Buff crashing nukes

Considering nukes can rather efficiently destroy entire spawns, I think losing all of your endurance is a fair trade off. Now, whether it's a logical trade off, since if all goes well the mob will be dead anyway and there's nothing stopping you from popping blues/resting to immediately get back all of your endurance, that's another question entirely.

a) There's a 16 target cap on nukes, full team spawns generally have 24 mobs, leaving at least 8 mobs shooting back at you while detoggled and with no endurance for 15 secs,
b) Most bosses and many lieutenants can survive nukes, and you just got their full attention plus whoever wasn't hit by the nuke while detoggled and with no endurance for 15 secs,
c) You're detoggled and with no endurance for 15 secs, and even if you pop a blue you'll still need time to retoggle.

Remind me of the trade-off again, is it related to the debt badges?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm 100% in favor of raising nuke target caps to 24.

1) Where's your tank? Control? Debuffs? ...Damage?
2) Your team has zero additional damage to make up the boss HP difference? Including yourself?

What build are you playing that has toggles with long animation times or simply has so many toggles that are 100% critical to your survival that you need them running at all times? I can't even think of any Defenders that would normally have that problem.

And if you do have toggles that are critical to your continuing survival, then don't use your nuke.

Playing my budding incarnate Fire/Storm corr, I generally use my nuke as a means to an end of myself. Generally, if the crap is about to hit the fan (I've got phase shift up and know it's about to end for me) I'll just drop hurricane and shoot off Inferno. Anything that lives will most likely kill me (or get blasted by my tornados or lightning clouds) so might as well use what little endurance I have to take out as many foes as possible. It's almost cheating considering the chunk of endurance will just disappear once you die.

Thankfully, I have Soul Transfer too. So yeah, don't care if I die. I just get to stun the crap out of everything anyway and get my endurance refilled and don't have to worry about any -recovery.

And this is why I'd rather the nukes stay true nukes. We have far too few 'all or nothing dump' powers that you just pour everything you have left into. Everything's about sustaining your status as is. Nothing is about 'that last moment' or 'your final stand'. There's not enough sacrifice powers, self destructs and what not considering how many self rez, rez, and target dead powers we have...actually, it's probably why we don't. A nuking blaster with rise of the phoenix is pretty scary...way scarier than a blaster playing it safe with a mini-nuke.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

See also: Energy type Paragon Protectors still having oldschool MoG that makes them all but invincible for three minutes.

This reminds me of one of Jack Emmert's famous foot-in-mouth moments, where a player expressed grievances with his character's performance, and Jack responded "So what was your team doing?" My "team" does not exist, because I'm not on a team. I'm playing by myself, something the AT description tells me should be possible for the AT. Considering that neither nukes nor anything else in a Blaster's powersets requires team-mates as an explicit prerequisite, I don't consider Blasters a team-only AT.

If your argument is that nukes are great ON A TEAM, then yeah, they kind of are. But people don't always play on a team.

I'm not against "final stand" powers. Not in the slightest. Powers like Unstoppable, Overload and Elude are easily some of my favourites. What I'm against is powers with very limited use an very dubious, unreliable results that nevertheless come with drawbacks which far outweigh their usefulness. I would sooner use Foce of Nature on my ex Energy/Energy/Force Blaster than Nove as a last resort, because Nova had an unreliable shot at hitting or indeed killing what's threatening me, yet it removes my ability to defend myself while Foce of Nature allows me to stand and fight and kill what's threatening me, at the cost of it then expiring, crashing my endurance and not recharing in another 1000 seconds. But at least when it's up, I know I can rely on it.

Blaster nukes are treading the wrong tightrope. They're trying to balance the ability to kill an entire spawn in a single hit with the fact that being able to kill an entire spawn in a single hit is badly overpowered in most cases, so they're kind of half-and-half, with the multiple damage components and the target cap and so on. More than anything else, they give a Blaster precisely what a Blaster doesn't need more of - shock damage.

