I know I've missed chunks of this thread - what's the scalable build up idea?
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Something to think about: the risk associated with confronting something like a mezzing boss (as a blaster) is very close to infinite; blasters typically take these things on by using tactics that essentially drop the risk associated with the boss itself to zero - the risk the blaster faces is that the tactic, whatever it is, fails to work at that time. If it does work, risk-free. If it doesn't, extreme, mostly fatal, risk exposure.
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Then, as I suspected, Blaster can't work as an AT.
Too much damage = 0 risk.
Too little damage = Infinite risk.
How can that ever be properly balanced? Am I missing something?
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How many times, Moridin, did I say "Blasters need help" in THIS thread, in the last 24 hours?
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I was commenting on is your blatant refusal to accept facts that suggest that at the current time scrappers are a higher damage AT then blasters are when played as intended. Simply saying something has to change if you cant bring yourself to accept reasonable targets for change because you refuse to believe what the evidence is telling you.
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All that aside, do you really think kiting is a good or fun thing to have in this game? Do you really want to see blaster play devolve into running away from something for 5 min while you fir an occasional shot and eventually bring t down? Would this really be fun to you?
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What is the alternative to kiting? One-shotting mobs? Is the entire concept of a "Blaster" broken?
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Ive said it before, but IMO two things need to happen. First, the large difference between tank/scrapper defense and blaster defense needs to be narrowed. How doesnt really matter, but my preference is for it occurring in a way that removes the exponential increases in defensive effectiveness that currently exists.
The second thing that needs to happen is some set specific tweaking that brings blaster damage to the correct level when compared to other ATs scrappers in particular. IMO this means comparable sustained single target damage prior to scrapper critical, and AoE damage that is superior across the board in a practical sense. (And still useful if there happens to be a general AoE nerf)
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I do not believe there was or is ever a time where all blaster alpha strikes were consistently lethal, and in a very real sense if that were ever made true, we'd have no need for defense because if there "isn't ever intended to be any survivors from a high-level single target blast" then by definition we are fighting risk-free again. Death is the ultimate damage mitigation.
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They were and cases still are cases where some blasters are close enough. This is why I almost always qualify any discussion on damage outputs. Fire and AR certainly can reach the levels for AoE damage where the attack itself functions as a defense, and I dont feel this would be a good thing in an otherwise balanced game. Since the game is way out of balance as it is I do not see this as an immediate issue, but it could become one.
Nova/Inferno/TB are limited by their long recharge and end drain, but 1-2 combinations like fire breath fireball are not limited in this way, and could very well become a problem again, but only if the baseline isnt 1 hero = 10 minions, 3 Lts, 1 boss all +4.
Blaster mitigation is currently fine if the baseline if 2-4 +2 minions with a Lt mixed in, but if it becomes more then that then something else is required, and even high damage AoE fits the bill better then kiting.
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Pulling, in a very real sense, is the ultimate exploit. What possible justification is there for allowing blasters (or anyone else with a ranged attack, actually) to single out one member of a group and get him to run over and attack you, while the rest of his buddies stand around like turkeys staring up at the rain?
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It seems to me what you are really saying is that range should have some sort of importance, and it does. Unfortunately that is mostly look, feel and style. There are a number of other minor benefits as well. There is also the potential to make AoEs into an important differentiation but this isnt universally the case now as three of the five blaster sets feel the need to label themselves as single target.
Making ranged damage meaningfully different then melee damage does not mean that difference needs to be as large as the current difference between scrapper and blaster defense, all you really need to do is insure that the benefit is suitable to the advantage it actually it actually brings. The play style will still be so different that there is no danger of a scrappers and blasters blurring into one.
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That isn't true for any other AT - no one else is told, when facing a boss, that they are supposed to die and if they don't something is wrong.
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To be fair the current goal for the devs is that when you face a boss one on one you need to be on top of your game to come out on top. This may only be true for blasters and some defenders who can actually have it much worse, but the breakdown isnt what blasters are being told they should be able to do but what other ATs do in practice.
What I believe we need is either additional or more potent secondary effects for our attacks.
If more defense makes me a long range scrapper, I don't want it.
Instead let me reduce the amount of damage the villain can dish out. Let me be able to reduce the amount of damage the villian can take/avoid. Let me reduce the amount of damage the villian can connect with. In other words, don't make me more resiliant, give me more toys to limit or diminish my foe's capabilities. No, I don't want to be a controller, I don't want to hold a baddie for an hour. I don't want to totally manipulate the surroundings for my benifit. What I want is to be able to make my car different from the others while still making it as good as everyone elses if I know how.
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I know I've missed chunks of this thread - what's the scalable build up idea?
