Crashless Nukes *Might* Happen

You're right, sorry for being snotty, that was uncalled for.

I disagree with your appraisal of average blaster ranged DPA. The difference between blaster DPA and scrapper DPA is that blaster sets are much more consistent: 63~ DPA, or one damage scale per second, is hands down the most common arrangement. Scrapper attacks, meanwhile, vary wildly from far worse to far better than that. Here I agree that if that's all you look at, the scrapper looks better.

One difference is that scrapper sets are cluttered with garbage powers that are at best useful while leveling up. You can say scrappers have the advantage of being able to utilize recharge to boost their DPA, I can say that blasters don't need the crutch of recharge since their DPA is basically flat in the first place. There are situations where melee range is either inconvenient or impossible to maintain and they're becoming more common with every content release.

Recharge SOs alone may not make a clean chain out of t1 -> t2 -> t1 -> t3, but throw in your tier 1 secondary power, an aoe, a self buff, an inspiration click, aid self... It is really not difficult to make a solid ranged chain from the average blast set even without considering IOs. If you do consider IOs, it isn't that blaster single target DPA will be superior to scrapper DPA when both are allowed to go nuts, it is that blasters make different tradeoffs in the slotting they can do and get different benefits.

Another difference is that this leaves most scrapper sets without anything like as much aoe as most blaster sets. This is where I see the main advantage for blasters. If you're comparing all sets and not the absolute top melee aoe primary/secondary combos, there isn't much of a contest. Blasters get big cones, big taoes, big pbaoes and delightfully big mini-nukes, rains, and other such things. There are two primaries and three secondaries that don't get much aoe, as I recall, compared to most primaries and most secondaries for scrappers.

I haven't gone into blaster melee attacks as I personally don't like them very much but some of them are very competitive with the best DPA scrappers can bring to bear. It isn't difficult to find room in one's build for a blap or two if you're more amenable to the concept. My point was that picking up energy punch and bone smasher in no way precludes you from switching back to power bolt, power blast and power burst when melee gets too hot. The scrapper who is driven from melee stops doing damage entirely unless he's claws, spines or KM and the drop in DPS even for those sets is severe indeed.

As for who's best at delivering ranged damage, the only competition I see brought up is corrs and doms. I find both of these to be pale shadows at best. Doms... I think A_F and Shubbie were just yanking my chain because nobody ever defended that assertion when pressed. Corrs can do similar DPA to blasters if you figure in the effects of -regen on a GM's health or the team-wide benefit of debuffs, but if a team already has either of those things, and indeed blasters themselves can bring both of those things as well, well, they're not going to be outdamaging a good blaster on the BM fight.

Doms do get good modifiers and they do have control but what they don't have is aoe competitive with what blasters get. It's kind of hard to compare their single target damage given how schizophrenic it is. Stone spears and ice bolt, por ejemplo, are not both tier 1 blasts by any measure aside from their literal placement in their sets. With the intensely glaring exception of sleet, doms are also kind of worse at debuffs than blasters, no mean feat.

The last page or so of posts has been most fascinating to read.

I have played a lot of blasters, but all have been strictly ranged. I generally dislike melee combat and tend to avoid most melee archetypes, but I dislike it even more if I am dying as quickly as my opponents. Unfortunately, that's how I tend to feel when I get in close with a Blaster. Melee exchanges tend to make me feel like "anyone can win, it is just a matter of who lands more attacks." If I am at range, not only do I have strong attacks, but I probably have a couple attacks that will help keep enemies away (Secondary tier 1 powers, patches like Ice Patch, Burn, and Caltrops, ST hold/stun blasts, and even just plain old knockback). My health bar fluctuates a whole lot less if I stay away from the mobs. Overall, the vast majority of primary/secondary combinations will include more ranged abilities than melee/PBAoE abilities, so I would rather just shoot from range as opposed to running in with the express purpose of using melee attacks.

In light of my views on melee, I am a big advocate for change towards crashing Tier 9 attacks. I can think of two situations in which I would want to "nuke:" Either as a panic button when I have been surrounded, or as a way to quickly wipe a spawn. Because of that, I would honestly take either of the suggested changes.

If we up the damage to make the crash worthwhile, that's fine by me, because that means that when I fire it off, everything should be dead.

If we lose the 100% end crash with -Recovery, that's fine by me, because that means I can fire it off and finish off anything that didn't fall in the blast.

In either case, I think the recharges should be reduced.

Blasters can also get a ton of defense if IOed and that is probably why they did not get a buff before.

IMO it would be a good idea both for balance and gameplay to make the crash less ridiculous so that you can actually use the power. The nuke can be less effective than any other power during a team because it essentially statues a member of the team. I'd like it to include a crash but not a 100% crash.

Give it like a 70 point energy requirement.

I would absolutely be willing to say that psi is simply a terrible blaster set because it only has one non-nuke aoe. I count archery and dual pistols not as marginal performers but as competitive with fire for aoe because their mini-nukes pick up that much slack and they already do pretty well with their cones and taoes. Ice and elec have bad reputations for aoe but really they do have two functional aoes each before the nuke. Psi stands out for me as the one blast set that really breaks the rule.

You could be right that the average blaster doesn't know or care how to get the most out of ranged aoe powers but I'm not sure that invalidates the fact that blasters generally get them and they generally can be very useful in a wide variety of circumstances.

It's hard to guess what the devs think sometimes but I think their recent behavior regarding blast sets supports my argument. Dark blast has two aoes and a regular nuke while beam rifle has, ehhh, sort of three aoes and a mini-nuke, but prior to that we saw dual pistols with three aoes and a mini-nuke. The last comparable set before that that I can think of is arachnos widows, who get scads of aoe and a crashless normal nuke. Dark blast is a counterexample but I still say that they're moving away from "normal nukes" as they devise new blast sets.

Oh, and one thing I will say about psi is that it was added at the same time as /mm, a very aoe-oriented secondary.