The standard attacks in Electrical Blast do drain endurance, just not that much.
The really weird thing is that the defender version doesn't have better END drain. Most other defender blasts have stronger secondary effects than the blaster versions.
DrMike, funny thing is my first ever toon (by luck) was Elec/Nrg (Issue 4), followed by an Elec/Elec blaster and Kin/Elec defender (Issue 5).
If you don't get into elec blast early, it seems easy to look past it for stuff like fire and ice that take less work to get the secondary effect off (fire = more damage, ice = slows).
The issue is Electrical drains are all or nothing. Either your enemy has enough endurance to fight you or he doesn't. You don't lower mob accuracy, damage, recharge rate, mez with drains, etc.
If the devs made drains stronger, you'd be able to lockdown anything in seconds with little work. As it stands now... your elec/elec needs to animate a 4 second Short Circuit and then use Power Sink to fully drain mobs. The Elec/Nrg has to use SC with Power Boost followed by Ball Lightning to drain an even level mob.
However, once you full drain something (save for AVs, GMs, etc., which have high resistances to debuffs), it's possible to never give them more than a minor attack's worth of endurance due to Short Circuit and Tesla Cage being automatic recovery debuffers.
Power Boost is going to make you see just how effective the drain can be if you slotted your attacks (slotting/PB also boosts the amount -recovery you do), even though you'll never have the space to slot for end drains in stuff like TC, Lightning Bolt, Ball Lightning, etc.
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This "design flaw" has never slowed me down in the slightest, never really knew of the flaw until reading the forums so I think it is more in the state of mind than anything else. Enemy usually dies too quick for it to be a problem I guess.
Oh yeah, I've seen it in action twice on my way to 50 
The thing is, Endurance Drain could be a brilliant tool, but just seems to be held back by the odd layout of the set.
End drains characteristsics are:
- It affects bosses as much as minions (unlike holds, but like knockback)
- It stacks with itself, sometimes requiring multiple applications to take effect (like holds, unlike knockback)
- It can be permanently maintained once established (unlike knockback)
The odd thing is, in a blast set as opposed to a control set, we're given the tool in the form of an AoE? It would be overpowered to let a blast set control multiple bosses, so it gets saddled with the long animation, the incomplete drain, the long recharge and so on. AoE controls in blast sets are often minions only (eg Dark Pit) - we cant do this with End drain because it doesnt distinguish between minion and boss.
This is why it would make much more sense to have the drain loaded into the single target blasts. Say you're soloing and come across a boss:
If you're an Ice Blaster (or Psi), and you attack with damage as your primary aim, the boss gets off 20 to 40% less attacks during the fight due to -Recharge.
If you're an Energy Blaster attacking the boss, he spends some percentage of the fight flopping around on his back or sailing through the air.
If you're an Electrical Blaster and you attack with intent to damage, currently the boss will lose about 20% of his END bar and therefore not affect his behaviour or mitigate damage in the slightest.
If you have the right secondary, and you modify your behaviour to risk a long rooting animation in melee, and you've slotting for it, then you can drain him.
This seems to me to be a lot of ifs.
If the single target blasts drained more END, you could attack with them and have the boss drained by the time his health was say at 40% or 20% or whatever, putting the mitigation on a par with that from other blast sets with defensive secondary effects.
With this kind of damage to drain, a damage-slotted Blaster is going to defeat a lieutenant before they drain them. A Defender would maybe drain the lieutenant first due to their lower damage, especially if they've slotted for drain rather than damage. Minions being attacked by the single target blasts (as opposed to Power Sinked or Boost-Short Circuited) would be defeated before being drained.
