Devs, for the love of...

Absolutely. The main problem is that only Caltrops and Taser really have any in-combat use. Good luck planting a Trip Mine at the AV's foot (and I prefer to stay at range too); you will get interrupted. Gun Drone can be summoned at range, but it's sometimes difficult to tell whether the damage the drone provides really makes up for the 7 seconds of damage you could have been doing when you were summoning the drone instead, and that's assuming the drone even lives for the full 90 seconds.

I saw someone suggest changing Time Bomb into a clone of Omega Maneuver, either in this thread or another. YES. PLEASE. I will totally make room for that.

You can all ready do this....... every ~180 seconds with SOs and Hasten.

It takes planning, timing, and a bit of luck to do it. It also takes 25ish seconds to pull off (my Arch/Dev does this all the time). You place the time bomb behind the spawn, the trip mine in front of the spawn on a caltrop patch and then back away to 90 feet, hit Aim and RoA just as the Time Bomb starts flashing faster.

The Boom and RoA hit at the same time. The KB propels any still living mobs on to the Trip Mine for a spawn finishing Boom. Stragglers are easily finished off with Fistfull or Explosive.

Oh, that's too much you say? Strangely enough you can do that same amount of damage in 8.5 seconds with Aim, RoA, Fistfull, Explosive, Fistfull plus you get another 10%ish damage from defiance.

With the above set up for Time Bomb and Trip Mine the huge defiance buffs from those powers wear off long before Time Bomb explodes, essentially providing no benefit. If you fire off RoA before the defiance buff wears off none of the mobs will be in Time Bomb radius when it finally goes off or you'll have killed all the mobs. Numerically you are better off dropping Time Bomb at your feet and ignoring it, and using the 52% defiance buff on your AoE salvo (it lasts 15 seconds). You "might" catch a boss in the explosion if you (or it, depending on the boss) can survive the 15 seconds to detonation.

Sorry I seem to not be conveying my point.

Yes you can do all the above with primaries. If you have the secondary doing it as well you have the ability to do that X2. Its pretty obvious from where the devs placed the stops on blaster damage they don't want that kind of damage as mitigation available to the AT. Which is why I'd be willing to bet blasters dont get the ability to take out bosses with a sequenced attack that they dont get to reply to.

edit: Reread, think i see what is being missed.

If you decrease the cast time of time bomb it will be buffed by aim from sets that have it.

In the the toe bomb scenario you could hit aim drop time bomb have it explode while still buffed, drop trip mine have it explode while buffed, and finish with inferno, nova, psy wail etc all in that window.

That is more damage than build up+ any of the attacks from the other secondaries.

Should that be possible ? I think so but if you look at blaster performance its significantly above the rest of the AT.

Standard code rant applies but, they "could" make it do that by making the TD ticks still occur every .5 seconds but have the buff last 260 seconds (the life of trip mine) and making it so that it doesn't stack. Since buffs on the caster are copied to psuedo pets when they are summoned this would do the trick for all blasters regardless of primary. (Provided the devs code Gun Drone as a Psuedo Pet rather than an actual pet.) It would also mean that TD would still provide it's benefit to the tier 1 and 2 primary and tier 1 secondary while mezzed solving that little problem too. (Unless you get chain mezzed for more than 260 seconds.

Sorry. disregard. That's PvP I was thinking about.

Ever play a Fire/Fire or a Rad/Fire? My Rad/Fire can put out about 50% more damage in 11 seconds of casting time than you can get with Trip Mine, Time Bomb, Aim and RoA and it can kick that kind of damage out every 30 seconds, and the lions share of that damage is from the secondary. Fire/Fire does it faster because Breath of Fire, Fireball, and Rain of Fire animate in less time than Iradiate, Electron Haze, and Neutron Bomb.

Also my Arch/Dev CAN take out a boss with a sequenced attack that they don't get to reply to. RoA is a non-targeted AoE. It can be fired around a corner without LoS. Trip Mine and Time Bomb don't require LoS either.

Even without criticals from Trip Mines, a stack of 4 with Time Bomb, and RoA + Aim will take out Bosses that aren't highly resistant to Lethal and Fire.

Oddly enough my Arch/Energy/Mace Blaster with Cardiac slotted can do it too...... but in about 1/4 the time it takes to set up the devices.

Edit

Again all ready possible as the buff from inspirations lasts for 60 seconds. Soloing outdoor maps with my Rad/Fire at +0/x8 and having 5-15 active inspirations is a common occurrence. Not so the Arch/Dev.

