Beam Rifle worth the money?

Since there's a 20%-off sale going on, I was wondering if it was a good idea to plunk down for Beam Rifle now. I tend to play Scrappers, Brutes, and Tanks mostly, but I've got a couple of blasters -- just not as enthusiatic about ranged damage, I guess. But I could conceivably create a Beam Rifle character, so I was wondering what people think of it so far. (Eh, I should probably just buy it. I can't think of much else to spend the points on, and, hey, it's On Sale, right?)

If you're going to have fun trying it, just buy it. You should have the points to burn, anyway. I know that's what I'm doing. I don't have very many corruptor/blaster/defender types, but I like the concept I have worked up for one.

I didn't pay much attention to BR during Beta so I'm really not comprehending what secondary would be the most synergistic.

I'd prefer to play it on a Corr over a Blaster, however.

I'd be inclined to grab it. Er. I did. On both accounts. I don't even usually like weapon blast sets, and redraw makes it seem unfun to me unless they add a Trick Bullet set. But! WHO CARES? IT IS A GIANT GUN!

This is CoH. If they let you replace your secondary for any AT with the Die Horribly set, which has nine death animations including the ghoul one, and when you trigger a power in it you die (using that animation), people would take it. And build characters that could, at the very least, run at +1/x8.

Beam Rifle is stronger for a cor than a blaster or defender.

First of all it benefits from alot of +rech since its nuke is so hard hitting and with no crash but a long recharge.

Animations are fast

But it needs to spread disintegrates, which blasters might have trouble doing or staying alive long enough to do it.

Also it benefits from scourge since it has so many dots.

The trouble is its too single target.

HOLY HELL GUYS.

Beam Rifle / Poison hits HARD.

Just sayin'.

I'll be trying Beam Rifle/Dark Miasma. Spreading Disintegrate and Cutting Beam? Check.

Spreading Disintegrate and Cutting beam in Tar Patch? Ooooooh yeah.

(Also, Redding Elite Rifle from Vanguard with Dark Miasma coloured greenish for that Vanguard magic look.)

I'm passing on this one. The set is bland. If I wanted an uninspired sci-fi gun that did nothing but vanilla damage -- no drone launcher, no laser bayonet, not even a simple repulsor beam for flavor -- I can have my pick of first person shooters. Even Fire Blast has a rain power to break up the monotony.

It did inspire me to pick up some pulse rifle attacks on my Bots mastermind, though. Photon Grenade is a halfway interesting power. A shame; Pulse Rifle was off to a promising start, but the devs got their heads locked into a crummy combo mechanic instead of spending some time at the drawing board.

DoTs are not especially good for scourge as they only check once to scourge, when the initial hit roll is made. I wouldn't say they're worse than all at once attacks, either, but it isn't an advantage for corruptors.

A case could be made that blasters kill stuff too fast to get their full bang per buck out of disintegrate. On the other hand, that's kind of an odd thing to say. Kill slower or you'll not be able to kill stuff fast! Wait, what? Still, it is true that defs and corrs will be proccing more disintegrate spreads, though their disintegrate-buffed attacks will be doing less damage to all of those enemies in the first place. This is getting confusing.

My beam blaster is level 10 right now. Maybe a third of spawns so far let me take advantage of spreading but that's due both to my burning down the disintegree and also the fact that I'm still on x1 because I'm not a lowbie blaster masochist. Even when you don't get spreads, you still take disintegrating targets out really fast. I've also had remarkable success against multi-boss spawns in the hollows considering single digit levels: they melt very quickly and are very likely to spread disintegration to their peers.

Even when disintegrate misses and you get caught with your blasting pants down the set does completely average damage. If energy and radiation are playable, so is disintegrateless beam rifle. Its cone is one of the quickest recharging among any blaster set so the fact that it only has one normal aoe, two pseudo-aoes and a mini-nuke isn't worrisome.

My complaint about the set is that the animations are boring. The particle effects are great, but all your character does is stand there gripping an occasionally vibrating rifle. People who think DP is too flashy should be all over BR!

