Love/Hate Thing
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My answer to this is that *bad* blasters faceplant more.... I'm also one of those
silly guys that said "Defiance is dumb" from the very minute that they raised the idea.
I'd add that blasters who frequently get to the point where defiance even applies....
are playing the AT poorly (imho)...
Further, I'd also wager that they are, unsurprisingly, most often the ones who end up
padding the faceplant statistics...
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Color me baffled.
Defiance comes into play every time a foe lands a mezz on me - that's pretty often. My Mezz resistances are high enough that I typically can continue blasting away with 3 solid attacks (thanks to Defiance) without using a Break Free.
Oh, incidentally, I hardly ever go down (only happens when I mess up against an AV, really).
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Well even if he is just talking about the damage boost its off the wall. Unless you are a one shotting spawns you are going to be seeing defiance come into play in a big way.
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What other AT steals aggro from the tank?
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You won't steal it from a tank with Taunt.
But thanks for pointing out to tankers again what I keep on telling them in the forums ::
---- punch provoke and damage shield DO NOT hold all agro. ----
Oh back to the original question - all of them if the tanker doesn't use TAUNT.
Oh, and blasters won't either if a tanker has Taunt and uses it correctly. (yeah, I know I already said that, but tankers really need to stop blowing off Taunt because they think it is a useless power).
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What other AT has to constantly break LOS?
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On the Blue-side?
Any that have AoE's - Controllers, Defenders, Peacebringers, and Warshades. Depending on what is going on, I'll even do it with scrappers.
Really, if you are tanker with Taunt, it can be very useful to break LOS after Taunting. The Taunted enemies can only attack you. So if your teammates have them held and the enemies can't see you, they can't attack anyone on your team. Of course, most tankers would think that it would be boring to do so.
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What other AT NEEDS so many inspirations to do the job it was designed for?
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I carry one column break-frees with all characters that don't have mez protection - that's all of them besides tanks and scrappers and even they carry that one column of break-frees until they have their anti-mez power.
All my characters carry one column of awakens.
Until the columns start getting 3 or 4 deep, I usually fill up the rest with respites and a couple of blues (when an character seems to be especially end heavy).
So all my characters basically carry the same payload of insps until level 35-40.
At that point, I might start throwing in some yellows and reds for blasters to up their damage output.
Back you your question, I don't see Blasters NEEDING insps more than any other archetype.
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OK, I mentioned a bit about defenders but they can still do their job competently, in fact every other AT can do what it was designed for without the outside help blasters need
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What do blasters need exactly that other AT's don't need?
Blasters have something that other AT's don't have - a massive amount of damage!
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But if I want to be a damage dealer, why a blaster over a scrapper, controller, maybe a tank, or anything redside?
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Uh, this is a trolling thread...isn't it?
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I guess I'm trying to say blasters are not performing properly in the role they were intended for
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This is definitely a trolling thread...I'm not doing to waste my time any more....
Honestly, your first post made next to no sense.
This one...yikes...trolling about blasters not doing damage...wow...
What would fix the blaster AT for most "new to blaster" players and folks that don't wish to rely on insps and positional awareness are things the devs simply aren't going to do.
The entire defiance mechanic could have been entirely negated by either doing the dominator trick with domination (ie: making defiance a click power that could be used while mezzed and provided mez protection) or by making the blaster a "boss mob" with mag 4 mez protection. Both of these things were discussed in the closed beta of I11 and both of them were rejected by the devs and most of the testers. The testers didn't want another click and the devs didn't want to duplicate domination.
Mag 4 mez protection was discarded as being too powerful.
As far as the other solution goes, that would be to redesign the blaster as an AT. Most blasters survive pretty well once they hit the 40s and pick up their epic powers but this is the very end of their leveling career rather than the middle part like most other ATs.
The solution would be to move powers that are in some of the secondaries into epics and move the epics into the secondaries where they probably "should" have been all along.
Since this is, in essence, creating a new AT the devs would be more likely to create a new AT with these characteristics and leave blasters as is.
Other than a few tweaks here and there I don't see the devs changing much more for blasters any time soon if at all.
Edit - and I'm not at all certain that any other changes are really needed. A blaster in competent hands is a sight to behold. There are more than enough tools in game to make blasters awesome.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Looking back through the thread now that my inner snark has calmed down (apologies for that) I realized we've covered a lot of opinions but we never got down to a why, or in a sense the how things are done. So question for the OP about your fire/fire. When you're soloing or on a team, how are you operating?
Build up and aoe blitzing? Pulling round a corner to bunch up mobs for more aoe damage? (specifically the PB ones in /fire) Making sure the tank has taunted some, or the controler getting his holds in place first? Possibly something to do more with the build then the blaster AT in general?
