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

Honestly, my casual attitude towards defense is half joking. But I am a super fan of recharge and will stack it endlessly.

You are correct. I love my blaster and my recharge build more than most people love chicken. And it performs. So, when I see posts (not yours) saying building for recharge is 'foolish', I provide the other side of the coin.

How much faster? Hmmm. Sometimes all it takes is one extra second to die, so every second is precious.

As for spending time throwing holds and bonfire and not doing damage... that's usually set up time. Stealth up, set up, bang bang. I rarely need it in an emergency. When I do, it's certainly quicker than hibernate, or phase shifting.

Ten +1 mobs get into melee with you, you're going down. I stay out of melee until the junk is clear, then it's a quick hold/hold on the boss (which, drops some of their unique resists etc allowing MORE DAMAGE) and we're done.

So, I get what everyone is saying about defense. What I don't get is why my style is considered less effective.

I herd 10 +1 mobs into melee so I can destroy them with AoEs.

I prefer to play on settings where 10 (or more) +1 mobs are standing together so I don't have to herd and can leap into melee (or TP) into melee and destroy them. Fighting +1s, going for recharge is silly, IMO. I can AoE kill most of a spawn in under 10 seconds then have another 5 ro 10 seconds to finish a few stragglers. All of my AoEs recharge in under 10 seconds without Hasten and with just 17.5% global recharge.

I can see going for +recharge on Archery, Rifle, and Pistols, in order to get those sweet tier 9s up faster. +Recharge on Devices is also very nice (that way you can use your primary more...). And +recharge on MM is OK (although I find DP is up plenty often with just good slotting and perma-DP is not much better than DP every 50 seconds). But for most other blaster combinations it seems frivolous in the general sense.

Perhaps if you fight a lot of +3s and +4s, then maybe the +recharge could also be better in a general case. I am still assessing this by playing on +3 or +4 more often (or running the new TFs). In the old days, I found spawns at those settings would live long enough that I often got to use my AoEs twice a spawn (and wishing they recharged in 5 or 6 seconds instead of 8 or 9). However, that is not as common now. More often I have more teammates that can also do AoE destruction with me and even when the +4s take longer to kill they do so in a way that I can use the AoEs twice in spawn A and they are still recharged when we hit spawn B (or as is more often the case in the group I run with, 3 of us hit spawn A, while 3 hit spawn B and 1 hits spawn C, while 1 of us bops in between all three, then after the AoEs on spawn B go off I switch to spawn A for single target cleanup and maybe another volley of AoEs if necessary, then some of us go help on spawn C while others look for spawns D and E and F...).

Fair enough.

Not to belabor the point, but I feel this bit above is worth fleshing out just for anyone who might actually have the patience to have read this far.

Assuming you're already at the ED cap for recharge enhancement on every relevant power, the Very Rare Spiritual Alpha is worth as much as (0.66*45) + (0.34*45*0.15) = about 32% in global recharge.

So the difference between your DEF build with 70% +recharge from IOs and your recharge build with 110% +recharge from IOs works out to about 110 - (70 + 32) = 8%. That's basically one Luck of the Gambler proc, a difference but not a terribly significant one once we've finished stacking all of the various bonuses elsewhere.

Now as we all know, recharge benefits long-cooldown powers more than short-cooldown powers, because the former are farther away from the bottleneck of the cast time. So let's look at a typical nuke with a 360-second base cooldown to get the best possible upside of an extra 8% recharge:

• Recharge build: 360 base recharge / (1 base + 0.95 ED-compliant slotting + 0.7 Hasten + 1.1 global recharge) = 96 seconds.
• DEF build: 360 base recharge / (1 base + 0.95 ED-compliant slotting + 0.7 Hasten + 0.7 global recharge + 0.32 Alpha) = 98.09 seconds.

So in basically the best possible case, you're saving 2 seconds. Needless to say, 360-second nukes come with other, significant downsides that might prevent your wanting use the power as often as possible, but they provide the most extreme example. That said, there are technically no diminished returns on recharge rate except where you begin to collide with the power's activation time. There is, however, a diminished practical return in the sense that players aren't robots, and thus it's easy to lose a 1 or 2-second recharge advantage (getting caught in the activation of another power, not paying rapt attention, heck, even sneezing at the wrong time).

A couple more examples: For a 60-second-cooldown power (like Rain of Arrows), that 8% gap in recharge translates into a ~0.35 second difference. For a 16-second-cooldown power (typical targeted AoE power like Fireball), that 8% gap in recharge translates into a 0.09 second difference.

Small differences in global recharge are mainly relevant to the extent that they affect your most commonly used, seamlessly-strung-together and (pre-)queued-by-rote powers, as in an attack chain. Unfortunately, those powers are also more prone to diminished returns because their cooldown starts to run up against the cast-time bottleneck faster. Suffice to say that it's very unlikely that these builds would have different attack chains as a result of the recharge disparity in this case. (Both can run the much-touted Blaze-Blast-Flares chain with no gaps, for instance.)

The main advantage for the recharge build is that it can afford to take Musculature instead of Spiritual. How much difference does that make in practice?

Welp, you're looking at the same ~32% bonus from the top-tier Musculature boost assuming all of your attacks are already at the ED cap. But that's not a net bonus, it's stackable with any number of other bonuses:

• Recharge build: 1.125 Blaster damage scale * (1 + 0.95 slotting + 0.32 Alpha) = 2.59 standing damage, with no Defiance, no Aim/Build Up, no other global damage bonuses of any kind.
• Damage build: 1.125 Blaster damage scale * (1 + 0.95 slotting) = 2.19 standing damage, same as above.

