tell me about psychic blast -

i've heard it's not the best set for blasters, but why?

is it at least a *viable* set?

It's certainly viable in the sense that any set can be used to solo virtually any normal content in the game on some difficulty level higher than 0x1. Occasionally it might even shine, for example when fighting enemies that are especially susceptible to psi damage such as Marauder during his unstoppable phase.

What makes it probably the single weakest blaster primary is that it only has one fairly poor aoe aside from its fairly poor crashing nuke, it doesn't do better single target DPS than average to make up for this, it doesn't have a useful secondary effect since -recharge is basically useless unless applied in massive quantities all at once, and the salt in the wound is that psi damage is actually resisted quite heavily by a diverse array of enemies spread across almost every villain group in the game.

That may have sounded a little harsh. Even the worst blaster set is still going to be able to kill things, you just can do a lot better.

the good things ive heard about psi blast blasters is the ability to do lot of burst dmg since they have several attacks that when executed in the right order can all land on the target at the same time (on my psi blast corr the combo that i use is will domination -> telekinetic blast and most instanced both powers hit at same time doing a large chunk of dmg even 1 shotting minions)

Yes it is a viable set.

The problem with it is that it does not have any strengths like other sets do. Ice has excellent mitigation and ST damage. Radiation and Fire are AoE monsters. Dark and Sonic provide some good debuffs. Most of this cannot be said for Psychic.

Psychic certainly has plenty of ST attacks, but there are few heavy hitters among them; it has no equivalent to Cosmic Burst, Bitter Ice Blast, Blazing Arrow, etc. Granted, you can cycle through the multiple ST attacks quickly, but that still leaves you putting out less damage per attack than other sets.

The only non-nuke AoE attack it has is Psionic Tornado, which is a decently damaging attack with some soft control, but the damage is DoT, which some people aren't a fan of, and it has a longer animation than most. Usually, it is best used as an opening attack to disburse the alpha strike and let the DoT accumulate while you cycle through ST attacks.

Its secondary effect is one of the least effective in PvE, especially at Blaster modifiers. -Attack speed (recharge) does not provide a whole lot of immediately apparent soft mitigation (like Ice's Slow or Dark's -To Hit), nor does it help to defeat your enemies more quickly (like Rad's -Def or Sonic's -Res).

It's hard control is also a tad lackluster. Scramble Thoughts is a pretty good stun, but that's it. Will Domination is a great sleep as long as nobody touches the enemy, which is problematic on teams, and means you have to avoid your own AoE attacks when solo.

The overall problem is there is no one area where the set excels, which makes it hard to justify its shortcomings. Again, it is certainly usable (I have a lot of fun on my Psy/Mental character) but you just have to acknowledge that it won't be as good as most other sets.

The problem with Psi is a concatenation of dev design errors based upon a small fraction of the player base's input.

Psi for blasters came out right before the PvP "revamp". There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the PvP community since at that time Psi was virtually unresisted in PvP and adding boost range to it by pairing it with /energy meant that it would have had the PvP potential to become the juggernaut that blasters are advertised as being and don't quite live up to. So the devs softened up the power set so that it wouldn't overpower pre-I13 PvP. Then right after they released the set they changed PvP and made the reason for it's lackluster performance moot.

For PvE it doesn't fit the role that blasters fall into. Most teams use blasters as a means to quickly wipe out minions and lieutenants with ranged AoE attacks leaving the hard hitting, single target attacking of bosses, to the scrappers and tanks. Slow projectile speed means that Psi blasters often corpse blast and they fail to fit in the defined team role of the blaster.

Soloing new content is a death sentence since the set lacks real mitigation save that provided by scramble thoughts and ambushes will tear you apart from lack of mitigation. Add in Scramble Thought's 3 second animation time and you have a control that you can't really use as a control once combat has started. 3 seconds with range 80 means that the mobs will have closed to melee range and hit you twice before the stun takes effect.

The best use for Psi is still paired with /Energy + Cardiac Alpha for range then slotting IO sets for ranged defense and as much AoE defense as you can get and using hover to stay out of melee range. This potentially leaves soloing with the set slower than soloing with /Dev as a secondary and painfully time consuming to get to the point where you have enough slots to go the inventions defense route. Add in that any other set can do the same thing better and you have a set that isn't as good as it should be for PvP, doesn't do what it should do on a team, and is too slow to solo for the majority of the player base. That makes the Psi blaster one of the rarest in the game and rightfully so.

Funny thing is, when Psi Blast was announced for blasters, most of the PvP community was asking for more ways to resist Psi damage rather than change the blasting set. The most spoke for adjustment was to give psi resistance to Force Field bubbles so that they could be a more viable addition to PvP (since defense was all but ignored then).

One more thing I'll say about this is that if you want to play a psychic blaster, you should just make a fortunata. Yeah, the first twenty three levels kind of suck and yes you end up with one costume that's unavoidably arachnos-branded, but aside from that it's better in every conceivable way. Not only does it get more aoe, the aoes do more damage than their respective blaster versions. In fact, so do the single target attacks. And scramble thoughts is mag 4, and instead of piece-of-junk will domination you get dominate, an excellent attack and control. And your nuke is identical but crashless. And you have status protection and powerful defense buffs that extend to the entire team. Fortunatas are really good in general, but compared to psi blasters there's really no contest at all.

@Miladys_Knight

with respect to your comment you speak sense from where you are in this conversation and i see a point beyond the sarcastic explanation of psi primary being the bottom tier of blaster primaries, but in my opnion i have a psi blaster 45%def s/l capped and he does quite fine on +2 mobs even bosses, its all down to player preference and playstyles, just because, and i agree, pvp has shot this set down with a mighty stick of poo, doesnt mean it doesnt work well, hell i see alot of psi blasters occassionally and i put billions to make my blaster a powerhouse, the secondary set with drain psyche is beautifully, lets me survive alot while i damage the hell out of mobs, i just use concentraion then psi tornado then pummel em one by one, even in pvp i still kick ***, notably i get my *** kicked at times too, but is no different to other blaster sets, again all boils down to player style and preference

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.