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My scalable build up idea was to start build up at 100% of base damage like it is now, and starting at at about level 20 slowly increase that to about 200% by level 40. That way, all through the 20s and 30s our burst damage keeps creeping upward to help us deal with things like mezzing LTs (in the 20s) up to more serious threats in the 30s and into the 40s. The idea is that we typically have more than enough damage to deal with a couple minions here and there, and the average non-mezzing LT is also not a problem. But build up would buy us a temporary boost to strike at the troublesome targets - and since its inherently non-perma-able, its a situational boost, unlike increasing base damage where you are giving blasters enough damage to deal with troublesome targets, but they get to keep that damage level all the time, which makes it harder to balance.
I hope it kinda evens out blaster life: TOs to 15, DOs to 22, SOs at 22, scalable build up kicks in and keeps adding incremental benefit until 40, and then EPPs kick in.
This won't work unless the blaster cap goes up substantially, or build up ignores the cap. But it is in keeping with the way scrapper mez protection, works, say. Actually, it would be comparable to scrapper damage if build up ignored the blaster cap, just like criticals ignore the scrapper cap.
The alternative I've heard is to allow build up to boost total damage, or what some people call increasing base damage. I'm not a fan of that mainly because I'd like the boost to be independent of slotting: there are so many ways that alternate slotting gets penalized from the classic 5+1 slotting, that I don't want to add yet another reason why not slotting 5+1 is stupid.
Devices would needs some alternative, but devices might get an equivalent benefit by simply improving the bombs (the bombs are a unique advantage of devices set in terms of alpha strike capability, so it makes sense to balance a better build up in other sets with better bombs in the devices set).
I also wonder if build up is too short. I wonder if doubling both duration and recharge wouldn't make it more effective: 20 second duration, 180 recharge. Fully slotted, you'd be using it 20 seconds out of every 50, instead of 10 seconds out of every 25, but right now the activation time inherent in build up acts as, in my opinion, an unwaranted penalty for some users.
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That isn't true for any other AT - no one else is told, when facing a boss, that they are supposed to die and if they don't something is wrong.
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To be fair the current goal for the devs is that when you face a boss one on one you need to be on top of your game to come out on top. This may only be true for blasters and some defenders who can actually have it much worse, but the breakdown isn’t what blasters are being told they should be able to do but what other AT’s do in practice.
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I wasn't referring to any specific dev statement, but rather other statements (by players) in the forums. The progression (and it is a loud but minority position to be sure, but elements of it are often quoted by a larger majority) goes something like this:
Stealth stacking with superspeed is an exploit, because it allows blasters to attack from melee range without being attacked first.
Why shouldn't blasters be able to do that?
Because they are squishy, they shouldn't be able to attack from melee range without taking damage.
But ranged attacks can't deal with a mezzing boss, unless your ranged attacks happen to have a mez (elec, ice). The stealth/TF strike is the main tactic some blasters have to attack and defeat an mezzing boss.
Who said you should be able to defeat a mezzing boss? You're a blaster, if you can't, tough.
I'm generally on top of my game. When not half asleep, and I haven't walked under any ladders recently, I can take out two mezzing bosses. But I find it interesting that - for some people - any time you are doing anything other than standing-and-fighting, you are probably gaming the game.
By that definition, my blaster's entire career is a thousand+ hours of exploits, in between struggling to find other exploits. I just always thought of them as tactics.
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Great_Scott: You did actually use post-multiplier Whirling Sword BI in your original post, vs. pre-multiplier BI's for everything else. . . but wouldn't it be cool if I _did_ have a PBAoE that did 9.2 brawls before slotting?
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Something to think about: the risk associated with confronting something like a mezzing boss (as a blaster) is very close to infinite; blasters typically take these things on by using tactics that essentially drop the risk associated with the boss itself to zero - the risk the blaster faces is that the tactic, whatever it is, fails to work at that time. If it does work, risk-free. If it doesn't, extreme, mostly fatal, risk exposure.
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Then, as I suspected, Blaster can't work as an AT.
Too much damage = 0 risk.
Too little damage = Infinite risk.
How can that ever be properly balanced? Am I missing something?
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Whats missing is that some people make blasters work in spite of this. How they do that should offer a clue to how to make blasters work in general.
I spent the 20s perfecting the art of the pull.
I spent the 20s and the 30s mastering knockback.
I spent the 40s jousting.
I would have been in deep trouble in the 40s in my solo missions, with Rikti Magi, Nemesis bosses, and the like (heck, just a pair of Mentalists would be death) without total focus.
Pulling, controlled side effects, tactical use of speed and maneuvering, combining melee and ranged attacks, and situational alpha strike mez.
The problem is that so many of these things seem to be opposed on ideological grounds as being exploits, or out of archetype definition, or in some weird cases, its argued that they wouldn't actually work, an interesting theoretical argument to make to someone who uses them.
There are even people who make fire/fire work, God bless them. How they manage that trick should offer clues to how to improve those sets. Look at what they do, and either change the sets so they don't have to do some of the crazy things they do, or, just the opposite, improve the sets so that the crazy things they do are not so crazy, and actually more practical.
