Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?

There's no 'points buy' system such as the one you describe in Champions Online. You never have to choose between gaining a new power or upgrading an old one. CO has a set level progression: at certain levels, you gain access to new powers; at other levels, you gain advantage points, or talent points, or another build slot. See here for more detail:

Level Progression

Maybe you meant the PnP game?

I actually meant Diablo 2 and its spawn. I don't actually know enough about Champions Online to talk about it. I just know that I can take powers, I can take flat power upgrades (as in, Fireball II, though there may be a couple of versions to take) and I can take two kinds of stat boosts, for a grand total of four separate things. But being that I can't stand the game for more than about 10-15 levels (and I've tried several times), I just don't know enough about the system.

I do know enough about Diablo 2, though, which basically gives you a pool of points that you can either take powers with or retake powers with, as it were. Certain Diablo clones start increasing power take cost as you move on, of which Dragonica is a good example, and I believe Dungeon Siege 2 does the same. That sort of thing is both very easy to gimp yourself in for simply taking too many powers and upgrading too few to too low a level. It also draws the line of what a "good" character is to where the character has a very limited selection of powers which are very strong. WoW does go some way towards mitigating this by capping skills at a relatively low level. 1-5 if I've understood right, with most capped at around 3, so it's both easier to "max out" your powers AND easier to gave more varied skills. Diablo 2, by comparison, caps skills at level 20 and if I'm not mistaken, caps character levels in general at 99. So, not a lot of choice there.

City of Heroes, by comparison, has power number and power improvement segregated very sharply. You WILL take 24 powers and 67 slots and like it, mister! And I don't want to hear about trading powers for slots and slots for powers, you hear me! I'm your mother and you will listen to me, damn it!

Err...

Basically, what I want to say is that City of Heroes enforces a diversity of powers by basically forcing you to take 24 different powers, and it also ensures that everyone gets equal enhancement potential. It would be better for min-maxing if that selection were a little more free, but the net result best efficiency would come from builds that are a lot less fun than even the ones we have now. Granted, to a large extent the limited number of slots you have does dictate s little less variety than just power picks on their own. To 6-slot everything would require adding five slots to all 24 powers, which adds up to 120 slots, almost twice what we actually get. And that's not looking at Brawl, Sprint, Rest or any of the Kheldian inherents, INCLUDING the powers that come with their forms. So something has to give somewhere, which is why we more or less WANT to pick certain powers that can't use, don't need or can do with fewer slots, so that we have more slots to six-slot other things. As such, we can't really pick 24 powers of whatever we please, since slotting them all will run us dry half-way through, but to a large extent, that's still a better choice than taking NOTHING, instead.

I gotta' say it again, the sales pitch that I didn't have to take powers over and over again and that they just levelled up (scaled, as it turns out) with me is singlehandedly what got me to buy the game way back when. I HATE points buy systems just that much.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

As far as I can see, more rigidly defined roles will only have a positive effect on performance. This doesn't have to come about through outright perfomance buffs so much as via eliminating aberrant outlier builds. Also, as Arcana points out, having a clear idea of what an AT is supposed to do makes it much easier to look at it and tell if it is or is not doing that. Right now, Blasters have a very nebulous definition of "just deals damage, kind of," which is very hard to point to and argue whether current performance is enough. In fact, I see Blaster design designation as somewhat akin to defining a character whose ability is to jump, but not really defining what body part he's intended to land on. Obviously, people who constantly land on their heads and die will cry foul, but when you look at it and notice that plenty of people land on their feet, and plenty also land on their hands and do fancy stunts, you can't really claim the AT suffers from wonky design.

