boardthug

If you could set a flag to preclude non-team buffs, I would see that as a positive addition to the game. Personally, I wouldn't set it since whether I mind having someone buff me depends entirely on my mood, and when I don't appreciate it, I simply walk away leaving the fight unfinished. When I do appreciate it I try to check my combat log quickly enough to find out who buffed me and send them a polite thank you.

Now, what I find odd is when someone buffs me, sees me turn and walk away from the fight, and follows to buff me again in the next fight. THAT person I find annoying.

Also, you may want to check on some of the invention sets. If you focus on the more common sets, you can get them fairly cheaply in the late 30s/early 40s, and while you won't get the most stupendous set bonuses, you will get set bonuses -- not to mention the enhancements you slot into each power will typically be more effective.

I do not want minions surviving my blaster's six minute recharge, drain all my end and keep it drained nuke. Yes, there are ways to recover the endurance, but they are not part of the design of the power. The power is designed to eliminate your ability to fight for the next twenty seconds, and at that price minions should not be walking away. +3, +4 and heavily resistant to my damage type, possibly, but even con, +1, +2, should not have a one in eight chance to get hit and live through it, and the 1 in 20 chance to be missed completely is pointless.

No, the OP is not exaggerating. With 98.1% damage slotting in T-Blast, 20.5% global damage from set bonuses, aim and buildup, there is nothing remotely unusual about nuking +1 and +2 arachnos spawns and seeing minions standing with quarter health or more when it's over. They have been hit. They just lived through it. Since the initial pulse from T-Blast hits exactly as hard as the other nukes, this should be as common in energy and radiation if nothing else, since they're using the same proportion of the same two damage types and should be facing the same resistances.

You do know when you get attacked by 2-3 stalkers, you are supposed to lose, right? Wasn't really sure about that from the OP.

I missed someone's post. You cannot nuke around corners with T-Blast. I believe that's limited to Rain of Arrows and Blizzard. Full Auto and Thunderous Blast target enemies, not locations, so you need line of sight.

If the nuke is modified to auto-hit and the random chance for damage becomes automatic, a nuke would kill all the minions with the exception of the stupidly resistant. You still won't kill resistant lt's, you still won't kill bosses, and you still won't kill more than 16 targets every N minutes, depending how much recharge you slot in it. It's ridiculous for these powers to have a six minute recharge, turn the blaster off for 20 seconds, and have that good a chance to leave minions standing.

Incidentally, this is not a result of t-blast's having a lower total damage output than the other nukes. All of them have this problem, because all of them can still deliver only the one pulse of 188 damage (extremely unlikely with fire, but it could happen) and all of them can miss. The psychic blaster faces ridiculous numbers of surviving targets against robots. I did factor in inferno's DoT. Without it, inferno would actually fall in the same damage pattern as everything other than T Blast.

While I'm not strictly comparing the electric nuke to the other nukes in terms of damage, electric doesn't gain damage for having a PBAOE instead of a cone, so I don't see why you would lower the damage on the nuke just because it has range.

Also, as has been correctly reported, you lose 40 endurance per target before your recovery is turned off. By the time you hit aim and buildup, then pay for t-blast, two targets leaves you out of the fight.

The "crash nukes" for blasters are a varied bunch. The electrical set has Thunderous Blast, which at its best is good for 312.8 unenhanced damage at level 50. Energy, Psychic, Radiation and Sonic top out at 375.4 damage apiece for Nova, Psychic Blast, Atomic Blast and Dreadful Wail, and Fire gets 544.3 from Inferno. Unfortunately, that's max unenhanced damage. Every one of these nukes also has the potential to hit for 187.7, unenhanced, and every one of them can also miss completely.

At level 50 you can't kill an irradiated gerbil with 188 points of damage, and I don't remember the last time I killed anything with a miss (myself not included.) Even slotted for damage and preceded by aim+buildup, Thunderous Blast vs Arachnos will leave half the minions standing. For powers that drain the blaster entirely of endurance and turn off recovery for 20 seconds, these powers should all be autohit, and the damage ticks should be automatic. If you need to, shave 10% off the max damage. But deliver it every time.

I mostly run my blasters +1/x3. Well, past SOs, anyway. Prior to that I just leave em flat.

On teams, I try to put my powers to work for the team as a whole. For some characters, this means shifting roles from a damage-primary role if they were soloing, to a debuff-primary or aggro-management role on a team. For some, it means using knockback within the context of a group effort. It has never meant stop using knockback attacks. Most of my knockback attacks are either directed downward or at a wall. I have rarely run an entire mission without at least some of my knockback attacks scattering the enemy, but I've never felt compelled to apologize for this. I just keep attacking.

None of my characters have ever slotted a purple anywhere. I can obviously see places where it would be an upgrade, should I happen to find the whole set of crafted enhancements sitting on the sidewalk. Nothing I've ever felt like I had to have.

I was playing radiation blast and electrical blast when it happened to me. If this is related to burst, then more than one bug is generating the same game-play symptoms.