Hot feet and ice patch are soooo close to being alike, yet the differences are critical to their usefulness. That's a huge hint for anyone balancing blaster sets.
I love the idea of turning the energy secondary melee attacks into PBAoEs, or short range (10-20feet) in-your-face attacks. But warning: those are serious buffs, and teeny tiny balancing changes that seem small to the devs can destroy the usefulness of the powers completely. Take thunder kick, from the MA set. Used to be a 100% mag 1 disorient. Now its a 20% mag 2. Mag goes up so it can actually stun things, percentage goes down so it can't stack effectively with other MA stuns. If the same thing happens to total focus - we get range, but the stun drops to 50% - its now useless (at least to me, for the primary purpose I use it for). This sort of thing is sometimes unobvious to the very people who don't like the powers, don't use them, and therefore aren't fully familiar with why they actually work.
So, how might you improve things? Here's a thought, explosive blast is a tier 8 energy blast power that hits weaker than torrent, has longer recharge, longer activation time, and doesn't even have a 100% knockback percentage. Lots of blasters don't even take the thing.
So, add a disorient to it, and lower its damage slightly. Torrent becomes the cone-kb, and explosive blast becomes the AoE-disorient. A short duration 75% mag 3 stun would work - good chance to stun LTs and minions, and good AoE damage mitigator to give to an otherwise heavy single-target set.
Whats nice is that almost no one would object to the additional effect (the KB scatters anyway, the disorient just helps with the not-shooting-back part), and any "balancing" the devs might decide to do is unlikely to hurt energy blasters (reduce the damage of EB? ha ha, ooh that stings).
The blaster class isn't hopeless. It doesn't even require radical changes. You just have to weed out all the "blasters suck, maybe with 10x damage they might be ok" stuff, the "blasters are fine, I solo invincible missions set for 8, and I only use power pool attacks, you losers" stuff, and look for the "I can make blasters work, but this might be helpful given how I play" stuff. Average all of those out, and you'll probably get some good stuff in there somewhere.
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Pulling, in a very real sense, is the ultimate exploit. What possible justification is there for allowing blasters (or anyone else with a ranged attack, actually) to single out one member of a group and get him to run over and attack you, while the rest of his buddies stand around like turkeys staring up at the rain?
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It seems to me what you are really saying is that range should have some sort of importance, and it does. Unfortunately that is mostly look, feel and style. There are a number of other minor benefits as well. There is also the potential to make AoE’s into an important differentiation but this isn’t universally the case now as three of the five blaster sets feel the need to label themselves as single target.
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Not so much range, as isolation. The way range affects aggro, combined with los issues, creates the actual opportunity for pulling.
If I said that what blasters need is a power that dimension-shifts everybody, and allows us to let them out one at a time, that would be laughed off the boards.
Except, thats what an expert puller does. We (most of us) think pulling is ok, but uber-dimension-shift is not ok. I think that is because we tend to think "tactics" are allowed to have final effects that just a straight (unskilled) application of a power should not grant automatically.
Problem is, once we venture too far into the realm of "what can I *do* to make *this* happen, we start to enter the grey area of "exploits." The question is, should there even *be* things that are "tricks" without being actual "exploits" and should blasters be allowed - even encouraged - to use them to compensate for lack of defense.
I tend to think yes, they should be so allowed; that tactical application of offense (and just plain tactics) should have some bearing on how blasters survive. The question is where to draw the line, and it would be helpful if the devs drew it for us, to eliminate endless debate on what is, and is not, fair game.
So far, they have done so (somewhat inconsistently) by example, but not by rule. That makes "tactics" discussions a veritable mine field of tangential debates.
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Making ranged damage meaningfully different then melee damage does not mean that difference needs to be as large as the current difference between scrapper and blaster defense, all you really need to do is insure that the benefit is suitable to the advantage it actually it actually brings. The play style will still be so different that there is no danger of a scrappers and blasters blurring into one.
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I agree completely, and its tactical concerns, and skill, that will be able to bring about and amplify that difference. Blasters are not, despite all the number crunching, hopelessly far behind scrappers. We are not 100x less effective, or whatever some raw number suggests. With just a small amount of (sanctioned) tools, blaster skill can take us the rest of the way.
I wouldn't mind at all if blasters required the most skill to be effective - I just want ways to use skill to level the playing field enough to make the difference not worth bothering about. Personally, I don't think we are really all that far away from that, in the grand scheme of things.
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I’m not sure what you are trying to get at here, are you really suggesting that because other borderline exploits of game mechanics exist that other should be created?
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Actually, yes. The only difference between an exploit and a tactical option in CoH tends to be "is this what we want to have happen or not."