Blasters are, basically, designed to dish out damage, but not a lot of care that I can see has been taken to account for what this damage actually does or, indeed, if they can survive dishing it out. Back in the day, they were designed as a team-mostly AT, so this kind of solo performance was strictly in the "don't know, don't care" category of design, where it's left up to the players to sort it out as that's not an intended and supported playstyle. These days, it ought to be, and fixes were made to somewhat help with that, but they still have one of the most abstract designs in the game, short of perhaps Masterminds. But where Masterminds generally don't have people complaining that this sucks or that's impossible, Blasters' tendency to spontaneously die under seemingly mundane circumstances HAVE seen more than a few complaints.

Now, such standardization will clean up the underperforming outliers, but it will no doubt burn the overpoerforming outliers, as well. I'm sure that if that particular hammer drops, Fire/Fire will be the first to scream, as they have the potential to... Frankly, break the game. Either that, or die quickly and horribly. It all depends on whether you're doing it right or doing it wrong. That sort of thing never goes over well with the player base, but Arcana has a point. The large-scale kill speed of Fire Blast, and especially Fire/Fire and Fire/Mental, can reach ludicrous levels, especially on teams, but at the same time, this is the only thing keeping them alive. It's a precarious balance that isn't solvable by just tweaking numbers here and there, as the system is inherently wobbly.

Finally, standardization will likely make characters play a lot more alike, and whether that is a good thing is a subject of debate. I, personally, happen to believe that the massive differences between Blaster types are best left as differences between the different ATs, rather than between powerset combos within the same AT. That doesn't mean they should play the SAME, but they ought to play similarly enough to where you can all hold them to the same rules. This is currently not even remotely the case.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

And I would argue that last paragraph is why many folks PREFER the COH ATs to the Classes of a game like WoW.

I LIKE that different types of blasters play differently. That's actually the one thing I WOULDN'T change. At all.

EDIT: To clarify, I like that if I pick fire blast as my primary, it's going to be a different experience and require a slightly different playstyle than if I picked Sonic blast or Ice blast.

That to ME (and I would bet MANY others) is a STRENGTH of COH.

One other thing that CoH has is that each of those different paths is a valid choice.

Having played games like WoW, Ragnarok Online, and Guild Wars, I know that there are certain classes that people just don't want at all. Past that, even if you're the right class, you have to be the right BUILD too. In all those games, if you want to team regularly, there's only so many ways you can build your character. You don't have the freedom to explore and try out powers and see what you like, because for people to take you seriously you have to be built in a certain way, and have certain powers.

In CoH, if I'm looking for a damage dealer I can take a wide variety of ATs. Blaster, Scrapper, Brute, Dominator, Stalker, VEAT, even Corruptors, Masterminds, and Khelds. What's more, if I do want a Blaster, it doesn't matter if the Blaster is Fire, Ice, Sonic, or Radiation. Each one contributes in its own way. A team can thrive with a Thermal on the team, or not have one at all. A team can have a powerful Tanker in the lead, or not even have a Tanker on the team. Pretty much every character and every build is a valid choice.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

THIS!



Add in our excellent IO system with procs, purples, and specialty IOs like the LOTG Recharge IO and Numina's rec/regen; and there is even more exploration of possible.

As you said, pretty much every character and every build is a valid choice.

The best way to represent my opinion on this is to say that some design philosophies want very wide "borders" between classes to distinguish them, and I don't.

Suppose that we decide blasters should be something, and scrappers should be something else. Visually, we could design the archetypes like this:

|<--- Blasters --->|<--- no mans land --->|<--- Scrappers --->|

In other words, even the most blastery scrapper was very far away from the most scrappery blaster: the two classes don't come anywhere near each other. This makes all scrappers, as a class, very distinct from all blasters, as a class. All Blasters play more like each other than they do like any scrapper.

I'm more of a:

|<--- Blasters --->|<--->|<--- Scrappers --->|

I prefer enough safety margin buffer to make sure an accident doesn't make a scrapper into a blaster, but I *don't* mind that there might be Blasters that play more like some Scrappers than some Blasters. The most scrappery Blaster at the far right edge of their allowed behavior is closer in style and performance to the most blastery Scrapper at the far left edge of their allowed behavior than it is the most blastery Blaster at the far left edge of their performance, and that's fine with me.

