because what they need isn't more attacks.

If the proposed solo Incarnate content is hard-locked at level 54, then that makes it a complete bust as a solo path to Incarnate status for anyone who's not already at +3. That is to say, it makes it a complete bust for ME, since most of the characters I want to take up the path haven't even run Ramiel's arc yet, as there's no to point at the moment.

Heh, I think I may have been one of the first people to suggest you review City of Heroes, back before it was on your list when you first made the site

That said, I think you've run into something of an unfortunate problem with City of Heroes - the original game was designed with zero regard for animation times, so some powers were made blindingly fast while others terribly slow, and it's not always the one you'd think would be fast or slow that actually are. The original balance only took into consideration recharge and damage (for attacks, at least) and balanced around that, as if expecting that you will always be bound by recharge. The thing, though - and you can't really tell this until you hit level 26 or 32 - is that when you get enough attacks, something magical happens. You suddenly have enough attacks to just cycle them endlessly without ever having to stop. Especially on your Blaster, you'll end up having upwards of 10 attacks, which is so many you will literally not have time in the day to use them all, with most standing around unused, waiting for the appropriate situation.

And on the notion of rooting, I actually consider this a good thing, and for a couple of reasons. For one, rooting allows attacks to be long without having to be ugly. I've seen games that allow you to move and attack at the same time, and to avoid bringing up other MMOs, I'll bring up the 2000 game Rune. In there, your torso and your legs are separate, allowing your lower body to run irrespective of the way your upper body swings. What this results in is both a very ugly combat system and a very dumb combat system. A lot of the time, you have to sort of time your attacks so that you're moving towards your enemy only as your attack is in mid swing and you're running back the rest of the time, producing this sort of "juggling" combat.

Worse still, having your body parts move independently of each other just looks BAAAD. I know other MMOs have done it, and I've hated it there, too. Especially with melee attacks, a lot of the apparent power comes not just from flailing your arms, but also from your lower back and your legs and your overall stance. My usual example here is: Try to imagine that you had to run backwards at speed and swing at a person in front of you, himself running towards you. Try and imagine how goofy that would look. That's how these types of combat systems actually look. When you disconnect torso from legs and turn your waist into nothing more than a transition zone, you lose the beauty and fluidity inherent in the motions of the human body. What you end up with is, in essence, a shooter that you're trying to melee in, and that very rarely looks good from a third person perspective.

Now, I get that you dislike being stuck in fire or being unable to catch a fleeing enemy or being sapped to death by Protean's Power Syphon because Total Focus takes three and a half years to connect. I've been there, too. But as you say, City of Heroes is actually pretty lenient about this. The need for precise timing combined with precise positioning isn't great, and where it shows up, you're usually given ample time to react. The irrationally popular Death From Below Trial (level one to level, what? 10? 20?) has this right at the end, where the two Hydra Heads summon either a vortex or a bubble under you, and you have to move away before it triggers and either hurts or debuffs you. The thing is, this gives you something on the neighbourhood of 5-10 seconds to react, and that's enough to cover pretty much any animation you can't interrupt.

Speaking of which, being able to cancel your own animation with movement might sound like a benefit, but it is a curse. I don't know what your ping time is, but mine's around 300, which means that I have to stand perfectly still for something like half a second before I try to use interruptible powers, and then I have to wait an extra half second to ensure I don't move too early. Being able to interrupt your powers would make the game system far more demanding on a player controls level, because right now, you can be sloppy and it'll still work. Queue up an attack, run past your enemy and it WILL trigger at some point. Because you can't interrupt it, you don't have to worry about interrupting it.

That's how I see it, anyway.

Only two powers in the set swing downwards - Hack and Head Splitter.

Well, there's your problem. Beam Rifle is not that great a set, and you appear to have been grossly misinformed regarding Street Justice and Titan Weapons.

There's really no right way to go about this. You have the points, but you don't want to spend them because you don't think what you're being offered is worth the cost. I ask you this - are those points worth more to you sitting unused, then?

These are two sides of the same coin. One without the other would not be such a problem. Let's examine.

The Well is sentient, but is not the all-powerful source of all super abilities. It is A source, and just one which happens to be convenient. It's malicious, facetious and probably evil, but hey - the source of OUR powers is greater, so we can take the Well for a ride, benefit from it and then double-cross it in a fashion not dissimilar to what happens with Protean at the end of the red-side clone arc.