The set is workable under some circumstances as it is, but I think could be improved. At the moment, the secondary effect on most of its powers is about as useful as a short lived Mag 1 hold - it's there but never takes any effect.
i use elec/eng and luv it afte a couple of shot into a mob thier drained but this took lots of planing and slotting and works good on most mobs not so good on purples takes at leat 2 tries...i think the atk powers shold drain a lil more because the drain is usless till thier at 0 so its not helping you 1 bit till then...and that limits your second set...i mean you wouldnt pick an elec..dev would you because the lower dmg wouldnt help you in elec cuz u couldnt drain them...so yes sucking a lil more would be nice...
To me, the only downer about end drain with Elec Blast is the long animation time of Short Circuit, but considering that as an Elec/Elec, I can drain whole spawns (including bosses) of their endurance at once, that's a minimal problem for me (unless I'm fighting large groups of mobs with high defense... in which case its a pain to be rooted for ~3 seconds while SC fires off.
On the upside, SC also does damage, and used with Static Discharge and Ball Lightning, makes for part of a decent opening AoE chain.
Loading End Drain into Elec's attacks isn't a bad idea, per se. they do that now, but most of us don't slot the attacks for Endurance Drain. If we did, we would most likely see a decent amount of drain happen with every hit, but suffer the consequences of dealing less damage (and after all, we're Blasters! 
). However, a slight bump up in the amount of drain to the ST attacks (or maybe even just a mild -Recovery debuff tacked on to them) wouldn't be game-breaking, IMO.
well i do slot mine for end drain its what this AT is about and mabey a lil -reg is what it needs..or get a team of them together...omg that would be fun
I teamed with one other elec/elec on decent sized teams in the past... never more than that though. Having two on the same team made most fight ridiculously easy.
yes it would be easy when u build a toon that can do such great things on its own 2 of them makes it like hot lightsaber thru butter... like 2 thug/dark mm's on the same team either can fall asleep afk and stillown the lvl i know this cuz my freind was playing wow and afk followed me and i whould call him once every 10mins incase he needed to resummon...so to elec on a team would be easy that y i say they need to make a lvl 6 diffucultty for us vets...
It has been said time and time again, and people still disagree. To some, Electric Blast needs to be reworked, whether that means more end drain spread out amongst the rest of the powers, upping Voltaic Cell's damage output, etc. To others, Electric Blast is fine as-is, and people just need to realize that it plays differently than other powersets.
Personally, I have a foot in both parties. I enjoy playing my Elec^3 blaster now, but that's only because I have gotten past my "this-isn't-what-I-was-expecting-at-all" stage. I can't see them replacing a power in an existing powerset, so there are a couple things that could tweak the set just enough.
1. Change around the End Drain. From what I can see, NPC Enemy endurance doesn't work the same as ours, and they can use any attack provided that they have the slightest sliver of a blue bar. To modify this, perhaps make the end drain a bit stronger in some of the other powers.
--OR--
2. Up the damage output. I think this could mostly be done by making some changes to Voltaic Sentinel (although upping the numbers of Short Circuit could work as well). If Voltaic Sentinel put out more damage with each attack, OR had more than just one attack, OR had a quicker attack rate, OR could be summoned in duplicates, etc. it might be viewed as a more viable power. Note: I am not bashing VS, because I love the damage boost it gives me. But when it is slotted the same as Charged Bolts but isn't putting out the same numbers with each attack, and then has to be re-summoned every minute, it can get very tiring. A few tweaks is all it needs.
There's my 2 cents.
@Winter. Because I'm Winter. Period.
I am a blaster first, and an alt-oholic second.
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It has been said time and time again, and people still disagree. To some, Electric Blast needs to be reworked, whether that means more end drain spread out amongst the rest of the powers, upping Voltaic Cell's damage output, etc. To others, Electric Blast is fine as-is, and people just need to realize that it plays differently than other powersets.
Personally, I have a foot in both parties. I enjoy playing my Elec^3 blaster now, but that's only because I have gotten past my "this-isn't-what-I-was-expecting-at-all" stage. I can't see them replacing a power in an existing powerset, so there are a couple things that could tweak the set just enough.