When are they going to give you your own forum, Arcanaville?

No, can't be range. None of my characters have boost range, and in the trick-or-treating almost all of the fighting was point blank. (What? If you move away from the door you miss the fulcrum shifts!)

Run a toggle that boosts everybody's chances to hit and makes blinding powers largely irrelevant, vs everybody on the team popping yellows every time they see the word 'blinded' pop up under their health bar (assuming they notice it at all.) You can absolutely get by without tactics, but I like it. Besides, it gave me a cheap excuse to take (and run) assault.

One of my chief reasons for favoring tactics is the perception buff. I don't want to haul around extra yellows just for smoke grenades.

With energy as your secondary, skipping your tier 1 attack means you have 1 attack at range while mezzed. Up to you.

I want to thank all of you for answering my questions regarding a WP tanker before I even asked them.

I would swear the last time I checked my combat log it showed I took X amount of energy damage, and 3X amount of 'nictus damage'.

If you don't plan to slot them, both Energy Punch and Air Superiority are wasted picks. Either slot Air Sup or take Hover -- even the default slot with a flight speed in it is quite useful on mission maps. Not amazing, but you will get some use of it which is certainly more than can be said of an emtpy air superiority. For fly, you will be well past the flight-speed cap with your current slotting. Since you can't actually fly faster than the cap, that makes the extra slots wasted.

Not sure what you're going for with the four run slots in Swift. Are you looking at that for a non-suppressing speed advantage in combat? You won't need that in PvE, and while I do not have extensive first-hand PvP experience I don't think that's going to be quite enough. I suspect a combination of two run slots in swift and two run slots in sprint (four total, two of them free) might yield better results, hopefully someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

For soloing, what use is vengeance? Also, the defense bonus blasters get from maneuvers is 1.88%. Might do better with tactics, as this gives +percep and a much more noticeable bonus to-hit. Assault is one of my favorite powers.

Where are aim and buildup? Where's boost range?

Rad deals energy damage, see above notes for electric blast, but I've played a rad/elec blaster and enjoyed it enormously. You must stay mobile -- your AOE's are ranged, cone, and pbaoe -- but your single-target control is folded into your highest-damage single-target attack. Its activation time is longer than many of the tier-3 blasts, so your dpa dips slightly, but you get both the damage and the crowd control in one power. There are fights you won't really need the control, and in those cases you lose kill speed for no real benefit, but I find it helpful against most lieutenants and bosses. For a blaster, radiation blast pairs very well with energy manipulation, since that has a stun of its own. This lets you stun bosses at the very outset, and keep them that way. My rad blast/dark miasma corruptor is likewise enjoyable, though the blaster version of rad blast has a very different feel from the defender/corruptor version just based on the normalization they did with the tier 1/tier 2 powers.

Gemstone is still running. I haven't had an account in years, but the last time I played it that was text based. They have accounts, they make money, they keep the game open. They did move from Gemstone II to Gemstone III to Gemstone IV, but I suspect the players migrated along with them. I know I did, from Gem II to Gem III, and so did the majority of my in-game friends.

Will you have as much fun, when the people you added to friends when you first started move on? No. On the other hand, you in your turn will help hook new players, and so on.

As with many exotic damage types, psi pays for relatively few resistant targets by having some of those few show very strong resistance. A pair of electric blasters could be fun. Two short-circuits going off simultaneously is obviously unfair, but then obviously unfair = fun if you ask me. Electric blast deals energy damage, which does run into the same problem with high levels of resistance in a small number of enemies -- I believe it's 40% on mu anything in the Arachnos faction, for one example, and malta sappers might as well be immune.

I know I ran into this during the halloween event, though I haven't played my blasters as often since and don't remember it happening recently. I think it is target related because I have a vague recollection that I tried switching targets, even switching and then switching back, and was able to attack again. I believe the game may be flagging your target as invalid when you become held, but once you choose a new target it applies the defiance rules and allows you to use attacks 1, 2 and 3. Personally, I think it's buggy and should be looked at, but try re-targetting as a work-around. If there's only the one target nearby, escape to clear your target, then target again and best of luck.

As far as double-tapping to attack the nearest valid target, compare this to tapping your attacks when you have a friendly targetted. Since you have a target selected, the game isn't looking for a new one. Targetting a friendly and attacking IS valid, since you can target attacks through an ally. If that friendly doesn't have an enemy target selected, you can tap your attack all day and nothing is going to happen.

apologies, Umbral. I deleted that post after realizing my signature is badly out of date.

Good set once you have everything. I admit to being somewhat disappointed that they normalized the tier 1/tier 2 attacks. Neutrino bolt in every other version of rad blast is a quirky, fast-cycling proc horse. Ours is a vanilla tier 1 blaster attack. You do have three ST attacks, but the third is not your fast-activating, OMGWTFBBQ heavy hitter. Instead it's a hybrid between your ST control power and your tier 3 attack -- control is decent, if short-lived out of the box, with much better damage than most blaster controls, but a longer activation than any tier 3.