I absolutely don't want this:

|<- buffer ->|<- B ->|<- buffer ->|<- buffer ->|<- S ->|<- buffer ->|

In other words, placing all blasters and all scrappers very close to dead center of their defined range, with lots of buffer all around them making them as far away from all other classes as possible. This means most, possibly nearly all conceptual options are actually disallowed.

The problem with CO, by the way, is that in my opinion their system is essentially this:

|<------ Scrappers ------>|
|-|<-------------------- Blasters -------------------->|

Good post!

And pretty accurate about CO.

Also LOL at the tags for this thread!

I think you have "fans".

I actually don't have a problem with Blaster primaries. I WOULD hold Assault Rifle to task for its non-existent single-target damage, but that's a specific, separate qualm I have with the powerset, itself. It's Blaster SECONDARIES that bug me to hell and back, largely because it seems like each different secondary belongs to a different AT. As a matter of fact, I dare say picking the same secondary and tabbing through all the primaries will produce vastly more similar Blasters than picking one primary and tabbing through the secondaries. Outside of Assault Rifle (and possible Electrical Blast), the Blaster primaries are already pretty much to code. Powers are jumbled and some things are replaced, but by and large the primaries are "similar enough.

Secondaries, though... These are all over the place, and I don't know about Castle (and possibly you), but I'll bet my left butt cheek that pretty much no-one, myself included, has any clear idea what they're supposed to do. They say "support," and then you see things like Fire Manipulation and Electrical Manipulation. OK, so Melee then. Except now you have things like Ice Manipulation and Devices, which are... Support? Kind of. What's Energy Manipulation, then? Melee? Support? Something else altogether?

When I look at Assault secondaries, I have a pretty clear idea what they're supposed to do, even though they're unique to Dominators. They're pure attack powersets mixing together ranged and melee attacks. Their purpose is to kill stuff dead. That's about as complicated as their purpose is. Mastery powersets, though? Some kill stuff, some buff you, some control and some do a little bit of everything. It's like if an AT could pick Fire Blast, Ice Control or Dark Miasma as a primary. What is that AT supposed to do?

You dislike AoE and what it does to Blaster balance, but if I had to lay blame anywhere, it would be on the secondary. A decent secondary can save a Blaster's hide. That's why I don't feel my Electric/Electric Blaster doesn't lack damage - his primary is has really low damage, but his secondary compensates. That's also why I feel my AR/Dev Blaster lacks damage, even though his primary does sizeably more than Electrical Blast.

I don't actually mind classes overlapping in the slightest. Scrappers and Brutes overlap almost completely in my eyes, and Stalkers overlap with both by a lot, but that doesn't bug me. When I say I want an AT to be defined, I don't mean defined as doing something no-one else does so much as simply defined in such a way that I can tell what the devil that AT was designed to actually do. Scrappers kill, that much is patently clear both from looking at their powers and from actually playing one. Brutes kill and go fast. Masterminds are a bit more complicated, but they basically turtle. Blasters, though? On paper, they kill. In practice, they die first. Some secondaries help keep them alive, others help get them killed faster, and still others seem to have dropped in from another AT altogether.

I want to look at a Blaster and say "Aha! This is what a Blaster is supposed to do! OK, how do I go about doing that?" I'm not terribly concerned if other ATs are doing some of the same things, since when I play an AT, I'm concerned with my own character and what that character can do. Unless it becomes a practical problem of being rejected from teams because the AT is gimped (which I don't believe is the case for any of ours), then overlapping abilities don't matter.

To put it in the simplest of ways, I care what an AT CAN do, not what an AT CANNOT do, and not what other ATs can do. I realise the latter two questions are important for AT balance, but I can deal with balance with a lot of overlap. Let's see if I can reuse your graphs to explain...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

I tried fitting the villain ATs onto this as an idle experiment, but I kept just wanting to put
|<-----------------------------Mastermind----------------------------->|
at the top.