By FAR the biggest problem Blasters have is that they have very little time to act, because the border between being alive and being floor pizza is often counted in seconds. A Scrapper can goof around, botch his setup, get hit about the head and still have quite a long time to react before things get really bad. A Blaster does not have that luxury, with the expectation that a Blaster's damage can work so fast that this short life span wouldn't be crippling.

But if I were looking for an all-or-nothing power on a Blaster, I'd want to see one which allowed me to do much damage by means of keeping me alive long enough to do so. All of my Blasters had more than enough damage to take anything and everything down, but rarely lived long enough to be able to do so. A power which gives me a window of opportunity where I CAN live long enough to kill stuff, at the cost of crashing me AFTER that fight is done if I don't drag my feet, is one I can respect far, far more than what is essentially a roll of the dice.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Ouch. Being compared to Jack Emmert.

My point was less "Just get a team! " and more "If nukes leave you vulnerable, then don't leave yourself vulnerable." Of course, the post I was replying to was talking about bosses and lieutenants and getting enemies' "full" attention, which alludes to team play (or a high-cranked difficulty slider, in which case the nukes aren't the problem)...

If you don't have faith in your nuke saving the day, then don't use it; it's a high risk but high reward power. But there's plenty of things you can do, even when solo, that will mitigate the risk. Even a small bit of planning or forethought would help. Not only do inspirations still work during a crash, so do your character's own two feet. You could also mez problematic targets before nuking to make sure they don't retaliate afterwards.

That argument is more to the effect that once you nuke, anything you survive is going to attack you, and you're going to be out of endurance with no toggles and potentially low on health. There are some nukes which have the benefit of control effects on them, such as Blizzard which leaves the Blaster pretty safe as enemies are slowed and slipping. But something like Inferno really just doesn't.

Furthermore, all nukes that I've ever used are slow, with animations of over 2 seconds. What this means is that you're sitting in essentially a large, full spawn, taking fire from everybody for over two seconds. Now, this is rarely enough to kill a Blaster, as I've found out, but it's usually enough to drop that Blaster into the orange, if not red. So if you nuke a large spawn and end up with orange health and no endurance AND a boss survived, then you are in deep, deep trouble, especially if said boss is a Tank Swiper or a Hewer Elite or a Gunslinger or some such.

First of all, shooting a hold at a problematic enemy before firing a nuke just means that the NPCs have that much more of an opportunity to kill you before your nuke fires, or to ensure you trade holds with them. Additionally, Blasters are the only AT I've ever played which is completely and utterly ****** without inspirations, if you'll pardon my language. If I don't have purples on hand in case I slip up or face a nasty spawn, I die. If I don't have break-frees for those holds at inconvenient times, I die. If I don't bring enough reds to the right fights, I die.

Granted, I tend to play mostly melee ATs and Masterminds, but I've never played a Scrapper, Stalker, Brute or Mastermind who was so completely SOL without inspirations at any time. Sure, I can't beat every elite boss on just my wits alone, and there are some exceptional situations where inspirations are mandatory, but as a general running theme, all of my other characters get more inspiration drops than they actually use. Except for Blasters, who use more inspiration drops than they actually get by a fair margin, so I never have any left over just in case I opted to nuke a spawn instead of fighting it conventionally. Really - why nuke and use up my inspirations when I can fight normally and very likely need to use none at all?

I find Blaster Nukes to be far too overbalanced on the side of caution. They don't do nearly enough to impress with with nearly the kind of reliability I'd want to see, and in return they have some of the game's most severe crashes. Seriously, the only thing which crashes worse than a nuke is Unstoppable, and I'd take Unstoppable over Nova any day of the week. Hell, I'd take Force of Nature over Nova any day of the week, and that ought to say something.

Yes, nukes are strong. I don't find them to be nearly strong enough to be worth the crash.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Wasn't that in response to a Tanker trying to solo a full-size spawn in the Rikti Crash Site? A spawn meant for a full team?

