ST damage

Im ice/ice/cold

Where do i rank interms of single target damage? Is fire #1?

Fire and Beam Rifle are the best primaries for ST damage... Fire has Blaze (the highest DPA attack a Blaster can get) but also has a slightly weaker than normal tier 2 blast, and Beam Rifle has the extra damage from Disintegration plus a full strength tier 2. Of course the absolute best ST damage a Blaster can do comes from mixing Blaze in with high DPA melee attacks (Fire/Electric is probably top of the list) but for ranged ST damage Beam Rifle is also a contender on hard targets.

Ice Blast is a pretty hard hitting ST set since it has full damage tier 1 and 2 attacks and one of the best tier 3s that isn't Blaze. I'd rank it 3rd on hard targets and 2nd (just behind Fire) on things that will die before Disintegration really matters when it comes to pure ranged ST damage. /Ice is pretty middle of the road on damage, but it has lots of mitigation to help you stay standing in melee so that's something. Ice/Ice isn't going to do as much ST damage as an /Electric or /Energy Blapper or a Fire Blaster with a secondary that has decent melee if survival isn't an issue, but it will outdo most everything else (probably including Beam Rifle once melee is factored in, since Beamers can't mix in melee attacks without redraw penalties lowering their DPS) and will be able to use melee in situations where most Blasters couldn't.

Depending on your Team/League, Sonic is a good contender as well.

ST Damage isn't enough info though. There are a lot of settings/situations where a single Blaster is causing X amount of DPS. If we are talking solo non-end game situations... Fire and Beam are possible the two best ST DPS sets along with Sonic. Beam and Sonic are hurt by their secondary attacks because the lack of synergy of the secondaries hurts the primaries niches. Beam ramps up with -regen and stacks (I never played it, but I imagine this is where it's getting its extra damage from), when you dip into your secondary for a sweet DPA attack you are causing redraw and more time away from stacking -regen. Sonic is the same way, it doesn't have redraw, but more time away from -res attacks, the less stacking you can do. Both Beam and Sonic ramp up for awesome damage. Fire just is awesome damage.

Some other context - what is the enemy? Assuming you go up against an AV with equal resistances to all types of damage (so the fact it's Fire, or energy, doesn't make a difference). The AV will resist the -regen, which hurts the Beam Rifle's DPS. Sonic on the other hand will still effectively do the higher DPS, say you have 60% debuffs on the AV, your next attack would do 60% more damage than had you not had any debuffs at all. So against a single hard enemy (one that can resist -regen), Fire and Sonic are the top 2 ST DPS. Fire is still tops.

If you factor in incarnates (interface DoT procs), Sonic closes the DPS gap against Fire but still comes up short. Why is this? Well any damage procs that an attack has is not affected by damage enhancements... but they are affected by resistance debuffs.

Let's say Fire does an attack that does 300 base damage, has 100% IO enhancements in it, and has a proc that averages to 30 damage per attack. The Fire's attack would do 300*(1+1)+30 = 630 Damage.
If you have a Sonic attack that does 200 base damage, has 100% IO enhancement in it, and has a proc that averages to 30 damage per attack. The Sonic attack would do 200*(1+1)+30 = 430 Damage.

So Fire initially has an advantage ratio of 630:430 or 46.5% more damage than Sonic.

But say sonic had applied 60% resistance debuffs to the target, then the 430 damage would look like 1.6*(200*(1+1)) + 1.6*30 = 688. So although Fire by raw numbers is far superior than Sonic, the debuffs of sonic can allow its attack to appear stronger than it really is. AND it will make the damage procs appear stronger than it really is.

I had a thread a while back that compared optimal attack chains between Sonic and Fire, showing that Sonic is very close to Fire... but still comes up a little short. The cast time to the attacks is what prevents the set from doing better... and the fact that the primary attacks rely on the -res debuffs too much to allow secondary superior attacks to interrupt it.

Final situation: Teams.
A Fire blaster on a team will do their superior raw DPS. But that's it. Let's say a Fire blaster does 350 DPS (which is great IMO), while another player does 150 DPS raw. That's a total between the team of 500 DPS. (This is a very small team, but it illustrates a bigger point that I'm making later).

Now lets say a Sonic blaster does only 200 DPS raw, while another player does only 150 DPS raw. Raw damage, they do a combined DPS of only 350. Much worse than the Fire blaster team. But let's assume the Sonic blaster is maintaining a resistance debuff of 50% on the target. The Sonic blaster's DPS now goes up to 200*1.5 = 300. This is still less than the Fire blaster. But the Sonic blaster is also making the teammate do more damage. The teammate's DPS now goes up to 150*1.5 = 225. Combined, they do 525 DPS. So in teams, even in a team of one, the Sonic Blaster can outshine a Fire blaster in terms of ST DPS (Sonic does not have good AoE and would not compete very well with fire, even if we include resistance debuffs).

Beam Rifle would be very similar to Sonic in the team category as their debuffs improves the effective DPS of each person on the team. However, I still believe it doesn't come close to what Sonic provides.






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As for you question about Ice/Ice it seems like you have a pretty good assessment of it. The /ice isn't worth riding home about, but Ice/ does have 3 good attacks in it's T1, T2, and Bitter Ice Blast. But one thing to keep in mind, you have to factor in inherent (The +Damage that blasters get from each attack) into your attack chain's DPS. So what looks good on paper may not necessarily translate because it may have a weak damage boost for the rest of your attacks. I don't think that's the case for ice, but I just wanted to bring that out.

Because City of Data is having trouble with showing damage, I can't really give you an assessment of the ST DPS potential of Dark, Beam, or Dual Pistols. But for sets prior to it, Ice is definitely second to Fire in raw damage. Might be close to sonic in solo situations.

Fire is overpowered, or rather... "because it has no secondary effect" Fire just gets the "right" to do way more damage than any other set. Bitter Ice Blast has good DPA... I'd even say great... but nothing comes close to Blaze. If you have a chain of Ice Bolt -> Bitter Ice Blast -> Ice Bolt -> Ice Blast, that's the best chain using only your primary but Ice Blast is the attack you could swap out if you have a better DPA attack in your secondary. With Ice Blast's 1.67s cast time it has the worst DPA there (not by much), but I still use this chain on my Ice/Devices and it isn't terrible.

Someone mentioned Sonic, and yeah after the debuffs kick in it does pretty well, it also works better in team scenarios where the debuff you apply to that AV is oftentimes more important than just having slightly better DPAs.

Back to Ice... since you paired it with /Ice your only ranged attack in there is Chillblain, which has worse DPA than Ice Blast, making it a power that I wouldn't use for damage at lv50, but would still be okay to use in lower levels when you don't have all those recharge bonuses. There are definitely better secondaries for dealing damage, sorry.

An Ice/Ice's strengths are good hold stacking capabilities and lots of slows, it's a safe but not terribly fast killing Blaster.