Explain Trip Mine to me

Trip Mine

Is there a reason why this puts a +DMG buff icon into my status bar while active? And is there a way to tell how much damage it's actually supposed to do when it detonates? Adding DMG enhancements to it just increased the +DMG percentage but doesn't give a flat damage number.

From what I've gathered, you want to slot this foremost with -Recharge so you can drop a small field of them without getting bored and falling asleep. Beyond that, is it worth slotting for damage? Without the numbers, it's hard to tell.

Seems like a straight forward power but the technical aspects of it have me confused.

The reason it puts a buff icon in your bar is defiance - the same as casting normal attacks gives you a slight damage buff for a few seconds, so does casting trip mine. Trip mine just gives a larger buff since its cast time is so long. This can actually be used in the same fashion as buildup, casting one at your feet just before you engage. The buff is much smaller than buildup, but it recharges quick and as a side effect the first guy to run up to you gets blown up.

As for slotting trip mine, it does do damage which can be enhanced, same as any normal power. It's just that since the power is a pseudo pet, the real numbers doesn't show the damage it deals. Regardless, it does do a *lot* of damage, and it's well worth slotting for that (it does about two and a half times as much damage as, say, fireball, in a 12 foot radius). With SOs/generic IOs I'd personally slot 1 acc, 3 dam, 2 rech. With set IOs the sky's the limit. I don't recall off the top of my head whether blaster trip mine takes TAoE or PBAoE sets though (I *think* it's TAoE), I remember there are some oddities about that between the various ATs which have it. Assuming it's TAoE I'd probably slot something like acc/dam x2, dam/rech x2, acc/dam/end, and rech/end from a KB set (with around level 30 IOs. If you use higher level ones, you won't need as much damage slotting) - basically, 50-60ish acc, max dam, a bit of end, and as much rech as you can fit.

Very easy. Just look in your in-game information for trip mine. Take a look at the defiance bonus. Every time you set one that's the damage bonus you get for the standard defiance formula of 7.5 seconds + activation time (5 seconds for trip mine). So 12.5 seconds of damage bonus.

I don't have access to the game right now, so I can't verify the in-game information but Mid's shows a damage boost of 26.4%. Consider that aim gives you 62.5%.

As for slotting of trip mine, I'd slot for accuracy then damage then recharge in that relative order. While its useful as a defiance damage boost, it's primary purpose is that of a trap. Set one at your feet, throw caltrops and then fire a blast at an enemy group and dash around the corner. There's various clever ways to use these things, but that's one of the more obvious ones.

Ok, I'll have to just blame my ignorance on that one. I knew of Defiance's "Attack while mezzed" properties but not it's damage boost ones. This is my first blaster I've taken past level 6 or so and so I still don't have the details nailed down and never bothered to sweat the Archetype bonus.

So, assuming it's practical, I should foot-plant a trip mine before attacking if only for the temporary damage buff. If some punk runs up to hit me and gets blown away, it's a bonus

Good to know! Up until now, I've only been using it for the "trap" aspect.

YEAH BABY. Planting that trip mine got me JUICED UP and READY TO KICK SOME BUTT.

The reason why you can't see Trip Mine's direct damage is that it is a "pet", so the stats are connected to it, not you. If you upen up the Power Description, and click on the Info tab, there should be links at the bottom that tell you the "pet's" powers. One of those should be the damage, and if you click on it, you should see how much damage it does.

Since it's a pet, its damage isn't directly connected to yours, but in general, it does somewhere between the damage of a Burst attack like Power Burst, and Full Auto. It also has a VERY useful knockback component. It is extremely useful to spread out at your feet prior to beginning a fight, so if anything gets in melee with you, it is automatically attacked and blown out of melee with you. Obviously, the other convenient use for it is to set up a trap of about four or five mines, right at a corner, then pull a foe into them. You run around the corner, and when they come to get you, the explosion takes them out.

I have found that if you want Mines to go off reliably, you have to spread Caltrops around them. That will slow down the foes enough that they will trigger the mines instead of just going through them.

The other main method is to "toe bomb", in which you use Smoke Grenade and then approach with Cloaking Device up. You can get right up into melee, like a Stalker. Set a Time Bomb at the foes' feet, pause a second, lay a Trip Mine, step back and (on AR) trigger Full Auto. There's very little that will survive that.

For slotting, it depends on how much patience you have. It's very satisfying to have five Trip Mines go off at the same time, but one will do the job. Really, I tend to lay down more than one so they don't all go off, and I still have some protection if more come at me. So Damage is definately the priority (after Accuracy, of course) but Recharge will let you put down more in less time.

When you're in a team, really, it's the length of time it takes to lay the mine, not the Recharge, that will irritate your team. Then you would likely just use them in combat, either to protect your own perimeter, or to toe bomb during the fight.

Right. Don't forget. Accuracy is important in Mines just like any other attack. Otherwise an enemy could set off the bomb, but not take any damage, because the explosion missed them. I just checked my in game numbers, and I have a set of 5 Scirrocos Dervish, which gives me roughly 95% damage, 57% acc, 42 % recharge and38% endrdx. My mines are very useful this way. In the lvl 50 game, one mine still not kill one white minion, but it will be close, like 85 or 90%, then a slug or a burst is all that is needed to finish them.