When I stand outside perception range and shoot a mob, then run around a corner, and the game mechanics cause one guy to run after me like an idiot, and the rest of his friends to stand around, also like idiots, that situation either is, or is not, an exploit based solely on an arbitrary judgement: is pulling reasonable as a tactic or not.
Should a blaster be allowed to use his melee attacks as a first strike weapon, which *requires* stacked stealth. If your answer is "yes" then stacked stealth is not an exploit. If your answer is "no" then it is.
I'm not saying exploits are good. I'm saying what we define as acceptable tactics defines what are exploits and what are not.
Range means nothing, to accuracy, to damage, short of being out of range. That means, to a first order approximation, moving while fighting is - or is supposed to be - a meaningless exercise (for blasters). Cover means nothing, because the game allows you to shoot at anything with any part in line of sight. This means hiding behind things is - or is supposed to be - a meaningless exercise.
When you really start to wind it down, on paper, there are almost no tactics to speak of that the game engine directly supports. Its Risk, with health for armies.
Most of the tactics - for blasters - take advantage of oddities in the way the game works. Pulling takes advantage of the fact that the AI is brain-dead. Its only two steps removed from the inert Terra Volta villains. Kiting is actually less of an exploit: it takes advantage of the fact I outrange them, and I intend to keep it that way. That cannot be an exploit, and kiting cannot be removed from the game so long as I do, in fact, outrange them.
Without tactics, blaster damage mitigation quickly converges on status effects the devs don't want us to have too much of, the defensive powers the devs don't want us to have at all, and massive offense that we simply are never going to get. And those tactical options tend to come from, for lack of a better word, "deficits" in how the game poorly mirrors reality.
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The problem with your logic is the situations where you could sit beyond a mobs range and attack it with impunity have been systematically removed from the game, so the devs are not in fact saying “if you want to be virtually unhittable and unkillable for 30 to 60 seconds, while standing perfectly immobile and shooting at things, thats fine” In fact they are saying just the opposite and the fact that they have not bothered to remove a handful of unprofitable cases doesn’t change this.
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So long as I outrange the foes, I can stand far away and shoot them, if I want to shoot at them slowly. This has always been true for a slotted snipe, and always true for boost range. Neither has been touched since the game was released. I'm actually unaware of any instance where blasters originally outranged a foe and they directly changed the game to cause us to no longer do so. I'm not sure what you are referencing when you say the devs have been actively trying to prevent kiting or out-of-range sniping, because while some AI has changed how the foes try to run away from you when you do it, they've never interfered with me actually doing it, that I can remember.
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All that aside, do you really think kiting is a good or fun thing to have in this game? Do you really want to see blaster play devolve into running away from something for 5 min while you fir an occasional shot and eventually bring t down? Would this really be fun to you?
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You could say that about any singular activity. It would be deathly boring to stand and fire, forever. It would be deathly boring to joust with total focus, forever. It would be deathly boring to hover-snipe, forever. Or to run up to foes and nova them, or permanently assist the tank with single target fire, forever.
But its nice to have the choice to do any or all of those as I see the situation warrant it. And sometimes one or the other is the best, or only good option available at the time, even if it would be boring to use it exclusively at other times. I still shoot single targets, even though total focus hits harder.
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Tactics are great. I'd like to see an environment that rewards this even more- more places to snipe from concealment, more "I can shoot you off tall places and then you have to run and get me" situations, pits full of angry crocodiles, whatever.
But requiring people to push the bleeding edge of tactics just to survive, that's. . .well, it's expecting an awful lot from your players.
And I don't think "Blasters Shall Never Have Defenses, No Never" is a core of the Dev philosophy- look at the Epic pools . Level 45 is just too late for Temp Invuln to help.
A *small* defensive in the secondaries can have a distinctly useful effect: there's a Regen power that gives 7.5% S/L damage resistance. It adds up, with Tough and lots of slots, to about 50%. Doesn't suck. 10% Defense, it could add up.
If that's too "ranged Scrapper" for ya (I don't see it as such) . . . maybe something more active, the equivalent of Smoke Grenade. 30% Acc Debuff isn't dogchow. (Drops 75% to hit down to, like, 52%. Don't know how it scales with enemy level, though.)
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Whats missing is that some people make blasters work in spite of this. How they do that should offer a clue to how to make blasters work in general.
I spent the 20s perfecting the art of the pull.
I spent the 20s and the 30s mastering knockback.
I spent the 40s jousting.
I would have been in deep trouble in the 40s in my solo missions, with Rikti Magi, Nemesis bosses, and the like (heck, just a pair of Mentalists would be death) without total focus.
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Thanks for proving my point! 
So, You spent your 20's using an AI exploit...
You spent your 20's and 30's using a specific ability that only 1 set has (I'm not sure if KB is an exploit, but players sure hate it!)
You spent your 40's using a Travel Power exploit.