Just curious, maybe a lil specifics could help us pin things down. Cause currently a lot of what you said, heh I could say the same about scrappers. I love blasters and SUCK at playing them. To each their own eh?
I can still remember leveling up my blaster and tbh, I think the devs have already made plenty of game changes to fix us...
we still have the utility to run average solo missions and can always skip a really hard one if we have no friends we can group with
in groups we are still king dps imo espcially in AE, speaking of which now that we have AE we can get so's and io's much easier (tickets and more money)
while to a lot of AT's the game is kinda over at L50... I feel that to a blaster, the game is just beginning... we lay down some massive damage which only grows as we tweak or L50 slots...
and when you talk about blaster face planting more than other at's... well when I open up on a large group and drop down 15k dmg across the grp in a few seconds... i better have my will in order... or a survival plan...
I agree that they really bloom late game, and seem to have it pretty easy in the beginning too- it's all that time in the middle tho...
I wasn't aware of what was considered in those beta tests, but even so, seems a little overpowered to me too
Goes to show a lot more people are happy with the status quo than I thought and maybe appreciate the fact they're not as easy to master as some ATs
And it's not necessarily the toon I'm working now, I think in the AT they're pretty balanced (my nrg/nrg, for instance, is a little safer, but doesn't bring as much to teams damagewise, which is ok)
And this one isn't giving me any more trouble than any of the others I have- he's 45 so there's certainly more tools to work with and the build is coming along nicely
I'm ready to embrace the fact that it's a certain playstyle (which I enjoy- I also have a bunch of /kins and kins/)
Hmmmm... maybe an elec/elec next
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I'm ready to embrace the fact that it's a certain playstyle (which I enjoy- I also have a bunch of /kins and kins/)
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That's all we can really hope for.
Blasters are Scrappers. Blasters aren't Defenders. Blasters aren't Controllers. Blasters are Blasters. Much like Scrappers require a specific playstyle Blasters require one. They aren't the same, even though we're both classified as the damage dealers of City of Heroes.
We don't need a change, we just need people willing to give a specific playstyle a chance, and if you're willing to try, we'll be more than willing to help. And hey, if you discover your Nrg/Nrg was a one time deal and you can't stand playing Blasters that's ok too, you gave it an honest shot and that's all that matters.
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Blasters are broken
There, I said it
I'm now working on a fire/fire and it never felt so true
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Hmmm...
*checks registration date of OP*
Aaahhh... I think I understand now.
Blasters aren't "Broken", my friend. They're hardly the strongest of the ATs, and they're not great soloers unless you really know what you're doing, but they're hardly "broken", at least not compared to what they used to be.
Back in the day they had nothing. Even Defiance was worse than it is now. We had to deal with things like the lead designer saying "Range is a blaster's defence", all the way completely oblivious to the fact that pretty near HALF a blaster's powers were essentially melee range, the real heavy damage in particular. Blasters had it really rough for a long time... but recently, they're not too bad compared to other ATs.
They're not broken, they're just hard to play.
Brother of Markus
The Lord of Fire and Pain
The Legendary Living Hellfire
Fight my brute!
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I wasn't aware of what was considered in those beta tests, but even so, seems a little overpowered to me too
Goes to show a lot more people are happy with the status quo than I thought and maybe appreciate the fact they're not as easy to master as some ATs
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I wouldn't make that conclusion based on the forums. Not saying its right or wrong just that the forumites are an extreme and very biased sample
I'm having a hard time figuring out if this thread is real or I'm imagining it. Blasters are hard? Blasters are broken? Is this a case of "I've spent so many years complaining about Blasters that I just do it out of habit now!" ?
Tanks are very safe and relatively easy, but they're slow. Scrappers are faster, but are move involved (chasing down foes, managing shields and endurance). Defenders are slow levelers. Controllers bloom late and require much more work.
Blasters are wonderfully balanced. They defeat their enemies quickly, Defiance is near-perfect in that it makes mezzes what they should have been in the first place.... a detriment to be avoided, but not crippling. They actually are interesting to play and require some thought, but aren't so tricky that a casual player can't easily master them.
Really, give blasters anything significantly greater and you've trivialized the game so much it would be senseless to play.
The different archetypes are not supposed to play all the same. Tanks are safe and easy, but have their own dynamics to deal with. It's a totally different type of playstyle when you have to worry about maintaining all the aggro. Controllers have their own playstyle, as do Defenders and Scrappers. If Blasters tend to be tricky for any one player, then maybe that playstyle isn't best for that player. It in no way means that the archetype as a whole has problems or is broken.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
Started playing when i6 hit and my first few were all blasters
My first 50 is the nrg/nrg
Soloed him about half the time
There have been changes, some of them not for blasters only, that help
But I still fell the same way about them
Some is more than none
I thought there would be more "right on, bout time!"