There is this phantom rule they call the "cottage rule". Basically it means they will not change a power from what was its original intention. So Time Bomb would still have to be "Time Bomb". You could mess around with the numbers a bit but it still has to look and feel a bit like the original power, otherwise the players who like it as it is will complain. Which did occur when they changed some powers around in the early stages of the game. So they learned or felt they did not want to incur player wrath yet again. Especially with a game that is 6 years old. As for some, something that drastic ( Yes I know its really not drastic ) would cause people to unsub and try something else. Which is the last thing they really want to happen at this time.

Now they could add something to it like a second options assuming the original power was still there and available. EG if they allowed you to set the bomb off when you wanted earlier then the designated time. Lets say for a bit less damage by reclicking the power. Maybe it would have an orange ring around it similar to DW does with the chain attacks. Once you lay down trip mine it slowly fades until it goes off normally or you can fire it off premature.

Played both. Its one thing to do that kind of damage over 11 seconds while the spawn is trying to kill you. Its another to do that kind of damage in the space of 4 seconds while the spawn either doesn't know you are there or they are being knocked around and can't do anything about it.

Of course if it were a melee toon it would be able to stand in that spawn picking roses.

Currently getting the boss on the time bomb when he needs to be is vaudeville. Laying down the 5-6 trip mines you need to make that work limits the rate at which it can be used.

At the risk of belaboring the point: for a ranged Blaster, almost every Secondary only has a couple of in-combat powers -- Build Up and usually one or two others at best. People usually argue (and I think rightly) that Devices' main flaw is the lack of Build Up on a burst-damage-reliant AT, a singular lack for which Devices never truly compensates despite the set's high situational utility.

But it is a singular lack. Simply tallying useful powers is rarely a good measure of inter-set balance.

This is usually where the discussion veers off into a heated debate about whether or not Blasters should be played as a ranged AT, which is a fine subject for another thread. The bottom line, though, for me, is that all Blaster Secondaries could use some revisiting -- not with an eye towards eliminating or invalidating the Blapper playstyle (though frankly it's always seemed a rather clumsy aspect of the AT's design), but with a view towards providing more general utility on an AT that seriously lacks for a proper role of any kind, at least at the high end:

Pure damage dealer is well and good in an MMO that incentivizes that sort of thing, but we don't play one of those (and by incentivizing I don't mean to suggest that CoH should enforce hard-and-fast team-composition requirements). In any encounter where damage output might actually be the difference between team success and team defeat, a debuffer is almost always a better option than a Blaster -- and not just a better option. A much better option. Likewise, few if any competent high-level teams have any issue clearing large spawns of normal opponents quickly, with or without so-called dedicated damage dealers.

And Blasters at the high end really aren't very good at soloing, comparatively speaking. Sure, they can kill stuff fast. Sure, any half-decent player can sleep walk through normal content at base or even slightly above-base difficulty levels with any build. That said, any melee build is miles better given equal amounts of investment. Most any well-IOed buff/debuff/control class is far better in terms of success-failure capability, too.

So the Blaster is an ersatz support AT, with no bona-fide (or if you prefer, uncommon and clearly defined) support capability. I guess the best term for the Blaster's role would be "artillery," but their practical damage advantage relative to their foot-soldier counterparts doesn't meet the analogy's standard. Heck, even the medics in our tortured metaphor can rival the Blaster with respect to their practical contribution to team damage output.

With all of that said, and with a mild cringe at the semi-derail and all that may come in response to it, I have never understood why the developers are so afraid of Blasters -- why non-IOed Blasters are basically required to use melee attacks to create a full attack chain, why their best ranged attacks have such short range (40' now was actually 20' at launch), why the craven AI actually penalizes AoE Blasters far more than AoE melee builds (when I do get the urge to blap, I see so many sliver-of-life runners on my Blaster that I'm half-tempted to ask for a freaking taunt aura), why Blaster nukes, which are only good for one spawn per several minutes, generally carry a massive crash with them, why the intersection of Primary and Secondary must always resolve into a false dilemma pitting overpowered control/debuff against a slew of largely redundant attack powers. For a more recent example, someone obviously took some pains to make Targeted AoE IO sets the red-headed step child of defensive bonuses -- an elegant move if taken in isolation, but all of the above applies all at once, turning Blasters into the closest thing we have to a hard-mode AT.

And if that's what people like, that's fine. I'd just like to see some more interesting build options than, "Take a zillion attacks." And I don't see the harm in buffing some of the AT's under-appreciated powers and sets, which in my opinion include nearly every Secondary. We've clearly reached (or nearly reached) the limit of the devs' inclination to boost our damage to differentiate us from other ATs. We've also clearly seen other ATs break the set of rules that are supposed to have restricted Blasters from receiving more (or better) utility powers for all of this time. (Play a Dominator or a Widow or any number of Controller builds if you haven't realized that already.)

If the concern is that adding more general utility to Blasters would make them as tank-magey as, or even more tank-magey than other ATs, then we've got a lot of room yet to work with.

