Blasters surpurflous?

Here is the main issue:

Status protection.

You have a few answers, combat jump, weave and IO's. However you will get held at some point and without break frees you die. Controllers, Corruptors, Defenders, MM's all have some without the ability to shield themselves.

Are these then also under-performing?

I ran a Positron part 1 on my blaster last night and I can tell you I was very helpful in my Energy/Energy blaster really ripped up the ambushes and kept the large ghosts dead nearly as they appeared. I made it my job to kill the big ghosts then the Ruin mages. No one died in the ambush. We had one Corruptor Ice/Storm and one Controller Ill/Rad.

I have been switching back and forth between 2 differnt blasters a Fire/En and an En/En. I am trying to see where the AT could be a failure and I can't see it - solo I do fine and in teams if I play smart, I am not a burden to support dragging the defender to constantly save me and I am removing the big bads FAST.

I don't see anything that changes my opinion of how the AT works.

A fire/fire blaster is PURE damage. You only get rain of fire and ring to protect you. I always take Air Superiority on fire/fire blasters. However you can take as I did fire/energy to get some mitigation. If you are facing a large group of high level foes - you need to be prepared or in a team to cover your hold issues.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. MMs if they want have as much or as little protection as they want irrespective of powersets, the other ATs can have both status protection and the ability to shield themselves.

I used to solo or dual box original positron before the rewards got hammered and they started implementing the pay for reward rate vs play with skill for rewards. Anyway I don't see how the observation that the AT performs well where its arguably at its peak of relative advantage.

Fire/En btw was one of the favored combos for running old posi for merits, so it really isn't surprising that it holds up on the current posi.

Well blasters as far as I can make out seem to be in continuous decline. That would be off the numbers that Arcana uses in her popularity analysis, the rankings the developers just put out, and my own on again off again surveys of various servers.

It can't work at all in non-survivable circumstances, but that's not the fault of Defiance's limitation if even without those limitations the situation is still not survivable. There are lots of situations where without D2.0 at all I'd be dead, but with D2.0 the situation converts to being very survivable. Situations with Malta that use flash bangs before I can defeat them, for example. 30 second stun with Malta around is often mortal without breakfrees, but its survivable with access to my primary attacks. Spawns with multiple Illusionists (but not specifically MI bosses) are often mortal situations because they can combine to perma-hold (also, at +1 the hold becomes theoretically perma if a single illusionist doesn't miss), but become survivable with access to two ranged and one melee attack (in my case).

It was a common misconception prior to D2.0 that mez was not just a kill on blasters, but an insta-kill, which was a silly misconception: anything with the damage potential to insta-kill you doesn't need to mez you. Mez tended to kill on moderate time frames, either by freezing you and then pelting you to death from range, or by allowing something like a Carnie Strongman to walk up to you and bash you over the head while you couldn't react. D2.0 generally gives blasters either a ranged immobilize or a melee knockback power, plus two primary long ranged attacks. That's enough to get blasters out of many dangerous situations. You're not going to farm 0x8 with it, but that's not what its there for.

They decline in popularity relative to increasing combat level. But I don't think they are declining as a percentage of new characters being created. That number has been in the high 30ish percentage range since practically the day the game launched, and I've never seen a period of time from then to now when that was not true. Admittedly the last time I looked carefully was almost two years ago, so if they are in decline it would have to be within that time frame. And I don't think that is the case or Scrappers would have overtaken them in the devs own posted statistics more recently, unless *they* were also in significant decline, which I think is even less likely.

So the ability to solo an MI is the new baseline? This is going to be a tough fight for a number of ATs, even with a break free (or two), depending on how fast the MI gets her pets out and how well the player plays and how well they are at timing the MI's phasing sequence. It will also depend on what powersets the player is using. However, as Infernus stated above, this affects more than just the Blaster, so I don't really see the problem here.

Personally, on my Blaster, I've soloed a +2 MI and DRM at the same time, and I've soloed +4 MIs countless times. I used to run Malta/Rularuu missions on Invincible, padded with two other players (back when you had to pad missions), way before IOs and Defiance and when you could get more than one Sapper in a spawn (loves me some Sappers!). Did it require Inspirations? You bet yer butt! Against that many Malta I usually had to run 2 resolves (and there were a few times I needed to stack a 3rd).

Everybody is going to have their preferred AT and their own opinions of other ATs. Personally, I can't stand playing a Scrapper, Corruptor or Defender. I have a high level Controller that is shelved and I just recently axed a high level Brute in favor for another Blaster. I'm trying to level a VEAT and just not feeling it. However, just because I don't like playing them doesn't mean I won't team with them. There is no AT that I will not team with, including concept builds and man builds. If I learned anything when playing with the Extraordinary ***hats, even the most retarded build played in the most retarded way can be a powerhouse, as long as the player behind the character is a good player.

And if you dislike Defiance 2 so much, then I apologize.