There are those toggles again. What toggles are you running on your Blaster?

Snipe boss, remove a fourth of his health, step in, nuke. That's what I would try. Of course, I can't imagine actually encountering resistance tough enough to make me want to nuke while solo.

That highly depends on what you're fighting and how you're going about it. If you're trying to mez a boss, yes, it'll leave you open while you go about it. But if you're one-shot holding a lieutenant, say, it's a simple jump-hold-land-nuke operation.

Wait, which is it? Do you need to use all of your inspirations all the time on your Blaster just to survive, or need to use none at all? Also, maybe I'm just reading too deeply, but are you implying you would need to use all of your inspirations to survive a nuke crash?

It's a matter of taste, really. And Blasters aren't the only ones with nukes, mind you. Yes, it's in their primary but so are they in Corruptor's Primary.

While you like the crashing armor clicks but hate the crashing nukes, I don't mind the crashing nukes but shy away from the crashing armor clicks if only because the crashing armors give a sort of false sense of security. Just because it's a big high-powered armor buff, you expect it to help you survive but its not always the case. Non-Brutes/Tankers only have 75% resists and even if you have capped defense doesn't mean you won't be dropped quick. And when you're teamed with buffers, those clicks don't do much extra.

If anything, I'd like more nukes that recharge faster and crash both HP and endurance. Why? Because Blasters are already getting pushed aside a bit with Judgements (not replaced but no one is picking the blaster for nuking but they *should*). A faster, bigger area, higher target cap nuke means you'll be dropping more stuff faster and more often. Better than what any non-nuking AT can do. And the team can cover you by managing what aggro is left and buffing/healing you so you can get up to do it again.

Sorry, Sam, but your bias toward Blasters is showing. I can really tell that your grievance is more with Blasters and not really their nukes.

Blazing Aura, Hot Feet, Fire Shield, for starters. Hover to keep me out of melee in every instance.

Any power I have no use for solo is a power I have no respect for, at least on an AT that's not designated support, which Blasters aren't. And you are correct - there is almost no instance solo when a nuke's drawbacks are worth it. That's my entire point. I've taken and used at least Nova and Inferno, and in neither case did I ever find using a nuke to be an advantage. It was cool, yeah, but it was also far too stressful and far too pointless as compared to what else I could do.

It's simple enough to hold that one lieutenant, yes, but what of the other minions? All it takes is one Malta Operative with a Taser, one Tsoo Yellow Ink Man and you don't get to nuke, then you get mobbed and killed. Or, more commonly, it's fairly simple to hold that one Chief Mentalist and then watch as the other four drones proceed to juggle you in the air for the next 10 seconds. The more I delay nuking, the higher the chance that I won't get to do that at all.

You're reading too deeply. I try to not use inspirations in every fight when I play, but with Blasters, I have to do that very often. When I fight normally, I have a very high chance of not using any inspirations in a fight. When I use a nuke, I almost always have to pop a blue or a green afterwards if ANYTHING survived, even just a single minion. Inspirations are consumables, which means sometimes, they simply run out. I can't afford to make a build which fails without inspirations in my tray. That's my chief grief with the "just use inspirations!" mentality. Yes, that's a viable strategy for one big encounter where if I'm not prepared, I can back out of the mission and prepare, but not a viable strategy for running an entire mission, because I simply run out too fast.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

True, it is a matter of taste. And though I mentioned Elude, that doesn't actually help as much as one might expect, considering it's stacking defence on a set that's already 3/4 of the way to its own cap with just slotting and power picks. So you definitely have a point there. However, as long as it's going to be all or nothing, I prefer powers which allow me to up my game and survive, rather than those that attempt to end the fight NOW. Simply put, game balance doesn't allow you to end fights NOW in a lot of circumstances, so such powers are simply operating against the design of the game at large. Balance, on the other hand, is much more lenient about extending your welcome by a few more minutes provided you can't use it too often and it's ONLY a few more minutes.

