So I'm going into Blasting seriously for the first time.

Now I've been playing CoX for kind of a while now, and for the longest time I've intended to give Blasters a fair shot. I've finally decided to get around to making one pretty much now, hoping to round out my characters a bit.

Problem being I don't know a whole lot about Blasters, just a few basics. They do incredible damage, they make badguys go away even faster than my Scrappers or Masterminds, and they tend to be awesome to watch, especially with Power Customization. I've fiddled with a few that never made it out of the single digit levels, and... That's pretty much it

So really I guess I'm kinda looking for quick Blaster tips in general as well as powerset suggestions for someone setting foot in the world of Making Things Die Mega Fast for the first time, though I'm already kinda eying Fire/Energy or Archery/Energy, they both seem pretty powerful and fun, but Fire/Energy looks like it'd be flashier. And flashy is good, in fact powersets will win bonus points with me for being exceedingly flashy with pretty colors and shiny explosions. (Though I'll probably make an Archery Blaster anyhow at some point as the powerset just looks like fun.)

So yes... thanks in advance for any and all advice!

Personally, I find the Fire set one of the blandest (visually) in the entire game. Ice isn't much better.

Both weapon sets are kinda cool to look at, although I honestly liked Archery more before the animation changes (when no one was playing it). It made the set far more playable, but it now lacks 'power'. Snapshot, in particular, looks like a little kid pulling the bow.

I love the look of energy, because you can see the strain in the toon as he tries to compensate for that enormous amount of energy coming out. Whoever made that animation deserves a gold star.

Keep eyeing that Fire/Energy if you want the full blaster experience. Good AoE, good Single-target, good at range and in melee, big explosions, capable of Making Things Die Mega Fast or of drawing massive aggro and faceplanting you in seconds...ah, fun times.

The first thing you need to know about Blasters is: Kill them before they kill you. Take Build Up and Aim as soon as they become available, get Fire Ball and Fire Breath, and prepare to melt giant mobs of enemies in seconds. The low levels should go by pretty fast. Once you get up into the higher levels and settle into your Blaster playstyle you can start figuring out what you want to do with IO sets and stuff.

If you've been playing tankers or scrappers you've relied on passive mitigation (your shields) to avoid dying. With blasters you need active mitigation of some sort. You can rarely kill them fast enough by only dealing damage.

Fire/Energy is good for damage, but the mitigation is a little thin. In the secondary you have one KB attack you have to take, a couple of melee attacks that have a chance to stun, a melee stun, and a big damage/stun melee attack. If you go this route you need to have pretty quick reflexes and know the ins and outs of how stuns work if you want to solo bosses safely. Rain of Fire is the only mitigation in the primary, and it's not the best. I recommend getting Aid Self so you don't have to wait between mobs (and you can often use it during combat).

Sonic/Energy is good for soloing; it has a lot of mitigation: a ranged single-target stun, an area sleep, a KB cone attack, as well as single-target attacks that reduce the target's damage resistance, which means you and everyone else on your team do more damage once you've hit them. This is very nice for sleeping large groups, and then taking them out one at a time with your other attacks. You can do this in almost complete safety solo. The sleep won't work on most bosses, but it's good for minions and LTs. If you take two of the three stuns available you can stun most bosses in two hits.

Energy/Energy's mitigation is all in the form of knockback. I like it, but a lot of melee characters object to it; carefully used you can avoid messing things up for them.

Ice/* has good mitigation: the holds and slows inherent to the attacks can really slow the villains. If you take two of the three available holds you can hold bosses in two shots, often before they have any chance to react.

Psy/Mental has decent mitigation, but it's a pain against things like robots and other high-level mobs that have psi resistance.

I've played a lot of blasters, and I liked Fire/Energy, Ice/Ice, Sonic/Energy, and Electrical/Electrical. Fire/Fire is kind of painful because there's very little mitigation. I go more for a blastroller rather than a blapper -- you don't need as quick reaction time and you're less likely to faceplant.

My favorite toon to date is Pulsar Knight (Guardian server). He's 34th now. I went Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation. Gives you good ranged and melee ability. Granted, like most blasters... you sacrifice defense in favor of offense.

Flight gives blasters a good edge. Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation is great for soloing, but can sometimes be frustrating in groups/task forces.

All in all though, I find it a solid combination.

I'd have to agree with those previous to me. Fire/energy or Rad/Energy I would take for increased damage output. Ice/Ice has great mitigation, along with Elec/Elec if ya go with the endo mod side of it. For style AR and Archery is nice both have decent damage output and AR is a lunatic with the AoE.