Fortunately for symmetry's sake, you wouldn't lose that bet. Actually, blaster secondaries have a very precise operational definition, that unfortunately is tied to a completely vague one. Blaster secondaries are supposed to support the blaster archetypal definition with tools other than ranged damaging attacks (which are the purview of the primary). The problem is, if you aren't 100% sure what blasters are supposed to be doing, there's no way to be 100% sure how the secondaries are supposed to help.

Single target melee attacks are a safe bet. Self damage buffs are a safe bet. Self other buffs are mostly ok. Ranged utility is iffy, but usually ok in small amounts. Then it becomes a crap-shoot, because you are now approaching the very fuzzy edge of the archetype definition. You can have burn, but not burn's immobilize protection. You can have cloaking device, but not superior invisibility. Thunder Strike, but not Foot Stomp. Sometimes, your guess is as good as mine.

I actually have an idea of how to handle the damage boost. Set all Stalker AOEs--even melee ranged ones-- to use the ranged damage modifier and then boost the damage on the melee damage modifier.

My Arcs
-----
Mission Architect Handyman

Actually, and I may be misreading your intent, but Fire Manipulation's Burn does have its immobilization protection intact. I was actually quite surprised about this, as the only other set that has that doesn't tend to use it much, as I believe Plasma Shield actually offers immobilization protection of its own. I've certainly had a lot of fun giving Malta the Finger as they Web-Grenade my Fire Blaster out of the air, I Burn as I land and get away anyway.

To be honest, that's actually how I would have made status protection work in the game if I were designing it. Yeah, yeah, passive status protection that simply makes status effects not fire is all fun and dandy, but it doesn't look cool, and it's... Well, passive. Knockback protection wouldn't simply make you ignore knockback effects, it'd just make you land on your feet or shove you back a bit, depending on how the power is supposed to deal with the effect. Holds, stuns, immobilization, all of those would always land and always affect, but you would still have a power with which to break OUT of them. And I would have prevented toggles of ANY kind from dropping while held from day one. If toggles must be dropped, institute another system specifically for that.

That's a actually pretty much 50% of the problem of melee vs. non-melee in terms of solo performance. When melee characters fight, they often face only a part of the danger, as melee oftentimes don't even KNOW status effects are being used against them. I didn't know Crey Security Guard clubs stunned or that Banished Pantheon... Well, clubs, knocked back when I was playing my first Scrapper. These effects just didn't play on me, so I didn't know they even occurred. It wasn't until I took my first Blaster through the game that I fully realised what the dangers were.

In fact, this is a large part of why I can play certain ATs, and why certain ATs I just "can't" play. The ATs I can are Scrappers, Blasters, Brutes, Stalkers and Masterminds. Scrappers, Stalkers and Brutes have status protection, Masterminds have several layers of protection keeping status effects away from them and they can still function even when held, and Blasters can fire out of their holds. The ATs I can't play, with the exception of Tankers which I dislike for other reasons, don't have that. Kheldians have status protection on Dwarf Form, but lack it anywhere else, Defenders and Controllers have no direct protection, Corrupters suffer like Defenders and Dominators DO have protection, but only sometimes. I've not even attempted to play Soldiers of Arachnos, so I don't know. Damage is, obviously, a problem, but later in the game, status effects take on the role of a BIG danger. In this respect, Fire Manipulation is actually better off than the rest of the Blaster secondaries.

---

To the general spirit of your post: I agree that, basically, secondaries are supposed to "help" Blasters do what they do, but since it's never really clear what it is that Blasters do, it's never clear, by extension, what the secondaries are supposed to help with. "They just help" does not work as a design goal, because implementation requires that you know what secondaries actually DO, and if you can't figure out what they need to help with, you end up with this - a mess of powers that's all over the place. I've played a lot of powersets in this game, and Blaster Manipulation sets are the only category that I have seen where I can cite terrible powers in every single set. They don't have to all be the same, but we really should have sat down to try and figure out what we want out of the secondaries and stuck with a more concise design.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

Huh? Did this happen in CoH Beta at some point? I first got into the game in the beginning of May 2004, and I distinctly remember reading AT descriptions, with Blasters being described as Range/Support. Man, I haven't looked at those definitions in over five years...

