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Time Bomb gives you a clue as to when it's going to detonate. You can speed yourself up a bit by timing HoB to the BOOM. The KB from the Time Bomb will provide you with extra mitigatation and enough time to go over to your trip mine patch which can be an HOB's worth of Damage fewer in number.
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Originally Posted by Local_Man
I have Time Bomb in my build for my DP/Dev Blaster and plan to keep it. I find it fun to use solo . . . I spot a group, back away and set up several trip mines around a corner, and throw Caltrop on the spot. Then I run into the group (with Superspeed+Cloaking Dev) and set Time Bomb. Run back around the corner behind my Trip Mine field. Kaboom! and the survivors come to find me, run into the trip mines. Yeah, it takes too much time, but not everything in the game should be about killing stuff fast. Fun is good . . . even if everything is not optimized.
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-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
I think regardless of wether you have somehow found a use for Time Bomb by running ahead of groups and forcing others to play around your horrible power set, the effectiveness of this power is entirely negated if you are focusing on this power in any way. The time spent setting up bombs would easily be returned doubly by simply firing away mindlessly with your primary.
The devs need to relook at devices. Simple as that. The device set was nerfed back when Jack was still around making entire powersets useless and ignoring things like ice tanks being entirely broken and certain classes having no value at all. In the years since then it hasn't been touched.
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Depends on the primary. And whichever primary it is, you are taking return fire while firing away mindlessly with your primary. Personally, I *like* being able to wipe out all Minions on the Time Bomb blast, then the LTs on the followup AoE, and then the Bosses in another hit or two. Without Judgement or crashing. Ditto for Trip Mine fields to get an EB after the Time Bomb aggros them. Time for safety - a fair trade in my books.
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Originally Posted by Comfort
I think regardless of wether you have somehow found a use for Time Bomb by running ahead of groups and forcing others to play around your horrible power set, the effectiveness of this power is entirely negated if you are focusing on this power in any way. The time spent setting up bombs would easily be returned doubly by simply firing away mindlessly with your primary.
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Time for safety is a good game mechanic. I have no problem with it in concept. It is the implementation in /Devices that is problematic. The time lost is drastically too much. Not just a little too much.
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Originally Posted by JD_Gumby
Time for safety - a fair trade in my books.
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Why Blasters? Empathy Sucks.
So, you want to be Mental?
What the hell? Let's buff defenders.
Tactics are for those who do not have a big enough hammer. Wisdom is knowing how big your hammer is.
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*Throws block of cheese* |
Originally Posted by Comfort
The devs need to relook at devices. Simple as that. The device set was nerfed back when Jack was still around making entire powersets useless and ignoring things like ice tanks being entirely broken and certain classes having no value at all. In the years since then it hasn't been touched.
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I have time bomb, I do use it. I like to play differently on different blasters.
He will honor his words; he will definitely carry out his actions. What he promises he will fulfill. He does not care about his bodily self, putting his life and death aside to come forward for another's troubled besiegement. He does not boast about his ability, or shamelessly extol his own virtues. - Sima Qian.
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If it were just time bomb that was the iffy power in the set I'd say leave everything as is. As it stands though the devices powerset in general just doesn't hold up in normal game play.|
Originally Posted by New Dawn
I have time bomb, I do use it. I like to play differently on different blasters.
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I'm all for different play styles with characters, but the one devices encourages just doesn't mesh well with a team environment.
MA Arcs: Yarmouth 1509 and 58812
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For *you* it doesn't hold up. For me it definitely does, even if I tend not to be able to solo most ranged EBs (who tend not to pull well and there's not always a convenient corner to break LoS with. No big deal, really, since EBs are meant for groups anyway - hence the warning at the beginning of virtually every mission that involves one).
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Originally Posted by Oliin
If it were just time bomb that was the iffy power in the set I'd say leave everything as is. As it stands though the devices powerset in general just doesn't hold up in normal game play.
I'm all for different play styles with characters, but the one devices encourages just doesn't mesh well with a team environment. |
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That's fine that you do have it and you may even use it. Do you use it effectively though? Are the seconds spent finding an area to set it, setting it up, getting hit with splash from something, moving to another spot, punching it repeatedly until your power finally does set, at which point your team has moved on past you, is that part really what you would consider effective? Does this power require the use of several other powers to be effective, such as stealth and smokebomb, or is it effective on it's own? |
Originally Posted by New Dawn
*Throws block of cheese*
I have time bomb, I do use it. I like to play differently on different blasters. |
I think it's great that you like having different blasters with different playstyles, but I cannot honestly believe you have this power, use it regularly, and consider that it is working as it should be. If the devs came down from their magical floating skycastle and granted you time bombs that did less damage but set up instantly with a delayed blast (a delayed blast fireball) which no other powerset has, which still makes them unique just much more easy to control, you would be up in arms against changing it to allow you to use it on a team effectively with everyone else? Are you against it just because you like to solo or run off on your own all the time, and don't care how another player might want to be able to use this power and still bring value to their team?
