StratoNexus

Eh, the snipes working situationally and having the situations becoming more frequent as you level up works fine for me. That is a standard of the game, room for growth. I consider it a feature that it works with Aim out of the box (all but one blaster set with snipes has Aim) and then as you level it can be made to work more often through quite a variety of methods. I also like that teaming is one of those methods, by the way.

Equal is not that easy to quantify. Great game design throws out a variety of options, choices, and potential. You may like those 12 things, I'll like these other 12 things, most everyone likes these 76 things, a lot of people avoid these 24 things (while those 24 things have a modest base of fans).

Plus, I'd never want the game dumbed down to the point where my build choices don't matter because I end up just like everyone else. While some say everyone will be forced to do x, y, and z to have the snipes always fast cast, I don't believe everyone will think that is worth chasing, which promotes variety. Some will be fine with it situationally, others will have to perma it. That is the sweet spot of design.

I am thrilled that each set gets its own little twist in the mitigation area.

Sadly, the stun sucks. You know how Hand Clap stuns, yeah Lightning Clap sucks compared to Hand Clap. But radial KB is situationally useful to a blaster.

From what I understand, you get the mitigation benefit regardless of anything being in range. So the HoT of Cauterizing Aura works even if no enemies are nearby. The absorb shield of /Ice works even when nothing is near. Granted, their current effects work better in melee, but the idea is that these powers are useful to a ranger and situationally more useful if you risk melee (which is as it should be).

In my opinion, Snipe is a viable choice when the faster cast is situational, say you can use the fast cast version ~3 times a minute. Getting the fast cast available 3 times a minute is trivial. For those who already have the snipe, it is likely they could choose to not change a thing and get that much benefit.

Anything more than that is min/maxing the benefit and like any good min/max situation, you may not be able to have it all. You will have to lose some things if you want to max out the snipe fast cast, or you can settle for a situational fast cast and keep those other things.

That is a mark of great game design, not poor design.

Electric damage doesn't need to be as good as Fire or Beam and they deal very solid DPS against hard targets. I know people poo-poo on Electric single target output because of the lack of a third tier blast, but when single target DPS really matters, Electric is fine (but VS is annoying because of the lengthy animation and its odd timing needs). On top of that, now Zapp can be used as a great DPA power on occasion, which will only help them more in comparison to other sets.

Those godawful PBAoE KB powers may not be appealing on an AT that has primarily melee attacks (but I really wanted Lightning Clap for Stalker Electric), but on an AT that mixes range and melee and doesn't always do well with 6 enemies hitting them in melee it is more interesting. Lightning Clap works now (although I think the stun chance and duration should be higher).

NONE of the known changes force blasters into melee. EVERY SINGLE NEW THING discussed so far is useful from range. EVERY ONE OF THEM. Only /mental is still forced into melee and that could be considered balanced by the fact that they can get nigh perma Instant Healing levels of regen (I don't think it is and I think the top end of Drain Psyche ought to be reduced while letting it have a bit on the bottom end without needing to charge into melee).

Improving a power that is weak is a bad thing. You heard it here.

Look, I understand what you are saying. Snipes are a situational power like Lightning Clap. I figured they would improve snipe by making it more useful in those situations and possibly adding something so it was useful in a few more situations. Instead they decided to vastly increase the situations it is useful by making it an obnoxious DPA power. Crap, it can still be used situationally from long range but now I also likely want to use it after every Aim or Build Up.

It can be frustrating when powers one has skipped become appealing. That doesn't mean they should leave often skipped powers unappealing and instead buff the powers everyone already has.

If these are kneejerk, they have really poor reflexes, because this problem has been tapping their knees for a long, long time. A kneejerk reaction would have been adding 20% defense all as a base buff and increasing the damage mod a bit. These are targeted, thought-out, and conservative changes. They may not be enough, but they do address some of the problems.

Voltaic Sentinel should be a high performer against Tyrant, especially once you get to the actual hard part, since the Olympians will be gone and it will only have one thing to shoot at (although it may also sometimes shoot at the Lights if Tyrant ends up near them, I haven't monitored that on my Emp/Elec).

VS isn't a very good power for spawn to spawn racing and killing mass groups, but it is very good against hard targets. It still should be improved for QoL, but it's strength vs. AVs is not an issue.

I'd rather it simply be a passive benefit just for taking powers, if we are going to be this generic. I argued against this type of thing when Miladys_Knight suggested it, but in thinking about it more, I would be fine with it if it capped at ten powers. This means take any ten blaster primary and secondary powers and you get the full effect of whatever buff you are suggesting (of course, at that point you could just have it be a passive ability that ramps up with level).

I am pretty much opposed to a defensive Fury type thing for blasters, I like the idea the attacks can control or debuff enemies, I am less thrilled with them buffing the blaster.

