A fundamental question about blasters...

I used to love my fire/em blaster for how easily it could solo things. I used to be able to kill nearly any normal boss, pretty much any with a second try, and never got my *** kicked unless I pulled too much or otherwise screwed up.

When my blaster hit 40 and I thought I'd try soloing some missions again, strange things started happening. First I got my *** badly handed to me by some carnie bosses. Maybe it's nothing, I though, since they got controller powers and some very nasty ranged DPS as well; maybe they're just particularly tough.

Then I got my *** kicked by Crey guys. Paragon Protectors are nearly impossible for me. I tried one some five times and twice I got close to killing him, but first time his Total Focus just dropped me from 2/5 HP to dead, and second time he popped some deflection shield and there it was, none of my attacks made it through. Okay, I thought, bosses are beyond my power now. I won't go into much detail what happened, but it just seemed that the bosses' Energy Blast came thrice as often as my fire, did twice the damage and being Energy it had knockback.

Next I got killed by a group where a lieutenant's total focus dropped me from 1/3 HP while I was busy blasting some minions. All this because one Blaze missed. Even if it hadn't, I would've had hard time. At which point will mere minions become hard to beat?

Is it just the way with blasters on higher levels, or is there something completely wrong about my playing? What used to work perfectly now hardly works against lieutenants. Am I to shun use of Blaze and the EM blapper attacks completely in favour of sniping everything from afar with boost range and flare+fire blast spam and hope they can't fly too?

The melee attacks are definetly riskier. The mobs you named are also pretty tough hombres. I think you can still use your melee attacks, but you must be more selective and much more careful at your lvl than you were earlier. I dont blap much at all, though I did add Bone Smasher back into my latest blaster build, and I find myself using it. Since you are EM, you can also liberally use Power Thrust, which I always do when something gets close. I am capped to range and play at range nearly always, but I do sneak in for a quick hit once in a while. Im Nrg/Nrg, so I often have time to hit something as it stands back up.

In melee, you are probably already doing this, but hitting Power Thrust and queing up one of your other melee hitters gives a better degree of safety at time.

The late game is definetly tougher, if you like the character, you may want to look into increasing either your ranged defense, or your Smashing/Lethal if you want to melee more, its helps alot.

Blasters are actually terrible at any level, but especially at high level. Incarnate powers make them obsolete as do all fourteen of the fourteen archetypes. The only way justice will be had for blasters is if they are combined with tankers into a super AT that does the best dps at range and has the best survivability.

There you go A_F, I took care of that for you.

Fire/EM is a particularly rough combo as your primary offers almost no mitigation and your secondary isn't so hot for it either. My suggestion would be to dip into the epic pool of your choice at level 41, as the blaster APPs are pretty much all designed to increase your toughness in one way or another. All of them have at least one control power available at level 41, for example. My pick would be flame mastery and I would take bonfire at 41, and char at 44. These powers respectively allow you to keep almost anything out of melee range and lock down almost any dangerous minion or lieutenant. They also set you up for rise of the phoenix at 47, my favorite self rez in the game.

It's also worth pointing out that your example groups there are Crey, a group particularly laden with mez, damage resistance and hard hitting melee attacks, and Carnies, who are actually pretty easy except, as you say, the bosses who are notoriously annoying. When you're up against things like that, another thing to remember is that at level 40 you got five additional inspiration slots for a reason. Even just one medium luck on a character that isn't IOed for defense makes a world of difference against something like a ring mistress. Carry breakfrees if you find yourself running something like the Madeleine Casey arc. An ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, and all that.

Of course, the solution that many of us adopt is to simply use inventions. Not sure how you feel about that but they make a giganto amount of difference. One thing any blaster can easily and fairly cheaply build for is ranged defense, another thing is smashing/lethal defense. Ranged defense keeps you safe from most ranged mez powers, and most ranged damage as a happy side effect. S/l defense largely protects you from melee and quite a bit of ranged damage as well. Get a -KB io, they can be had cheaply and just a single one of them, stuck into combat jumping or hover, prevents 99% of knockback effects from working on you.

As I see it, you have loads of options. Sure life does get a bit more complicated for the modern blaster past level 40 but that's part of the fun in my opinion.

Go poke a head over in AT forum, big discussion on this issue.

And oh that tanker/blaster super AT he was talking about

Thats a Brute... try one out, they hit 40 and becomes gods among mere mortals.

