Spectralshift

Tough is 10% base for blasters (22% maximum), far as I know (it was before I slotted it way back when, anyway).

Almost universally, Smoke Grenade is better than Tough/Weave. While Tough/Weave is conditional, Smoke has to hit. Also, in terms of endurance, Tough/Weave aren't nearly as good as Cloak or CJ, both of whom have good side effects rather than conditional defense.

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Given you entered into an exchange over the nature of grouping an viability in groups, perhaps you'll address that.


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Sure. Blasters aren't needed in groups. I mentioned that. They then have little to no ability to solo now. That's what I have been saying.

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Who said anything about forced teaming?


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I did. You said they are ok in groups, which I don't really agree with in the first place. A civilian with 95% def is 'good' in a group. I mention they have no choice, now. If you can't solo, your are forced to team.

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Our group is our group. I don't hold it to be anything special and certainly I've worked in others (or other variations of our group depending on who is about).


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A group of blasters can't do it. Scrappers and blasters doesn't help the blasters live. Tanks help moderately (spamming provoke), but that didn't work in the trial. Would work in missions. Controllers help minimize it, as do defender buffers/debuffers.

You are a defender primarily, a scrapper secondary. There are no times when you do expierence this... Look at it from before the patch - not being able to find any blasters to group with you... Blasters are looking somewhat like that now. It isn't huge yet, but the gap is growing It really only shows up at 35, but by 40+, from what I can tell, it get nighmarish.

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The issue WAS GROUPING. Nobody has said anything about forced grouping.


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I did. If you agree with my statements, which you said you did I think, about soloing - blasters now have to group. They are not 'on par' they are now in the middle of the pack... above defenders maybe, and maybe on par with tankers, but way behind scrappers and maybe even controllers, at the same gaming level (ie: optimal blaster vs optimal scrapper and fun scrapper vs fun blaster). I haven't played or seen a controller solo lately, so I can't attest to that.

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Please read what was written. Did I say anything about survivability? No. I said their soloability was dropped to be in line with others. As to survivability, there seem to be quite a few Blasters claiming that things haven't changed for them.


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I can manage with a min max character too. I had to respec my character into something he as not before to accomplish it. Certain mixes can handle it, moderately well. That's like saying that Burn tankers have no problem killing things, so Tankers are doing fine. Its a lot more complicated than that... Even non-burn fire tankers would be axed... It isn't an 'AT' anymore, its an extremely narrow build that you need.

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Yes, its a hard mission. Members of my supergroup failed the first time on live and succeeded the next time (personally I was tired and had gone to bed before they started), and they indicated it was a difficult mission.


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Well, it was easy for the scrappers... definately hard for me. It is immensely difficult, worse before. What you aren't quoting is how unbalanced it is - balanced teams with blasters die. Unbalanced teams with minimal blasters is better. Each person adds something, and takes away something via increased spawns. It would appear that blasters are the least contributing member, now. In negative territory no more. I can see pulling one along after 32 to deal with minions... he can just leech until then. I must admit, I still feel impressive when FA does 18 ticks of 24 to a dozen mobs (5184 damage!). I don't even pull aggro from the scrappers with it, though. And I kill maybe 2-3 minions. And I still die to one hit from those things.

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Good, though that would rather indicate that Blasters aren't at the disadvantage being portrayed.


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You misunderstand - Failed with all of the blasters, until the last. It was coupled together with "that was my first success, and I had done it 7 times with balanced teams". Good news is that I almost did it a couple of times... so it wasn't an 'automatic failure', but the difference between the success and the closest failure was immense.

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While I wasn't there I'm near certain of the group make up that went from our SG and it would have included a Blaster, 2 Tanks, 2 Controllers, and either a third Controller or another Blaster (depending on which character a particular person was playing).


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That's funny... a blaster being a minority?

You could remove that blaster and it would of made very little difference... maybe even easier. It'll take time, but people will notice.

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There is a difference between being required and being advantageous. When people pull out the word "needed" they tend to mean more "required" than than "advantageous". I find it to be a good thing that specific ATs are not required, seeing a good player to be an advantage regardless of AT.


