Destiny Slot for Blasters?

I posted this on the "blaster incarnates" thread with no results:

I have an energy/energy/force Blaster (My strategy is usually in your face, then knockback or ranged attacks after my meles have done the damage) . So far my slot choices are as follows:
Alpha slot: Spiritual Core
Interface: Dimagnetic Core
Judgment: Ion Radial
Lore: Clockwork Radial
Destiny: NEED HALP

I need some help on the destiny slot, here are my current stats with all of my toggles on..
Regen: 188%
Recovery: 178% (2.98end/sec)
End Usage: 0.51 end/sec (without superspeed, with SS --> 0.81 end/sec)
Recharge: +77.5%
Resistance: Smashing (53%); Lethal (48%)
Defences: All hover around 6% accept energy & negative (13%)

I know my endurance is good for my play style, but i do run out and hover between 25-60% at all times during combat. My resistance is good when fighting yellows-oranges, but purples swat me down like a fly. I also have force of nature as well.

Here's a data link if you want some additional info:
http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/downl...63CE3F23D0EA1F

Rebirth is a GREAT pick, especially if you work out a rhythm on when to use it with other people on your team who have Rebirth. You either get big shots of regeneration or big shots of extra health.

A Blaster friend of mine claims that she can use Ageless to stave off the crash from nuking, and I know my SS/Fire Brute loves it.

Barrier is good for an "Oh crap save the team!" power. If you got PFF from Force Mastery, then I guess you might not care about it, though.

Clarion...Well I can see the use for Blasters, but I'd rather carry the break free insps and boost things that you CAN'T boost with inspirations. I've seen a lot of blasters put this power to good use, but my persona preference is to leave this one alone.

Don't forget, the Radial tree of Clarion boosts your secondary effects in addition to status protection. That means your heals, stuns, kb, etc etc are all stronger during the effects of the buff. I have it on my Energy/Energy blaster and it compliments my stuns in Bone Breaker and Total Focus quite nicely.

Also, with Rebirth, there are already SO many powers that max out regen so I figured Clarion would be a better bet. Also if you have problems with endurance, get Geas of the Kind Ones.. it makes out your end recovery and boosts recharge, woo!

Xegreny - Blaster|Level 50|Energy Blast Energy Manipulation Force Mastery|Vigilante
Taxibot REBIRTH - Defender|Level 50|Empathy & Sonic Blast & Psychic Mastery|Hero
Acton Blake - Dominator|Level 15|Electric Control & Electric Assault|Praetorian-Loyalist

Are you guys really having such a bad time with your blasters in i20? For me it has been a riot. My only post-alpha characters right now are my dp/em and my db/inv and while it's true that judgement and destiny push the scrapper into the stratosphere, my blaster feels even more improved by the new stuff and that's without destiny unlocked yet. Between hail of bullets and ion radial I can clear ITF, KTF, et cetera spawns faster than teams can keep up. Who cares whether my character is as durable as melees when everything dies instantly anyway? By comparison, my scrapper is untouchable to almost any AV in the game anymore thanks to rebirth, yet takes far longer to do the basic spawn clearing that still makes up 80% of the high level game even on speed teams.

As for the destiny I'm choosing on my blaster, that's easy, rebirth. Mez isn't a big deal in most situations and when it is, well, there's insps. Barrier is just overkill. I don't need to be that invincible for ten seconds when I could be generally sturdy permanently and still essentially invincible for the first ten seconds. Ageless... maybe on a blaster that has endurance issues, but that's part of the magic of dp/em.

Why not take clarion for, say, STFs, and rebirth for less mez-heavy content? I disagree that you're forced to take clarion at all, I certainly don't plan on taking it until I have threads to burn, but it's maybe three or four trials to get it in tier 3 form in addition to whatever else you'd like to use in the destiny slot.

I'd also note that the praetorian content radically diversifies the threats players face. At one time I would have bought the argument that the devs lean on mez, especially in the wake of cov's launch, but lately they've gone out of their way to threaten everyone in equal measure. I never get mezzed on BAF and mez on Lambda is evitable by judicious termination of augurs before they cause problems. At the same time, the new content is more dangerous to someone who has just barely permanent domination, for example, as the warworks throw around slows like mad.

