VKhaun

It's only a text 'error' if this is intended as the one and only ATO set that will ever be added. If they plan to add other ATO sets based on enhancing something besides damage they would clearly want all of the powers in an AT flagged ahead of time to take relevant ATO's, even if they couldn't take the current ones.

I think he must have read THB's thread, Hopeling. :P

I rerolled my main to FF/BR and do not regret it. Many of the games better powers lean on DoT's already so I don't worry about the small delays. Once you get rolling shooting at something it's just aesthetics and math, and BR excells at both.

+1 for up the difficulty and/or pick out hard targets.

It should be downloading everything automatically... just leave the game running at the character select screen, play with costumes, click the 'detailed info' button and look at the stats on the powers a bit.

Okay I get what you said earlier about aim/build up now. I typically think of those as burst powers where I'd hit both then hit something, but you're saying run my attack chain of Charged,Havoc,Blaze,Grasp... and then instead of adding a fifth split up all the other stuff to take turns covering the gap. One rotation hit BU, another rotation hit Aim, another hit Power Sink.

The flares isn't meant to compete with other attacks, it's just there as sort of a 'nothing else is up' button. Previously I had always built around replacing a specific power with aim/buildup (aimed shot for archery, among snap/aim/blazing chain) not building a chain to take multiple powers in one spot. Where I'm normally doing aimed shot and it's the odd rotation that I don't. In this case it would be flares that was the odd rotation.


Let's make a rough estimate. If our filler attack flares is going to share an even burdern with all the other 'stuff' we thrown in as the next attack, lets take the four chain and add up the animations assuming the fastest possible animation for the 'other stuff' of 1second. Roughly 6seconds.

If it was flares every time that'd mean flares had to come up every 6 seconds. Easy. If it was flares and build up sharing the gap in turn, both would need to be up roughly every 12 seconds. (Every six seconds you'd need to fire one of them including the animation time of the filler used last chain) Add Aim as a fair share all would need recharges of roughly 18 seconds to ensure one of them was up every time the chain gap came around and they were all used equally. Power Sink takes us to 24. Rain of Fire added in that would make them all only need to be roughly 30 second recharges. That sounds very possible.

Doing it this way where flares/ice blast would rarely come up but Blaze/BIB were being done every rotation, makes Blaze clearly better.

Thank you I think that's all I can do from work without mids. I'll definitely be all over this when I get home though.

Thanks for the forum bumps but I'm not really looking for perfect do everything blaster builds to solo trials. This is a fun character going for potatoes ridiculous damage on a blaster (which shouldn't sound unusual, but it does... c'mon devs... :/) I'm looking for a maximized damage blap attack chain, THEN I will go back and get as much defense in there as I can. Obviously I'm not compeltely off my rocker. I want SOME defense not just a build full of recharge and damage, but I want to lean that way a lot harder than a do-everything build.


Oh yeah, and assume musculature for incarnate because loldps. :P




Right now I'm looking at Charged Brawl, Havoc Punch, and Shocking Grasp as my starting point, all are above 100 DPA. I don't think any other set a blaster gets has three 100dpa attacks in it, primary or secondary.

My question is really one of what to add to this. Because Charged Brawl is my highest DPA and lowest recharge, I think it makes sense to try and repeat that in the attack chain. I'm wondering if I can get away with just those three and Blaze from Fire/ by repeating Charged Brawl once to give the others more time to recharge.

If not, I think I would have to go with cold since IIRC Fire/ had no other decent single target DPA. Cold seems next in line with Ice Blast and Bitter Ice Blast, which together seem like they'd be better than blaze + anything else in fire blast but I could be wrong.

Does anyone feel like playing with numbers for me, or arguing something like Voltaic pet damage, defiance differences... anything I might be missing?



About sets.
For the sake of exemplaring with this build, I like the sound of Kin Combat in pool melee attacks. Boxing/Kick/Charged Brawl/Havoc Punch/Air Supp would look good. So lets assume those pools and leadership, leaving one more open.

Going to go look through sets to find recharge and defense together, see what that shapes up like. Damage/Recharge/Defense set efficiency could end up meaning more DPS for ice if I could devote more sets to offense using slows for example. Going to check things out.

My TW brute is 41 and I agree with the tone of the thread. End hungry, powerful, and the momentum effect may make you hate it.

Weapon draw is especially painful when you don't have momentum, but the build up power 'Build Momentum' draws your weapon, so I find it nice to jack up the recharge and save that for when I use secondary set powers that put my weapon away, so I can pull it back out, build up, and be attacking with momentum again all at once.

Yeah melee is their secondary set for a reason. It's intended as a last resort burst of damage when things do get close. They also don't the other criteria besides damage. Especially not 'needing' to get close.

I think CoH/V is past 'street sweeping' for interactive content. If we wanted outdoor level scaling content, that's what zone events are for and I'm all for more of those. Trying to spruce up the streets in general would be too much time for too little return because of population vs area.