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Well, I wasn't required. And I wasn't needed. I increased the spawn level therefore no matter how good of a player, I was a liability. Hell, they even complimented me on being 'the best blaster they have played with' (which means nothing with blasters, heh)... mostly cause I didn't do anything, I think. I hit FA to pull some minions off of them. Then I ran around like a chicken with its head chopped off.

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Our controller heavy team succeeded on their second attempt, which isn't bad for going in completely blind the first time around.


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Imagine that...

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Understand please that I'm not saying that Blaster shouldn't be looked at for balance. . .that's not why I first posted in the thread. I take issue with, and continue to do so, the notion that Blasters are planned for obsolescence or are largely there already.


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You are hearing two sides - the blasters that can handle this by previous design, and certain blasters (AR/Dev being the worst right now) being forced into a single build to play this game at all reasonably. I have given up playing Solo... every evening (ie: 1 hour ish) I play alone, I have died at least once... normally right away, so I team up. I'm not talking Eden, but a mission. I got my 'work of debt' badge based on the debt I incurred in the first 24 hours of the patch... that's stopped now that I cap my defence with fortitude...

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My evidence is that I'm out every night in a group team with Blasters who aren't dying in droves like is being portrayed here. They stay alive and I know how my group works. Hmmm, if our Blasters live and you're not. . . .


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Three problems;

1) That is not evidence of what I was talking about at all (soloing);
2) That is *percisely* what other AT's don't want to have happen to them (forced teaming)
3) That is only within certain groups, tending towards very specific power-buffed groups. ie: Mandatory class selection.

If your support for this system is to make us group, then what is utterly unfair is that blasters were turned from soloers (which is why I made my blaster - I have extremely erratic gaming schedules, from 5 minutes to 5 hours, randomly interrupted) into support, then you have destroyed the class that people built on.

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I'd say they are no longer overwhelmingly superior units in a group and have had their soloability dropped into line with where others are, but the basic idea is the same.


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False. Tankers and scrappers... and even to some degree, controllers (though that pet change... erg) have higher survival and are now in line with the speed to kill... that is, the time it takes us to find a group we can handle. Had this discussion with 30+ scrappers all the time many times over now... and tankers and scrappers are still being improved upon. SR aside, they are almost universally better than the best max/min blaster out there. As I note below, in the trial;

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So you went sidekicked into a group situation with a lopsided group and died on a mission designed to be specifically extra hard. How is this indicative of more than questionable planning?


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False. This was the first successful group I had. I failed 3 times on test, 4 times on live first. I did it with my own blaster, with an energy blaster and a fire blaster, in groups of 4 to 8... Friends couldn't do it either... the amount of failures standing outside TV caused crashes on launch night. yet, we four completed it without breaking (their) sweat.

This was, ironically, the optimal build. This was all on the 'extra hard' at release one too.

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The mission is known to be more than run of the mill and that should suggest covering all bases not just loading up with damage classes that have no ability to deal with several of the challenges that you'd normally find on a mission let alone the challenges an extra hard mission is guaranteed to bring.


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Percisely true. Blasters are the ones that aren't needed. They shouldn't have taken me with them, they would of done it faster. We are not, in any way, needed. They probably should have had a fourth scrapper, or maybe a debuffer for decreased kill time.

Know why they took me? They needed someone to shoot the explosives. Sigh. They had done it many times over already... successfully.

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Sleeps are currently broken by heals, but to your group a Sleep was as good as a Hold because neither Scrappers nor Blasters are known for their abilities to heal others. An Empathy Controller/Defender can break Holds, and a Storm Summoning Controller/Defender can immunize you from Sleeps and Disorients.


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There were no sleeps, only disorients (and the occasional hold). I could *not* have been healed. I was insta-killed. I could *not* have been rescued by an empathy because they also would be one hit (no debuff). I could *not* have been saved with only two scrappers because the number of bosses outnumbered the scrappers already by a huge number. They never came close to dying, empathy was useless to them, and me. Tried it already with controllers and defenders, it didn't go nearly as well.

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You seem quite reasonable, but you are still ignoring the underlying theme here.

We die. Lots. We died before, tending towards a fair bit (always glossed over because of SG). Min/max characters using TM and FA did just awesome. Now, even they are having problems. Grinding, sure... but outside of that?

Blasters are now support and they aren't fun support, they die all the time and can't survive any status effects.

