Blaster Guides and FAQs

Drink!

Relevant: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=291737

Also has questions by players answered by other players that are relaying info from the resulting live chat as well as answering new things not covered in that chat.

As for regarding the speed of changes added to the game, I'm not going to be bothered acting anymore jaded than I already am about it so I'll leave that to you, I suppose.

In the very same post, I said 'and that's perfectly fine to discuss'.

Hey, look at me! I'm saying /Dark is going to be way better than /EM come these changes! Having Touch of Fear be 80ft range that also buffs you!? Come on! Energize is weaksauce compared to that.


Not shutting down discussion and I know how sleeps work, I've been stacking them for nearly the whole career of my Sonic/Ice Blaster. He can then supplement that with other controls. With the sleep, you can get through a spawn possibly with no retaliation if your timing is perfect.

The only thing that can really do that is /dev laying down a mine field before hand.


Or, I can frankenslot Blackstar for -ToHit for a heafty -40% ToHit and get generally a similar effect (foes that have a very low chance of hitting me).

And you keep saying 'the only way to stack /dark's -ToHit'. Lol the only way to stack Dark Miasma's -ToHit is....OMG....Dark Misasma.

Lol you don't need another set's effects to stack just to say you're stacking. Dark Miasma *has* powers to stack -ToHit already and they're called Fearsome Stare, Darkest Night and Dark Servant. You don't need power boost or Tenebrous Tentacles just so you can say 'Look at me! I'm STACKING!'

As of now, I'm perfectly comfortable stacking Touch of Fear, Penumbral Grasp and Smite on hard targets on my Rad/Dark. Everything else is likely dead in short order because Soul Drain + Death Shroud + Irradiate is that mean. I don't even have much defense on her and she's still pretty ridiculous. Would she be better with Power Boost? Of course, but not at the expense of Soul Drain and Touch of Fear.




And you're misrepresenting a power that doesn't actually do anything without the use of other powers to a power that can debuff ToHit by upwards of 30% as well as fear bosses and will eventually be usable from 80ft away and buff your regen dramatically.

Lol I'm not comparing Touch of Fear to Blackstar, you're trying to imply how much better Power Boost is *IF* you have Blackstar lol which for some (quite a few in fact) will not have.

But then you're completely underestimating ToF here, which is all I'm commenting on really. The only reason melees are so passive about it is because usually they don't need that much survivability...kind of like how some drop the parry type powers for better damage...they don't need the extra survival. Now if a Blaster had an 80ft ranged attack that gave 10% def to lethal and it buffed your regen by a large amount? That's huge. That's about as good as Touch of the Beyond will be.

469 replies in that thread nice short and concise. 47 by Arbiter Hawk some of which are themselves ambiguous and contradictory.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...95#post4281995

and this

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...10#post4282010

Prompts one to ask is water jet included or excluded from the 80 foot range. Which post is definitive ?


We both have to live with this if its done wrong.



You know I actually did the numbers for this earlier in the thread. For someone who insists that people who haven't sifted through the minutia shouldn't be talking or that don't have the numbers shouldn't be talking you seem to have no trouble resorting to the same when you want to make a point.

Unless you think Touch of fear is going to get your recovery above 6 end/sec good luck running the snipe chains.


You can do the exact same thing with any AoE hard controls you can stack.

That can do what ?




Let me see which is better ?

-60% to hit, and a free +78% -to hit in all your attacks that have it (which is more than you can get from)

Or having to franken slot every attack you have for -to hit.

Are you being deliberately dense or is mischaracterizing what I said all that is left to you ?

The original statement statement was :

[quote]
As of now, I'm perfectly comfortable stacking Touch of Fear, Penumbral Grasp and Smite on hard targets on my Rad/Dark. Everything else is likely dead in short order because Soul Drain + Death Shroud + Irradiate is that mean. I don't even have much defense on her and she's still pretty ridiculous. Would she be better with Power Boost? Of course, but not at the expense of Soul Drain and Touch of Fear.
[quote]

Yes I am sure you have something that works sometimes. I am really happy you have managed eating an alpha for nearly 5 seconds before you do damage without much defense.