If my super power is that I'm smart and I make gadgets, then I will eventually outsmart the Well and design a gadget to beat it. If my power is magic, I'll eventually develop a spell to defeat the well. If my power is brute strength, then I'll eventually find what I need to break to kill it.

If the Well is NOT the source of all power, then it can be defeated and its power taken. Whether or not this happens on-screen or in the actual game's narrative, it COULD happen, and I could therefore do it. Moreover, I can do it with MY OWN power, and hang the gains from the Well on my belt like a trophy, proving that, in the end, Sam is strongest there is.

Alternately, the Well is the source of all super abilities, but it is not sentient. It is simply the personification of the abstract natural phenomenon of abnormal power. Magic, technology and good breeding still exist irrespective of the well, but its power is inspiration. It inspires us to develop our own powers, it inspires us to create, to think and to invent, it inspires us to train our bodies and exercise our mutant powers, it inspires us to delve into the ancient lore and comprehend the old texts, it inspires us to be better.

But it does not MAKE up better. At no point does the Well give us any actual power. All of it is our own power, all of it is our own doing, all of it is our own achievement. Thus, the Well is a source, but not the source of power directly. It is the source of inspiration through which beings make themselves all-powerful.

The thing is still a powerful force, so it could grant some measure of esoteric power, but it should never be greater than what we already possessed on our own. That's why it needs people - because it isn't "super" on its own. Instead, it has the ability to inspire others to be super. The Well, then, becomes a tool for learning, training and motivation, and that leaves character progression consistent with our own designs.

Due to a quirk of scaling, elite bosses actually have higher status protection than Archvillains outside of the POTD. Normally, that makes up because the POTD offers very high status resistance, but because it doesn't cover immobilization, AVs are actually easier to immobilize than EBs.

That's been my impression, as well. In most other MMOs out there, you have a basic auto-attack that you're always doing irrespective of using any "skills," so even though you may not actually be doing as much in terms of player involvement, your character still looks like it's doing something. Frankly, I personally find this design to be far more boring than City of Heroes because most of the time, you quite literally can subsist on your auto-attack and only one other. In City of Heroes, the game more or less forces me to use multiple attacks because if I don't, I have nothing that's recharged. In, say, 9Dragons, I can keep my auto-attack on a constant loop and only ever use one other attack, because by the time I can use ANY attacks at all, that one attack has recharged. Why bother with anything else?

Interestingly enough, Masterminds probably come the closest to the WoW model, because they kind of sort of do have an auto-attack - their henchmen. A Mastermind has damage output that he doesn't have to spend animation time on, which means he's dealing damage while doing other things, usually support. That actually makes the game "feel" a lot faster because there's always something going on around you and even if your character may be standing still and waiting on recharge, at least one of your henchmen is shooting at at least one of your enemies.

As a point of fact, the game can become TOO fast at times. One of my original complaints about Blasters back in the day was that while I COULD try and control my enemies, it felt like I spent so much time trying to control them that even if I could stop most of them, I didn't have enough uptime to actually deal damage and died of attrition before my enemies did. I suppose that could just have been my slotting, but in City of Heroes, you REALLY need to pick your attacks, because there is only so much you can do before you plain run out of time in the day to do it.

I suspect that's why he spent so little time talking about the store. The interface makes it damn near impossible to find what you're looking for if you don't know exactly where to look for it.

Now that you mention him, a lot of his posts make so much more sense if I envision him elbow-dropping his own jacket.

This is a point I've been trying to make since 2004, which is when my Blaster first met enemies with consistently deadly ranged attacks, namely Nemesis Troops, Crey Security and high-level 5th Column troops, as well as enemies with strong control capabilities like Rikti Mentalists. For a long time, I actually tried to buy into it, making all my Blasters into fliers and keeping out of range with Hover... Only to die to Nemesis Grenades or Spectral Demon slaps because the things fly, or to be knocked out of the air by a Yellow Ink Man.

People talk about kiting and how you can avoid taking damage if you jump around like the Rooftop Raider used to once upon a time, but the more I think about it and the more I try it, the more it seems like just plain old herding enemies around you and AoE-ing them to death is safer and more productive. And you're right - Blaster range is seen as such a huge asset that they end up paying through the nose for it, and I don't it does as much for them as they suffer for having it.

