Favorite Crashless Nuke

Blizzard + Blue Inspiration.

Rain of Arrows, definitely. Hail of Bullets is fantastic looking but it takes too long to recharge to ever be able to use it every spawn unless you are fighting purples, while Rain can be up every 20-25 seconds. Going only by awesomeness of animation it's HoB > FA > Rain, but adding in actual ability to "arrest" things (with extreme prejudice ) Rain comes out on top.

LRM rocket is also awesome, but it just takes too long to recharge and requires taking the epic pool with the worst armor. I have it on one character and it's a lot of fun, but he also has Rain of Arrows and there's no question which I like more.

Miladys earlier post is also disingenuous when talking about timing. Using HoB is not really slower than firing up RoA or Full Auto. RoA actually takes a good amount of time to activate, and Full Auto does fire for a long time. HoB does technically have a longer animation than the other two, but running in is not going to add much to the animation. If you're taking more than half a second to get into range for HoB to get the job done, you are doing it wrong. Either Sprint in or use Hurdle with CJ and get in there fast: that takes very little time.

Another thing to consider is that for RoA or Full Auto to drop minions and maybe/probably Lieutenants is that another attack is needed. HoB can do that with just itself and Fiery Rounds. And if you don't have Swap Ammo on a Dual Pistols Blaster, you're not playing the set smart, either. All that means is that HoB's longer animation allows for more damage to be done to most of its targets most of the time.

Miladys, I get that you don't like the Dual Pistols animations, but at least be honest about how it plays out by the numbers, and in game performance. You really are more down on the set than you need to be, and believe me, I can be down on what doesn't work for a set, so I'm not getting on you for nothing. HoB is not at all a part of any problems Dual Pistols has (and any it does have are not that major).

FA is pure, unadulterated awesome. Especially when I lead with Flamethrower and follow up with M30 grenade... and rejoice in the sea of great big orange numbers.

Of course, the only issue is that half the time I end up pulling aggro off the tank and have to go dashing THROUGH the angry mob just to make them notice the big stone/flaming/whatever dude smacking the crap out of their buddies again. But hey... any blaster who can take aggro away from a competent tank is just doing their job TOO well.

LRM is wonderful in the situations that present themselves, but I find myself using it sparingly, mostly due to the long activation and hellishly long recharge.

HoB is not bad with incredible visual effect, but after 4 years of AR, I found DP to be kind of lacking.

RoA is an awesome nuke, and a wonderful sister power to FA. But I gotta stand by my baby here.

I never really had the patience to develop my TB skills so I can't really say too much about it. A stack of trip mines, OTOH, is pure love. Nothing can be more fun than starting a fight with an EB at 3/4 health.

Details, details, and minor ones at that.

Bottom line for me is that I don't care for the aesthetics of the set so there is no "cool shiney" factor for me to make up for the lower performance.

Even if they get around to creating non-gunfu animations I won't play the set unless it's brought up to my personal minimum standards for blasters.

Since blasters live (and die) by their secondary effects the secondary effects of DP need to be brought up to standard. I don't buy that being able to change to the different types makes up for the reduction in effect for 2 reasons. Losing Aim for this power and not being able to effectively boost the secondary effects "properly" by slotting the power for secondary effects. I "might" marginally buy swap ammo as is if the split was 30/70 on damage type rather than the current 70/30 that it is.

If, for example, you slot a power for Slow, that slot only provides benefit when you are using cryo rounds and is wasted any other time. This lack removes much of the benefit of being able to swap ammo. If you want to increase your secondary effects you limit yourself to 1 or 2 types of ammo, defeating the entire purpose of the swap ammo power.

How would I fix DP?

First off would be a set of Malta-ish animations as an alternate.

Second, I would make Swap Ammo slottable. Swap Ammo would provide a global damage increase of 5% when selected (this would be ED slottable up to 10%ish which is (using SOs as a standard) roughly equal to the damage boost provided by Aim but spread out over 45ish seconds instead of a 62.5% boost for 10 seconds every 45 seconds.

Further more Swap Ammo would accept KB, slow, and def debuff enhancements and would apply their enhancement to the secondary affects of the various Ammo types as they were swapped, KB for lethal rounds, Slow for cryo, def debuff for toxic. So that multiple slots aren't wasted in the damage powers by trying to bolster secondary effects for only one aspect.

Finally HoB would get the 60 second recharge that it should have and it would animate in 3 seconds, 6 damage ticks (one per .5 second) having a 100% chance per tick of dealing 36 damage per tick split 9/9/9/9 Lethal, Fire, Cold, and Toxic and applying the secondary effect of each possible ammo type (though dropping the chance of KD to 80%)

If it is going to be the ALL out damage power of DP then it should have ALL the flavor of DP rolled into it.

That would bring it up to average for me. I'd probably play it then instead of passing it by like I do with elec, and Psi.

Drain Psyche then any of the blaster nukes

Rain of Arrows. I've got the recharge of that down so that I can pretty much use it on nearly every mob on the map.

RoA.

RoA...no question about it. With the Alpha slot and set bonuses, its recharge is down in the 15s area. Beautiful.

BU + Aim + RoA + PSW all hitting at once. Huge damage, no crash, repeat a few seconds later. Now that's a nuke I think we can all appreciate.

After careful and deliberate thought, Hail of Bullets has to be my favorite (unless Fireball + FSC + 3 ticks of Hot Feet + 3 ticks of BA (the last to a small number of foes) counts as a crashless nuke).

Hail of Bullets meshes much better with my preferred playstyle and it works better with my 2 favorite secondaries, /Fire and /MM.

Rain of arrows. I have mine six slotted, with 3 Damage/range HO's, a javelin A/E/R & A/D/E/R, and a +rech Io. This gives around 40% accuracy/endurance, 80% recharge, Full damage, and full range. Tack on boost range and you have a 200 foot ranged rain of pointy death every thirty seconds or so.

Runner up is LRM,same slotting, which has a two minute recharge but a 330 foot range.

Hail of Bullets is my favorite for several reasons:

1) it has a fantastic name
2) its like a nuke should be: all or nothing
3) it looks quite awesome
4) it gives you 11,25% def for being in middle of the mob
5) it has the most tohitchecks of all mentioned powers

Having characters with well slotted versions of each, I select Full Auto, ONLY with Build-up. I like how fast it starts spewing out streams of orange numbers, especially since with RoA there is a big desire to use both Aim and BU, which frustratingly often leaves Arrows perforating already body-strewn (enemies defeated by teammates already) ground. I really don't run into that with FA.