That's the big problem, really. Range as defence DOES NOT WORK. Short of constantly hovering (which I do), you're simply not going to get left alone on ground level. Unlike, say, a zombie shooter where you can back-pedal AND shoot, City of Heroes roots you while you attack, ensuring that ANYTHING which is chasing you is going to catch up and punch you, and even then you need a linear mile to kill anything meaningful. Yes, some sets have tools to combat that, but they don't work. Ice Slick is nice, and Ice Anything tends to work, but neither Hot Feet nor Burn nor Rain of Fire keep things away for crap. Things run away, yes, but they quickly turn around, return just in time for their attacks to have recharged, and punch you. Caltrops helps a little if you happen to spend the majority of your life in narrow corridors, but when enemies go around, you're forced into back-pedalling. And not all enemies even succumb to these things at all.

But even if you Hover, as we've already established, not all enemies are more dangerous in melee than they are at range. Sky Raiders, for instance, will rip you a new one like a firing squad on a cigarette-smoking man, and it just gets worse from there. Crey are a little better, but a full spawn of Rikti Drones will keep you spinning in the air like a floating tumbleweed. And kill you. Then we have Nemesis, Malta and, oh! The Soldiers of Rularuu, where everything BUT the Brutes can fly.

And the higher you go in the levels, the more your damage tanks in comparison to enemy hit points. In the low levels, a Blaster can one-shot minions with a crappy, slot-less moderate damage attack, but in the high levels, you'll need a fully-slotted extreme damage attack to do that, and even then you'll probably need Aim and/or Build Up. That's why pitting level 1 heroes against GM code Rikti in Rikti invasions is a death sentence. Level 1 damage DOES NOT SCALE WELL. All this means is that Blaster attacks are constantly getting weaker as Blasters level up, at least up to some point, so damage becomes progressively less of a decent form of protection with levels, which is kind of *** backwards, if you ask me. What's more, certain enemies are designed so that they CAN'T be dispatched the only way Blasters know how, which creates further problems.

Basically, I have a certain degree of doubt that the way Blasters are designed to work is actually very realistic within the confines of the game.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

According to Castle, and I'm paraphrasing, Blaster tools are meant to keep enemies out of melee, throw things out of melee, or kill them while in melee. Moreover, that design position has never really changed over time.

The whole "ranged-focused killer" thing was always very iffy. Take my Energy/Energy Blaster. In the primary she has access to three single target ranged attacks (power bolt, power blast, power burst) not including the snipe. She has two AoEs: one short ranged cone and one long range AoE. Rounding out the set is a self-buff (Aim), a ranged soft mez (power push) and a nuke (Nova).

However, in the secondary she has access to three legitimate melee attacks (energy punch, bonesmasher, and total focus) and one power most don't count as a melee attack but does a surprising amount of damage (power thrust does scale 0.8 damage, which is a higher amount of DPA than power bolt used to have). It also has one melee mez (Stun) and four self buffs (Build Up, Conserve Power, Power Boost, Boost Range). Its questionable as to whether En/En has significantly better ranged options than melee options, unless you allow for both torrent and EB to start hitting lots of targets.

