The most current, powerful leveling Blaster?

Well, I am ery new to this game and totally fallen in love with it. I have just done a second build of my original fire/fire blaster - I messed up picking flight at lvl6 and had some friends starting so I re-rolled her.

I find as long as you don't rush in and pick on one target at a time you can stay alive relatively well. The trick is I think is to not try and be a 'Hero' (groan) I have been teaming with an Electric/traps player, and we are very effective together, especially when it gets hairy and lay down the Healing Pyramid thingy. We both levelled up quickly and don't often have to back down from a fight but... if all else does fail......leg it!

Thanks for the advice.

I'm currently working my 2.0 blaster (fire/ice) and I can start to see where this might go.

Now that I apparently have the primary/secondary out of the way, let's talk about complimentary pools/powers that also go along with my overall goals.

Firstly, I'm using Ninja Run/Sprint/Hurdle, and it's not bad complimented with Bank Mission Powers.... But how important is Flight to a blaster in my type of build? Hover is nice but not nearly... always useful. Flight is nice too.

I have a level 27 scrapper that I just made since coming back to CoH and he's only got the Ninja Run Combo and I find he moves really well. I also landed a universal but in reading up on that, it looks like a bad recipe... anyway getting off track.

So Aid Self is pretty much needed. How about Tough/Weave ? Or is the mentality that if you're relying on Tough/Weave you're probably in too much trouble as it is?

I used to always think of "flight" pool as a very "blaster" thing. Is this still true?

hasten and stamina are important to your blaster. if you are soloing, aid self would be really nice too. from there everything else is just flavor.

I'd say that the most important things on my Blasters aside from their main attacks (up to 9 in some cases) are:
1. Build Up and Aim. [I don't play AR or Dev. I said MY blasters for a reason.]
2. Stamina.
3. Some sort of knockback protection (I tend to go with, for instance, Hover and a Karma -knockback IO.)
4. Distant 4th, some sort of stealth (again, I tend to go with an IO in a movement power.)

I have a miniguide to playing Blasters in my sig- scroll down, because internal links in the guide are broken.

Fire/Ice should be good for what you want, I think it very well might be a combo you'll go all the way with. I finally got a blaster to 50 after many years as well and with a similar offensive/defensive combo of fire/dev. Maybe my playstyle, but I found it faster than fire/ice, not slower and I did try a fire/ice to 30. Caltrops is much faster (and usable with hover) compared to ice patch and I just don't usually bother with trip mine which is the power that probably most gives /dev the "slow" rep. /Ice gives you shiver though which is better to use with rain of fire and of course has build up. So, it definitely has its pluses.

Once you do put enough time and money (IO's) into a blaster you'll be wondering why you bother with a scrapper instead of the other way around. I now kill a lot faster with my blaster than scrapper and am just about as survivable. Sometimes more so as I watch the poor scrappers struggle through things like quicksand and see their defense disappear while I hover over it unscathed.

Oh, and you do not need aid self. I keep trying that power out because I keep hearing how important it is. Every time I find I'm better off just killing everything in the time it'd take to stop and try to get off its slow heal. Many times "try" is also the key word as it doesn't always work. Greens drop a plenty, there is rest, and eventually you can get a pretty decent regen rate to take care of the occasional hit that gets through.

Just started Rad/Ice, seems like it has a lot of potential and synergy (maybe even moreso then fire/ice). Chilling Embrace and Ice Patch to aid in the safety of opening with Irradiate just sounds smexy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Sure, the devs are supposed to listen to their customers, mister business 101 out there. And if I decide to start suggesting that the devs change the game from being about superheroes and supervillains to being about clowns that is my right as well, and technically Paragon Studios is supposed to pay attention to me. But I hope strongly that they assume a meth-head somehow managed to hack into my forum account and make paper airplanes out of my posts, because I hope they recognize stupid when they see it. I assume they will recognize futile just as accurately.

Also, keep in mind what works for levelling up might not be what you want at 50...

So, while levelling I generally take aid self for soloing, but at 50, I rarely keep it in my builds, as I am soft capped to range defense, and usually dont need it anymore. But getting to 50 without it would have been more tedious, so I usually recommend it on blasters who solo. Its all well and good to think you are going to kill them all before they kill you, but before you have defense or much mitigation, I prefer to have aid self to fall back on to keep me rolling along with no downtime.

For power pools while levelling, I usually go with fitness, speed, medicine, and leave the 4th pool to meet any needs i havent already addressed. I ALWAYS take stamina, and hasten, and on blasters get build up and Aim ASAP.

Your job is to kill mobs before they kill you, so haivng end, recharge, and buffs to hit and damage are your main requirements.

