Blasters surpurflous?

THANK you, Claws!

That makes no sense. "People still play/invite blasters because they don't care about what's better or worse. Therefore, blasters are no better or worse."

Are you just trying to be frustrating, because you just missed his entire point.

Play a blaster because you like playing Blasters. If you don't like them, don't play them. If the numbers bother you, pick another AT.

Blasters are made to deal ranged damage, or melee damage if you're feeling sassy. Instead of defense sets you get MORE ATTACKS. Sometimes you have some controls. Sometimes it's all about the damage.

In the end, the important thing is that you have fun. My Fire/Fire blaster is crazy addictive to play, and he faceplants ALL THE TIME. Could he be outdamaged? Sure. Do I care? Nope.

I am sorry but what people are happy playing blasters how many and why, and how does that relate to the overall population ?

If you can't answer that your statement isn't a "inconvenient truth", its just distraction and propaganda.

I will say this, while its not a valid statistical sample, I have been on an enormous amount of trials to get incarnates done, and what I haven't seen are blasters participating in the amounts you would expect for the most popular, third most popular, or most created AT.

Because some people enjoy playing more difficult characters, and players do drop blasters.

Even Arcana conceded this point.

But just because they are weaker than competing archetypes doesnt mean no one will play them, Heck players still play gravity dom's no matter how utterly horrid they are, doesnt mean their balanced.

Just because you enjoy playing does not mean its balanced, and they cant make any content more difficult till they balance better.

We're not talking about some people here. We're talking about nearly a third of all new heroes created and around a quarter of all active heroes across all levels. They can't have numbers like that and be totally abandoned post level-40 as some of you here are suggesting. If so few people are playing Blasters post-40 then what are they playing and where did THOSE characters come from? That would have to be reflected in the created and active-across-all-levels numbers too. They don't spring into existence at level 40 or 50 when people dump their Blasters.

The degree to which people are abandoning Blasters was overblown due to a misunderstanding that was cleared up earlier in this thread. They are still being abandoned somewhat more often than others but not by much. And you might expect that from the fact they are created more than anyone else. Is it a problem that people think Blasters suck or is it that they just weren't as super-amazing as they thought they might be but are still good enough to play more than a lot of other ATs? What matters is how many people stick with them in the end and that number is absolutely very healthy from the available stats we've seen.

Oh sure. People even play Stalkers. But look at how many, man. Doms are a lot better than they once were. Stalkers even got some love. But neither is up to the level of popularity as Blasters. Not even close. Doms and Stalkers used to compete for the title of "least played non-epic AT". Sympathy for the poor Blaster? Don't make me laugh.

That's pure B.S. You can't know that and as it is Arcana makes claims that border on reading entrails to support her position

If you're going to respond, please respond to what I actually said.

I said people still play and invite blasters because they don't particularly care what people are playing. Whether they are better or worse never even came into what I said until the end.

Blasters in fact ARE no better or worse than other ATs. They are designed to do one thing: Deal lots of damage in a short amount of time. And they do it well.

Whether you like it or not, there are hordes of people in this game who couldn't give a chrome plated crap less what the numbers or people posting on the forums say. They are going to play what they like playing. And this may surprise you, but I see blasters all over the place in the game. I see them quite frequently above level 40. I see a lot of them in trials.

So, the fact that a few forum posters are trying to make the point that blasters are useless doesn't seem to be having much of an effect on the blaster population.

Unless you have concrete, inarguable PROOF that players are abandoning blasters in favor of other things in large numbers, well, your point is completely moot.

It's kind of funny how people try to make a video game such damn serious business. Why the hell do you even CARE if people are playing blasters or not? Are YOU playing blasters? If you are, why do you care that someone else isn't? If you're not, what difference does it make if someone else is?

That's what has me confused more than anything else. Why the hell is it so important to you to know and/or approve of what other people are choosing to play?

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Arcana's AT Popularity Analysis uses data released by Back Alley Brawler. It's admittedly a few years old by now, but it shows Blasters being created close to 30% of all new heroes and 16% of all ATs, period. The highest number at the time. The "Active since..." data shows around 24% of all heroes were Blasters. Again, the highest number, but less than the 28-29% creation rate for heroes.

I suppose you could claim it's out of date and recent changes have knocked Blasters entirely out of the running except...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ersaries-today

That's where we got the most recent info about level 1-49 numbers. Blasters drop to third at level 50, which while it supports the idea that endgame Blasters drop in popularity that "drop" is only to third place. Third out of 14 ATs? That's what you call a problem? Can my favorite AT have that "problem"? Pretty please?

You know that's funny because I actually like stalkers. They have a very nice effort/reward ratio. While their overall performance is a little short of brutes and scrappers you can build very nice stalkers with considerably less effort than the equivalent brute or scrapper. They also can do a few things that other ATs really have a great deal of trouble accomplishing.