1. Change around the End Drain. From what I can see, NPC Enemy endurance doesn't work the same as ours, and they can use any attack provided that they have the slightest sliver of a blue bar. To modify this, perhaps make the end drain a bit stronger in some of the other powers.
--OR--
2. Up the damage output. I think this could mostly be done by making some changes to Voltaic Sentinel (although upping the numbers of Short Circuit could work as well). If Voltaic Sentinel put out more damage with each attack, OR had more than just one attack, OR had a quicker attack rate, OR could be summoned in duplicates, etc. it might be viewed as a more viable power. Note: I am not bashing VS, because I love the damage boost it gives me. But when it is slotted the same as Charged Bolts but isn't putting out the same numbers with each attack, and then has to be re-summoned every minute, it can get very tiring. A few tweaks is all it needs.
There's my 2 cents.
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I'm actually not adverse to adding appreciable damage to Tesla Cage... although the -Recovery debuff on top of the Mag 3 Hold makes it plenty fine for me. It would end up making for a more appreciable ST attack chain than CB/LB/repeat (although most Blasters who play elec/ have attacks from their secondary to cycle in).
Well two things could improve Short Circuit without changing it with extra work for Castle/Back Alley Brawler:
1. The drain triggers when the animation starts.
2. Mobs can't aggro until the drain hits.
Right now, you can be attacked the moment you start to fire it.
I'd love to see Short Circuit get Irradiate's animation time. I think the reason it didn't before is due to the {IWinButton] factor. Pre-Enhancement Diversity you could one-shot drain mobs with SC off just 5 ++'d out End Mod SOs.
Even after ED you could do it with pre-Power Boost nerfed 120 percent boost. After both changes.... you have to earn it a bit more, following up with Ball Lightning and even then you're just sapping even levels (this is quite useful on the ITF and LGTF).
I can dream for a faster firing SC at least...
That... and perma Voltaic Sentinels... and Tesla Cage getting a flares-level damage boost... and... and...
sighs. I'm greedy.
Thank you, City of Heroes, for giving me a superhero social network combined with amazingly smooth game play. Petitions signed with realistic expectations.
Thats a really good point, Rejolt.
Before ED (which was before my time) Short Circuit could be six-slotted for END drain and drain a whole group in one go. Its high base accuracy also suggests this was the intention - you didnt need to waste a slot on an accuracy enhancer.
The reason I suspect this hasn't been fixed post-ED (say by upping its base drain to 50%) is that a boss-level AoE control is a bit too much for a blast set.
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Well two things could improve Short Circuit without changing it with extra work for Castle/Back Alley Brawler:
1. The drain triggers when the animation starts.
2. Mobs can't aggro until the drain hits.
Right now, you can be attacked the moment you start to fire it.
I'd love to see Short Circuit get Irradiate's animation time. I think the reason it didn't before is due to the {IWinButton] factor. Pre-Enhancement Diversity you could one-shot drain mobs with SC off just 5 ++'d out End Mod SOs.
Even after ED you could do it with pre-Power Boost nerfed 120 percent boost. After both changes.... you have to earn it a bit more, following up with Ball Lightning and even then you're just sapping even levels (this is quite useful on the ITF and LGTF).
I can dream for a faster firing SC at least...
That... and perma Voltaic Sentinels... and Tesla Cage getting a flares-level damage boost... and... and...
sighs. I'm greedy.
[/ QUOTE ]
Ive PM Back Alley Brawler about this a few times.. giving Short Circuit the same animation as Irradiate... no response..
The hard things I can do--- The impossible just take a little bit longer.
If numbers are so much more important than a teammate who is fun to play with, forget about the game altogether and go play with a calculator instead. -Claws and Effect-
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Well two things could improve Short Circuit without changing it with extra work for Castle/Back Alley Brawler:
1. The drain triggers when the animation starts.
2. Mobs can't aggro until the drain hits.
Right now, you can be attacked the moment you start to fire it.