The reason I'm so agitated about this subject is I played a fire/dev blaster to 45. I deleted it and rerolled a better toon. It's 50 now, and my main, and I love blasting. I like the idea of devices, but as they stand the powerset is mostly just an defect from a primative time in CoH history which is in my opinion firmly been waiting a long time for a second look by the devs. Until then, it is non-existant to me.
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Yeah, it's not a team power. We get it. It's best used solo, which is fine.|
Originally Posted by Comfort
That's fine that you do have it and you may even use it. Do you use it effectively though? Are the seconds spent finding an area to set it, setting it up, getting hit with splash from something, moving to another spot, punching it repeatedly until your power finally does set, at which point your team has moved on past you, is that part really what you would consider effective? Does this power require the use of several other powers to be effective, such as stealth and smokebomb, or is it effective on it's own?
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| If the devs came down from their magical floating skycastle and granted you time bombs that did less damage but set up instantly with a delayed blast (a delayed blast fireball) which no other powerset has, which still makes them unique just much more easy to control, you would be up in arms against changing it to allow you to use it on a team effectively with everyone else? |
Solo I am playing a type of Scout, Rogue, a trapper. In some games you get characters that unset traps, pick locks etc. My Devices lays a trap, pulls an 8 man teams worth of mobs to it and takes everything out. Is it good xp/time for soloing a blaster? Well there is a lot of survivability to it. The best xp/time comes from knowing just the right amount of tripmines so you don't over do it.
I personally think that there is a lot in the Devices set that can be used for team support. It's better in ways than other secondaries. Tripmines and Timebomb are -fight duration powers. In the old days a tank would herd a collosal amount of enemies into a container full of trip mines. They would not go off unless I was in range so I could shoot in and set them off once the container was fully packed. Nowadays a team may look at a group, not fancy their chances and have me to give them the laggiest bang ever so that the fight duration is short enough for them. I could scout ahead, drop a time bomb in the middle of a mob undetected and then at the moment it goes off have it stack with a trip mine, scoot back and open fire with autofire for my own kicks if I wanted.
Blasters are ranged/support. Not ranged/melee as some people may think and when it comes to support Devices has lots of useful things it can do for a team. It can be my duct tape Trick Archer so that I can tank AVs comfortably with any of my Tankers when there is no Defenders about. It can prevent back line defenders from getting attacked in melee. It also has control, ghostability which makes it a proper ranger/scout.
I've liked one idea to change Time bomb but they're unable to do it. Whatever ideas come up it just best not be trying to make one blaster like some other cos I do like to have a reason to play different blasters. Oh and sometimes Gun Drone I use to get mezzed instead of me, or take initial hits instead of me, whatevers the case on top of usual stuff.
He will honor his words; he will definitely carry out his actions. What he promises he will fulfill. He does not care about his bodily self, putting his life and death aside to come forward for another's troubled besiegement. He does not boast about his ability, or shamelessly extol his own virtues. - Sima Qian.
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This is not really the case anymore. When the game first came out it was true. Blasters had primary power sets with much longer animations and the animation times were unbalanced (Flares with a 3.3 second cast time for instance and less than 80 range) and AR and later Arch with most powers having cast time averaging 2 seconds.|
Originally Posted by New Dawn
Blasters are ranged/support. Not ranged/melee as some people may think...
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At the start blasters had lower hit points and did roughly the same damage as scrappers but had vastly lower survivability. We were told at that time that range = defense and the fact that blasters did damage from range was supposed to compensate for all the weaknesses and it did.....
Until the devs realized that some people were hovering out af range and never taking any damage so they fixed it so that the mobs out ranged the blasters and blasters started dropping like flies (a poor choice on the devs part since the speed at which you could do that vastly outweighed the safety provided ie: the time for safety trade off was far too high especially when compared to all the other ATs. This is currently the case with devices its an outlier in the time/safety trade off and not by a small margin.)
So Blasters were given defiance to compensate for that nerf but it didn't compensate for it. Animation times were too long and you were defeated long before you could get a reasonable amount of damage output going.
Since blasters were consistantly the lowest rewarding arch types the devs once again changed defiance. The tier 1 and 2 primary powers were all standardized for range and animation time and while this was going on animation times for sets like AR and Archery got tweaked to lower values.
These changes make blasters the "damage archtype" (a mis-nomer in most cases since the mobs still out range blasters, many scrappers and brutes can still out damage a blaster and they out survive them too, and brutes and scrappers are "designed" to be in melee and have real mez protection a lack that still results in more blaster defeats than any other single issue).