How do I know that this isn't the dev intent? Because of the Arena.
Travel powers now have suppression.
Stealth powers can be seen through.
Good luck "pulling" or otherwise messing with the AI of another player!
I have no doubt that Knockback will be "adjusted" in a further issue, as Players don't want to be denied the possibility to react.
The Arena shows us that if AI isn't involved and exploits are removed, Blasters are a binary AT, just like Regen is a binary set.
Enough Damage? You win.
Not Enough Damage? You lose.
Defense? None.
Holds? Against one opponent, sure! Against 2 or more....dead-ski.
But at least you know the outcome of a match in 45 seconds..that's a good thing, I suppose...
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I wouldn't mind at all if blasters required the most skill to be effective - I just want ways to use skill to level the playing field enough to make the difference not worth bothering about. Personally, I don't think we are really all that far away from that, in the grand scheme of things.
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Interesting. So you're stating that less skilled players should be denied the ability to play one AT, but not others?
Or am I misreading you?
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I wouldn't mind at all if blasters required the most skill to be effective - I just want ways to use skill to level the playing field enough to make the difference not worth bothering about. Personally, I don't think we are really all that far away from that, in the grand scheme of things.
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Interesting. So you're stating that less skilled players should be denied the ability to play one AT, but not others?
Or am I misreading you?
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Denied? Anyone can play anything they want.
Defenders are harder to play than tanks. Is that also a problem that needs fixing?
Perhaps that is just a sidestep of the question. So rather than take the coward's way out, I'll say, yes, if the ATs are going to be different in a meaningful way, those differences are going to mean that some people will not want to play some ATs. That may be because the sets don't appeal to them - specifically how they *think* the sets ought to work. That may be because the play-style doesn't work for them. It may be because of leveling speed, or dependence on teaming.
Or it might be because they just don't have the skill to make the set work.
I don't see anything wrong with that at all.
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Thanks for proving my point!
So, You spent your 20's using an AI exploit...
You spent your 20's and 30's using a specific ability that only 1 set has (I'm not sure if KB is an exploit, but players sure hate it!)
You spent your 40's using a Travel Power exploit.
How do I know that this isn't the dev intent? Because of the Arena.
Travel powers now have suppression.
Stealth powers can be seen through.
Good luck "pulling" or otherwise messing with the AI of another player!
I have no doubt that Knockback will be "adjusted" in a further issue, as Players don't want to be denied the possibility to react.
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By extension of that logic, controllers were not meant to be able to control (holds have suppression), tanks were not meant to resist ranged damage (blasters get unresistable damage), toggle defenses were meant to be fragile (the number of detoggle powers is now pretty extensive).
You aren't supposed to extrapolate from the arena like that. I can't pull in the arena, but neither can a tank taunt - at least, not like they can in PvE. A large percentage of the changes in the arena were made either because players react differently than the AI in the game either does, or can, react, or because players have substantial advantages in PvE that the devs did not want to carry over into PvP.
Or sometimes they wanted to give the players an advantage. Defender debuffs are unresistable in PvP, but not in PvE. Why not make them unresistable in PvE, if the arena is supposed to be a guide to "how things ought to be?"
BTW, as to jousting, the -acc in superspeed did not prevent jousting, at least for blasters. Neither does suppression. And it affects me not at all with regard to using stealth+SS as a first strike enabler for total focus. If you think the developers believe that is an exploit, and are working to eliminate that, they are doing a really bad job at trying.
You'd also be wrong: they specifically stated that they added the -acc, and subsequently movement suppression, to force players who use travel powers in combat to have to "stick around" if they attack, so that there is at least the possibility of counterattack - in the arena.
Unless you are a warhulk, there is no possibility of counterattack if total focus lands in PvE, but not because of movement, but because of the mag 4 disorient. If you think something is wrong with stealth+ss+tf, its problem lies with the mag 4 disorient in TF, not in stealth+ss.
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The Arena shows us that if AI isn't involved and exploits are removed, Blasters are a binary AT, just like Regen is a binary set.
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Well, at least regen is a really good binary set. 
But seriously, you almost seem to be coming from a position that states any tactic that doesn't involve pushing a power button and seeing what happens is by definition an exploit. Its a circular argument that says blasters are supposed to be completely defenseless, thus, anything that mitigates damage for a blaster is by definition an exploit, and when we remove the "exploits" that mitigate damage, blasters are helpless.
It equates defenseless with helpless, to prove blasters are helpless. But the premise is false: blasters are not supposed to be defenseless = helpless, they are supposed to be defenseless = little or no +DEF and +RES.
The fact that you think my experience proves your point only demonstrates that we see things differently. But, if you really believe what you are saying, that these blaster techniques are really exploits, in the proper sense of the word, then you really ought to be petitioning them whenever you encounter them.
In fact, I will do you one better. I'm going to log my blaster this evening, execute all of those tactics, and then petition myself.
