Blasters surpurflous?

I haven't really bothered with this thread for a while. But today I was on a mini BAF and a Speed Lambda that just made me think about all this talk of blaster being useless and not needed or even welcome on some teams. Okay we did the lambda first and of the 16 players involved 7 were blasters and 2 were corruptors ... we had a grand total of 1 defender (the league leader), 1 tank and 1 Brute. We added a SoA crab and the rest were scrappers. Yeah I am sure you are think OMG almost half the league is blasters and no control the death toll must have been horrid. Yeah it was .... I have never seen so many IDT drop so fast in my life. Even on the Glowie phase I visited the hospital once and we finished in near record time.

Unlike many recent Lambdas I have been on we did not leave every portal open for almlost 2 minutes (till 18:00) instead we closed all but two and amazingly still managed to wipe out 30 IDT for the extra Astral quickly and then dropped poor Maurader before he got to use his catch phrase "On the Ground again" twice. In short it was one of the best lambdas I have been on in recent days.

Okay we moved on the the mini BAF. Phase one was over so fast it barely seemed like I got to attack much at all. then, since our lone tank had quit, a blaster used snipe to get Northstar to the north wall and we tore her and her adds to pieces.

I dc'd for a moment with less than 1 minute left on the prisoner phase so I don't know exactly how that went but in over 4 minutes not a single prisoner had come close to escaping.. so I am guessing they got the added astral for no prisoners escaped.

I got back as Siege was lumbering into position and along with everyone else opened up on him. The big pile of steel dropped like a rock and then we tore him and his girl friend apart. Oh did I mention we had gotten a little larger between trials.. we had 20 in the league on the BAF and 10 were blaster, one corrupter woth our SoA crab adding his AoE attacks.

Aside from the brief crash, which cost me at least one Astral, it was a totally enjoyable experience for my Fire/Fire/Flame Blaster. Let's face facts any good group of players can succeed at anything in this game if they are willing to work together.. We have seen all Blaster ITFs, All Defenders STFs, ect, ect.

It's funny, the original premise of this thread was that with incarnates (essentially) everyone's a blaster, so who needs blasters? But I was on an ITF the other day (a truly stupendous run), and at the end of it, one of the other three people said "if the blaster didn't die, he wasn't trying hard enough." I just sort of giggled to myself (the only blaster on the team, and I didn't die), because with cardiac, lore, and rebirth, who needs . . . well, I won't go there. I'm just saying.

A blaster that knows what to do and manage his own aggro doesnt die a lot.. I dont die a lot on any of my blasters..

I think the entire arguement comes down to what sort of blaster you are. Unlike melee damage sets which do differ.. the difference between ranged sets is far greater then it is between melee sets in terms of damage, and the secondary sets are so far more across the board then any other primary and secondary sets out there. Naming them support and then having a range from Devices to Fire Manipulation makes no sense.

This is the funny thing is that you may not even notice it because if someone spends a lot of time soloing/small grouping with Elec blast up to the level cap it will be pretty decent to them.. until they step on a team with a Fire, or rad, or duel pistols.. heaven forbid an archer.. let alone a group full of incarnates and suddenly you get that true sense of how abyssmal elec's overall performance is.

I think if you are playing a Fire/fire or a Fire/whatever you won't feel superflous even in the end game as Fire/ is just that good. but if you play an Elec/fire blaster or an Elec/whatever you will feel it. The performance differences between sets is just too great at times and needs to be brought closer into balance.

I think it boils down to this whenever I go into the different forums:

'What kind of scrapper should I make?'

-Make whatever you want, there are no bad scrappers

'What kind of Brute should I make?'

-Make whatever you want, there are no bad brutes.

'What kind of blaster should I make?'

-Fire or you just arent going to deal damage. And dont play Devices. Or Elec blast. Or Dual Pistols. Or this and that.

(All numerically speaking, fun doesnt factor into numbers)

Blasters are great at one thing and that is damage.

I have several lvl 50's of various classes and have one of most every class at least in the low 30's and I can tell you that none of them are as damaging as my blaster.

That said I do feel blasters are pretty lacking for solo play even with epic shields.