This is *all* percisely the opposite of what they are before. I don't want to tank, I want not to wait 90-120 seconds why a lone boss in my single mission slowly freezes me to death. I want to not die from some boss that I didn't see come up and whack me, or when I can't get away and kite in time (indoor caves, egad). I want to not have FA miss 2/4 mobs and die before I can even run away. I want balance. I was a strong anti-smoke advocate because it removes teaming... but to go off the scale and *force* teaming is something else.

To be blunt, it sucks... a lot. To not have a choice in power pools because deviating means you get to eat dirt twice as often... that sucks. The datamining is skewed. My suggestion is to change the powerpool toggle powers to 'semi-intrinsic' (ie: they still consume end, can be turned on and off, but aren't hit by status effects) for at least Tough, Acrobatics and Stealth. That alone would make it feasible...

If you haven't played a blaster that is 35+ since update two, you will have to put up some evidence to support your opinions. The game has drastically changed since the patch. Its not about SG. Its about game design. Let me give the current situation;

1) Blasters have no intrinsic defenses. They are all toggles, without exception.
2) Blasters have the lowest hitpoints (tied, I know).
3) Blasters are the most likely to gather aggro via aggression (irrelevent for soloers)
4) Holds have been increased across the board, insanely in some cases.
5) The number of bosses and liets/ group in missions and especially in trials has increased.
6) There are a number of bosses that can single hit you if they are above your level;
6a) Every boss can either stun you or kill you with two hits, with the occasional three hit from devoured.
7) Our major defense - fighting - is scaled down compared to others.

So, you combine these together, and you get this sentance;

When a blaster solo, he cannot take on bosses, cannot survive a single hold and he cannot find many groups that does not have one or the other. Blasters are now support units. Just like 8 defenders working together can hunt together, so can a bunch of blaster - overwhelming aggressiveness, iow - but individually, the extent of our fighting comes down to using up disciplines like candy.

Its true, there are some builds that can handle this. A max/min build of /dev can get their defense pretty high (46.3% and 33% res). That means to live, we merely have to not get hit with a stun (occuring 11% of the time with liets, 19% with bosses) which take 3 and 6 hits respectively (2 and 4 counter fires).

This gives us, respectively, a chance of living of 42.3% for bosses... even discounted for the times when we get lucky and don't get chain stunned or dead before that (that happened to me once so far, with a crey boss) and a 79% chance with a liet... though in those cases we are able to run away fairly easily, unless its a couple of them.

*Yes* if we hit the defense or resistance cap, we are good to go. We cannot do that, not even close. Any non-optimal non-dev blaster is going to have so little defense as to be paper thin. The utter maximum possible for our defense, which requires fitness (all toggles), is 55% for */Dev. This involves taking 7 powers and 30 extra slots, with no hasten. Reasonably, we can expect is 27% for Devices and 25% for non-devices, so long as we dedicate our power pools (ie: no variation in travel powers, ect).Talk about a force fed AT.

In conclusion, all numbers above are *optimal* builds. If you play a blaster in the 35+ area with a non-optimal build, you are going to be killing minions and maybe lietenants, a couple of them, maybe... Missions alone have gotten difficult for some mobs.

Here is an observation;

We did the lvl 34-44 Respec trial (freakshow). I was sidekicked up to 39. It was me and three scrappers. I was the only one to die... 4 times. Every single one of them was a 'one hit dead'. All of them were while I was stunned or otherwise immobilized (eg: Hand slap, FA). I have died multiple times to chain stuns by crey bosses (which takes a long time...) and I used up four disciplines after dying to finish him off... lucky there was only one. The next mission has three (ah, emp defenders,I love you) I have been killed multiple times going against the DE - fungoids are the bain of my existance - but they are the easy ones now, comparably. I no longer play, even single player missions, without my GF's emp defender (go clear mind!).

So, for what some of us are able to do (I can solo moderately effecitve with groups of 3-5 minions) have created a min/max character to deal with the situation. If you do not, then your chance of survival is extremely low. A 'fun blaster' is probably now on par with the good old mind controller.

Can anyone name a zone where you get spawns of only 2-3 minions at 35+? No? Alrighty then. Lets not even talk about the problems AR/Dev have with Lethal resistance...