firespray

At least we can agree on this.

This here is really the crux of the problem. While I would argue the point that blasters haven't ever had a functional core concept, I agree with you that they don't really now. And that's why I think fixing blasters is going to be so hard. I think to really do it right you would almost have to redesign the AT from the ground up, and I don't picture that ever happening.

I don't think it's meant to be realistic.

The range = defense thing has been crap for a long time now. Back before they gave every enemy a ranged attack of some type it conferred some advantage, but now it's meaningless.

I think this kind of goes to the core of our disagreement here. You clearly want improvements that will make blasters easier to solo. I couldn't care less about that. I don't play this game to solo. 90% of the time I'm playing, I'm on a team with at least 6 people. Generally on a team that size, I can survive okay. Maybe not as well as a scrapper or brute, but it's not like I'm dying constantly. What I really want is for my impact on a team to be felt more. I don't want to be interchangeable with every scrapper or brute. I want there to be a fair tradeoff to playing a blaster. I want the team leader to say "Okay, it will be harder to keep the blaster alive than a scrapper or brute, but the blaster will do a lot more damage".

I do realize that the devs have mostly tried to make sure soloing was a valid option as well, but this is still primarily a multiplayer game, and I feel any fixes should be focused primarily on the multiplayer aspects of it.

I'm not saying it should. I'm just saying that "Giving blasters mez protection and nothing else is good enough for me, so by god it should be good enough for everyone else too" is a selfish argument, and isn't likely to convince a lot of other people.

Uh huh, which is why I've repeatedly said that blasters should get survivability buffs as well as a damage buff. I just don't want survivability buffs instead of a damage buff.

I agree with you that at the moment blaster survivability is too low to balance strictly with a damage buff. I am not, nor have I at any point said that the devs should buff damage and be done with it. I'm not sure how to get that across to you any more clearly.

I see no reason why it couldn't be a bit higher than that.

It will if you also increase survivability a bit at the same time.

Maybe I can explain a little better what I'd like to see done. The example below may not hold 100% true to reality, but hopefully it is close enough that you can get the point I'm making.

If you look at the 4 melee archetypes, they sit on various points along two spectrums, damage and survivability. If we say the high end of those spectrums is a 10, and the low end is a 1, then for survivability, you have tanks sitting at 10, brutes at maybe 8, scrappers at 7, and stalkers at say 6. For damage, you have stalkers at 10, scrappers at maybe 9 (I realize stalkers may not be higher damage than scrappers, but bear with me), brutes at 8, and tanks at 6 or so. For the most part, the archtypes are balanced, because tradeoffs are fair. For any given archetype, the higher they are on the survivability spectrum, the lower they are on the damage spectrum. If you add together the damage number and survivability number for each archetype, you get 16 for each one, meaning they're pretty well balanced.

Now if we add blasters to that spectrum, They sit quite high on the damage spectrum. Probably a 9 or 10. On the survivability spectrum though, they sit at about a 2, maybe a 1. So the combined number for a blaster is 10-12, well below the other archetypes, meaning blasters aren't balanced with them, as everyone is perfectly aware.

So if we're going to fix blasters, we need to bring them up to a 16 somehow. You could leave their survivability at 1 or 2, and bring their damage up to 14 or 15. That's very unlikely though, and may not even fix the problem, since you'd still get mezzed a lot, and die frequently. So overall that's probably not a good fix. You could also go to the opposite extreme. Leave their damage alone at 9 or 10, and bring their survivability up to 6 or 7, on par with a stalker or scrapper. I think that's just as unlikely, and I don't think that's a good solution either, since other than having more ranged and less melee attacks, I'm not sure the blaster would play much different than the stalker or scrapper. And then there's the combined approach. Bump the blaster's damage damage up a modest amount, say to 12, and bump their survivability up a modest amount as well, say to 4. Then you have an archetype that is to scrappers as scrappers are to tanks. They'd be more survivable than they currently are, but still less survivable than the melee archetypes, but there would be a reward to balance out that risk as well. They'd do more damage than the melee archetypes. And that I feel is the best solution to fix the issues with blasters.

It's interesting that you mention this. I've thought of the same mechanic, though I wanted to replace mind control's mass confuse with it, to give the set a real pet.

I think toxic attacks still have positional components, there's just no typed defense against them.

