Blasters: Chasing the holy grail of recharge? Or chasing your tail?

I've been tweaking my alpha build for my DP/Em blaster.

I came across something that never dawned on me.... in some of my most expensive builds there is an obvious price in influence but also a secondary cost of my defense. My Defense, especially positional, gets very low with purple slotting.

BUT I found a way around this. Next step.... see how awesome I could become with purple slotting for recharge.

My goal was to take my piddly 139% Recharge blaster, and turn him into a 175% recharge monster. How amazingly expensive would this be? Well I find I can do it with 4 sets of purples.

You figure out the influence.

But the funny thing is all this time I've been thinking this is the Blaster holy grail. Is it not?

Then I looked according to Mid's with my Uber recharge build, I can get my nuke up every 35.86 seconds!

According to mid's with my 'cruddy' no purple build, I can get my nuke up every 36.51 seconds.

Am I missing something or is the message here that I would be paying a few billion influence for about a second of recharge?

Two things:

1) Recharge is subject to diminishing returns. Every % you add does less for you than the % that came before it. This is because recharge is in the denominator of the formula.

2) Typically, no one builds for "as much recharge as possible." They build for "enough recharge to run my optimal attack chain."

I certainly see that now.

I did not think the return was that low, considering my primary build has no purples, and my 'uber' build had 4. I didn't think 4 sets of x10% recharge netted me a second. That's still.... very underwhelming.

If you don't plan to exemp much purples aren't too great on a Blaster. They give lots of recharge, but no defense... and defense is often the thing blasters build for.

Extremely high recharge builds are mainly good for characters who have a long recharge power they need to make permanent. Domination or Phantom Army, for instance, are far more effective permanent than with even one second of downtime. With Blasters there aren't really any such powers though... all recharge does is let you nuke more often or use more AoEs. That's handy, but in practice you only need so much recharge to do it. My Blaster recharge goals are generally:

1) Have a non-stop single target attack chain. I go for this on every Blaster.

2) Be able to use a crashless nuke every spawn (for Archery or AR, DP's nuke is more of an every other spawn thing). That can get a bit expensive but it's handy.

3) Be able to use Aim or Build Up every spawn. Takes about the same recharge as the crashless nuke, but applies to all Blasters with Aim and Build Up.

Once I have those, there's no real need for more recharge. I'm not going to be using Rain of Arrows twice a spawn or getting Aim and Build Up every spawn with any sane level of recharge, so once I have a solid attack chain and I can use all my AoEs each fight what is more recharge really giving me?

About the only purples I'd consider on a Blaster (assuming I ever get so attatched to one I use purples on him) are the Sleep or Confuse sets (for the bonuses) or the PBAoE or Targeted AoE sets. Thunderstrikes and Lockdowns are far too useful for defense to replace with purples... if I need more recharge that's what LotGs are for.

Recharge works like this...

Get to perma hasten. Stop.

If not, build defense.

Recharge is a mindset. If you are not of that mindset, it's absolutely useless to you.

I slot 5 purple sets. I shun defense on my primary build.

Generally, I run in big groups. And I'm always the high damage dealer of the group.

A lot depends on whether you solo much. Decent defense (25-35% or so, don't need to softcap) makes a huge difference for soloing on medium difficulties (+1/x4 or so). If you have a crashless nuke then recharge can also help a lot since if you use the nuke every spawn you can generally fight larger crowds, but if you don't have a crashless nuke recharge does almost nothing beyond a certain point.

Once you have a good single target chain, more recharge will do little to help you improve DPS on hard targets since you're probably still using the same chain. Only if you add so much recharge that you can move up to a better chain does it help, for instance going from Flares -> Fire Blast -> Flares -> Blaze to Flares -> Fire Blast -> Blaze. And once you hit that higher chain you're done... you aren't getting Blaze -> Fire Blast even at the recharge cap.

Likewise, once you have your AoEs up every fight and maybe your targeted AoE up twice, do you really need more recharge? You're already wiping out the minions with AoE blasts... finishing off the Lts and bosses is more a job for your single target attacks.

Of course that's only while solo. In large teams there are generally more than enough bad guys to go around... the faster you can toss out AoEs the more you add to the team. But solo you just aren't going to need three fireballs on one spawn, unless for some reason you play at +4. What you do need is to stay alive long enough to take out a full spawn with no tank or controller mitigating their return fire... so unless you can wipe them out before they shoot (have I mentioned how much I love Rain of Arrows ) you are going to want some defense if you plan to up your difficulty much.

On my Arch/Dev/Mun blaster, I have chased the highest recharge I can get out of the build without sacrificing what I consider useful/needed powers. And when it gets its Spiritual Core Paragon (tier 4 recharge) alpha incarnate slotted, I'll have Rain of Arrows recharging every 14.5s.

...but this blaster is as squishy as bug under your shoe. But in a team setting, I dish out a LOT of damage and have been know to steal aggro from tankers and scrappers. And this build was EXTREMELY expensive and is really only for me... does my team care if my rain of Arrows rech in 16.73s or 14.5s? No. But to me it's worth it and fun.

My DP/Mental/Mun blaster on the other hand, I built for survivability (and moderate rech). Even though I do not have softcapped def and only moderate resists in S/L... it is EXTREMELY survivable and I have no fear when I play it. I have no problems facing off one-on-one with AVs/EBs or playing at +1/+2 (x8). ...I can't do that with my Arc/Dev blaster. This defensive build was expensive, but no where near as much as my Arch/Dev's rech build.

(And I don't know why people say DP damage is bad... I am usually ahead of the tank and leveling the mob before the team gets there--or off on my own mob nearby and finishing an entire mob in roughly the same amount of time as the team).

Anyway... your "Holy Grail" for your blaster is whatever you want it to be (as in life too, I suspect ).... if you feel recharge will suit you best then go for it! if you feel defense is better then go for it instead.

This is currently my favorite set up for my ice/ice/cold:
Aim
Buildup
Icestorm
Blizzard
Pop a blue
Hibernate
Hasten
Kill whatevers left
Smile and laugh

Of course I can't do that every mob, but thanks to hasten and spiritual I can do it pretty often.

My archery/fire blaster is perma hasten with 28 ranged and about the same for S/L defense. I'm pretty happy with it solo, on teams I rarely have any problems. I have Nerve in my alpha as of now, but may change it to Muscular. Dead things don't hit back

Edit: BTW, it wasn't cheap!

I'm closing in on softcapped s/l/e and perma-hasten on my DP/MM. I doubt if I can get hasten to true perma, but being six or eight seconds off isn't a big deal really.

If it's a choice between rech and def, though, I think you're foolish to go for +rech as anything other than archery (and maybe AR.) Most blasters are going to spend significant time either in melee or with things shooting at you, and as OP notes, you can add a lot of defense at the cost of a small amount of functional recharge time.

Damage per second goes to zero when you die.

Most blasters get a ton of damage out of their secondary abilities, which means spending a decent amount of time in melee. Being in melee without having solid defense means you're likely to die.

OP's question isn't about cheap builds; it's not a decision between having a softcapped build with no recharge and a high recharge build with zero defense. And as OP discovered, moving from "high recharge blaster" to "recharge monster" doesn't deliver a ton of benefit. So why would you want to?