So that would be like Build Up ? A power that doesn't do anything without other powers ?

BTW touch of fear best case without incarnate abilities is about -17%


Well first first I can have touch of fear which aggros and doesn't do damage or I can have a fast snipe which will kill what Touch of Fear will fear.

Oh that is a tough one. Let me see 150+ feet and dead, or 80 feet and feared. Have to think on that.

Well be all for me to complain about you whining about common information. You apparently have backed numbers coupled with incomplete info so I'll just comment to correct you.

So no, Frigid Embrace's absorb, Cauterizing Aura's Heal nor Field Operative's regen suppress while mezzed.

Irrelevant to that information, this has been clarified repeatedly because people were (to no surprise) concerned about the toggles dropping and suppressing while mezzed because mez is a common roadblock to anything concerning Blasters using toggle powers.

Don't need to. Things will be dead before needing to seriously chain anything. But frankly, I feel it's easier to get endurance/recovery than it is to get damage.


You tell me what type of control effectively lasts 30+ seconds outside of nukes without needing heavy slotting. Sleeps can generally last that with some slotting and 40+ with heavy slotting. That's if you actually take that long to kill a boss and its Lt though.

To put it frankly, sleeps last very very long without slotting, you just need to stack mag and leave them alone. For a ST focused chain, this can skyrocket survival.

The game is specifically balanced not to allow hard control to be capable of that the majority of the time. Outside of accolades, temp power stacking and constant cycling of mez powers (or perma-domination) you're unlikely to get the same effect with holds/stuns.



Mmmm, I think you've set yourself on a confused path and now you're getting aggravated. I'm not comparing ToF to Power Boosted Dark Blast...that'd basically be comparing a Secondary to a Secondary + Primary.

You can't attribute PB's buff to its primary because then we'd need to supplement ToF's to its. Power Boost and /Energy don't *have* ToHit debuffs, they can only boost them if you have them. If you have them, great, you can debuff ToHit for a nice (yet limited) duration in an area but if you don't you can't. /Dark can debuff ToHit regardless and greatly improves damage as well. If you have supplementary ToHit debuffs, you can debuff decently in a crowd plus hammer the ToHit of single targets.

Trying to do that with Dark Blast + Energy Manipulation, even with 150% ToHit debuff, you're looking at regular debuff of 14% for 10 sec plus whatever else you can stack in that window which requires slotting and frequent PB use.


Thanks, that's all I've been saying.

It's pretty easy to pop a purple, rush and soul drain a group, touch of fear the hard targets as they melt then do the same to the next group, repeat the process of the 1st on the 3rd group.

Eventually, with Touch of the Beyond, I can start the fight with a hard target debuffed, rush in (Dark Pit or Repulsion Bomb) to stop some of them, drain them and melt them, 2nd group Atomic blast, 3rd group pop and inspiration or two and drain either drain them before they're dead or do that on the 4th after another volley of PBAoEs.

The point is, I'm not seeing how swapping the /Dark for /Energy will make it any better. In fact, it will make the combo worse. The only thing it's got is stacking stuns (/dark technically has stacking *ranged* stuns too) and power boosted holds on Atomic Blast. Even the endurance discount isn't going to counter just how much PBAoE it adds and power boosted defense debuffs are probably not worth mentioning.

And I go on to say /Energy, while good for the stacking longer duration stuns, cannot stack the sleeps like /Ice can. The overall control contribution of /Energy won't suffice. Better damage, yeah, less survivability most likely. I say this as an opinion though with particular experience with the combos I play.


Yeah, even BU isn't really as good as Soul Drain.

But that's beside the point. Just curious what Power Boost would do for Archery, Energy Blast, Fire Blast, Assault Rifle or hell, even Dual Pistols. The main point being, if you want mitigation, you might not get it out of Energy Manipulation. Dark Manipulation, conversely, will give you that mitigation + more damage. Which is why I think it's better.

