Help a Nooblet

I am pretty new to this game. Have a lvl 50 Ill/Rad 'troller and both VEATs in the high 20's.
I would like to make a really powerful AOE blaster. What power sets would you recommend?

Your best options for primaries would probably be Fire Blast, Radiation Blast, or possibly Archery, but that one blooms later, once you have access to Rain of Arrows and can launch it every 30 seconds.

For secondaries, I would go with Fire Manipulation or Mental Manipulation. Both have a good amount of AoE attacks. Fire will give you more damage, but Mental will give you a couple more strategic utility powers. Choose according to your wants.

Hope you find what you want!

I would definitely go with fire blast for the primary.

For secondary, /fire, /mental, /energy, or /elec are all good. /Fire has the most AoE damage, but you may not need it because you already have a ton of it in the primary. /mental has some damage and an excellent self buff in drain psyche. /energy has a bunch of great utility powers and good single target melee damage. And /elec has the most single target melee damage, so it's probably most fitting for a pure blapper (blaster that's played like a scrapper) type.

Fire is going to be where it's at for AoE goodness.

I differ on my choice of secondary though. I tried playing a Fire/Fire and a Fire/Mental but found myself unable to handle the aggro from all the AoE madness without some added mitigation.

I then turned to Fire/Ice and found my second favorite combination to date! 1 of my 3 50's and by far my safest Blaster. Was also the fastest levelling soloer I've rolled.
Shiver turns Bosses into jokes and the AoE power in Fire lays waste to everything else in short order. Added benefit of getting to use Rain of Fire with Ice Patch!

I also have an Arch/Mental that has a nice stable of AoE's. Haven't made it to 32 yet though and so far feels much weaker than my Fire/Ice ever did.

I've just got my Fire/Fire/Fire blaster to 50 and she lurched from awesome bringer of firey AoE death to awesome aggro magnet of suicide depending on the team I was in.

It's a brilliantly fun combo - pulling with RoF is always good for a laugh - but your capacity for attracting aggro is limited only by the amount of time you can stay alive.

You must have been out of town last weekend, plainguy.

Fire is good for aoe and is a very straightforward set but if you want something a little zazzier you should consider radiation or the weapon sets. All of the weapon sets have more or better aoe than fire unless you really want a crashy nuke, while radiation pretty much keeps pace with it. Fire has the best single target damage but that wasn't the question!

Fire most definitely has more AoE than any set besides archery. While RoA is amazing, the set is a joke all the way until level 32 when you get it. Meanwhile fire is dominant all the way from level 1.

Fire has: rain of fire, fireball, fire breath, crashy nuke
Radiation has: irradiate, the cone thing, neutron bomb, crashy nuke
DP has: empty clips, bullet rain, piercing rounds, hail of bullets
Archery has: fistful of arrows, explosive arrow, rain of arrows
AR has: buckshot, msomething grenade, flamethrower, ignite, full auto

So no, fire does not "most definitely have more aoe than any set besides archery." Archery is in fact the only set there with less aoe than fire, which is why I said "more or better" as rain of arrows is better than anything fire can do. I also consider crashy nukes useless for normal play which is why I feel that the weapon sets pull so far ahead of fire for aoe. Radiation only has as much aoe as fire but I think irradiate and neutron bomb are arguably more interesting than rain of fire and fireball, if not outright superior.

Like most said, Fire/ is definitely the way to go. In fact, I find it hard sometimes to play my other blasters because of how much damage it does.

I have a Fire/Fire and I didn't enjoy the secondary for fire. The reason was that I didn't think I needed *anything* in the secondary. The toon is not gimped in any way, but I literally only took two of the secondary powers, but I am still a HUGE DAMAGE MONSTER. The good thing about /fire for a secondary on this toon was that I was free to make a lot of other power choices with the power pools.

If Fire doesn't win for damage, then something needs to get nerfed. The only point of Fire is damage. Also one factor that helps Fire is the fact that it's less resisted than say Archery.

Okay then let's try this from another angle.

Take the cones. Fire breath does .66 damage scale per second. It is beaten by fistful at .78, buckshot at 1, flamethrower at .83, and full auto at .71. It beats electron haze at .56 and empty clips at some laughably small number. It recharges in 16 seconds, the same as electron haze and twice as long as buckshot and fistful at 8. Empty clips is at 10.