You also want to nail down what play style you're gonna be messin with. Are you going to be blapping, full ranged, arial or speed jousting?

With Nrg as it has been said I can not help but repeat it. It is my favorite set of all of the blasters powers but when teaming you almost need to have hover, or melee char's will be rather upset. When teaming with other AOE builds (such as Archery) stick with single power strikes just to be safe unless you can get the baddies backed into a corner or wall.

In closing AIM+BU+Rep Bomb+Exp Blast+NRG Torrent = Pure Carnage

Hmm, a possible slight change of plans assuming it'll work out ok, after messing around a bunch with the colors on Fire/Fire I think I might be more inclined to give that a try. Fire Sword Circle looks AWESOME. Though Bone Smasher and Total Focus look great too, so it's kind of tough to decide...

I suppose we can't color epic power pools yet? Otherwise a Fire/Fire/Fire might be the way I wanna go on this guy unless there's some reason this just wouldn't work. I love the things that can be done with Fire color-wise.

I've recently been on a blaster kick myself, even though I usually play tanks. I have two 50 blasters, a AR.Dev that I rarely play anymore and a Nrg.Nrg that I just got souped up with IO sets and customized blasts and he is SO MUCH FUN to play. I also have a 32 Ice.Ice blaster, but I only play him with his partner, another Ice.Ice to stack the slows. I have a few lower ones, a 23 Fire.Ice among them.

I also have a Mental.Mind blaster at 42, but I haven't played him once. I've been PLing him forever, because I don't really enjoy playing low-level blasters, but at high levels, they can be a lot of fun.

Blasters can be maddening to level up because they die so easily. When you go through a rough patch in their development, it can be murder, slow painful agonizing murder. You wear out a path between your mission and the hospital. When a wakie drops to you, you think "Cool, I'm going to need that." But, once they hit their stride, it's very fun. Things die very quickly. You attack AVs and you can see their health go down markedly after you pop a red or two, and hit Aim>BuildUp>Snipe. When you get on teams with tanks that can effectively hold the agro and you can blast with abandon, that is perhaps the most uber any toon feels at any time in the game. It is, quite literally, a blast. Enjoy.

I don't mind Fire/Whatever, but if you want a more in-depth Blaster experience...one with more mitigation options and utility (And admittedly a little less 'Oh, dear Lord, the damage!') I'd suggest trying Ice/Something or Elec/Energy or Elec/Elec. Elec has nice sapping options, and a single target hold, as well as my favorite Nuke and Ice has the holds, the slows and some decent damage.

Fire is probably of more use on a well-rounded team with its pure AoE mayhem, but I do like the tools the other sets have available to them. It's a more interesting play experience for me, but mileage may vary.

Re: Flame Mastery and S/L softcap

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doctor_Kumquat Pretty much agree with you on the other main points, but was wondering where you got this from.

Frozen Armour, from the Cold Mastery epic, is usually seen as the way to go for the S/L softcap (a base 10% S/L, IIRC). All of the other epics offer Resistance options, so there's very little chance that your S/L defense is to reach 45% unless your entire build is focused on that goal.

With CJ, Weave, Hover and Maneuvers all running 3-slotted for Def, you're looking at less than 15% Def total.

Frozen Armour has a base of 10% S/L Def that can easily be enhanced to 16%.

From the better builds I've seen, people either build their Blasters to fly and look for the Ranged softcap (with AoE to support), or take the blapper route with Cold Mastery and the S/L softcap. Or they just forget about the softcap and focus upon some other equally-valid goal.

TLDR; Trying to achieve the S/L softcap without Frozen Armour's massive S/L boost is hard without gimping yourself.

Start at post 10.

I think I figured out what I left out of the guide. The lab work.

Usually I recommend this for fire/* blasters. (Fire/Ice, Fire/Mental, Fire/Elec and Fire/En are four of my favorite things in the game.)

This is a good thing to do every 10 levels or so. Let's say you are level 17 and doing this in Boomtown.

1. Go to a contact and fill your tray with Lucks. I'll explain later.
2. Go to the lab. Somewhere in Boomtown, say, where there's a nice arrangement of Lost sitting around a campfire.
3. Put on your protective gear. They always say this in lab courses. There's a reason. Take three Lucks, in this case.
4. Experiment. Pick a badguy in the middle of an even-con group. Hit Build Up, Aim, Fire Breath, Fireball.
5. Take data: did you get the whole group with the fire breath? Did everyone die? Who's left alive? Did people scatter when the breath hit, so you missed some of them with fireball?
6. Clean up your lab area (blaze, fire bolts, etc. on lieutenants and survivors.)