Im fairly sure dots continually check for scourge, I know Ive seen my ice and fire corruptors start scourging after the initial hit.

I liked Beam Rifle enough in Beta to pick it up now that it's available on Live. I'm using it with a Devices Blaster right now simply because I didn't want to be constantly redrawing so it was imperative for me to pair it with a relatively hands-off powerset. If I made a Defender or Corruptor with it, I'd have to pair it with Force Field or Sonic Resonance.

I'm with Tenzhi. It's odd to say it's an advantage for fenders and corrs that they will be getting more disintegrates since what that really means is they'll be taking more time to kill the same number of targets. The number of procs you get has a linear relation to the number of attacks you perform. If you're getting more procs, it's because you're being forced to attack more. At the same time, both of these ATs have competing pressures from their primary or secondary to attack less and buff or debuff more.

Both of these ATs also quickly bump up against the recharge limitations of disintegrate, or more accurately the lack thereof. If you could only disintegrate once per fight, killing your target would be a huge bummer. In reality, though, disintegrate is itself a high damage attack that is a part of your chain. The blaster will be throwing it down either every three and a half seconds or every four and a half seconds on a finished build, depending on whether you consider lancer shot worth it versus the extra recharge to simply chain the tier 1 and tier 2. In that sense, the blaster has as many "procportunities," if you will (please do), as the others but is chewing through her targets faster.

Seems like it's a pretty good blaster set to me. Its aoe potential should definitely manifest itself more completely when the difficulty jumps up to x4+, either by teaming or by IOed soloing.

I am doing a duo with a friend. I think it will work very well.

He took a cold/storm controller so I matched his low damage (well low till lvl 38) with a BR/Dark corrupter. With us both using toggles to slow down and debuff groups we do very well.

I dont see BR being 'perfect' then again I dont see any of the other power sets as being perfect either.

We just need to get someone with some /rad or rad/ and I would see us as being unstoppable, without a crash.

I played around with it on test long enough to decide not to buy it. Its playstyle doesnt suit me, it lacks a few core items i look for in a set (like DP and AR, lesser Archery, do have as weapon set).

The nuke is pretty nice, but the sound and animations are too 'cheap'.

All its advantages other sets can do also, except you are not forced to keep mobs active with some debuff.

It's ok. The animations are hella rooting but the D.U.S.T cannon looks awesome. Only level 8 so not sure about damage output yet.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can get Disintegration/Spread Disintegration to proc on other players' Disintegrate attacks. Things get wild when you have a whole team of Beam Riflers.

I rolled a BR/NRG Blaster on Beta (which I've rerolled on the Mains)(no Level Bump, made it into the 20s). I liked what I did w/the Character. Kept mostly w/the ST attacks early on.

What I liked was the overall recharge speed in the powers and I could tab targets easily enough to take them down. The changes made about a week & a 1/2 ago to the Spread rates made all the difference, I feel, in the use of BR.
For example: On Beta, I took the Character through the Midnighters Arc (Blue Side). I really don't like the Lady Jane mission. I managed through that facing +1 mobs most of the way with very little problem. I was catching the spread on say 80-85% of the mobs.

And if you have a couple of BRs? The mayhem gets fun. Imagine running Forstfire w/a couple of BRs. The overall tight quarters and spreads going off everywhere, it crazy.

Though that brings me to the one downside w/BR. You do need mobs reasonably close together for the Spread to work right. This is where Defs and Corrs have a slightly better advantage, I think.

Overall, I'd say grab BR now, if you feel you have the points. It is a fun set and has a good number of sets it can play off of.

Thank you for the time...

@Travlr (Main) / @Tymers Realm (Test)

I tried GR in beta and didn't like it, the mechanic is clunky and the lack of aoe hurts really, really bad.
I had no intention of buying it until I saw it on special, yep I am a sucker.

I'd just go with if I like the concept or idea of a character with that powerset.

Everything else is pretty fluid. I trust the powersets will be relatively balanced. For the most part, the quirks of powerset combinations are expected [ie, heavy ST set with a Blaster].