Finally, it seems to me that some people undersell the value of aoe damage on purpose. You won't hear me complain about a permadom on my team, yet are most dominator combos really going to be running with aoe blasters? I guess they added sleet to the epics at some point and I haven't seen the impact of that, but the last time I checked most of the secondaries have, at best, mid-range-damage-for-a-blaster aoes on timers that are all several seconds longer than any equivalent blaster version. Obviously a dom brings additional value to a team on top of that, and as you say can be made to rarely have any issues with mez, but in my experience at least I don't think you can compare them for spawn vaporization efficacy.

Well the aoe's amazing, thanks for asking. Single target is passable, enough to take down a boss before it causes trouble, but that's not really what I'm after from a blaster, personally. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your argument but it sounds like you're saying blasters should both do the best damage and also not have weaknesses? I completely agree that teaming is about helping cover one another's deficiencies, so why do you not give blasters the benefit of the doubt on getting some team support to allow them to make full use of their uniquely potent powers?

Take a team of seven that already has high aoe damage between them. I'm not saying they need a blaster and can't possibly get by without one. What I will say is that if they get a blaster in that last spot, things will go even faster. And, assuming the team is thus-far blasterless, that blaster will get plenty of backup from his more support oriented cohorts. People talk about force multiplication a lot, especially on the debuffy types' forums. Blasters don't multiply very much at all, but they do bring a large constant to the table. Combine multipliers with that and you're cookin' with gas. Or, add incarnate abilities for a little bit of self-support.

I used to mainly team with my blasters as they weren't all that great at soloing. That isn't really an issue anymore, though I still tend to team with them because I'd rather run the new team content than tips, scanners, and ancient arcs. Speaking only for myself, the teams I run with make me feel neither like a non-contributive member nor like an especially vulnerable character.

Wow, it sucks when the forum decides to eat an extra-long post!

The gist of what I had been attempting to post was this: I know precisely what you mean about the appeal of bringing a little bit of confident swagger to a TF. The earlier the better, but you want it to last to 50 as well obviously. Most of my 50s are scrappers and I delight in being able to either hang with the team and chew through spawns or sneak to the end and finish a troublesome boss room by myself as necessary. It becomes increasingly apparent to me, though, that it doesn't take a scrapper to be able to stealth objectives on TFs and trials.

Take my dark/sonic defender, for example. Permahasten and 35% ranged defense down to level 30. No mez protection at any level. Does that stop me from killing half of the shadow cysts, or finding the real security chief, or killing groups during the "find the scientists" phase of the TV trial by myself? It does not.

Surely that is an unfair example as it has huge debuffs and an expensive build. Well, I ran a Moonfire the other day with my pistol/energy blaster and it sort of looked to me like I was doing the same thing on that. Thanks to laziness while ioing, at 28 I've got a mere 15ish% ranged defense, but I make it a point to ideally carry 16 phenomenal lucks at any given time on my blasters. Between that and hail of bullets' defense boost, it went well enough for me. I used two phenoms and combined four, for a profit of two, died once thanks to my own silly behavior, and we finished in about 35 minutes. I had a couple speedy scrapper friends on the team and we simply split up whenever it was expedient to do so, without issue.

This is not to toot my own horn, as obviously a better player than I with a more solid build wouldn't have died at all, and sub-30 is very doable on Moonfire. My point is simply that having any kind of specific pronounced advantage, in this case aoe damage, means you can play on that in some way to achieve good results with soloing TF and trial objectives. Further, it is my view that the harder you have to "work" to get the same result in this game, the more fun you are likely to have been having. Can my blasters do everything that my scrappers can? Well, I'll just have to guess that they can't solo AVs because I've never tried, because it sounds painful without a bigger bag of tricks than blasters get. On the other hand, I don't care to solo AVs in the first place. After the first few I lost interest in the concept. So, in terms of game content that I actually want to do, blasters are just as good, though more challenging and thus more rewarding.

Bringing this feebly back around to the actual topic of the thread, this is why I don't think you need clarion on any 50(+x) blaster. The barnstorming playstyle continues to work at any level, in my experience.