I'd love to see Short Circuit get Irradiate's animation time. I think the reason it didn't before is due to the {IWinButton] factor. Pre-Enhancement Diversity you could one-shot drain mobs with SC off just 5 ++'d out End Mod SOs.
Even after ED you could do it with pre-Power Boost nerfed 120 percent boost. After both changes.... you have to earn it a bit more, following up with Ball Lightning and even then you're just sapping even levels (this is quite useful on the ITF and LGTF).
I can dream for a faster firing SC at least...
That... and perma Voltaic Sentinels... and Tesla Cage getting a flares-level damage boost... and... and...
sighs. I'm greedy.
[/ QUOTE ]
Ive PM Back Alley Brawler about this a few times.. giving Short Circuit the same animation as Irradiate... no response..
The hard things I can do--- The impossible just take a little bit longer.
If numbers are so much more important than a teammate who is fun to play with, forget about the game altogether and go play with a calculator instead. -Claws and Effect-
I think all they should do is reduce the animation time of short circuit and allow us to have multiple voltaic sentinels with enough recharge, this would allow elec blast to have some decent dps but still mediocre burst to balance the control powers in the set.
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I think all they should do is reduce the animation time of short circuit and allow us to have multiple voltaic sentinels with enough recharge, this would allow elec blast to have some decent dps but still mediocre burst to balance the control powers in the set.
[/ QUOTE ]
You can forget about multiple pets.. Plus I dont want multiple items that fire all over the place but do not draw aggro to themselves, instead I get all the aggro they create..
The hard things I can do--- The impossible just take a little bit longer.
If numbers are so much more important than a teammate who is fun to play with, forget about the game altogether and go play with a calculator instead. -Claws and Effect-
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...and that limits your second set...i mean you wouldnt pick an elec..dev would you because the lower dmg wouldnt help you in elec cuz u couldnt drain them...so yes sucking a lil more would be nice...
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You say you wouldn't pick /elec with elec/. That seems a bit odd to me. They work very very well together, especially with power sink combining with short circuit to completely drain groups of end. Also the melee attacks are very hard hitting, and do end drain as well.
i dont think elec needs more dmg thats not the point of the power its suppose to drain...i just IO my lvl 47 and it nice but it seems the red bar goes b4 the blue bar in fast teams and the fact that a criter can lite of a t7-9 atk on u with a sliver of blue is broken when the mob is still alive with no blue i do notice the partys survilal rate goes up but the fact is that end drain is elec bread and butter and it is just so hard to pull off before the mob is dead and then what all that end u drained and they stilll got to atk the whole time. and i would like SC time to be shorter but i can deal with it as is atm.
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slotting/PB also boosts the amount -recovery you do
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Since when? Since when does PB even ACCEPT anything other than recharge reductions and possibly end redux?
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Well two things could improve Short Circuit without changing it with extra work for Castle/Back Alley Brawler:
1. The drain triggers when the animation starts.
2. Mobs can't aggro until the drain hits.
Right now, you can be attacked the moment you start to fire it.
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I've already suggested the fix for this, oh for years now, which makes me sad. But giving the "rain" animation to short circuit which is used by powers like rain of fire and freezing rain, would do both things. It would start the damage/drain at the beginning of the animation eliminating a lot of what you just said.
It would also take its cast time down from 3 seconds to 2.03 seconds, which helps the power overall as well but isnt an "omg overpowered" change either, with the main intent that that animation already implies that the attack hits at the beginning of its animation, and it also actually makes SENSE as an animation for short circuit.
V.S., still has its issues. The main thing IMO is that aside from it being "overlooked" when they bumped up all the blaster primary powers base damage up by 12.5% in issue 8 i think?, is that it needs improved.
Suggestions are either to increase its attack rate, give it lightning bolt as well, or give it tesla cage, or give it more significant end drain and -recovery.
As to the whole ENTIRE notion of the usefulness of end drain, and how few builds can actually make ANYTHING of it, i also for years have been suggesting a fix for it, that would make ALL end drains useful.