In more basic terms, I find Nukes to be a gamble almost every time I've used them and I find defence set god mode powers to be a gamble almost never at all. And I don't like gambling.

My bias AGAINST Blasters, you mean. And, yes, it's showing, I make no secret about it. I actually do have a list of all the things that drove me away from Blasters and the penalising nature of nukes is pretty high on it. I suppose you could make the argument, as others have in other circumstances, that because I don't like Blasters then my arguments should be ignored as I cannot be pleased - and in THIS CASE AND ONLY THIS CASE I'll grant you that this may very well be true. But I still dislike the idea of a big nuke with a big crash in a game. It works well in a comic book or a movie, but in a game it just serves to irritate me.

I want to make a confession: I would sooner LACK power than have power but be prevented from using it. And that, in a nutshell, is Blaster gameplay in general and nukes in particular. You have all of this power, but because of how the AT is balanced and how the abilities themselves are designed, you usually can't use them for fear of SOMETHING. And I hate that!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Nukes aren't available only on blasters, corruptors and defenders have them too. Anyway, examples of toggles:

Blaster (En/Dev) - Cloaking Device, Targetting Drone, Combat Jumping, Acrobatics, Tough, Weave, Charged Armor. That's seven toggles, and around 10 secs worth of retoggling once I get a bit of endurance back. If I use a nuke, they all crash. Without them, my defence plummels, I lose all of my s/l damage resistance (which is over 50%), I lose my +tohit, I lose my protection against immob, hold and knockback, I lose my unsurpressed travel power (jumping around), and I'll no longer be invisible once the fight ends.

Defender (Rad/Rad) - Radiation Infection, Enervating Field, Hover, Maneuvers, Assault, Tactics, Tough, Weave, Temp Invulnerability. That's 9 toggles and around 15 secs worth of retoggling once I get a bit of endurance back. If I use a nuke, they all crash. It's even worse here, because not only am I directly affected by the loss of the toggles, but my entire team is suddenly facing whoever survived the nuke without my team buffs or enemy debuffs, which regardless take at least 8 secs to recharge.


Good advice. We're still stuck on Dupont circle here.

"I don't use my nuke because it's useless to me",
"What? It's very useful, but you shouldn't use your nuke",
"I won't, because my nuke is useless to me",
"Good, it's very useful, but you shouldn't use your nuke".

....

You, you owe me a new brain!

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Well there's a problem right there. Fire Manipulation only has 2 powers that provide any form of mez, and it's largely movement-based mitigation, plus the likely unreliable afraid effect in Hot Feet. Though I'm not quite clear how Blazing Aura or Hot Feet actually get anything done if you're hovering above melee. Or for that matter, how you melee. Do you swoop in and out?

That's not what I said. I said that there's no point where a Blaster would encounter a group while solo that would be worth nuking. If you did stumble into 8-16 enemies, then it would probably be worth it.

You don't fight Yellow Ink Men in any of the level ranges you can nuke. Malta are a pain to fight, period, and Rikti are binary, in my experience. Either they pose no threat or they're wrecking you.

This just confuses me even more. You're not trying to clear the whole mission with just your nuke, eh? And when I say "use inspirations to mitigate the crash" I mean "pop a blue and just deal with the problem or pop a single tier 1 purple, which will nullify 90% of trouble in the entire game". Plus I only suggested it as a method of hedging your bet against the gamble of using your nuke in the first place.

Personally, I've never actually experienced any nuke fails, largely since I always pair mine with Aim and Build-Up.

In Sam's case he was exclusively talking about Blasters. In your case, I was objecting to the idea that it would take a significant amount of time to retoggle important powers, regardless of AT.

You wouldn't be invisible when the fight began anyway - Cloaking Device suppresses like most stealth powers. If Targeting Drone is your sole method of landing hits, there's a bigger problem. The rest are more important, but aside from Tough all activate pretty darn quick. Yes, together they all add up into a large time investment but one, you don't need all seven toggles running to deal with a few nuke leftovers, and two, every single one of those powers can be activated while moving.