This is something that I think we are thankfully past as a community. That's what amazes me about the forums these days - both the developers and the players are open to new ideas on a very broad scale. They may not always be good ideas... Or even always rational, but there always seems to be room to explore WHY these ideas are good or bad and if they really have much of a place in the game. There was a time when just so much as mentioning "range" and "defence" in the same sentence caused people to instinctively point their fingers and yell "TANK-MAGE!!!" but these times seem to have passed.

If you get the development team to re-examine Blasters, then that can only be a good thing. The AT has some serious issues. Personally, for the time being, I'll contend with re-examining powers with severe penalties and drawbacks and trying to figure out if these really still have a purpose that needs to be fulfilled. In some cases, I could see that. As you mentioned, "god mode" powers are designed to give you time to finish your fight, in return for the gamble that if you couldn't finish the fight in that time, you will either need to leave or die. A penalty at the end makes sense there.

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My real beef, though, is with powers which I can tell were intended to be awesome, but were balanced such that the game would slap us across the hands every time we went to use it. It's like the developers put in these awesome powers just to taunt us with, but didn't actually ever want us to use them but once in a blue moon. Ugh!

I'm not talking about attacks specifically. I mean powers with penalties of any kind. Cloaking Device's stealth and defence suppress. Cloak of Darkness' stealth and defence do not. Blasters are the only AT specifically designed without any real form of status protection or enemy control that's still given toggles which drop when held, making these toggles a pain and a half to use.

Blasters, by and large, are the ones who pay by far the most for the powers they get, and the real sore spot is that what they get fails to blow me away. And I'm not just saying that from the outside looking in. I spent something like four years of my life trying to find some way to work with Blasters on a comparable level to my other characters and utterly failed.

I want to quote this out of context because this is exactly where I am. Yes, we get it. You're very good at the Mission Architect. But while you're out having fun tying the powers system in a knot, I'm essentially sitting idly by, waiting for you to finish so I can get back to actually playing the game. The newer a piece of content is, the less there seems to be to actually do in it. Dialogue vectors, complex triggered ambushes, five-minute missions and more and more... When do I get to kill stuff? I didn't log in to watch a movie written down in text, you know. Especially when none of it is actually interactive.

Gimmicks are only good when they're used sparingly. When they're overused, the missions begin to feel cluttered and clunky and they take bloody ages to make. I'd rather have a story arc made of simple "defeat boss" and "click glowie" objectives over just one mission with a trigger script complex enough to get lost in. However "good" that mission might be, it's still just one mission.

I've been quite impressed with especially the powers team in just this regard, by the way. Synapse doesn't post much and doesn't go out of his way to start threads prompting feedback on abstract notions like David does (Thank you, David! ), but from everything he HAS said, it feels like he's very much open suggestions and interested in designing powersets around how people actually tend to play them, as opposed to an idealised prognosis of how people might play something like this.

As for Power Burst, sometimes I chuckle to myself when I remember that power used to have a range of 10 feet. Yeah, the same as Titan Weapons' melee range right now. The same range as Head Splitter. That's what made me scratch my head when Jack Emmert insisted that range is a Blasters' defence. If it were, then why the hell did you make some of their most powerful attacks have to be fired either point-blank or from a range so short it may as well have been point blank? That's what I mean when I say powers that are supposed to be strong become weaker because of the "tradeoffs" they are given. And Blasters are the AT with the most "tradeoffs" of all.

That, really, is something which bugged me about Blasters pretty much since day 1 of playing them... Well, week 1, at least. They are capable of doing so much, but they are simply never given enough time to do most of it, because none of their tools are capable of buying them time. With a Blaster, if you screw up, then your failure is immediate and decisive. With a Scrapper, if you screw up, then you have time to recover from it, time to run away and even time win before your mistake catches up to you. This kind of safety net, this kind of margin for error, is what makes them so much easier to play and so much faster to level up. It's much harder to fail with a Scrapper for about the same degree of concentration, preparation and knowledge.

And the worst part of it, that seems to have been intentional. As you say, "use inspirations or die I suppose" is more or less what Blasters end up falling back on more often than not. They simply don't have the tools to do anything else, because their secondaries do not help them.

And that's the big problem at the end of the day, and also a problem which feeds back into what I was saying before about "out of combat" powers. Blasters in general and Devices in particular are seen as so dangerous if allowed to actually work, that they are hamstrung by limitations intended to do nothing more than annoy you for having to deal with them. And the real kicker is most of them wouldn't be all that out of line if they were freed from this burden.