As a comparison recently I leveled my old fire/em blaster sitting in the 20's to 50 and ran the ourorobos initiate missions and the incarnate alpha unlock missions. I died 3x on my fully io'd blaster when dealing with the hero, Holtz and the room packed with rikti.

A couple weeks before I had gotten my fire/cold corruptor to 50 and ran him through all the same missions and he never died once. Coming into the room full of rikti with the hero and Holtz he mopped up thanks to his crippling debuffs, sleet and oppressive gloom. And I had him set to +0/6 vs +0/1 on the blaster.

I generally feel way more usefull and have a much more enjoyable time solo'ing my corruptor, but even though he does excellent damage he doesn't even come close to my blaster unless he's sitting on one target and has that target fully debuffed and even then I'm pretty sure the blaster still does more damage.

A good comparison was when I checked fireball's damage on my corruptor at 107 damage with t3 musculature vs the blasters at 165 damage with t2 musculature. That's a big difference and a HUGE difference with aim+bu in the blaster's favor.

So when you need more damage you can never go wrong with a blaster imo.

Part of the problem when talking about Blaster damage is that people look at different things when they talk about it (or damage in general), usually boiling down to Single Target or AoE. As an AT, Blasters are the AoE king and when people talk about how Blasters have amazing damage, they are almost always thinking about multiple simultaneous orange numbers (Fire Ball, Rain of Arrows, etc.). When it comes to ST damage, though, Blasters are basically just Scrappers or Brutes who get the option of doing it at range (a benefit which isn't nearly as useful as it sounds in PvE) - their ST dps isn't actually all that amazing, but whenever somebody starts to talk about it, the usual response is "Yes, but Fire Ball".

There's really a lot of reasons for Blasters to underperform, in my opinion, and a lot of them are general design flaws to the game that just so happen to emphasize the things that Blasters are good or bad at:

1) Inconsistent modifiers, especially when applied to pool and epic powers. For whatever reason, when Blaster ranged damage was increased, their melee damage was not, even though it actually matters to them; in fact, they and Dominators are the only ones who have both ranged and melee attacks in their primary and secondary pools and have different ranged and melee modifiers, but Dominators are the ones who have a more reasonable layout of having a higher melee modifier (because it's "more dangerous" in melee). One of the amusing/annoying little facts of the game is that the melee ATs (those with higher melee modifiers than range) use their melee modifiers for every attack, including ranged ones in their epics, while the ranged ATs are stuck using their weaker melee modifiers on the melee powers. This has never really made sense to me and partly skews the abilities of the various damage ATs when epics come into play: Scrappers get Blaster mods on Fire Ball, so why do Defenders have to have crappy modifiers on Thunder Strike and why does my Blaster have terrible modifiers on Charged Armor?

2) Speaking of Fire Ball, when it comes to the Epic Pools, it seems to come down to "everybody whose normal drawback is lack of aoe gets amazing aoe powers" (see Scrappers, Brutes, Tankers, Controllers, Dominators) while the ATs that already have good aoe powers get pretty meh epic pools (Blasters, Defenders, Corruptors). Dark Obliteration and Darkest Night for Soul Mastery, Fire Ball and Fire Blast and so forth... And Blasters can dig into Epics to get a wimpy shield (most of which are Resist, of all things) and a couple crappy utility powers (Bonfire? Char? Melt Armor with terrible modifiers?). Why not Flashfires or Healing Flames or, say, Healing Aura? Most of the powers available in a Blaster epic are actually not all that different from the type of stuff you can find in Blaster secondaries; I thought epics were supposed to let you branch out and fill the gaps in your AT? It's kind of sad that the best thing a Blaster can nab in their epic pool is a self rez.

3) Speaking of Blaster secondaries, the Devs have kind of painted themselves into a wall on these things. They were seemingly built without any actual design theme - mostly a "let's just give them a smattering of random abilities" - and now they've got their hands tied when making new sets in that they have to follow a roughly similar idea; yet, it's too late to change the existing sets to have them be more relevant to a Blaster. I would really like to see statistics on things like the damage auras, the non/low-damaging mez powers, Lightning Clap, etc. to see how often they're taken, used, etc. And poor, poor Devices...