(I know its a late reply, but I had to go to lunch in the middle. )

Where are you getting the creation rate broken out ?

I had to laugh that is very well done. But no I never proposed it as a baseline.

This one wins though

Actually, the very first numerical anything I did on the forums was an analysis of the game population, taking multiple measurements across all the zones at multiple times of the day, analyzing by level. Based on that I could come up with an estimate for blaster (and all archetype) density per combat level range, which allows an extrapolation of the creation rate (at least in terms of characters that leave the tutorial).

Its also possible to extrapolate from the archetype popularity data posted by BaB. In between, I've asked the devs occasionally on a couple of occasions, specifically within the context of discussing blaster improvements.

Any one of these things is subject to moderate error bars, but they all converge on the same range of values in the high 30s (percentage points), across many years. And its consistent with the notion that beginning players (especially beginning to MMOs) will often take the options described as having the best offense, without knowing how low or important defense might be in that game. And in the early game, that faith is rewarded because threats are too low to be a serious impediment to blasters.

Plus, in a game where lots of players take every travel power and use whirlwind as the prototypical costume change emote, shooting things from range tends to sound more fun regardless of numerical performance. Its not surprising that blasters are rolled very often.

Interesting, how do you compensate for the decrease in time spent by characters in the various levels resulting in smaller sample sizes ? Also are you checking for uniques, because otherwise the number of an at at a given level range becomes a proxy for the amount of time the AT spends in a level range more than the number of that AT that were created and played through.

Then answer two simple questions:

* What do you propose the baseline be?
* What would you like to see done to Blasters?

This can be very difficult to extrapolate out of the data in the general case, but fortunately I have an out: I happen to know (although I cannot specifically repeat) how "clustered" the average leveling rate is across the the powerset combinations and archetypes across the entire playerbase. I don't know specifically how fast anyone levels, but I can say that, for example, taken across the entire playerbase no archetype is leveling twice as fast as any other. Its actually tighter than that, and that allows me to make judgment calls as to just how much actual spread is being induced in the data by leveling disparities. They have to be low at lower levels and cannot exceed certain values even at higher levels, which means its possible to extrapolate within some moderate error bars how much of an archetype has to be rolled, given how popular it is in the lower levels vs higher levels. In fact, to a first order approximation if 35% of all characters below level 15 is a blaster (just making up an example) then blasters have to be rolled at something close to that rate, because if they weren't that would imply they leveled even slower than they do relative to everyone else that was outracing them.

Furthermore, if everyone was outracing them by a larger than expected amount (we know everyone outraces them by at least a little on average) we'd expect the percentage of characters playing blasters to actually rise a bit with increasing level, and that doesn't really happen to a degree you'd expect. Alternatively, they would have to be abandoned at high rates even at relatively low or moderate levels, and that doesn't seem to happen either.

I discussed this a bit when I did my last analysis of archetype popularity, but given the data we have it would be extremely difficult to directly derive a conclusion based on the data but it is possible to indirectly derive conclusions by eliminating extreme cases the data excludes or strongly disavows. We can say with more certainty what the situation is not, and that provides at least some limits on what it is. For example, I can't say how often blasters are rolled (or were rolled when I last looked) but I can say they were not rolled more than half of all characters (dev statements contradict that) and I can say they were not rolled less than 25% of the time (this would contradict them being the most popular at all levels by a wide enough margin). The data strongly implies blaster creation rates have to exceed 30% and probably lie below 45% of all new characters. Given the maximum leveling spread, the data strongly suggests that the lower limit is even higher: at least 35%. The upper limit is probably marginally lower for the same reason. That means its between about 35% and maybe 42%. By process of elimination, we can get a fairly tight window.

It is possible even this analysis is wrong: this is just what I believe to be the most likely correct interpretation of it. Its not mathematically impossible for the number to exist outside that range, so I can't prove that analysis must be correct (I mentioned that as well in the last analysis I did). I'm about 85-90% certain its in that range though.

Are you saying blasters have historically gotten no love (and continue to get no love) because the devs consider them to be overly popular and don't want to encourage MORE people to roll blasters?

In fact, the exact opposite is true. Regardless of blaster archetype popularity they've always been datamined to have the most problems with leveling, going essentially back to the beginning of time, which is why they are, as far as I know, the only archetype to have been revisited on three separate occasions and targeted for archetype-wide buffs. The first time, their health was increased to its current level and its damage strength cap was increased to the current level (blasters originally had lower health and only a 400% damage cap). The second time, they were given Defiance 1.0. The third time, they were given a revamped Defiance that allows them to shoot some of their powers while mezzed and replaced the health-scaling damage buff of D1.0 with the more follow up-like damage buff of D2.0.

You can argue the devs never did what you personally think they should have done, but you can't argue the devs have ignored the archetype.