Its actually quite painstakingly simple in how it would work, and would make sense a lot. Going even off the base principle thought of "mobs with no end deal no damage" etc.
So the fix i suggested many many times over, was to have the damage NPC so dealt on a % basis tied to their current endurance amount.
For example:
100% end, 100% damage
75% end, 90% damage
50% end, 75% damage
25% end, 50% damage
etc.
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Frankly, I think there needs to be a change to the way draining affects enemy NPCs so it's less binary. One thought I had was that enemy attacks should have a required level of end.
To clarify, say an enemy has Knockout Blow. Let's add a requirement to it that says the enemy needs to have 75% of its end available to use KO Blow. So if you drain its end down below 75% it can't use KO Blow.
Branching Paragon Police Department Epic Archetype, please!
I'd settle for mobs actually needing enough endurance to pay for the attack. Right now it seems like mobs can use any attack, no matter how high the endurance cost, if they have even one point of endurance. Which means the only way to stop huge attacks like KO Blow is to reduce them to zero and also zero out their recovery.
At least if they had to pay full end for attacking they'd have to do what we do when mostly drained but still recovering: use small attacks as we get endurance, or wait several seconds to get enough back for a big one.
Cascade, level 50 Blaster (NRG/NRG since before it was cool)
Mechmeister, level 50 Bots / Traps MM
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Um, if they are at 75% endurance, things like Knockout Blow will not be as damaging to begin with in my change...
There is no way for them to legitimately change the way an npc uses an attack based on how much end they have if they "technically" have enough end to use it.
The mechanics to do such a change would be worse than their "presumed (aka lied)" reason for not letting recharge affect pets attack powers.
With my change it fixes pretty much every issue of end drain, while making complete sense too. Think about it, if you are tired, are you going to be throwing a punch as hard as you could if you were just starting a figtht? No.
Plasmic's Guide to Sonic/Mental
Plasmic's Guide to Regeneration
Plasmic Fire - 50 Fire/Rad Victory Server
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Um, if they are at 75% endurance, things like Knockout Blow will not be as damaging to begin with in my change...
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90% effectiveness vs Not getting hit by it at all...hmn
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There is no way for them to legitimately change the way an npc uses an attack based on how much end they have if they "technically" have enough end to use it.
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Flag it so that it "greys" below 75% end. for nukes I think you cannot use them below 50%
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The mechanics to do such a change would be worse than their "presumed (aka lied)" reason for not letting recharge affect pets attack powers.
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It is a lie, the purple pet set still works on sparky
Anywho, you have a point with SOME mobs:
Some mobs naturally wear down their end with attacks, so they would be nuetered in that they weaken themselves
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With my change it fixes pretty much every issue of end drain, while making complete sense too. Think about it, if you are tired, are you going to be throwing a punch as hard as you could if you were just starting a figtht? No.
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not every aspect, seeing as without -rec, they just get strong again
Electrical Blast's secondary effect of Endurance Drain is pretty much concentrated in a single power - Short Circuit. Even stranger, its a PBAoE power with a long animation.
Other sets, such as Ice Blast, for comparison, tend to have their secondary effects evenly spread over most of the powers.
Designing Electrical Blast from scratch, it would make more sense to me for all the standard attacks to do a bit of END drain so that when soloing a hard target like a boss, they got their End drained at say 1/4 health or 1/2 health if slotted for End Drain.
Ice Blast applies a steady -Recharge just by attacking. Energy Blast knocks the target around a bit just by attacking. Why doesn't Electrical Blast drain significant End just by attacking?
I know this is the way the set is, I've played Electrical Blast to 50 twice now (Elec/Elec Blaster and Kin/Elec Defender, so Ive been able to use End Drain quite well) and I'm going back for thirds with another Blaster, this time Elec/Energy, the third functional sapper build.
Im just curious if there's ever been any dev word on this design decision, or if any other players have any insights into it.