I think Hawk's suggestion is much more interesting and I actually like that these specific powers all got solid ability added to them that makes them much more interesting to take. I don't think it is enough, but I also think it is the proper direction to take rather than a plain AT wide buff, give specific (different, but similar) powers to each secondary.

Allow me to rephrase. In order to be the real improvement blasters need, regeneration based mitigation needs to be backed up with something to stop bursts.

Of course the +regen is going to be useful, Heck, it is even almost the same amount that I chased on my favorite blaster in order to make it more survivable back in Issue 9. I acknowledged +regen would be useful in the post you quoted, "People will still push the envelope and when they do, regen will not help when they get unlucky (OK, of course it will help sometimes, but there will be plenty of times where it doesn't)."

Because it isn't? I don't have anything to back that up with other than a few characters who rely on mostly regen to survive not being nearly as survivable as those who rely on other means. There are probably a variety of reasons why that is true, but my experience leads me to this conclusion. So when I say regeneration needs something to help it through bursts, conclude what I mean is it needs something more than what every character has just because they exist.

I don't normally make statements assuming the baseline is every minion hits 100% of the time, because that isn't the baseline I normally experience. But one only has to fight some DE and let a quartz drop to know that our baseline is not insignificant compared to everything hitting 95% of the time. Yet the normal 50%ish we do get hit +300-500% regeneration is only go to encourage us to move faster and still die often.


Sure, but I wasn't really trying to be that absolute, I was just trying to say that my experience with +regen as mitigation leads me to believe that it alone will not be the fix many are looking for (and that includes you, this will not accomplish your goal, IMO). Since I will still be playing with tankers and defenders keeping me alive, this isn't a huge deal to me, but if I wanted blasters to be on par with other ATs outside of team assistance, I would not be content with what we know so far (even assuming a modest amount of additional smaller changes).

Since you brought up numerical validity, how does Regeneration rank in your scrapper comparison if you just use Fast Healing, Health, and Integration? Add in Tough and Resilience, how does it look now? I look at the 30 second numbers in your comparison and those are the scenarios I am thinking of.

"Clearly, DA and Regen are emerging as the obvious leaders. A significant part of that comes from their powerful heals. However, because those heals are only usable at intervals, its possible for a critical amount of damage to outrace the heal and kill the scrapper before it can fire. Doing so can "break" the heal, by defeating the scrapper before it can be used: the scrapper will perform significantly lower than the "naive" averages would predict. We're going to look at two situations: first, the amount of damage necessary to kill the scrapper in 30 seconds with no click heals."

Also, on the topic of dying quickly and what quickly might mean:
"One thing my testing shows (I've tested essentially all of the scenarios depicted in these calculations in-game) is that 30 seconds seems like a very long time on paper, and its a very short time in-game when things are shooting at you and health is dropping fast: unless you time things with a clock, I wouldn't trust intuitive judgement for how long you think you're surviving under pressure. When someone talks about a scrapper "being killed in seconds" that is quite uncommon - it takes massive amounts of damage (or really bad luck) to accomplish that."

Sure they are. Illusion helps Empathy just as much as it helps Rad and is "better" than the other (non fire/plant) control sets for Emp. Empathy may not help Illusion as much as Rad, but that isn't Illusion's fault.

What would be better with WP than SS? Footstomp + Rage is still awesome. It is not like WP is doing anything special with Battle Axe or MA that overshadows how good SS can be.

I am pretty sure that the fact that I read about it is not a violation of the EULA. Whoever wrote what I read may have been in violation.

Short story, Sorcery may have some form of mez protection.

I am not sure I needed it to be under 10 seconds to be quick, although I wouldn't be thinking much longer than 10. I definitely wasn't necessarily thinking from full to dead. There are a lot of reasons a blaster could feel safe at below full, overconfidence and risk taking are just two. I was thinking of scenarios similar to: for whatever reason most of the spawn was aggroed on a tanker and things were happy, even if the blaster had taken some minor wounds (maybe at 75% health). Blaster unleashes AoEs. The wrong three enemies were not aggro locked. The blaster will survive one volley, but now may be at 20 to 30% and are at real risk. In this scenario, regen is just not gonna help.

Am I thinking that type of damage shift happens more often than it really does? How about that spawn all mezzed suddenly breaking loose and targeting the blaster who threw out the AoEs? Maybe they stick out in my mind because that is when bad things happen, but I think when bad things happen is a more serious problem for blasters than a single digit percentage. I could be wrong.

Possibly. I know that mirrors my personal experience, but I have learned what most players never do. Running often kills you. I see blasters die in 15 seconds to enemies they could have just killed in 9 seconds had they not been running around.