Although */En got a lot of the blapper love, that was mostly on the strength of the mag 4 total focus. In terms of pure damage, */Elec was probably always better (and as a long time En/En it pains me to say that). It does have a ranged single target immobilize. But it also has four legitimate melee attacks (Charged Brawl, Havoc Punch, Thunder Strike, Shocking Grasp) plus a PBAoE damage aura (lightning field) plus two PBAoE mez/debuffs (Lightning Clap, Power Sink), plus Build Up. Its unquestionably far more focused on killing things in melee range than trying to keep things at range or eject things from melee. And Energy Manipulation and Electric Manipulation are the rule, not the exceptions to the rule. Only Devices is really far more focused on supporting ranged offense than supporting melee offense (some people back in the day called Devices the only "true" Blaster secondary because of that).

As you point out, they started off Ranged/Melee. Although they were eventually changed descriptively to Ranged/Support, they are in actual fact Ranged/Melee-Support.


Ice Blasters and Sonic Blasters can't do that. They can do significantly better things than that, though.

It sort of works.

I wasn't in the beta, but over the years I've become very well informed by people who were in the beta. There's also Jack's dev diaries which document a lot of the early design thinking:

- September 17, 2003.


I've been told that the change from "Melee" to "Support" happened right before launch, probably on the same day Super Reflexes traded in most of its defenses for a lucky rabbit's foot and some rosary beads.

OK, I was too harsh. It sort of works, and it sometimes works, but that's part of the problem - it doesn't work all the time, or even anything close to that. Trust me, as someone who keeps a Blaster out of melee all the time, I can guarantee that this is STILL not enough. It helps, but it only helps kind of, it only helps sometimes and, crucially, it doesn't help in the situations where it really counts, which is boss and elite boss fights.

Must have missed it by about a month. I heard about the game too late, and it took me some times to buy it across the Atlantic. Seems like a lot happened in the time between late Beta and early Live, because I apparently missed the infamous purple patch, as well.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

It couldn't have been too close to launch as even the manual that came in the box says Blaster secondaries are Support.

Critter damage modifiers are designed so that you take a lot less damage at range than in melee, all other things being equal. The ranged damage scale is generally 60% of the melee one, so being at range you'll likely take 40% less damage.

The problem is that is not singularly enough to outrace bosses in a slugfest. But it does do something (there are other complications, though, that make this less of an advantage than the damage modifiers alone portray: but the effect is still there).

I should also point out that throughout the history of the game, defensive powers in general and super reflexes in particular have been described in exactly the same way: they help, but only kind of, only sometimes, and not when it really counts. One thing I'm generally glad about is that I no longer have to deal with the mathematically dubious assertion that defense only helps "sometimes" while resistance helps "always."

I was being a bit facetious there. It probably happened around the end of '03 or maybe the beginning of '04. SR was *literally* changed in the go-live build as far as I've been told.

The manual is a hodge-podge of half-truths so that description doesn't *prove* when the actual change in philosophy was made. The manual looks like it was written by someone who was told what to write but didn't play the game or understand the mechanics well enough to avoid many fundamental misunderstandings**. Its less that description and more they had to actually change the secondaries to their current form as part of that philosophical change, and that didn't happen overnight.



** The way the Prima Guides were written could serve as textbook examples of how *not* to communicate technical information for documentation purposes, for those that actually know how they were written. And no, I really can't say.

A couple of points to make here. One would be the one you alluded to, but avoided - damage modifiers only matter insomuch as they determine the strength of a melee attack relative to the strength of a "similar-size" ranged attack. That means that, all things being equal, things will hit harder in melee than they do at range. And this is true for a lot of things like Warriors, Trolls and even Rikti, to some extent. That is because they are, by and large, melee NPCs with a ranged attack. This fails utterly, however, when you are pitted against NPCs designed to be ranged damage dealers, whose ranged attacks are so strong they end up dealing MORE damage than their melee attacks. And some enemies don't even HAVE melee attacks at all. Nemesis Dragoons are a good example of this, as are Rikti Drones. And given how AI operates, you are unlikely to suffer melee AND ranged attacks if you go to melee, making some enemies actually safer in melee. A good example I can think of is Zeus Class Titans. If you force them into melee, they will only cycle their punch, never actually firing their much more damaging Plasma Beam, Plasma Beam Barrage, Explosive Missile Swarm, Incendiary Missile Swarm and Gas Missile Swarm attacks. They are LITERALLY safer in melee, because they are designed to be ranged enemies. Gunslingers are in the same boat, lacking a melee attack, as far as I've seen.