Let Cryptic make the final call: exploit, or reasonable tactic. If Cryptic doesn't think its an exploit, that would be authoritative.
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Tactics are great. I'd like to see an environment that rewards this even more- more places to snipe from concealment, more "I can shoot you off tall places and then you have to run and get me" situations, pits full of angry crocodiles, whatever.
But requiring people to push the bleeding edge of tactics just to survive, that's. . .well, it's expecting an awful lot from your players.
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That is why my opinion is probably a lonely minority: blasters aren't broken, because skilled players can make them work, but blasters need help, because the skill to make them work can be substantially higher than other classes in most cases in the late game.
Blasters (to my mind) are in a grey area that makes tweaking them something to be performed carefully. It wouldn't take much to make them excessively powerful in the hands of someone with any skill, and it wouldn't take much to break them so no one could play them well.
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And I don't think "Blasters Shall Never Have Defenses, No Never" is a core of the Dev philosophy- look at the Epic pools . Level 45 is just too late for Temp Invuln to help.
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Conversely, level 15 is too early - it turns us into scrappers. There is a fine line there. Or rather, temp invuln is probably too strong to give at any moment other than the absolute end game.
Lets not forget, the devs sometimes do contradictory things. They might still believe blasters, as a class, should not be getting +DEF and +RES, and then turn around and say "EPPs should give blasters what they can't get normally to make the EPPs cool" and then give us powerful +DEF or +RES.
That would be comparable to believing that "the tier 9 scrapper defenses should be situational and not be perma-able" and then deliberately give SR a perma-able elude for "scrapper balance" and then deliberately give regen a perma-able MoG, for "regen balancing" - and then taking them both away later to reassert their original belief.
They actually did, in fact, do exactly that - witness the evolution of Force of Nature.
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A *small* defensive in the secondaries can have a distinctly useful effect: there's a Regen power that gives 7.5% S/L damage resistance. It adds up, with Tough and lots of slots, to about 50%. Doesn't suck. 10% Defense, it could add up.
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You need to be careful, though, when pulling out one element of defense from a scrapper set, because they have a tendancy to combine in ways that stack the benefit.
Tough, for example, benefits regen scrappers a lot more than the resistance numbers imply, because of the ultra-fast healing they have. Tough lowers incoming damage, and thus buys time. But buying time means something radically different for a regen scrapper as a blaster. Buying 10 extra seconds means the regen has healed over half his total health. Buying 10 extra seconds for a blaster means he might be able to pop a respite if he has one.
I'll take freebee resistances no matter how small, but its worth noting that even the resistance of tough, which is higher than most suggestions for adding resistance to blaster secondaries, isn't enough of an incentive to get even a sizable minority of blasters to take it.
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If that's too "ranged Scrapper" for ya (I don't see it as such) . . . maybe something more active, the equivalent of Smoke Grenade. 30% Acc Debuff isn't dogchow. (Drops 75% to hit down to, like, 52%. Don't know how it scales with enemy level, though.)
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I think the devs realize they are walking a fine line when giving blasters mitigation powers, and I think that in general, they are much more likely to hand them out to one set at a time, so that they can balance the set internally, rather than give out blanket debuff/control powers. Thus, devices has caltrops and smoke, but its missing Build Up. Ice has holds, but its missing a snipe. That sort of thing.
Given that, I think its actually more likely that we will get control in the primary and secondary sets (of a sort) rather than defense in the secondaries (although that doesn't preclude getting both). But I think the devs will want to experiment with small things first, not big things like giving everyone smoke grenade.
Changing power thrust into repulsion field, for example, fits in real well with the "range is supposed to be a defense" idea they have, and its a small change that basically turns a targetted power into a PBAoE (but I would miss that punch). But there is no /fire power you can turn into rep field naturally. But you could turn hot feet into a (maybe better) version of ice patch. Its tier 9, so maybe its bigger in area of effect than ice patch. A 40 foot ice patch would turn hot feet from crap to cake in one swoop.
I think changes like that are much more likely, and certainly much more likely than straight +DEF +RES +REGEN.
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Interesting...very interesting! You're helping me better refine my points.
Thanks!
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But seriously, you almost seem to be coming from a position that states any tactic that doesn't involve pushing a power button and seeing what happens is by definition an exploit. Its a circular argument that says blasters are supposed to be completely defenseless, thus, anything that mitigates damage for a blaster is by definition an exploit, and when we remove the "exploits" that mitigate damage, blasters are helpless.
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This is true. As the game is currently, Blasters are helpless.
Once side effects of the game engine and AI is taken out of the equation, it's clear, even to you, that Blasters have no defenses at all.
This is my entire point. This is a problem, actually.
Blasters need "defenses" that are not side-effects of the game engine.
Even something as simple as Range being an accuracy modifier creates a whole new world of viablilty to the "All Offense" Blaster concept.
