Give blasters +DEF versus range (only)

The concept of "range is a blaster's defense" has gotten much derision poured on it for various reasons. What if we made it literally true by giving blasters either a secondary power or an inherent power that gives +DEF to range (only)? They would still have a big hole to melee attacks, so your blaster could dodge bullets and laser beams, but easily get punched out by a Knockout Blow, and once in awhile can get nailed by a lucky shot. This seems right for blasters thematically.

I don't think it would be too overpowering, and there is even precedent in fortunatas, who essentially are range attackers with high defense (only their defense works against every positional vector).

I was just pondering the idea of scalable Def/Res in Defiance. From what I remember, Defiance is fairly resource intense server-side, so this may not be a viable option.

Always a nifty idea, but it was obviously decided back in I10 that they wanted to keep the squish in the blaster. Ideas like this were tossed around by the devs at the time. That said, it has been sometime since that choice was made and we do have a lot of new devs and new thoughts in the studio that makes these choices now.

My personal opinion is that I have fallen into the camp that wants to keep the squish in the blaster. I likely would not sweat it if they took some of the squish out (after all I spend a great deal of influence and time to make IO builds to take some of the squish out of the ones I play), but I also am not all that interested in the devs spending time to do it.

I also am against any ideas that further denigrates blaster secondaries. There are already enough trade-offs that need to be made in order to use most secondary powers (we aren't all /Devices ). I was really unhappy when they opted to increase ONLY the blaster ranged mod in I11. That said, ranged defense would still be very useful when using melee attacks, so I should not be bothered by this, but there is the psychological aspect that would lend weight to the argument that blaster secondaries should not have melee attacks.

Other thing to remember, too, is that by staying at range (when we do, at least) for most mobs we're dealing with their less damaging attacks. That may be part of the decision not to do this.

(I'm not really leaning one way or the other on it - though what can be done with IOs might also count against somewhat to the devs.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

I wouldn't make it inherent but I wouldn't mind giving up a melee attack in exchange for a click power similar to Build Up or Aim that gives a ranged and maybe AoE defense buff for a certain amount of time. That's unlikely to happen. But maybe if they ever added a tenth power.

Keep in mind that you can obtain plenty of ranged defence per invention set bonuses.

-Johnny

As someone who runs an SR Blaster thanks to IOs (though maybe I should start calling him a Shield Blaster, due to Temp Invuln backing up those defenses), any amount of inherent ranged defense would be broken.