Repeat steps 3-6, going back for more lucks as needed, on even-cons, on +1s, on +2s, using "no self buff", Build Up alone, Aim alone, and both together. Pretty soon you should be able to look at an entire group of badguys and know where to stand and what to use to turn them into two half-dead lieutenants and a bunch of XP. Soon you can try it in a non-lab environment, ie "without the protective gear."

Do this again around level 22 when you're SO'd out. Again around level 32, cause badguys got tougher. Again whenever you feel like a little target practice.

Remember the protective gear!

Two somewhat contradictory points I'd like to add:

Lincoln's advice to an unsuccessful general: "In the next battle, put in all your men." As Fulmens' guide (and others) have emphasized, when soloing, and sometimes when teamed, you will be best protected by going all-out and crushing your enemies rather than fooling around while they shoot you. You're the offensive guy, right? Offend everyone. Something someone once said about another game (Total Annihilation, if you're curious) applies to Blasters: "I play this game for one thing: large ordnance downrange."

Having a lot of your powers recharging at the same time might seem like you're temporarily weak, but you're not only getting some efficiency out of it (they're all recharging at the same time, you're getting a lot of benefit every second), you can also use the time to scroll through your reward text and see if anything good dropped.

Working with debuffers: It's a little different working with debuffers (some Defender and Controller builds, some Corruptor and Mastermind builds, and occasional special powers in other ATs). Debuffers will be able to make the enemy less dangerous to you -- taking the pressure off you to unload everything at once to stay alive -- and/or they will be able to soften up targets for you, so you will hit more often and do more damage. When working with debuffers, it really pays to hold off for a few seconds and let them "prepare the battlefield" before using your AoEs. Learn what their debuffs do, and what they look like. How? Ask a few questions, debuffers will be so surprised to find someone is interested in what they do that they will never be offended! Then wait until you see the Freezing Rain fall, or the Rad toggles percolate, or the Tar Patch stain the floor, and THEN unload your big hitters and watch much more destruction take place.

Replying directly to the OP, I love blasters. They're by far my favorite. I've had ones that are control heavy, ones that are single-target heavy, ones that are AoE fiends, and so on, and I can say that one of the most fun and relatively easy to play (not to mention high damage even at low levels) is my Arch/NRG. I know you mentioned you're interested in Archery, so you might want to check out this thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=190442

It's got a lot of really good advice & sample builds for an AoE based Arch/NRG blaster.

E: Fire, of course, is awesome, too, especially now that you can change the colors. One of my friends has a Fire blaster with bright green flames and he looks like a witch doctor. Pretty BA.

Ok I think by this point I'm fairly set on a Fire/Fire Blaster, messing around with designs and looking at Mids. I think the sheer number of AOE's, while still having what appears to be pretty damn good single target damage is what sold me on it.

Would I be right in assuming all these AOE's combined can put out some incredible carnage? And am I right in assuming the slow effect from Hot Feet combined with the slow effect from RoF might be enough to keep enemies from running away as I slam them with brutal AOE after brutal AOE? Though I'm drawn to the Hover/Flier style of fighting, I can't deny that I also love being right in the thick of it all, especially knowing I'm capable of dealing that much damage.

Fire/Fire can definitely do some brutal damage. One of my SG leaders regularly runs a Fire/Fire that destroys things pretty much instantly. He's slotted for +regen (to survive aggro from AoEs), +recov (b/c fire is end heavy), & +recharge (to use the big powers as much as possible.)

Here's a good guide that has individual powers breakdowns: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=125895

I'll add my 2 inf here. I have a lvl 29 Arch/Mental that is my favorite toon to date. He has lvl'd from 1 - 29 in less than about 10 hrs total game time.
The Mental Attack, while they do cause redraw, are nice cuz its an exotic damage type, and blends well with the cone. the redraw isnt a big deal due to the fast activation of Arch. I cant wait for lvl 32 and RoA. WOOT. I would mention that I did die quite a bit on teams and solo (probably due to my love of AoE) so I had to get tough and weave asap (also have CJ and Stealth ). Overral an amazing combo..plus who doesnt love having a laser site on their compound bow? Cheers!