And lasts 20 seconds and recharges in 10 seconds so can stack for around 33% debuff with minimal slotting.


Post your homework then.

What snipe will one shot a boss? I don't even recall snipes one shotting Lts of the same level without outside buffs...to which then I can just use Soul Drain after I debuff the boss and 1-shot the very same target in the *next* spawn because SD lasts 30 seconds

Touch of Fear is mag 3. It can't 1 shot a boss, it can't 1 shot fear a boss.

Do you play /dark or are you just talking out your rear ?

Neither can a snipe 1-shot a boss. If you can get your insta-sniping /EM to one shot a boss with a snipe, so can I, a lot easier with soul drain'ed snipe.

And generally, I build my Blasters (generally, that is the ones meant to be very survivable or comic title protagonists) with at least 25-35% defense. It's generally the -ToHit in ToF I slot and use since I'm usually busy doing damage. I can basically sit at capped defense to that hard hitting/mezzing target or even multiple targets at a time.

I'm starting to wonder if you've ever even heard of Touch of Fear. Lol I've been using it on dark melee characters for years and although it's not quite as good on a Blaster, it's one of those versatile powers like Parry/Divine Avalanche and Siphon Life. It can be a game changer if you form an attack strategy around using it.

Power Boost is the same way...that's why I have it on my Dark/EM blaster so she can use power boosted debuffs, heals and defenses...or are you under some dillusion I'm bad-mouthing your little combo?

You want to talk about what's the best for Blasters and I'm telling you what is...IMO...which is probably what all the posts in this thread amount to: people's opinion.

I should have realized, you were just trying to throw complete garbage on the topic and then shoot for it's all just opinion so nothing matters.

Sorry that is not the way things work. Objectively Energy Manipulation gains more from the changes than any other secondary. The only way that isn't true, is if one or more of the sustain gets considerably more than conserve energy does.

You can dance and jig all you like but at the end of the day /energy gets the 2nd easisiest snipe, and gets more from every nuke with a power boostable secondary effect.

It even gets more from the range extension for the T3 blasts. But why bother with little things.

Aww, are you sad people want to come and post their opinions on a message board?

QQ

But then you can objectify whatever you like and claim it so however you feel but doesn't make it so

And I'd say some of the other sustains actually are better than Energize. Frigid Embrace, for one, is not only a nice absorb that can be gamed with resistance better than energize could, it's also attached to a 30ft -rech/movement/-dmg debuff that does not detoggle when mezzed.

And again, Touch of the Beyond is a big debuff at ranged that's stackable attached to a self buff. The 2nd easiest snipe is countered by the most potent PBAoE nuke (thank you Soul Drain) to which...there's a lot of. And Power Boost is only useful for a select few sets, namely ones with mezzes or debuffs worth slotting for to which can be partially replaced by...simply slotting for the effect. Oh wow! Energy Manipulation can buff the stun in Psychic Wail...or I can stack the -rech that PB won't affect with Frigid Embrace's -rech and slot a bit for stun instead!

Lol yeah, PB is great if you actually build around it otherwise it could just be useless (sorry Arch/EM blaster, no Power Boost for j00 but you, Dark/EM, you're dandy...you can be just as dandy with /dark tho) .

Boost Range? Yawn. Unless you've got cones (hey, look, there's Dark again and hey there Assault Rifle) it's not really much to mention. If anything, the range boost of the tier 3s help other sets more than /EM...at least before, EM was useful for *helping* you get the ranges standardized. Now? Is it all that important to plink away at stuff from 150ft away when you have a 25ft radius PBAoE nuke ready to use? Rad, Dark, Psy, Fire and Pistols scoff at your assertion.

I call your 'objective' view of /EM as 'subjective'. The advantages you proclaim it has aren't even particularly important. Only on min/maxed super recharge builds would I even think EM pulls ahead of the game.

And who are you? Do you actually have a purpose or something?

He isn't interested in discussing this. Matter of fact he figures, if he uses the thread as his toilet, everyone who wants to will have to stop.