Pretty much what Winterminal stated above.

I'll add in a little bit of advice with Carnies. Dark Ring Mistresses have a hold and debuff your chance to hit as well as debuff your endurance recovery. Even if you make it past the hold, make sure you have some yellows and blues and Aim is recharged. For Master Illusionists, use Inspirations and pray. MIs can be quite annoying primarily due to their summons. The one thing to remember is that all Illusionists, Master Illusionists and summoned Illusionists have a 5-7 rotation where they are phased for 5 seconds and then unphased for 7 seconds. Try to check the timing before you engage so you can have a mental timer on when not to use your big attacks.

As for Blasters in general, they can be one of the harder ATs to play post 40, as the game scales up quickly at that point. Carnies, Malta, Knives and Rularuu are all new enemy factions for that level range and they can be quite brutal, all in their own way. Still, there's a satisfaction you get with Blasters that you just don't get on the other ATs. Well, for me there is.

One of the things that happens to Blasters in the level range has to do with what we get in our Secondary sets. At level 38, your Scrapper friend is getting probably MoG or something similar, and you get Total Focus. His power lets him survive tougher enemies, yours forces you into melee range for a single-target attack. TF used to be Mag 4, so it was worth being in melee range for the animation time.

There is good advice in is thread. Many times I have cleared most of a room using my snipe. Takes longer but it's safer.

Stick with it. It gets better.

Around level 41 on my Energy/Energy I was stoked to finally be getting my Epic powers unlocked. Then, like you said, it seemed to come out of the blue (was my 1st time at that level) Every group just became really... Tricky.

During this period my Blaster morphed into a silent assasin. I respecced into SS to use in combo with Stealth and started 'Ghosting' most missions. Ultimately turning into a boss killer. 10 levels later that would become what he's most memorable for. No other toon I have can take out bosses as fast, not even my Brutes and MM's.

It was around level 44 I realized the initial hardships when dealing with certain high level mobs began to vanish. I recalled how it was the 1st time this toon came up against a Tsoo Sorceror and chalked it up to par for the course. Now that I had a decent hold in my arsenal thanks to the Anc pool I was actively hunting down Paragon Protectors (for payback and the badge) in Eden for months!! Was tons of fun. They never stood a chance.
I'd just stand right beside them for a bit, before hitting Aim+BU and Bonesmash quickly followed by TF. 9 times out of 10 they'd be stunned and on the floor shortly after! Few times the stun would miss I'd overwhelm them with blasts before they could pop the shield.

Only one's I still struggle with would be the Elude users. They seem to always get it off at the last possible second. Still it's simple enough to either SS off and flank them to wait it out with insps.

In other words, stick with it! Level 40 through 50 is the period of refinement for all AT's.

As for Nemesis using PFF. I generally just pause and use a mocking emote like /e Teabag while I wait for him to pop back out. They're usually down before the staff is fully pulled as it was their mistake to let my BU recharge afterall. ;p

This is the Blaster forum, so people are very sensitive to any suggestion that blasters might be disadvantaged. But yes, the endgame for blasters is very tough. It has nothing to do with the particular enemies you're fighting because all 40-50 enemy groups are dangerous. You'll need to play cautiously, use your APP mez and soft control well, learn to manage inspirations/APP rez/godmode, and in the long run think about building for defense. You'll also need to accept that sometimes you will die due to bad luck and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Try to look at it in a positive light: the skills you'll learn are valuable and will serve you well on other characters. My first character was a blaster (Fire/Fire, so even more naked than yours is) and I eventually got good enough that I can speedrun ITF on a build with no defense. When I run Lambda and watch other squishies die over and over again, rendered completely useless and whining they got 10 threads as rewards, I smile.

A couple of general suggestions:

- Make sure you have a -KB IO slotted somewhere. Hover or Combat Jumping are good places since most characters tend to have one of those, and you can drop the Zephyr -KB IO in a travel power if you don't mind paying more inf. One KB IO stops about 95% of the knockback you will run into, which helps a lot.