I wouldn't see it being a huge problem for a toxic-themed powerset anyway. With the exception of smashing/lethal, it's not super common to run into enemies that are resistant to your attacks. Toxic attacks would have a slight edge there, but probably not enough to make it out of the question.

How'd you know about that? That was supposed to be a secret. I swear it was an accident.

Give martial arts a Street Fighter style Hadouken attack.

Yes, sometimes it may mean that. Other times it will mean the difference between blaster dead and boss with a sliver of health and boss dead and blaster with half his health bar left. It may not be a large effect, but it WILL have a positive effect on blaster survivability.

I do. I want blasters to live up to what they're supposed to do. Damage, and lots of it.

I'm not sure about most people. That doesn't apply to me though. I mainly play my blasters on large teams. I don't spend an appreciable amount of time mezzed, and I die infrequently. And despite that, I can't conclusively say that my blasters outdamage brutes or scrappers on the team by an appreciable amount.

I just can't see that ever happening. While there have certainly been changes made to archetypes over the years, none of them have strayed too far from their core concept. And like it or not, blasters' core concept is the glass cannon. I don't see them ever getting rid of the glass part of that. While blasters may see some minor increases in survivability, I can't imagine it ever even approaching the level of melee archetypes.

I disagree with this. Blasters need increases in both survivability AND damage to become competitive. And I think the game's design philosophy makes it more likely that we'll see the damage increase than the survivability increase.

This just seems selfish.

I'm focused on the damage side of the issue because to me that is where the problem lies. Yes, melee archetypes can do comparable damage to a blaster with much greater survivability. But blasters always have been, and have always been intended to be, high-damage, low-survivability archetypes. I wouldn't mind so much my blasters being harder to keep alive than my scrappers IF they did more damage while they were on their feet.

And I don't believe that the devs will bring blaster survivability up to the level required to balance them with melee archetypes without a damage buff as well.

And as I've mentioned before, I don't want a damage buff BECAUSE it will increase survivability. That's icing on the cake. I want a damage buff to make up for the lack of survivability.

These are valid points, but I didn't feel the need to account for them because you won't change. Those things are all true now. And they don't change the fact that a modest damage increase will still have more of an effect on the kill speed of bosses than it will on lower ranked enemies.

I'm not arguing that blasters shouldn't get survivability boosts outside of a damage boost. I'm saying they should get a damage boost in addition to boosts in survivability. My reasoning is pretty simple too.

Most of the melee archetypes (barring tankers) do comparable damage to what blasters can do. Logically then, in order for blasters to be balanced with melee archetypes, they'd need to have survivability on par with them. And I really can't see that ever happening. It smacks too much of tankmages, and for good or ill, that concept seems to be considered unacceptable in this game. And even if they did decide to do it, I'm not sure I'd want them too. I like the glass cannon concept, but I want to actually BE a glass cannon, rather than a paper mache shotgun.

So since they probably aren't going to buff survivability enough to bring blasters in line with the various melee archetypes, the next best thing would be to bring survivability up somewhat, and bring damage up as well.

Exactly, thank you for pointing out the quote. Nowhere in that quote do I say they should do it all the time, and nowhere in that quote do I say that there couldn't possibly be a problem with that level of damage. I said it sounds about right to me.

While my post could have been clearer, you're making incorrect assumptions based upon it.

I disagree with your premise here, particularly the bolded part. I mainly disagree with it because not all enemies present the same level of threat to a blaster. Barring a few specific enemies maybe, minions are much less of a threat than bosses. And because of the way hit points scale based on rank, damage buffs become more effective at lowering the number of attacks required to drop an enemy as you go up in rank. A 25% damage buff might not change the number of attacks required to defeat a minion, but it would certainly lower the number of attacks required to defeat a boss. And since bosses are considerably more able to kill a character than minions are, that would certainly have a positive effect on survivability.

Well, I didn't say that either. It would be great if you would stop putting words in my mouth.

Then I'm not sure why you said going from buildup active a third of the time to buildup active all the time is a threefold increase in damage, when it clearly isn't.

I agree with you there, but that's not the argument you made.

Yes, this is the argument you should have initially made. And I agree with it.

My point has never been that blasters should be able to one-shot minions all the time. My point has always been that there is room to increase blaster damage so that blasters can again legitimately claim to do the best damage in the game without breaking anything.

If someone can legitimately prove otherwise, I'll listen, but so far no one has.