All blaster secondaries do damage but not all of them provide significant mitigation (/energy and /fire as examples), its not always melee damage but today's blasters are the damage/damage archtype not a damage/support archtype. Damage/support is the corruptor's role in the game.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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Oh hey, forgot about this thread.|
Originally Posted by JD_Gumby
For *you* it doesn't hold up. For me it definitely does, even if I tend not to be able to solo most ranged EBs (who tend not to pull well and there's not always a convenient corner to break LoS with. No big deal, really, since EBs are meant for groups anyway - hence the warning at the beginning of virtually every mission that involves one).
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I should probably clarify what I meant by normal since I wasn't terribly clear at all. The somewhat slower, more pre-fight setup based gameplay encouraged by the /dev powerset doesn't appear to be the typical (or 'normal') play style for CoH. So while it functions well enough when solo where you can have an unusual playstyle and be perfectly fine its overall usefulness tends to drop significantly when in groups.
So yea, basically /dev isn't generally a useful powerset when teaming. Big shock.
I don't recall having a lot of trouble soloing ranged EBs on my energy/dev actually. It's been a bit since I did any significant amount of soloing on her though. I do recall getting mostly destroyed by the Vanguard EB in the incarnate unlock arc, though trapdoor was a pushover. My general mindset for EBs has always been that they were the solo version of an AV. I know it's the 'solo and small group' version more than just solo but it still annoys me on the occasion where I can't solo one.
MA Arcs: Yarmouth 1509 and 58812
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Blasters are still Damage/Support, not as much support as Corrupters but its still support. An empath can turn my Elec/Elec into something of a decent tank mage then I would end up sort of doing the Tankers role then gazumping all the endurance a mob has for survivability because a Defender increases the level of support I can provide. There are tonnes of reasons and until the official source that told me its ranged/support tells me otherwise Blasters are going to always be ranged/support.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
All blaster secondaries do damage but not all of them provide significant mitigation (/energy and /fire as examples), its not always melee damage but today's blasters are the damage/damage archtype not a damage/support archtype. Damage/support is the corruptor's role in the game.
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In groups I expect blasters to use the best tools for the moment, this could mean as it does for me that the primary gets used alot. It's not like any blaster is forced to need the secondary most of the time.
He will honor his words; he will definitely carry out his actions. What he promises he will fulfill. He does not care about his bodily self, putting his life and death aside to come forward for another's troubled besiegement. He does not boast about his ability, or shamelessly extol his own virtues. - Sima Qian.
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If they are support they are pitiful support. The only spot where they get close to being reasonable isn't even in a secondary its sonic as a primary. The support they have in the secondary is with few exceptions uniformly minor, and when it isn't the blaster needs support to deliver the support |
Originally Posted by New Dawn
Blasters are still Damage/Support, not as much support as Corrupters but its still support. An empath can turn my Elec/Elec into something of a decent tank mage then I would end up sort of doing the Tankers role then gazumping all the endurance a mob has for survivability because a Defender increases the level of support I can provide. There are tonnes of reasons and until the official source that told me its ranged/support tells me otherwise Blasters are going to always be ranged/support.
In groups I expect blasters to use the best tools for the moment, this could mean as it does for me that the primary gets used alot. It's not like any blaster is forced to need the secondary most of the time. |
Blasters are not support.
Here, class, let us look to the Holy Trinity
Tank. Damage. Healer.
Healer is one that has the job of flitting about doing little but making sure their allies stay alive. You might also call this support.
Damage focuses on killing things.
Now, remember, our last class on BIG NUMBAHS? Big numbahs are what people look at when they verify how good you are at damage. Big numbahs don't always mean you're doing the most damage though, just that you hit very, very hard when you do.
Some would say that blasters do less damage, but in fact they do equal or more damage to some of the classes that get BIG NUMBAHS because they get to flit around overhead or hide far away and hit things, lots of things with lots of different powers that all focus around doing damage.
There are also some blasters who sacrifice all their cool damage bonuses and recharge bonuses for defense, because maybe they thing they are scrappers or maybe they're just bad at staying alive or maybe they couldn't find their rise of the phoenix button.
There are also blasters that play /devices and they will never get big numbahs or even really do much of anything but fly around hoping to summon pet or bombs or something and getting punched in the face instead, never summoning anything and in general being useless.
Edit: Just kidding, I've actually found a reason for device blasters and it's so they can throw caltrops down, slowing mobs for me to kill in nice groups while they wander off and be otherwise useless.
They will not do anything with Time Bomb, let alone Device. So posting about this set or any power within this set to be fixed is really a useless thread.
At this point there are enough threads about Device in this forum, that if someone fails to do a search and then finds out it is lacking somehow, it's their own fault for not doing a search in the first place.
1. Why Soft Cap is Important : http://dechskaison.blogspot.com/2011...important.html
2. Limits: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Limits
3. Attack Mechanics: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Attack_Mechanics
4. Rule of Five: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Rule_o...e_Law_of_Fives