- Get a defensive power from your epic pool ASAP. Going Flame Mastery can be handy since it gives you Fire Shield for protection, Char to stop annoying minions or Lts (sappers, those DE mushrooms, etc...) and Rise of the Phoenix to turn a faceplant into a chance to blow things up. Force Mastery is also good since it has a nice armor power, an emergency "you can't hit me" power, and a mini-godmode for tough bosses. Cold and Mace (if you go villain long enough to pick up patron pools) offer S/L defense instead of resists in their shields... very handy if you want to make an expensive IO build and boost S/L resists to the 30s or even the softcap and stay in melee a lot. If you prefer a cheaper build the resist shields are probably better though.

- One handy tactic with /Energy is to use Boost Range and just stay back and shoot. You can even take Acrobatics for the hold protection (since most stuns are melee range holds are your biggest mez threat at range). Then once the enemy is thinned out you can stun or take down the nastiest remaining target with Total Focus and toss a few punches.

Unless you really like melee I'd go with the Flame epic and slot up Char for recharge and hold. Add in Fire Shield for some resistance and Rise of the Phoenix for when the inevitable happens (blasters faceplant more often than most ATs no matter what) and you should be good to go. Then it's just a matter of learning the new enemies and figuring out what your strategy, because "charge in headfirst and blow stuff up" really doesn't work that well any more.

(Well, actually, charging in headfirst and blowing everything up works great... if you make a very expensive IO build and pick your target groups carefully. But you have to really know what you're doing so it's best to start off more conservative until you get enough experience with the endgame groups to know what you can and can't handle.)

You really don't need to turn off bosses but if you want a smoother, creamier difficulty curve I guess it's an option.

"Learn to jump" is in fact excellent advice however, credit where credit is due, A_F. If you aren't bunny hopping around with CJ and hurdle, you aren't getting the most out of your blaster. Yeah yeah, hoverblasting. You can do better! Jumping is also more fun. Among other things, it enables you to essentially ignore long animation times, keep dangerous enemies out of melee indefinitely, look sexy as hell, and little known fact, the more you jump the more likely it is for a purple to drop.

Jumping around in combat is in fact great for any type of character, but blasters probably get the most out of it of any AT. They are the one AT that is the most committed to ranged damage and the least encumbered by other obligations. That is to say, you rarely have to take time out of your busy murdering schedule to heal someone, or buff someone, or rez someone, or anything else.

So yes, a good point which I don't believe I've articulated very often in my frequent defense of the archetype. It may not be intuitively obvious but if you're blasting, you ought to be hopping.

One issue on the difference you may have experienced is that previously Total Focus would stun a boss level mob with 1 hit. It no longer does this and will only mez Lt level mobs in one hit now. Bone Smasher has a fairly high mez persentage so stacking the two can quite often mez a boss then. I would also look at two specific epic pools in your forties. Fire and Energy both have some nice perks to them that go with your power sets. Energy offers Personal Force Field which essentially makes you untouchable by mobs, while Fire offers a hold (which you can use with TF) and a self rez. I would also recomend speccing into the medicine pool and get Aid Self. Combine that with PFF and you can heal yourself back to full health while they swing harmlessly at you.

@ the OP

I say post your build as it is currently and post a build your looking to get into at level 50.

What setting are you running missions on ?

Who knows how your slotted. It could be you or it might not be, but personally I would need to look at the numbers to see.

Over time I have come to discover and accept you cannot build a toon around a concept but you can build a concept around a toon.

But if your just making a build and want to play to live then I can tell you your doing it wrong or something is not right with your build.

If I can solo 4/8 settings on my AR Device and Archer EM then you should be able to handle a 0/0 setting.

But again I think we need to see a build to make and ask some questions regarding play style to make an educated decision.

Some blind comments

Do you have defenses ? Do you know what soft defense cap is ?

Having an Archer / EM I can tell you that you can have aid self in the build and still obtain range defense cap.

Again current build and future build if you thought that out and lets take it from there.

I recall the 3B Blaster guide from back in the day, and a lot of the advice still holds true, as Arcana pointed out. As a Blaster, you need to go in guns blazing (the 3B guide called us low down "blasterds" or something, that shoot people when they're not ready and kick them when they are down). Hit before the mob knows you are there, knock out the mezzers or annoying mobs first, etc. My E^3 Blaster generally holds Sappers or mezzers when going into a mob, then drains the rest if he needs to (though usually he just beats the rest into a pulp in a few seconds). My AR Blaster drops M80 into a mob and then fires off Full Auto while the mobs are flying. Most don't get back up. Same thing for my En/En Blaster's two AOE attacks.