Sounds good. Exchanging a Build Up power that would be available every 20-30 seconds for a high-powered (and not-buffable-by-the-absent-Build-Up) pseudo-nuke every couple of minutes sounds like an entirely reasonable trade off.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I still think the VEAT model is fascinating when compared to blasters. The Dominator is also of great interest. The guiding principle of Dominators is that have dual primaries of control and damage (Link to I15 dominator revamp thread). It is interesting to point out that the general gist of that conversation was that the blaster team role was so well defined, no one ever needed to ask what they brought to teams.

The issue with defining blasters aside from damage is that the AT is kind of all over the place when it comes to a secondary role. Control is mostly the secondary function, which is why Doms play similarly. However, that is not strictly the flavor behind the various blast and manipulation (devices) sets. Also, any improvements to the blaster AT that pushes more control at them just makes them more like dominators, which would be less than desirable, IMO.

I agree that they probably could do quite a bit to make the AT more entertaining and less prone to face-planting. I'd prefer to see them focus on the variety in the AT, rather than draw the various sets closer together (although a few changes could be AT wide, especially if it were to involve powers shared across many sets (nukes, snipes, AIM/BU)).

But /Devices seems to have a special need, IME. I'd rather address that one set first and see how it goes. In other words, I'd buff the crap out of /devices and then assess its state after several months. If it is in a good state, I'd re-work all the other sets then. And all of that is aside from the fact that Gun Drone going into melee is a bug (or an unfortunate consequence of how some new code functions, but either way, it should be a priority fix).

Why? Solo I can consume a tray full of insps and deal that damage in relative safety and when I'm done with the spawn I have a full tray of insps again and 30 seconds (or more) duration on the previous batch of insps.

Teamed I'm buffed, the enemy is debuffed and/or controlled, and the tank has them all in a neat pile for me to obliterate.

Devices doesn't work that way. It takes 3 times as long to do 75% of the damage for a safety trade off that isn't a good trade at all. Devices isn't a good set for teaming, its powers are all marginalized by the presence of teammates, and/or IO sets. Its an OK set for soloing it's very safe and very time consuming. The risk to reward ratio is very much out of kilter for /Devices. It's also the set that gets the very least out of defiance and the only one that didn't do well when defiance was updated.

Indeed, blasters are still at a massive disadvantage when compared to a melee toon mostly due to the dev vision for the AT.

It's not hard to do, its merely time consuming. The reward is NOT worth the time it takes to pull it off. Both scenarios are broken and in need of repair.

Against EBs, sure, and on higher +#/x# settings. At normal difficulties, though, against normal (plus Bosses) foes, they're just fine...

To you, perhaps. Not everyone has the Go! Go! Go! mentality where speed is everything.

I was speaking numerically not anecdotally.

41 post from 21 unique posters. Your the only one talking about go mentality.

Further if you need Trip mine for normal setting, well lets just say I can't think of what you would need with Trip mine on regular setting. Running regular setting I could just use my primaries and maybe Caltrops. I just think Trip mine is over kill for regular setting. Unless your one of those guys that take all the travel powers and whirlwind, then I could understand the necessity.

Well, to be fair, I've always found there's enough skippable powers in /dev that I could comfortably get away with taking two or three of the travel powers.

I think at one point I had SS/Fly/TP in order to help a friend get around the shard and then to see what all the hubbub was about whirlwind un-rooting the blast animations and the better stealth with SS. It really didn't impact my capabilities on a team in the slightest. Solo yea a little, but teaming not at all.

Edit: I misspoke slightly. Skippable isn't really the right word. It's more of a lack of "must-have" powers for me than much of anything being 'skippable' (other than time bomb and possibly smoke grenade if you have a stealth IO or use SS for a travel power).

Fighting against +0x0 using as many insps as you like everything is fine, and by that logic there was never a need to nerf or buff anything in the game because they were all fine.

This is an interesting idea and would be a nice option as well.

This just shows HOW much /Devices needs fixing on the whole. The devs give us powers to take, not to skip. (And I don't blame you, Oliin, or anyone for skipping any powers.) But since lots of people seem to skip a lot of the "big and impactful" powers in the /devices set, it's a HUGE indicator to the devs that they need to do something about it. The devs just need to wake up and devote some time to fixing these things. I love new content as much as everyone else and I know it's what keeps people paying every month, but at least once a quarter, I'd like to have a big patch where things are fixed or QoL is added in.

Gun Drone is obviously bugged. It going into melee all started when they made the changes to the Malta version several issues ago. It has been long enough for the devs to fix it and and I'm tired of /bugging it. They need to fix its AI, in the VERY least. I would only hope they will see this thread (and others) and realize that Gun Drone and /Devices on the whole need other major fixes as well.