As far as aid self goes, take it or dont, but I have run about 260 levels of blasters, and solo it really helps speed up levelling because without it you are looking at serious downtime for rest/regen or holding tons of green insp every map. I prefer to hold purples and use aid self and just keep rolling along rather then taking a knee every other mob to get my green bar back.

Keep in mind, my advice is for levelling up to 50, not for being 50- theres a big difference. plus you spoke of being on only short hours and soling alot ( which is my exact playstyle as well) so my advice on aid self was with soloing a blaster to 50 in mind.

Nice current joke.

I have a Fire/En which held the FoTM for a large amount of months. He is REAL fun and put down some damage. He's sort a scrapper with the secondary for when mobs rush. I do die often with him I have to admit.

I also have an Arch/Elec...she is crazy fun! Not outrageous damage, but good consistent damage. The elec secondary has some very good control powers..mostly knockback and disorient effects plus the power sink for endo recovery.

One of my only 50's is elec^3. He was QUITE frustrating due to lower dmg output, but after like lvl 38-39, he's extremely well rounded particularly because of the secondary and epic but mostly because of the ranged nuke. He can survive pretty nicely on his own.

I only have the medicine pool on 1 out of about 25 blasters. And for that one, it's an experiment like Riverdusk has. The good thing is that with the ability to have a second build, you can try the same blaster with and without that pool (it gets a bit pricy if you want to IO them both out, however).

As far as the lack of Infl goes, there is a large element of randomness to it at least until you get to the upper teens, so your observation that your blasters are poor in comparison with a scrapper is anecdotal at best. Think back - did that scrapper get a really good drop or two, maybe a run of Luck Charms?

There's no good reason why your new blaster can't have as many opportunities to get merits as the scrapper did. The soloing tactic is different (as many have pointed out) but blasters can certainly solo content, including story arcs for merits.

All my blasters fly and all of them get Stamina by the mid20s (not all right at level 20). Beyond that, some have Stealth, some don't even take a third or fourth power pool, instead taking nearly all the primary/secondary and then ancillary power pool.

What server is your new blaster on? If I have a character there, I would be happy to promote your blasting career with a gift of Infl.

I want to throw out Sonic/Mental as a great blaster for all events. Sonic has one of the best secondary effects. It has 2 cones which go really well with Psychic Scream. They match remarkably well. Here are just some fun pairings.

AOE Sleep, then Drain Psyche.
Add in the lvl 38 PSW for a nice hit.

The 2 sonic cones do enough -RES to make even robots melt before Psychic Scream and are all roughly the same cone size for all 3 attacks.

You get a reliable single target stun. Not as good as RADs mind you, or as early.

-RECH & -RES are very valuable on teams as well.

Well you guys are certainly giving me a ton of good options.

Since I rolled the Fire/Ice I have worked hard on him given my limited play time. Solo was painful... but if there's no team... there's no team.

I started with honest intentions of getting badges, but he just has so much trouble with the 'rescue' style story archs.

I reached a point where I just really wanted to get him closer to 20.... I made contact with Huge Redding and I simply ran back and forth buying tons of insps, gulping them down, and running to the park at Steel Canyon (10 yards away from Hugo) and downing as many CoT as I could in hopes of 1: Leveling. And 2: Getting good Salvage.

Doing this in a short (but boring) time burst I reached level 12, got 5 Ancient Artifacts, 6 Luck Charms, and 4 Scrolls.

The thing is do you keep these at this level so you can make some of the better recipes? Or do you let them go for short term financial gain? Hard to say.

Finally I realized I was down to about 20K influence from my little Huge/Insp/CoT trick, but I landed a fantastic team. My time was limited but the damage output was good. We headed to Faultline and I hit 18 in a couple short hours! (6 levels)

Part way through I trained up and saw -some- of the good stuff you guys are talking about... I gave him some of the powers you guys have suggested are 'must have'. (admittedly I would have normally taken aim OR build up at this point, but not both).

And as a result even pre-Stamina, Pre-IO, I could see some light at the end of the tunnel. Ice had a soft control from level 1, and now I had a little bust combo of :
Hasten + Aim + Build Up + Fire away... pretty much torched anything. With a good defender buffing me (even at that level) it was a considerable amount of damage!

That was probably the best time I've ever had with a blaster. I think of the small, but very significant changes I made in his build thanks to this thread, and I just wanted to say thanks.

So he's called: Prazus and he's on Freedom. I really hope to stick him out to 50.... would be a first on a blaster. Feel free to shoot me a tell if you're on there! He does seem like he's starting to come around, but I don't want to jump the gun.

The few things I haven't decided on are still Travel Power? (I'm enjoying the 'spare' powers afforded by Ninja Run/Sprint) Aid Self? (yes I definitely see the short term benefit of this.. especially solo, but it's two powers at a level where it feels like you want everything!)