Trip Mine is seen as a big problem if it were usable without the interrupt. But the thing is, even without it, it's still a slow power you place at your feet that doesn't even always trigger when things walk over it. And all of this when a Shield Scrapper can do almost as much damage with about the same radius, but nearly instantly and at a significant range and do so in the air. And what we have now is the WEAKER version of what this was when it was first introduced. Or, even simpler, Spring Attack from Leaping that's available to just about everybody, but which does more damage for Scrappers than for Blasters.

I realise that overpowered characters and powersets are a bad thing, but the fear of it in some cases is irrational and damaging to the subjects it's applied over.

Which brings us back full circle to the large number of powers which are seen as so good that they are counter-balanced into near uselessness, as this is apparently seen as the only way to offset their power. The problem is that, after a certain critical mass of countermeasure mechanics applied against a particular power, it no longer matters how good it is. If it's a pain in the *** to use, then it's just not worth using and, worse of all, not worth taking and slotting. The only way such powers ever become useful is if someone finds a way to harness the supposed awesome potential of the power, but in a way that circumvents its limitations. That's what happened to Trip Mine - it's a decent power if you can actually use it, and learning to toe-bomb is using the power without suffering many of its drawbacks.

More than just idle contemplation, though, I do seriously question if this sort of approach to power design is even merited at this point. I know it's not something I should be saying, but at this point, people are used to this game being convenient, and inconvenience is seen as a massive, massive tradeoff. Just look at Masterminds - they ARE tank-mages able to deliver massive damage at range, survive hideous punishment and wield support powers, yet you almost never hear anyone complain about them. Because so few people play them. And it's not because they're paid or because they're weak. Almost universally, it's because they're a pain in the *** to play, especially if you don't have the right binds. Henchman AI is kind of dumb, they draw a lot of aggro, henchmen keep falling off things, you spend a lot of time giving orders and it's just cumbersome overall.

Trying to counter numerically superior powers behind *** backwards limitations doesn't "balance" them. It just makes people not bother. Not all people, obviously, but I can say this for a fact - I have not seen a Devices Blaster in a very, very long time, my own notwithstanding.

An NPC in a mission somewhere mentions something to the effect of "...before one of the 50 000 heroes in Paragon City rescues him..." in a red-side mission, I believe. That said, I don't think the comics are exactly canon.

Then they should have taken that out of their descriptions. In fact, a lot of enemies can do with better descriptions overall. Almost all the Rikti share the same one, for instance, and I wouldn't think it would be that hard to write a 300-symbol description for at least each unique enemy type.

If the well ends up to be mindless and is acting malevolent because it's being controlled, then I'd call that a writer's saving throw. It would be a clever way to fix what is a fundamentally broken story, and one I would get behind wholeheartedly, but it would still be a ret-con, if we want to be realistic. From everything written about the Well so far, it's fairly obvious it was intended to be an amoral selfish cosmic entity about on the level of the Beyonder, who is essentially messing with us for kicks and giggles. Changing it to not be that is pretty much the definition of a ret-con.

That said, this would be a ret-con I would not mind in the slightest, and would actually heartily defend if it happened. Ret-cons don't have to be bad when they're used for good. They're only bad if you use them to pervert a good storyline in order to fit in a bad storyline (or, really, even a mediocre one) into continuity, but what happens if you ret-con a bad story? Really, what other way do you have to salvage something like the Well? Expand on it? Do we REALLY want to even have that in our continuity? Because I, for one, am more than willing to look the other way if the great hand of a writer were to reach in and pen a much better story over the bad one we're looking at right now.

And let's be honest here: The Well as potential incarnate - as a tool - which is being used by malicious people to do evil but can be used by good people to do good (or by OUR malicious people to do OUR evil) is a far better story than the Well as a sentient god. That's actually an interesting story I'd very much like to be part of.

Of course not! Not in the slightest. I have been trained in Wing Tsun (somewhat) so I do know what an actual martial art looks like, and City of Heroes Martial Arts ain't it. But my question here is... So what? Assault rifle is weird beyond belief, Broadsword swings like a baseball bat, Titan Weapons hates your spine, Dual Pistols is replete with more unnecessary twists than an M Night Shyamalan movie and Haymaker isn't a haymaker. "Authenticity" is not something I've ever had the impression that City of Heroes is striving for. That and realism just are not intentional goals. When they happen, it's accidental, and when they don't, that's just how things go.