To add to this, the developers have continually acknowledged that while, yes, that's how things were designed to work, when things ACTUALLY work like this, they find themselves scrambling to fix it. When people were farming wolves by hovering out of their range, they got a ranged attack. When people kept doing that anyway, they got a ranged attack that STUNS, so as to knock fliers out of the air. It ought to have been working as intended. So why was it "fixed?" I mean, OK, give them a ranged attack, but why keep making it stronger?

The other thing is something you already mentioned - you can't out-damage bosses when it comes down to it. They do too much damage and are too much to kill. This is, from where I'm standing, a design requirement, so it isn't going to change, but that just makes it more of a problem. Realistically speaking, the only recourse is inspirations, and when bosses show up more frequently than inspiration drops, problems begin to occur. In fact, this was a huge culture shock to me when I played my Dominator - a Luddites Crusader was able to LITERALLY two-shot me with his crossbow. OK, one I can "cure" with Domination. But when three spawns on the deck of a ship map were all Crusaders, that creates a problem. Domination cures the first, and may help with the second, but the third is fought entirely as is. And with what enhancements I had at the time (read: Training) I couldn't permahold him before shot me full of crossbow bolts. It's doubly as fun when I met things with purple triangles of death. No status effects, not enough damage to take them down, not enough life to outlast them. I can't play this.

Here's the crucial point, though: they help sometimes, but they help exactly when you need them. Blaster "survivability-through-killing" works sometimes, but FAILS exactly when you need it most. Killing minions fast, eh... That's cool, and it works, though there are other ways around it, and minions aren't as dangerous. Killing bosses fast? Yeah, that HAS to happen, but it CAN'T happen, so defences fail right when they are most required. It's like a SR facing meeting bosses with autohit attacks or Invulnerability meeting bosses with unresistable damage. That's actually the BIGGEST thing. Most any Scrapper secondary has one final power which is, essentially, a battle-turner. When the chips are down, I'm about to die and my enemies are overwhelming, I can hit that and STILL win. Blaster secondaries offer no such thing. In fact... What the heck are they supposed to offer? Energy Manipulation offers Total Focus, which is cool, but not in the Elude sense of the word, and that's probably the best final.

But what do the others get? Devices gets Auto Turret, probably the MOST overbalanced power in the whole game. It takes ages to set down, costs more endurance than it has any place requiring, and it produces a pet that is, for all intents and purposes, highly underwhelming. And what of Fire Manipulation? Hot Feet is a fad. It turns off when you get held (and you WILL get held) does not a lot of damage, costs a bundle AND doesn't stop enemies from running in to punch your lights out anyway. And it works pretty badly with flying, as well. Electric Manipulation has Shocking Grasp, which you've already praised, but Ice Manipulation has Frozen Aura, a power that gets outstriped by an Epic equivalent. There really is no Blaster power that can get you out of a pinch, with the possible exception straight-up nukes, which both not everyone has, and also don't actually always kill everything, especially without Aim and Build Up.

As to defence vs. resistance, the notion that defence works "sometimes" is patently silly. It works all the time, and hits and misses because of it ought to average out over time. Yes, it can lead to unreasonable defeats, but it can also lead to unreasonable victories, and again over time, they average out. It's all down to how much you are willing to rely on it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.

precicly what I wanted to say. Completly agreed.

Except "that other game" also fails to offer any sort of teaming incentive, whereas ours offers a pretty fat experience and influence buff to those on a team. Granted, it's less than what you get solo, but a LOT more than 1/8 of what you get solo, which is how things tend to be divided elsewhere.

No-one teams because there's no incentive, not because there's no need. There's a difference.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville 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.