This sounds borderline fictitious, or you've got the difficulty cranked too hard. Between all of your debuffs and buffs, you nuke, but somehow leave enough enemies alive (either by not doing enough damage, missing, or hitting the target cap) that your team cannot handle them without your debuffs? Every single Defender nuke with a crash, with perhaps the sole exceptions of Nova and arguably Thunderous Blast, leave a hyper-potent lingering debuff or mez (or both) on enemies. This is also implying that your teammates are incapable of covering you in any meaningful way, since none of your personal defenses should be immediately necessary, especially if you can get the first two toggles back up. (Rad Emission also comes with a built-in recharge buff, which means the majority of the time your main toggles are coming back up in six seconds rather than eight.)

And if that was the case, that you were the sole thing keeping your entire team alive, then yeah, don't nuke. Defender nuking comes down to making the judgement call of taking yourself out of the fight for a few seconds in exchange for some burst AoE damage plus a singular, powerful debuff. How useful that would be varies wildly with your build and play style.

Also do you take Tough and Weave on all of your characters...?

The original purpose of this thread was addressing the imbalance between powerset nukes and Incarnate Judgement powers. But most of the arguments I've been countering have really been less "Nukes are unbalanced!" and more "Well I don't like nukes. Make them different to please my sensibilities.". You may not find yourself in the situations where nuking is totally worth it all that often, but I very much do.

I have a huge problem when it comes to taking a power and then almost never using it. As a result, I attempt to use my powers as often as I can, with the possible exclusion of self-rez powers for obvious reasons (though my Blasters seem to have those as part of their attack chains). What this means is I try to nuke a lot. If not once every 6 minutes, then at least once every 10. Yes, sometimes I'm nuking spawns of 6 or 7 enemies, and sometimes even that fails BIG TIME.

The problem with nukes is two-fold. For one, the most accuracy you can get is 95%, and with the RNG as evil as it is, there's almost always AT LEAST one enemy who doesn't take a lick of damage seemingly every time I nuke. Moreover, your nuke's damage is staggered in three components: a 3.0 scale damage hit guaranteed, a 1.5 scale damage hit at 75% chance and another 1.5 scale damage hit at 50% chance What this means is you only have 37.5% chance of delivering full damage, and are actually running a 12.5% risk of delivering sub Total Focus damage. All of this conspires to leave lieutenants alive a lot of the time if you're unlucky.

All of this means is that you're left toggle-less, drained and defenceless with no real guarantee that everything you nuked actually died, or indeed that everything you wanted to nuke got caught in the blast area, as opposed to avoiding a hit by hiding behind a tree or a street light or around a corner.

Finally, about the only real way I've found to ensure I don't die BEFORE I nuke has been Personal Forcefield. In every other case, I need to run into the middle of an enemy group and squat down for upwards of two seconds while every minion, lieutenant and potentially boss takes potshots at me. I've lost count of how many times I'd go to nuke, get knocked back with my nuke queued, then killed before I could recover and have my nuke end up pointless. I've furthermore lost track of the number of times I've rushed in to nuke a bunch of, say, Rikti Infantry only to have one of them stun me with a plasma shot just long enough for his buddies to cut me to pieces. Or how many times I've held a Mentalist only to see a bunch of Drones juggle me four 5-6 seconds.

I'm not making my problems up. These are some of the very real reasons why I ultimately gave up trying to use these horribly awkward, scarily dangerous powers.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm a big fan of Aim+Build Up, Teleport, and queue the nuke while the teleport is executing. I've found it to be extremely reliable if you can target the teleport accurately. I don't think I've ever been killed or knocked back before the nuke could go off, and mezzes won't stop it if it's queued when you teleport in (but have a breakfree handy to get free afterward).

The only trouble I occasionally have with that is if someone else on the team causes the spawn to move out of position after I've targeted my teleport.