I might regret commenting on this conversation, but I just wanted to say that the defense boost Power Boost provides is far more valuable than its boost to any single target control.

1. Its difficult to compare the sustain powers without complete numbers. But it is true that we know /Ice gets two things which are a bit difficult to directly compare to /Energy. Its getting a much wider Chilling Embrace, and its getting a completely different effect: Absorb. Its entirely possible that Frigid Embrace and Energize will end up reasonably close in net overall damage mitigation benefit.

2. Power Boost has the additional offensive benefit of adding a method for enabling fast snipe, but that's not a binary benefit. There's a cast time cost to use power boost (unless you're using it already as fast as possible, but that shouldn't be assumed) that partially offsets its fast snipe benefit. Furthermore, the benefit should be compared in context: other secondaries will get *some* fast snipe benefit, and the only incremental benefit power boost offers for fast snipe is increasing /energy's fast snipe availability from what other sets have to what energy has. A secondary other than /devices will still have some non-zero fast snipe availability. If we assume that its something like 2/3rds of the time for non-energy (and non-devices) and 100% of the time for /energy with power boost, that's something like a 33% additional benefit of 20% more damage, or about 6.6% more overall damage (very roughly of course). Using power boost every 35 seconds or so to get there is about a 3.8% net rooted penalty to offense. So the net overall benefit is about 0.964 * 1.066 = 2.8%.

So very roughly, the fast snipe offensive benefit of powerboost is, at least in this estimate, about a 3% increase in net offense. Its unlikely to get much higher because in recharge domains where it can get you perma sets with BU and Aim should not fall too much lower than 2/3rds. But in any environment where you can get more availability than that the fast snipe advantage of power boost should drop.

Factoring in other variables, like using power boost during interstitial combat time, I would say power boosts net offensive benefit is probably between in the general neighborhood of 5% net increase in single target offense, and somewhat less than that in a mixed single/aoe offensive situation.

Noteworthy, but not dramatic, and small enough that other factors could swamp that benefit across the playerbase in general. For example, its far easier to get perma fast snipe with /devices, and for many players that offensive benefit will deliver a much larger practical benefit. For min/maxers, until I know more about the other powers I believe /energy and /ice have the advantage. But I don't think we know enough to choose a winner between those two.

The secondary that worries me the most is /Dark.

But not nearly as much fun as watching you opine on economics. I mean the privilege, we have the inventor of monopoly pricing on these boards.

Agreed, but so far the only one the devs have only singled out /mental for special treatment. /Ice gets a different effect. That may be greater or may not be. What I can say is endurance can scale with endurance use, but a static recovery benefit will not.

Without seeing your calculations I can't comment. But as to the initial statement there is a very large binary benefit of having permanent snipe available. It means you can drop a ranged single target attack from your build. Edit or in the case of AR it means you actually have a full chain of st Attacks.


Dark also gains the permanent snipe and already has a a very large permanent damage buff. But it seems to be in the same position /mental is now. You can contrive situations where it performs spectacularly.

Once again this ignores the other changes, non crashing nukes with secondary and range increase in the tier 3s.

My specific worry is that it alone requires the use of a targeted power to gain sustain.


I don't think the range increase in the primaries specifically benefits /energy. You could even argue that it partially reduces the benefit of boost range, as /energy could always get decent range on that attack. The additional benefits it gets for being able to boost range beyond that have to be considered diluted relative to the current status quo.

The ability to boost an additional attack for the case of ranged (currently) crashing nukes is not one I would ordinarily consider an additional benefit for /energy beyond what it gets now. That would imply that if the devs were to add a tenth attack, /energy should be considered to gain more because it has one more attack to range boost. You could also argue that /energy's range boost benefit only improves some of the crashing nukes and not all of them. Situationally speaking, PBAoE nukes would benefit more from more PBAoE-centric secondaries in either offense or defense, such as /Fire or /Ice. Dark's Soul Drain would be a potentially strong beneficiary of having more PBAoE offense.