Right now, as the game is written, even ducking behind a corner isn't always useful...the "to-hit" dice roll is made the very instant a mob "sees" a Hero, and shots will go around corners to hit that Hero.
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In fact, I will do you one better. I'm going to log my blaster this evening, execute all of those tactics, and then petition myself
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This won't prove useful. The Developers are leaving the game as-is for a reason; even though the game is "broken" for Blasters, it "works", after a fashion.
I don't think that the Devs are willing to rework the entire game to fix thier Beta mistakes. They are (thankfully) more pragmatic than that.
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I'll take freebee resistances no matter how small, but its worth noting that even the resistance of tough, which is higher than most suggestions for adding resistance to blaster secondaries, isn't enough of an incentive to get even a sizable minority of blasters to take it.
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Blasters have nothing to stack directly on top of tough. See, what makes Resistance juicy [aside from the Regen advantage] is that it works with Tough. Tough alone allows you to take 50% more S/L damage: Resistance and Tough allow you to take 100% more S/L damage. 66% resistance would allow 200% more S/L damage.
Right now, Blasters [correctly] judge that they can't get enough damage mitigation to be worth the colossal investment in powers, power pools, and slots it takes. You can try to build a "pool power Scrapper defense" but it really, really just doesn't work.
However, due to the cumulative nature of +DEF, if you had a power that gave just a LITTLE more defense- 7.5% unslotted, in that range- you could then choose to build a Blaster that would have 50% +DEF - yes, it would have large holes [Area of Effect, probably toxic/psi, possibly more] and cost a lot of powers, but it would be an option for Blasters who want to be less Black Widow and more Thor. (spoilered gawdawful pun follows) [yeah yeah, you're plenty thor now.]
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Right now, Blasters [correctly] judge that they can't get enough damage mitigation to be worth the colossal investment in powers, power pools, and slots it takes. You can try to build a "pool power Scrapper defense" but it really, really just doesn't work.
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I disagree. My Blaster had the free slots for Tough/Weave, Health/Stamina, Combat Jumping and Hasten, right when I really started to need them...in the high 20's.
Once you have a full attack chain by level 20, the slots are there to get 33% Defense or so. That plus a purple insp is GimpySR with SuperGimpyRegen.
Not awesome, but not bad at all. Of course, you get the most use from those powers in melee, but I imagine a Ranged blaster could get use out of them as well.
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See, I hadn't considered taking a single purple insp... to me they come in pairs or more, because when I need them I need to NOT GET HIT NO NEVER NO MORE.
It'd work - it'd probably work REAL well.
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I'll take freebee resistances no matter how small, but its worth noting that even the resistance of tough, which is higher than most suggestions for adding resistance to blaster secondaries, isn't enough of an incentive to get even a sizable minority of blasters to take it.
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Blasters have nothing to stack directly on top of tough. See, what makes Resistance juicy [aside from the Regen advantage] is that it works with Tough. Tough alone allows you to take 50% more S/L damage: Resistance and Tough allow you to take 100% more S/L damage. 66% resistance would allow 200% more S/L damage.
Right now, Blasters [correctly] judge that they can't get enough damage mitigation to be worth the colossal investment in powers, power pools, and slots it takes. You can try to build a "pool power Scrapper defense" but it really, really just doesn't work.
However, due to the cumulative nature of +DEF, if you had a power that gave just a LITTLE more defense- 7.5% unslotted, in that range- you could then choose to build a Blaster that would have 50% +DEF - yes, it would have large holes [Area of Effect, probably toxic/psi, possibly more] and cost a lot of powers, but it would be an option for Blasters who want to be less Black Widow and more Thor. (spoilered gawdawful pun follows) [yeah yeah, you're plenty thor now.]
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Actually, this is an argument for granting defense instead of resistance - since there are more defense powers in the power pools to stack.
Except, and this is tricky, right at the point where it starts to work well, the devs are likely to pull back on it.
My objection to adding resistance isn't that resistance is always going to be too weak, but rather that the devs are going to shy away from making it strong enough to matter, almost by definition.
They don't seem to mind giving us 100% damage mitigation in the form of an ice hold, but 25% defense is probably way too high. This points to thinking about damage mitigation in terms of the notion that it isn't how much we get that matters so much as the perception of how we go about getting it. Getting it by being forced to attack things seems more palatable than anything "passive."
Which, despite all the other statements about blasters and scrappers, might be their true fundamental difference. Its acceptable for scrappers to get passive defenses (even toggles), while blasters should generally get active defense, in the form of damage mitigation through attacking.
If this psychological point is true, then it tells us what to ask for. Ask for resistances, and we might get them, but they will be weak because of the perceived notion that we ought not to be able to just "take it." Ask for enhanced knockdown, ranged disorients, immobilizes, or other forms of active mitigation, and short of asking for too much overlap with controllers, we might get a lot more net mitigation capabilities that way.
