How about this Idea? Tier One Blasts...

Hello Defenders,

**Disclaimer**
Yes, its another "Change my Defender thread", but be gentle, this is just something to discuss peacefully
** **

Many of us feel that something should be done to help defenders out a bit.
More damage would be nice to help take down Bosses faster (I can read a paper in the time it takes),
and some kind of help pre-stamina/pre SO for the endurance crunch we feel.
And my personal desire to add some melee feel to the AT.

So here are a couple ideas I had;

What if we boosted the Tier One blast damage to be about 30% more damage.
This would help tremendously pre-stamina and pre-SO levels, but would not add to AoE strength of the AT, and would not push overall DPS too much and be in danger of upsetting Blasters/Corruptors. As it stands now, this blast is;
1) Required, so you cannot avoid it, even if you wanted to
2) Very low damage, to the point that I wonder if it would make more sense to just leave it out of an attack chain and add more recharge into the Tier 2 blast.

My second Idea is one that could be implemented by itself or even combined with the first;

What if our Tier One blast had a kind of dual effect. If your target was at range ( farther than 8 feet away) it would act as it does now and animate/damage as a blast. Then, if your target was in melee Range, it would animate as a melee version of the attack and do essentially double damage. (For reference Power Bolt --> Energy Punch for Energy Blast set). These numbers could be tweaked, but this addition of a melee option would be really helpful to defenders, since melee range is unavoidable and it would open up some interesting attack options. For unusual sets like Archery and Assault rifle, they would not get a melee animation necessarily, but they could get extra damage at melee range to be fair.

Ok, flame-retardant is on. Anyone think these could help out Defenders solo and pre-stamina ? Too much extra damage ?

Problems with it.

- It means adding in animations and I'm not sure BaB would be found of it.

- Damage scaling happens 1-20 and helps defenders, so pre-Stamina damage isn't an issue.

- If Defenders have a damage issue, it's after 20.

- Getting to 20 is easy enough to where any under performance is quickly bypassed.

I look at the melee "hole" as being an inherent part of the balance of the AT. (And Corruptors as well) Defenders have blasts and can to some extent defend themselves, but they don't have melee attacks.

And really, Defenders do less damage in melee (0.55 base mod instead of 0.65) so technically if your blast doubled as a melee attack it would have to do it on the 0.55 scale. So instead of doing double damage you would only do about 1.7x damage.

Additionally, Blasters do more damage with their melee attacks, but they have greater recharge and End cost them as well. You could make the Defender attack cost greater End for the double damage, but there really wouldn't be any way to make it recharge slower.

No, I'd leave the Power Pool for those Defenders that want a melee attack. I like your first idea, though. Although maybe they should Scourge, like Corruptors do.

[the tier 1 blast is...]

Changing between melee and ranged blasts is too gimmicky.

I'd like to see the blasts get an END discount first to see how much it helps the Defender.

The only time I've dispensed with my Tier 1 attack at higher levels was with my Emp/Energy duo - once they were perma-AB'd they were using Blast-Torrent-Burst-Explosive as an attack chain.
Every other Energy Blast Defender ended up with Bolt-Blast-Bolt-Burst with AoEs thrown in when they're up.

So I'd dispute that your first solution only helps low level Defenders. Luckily, I think its not just low level Defenders that need help.

I think it introduces too many extra issues though. How do Archery and Rad Blast work, with their faster smaller Tier 1's? If you up Neutrino Bolt's damage, you shift the procs vs Damage slotting balance that many builds are based on.
Does it unbalance Psychic Blast, which has four single target attacks?

In the end it would be a lot easier and lower risk to reduce all Defender (and Tanker) attacks to 80% of their current endurance cost - still leaving them with lower DPE than Blasters and Scrappers but better than what they have now.