Not true at all. When buildup is active, I do roughly 300% of base damage for the power (100% base, +100% for buildup, +100% for slotting). When buildup isn't active, I do roughly 200% of base damage. Buildup being active one third of the time means on average I would do roughly 233% of base damage. So going from buildup active a third of the time to buildup active all the time would mean my damage increased roughly 30% over what I normally do. That's a long way from a three-fold increase in damage.

I realize this, and even mentioned myself that these characters were pretty high on the performance spectrum.

Nowhere did I say that blasters need to be able to do that kind of damage all the time. I was simply countering the hyperbole that was posted as an argument not to buff blaster damage. While I feel that blasters need a damage buff (among other things), I don't think it needs to be that large to make them competitive. There's a lot of room to work with between the damage an average blaster does and the damage a purpled-out, fully-incarnated dark/shield scrapper does. The former shouldn't equal the latter, but I think it could be moved closer without hurting anything.

No, I can't do it all the time. It takes buildup on my fire/sr scrapper, which is only up about a third of the time IIRC. My dark/shield can do it more consistently since he has both soul drain and AAO. And both are admittedly purpled to the gills and have T3 or T4 incarnate abilities in all their slots.

However, my point was that what Miladys_Knight was using as an example of game-breaking amounts of damage is already available, and isn't breaking anything.

I strongly disagree with this. There are already many melee sets that can do more damage than most blaster sets, both in burst damage and sustained DPS. Blasters are nowhere near the 'glass ceiling'.

I hate to tell you this, but my scrappers can already one shot minions and two-shot lieutenants. They can't 3-shot bosses because bosses have way to many hit points for that. I would say that dropping a boss in 3 hits, and one-shotting minions and lieutenants would be about right for blasters. Especially considering many enemies are capable of two-shotting a blaster easily.

No, I'm pretty sure buffing blaster damage would work just fine. It certainly isn't going to break anything.

It is definitely melee heavy, no doubt about it. There's a reason for that though. When they create a new melee powerset 4 ATs can use it, almost unchanged. So they get a lot more benefit for the same amount of work. Conversely, things like dominator and blaster secondaries, and mastermind primaries can only be used by a single AT, and are just as much work as a melee set (or a whole crapton more work in the case of mastermind primaries). That's why there are something like 18 melee sets, and only 7 blaster and dominator secondaries.

I would like to see more non-weapon sets as well. It seems like there are some relatively easy concepts that could be explored. Psychic melee, radiation melee, radiation armor, gadget or devices control. All have been mentioned many times before. And all are concepts that are already in the game in one form or another. I'd love to see them explored.

Like I said, it's okay. If you like it, then great, but it's nowhere near good enough to be called the best in the game. And you can call Titan Weapons and Street Justice pay to win and ignore them all you want, but they're in the game, they exist, and they're considerably better than MA, it's just reality.

How do you figure? If you compare the PBAOEs from all the scrapper primaries, Dragon's Tail is middle of the road by nearly any metric you care to come up with. If you go by raw damage, it's in the bottom third. If you go by recharge, it's about average at 14 seconds. If you go by damage/end usage, it's 4th from the top. The only metric where it is significantly better than some sets is DPA (which doesn't matter as much for AoE attacks), and even then it's beat out by both street justice and titan weapons, and isn't significantly better than katana, fiery melee, or claws, all three of which have better burst damage. So while it's not a bad AoE, it can hardly be called one of the best in the game.

Do you know whether it's possible to buy them without confirming?

I'm disappointed in you Arcana. That is clearly not a cookie dough blizzard.

I do like your analogy though I'd take it a step further. Scrappers are like a scoop of haagen dazs vanilla ice-cream. Brutes are a blizzard from dairy queen. Both are delicious, but for different reasons. For the haagen-dazs, its simplicity and quality are what make it shine.

I'm pretty sure I've fun SSA5 on this character after getting back to hero, and I was able to pick a hero merit then.

Just in case I'm wrong though, let me confirm how this works.

I can buy a-merits with reward merits without having confirmed my alignment as a hero. (I thought this wasn't the case either, I thought you had to have confirmed to even buy them)

But I can't earn them from the SSAs until I have confirmed my alignment by running another hero morality mission?

That seems needlessly complicated to be honest.

We should be able to get them with a-merits and i-merits because the devs told us that we would.