Take the taoes. Fireball's DPS is great at 1.26, hands down the highlight of the set. Bullet rain's DPS is significantly worse than that, yet it does manage to do the same amount of damage. M60 and neutron bomb are comparable to bullet rain in DPS but lower in damage. Explosive arrow does .9, respectable. On this one, everything is at 16 seconds recharge apart from bullet rain at 18.

Take the "other" category. Here we see rain of fire doing something like scale 2 damage for a two second animation - pretty good, except it has a 90 second recharge and takes 15 seconds to apply its damage. This is a good power for corruptors because it scourges, and it will be good for defenders because it will do blaster damage, but for blasters that is really not impressive. More of a nice addition to the ranged chain when you have an opening for it. It is up against irradiate, which does scale 1 in 1.07 seconds and applies its damage over 5 seconds in addition to a significant debuff, on a 20 second recharge. It is also up against rain of arrows and hail of bullets, and next to those it is simply pathetic. Rain of arrows and hail of bullets do approximately scale 3.3 and 4.3 damage respectively and are up basically as often as rain of fire. Oh, and I think ignite also hits about that hard if you manage to plant something in the patch. Not useful that often but a very damaging power for AVs and things that won't run away.

Fire also gets inferno, a lame power that throws away all of your endurance for 20 seconds and even if you mitigate that with a blue or with ageless drops all of your toggles, which you must then toggle back on for some substantial number of seconds. Inferno is better than atomic blast, which has the same downsides but only hits just slightly harder than hail of bullets. Whee.

So there you go. Fire is a perfectly fine set for aoe but it isn't the best. Neither is it the worst. If you really enjoy lining up cones that helps a bit but of the sets I named only dual pistols and rad have worse cones than fire breath.

Oh, and let me add that when one considers procs, the fact that the other four sets can throw out more aoes works in their favor regardless of how much damage the aoes do. This is particularly significant if you consider armageddon or reactive, which rapidly widen the gap between a fast-aoeing set like assault rifle and fire even further.

Thank you for noticing that I don't give a damn what anyone thinks when what's at issue is what is true.

If you're not familiar with the damage scale talk, think of it this way. Fire breath takes well over twice as long to deliver not quite twice as much damage as fistful of arrows, and you can only use it half as often.

But even you have to agree, when looking at the overall picture from 1-50 Fire wins out.

Sure if you only focus on the 35+ game with Procs and all avail extras the other sets equal out or even outperform but that doesn't change the fact that Fire is an AoE monster from level 4 on...

I think you can say fire wins out if you consider its amazing single target damage coupled with its good aoe. If the main thing you care about is aoe, other sets are superior. If you care about overall "best damage" and do not value the tricks that other sets get in addition to their damage, you absolutely would do well with fire blast.

My experience with AoE blasters stems from a DP/Fire. He's only at level 28 (Pre-Nuke stage.) I only have bullet rain, combustion, and fire sword circle and the DP cone snipe. At this stage his damage is phenominal with incendary rounds. In close range I can usually three-shot a mob of whites with only one or so red inspirations.

When I hit the level 50 ding, my total AoE's will include:
Bullet Rain, Combustion, Fire Sword Circle, Precision Shot (cone snipe), Hail of Bullets, Burn, and also hot feet!

Also note: /Fire contains a PBAoE power called consume. For every enemy you hit it brings back a base value of 20% endurance, fully slotted that almost doubles. Hail of Bullets also grants a 10% defense boost during the animation, and I've reduced the recharge to about 40 seconds. In close range he is a force to be reckoned with! The only /fire i could think that would be better is a fire/fire.

Well, that last bit is just the thing, Stryker. I wouldn't have held the weapon sets in such high esteem if they didn't have their mininukes along with their other aoe, but they do. I don't even feel that you need to have it every spawn - if it's even every two spawns that means that half the spawns you'll do slightly slower than fire and the other half will be radically faster. It does take more effort to get hail of bullets up even every two spawns, but rain of arrows and full auto? No big deal. Radiation competes with fire without even having a useful tier 9, in my opinion, which says something about it. You're certainly correct that blaze speeds things up for the fire blaster even in the context of aoe, but it's not an insurmountable advantage.