Fire and Ice seem really fun... more fun than I thought. I've only got the first power from Ice for the soft control, and I skipped Fire Rain until I get Stamina rolling, but this is definitely the most fun I've had on a blaster in the last... 6 years!!! So again I really appreciate all the great ideas, and suggestions you guys have given me. It's helped a lot.

Regarding Travel - I took Hover on my Fire/Fire Blaster - as do most - but I stuck two Flight Speed +10's in there, using a Crowbar!

I have been considering a Blaster with TP, though I don't think this would work too well, probably still gonna try at some point!

Leaping is always a fun choice, I will get shot down in flames for saying this but I would be tempted to take Leaping and Hover for the right concept.

It took me a long time to get my first Blaster to 50 -- and it ended up being the second character I ever rolled up in the game, an Ice/Ice Blaster. Now, he is one of my favorite characters to pull out for high level content.

Part of it may be that I am mostly prefer controllers -- and this character has three stackable single-target holds and some nice AoE control powers -- he is almost a Blue-side Dominator. But he is very easy to solo, since he can Hold-Blast-Blast-Blast for minions and Lts, and Hold-Hold-Blast-Blast-Blast for Bosses. And if I need AoE? Shiver slows them all to a crawl, and then Frost Breath, Ice Storm and Blizzard handle the AoE damage quite well. Shiver, in particular, is an amazing tool.

I tend to say out of melee, using Fly and Hover to stay above things (I skipped the melee attacks). If staying in the air is not an option, then Ice Patch can provide some protection from melee. (To flip between Fly and Hover, I use the Speed-on-Demand binds in CityBinder.) I recently changed over to the Ice APP set in a respec, and haven't had it long enough to really get a feel for how much I like it.

I have found that this is a great character both solo and on teams, with a lot of safety from the control powers.

Well now at nearly level 26 (I think a bubble away), I have to say this guy is doing well.

As a fire/ice I see the benefits of mixing these two, even though I am probably much more 'fire' reliant. The ice patch is huge for soloing when things just simply aren't going my way.

This guy really shines on teams though. I'm amazed (with a good tank, and even just a few buffs) how omnipotent and devastating this guy feels in large missions. The AOE's are icing on the cake. If I have a team without too many people pushing mobs, and scattering them with various powers, it is very good damage output even in the mid 20's.

It's a simple enough combo... Hasten + Aim + Build Up + Fire Ball + Fire Breath = mob gone.

As I said earlier my character is pretty broke, so there's a lot of 'discount' and Franken-slotting going on here. I don't think I have an I/O on him worth more than a bucket of beans, and he still does the job pretty well.

That's the fun stuff... being on a good team that lets me crank out those AOE's and finish up with single target stuff.

Soloing is getting a little rougher. I haven't upped my mission difficulty but the mob type is trickier, even after adapting my playstyle, I can see this is always going to be my character's achilles heel.

At 26 I still haven't picked up a travel power, nor Aid Self. I'm doing fine with mission teleporter and Ninja Jump and this way my character's powers are pretty well rounded but yes I can definitely see the benefit of Aid Self in solo mode.

So far so good... he's fun, and even funner on a team. Some times it -does- feel.... repetitive, but he's really starting to shine.

Thanks again for all the tips.

You're in the golden levels for Blasters. Fortunately, you have access to Shiver soon, and so when it starts getting rougher you have an excellent tool to calm things back down.

Any Blaster can contribute well to a team... they do tons of damage, which is always welcome. AoE damage is generally most useful but high single target damage can still be a big help. If you also want to be able to solo well you'll need some decent single target damage to handle bosses / EBs, plus solo spawns are generally small.

Some good options:

Archery / Energy - makes a fantastic pure ranged hover blaster with great AoE damage and a solid single target chain. Get Boost Range permanent ans set it to auto and drop a Rain of Arrows on each spawn then plink away from 100+ feet.

Fire / Mental - massive AoE damage, great single target damage, and a huge survival boost from Drain Psyche. With some defense and enough global recharge you'll be giving the team a huge assist by going off and soloing entire 8-man spawns pretty much as fast as the rest of the team kills one. (Seriously, a permahasten Fire/Mental is pretty much death incarnate. It's a hellaciously expensive build though.)

Fire / Ice - What's better than high AoE damage? High AoE damage plus control.

Sonic / Mental - Cones, cones and more cones... you'll have a nonstop AoE attack chain plus stacking -resist debuffs. Not to mention Drain Psyche.

Ice / Energy - The ultimate single target wrecking machine. Massive single target damage plus multiple holds and stuns means you're going to kill bosses faster than most Scrappers can. You don't have a lot of AoEs so you'll add less to an 8-man team, but solo and in small groups you'll really shine. Plus having Blaster damage plus more single target hard controls than any Controller is amusing... (As many as 3 holds, 2 guaranteed mag 3 stuns, and one 60% chance of a mag 3 stun.)