Your scenario is a perfect example. Once you get to 30% health, random events become much more important. From 100 to 60 could have been 100 to 30 if you got unlucky, but either way you lived. 60 to 20 becomes death when you get unlucky (which I figure was your point). While I admit high regen will mitigate that because there will be less fights started at 60, your own argument about how people play applies. People will still push the envelope and when they do, regen will not help when they get unlucky (OK, of course it will help sometimes, but there will be plenty of times where it doesn't). And, of course, once they get to 30, now they get afraid. Hey, I might die. Then they do wrong things (I am suggesting this is because they don't have a lot of regular options outside of inspires).

Regeneration based mitigation needs to be backed up with something to stop bursts. Dull Pain, Reconstruction, MoG, Mind over Body, Heightened Senses, HPT, SoW, IO defenses, high resistance. Otherwise, it only encourages us to move faster and still die often.

It is simply wrong that /Mental did not get a change as well. Heck, this is the perfect opportunity to fix Drain Psyche!

Give it an upfront regen/recovery amount that doesn't require any targets. 100% regen enhanceable and 50% recovery enhanceable. Then have it give 50% unenhancebale regen and recovery per target hit.

And make Scare and WoC adequate instead of poor.

Because I wouldn't want to put that many slots into Build Up early on SOs and Build Up is only 15% to hit.

That said, with IOs that I normally slot, I would make it work. 1 Kismet and level 25 Adj Targ Rech and Adj Targ To-hit/Rech is just enough.

In a leveling build, I do not think Build Up will be be helping the snipe until very late in the process.

Because no other AT has this issue? You know lots of armored builds that skip the mez protections and the basic Sm/Le mitigation power?

The only thing that makes this odd is that the powers getting this change are not ones that have been nearly mandatory since launch, but rather have been mostly skippable. Nearly mandatory powers have always been a reality. Radiation infection, Unyielding, Foresight, Blaze, Fulcrum Shift, Healing Aura, MM Pets; the list is huge and every AT has them.

But in the current level 40+ meta-game, you can get massively more mitigation from defense than regen and even small additions of defense mean a lot due to what they are likely stacking with. The regen (and other +HP mechanisms) on top of defense builds will be excellent, but how will they play out on minimally IOd builds? It is not so much that regen is not beneficial, but I don't see how it will help the average player when the most likely cause of death is blundering into things, stripping aggro off the tanker (due to any number of mistakes by either party), or unexpected adds and in most of those cases getting killed quickly. Monitoring the war of attrition on HPs is an advanced player skill, I think.

In the 20 to 40 game, I'm just not feeling it. Running a regen stalker (or scrapper or brute even) from 20 to 40 with just Integration, QR, Fast Healing, and whatever mitigation the primary can provide would not be acceptable and therefore I don't accept it on blasters either.

I have a blaster with 350% regen. Turning off Fire Shield and Tough makes a huge difference (vs most things). The +regen and resists are very good to me in normal mission running (but nothing like what a defense build can do, much to my chagrin). I can pace myself in a mission to take advantage of the +regen, know where the trouble points on maps are, know which enemies are the most problematic, and use inspires frequently. It does allow me to keep moving from spawn to spawn at my preferred difficulty settings. But, it really doesn't matter when things go south and I am guessing I avoid things going south far more than the average player.

My Emp/Elec blaster has almost no other mitigation besides regen and Healing Aura, from experience I am pretty sure it will not be enough (but it is still a good start) on its own.

Indeed, although there are some things that can be done now to sort of test it out. You could run a blaster with an Emp and have the Emp rotate RA and AB and do nothing else.

An AT that can create hate quickly ought to generally have something to deal with the occasional high incoming damage. Regen scrappers can pop off MoG and tank a spawn, but no one confuses them with tankers. If blasters could occasionally prevent even 30% of what MoG can prevent without resorting to inspires on top of these other proposed changes, it would not be making them tankers/scrappers/brutes but it would be a noticeable help.

Zwill said they were considering granting a freespec in I24, but it hadn't been decided yet.

There is one difference that I can think of (two if we include PvP, but the BA effect will likely be regen in PvP if it exists there at all). Actual HoTs wake you from sleep, +regen does not.

The effect varies with secondary.

But I agree with the notion that alone, this is likely not as effective as needed. That said, on top of IOs and Epic shields, it may be very good. Will it be good enough in the 20s to 40s? Possibly; stuff does less damage in those levels, but I didn't think Drain Psyche was all that great until I stacked defense on top of it (but it also wasn't perma either, and it seems like these others will be perma).

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that verbal communication is the original one and that a video feed more properly represents that than a forum post using fancy symbols to represent sounds.

In any review of blast sets, I would expect the possibility of Blaze, BiB, and some Psy attacks being reduced in effectiveness in some manner. Not saying that is going to happen, but it has to be a possibility.