To my eyes, Martial Arts is cool irrespective of how accurate it is to any real life martial art. The few times I've used it, as a point of fact, I've used it to represent fast hand-to-hand combat, and almost never actual real martial arts. I used it on my fast kicking robot long ago inspired by Rook from Rise 2: Resurrection and I used it on my 600-year-old transcended kung fu master who's about as realistic as Jackie Chan sliding down the Willemswerf building's sloped glass in Who Am I? I used to use it for my action school girl, but replaced it with Street Justice because I laughed my *** off at a tiny little girl using those painful-looking attacks, and I had it on my Ghost in the Shell/Battle Angel Alita inspired human-looking cyborg, who eventually swapped over for Super Strength because I could now have a hero using that who wasn't a Tanker. Years ago, I had a concept for a character who had an ability reminiscent of a video game quicksave, allowing him/her to return to a previous save upon getting hit and try something else to dodge the attack. That will likely be Martial Arts, as well, if it's not Dual Blades. That remains to be seen.

No, Martial Arts is not realistic and, for the most part, isn't even logical. But it's still damn cool and I honestly don't need it to be Street Justice for me to like it.

Interesting anecdote. Right now, I "belong" to a Super Group, and I put that in quotes because I don't actually have any character in any of their SGs, but I have made their community forums my home and consider those guys and gals my friends. Do you know how I ended up being invited in there?

I was minding my own business, soloing stuff with Kia, my Sword/Shield Scrapper when I get a tell asking me if I'd mind padding for a Manticore TF, since apparently they were one person short to start. I look at the clock, run my plans through my head and realise that I could actually afford to run the TF itself. I say I'll join, but ask if I could stay for the actual TF through the end, and the people agree.

It was a fun TF, it was relatively clean, we had some fun, tossed some banter around and at the end of the day, they directed me to their own community website, suggesting I could make an account and keep in touch. I did, and as it turns out, that was a great decision to make. The thing is, most of my characters are on Victory and most of theirs on Pinnacle, so even today, I don't get to team with my SG a lot, nor participate in many of the scheduled events, but I do chat them up over Global and post my walls of text on their forums just as I do here, and it's still a lot of fun.

The moral of the story? I guess "teaming is good," and while that's true... I do team when I feel like it. The above experience was as good because at the time, I actually did feel like teaming and indeed insisted to stay. Had I not felt like teaming but been forced to, I'd probably have acted like an *******, complained the whole way and ruined everybody's fun. That's why I'm in favour of everyone teaming when and only when he or she feels like it, and never having to be forced to team when that person is not in the mood.

Thank you, Arcana! That's very well said. It's both painfully true and damn entertaining

And while that's the heart of the problem of what Blasters in general are most at fault for, you have to admit that that's not really the whole story, or even most of the story. Blaster design is a mire of unknowns, but it's also plagued by a series of problem power design decisions which contribute to the problem and which would likely survive any AT-wide design.

Blasters are an AT cursed to be "hard mode" in return for performance which fails to impress, that much is true, but on top of being hard mode, they're also cursed with powers they plain can't use, and that aren't all that amazing even when they're used. Blasters are an AT which simply got crowded out of the game and now exists in a limbo, and the tools it is given to try and carve some place for itself are flawed at best.

Think about it realistically - of all the ATs out there, which is the one which has the most attacks which come with penalties to them? Blasters. Their nukes have hideous crashes, their Snipes are "situational" and one whole secondary is full of powers that are either useless or cumbersome. No other AT has to suffer as many indignities as that. Scrappers and Brutes have crashing T9 powers, sometimes, but that's about it. Rage kind of crashes... Sort of, but it's not that bad, and that's about it. Stalkers are right now cursed with a "melee snipe," but it's stronger and faster than Blaster snipes... And it's getting fixed. OK, I suppose Defenders and Corruptors are somewhat in the same situation, but at least their AT isn't full of holes.

To my eyes, though, the concept of cumbersome powers with drawbacks and penalties needs to be re-examined separately from the larger problem of Blaster balance, partly because it affects more than just Blasters and partly because Blaster changes likely won't focus around it.