The whining on Doms is much more understandable. They start and stay very slow untill you start IOing them out, then they become incredible.

The problem with blasters is their curve is nice initial start, then "WTF why am I playing this ?". After you hit that inflection point they just become a money pit where you throw inf into them to mortar and plaster over their inherent shortcomings.

I've read everything in this thread, and it is quite lulz worthy, however I will just respond to the OP.

Blasters: 7 (4 @ 50)
Scrappers: 6 (3 @ 50)
Dominators: 5 (1 @ 50)
Tanks: 2 (both @ 50)
Defenders: 3 (none @ 50)
Stalkers: 2 (none @ 50)
Brutes: 2 (none @ 50)
Controllers: 2 (none @ 50)
SoA: 1 (not @ 50)

So are blasters "surpurfluous"? not to me, almost every other AT is "surpurflous".
Infact my only really active 50 is a blaster. They only characters I've wanted to play after IO'ing are blasters.

All of my Blaster 50's came from teaming (I leveled the Scraps in between each blaster through teams, my other 50's were a mixture of teams, tf's, and SG farm runs, mostly the farm runs to help with SG stuff.)

The only consistent fun I've had in this game is on my blasters, and to a lesser extent my scrappers, through running mishes and story arcs, which I mostly solo, or run Pick Up TF's.

My non-50 non-blasters could probably all me deleted and I wouldn't miss them, but I either like their name, costume, or concept I came up for them, so they'll stay there unplayed until I can come up with a better concept for the name, all while I continue to play my 'Main' Blaster, and enjoy it, on multiple ranged TF's, Incarnate Trials, and whatever else comes across my plate. I will make sure to stay away from whoever thinks blasters are useless, because I wouldn't want my "surpurflous" blaster ruining their game experience.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Sure, the devs are supposed to listen to their customers, mister business 101 out there. And if I decide to start suggesting that the devs change the game from being about superheroes and supervillains to being about clowns that is my right as well, and technically Paragon Studios is supposed to pay attention to me. But I hope strongly that they assume a meth-head somehow managed to hack into my forum account and make paper airplanes out of my posts, because I hope they recognize stupid when they see it. I assume they will recognize futile just as accurately.

I love people who use numbers without understanding them, or let alone thinking through the implications of their statements.


If blasters are 30% of all heroes created and 16% of all ATs created this implies that villains were and are being created in nearly equal numbers to heroes.

If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Matter of fact that article you cite below puts the lie to it as well. There is only 1 villain AT that even makes the top 5 of all and that is the mastermind.


Here are a couple questions for you, How many level 50 characters have you deleted ? Does a level 50 have other uses, besides participating in combat related content ?

If you answer not many, and or yes, you should be able to understand why that can be deceptive. Once you get a character to the point they are maxxed out in terms of storage and transaction slots they have other uses than strictly fighting.

A brute is even less of a 'concrete example' as was claimed by an earlier poster. And has next to nothing do do with anything being discussed. Even if she was main tanking all brutes still has the same hp, res,and def caps - granite was popular because of the fact that not everyone was always able/willing to bring the optimal support setup, so the set already havigg dullpain, high def and high res made it a simplier choice. If you had a cold or two and a thermal then any brute became a granite. But you also wanted rads and kins.

Now you just run it with whatever cause IOs and downgrading the sf took pretty much all the difficulty out of that task.

And she did cite that her blaster has run more rsfs than stfs, but that can only be since the sf was downgraded and we have all been massively upgraded with ios. The exampme is verging on meaningless when we have become so powerful that the rsf can be soloed by some and easily duo'd now.

I enjoyed having 9 fire imps out.
I enjoyed old PSW
I enjoyed shield charge nuke
I enjoyed toggle IH

I enjoyed old dom domination
I enjoyed defiance1.0 (way more than d2.0)
I enjoyed pre i13 pvp

Fun =/= balanced
Of which blasters are pretty weak compared to other ATs. Thankfully it doesnt hugely matter cause the game is so easy, but lots of people do care about the balance metrics.

Asking if blasters are superfluous is not the same as saying they are useless. I think that might be confusing some people. They are just rarely in a situation where you wouldnt be better served with a different AT. But the overall ease of content doesnt result in that decision being a pass or fail. So why does it matter that they are a bit weak then? It doesnt to a lot of people, but neither did some of the things i listed above. They do matter to some though.

Unfortunately that is what people are responding with, and saying that blasters are useless because everything is better, or not useless because nothing is useless. YMMV

If you "strengthened" Blasters the only way to do that now is add layers of protection that would make them essentially ranged scrappers, either way effectively making all other AT's useless, because if you have the protection of a scrapper, and can do the damage of a blaster from melee or a distance what's the point of playing anything else?