4) Ranged sets are often terrible DPS sets. The standard 4 second, 8 seconds, 10-12 second blaster setup has a big problem in that you can't build a chain with it unless you have (a) extreme amounts of recharge, and/or (b) a very long animating tier 3 blast. This is the primary reason that Blaster ST damage isn't all that great compared to their Scrapper and Brute counterparts. Sure, Blasters have great ranged damage modifiers and can start off with those, but then they have downtime that they need to fill in with AoE powers (usually poor DPA and certainly poor DPE when facing single targets) or melee powers from their secondary (which have a lower damage modifier and wind up with extra high recharge times to give them good damage) or power pools (which suck). This is part of the reason that Fire Blast is so great: its T1 and 2 powers recharge in only 2.18 seconds and 4 seconds, which makes it easier to make the T3>T1>T2>T1 chain work (with the bonus damage offsetting the lower base damage). Out of all the issues on my list, this is actually the easiest to fix, since many sets have minor damage ST mez powers that could be upgraded to have decent damage.

5) Speaking of, the mez powers are ridiculous. Why do they need to be 20 second recharging powers that do minor damage and have only a scale 10 duration (11.92 seconds for a Blaster at level 50)? This would save a lot of headache.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that since damage is all Blasters get, their damage should be the highest in the game.

I mean, literally. Tankers get crap damage, but they make up for it with the ability to create the unchallengeable, unapproachable best defense and resistance in the game, blowing Scrappers and Brutes (The two closest competitors) out of the water. Defenders get crap damage, but make up for it with Buff and Debuff modifiers that Controllers, Masterminds, and Corruptors (The three other buff/debuff classes) can only look at and cry. But Blasters, who literally get nothing in the world save damage, damage, a couple worthless Mez powers that are useless on teams, and more damage? Scrappers have exactly the same base damage, PLUS criticals, PLUS surviveability.

Blasters should be to damage what tankers are to HP/Defense/Resistance and what Defenders are to Buff/Debuff. They should be the unchallenged, unsurpassed, Best Damage In The Game.

Because that's all they get.

Hmmmm, you know one thing I do wish Blasters would get? With these new archetype IO sets, they should not get a damage proc. If Brutes should get a proc that helps their Fury building, Blasters should get one for Defiance damage building (or retaining those bonuses for longer). That would be quite cool.

Outside of Brutes and Tankers, the rest just seemed to get a damage proc, rather than something cooly thematic (even if not everyone likes the +res for Tanks one).

The problem with blasters is having the most ridiculous secondaries in the game.

Having a primary of damage and a secondary of damage is so beyond comprehension its just amazing.

Violate the cottage rule and redo the secondaries to include some defensive and more auxiliary powers and get rid of the stupid melee attacks, take away the crash from nukes, and low and behold blasters might get useful.

Till then Im keeping my blasters shelved, blasters off my team and sticking to playing corruptors.

Let me just say this, if any other AT took 2 powers from their secondary they would be laughed off a team, but this is close to the standard for blasters, they often pass up nearly their entire secondary to stack defense from pool powers. No AT should be skipping big chunks of their secondaries for pool powers.


The days of defenders taking 1 attack are long gone

Your always better off taking defensive pool powers than melee attacks, taking melee attacks without having defense is a trip to a debt badge.

Again we arent talking level 50 blaster incarnates with purples coming out of every orifice.

No melee attacks itself is not the problem, dominators are fine.

The problem is 3/4 of blasters total powers are attacks.... what... wait.. and they still dont do that much more damage than scrappers, corruptors or dominators, Soa.

Im not saying they dont do any more, just not enough more for the fact that they do nothing else.

Nevermind the fact that what the heck does any character need more than 5 or 6 attacks for anyway, you dont have enough animation time for any more than that.

Recharge is hardly an issue later in the game.

Theory + Facts = Conclusion

You have a Theory that blasters are not desirable. The Facts are some people play them and have zero issue.

This not fitting your Conclusion you then argue more with the same points over and over and again others don't agree. Your Conclusion is not valid - your Theory is fine and with added Facts you just need to change YOUR Conclusion.

Your Conclusion is for YOU - you don't find the trade off with being squishie worth the small added damage.

My Conclusion - playing a blaster is fun and I need to be attentive and cautious or I die. This means to get a blaster to higher level means no training wheels. This equals fun for me.