Heh, I know one of the posters and have talked to him about this, so I had a good laugh when he was all lrn2plynoob
I got directed to this thread, so there you go.
I've never believed that Blasters were broken. They've always been playable, even with the original Defiance. It's just that... They sucked. Bad. Never have I felt such rage at playing a character as I did trying to get my old Blaster a few more levels back in the day (with the possible exception of Mako's Fonts of Power vs. my Mastermind). Yes, the improved Defiance and upped damage scale helped a lot, but they failed to address the core of the problem, in my opinion - Blasters just don't measure up to other ATs.
Let me explain. I'm typically a Scrapper player, it's how I usually roll. When I accidentally stumble into around a corner and bump into a boss, my reaction usually is a long the lines of "Oh... Boss. Cool, bring it." Not so on my Blaster. When I do the same, my reaction is more along the lines of "Crap! A boss! Not good not good not good!" It's around about that time I realise I feel like a wimp, and probably act like one, too. And, my friends, that's not how I enjoy playing this game. That's not why I made all the Blasters I did. I picked Blasters because of the raw power they wield that none can even come close to. Yet, in actual practice, lacking staying power as I do, I never actually get to USE that power before I'm dead.
When I play a Scrapper, I have confidence in my ability. I know I can take care of myself, know that even if things get heated, I can still respond and eventually triumph. With a Blaster, not only is that never the case, I KNOW my limitations all too well. I know that I barely have the power to handle what I'm already facing, and even then to a large extent if I get lucky, and that any added trouble will simply be far, far out of my hands. I don't like that feeling. I don't mind losing, itself. Hell, I've had the time of my life with Soul Transfer. What I mind is knowing I can't win, and knowing that, were I using even the crappiest of my Scrappers, I'd be able to walk all over the enemies without breaking a sweat.
Blasters, to me, progress in a really, really rotten fashion. In the low levels where enemies aren't very dangerous and damage is king, they rule without question. Yet as the levels come and everything changes, my Blasters get weaker and weaker and weaker. In the 30s, it's disappointing. In the 40s, it's depressing. At 50, I just wash my hands from the whole thing and go play something that doesn't die at the drop of a hat.
Blasters play without ANY staying power whatsoever. That's fine when one can pump out enough damage to not need to stand and fight for very long. But game balance dictates I shouldn't be able to do that. It dictates that a boss, powerful and durable as he is, shouldn't be defeatable quickly, making use of my prime strength, but rather has to be beaten down in a stand-and-fight scenario, or even worse - a hit-and-run one that takes BLOODY AGES. Blasters are designed to hit hard and hit fast, so when faced with targets that cannot be hit hard and fast, yet hit back harder and faster than they can... Things aren't pretty.
I know Blasters are playable. I never claimed they weren't, and I know they're a lot better now than they were before. I cannot, however, understand how you can claim they're easy mode, not for the life of me. Maybe you're using a cleverly-designed collection of Inventions Sets, I don't know, but my experience has shown me that, for comparable builds and slotting, Scrappers, Stalkers, Brutes and (obviously) Masterminds can take on more, harder enemies with less effort and less danger. To me, that just isn't good.
What would I do to fix this? Hell if I know. Can't raise their hit points (by much), can't give them powers for free that other ATs have to spend power picks on, can't raise their damage (by much - still want to see Snipes strengthened). I guess the only thing I could see is a resistance (to everything) buff added to each defiance buff as we fight. Not something major, certainly not resistance cap or anything close. But a few percent here, a few percent there, stacked with each other to provide some token amount would help.
I really like Blasters and the power they wield, but I REALLY hate it when I don't get to use it.
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I really like Blasters and the power they wield, but I REALLY hate it when I don't get the most out of them.
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Fixed.
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Blasters just don't measure up to other ATs.
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They measure up quite well against defenders. Then again is there anyone who thinks defenders don't need some buffage ?
You are quite right though about blaster reaction to higher hitpoint critters.
If you look at the hit point distribution
Minion: 430
Lieutenant : 855
Boss: 2570
Blasters deliver good damage as long as they alive, well to kill a boss you have to stay alive six times as long as a minion.
Seeing as blasters in general have little in the way of built in mitigation and as you go up in level it gets harder and harder to land your damage playing a blaster gets harder and harder.
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I really like Blasters and the power they wield, but I REALLY hate it when I don't get the most out of them.
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Fixed.
