Tanker Looking For Help With Blaster

All my experience since 2004 in CoX has been with tankers. I recently started a couple of scrappers and was looking about trying a blaster or two. Whatever I decide will be the next toon I take to 50. Does anyone have any suggestions about a good first blaster that can survive really well? I have a 13 level en/en. I would have thought with all the knockback I would be ok. This will be a solo toon.

Your primary is damage. Your secondary is mostly damage.

There are no blasters that survive "really well" by the standards you live by. Especially not solo.

At level 35, a SO'd out blaster is 1/6 as tough as an SO'd out scrapper. Roughly.

So what's a blaster to do? Learn, adapt, and improvise. I have a mini-guide in my sig. By the way, someone is going to probably say, at some point in this thread, "Well, get to the ranged defense cap..." (I know, I just did, very meta.) You can't really get signficant defense until, usually, about level 44. It just takes a lot of spare slots and millions on millions of inf.

Learn to kill people very, very fast. It's the ultimate debuff.

Pretty much what Fulmens said. You need to hit fast and hard and hope you dont get one or two shotted in the process. I am working on a ranged build for my Ice/Fire blaster and it is expensive. It will get me only 39% ranged and like 5% aoe. One of my blaster friends told me his motto for blasting and I completely agree with him. "If you ain't dying, you ain't trying".

Blasters do have their own survival tools, but they're much more active than tanker survival tools. /devices and /ice each have a good lineup of survival tools, as do some of the primaries (sonic's AoE sleep, energy's knockback, ice's holds and -recharge). No matter what you pick, it'll be less about cranking up your own ability to withstand damage (as a scrapper or tank does) and more about managing your enemies' ability to deal it.

If you want a fairly high-survival blaster that doesn't trade off his killing power too badly, you might try ice/ice. I'm fond of /devices, but the lack of Build Up or extra attacks in it drives a lot of people nuts.

Energy/Energy sounds like a very good choice for a solo blaster.

Your attacks do knockback for free providing very good damage mitigation, and you have a few reliable hard mezzes in your secondary for dealing with annoying mobs like mezzers or Tsoo Sorcerors.

The most survivable blaster I have ever seen or played is a sonic/devices.

It is a very deliberate playstyle, in which you must think several steps ahead in order to survive, but once you get good at it you will be able to get through entire missions without ever being touched.

Siren's Song + Screech + Taser is an absolute win combination.

Siren's song is an AoE sleep that is perma out of the box. Screech and Taser are both ranged stuns. Sleep a mob and wake them up one at a time with a stun. They won't be able to fight back and you can blast them down one at a time while the rest of the mob slumbers away. Like I said, it's very deliberate, but very survivable.

Sonic/Energy can do much the same thing, and you get Build Up really early to boot.

Solo, Ice/ and Sonic/ give a good deal of survivability with Energy/ being up there as well. /Devices for those instances you know it's going to get rocky.

Teams, /Ice definitely. You won't be dishing out all that much extra dmg, but at least you can keep sh** off your back. I wish they'd release, another secondary that was 'mitigation' focused so there were more choices.

Fire/ and well anything.

Fire gets its punch early in the form of AoEs and cripling short range hit as well. You can easily go to spawn size 2 or 3 early on as long as you are patient to have all your AoEs ready at the start.

Long term sillyiness would be Fire/MM/Elec.

Fire Breath (Cone) (Level 8)
Fire Ball (AoE) (Level 2)
Psi Scream (Cone) (level 10)
Drain Psyche (PbAoE) (Level 20)
Psi Shockwave (PbAoE) (Level 38)
Static Discharge (Cone) (level 41)

5 Damage AoEs and one -Regen -Rec (foe) +Regen +Rec (you).

And elec has Surge of power, which is awesome.

Nothing thematic about it except extreme fun. There are enough variety on powers to slot off sets on the cheap (Like confuse in World of Confusion and Fear in Scare) plus you still get a Hold in the epic as well as another -Regen power for taking down EBs.

My Drain Psyche experience is that regen by itself won't keep you alive ... and regen that requires you to be in pointblank range of the people you're getting it from? Even less alive.

My Fire/*/Elec experience is that I sometimes had trouble finding a target for the third AOE. Lots of clicking the button while the game tried to find a survivor. So five might SOUND good but I don't think it's really that great an idea.

Fire/Mental is a very good combo- Mental has a damage cone that is also a -Recharge cone. So you get to live two or three times longer if you survive the initial return fire. Mental is just an all-around good secondary.