Usually I use it by first tossing out Caltrops between myself and the enemy, laying a Trip Mine at my edge of the trops, and then opening fire. Enemies will take a long time to trudge across the caltrops, and when they finally get to my side the mine blows them back across the caltrop patch. Generally I only find this worthwhile when encountering a tough spawn while soloing; otherwise I just use the caltrops.

I believe my trip mine has 1 acc and either 2 dam/3 rech or vice versa; with minimal IO effort it should be trivial to get all three of them as high as you could usefully want.

Also one thing that can cofuse some people. The Trip Mine buff icon will remain on your status bar until the trip mine either explodes or expires. However the damage buff itself will only last for 11.5s from the time you start casting (or 7.5s after the animation ends).

I'm anti-trip-mine because my feeling is that you need two trip mines to get anything done, and even with severe recharge slotting that's something like 15 seconds. And then you have to wait for people to amble over to you and get blown up.

I discovered this with my MM and hopefully it also applies to Blasters but if you drop a mine and nothing goes into melee to detonate it, the icon allows you to know how many mines you have active. While Trip Mines will eventually detonate on their own if left alone long enough, there is no max limit outside of the speed of recharge and their own inherant timer. Also, Trip Mine will not activate while phased nor will it activate if a phased mob hits it so it allows you to "prep time" a nasty surprise for mobs with predictable phases like Lord Winter, Nemesis, and those Council bosses.

The Blaster way, traditionally, is "Kill them fast, before they kill you." Nothing worse than ten guys with 1 HP each, all shooting YOU.

I don't see the temporary damage buff as that great- although I'll admit that in a powerset with no Build Up it's better than nothing- and four seconds is kind of a long time to spend doing nothing. Let me rephrase that. Four seconds is a long time to spend doing nothing, when you're doing it 100 times an hour.

Trip Mines can also be thought of as a way to shift animation times backward in time or damage forward in time.

Regardless of how effective a given attack is, you can generally only do one attack at a time because you're doing the animation for the attack. People like quick animations in part because you can chain several attacks together quickly and get out a lot of damage before much damage is dealt to you. This is one reason PBAoE damage auras like Blazing Aura are so helpful -- they are doing damage automatically while you are at the same time applying other attacks yourself.

But Trip Mine lets you shift that animation time away from the moment of engagement/aggro. You go through the animation first, and repeatedly, if you plant multiple mines....without drawing aggro. Then when the aggro hits the fan, you use your strong regular attacks AND the Trip Mines also activate, stacking a whole bunch of AoE damage up in a very short time. Each mine has a chance to hit all the enemies (still limited by the target cap, of course) in its radius; a tight field of mines will apply lots of damage to lots of enemies.

This not only can kill enemies before they get off a second shot, it also minimizes enemy regeneration, because you're stacking up several attacks into the same instant of time; there's no time for the regen to heal any of it back.

With frankenslotting there's no reason you can't have good recharge -- my first amateur attempt, right after IOs came out, resulted in 98% damage, over 50% accuracy, and 95% recharge, if I recall. Add in Hasten and some global recharge and...well, it still takes time and patience to set up several mines, but it's not too hideous.

It goes that much faster if two or more of you have TM.

It's definitely a different style of play, but you can use small minefields (2-5 mines) to really rip through stuff. Caltrops are handy not just for slowing enemies down to give the mines time to sense them, but also for stacking up the enemies, especially at corners. The first ones to hit the caltrops are slowed and the others overtake them, like a wave front compressing. Placed in advance of the trip mines, this will often clump the enemies up before the mines go off, helping to avoid the "kill the first guy many times over, but now the mines are gone and here come the rest of them" problem.

Just wanted to say thanks for the advice, everyone. Played around with the trip mine/caltrops thing and had a pretty good time of it at -1/x3, allowing me to do all sorts of AoE carnage. Blowing up the guys who made it past the caltrops worked as advertised

Previously I had been using trip mines just to set mine fields which was tedious and rarely worked well (one minion sets off four mines, etc). I was about ready to respec out of it since I rarely felt like spending what felt like a minute and a half before each fight. This has made them a lot more useful to me. Of course, I still do the "Run mines along the wall and around the corner" routine when the situation calls for it.

I've now got this image of a blaster laying out a string of mines, then stepping out from the corner and going "Needer, needer, needer!" at the bad guys . . . .

You can't really control it, but the absolute best moment a Tripminer can have is when one clump of mines blows a boss off his feet and he sails over and lands on another clump of mines. It happens occasionally when you set up several clusters.

Unfortunately it interferes with your DPS, as you spend some time afterward laughing your butt off instead of killing.

This thread makes me want to make a static team consisting of either all /Devices blasters or all Traps/ Defenders.

Most of the /Devices Blasters I've played with will lay down 4-5 mines before pulling a group. Now, imagine that everyone on your team drops 4-5 mines. That would be 32-40 mines lying in wait for enemies. My inner pyromaniac is laughing maniacally and howling at the moon just thinking about it.

The Traps/ Defenders wouldn't have anything close to the amount of follow-up damage as /Devices Blasters, but they'd have 8 Force Field Drones, 8 Triage Beacons, 8 Acid Mortars, and 8 Poison Traps to fall back on while opening up with what firepower they do have. If a few of them have Assault Rifles, using Web Grenade and Ignite on 8 enemies will likely take them out of the fight, or even using all of them on one enemy, should it be an EB or AV.

*eye twitch*