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Fix it all you will. Any half-competent Blaster will tell you that opening with guns blazing against a Malta Titan or a Chief Mesmerist will send you to an early grave. It takes tactics to approach them and control to incapacitate them and KEEP them down, all of which takes both time and endurance away from doing what you SHOULD be doing - blasting. Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that other damage dealers don't have to go through that.
Where a Scrapper can charge in like an idiot, dive into the middle of a spawn and let rip with his bigger attacks, a Blaster who does that with Full Auto is likely to be dead before his ammo belt runs out. Pretty much all the Blaster horror stories start with "The Blaster pulled with Fireball." Blasters have a LOT of power, but actually USING that power gets them killed. The only way to succeed is to NOT use it all, and that really, really sucks.
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Blasters just don't measure up to other ATs.
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They measure up quite well against defenders. Then again is there anyone who thinks defenders don't need some buffage ?
You are quite right though about blaster reaction to higher hitpoint critters.
If you look at the hit point distribution
Minion: 430
Lieutenant : 855
Boss: 2570
Blasters deliver good damage as long as they alive, well to kill a boss you have to stay alive six times as long as a minion.
Seeing as blasters in general have little in the way of built in mitigation and as you go up in level it gets harder and harder to land your damage playing a blaster gets harder and harder.
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Nobody has anything in the way of "built in" mitigation. Tankers have to run their armors or choose passives when leveling up. Same for scrappers. Controllers and Defenders need to actively use their powers against a boss. If anything, Blasters have the most built-in mitigation as, without using any kind of power selection or activating any kind of power, they can ignore mezzes to a significant degree as part of their inherent.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
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Nobody has anything in the way of "built in" mitigation. Tankers have to run their armors or choose passives when leveling up. Same for scrappers. Controllers and Defenders need to actively use their powers against a boss. If anything, Blasters have the most built-in mitigation as, without using any kind of power selection or activating any kind of power, they can ignore mezzes to a significant degree as part of their inherent.
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One built in refers to primary or secondary powers, as opposed to CJ, acrobatics, and health.
Two if you mean having less than 1/6 of your powers available and still getting a death sentance more often than not when mezzed, yes.
If you've been mezzed, there is certainly aggro directed at you
At that point you have access to your 3 lowest tier powers
That may seem significant to some but it it's certainly not the most built in mitigation- before the teens it's awesome and can save you, but once you hit Tsoo, mezzing CoT and the like, you're done
At that point I'm usually eating a break free anyway
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Fix it all you will. Any half-competent Blaster will tell you that opening with guns blazing against a Malta Titan or a Chief Mesmerist will send you to an early grave. It takes tactics to approach them and control to incapacitate them and KEEP them down, all of which takes both time and endurance away from doing what you SHOULD be doing - blasting. Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that other damage dealers don't have to go through that.
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Samuel_Tow,
I don't know if you're referring to such an approach in the context of soloing or teaming, but I'll give you my take on both.
When you solo, of course you have to rely more on tactics than firepower when dealing with challenging content. I missed the part where that was a bad thing. Where would be the fun in blowing up everything in your path with minimal risk of eating dirt? Beats me.
When you team, that's your chance to "textbook" blast. You are the heavy artillery in that setting, for the most part. Any player with a decent sense of positioning, and some uncommon sense, will blast just fine.
But maybe you are down on the Blaster AT because it's just not Leroy friendly? LOL at that notion.
You underestimate the power of those first three powers you have access to. They're easily sufficient to take out a boss. Immobilizations can keep the boss away, knockbacks can keep him away, there's powers with slows and -recharge. Tanks and scrappers may be able to stand up to a boss better than anyone else, but even defenders and controllers, when mezzed, can't do much. Considering we have more hit points and three damaging attacks, I think it's exaggerated that going up against a mezzer is an instant death sentence. Those three attacks alone can easily make a repeatable attack chain.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
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When you solo, of course you have to rely more on tactics than firepower when dealing with challenging content. I missed the part where that was a bad thing. Where would be the fun in blowing up everything in your path with minimal risk of eating dirt? Beats me.
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This is why blasters are my favorite archetype. On my tanks and scrappers, I run through the same sequence regardless of what the enemy is. It doesn't change too much for controllers and defenders. With blasters though, I get to use tactics, and that makes them much much more interesting and rewarding to play.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
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You underestimate the power of those first three powers you have access to. They're easily sufficient to take out a boss.
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QFT and that's why I love my Defiance.
Which type of boss are you referring to? Carnie? Malta? Council?
Or a Skull?
Or do you mean while teaming and possibly mezzed with no follow up attacks and you just sleep and blast away
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what happens when you put out so much damage that all the aggro is directed to you?
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On a good team, you live anyway.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.