Now let me ask you a question. You quoted an entire post of mine that discussed some statistical analysis process that is involved in measuring how popular blasters are or might be, in response to another poster. Where specifically in that post do I give you any hint whatsoever that the devs balance the archetype based on primarily on, or even at all on, creation popularity? I've reread what I type and I don't see how anyone could possibly make that inference.

Blasters, as an AT, were only altered twice. Defiance, more HPs, and the higher damage cap all came at the same time. One could argue that the debt reduction in I12 was primarily made to help blaster leveling, I know I believe that to be true (and I am not bothered by that, debt adjustment of some kind was actually quite a popular player suggestion in the thread Castle had made to discuss the blaster AT). A lot of players I encounter do not really seem to be bothered by the occasional blaster death and I think the debt reduction did have an impact on the level of frustration from defeat.

Very good question, wish I had a really good answer. I know I wouldn't define it in terms of enemy groups in the game, there is just so much variance in the typing of their attacks (in terms of type and position), their resistance to attacks, and the nature of their attacks. If somebody said the CoT or even the Council was the baseline, I am sure I could find a combination and build that was reasonable that did poorly against them.

I think you are going to need multiple levels of performance criteria, does so well against non mezzing generic damage opponents, does so well against generic damage mezzing opponents etc etc.

My thinking is that I would want the baseline performance levels high enough that their leading cause of death wasn't teammates with ADHD, or general complete lack of comprehension.


I have kind of a Chinese menu of a wish list. You can pick 1 or two things out of the list and they get to be your meal.

1. Folding the damage bonus from defiance 2.0 into the base damage. It would have to be averaged and dropped, but blasters overwhelmingly derive benefit from bonuses at the beginning of fights. Nobody waits till the end to hit aim and build up.

2. Improved pool/epic numbers for blasters. There are other things that could go with this, maybe adding an additional IO set in the ranged pool that provides decent defense bonuses for something other than just ranged defense maybe something with defense and recharge, like obliteration has, but for ranged and/or targeted aoe.

3. Some sort of bursty mezz protection. I like Strato Nexus's idea of tying it to aim and buildup, but that would mean that Assault Rifle, Dual Pistols, and Devices would need a little specialty work.

4. If blasters aren't going to get a genuine mezz protection, upgrading the protection defiance brings seems in order. Make it the Tier 1,2 blasts, and 2 picks that the player gets on their own. Playing a /EM ranger and and you think energy torrent will let you ride out the mezz better than trying to punch someone that isnt in range ? go for it.

Just how are blasters meant to be played ? I find every combination I have played has required its own approach.

I think his purpose was simply to swoop into the middle of the argument and throw down the "You're doing it wrong!" card. Ironic, considering how he's complaining that little has changed in his absence. THAT sure hasn't changed.

Woah...relax there, big guy. I wasn't trying to start a fight, just trying to get the gist of what you were saying.

As you'll see if you read my previous post, I don't think there's a thing wrong with blasters.

That's a fairly broad statement, I realize.

I guess my first answer would be, it's a game, so play blasters or any other archetype in the way that you personally find to be the most fun. As a general rule I believe people should play the way they WANT to play.

That said, I've PERSONALLY found that hovering, darting and staying at range to be the best way to play a blaster. So I build mind to do just that - to use range, mobility and my own skills working the mouse and keys as a defense as much as possible, as opposed to just standing there slugging it out. But that's how *I* play. If I came across as trying to tell everyone else how THEY should play, that wasn't my intent. Perhaps I phrased things poorly.

That is a tall order indeed. Give the Blaster a Placate Aura whenever the player starts yelling at their teammates?

Your prior response is actually somewhat surprising, and is indeed the correct answer, IMO. You cannot tie it to a specific enemy group, or even a specific challenge. I think this is why the game initially started with the "3 Minion or 1 Lieutenant" mentality. Granted, the game has evolved quite a bit since then.


1. Blasters already have some very impressive damage, and fronting it with BU/Aim is yet another boost. I'm not sure they need much else here, however I would not be against slightly increasing the duration of BU/Aim for Blasters.

2. This could be a viable option, and I do agree that there needs to be more Ranged IO +Def Bonuses that offer more than Ranged. Melee sets have ranged and melee options, so giving ranged a good +melee defense would be most welcome.

3. Not sure I like this one, specifically due to the requirement of having to rework a few power sets.

4. With Mental's +Regen and Dark's supposed self heal, I will never say Blasters will never get something. Still, a Blaster with genuine mez protection isn't something I see in the cards. Allowing the player to choose which powers were available when mezed would most likely not be a wise thing to do, even if you capped it to a certain tier.


What would you say to an additional inherent that grants Blasters a high resistance (not protection) to Mezes, but is only on when they are solo, or have it scale based on team size? Or give them a (stacking) high damage boost each time they are hit by a mez?

No, that was not in ANY way my purpose. Sorry if you misunderstood and took offense.