There is a larger question when it comes to which secondary benefits more, and that's which ones are currently the most problematic. /Energy works fine now, and has always worked fine. Its always been, at least in my opinion, the most well rounded secondary. But that means when looking at which secondary benefits more, other secondaries have far more room for improvement. For example /Fire has vastly more damage potential than /Energy, without question. Its also, without question, far more problematic due to its PBAoE nature. Suppose sustain is strong enough in I24 to make /Fire blapping an accessible blaster strategy. In that case, I would say it would be difficult to say that /Fire didn't benefit at least as much as /Energy, in that an enormous amount of locked potential was released by I24. It isn't so much that its strength was directly improved, its that its strength became usable.

That's not so much a question of comparing /Fire's sustain to /Energy's sustain, and more a question of asking if /Fire's sustain is high enough to put more of its tools in play that currently are far less often leveraged. Nobody takes bonesmasher or boost range and then sits on it. But /Fire is often too dangerous to use more than sparingly for many blasters. If that changes, its *incremental* I24 benefit should be judged to be huge.

I was under the impression it didn't have to hit any enemies.

Why not ask what needs to be true in order to make adding a the same tenth attack be of equal benefit all secondaries. If you think about it, it is nearly impossible have an attack that will be of equal benefit to all secondaries.

The simplest way to see this is to just consider the types of attacks. If the tenth attack is a cone /mental will gain less than other secondaries because if you want an extra cone you can now select it from the primary. If it is a melee attack secondaries with good melee capability gain less than those that aren't quite good at melee, and so on.

Now if you go to a direct comparison of three secondaries, and picking these to most dramatically demonstrated the point. Consider /Energy Manipulation, /Fire and /Dev and adding the tenth power of an AoE high damage mag 3 Stun. At minimum Energy gains a power that works better than the other 2 secondaries. Energy VS Fire the power simply works longer. Energy vs /Dev, The new power works longer and does more damage.

Another way to look at the question is to ask "Do /Energy manipulation combos gain more if the primary has a power boostable nuke than those that don't". The obvious comparison there would be is the new crashless nukes greater benefit for Energy/Energy or Psi/Energy ?

Last I recall it had to hit enemies, but its sustain benefit was designed to last long enough relative to its recharge to make it only necessary to use once every so often (something like a minute or so). But if that changed in a stream or something I haven't seen every minute of those.

That's true, but there's lots of angles to play with there. Take Dreadful Wail. Its a PBAoE nuke with a guaranteed mag 3 stun. Power Boost obviously helps there, so a Sonic/Energy Blaster will gain a slightly better nuke than Sonic/Ice would, say, because Energy can powerboost the stun. But on the other hand, Ice will have much higher PBAoE survivability with Ice Patch and Frigid Embrace. That will mean Sonic/Ice will have the opportunity to put more targets within Dreadful Wail's PBAoE radius. Which is better: longer stun, or hitting more targets?

And what if you're Sonic/Fire and you can now stack that nuke with FSC? You will now have a 5.75 chain that can reliably kill LTs with just regular damage slotting and Aim. Anything that can be stunned with mag 3 will now be dead with Sonic/Fire.

Now that the nukes won't crash, it seems to me that its reasonable to suggest that there are three distinct synergy elements that come into play with more frequent nuke use. First: things that can make the nuke easier to deploy. Range boosting nukes that actually have range, for example, would be one thing. Providing PBAoE damage mitigation for PBAoE nukes would be another. The second would be AoE chaining with nukes: whereas before that was difficult, now it will be much easier. This would tend to favor secondaries with more AoE potential, and particularly AoE potential that was similar to the mechanics of some of the crashing nukes. /Fire has PBAoEs which would stack more readily on PBAoE nukes. Mental has a cone which would tend to be easier to stack onto ranged nukes. The third would be synergy things that can increase the effectiveness of the nuke itself, or allow the nuke to increase the effectiveness of something else. Powerboost for the most part, that can increase the mez strength (and drain strength) of nukes. But thunderous blast could make it a lot easier to saturate Soul Drain.

I don't think all of those tactical synergies in particular have been fully thought through.