Psi/ice?

I was thinking of rolling a psi/ice blaster, but cant find much info on psi as a primary. Can anyone lend some insight here? How does the set play? Is there no info on it because its not any good?

just rolled one last week i like the play style its fun not slotted it yet but i say give it ago it is good¬

There were several changes made in the transition from defender to blaster psi blast, and, as mentioned, many think that these changes left the set worse off.

First, the power swaps. From the original set, subdue and psi scream were pulled to go into mental manipulation - psi scream unchanged, subdue turned into the obligatory immob. This, of course, left two holes in the original set.

For subdue, mental blast was bumped up to be the tier 2 and psi dart was tapped to fill mental blast's spot. Unless you considered the potential immob of subdue as important, this was actually a net positive for blasters - they got better DPA on their tier 2 and a shorter cast/better DPA on their tier 1 out of it. Psi scream's hole was simply filled by aim. Whether this is a plus or a minus is iffy - aim is nice, to be sure, but this also leaves the set *very* light on AoE - only sonic really competes with it on that front, and the -res on howl probably still puts sonic ahead.

The real annoyance, though, is the change to will domination. For no apparent reason, blaster will dom was heavily nerfed in the transition - it went from being a damage scale 1.96, 14 second recharge attack to a damage scale 1.24, 20 second recharge attack, without gaining a thing to offset it. Thanks to the damage difference, defenders do almost as much absolute damage with the power as blasters do, despite blasters having a ranged damage modifier almost twice that of defenders.

Basically, the problem is that there's nothing psi blast does that another set doesn't do better. It's probably the worst blaster set for AoE, and thanks to the will dom nerf its single target damage isn't good enough to compensate. The set is no great shakes on overall mitigation, either, especially with the removal of the biggest source of AoE -rech in psi scream, and since scramble thoughts sucks so much.

If you want mitigation and single target damage, sonic beats psi and has better AoE to boot. Fire massively shreds it on both ST and AoE, and ice likewise has psi beat on ST damage, AoE damage, and mitigation. Both of the latter sets also have far fewer issues with enemy resistances. The set just has too many weaknesses and no real strengths to offset. Amusingly enough, the defender version of the set would have had better st *and* aoe damage, and better mitigation to boot - the only thing missing would have been aim.

That's not to say that you can't make the set work. It's one of the worse blaster primaries, but it'll still kill stuff fairly well. It's just that there are several sets that do everything it does, only better.

Thanks for the info. I had figured that the set was lacking overall based on values of the powers in the set and the lack of AoE, but it's nice to hear confirmation about it. Too bad, it's such a great conceptual power set.