Or you can just add more damage to the blaster. You could figure how much of a percentage a scrapper or brute is more survivable then a blaster, then add that % in damage to the blaster AT, unfortunately blaster's do enough damage to get through the game fairly easily, so adding more damage wouldn't really add anything to the AT.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Sure, the devs are supposed to listen to their customers, mister business 101 out there. And if I decide to start suggesting that the devs change the game from being about superheroes and supervillains to being about clowns that is my right as well, and technically Paragon Studios is supposed to pay attention to me. But I hope strongly that they assume a meth-head somehow managed to hack into my forum account and make paper airplanes out of my posts, because I hope they recognize stupid when they see it. I assume they will recognize futile just as accurately.

So, if blasters were adjusted so they were no longer the "worst" choice for a particular task, it logically follows that something else would take their place as the "worst" choice.

Would you rather play AT leapfrog, where in any given issue a particular AT is the "worst"? Makes more sense to me to leave it as it is and let people play what they enjoy playing.

There are many reasons why someone might shelve their blaster in favor of something else. I'm not going to go into all the possible reasons, but I'd be willing to bet "Some guy on the forums said they were numerically inferior and AT X was better" was not the reason for very many of them at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the number of people that was the reason for is pretty close to zero.

And at any rate, EVERY AT is superfluous. You don't NEED any given AT or power set to succeed in the game. This month it's blasters getting the hate, next month it will be defenders, or tanks, or scrappers, or controllers, etc.

If these forum debates had ANY truth to them at all, no one would play anything but whatever was deemed to be the best brute this month. Since people DO play other things, quite extensively, the whole argument is a bunch of hot air.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

More attacks is a meaningless advantage if they don't result in more damage, and since we're only in a three-way-tie for damage output, I'm gonna go with 'no.'

Fair enough. On closer inspection, it turns out the actual creation rate of Blasters as a ratio of all heroes is more like 27.5% in the data that BaBs gave us. This is what the 16.14% of all ATs compares to. If you still think this is wrong, why don't you look over the post yourself and tell us all where you think BaBs lied to us?

If you stop playing a character because it's not fun anymore at level 50 you are going to either delete it or just leave it around gathering dust or, as you say, serving as enhancement storage or something. Either way, it's because the character wasn't fun to play anymore. So regardless of whether the data is showing us real actively played characters or just characters that exist on active accounts, the shift from 1st to 3rd place is an indication of how much people are shifting away from Blasters. They are, but not by much. It doesn't really make sense to believe that if someone is twice as likely to delete a Blaster than a Scrapper, they are for no good reason three or four times as likely to side-line a Blaster than a Scrapper. Not if the reason for both is the same: Loss of interest.

Admittedly, it would be better to sample the participation in iTrials to decide how popular/good Blasters are at level 50. If that shows a serious shift then there is indeed a problem worth looking into. But as with anything you have to take a sufficiently large sample. Most of the time, for example, I only see one Stalker on an iTrial. Me. Last week I was on a 24-person BAF with four! Couldn't believe my eyes. Hasn't happened since.

Course, the leader was a Stalker.

You shouldn't tempt me like that.

Double us of a false dichotomy.

First they don't have to be adjusted to the point of being best or even better than the worst, simply improving them so the gap is not so significant would do a world of good.

Second you can adjust them up so they are equally good but in different ways.

Good use of the slippery slope argument.


By that logic we should never get balance nerfs at all. After all if the game is so easy you don't need to adjust weak ATs up why adjust things down ? Its all so easy that balance doesn't matter ?

Entrails might be too generous, If this thread manages to get another inconsistent set of statistics wedged in it will have to become an argument on climate change.

there is some strange logic going on in this post.

Interstingly enough, corrs,defs, trollers and mms all exist in a realm of being reasonably well balanced against eachother. This is despite them being an order of magnitude more difficult to balance than the 'damage' ats. They of course are plagued by intra at balance issues, but are pretty good across ats. Any disparity is pretty easily covered by the large differences in playstyle.

Blasters on the other hand have intra set issues as well as issues when compared to other ats. Which is sorta sad cause they only by and large bring one element to the party - damage.

Of course many of you are right, blasters do enough damage. Perhaps they arent the issue cause it is prwrty easy to design a functioning hammer. The issue is that everyone else has been given too much damage in comparison.

Now widespread nerf probably isnt going to happen. THe opposite is being handed to us with incarnates as the devs seem to no longer care about tankmages. But it still doesnt alter the basic fact that blasters arent up to snuff.

You should know I send virtually all of my analyses to the devs, and usually discuss their conclusions with them. I am always holding Aces. I just usually have no desire to beat other people to death with them.

Usually.

Go for it

I can't wait to see you come up with things I wasn't talking about. It should be nearly as much fun as when you tried to correct a ballpark estimate