I would love to see a 'riot' zone event where the random NPC spawns were breaking into stores and making off with stuff, or a 'car chase' zone event where some super vehicle was driving around super fast with guys leaning out using various mez, slow, and -fly attacks on people in attempt to get away from super heros. After a grace period of X minutes, if no heros are within Y range it despawns and 'got away'.

But I don't want to hijack this into a zone event thread if you want to keep going with improving street sweeping outside of actual zone events.

I know I'm probably really late to the party on this one, but it occured to me that Charged Brawl, Havoc Punch, Blaze, Shocking Grasp might work as an attack chain if I repeat one of the attacks. It's neat to learn about DPA because the attacks you would repeat are the fast recharging ones, which seem to have solid DPA in the case of blaps.

Forgot to bring my netbook with Mids to work though... T_T

Actually now that I toy with mids a bit, it's looking hard to make Charged Brawl, Havoc Punch, Blaze, and Shocking Grasp gapless. The animations are so short Havoc Punch would need to be down to 3.432... which is way past perma hasten recharge levels. The build (and Alpha slot...) investment to get that would probably make it weaker than some other options. Need to add another attack. Either swap something for a power with a longer animation, or add another power to the chain. Either one makes other sets more attractive.

Going to bed.
More thinking to do tomorrow. T_T

Depends what and how you're fighting.

DPS while dead tends to be zero. I know I started the thread as glass cannon, but life drain is a grey area in that context. If rotating Siphon life every few seconds has you doing the rest of your chain over and over while the Blaze version studies the floor tiles that was a DPS increase.

I tend to agree with you though, StratoNexus. If I were going to follow that mentaility I'd be doing ranged attacks from 80(+) away with capped ranged defense like everyone else.

DPA is new to me. What exactly does that mean? - Wouldn't the actual DAMAGE be the damage per activation? As in, the amount of damage done when activating it? What is this 'other' damage per activation?

EDIT--
Okay so looking at it in game, it seems to be damage divided by activation time. I have no idea why you would do that or what meaning it would have. It's like a DPS number if the power had no recharge, but why would that ever be more relevant than the actual damage? The damage is what it does when it comes up in the chain, not the DPA.


EDIT 2--
Okay I get it... it's how much damage you get for that period of time IN the chain. A gapless chain is a string of animations. For that X seconds you get Y DPS. Gotcha. Higher DPA = more efficient attack chain.

I'm slow, but I get there.

Looking at energy, electric, and dark.

Shadow Maul is not that bad in context of thunder strike and total focus. They do more damage than shadow maul sure, but looking at the whole attack chain SM doesn't seem to slow dark down as much as the others. The to hit debuff seems short lived though and I wouldn't expect it to stack up too well.

Electric looks like it could straight drop thunder strike. Charged brawl, havoc punch, and shocking grasp are all over 100 on redtomax, all have fast animation times, and are all 15sec or faster base recharge. I'm not at home with mids so I'm not certain, but I suspect you could make those three gapless for a good fast attack chain including a hold with all three attacks having a chance to refund end. With the fast animation times it would be stacking up defiance pretty good, too. Electic seems to be a lot more smash than elemental damage, compared to the dark/energy though.

Energy's Total Focus says +21% defiance damage... o.o
It does not have a damage aura like elec/dark, but that might be a good thing for aggro reasons, and the +% would probably beat DoT aura damage for single target.


Comparing to scrapper/stalker is not easy... stalker's EM looks brutal with TF/ET/AS, but that's a 10sec attack chain even if you made it gapless. I could rotate /elctric blaps three times inside that chain. PvE damage scale, crits, AF... way too much going on to estimate. I actually have a 50 fire/electric. I might have to respec/build him and go get a pylon time to give this all context.

A comment in another thread reminded me that when I played originally, I had always wanted to run a blapper. A blaster to focus on meleeing with the secondary set. I never did because back then going from 1->20 using your secondary was not fun and respecs were harder to come by. Today I could DFB it up a bit to start off, then keep the primary build conventional while I use build 2 for the blappage.


In todays game...

1) Can a blapper out dps (single target) a stalker/scrapper, or even get on par?
2) What SECONDARY set is the best for blapping?
3) What PRIMARY set could I use to mule the most defense sets?


I'm aware of the mez issues, I've seen that buzz around the forums. Doesn't bother me. Even though I will try to maximize defense to take some hits I have no illusions about being on par with stalkers/scrappers in that arena and would consider this a glass cannon in practice. I am okay with the glass cannon (AKA pro floor eater) play style.

I usually play action games so melee to me is either fast combat vs other melee, or a sudden visceral impact.

Brute works fine as my farmer constantly on the edge of dying. She's something like lv41 and has a half baked random build, but she's up to ... +3x8 I think and that's plenty to grab tickets when I need them, but outside of that I only want to play a scrapper and get that big 'THWOMP' on the first hit without the setup of a stalker or the build up of a brute.