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They don't seem to mind giving us 100% damage mitigation in the form of an ice hold, but 25% defense is probably way too high.
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It's 100% to one guy. If there are four guys, it's 25%.
If there are twenty. . .that's a problem.
But there are interesting ideas in the rest of the post.
BS/Katana has a Parry (Divine Avalanche, I think they renamed it to) power which is essentially defensive- it does a little damage, but gives +20% melee defense for the next 10 seconds.
Something like that, but with RANGED defense? Would be cool. I don't know how you fit it in with the world. . ."Covering fire" maybe? Would be a problem with aggro, but if it could be buffed up to 44% ranged +DEF, aggro ceases to trouble one.
20% is way high, I think. . . the Katana attack is slow and END-hungry, that's how it is balanced.
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All the different LoS-breaking tricks used by blasters for pulling, or just plain shooting, are a form of damage mitigation. If its considered cheating to use them, and blasters aren't supposed to have actual defenses or resistances, then we are really left with saying the game is designed for blasters to get killed, and if blasters aren't getting killed, something is wrong, which to my mind is insane.
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My impression was that Blasters are intended to kill all of the Mobs in a spawn before they can return fire.
So, yes, if offense = defense, then ducking around a corner is an exploit.
There isn't ever intended to be any survivors from a high-level single target blast, or lower level attack chain.
That's how I imagine that this game was originally balanced. Now that mobs have gotten tougher, and more levels exist than when the game was released, this is no longer the case.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the exploits aren't being fixed because they are acting as a band-aid to the solo Blaster game.
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I do not believe there was or is ever a time where all blaster alpha strikes were consistently lethal, and in a very real sense if that were ever made true, we'd have no need for defense because if there "isn't ever intended to be any survivors from a high-level single target blast" then by definition we are fighting risk-free again. Death is the ultimate damage mitigation.
But pure offense cannot be blaster's sole damage mitigation, because if blaster's sole damage mitigation is kill-speed, then you have only three real possibilities: build in an enormous amount of downtime in-between attacks, or turn blasters into unstoppable killing machines, or if the kill-speed isn't good enough, force blasters to commit suicide when they attack things.
I suggest scalable build up because it does act to use "downtime" of sorts to balance better damage, but that alone can't be the sole method of balancing blasters, because alone it is too knife-edged in its balance - too easy to give too little or too much damage. Other mitigators, like knockback or disorient, act to slow combat down enough to prevent runaway offense from taking over.
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Basically, what I'm saying is that the exploits aren't being fixed because they are acting as a band-aid to the solo Blaster game.
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My point was that if the game engine didn't allow for what some people are calling exploits, I'd be advocating actually adding them in as explicit features.
Pulling, in a very real sense, is the ultimate exploit. What possible justification is there for allowing blasters (or anyone else with a ranged attack, actually) to single out one member of a group and get him to run over and attack you, while the rest of his buddies stand around like turkeys staring up at the rain?
But without pulling, there absolutely must be some way for blasters to isolate members from a group, because they are simply not designed to take attacks from the entire group. So if the game engine didn't allow for pulling, we'd have to just build it, or something like it, right back in.
So maybe some things aren't being "fixed" simply because, intended or not, it just makes sense for them to be there, given how the game currently works. Necessary evil, or unexpected bonus, its all the same, if it works, at least until something better comes along.
Something to think about: the risk associated with confronting something like a mezzing boss (as a blaster) is very close to infinite; blasters typically take these things on by using tactics that essentially drop the risk associated with the boss itself to zero - the risk the blaster faces is that the tactic, whatever it is, fails to work at that time. If it does work, risk-free. If it doesn't, extreme, mostly fatal, risk exposure.
The way I deal with them is by using what a lot of people consider an exploit: stacking stealth and superspeed, and using total focus to disorient the boss without giving him any chance whatsoever of getting a shot off.
The problem is that, at least for me as an energy/energy blaster, I don't really have much in the way of alternatives. I've been told that there aren't supposed to be any - I'm supposed to die, basically.
That isn't true for any other AT - no one else is told, when facing a boss, that they are supposed to die and if they don't something is wrong.
Its not necessarily a common perception, but its out there, and its probably one of the most important things that needs to be addressed: the notion that just because blasters are supposed to be "defenseless", in the sense of no +DEF, they are also supposed to be "defenseless", in the sense of "helpless."
There's offense capabilities, and defense capabilities, and if defensive capabilities are going to be restricted, and offense is not going to be allowed to run rampant, then what blasters have left is tactical application of offense. The game engine is not a FPS; tactical options are extremely limited and what can be added is extremely limited. We shouldn't be dismissing off hand the few we have, just because they might be "unintended." The game engine itself might be giving us hints we ought to listen to.
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