So best case, the Musculature Alpha gives the Recharge build a 2.59 / 2.19 = about an 18% damage advantage, a sizable bonus. But Blasters generally care most about their damage output when they're spiking, and if they're DPSing, they generally try to use their large damage buffs as often as possible.

With full Defiance (which can be estimated at about a 40% damage bonus), we're looking at an advantage for the recharge build of about 13.6%. With Aim and Defiance, we're looking at an advantage for the recharge build of about 11%. With Build Up and Defiance, we're looking at an advantage of about 9.5%. With both Build Up and Aim (no Defiance because we're probably starting a fight here), we're looking at an advantage of 8.9% for the recharge build.

And of course, the Musculature boost does not affect damage procs, though Blasters probably don't use those as much as other ATs do (due to a relative lack of opportunity if nothing else).

But hey, let's assume that the average relative benefit of the Musculature Alpha is 15%. That's still a good large number, at least in principle.

Defensively, the recharge build (assuming 20% DEF) takes six times as many hits as the DEF build, provided we're looking at the right type of attack. We will not always face the appropriate attack type, so it's kinda hard to draw a direct comparison between the two builds -- but it's pretty clear that the defensive benefits are numerically superior to the offensive benefits provided your play style favors the attack types to which you can stack DEF.

That's the big caveat. As long as we're making disclaimers, it is true that the DEF build's big advantage can be marginalized in a team with the right (or wrong) buffs, but it's also true that the recharge build's Musculature boost can be trivialized by team buffs. The unfortunate bottom line is that highly optimized Blaster builds, even the best of them, are at a general disadvantage relative to highly optimized builds of other ATs.

As far as the Incarnate content goes, my understanding is not that DEF is rendered meaningless in the new Trial. The only hard numbers we have now (as far as I know) indicate that the ToHit is simply higher in the new content (64% versus 50%), which actually tends to favor IOed DEF builds over non-DEF builds, because the former are more likely to reach the higher Incarnate-content soft cap through team buffs than a build with no DEF at all (or none worth mentioning).

As always, you will never find a build, and particularly a Blaster build, that derives maximum benefit in every situation. All you can do is firm up your own self-contained performance.

It's not a matter of style. Clearly, some tactics and some builds will favor some players more than others. Player skill or preference certainly influences performance, but ultimately we can't quantify those things. If you divorce the build from the player and just look at numerical trade offs, then DEF comes out ahead once you've passed a certain point with global recharge.

That doesn't mean that your approach can't be equally or even more effective for you (though your approach doesn't entirely eschew DEF, or AFAIK make loony-toon sacrifices to push recharge into the stratosphere). It does mean that preposterously high-recharge build recommendations have to be viewed with a heavy dose of skepticism. Sometimes such recommendations come from legitimate insight into the particular player or build in question, but more often than not they arise from a kind of knee-jerk fixation on the presumed role of the Blaster, and/or from an ignorance of the game's mechanics.

[Bolding used above simply to help navigate my embarrassingly long wall o' text, not for rhetorical effect. Sorry for the ramble.]

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Ha ha ha ha!!

(I laugh because I am part of this group StratoNexus is talking about--and it's fun to do this!! Crazy, but fun!)

So to add on to some others' comments and to help bring back full circle to Op's original statements...

Yes, I too purposely herd or jump into the middle of 10 or more +1 mobs with my DP/MM blaster and prefer fighting this way--with this toon and build. This blaster combo lends itself to this particular type of playstyle. And I built the toon specifically to survive in large mobs and AoE them to death--but it's not an uber defense-heavy build like you might think. It's just a well-rounded and AoE heavy build with moderate recharge and defenses and a few extras for surviving inside a large group--and it's VERY successful. Rarely, if ever, do I perish with this toon. And this build cost me about as much as any other toon I have.

However, on the other side of the coin, I do have an Arch/Dev blaster that I spent billions on for maxed out recharge--but it has very little defenses and really, its only defense is its offense. Why did I build it for max out rech then? Purely for fun; and I also wanted to see just how much rech I could squeeze out of it without gimping my powers, toon, or playstyle. So with Spiritual Core alpha incarnate, I'm able to get my Rain of Arrows down to 14.5s rech vs. ~16.8s to 17s on a "normal" build. Do those extra 2 seconds matter on my RoA? Maybe, maybe not. As someone mentioned previously... 1s can be the difference in life and death for a toon. But this toon works best in a team support capacity rather than solo'ing (although I do solo with it successfully but at lower difficulty levels).

...and back to the Op's statements...

So yes, you can max out your rech and spend billions to do so for only a second or 2 off your times OR you can spend "normal" amounts on a decent well-rounded or defensive/survivable build.

As what was also pointed out in this thread, there seems to be a mentality that +rech is the "Holy Grail" but not just for blasters but for ALL toons. You hear it all the time in global channels, "yea! I have perma-Hasten" "I have perma-this" "perma-that" "perma, perma, perma...." So Elektro, it's no wonder you thought building for +rech WAS what you should strive for. But again, as a reminder to everyone, the "Holy Grail" is not just +rech or just +def instead... it's whatever YOU see fit for the toon, your playstyle, and/or budget.

My Arch/Dev's "Holy Grail" is +recharge. My DP/MM's "Holy Grail" is defense/survivability.

Recharge builds and defensive builds both have upsides and lesser-upsides. One is not better than the other on the whole. Some people do prefer one over the other (which is fine), others prefer a balance (which is fine), and others avoid blasters all together (which is absurd)! But building to what YOU think is best for you is always the way to go. YOU are playing the toon, so build it so that YOU have fun with it.

That's true.

There's a 20% recharge base buff that lasts an hour, though. People frequently forget about that.