En/En: My only Energy primary was Fire secondary. Which is a terrible combination, by the way. I didn't like Energy primary, I didn't like Fire secondary, but they may do better matched up with something else. My feeling is that if you shoot a single target repeatedly, they WILL be knocked back. If you throw out an AOE casually, you will probably knock back a few and anger all of them. Single target assassination is a fairly safe way to play an EN blaster.

My wife used to have a "volleyball combo" with an /en secondary blaster: Bonesmasher [knocks down], Air Superiority [knocks up], Power Punch [knocks back, HARD.] Bounce, bounce, SERVE !

My recommendation is Energy/Electric/Electric. Lots of KB, which is great mitigation for a soloer.

Electricity Manipulation has some cross-over to melee, with a couple of solid melee attack in Havoc Punch & Thunderstrike.

But the main tip I would give you is to remember this mantra while you play your Blaster:

"Not a Tank! Not a Tank! Not a Tank!"

I have a level 32 Ice/ice that solos rather well with just basic SOs. If it's not dead, it's controlled. I just started a Ice/mm that should fill in rather nicely as well and might be even more recommended over the Ice/ice since it has more AoE and still solid in the controls department.

I have a Rad/MM/Ice that's sturdy as all get out as long as what I'm fighting deals mostly lethal and smashing damage. I'm pretty well over the soft cap. I sneakily slide into the middle of the mobs. Drain psyche then go nuts with all my aoe. It's something of beauty and if I feel like it I nuke and don't end crash. Win.

"With great moustache comes great responsibility" - Zee Captain

Rad/En may be a good combo also. By lvl 26 you could have 3 AOE's. You will easily be able to clear the room of all the minions fairly quickly. You will of course take damage doing so but if you are fight spawn sizing of 5 or less at lower levels these encounters shouldn't be deadly. At lvl 22(provided that you take stamina at 20) you will have 2 stackable stun powers for the bosses, not to mention a couple of "chance to stun" powers and power push. You should be able to keep most if not all bosses permastunned. The only downside I see to this combo is no buildup.

It's not the safest Blaster set, but the one I've had the most fun with is Archery. I went Archery / Energy and took Hover to avoid melee range, only getting Boost Range and Build Up from /Energy. Well, I also took Stun to stack with Stunning Shot on bosses but I almost never use it. Archery is fast and has good AoE damage (especially after Rain of Arrows) and if you stay at range you get stunned a lot less and take considerably less damage.

For a more defensive build you might try Ice/Energy. You get two holds, several stuns, good melee damage, and -recharge for even more mitigation. Your AoE potential is almost zero, but you can take down hard targets easily. Sonic / Electric is another good single target choice... use your AoE sleep and then pulverize targets one at a time with Electric's extremely powerful melee attacks. Sonic / Energy works similarly.

Finally, if you want to be totally different than your Tankers, try Fire / Mental. You'll have absolutely insane damage output and can often survive simply by ensuring that nothing lives long enough to attack you more than once. However, you will have a steady diet of pavement learning to play that combo, and getting good just means fewer faceplants, not none. There's a good reason Blasters are called squishy.

Oh, if you are feeling somewhat suicidal you can also try Fire / Electric. Get some serious recharge and nothing in the game will match your damage... not even a Fire/Kin or a SS/Shield Brute. I'm talking over 300 DPS here... and about as much mitigation as a level one Hellion in Eden. But hey, did I mention more damage than a Fire/Kin?

My Fire/Fire/Cold puts out ridiculous amounts of damage, but he's the original glass cannon. On a team with good support/agro management he's a deity of fiery death, but when he's alone his playstyle differs dramatically, and his damage drops off by a large percentage.

....turns out mobs don't like it when you hit them in the face with a Fireball from 5 feet away....who would have figured? He's kind of an AoE blapper, which leads to almost illegal levels of damage....did I mention he has all but the last debt badge? I enjoy the minigame of "survive my own damage output", but that playstyle isn't for everyone.

I like Sonic/Devices because I can use Siren's Song while Cloaking Device is running. Nothing like putting a spawn to sleep that didn't even realize you were there. (a Stealth IO is recommended for true invisibility, or you can go overkill and stack CD, SS and Stealth IO)

Sonic/Ice is survivable as well. Shockwave em into a corner, hit em with Shiver to slow em down and drop an Ice Patch right under em. They do the fish flop (very slowly at that) and you can wail away on em in relative safety. I had one when I first started playing and deleted him because I made some bad choices that I thought I was stuck with. Really wish I hadn't, since he'd be a good character to have and I liked his name (which has since been taken by someone else)