Traps, Devices and the "out of combat" concept

Is your webnade slotted?

Yeah. There aren't that many powers that are just good without slotting. Without slots, Web Grenade is too slow, too expensive, and too inaccurate. With 5 slots (I have Enfeebled Operation in there), Web Grenade recharges in less than 2 seconds, the immob lasts ~30 seconds, and the end cost is low enough that I could throw all day and never drain my end. It takes a little bit to ramp up, but you can pretty easily maintain high mag immob while weaving in other Traps powers.

It's also worth noting that the purple triangles do not cover Immobilize, so you should be able to immob anyone short of a Giant Monster provided you keep up a steady stream of webnades.

I misspoke a little. I meant to say increase it's AoE, since it's existing radius is a little small (8'). Not a lot, maybe just 10', and decrease it's fire rate to 5s (from 5.5s). As for needing to "up" my difficulty, that is an indication that the power does need to be tweaked at least a little bit to make it a less-situational power.

Why do you feel improvements to Triage Beacon aren't needed? As an actual healing tool, it's extremely weak unless you have multiple beacons operational, and even then it takes 3 beacons to get close to the +Regen as a single cast of Empathy's Recovery Aura. I know people that take Triage Beacon just for an extra Healing power just to slot special IO's in.

And that is the point Sam is making - the original concept for Trip Mine is very different to how the game plays. The fact that Trip Mine remains useful in today's environment is that drawbacks to using it are just low-enough that people have found ways to use them in unintended ways (toe-bombing). Even though I do like my Trip Mines, they are still a very situational power that can usually be out-performed by other powers of similar levels.
There are too many ways I could respond to this comment, but at least you acknowledge that it is a useless power.

That's the general idea. The last power in a set is supposed to be a very desirable power to have, not the worst power of it.

I have mine slotted with commons, and while it DOES build up to some immobilization, it just isn't enough to keep an enemy from running away, and it certainly isn't enough to keep that enemy from moving at all. Especially those elite bosses who have status protection, or who like to use Unstoppable. As I said - I can get some immobilization, but nothing at all like permanent immobilization. No, the POTD doesn't cover immobilization, but elite bosses still have high mag protection from it, and I'm fairly confident they resist its duration.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Except that is what stalkers do, and they need Hide to do it.

Blasters should not get a power that replaces the whole point of stalkers, just so that one extra power is more useful to them.


So what nerfs to the set are you proposing to balance the buffs to the powerset?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

First I'd remove Build Up.

One of the arguments that Stalker players trot out in favor of buffs is the minuscule difference in mitigation between Stalkers and Scrappers. Blasters have no armors until APP/PPP, no boss level stealth, and no constant mez protection. The difference in mitigation is a chasm.

It would not be problematic at all for Blasters to do more damage than all the melees in my opinion.

In Sam's defense, Infernal and a few other special AVs have inherent mag50 immobilize protection that never, ever drops.

Burk, Nos, and most others do not have that perk, however, so slot your web grenade and trap away.

Something I expressed to the devs recently is the fact that among the problems Blasters have is a harsh meta problem unique to them. While the devs have some concerns about one archetype stepping on the toes of another, that *doesn't* include blasters. Uniquely, Blasters are defined in terms of what they are not allowed to be but not given *any* protection against other archetypes stepping on them.

Blasters are really only explicitly designed to do one thing: damage. That's it. Everything else is incidental to their design. So tell me: which archetype's damage has been restrained to make absolutely certain they don't infringe on blasters? Scrappers have consistently had a higher damage modifier, the same damage cap, and even with the recent increase in Blaster ranged modifier Scrappers still trump that with criticals, and still have higher melee modifiers. Even *dominators* have a higher melee modifier than Blasters.

Conversely, look at the long list of things Blasters have to avoid: they have to avoid doing too much burst damage and infringing on Stalkers; they can't have personal defenses which would infringe on the melee archetypes; they can have significant control; they can't have ally buffing; they can't have too much foe debuffing.

Some archetypes have the problem of too much overlap: Defenders and Controllers on buff/debuff, or Defenders and Corruptors just plain everywhere. But Blasters *uniquely* have the problem of being fenced in on all sides. They can't have *anything* except damage.

And the best part is, they can't have too much of that either.


So once Stalkers are looked at, and Tankers are looked at, after Dominators were looked at and Kheldians were looked at, after everything else has the damage players believe *everything* should have in the "current game" and after every game mechanic from mez to AoE effects to damage buffs to ally buffs are doled out to "fix" the other archetypes, what are the devs going to be able to do with Blasters?

Nothing. They will be painted into a corner with no options left that other archetypes haven't already laid claim to.

The honest truth is that blasters are the designated killer of things that don't matter, provided its not too many of them, and they take a lot of damage while they are doing it. And preferably, they should die periodically to prove they aren't too defensively strong while they are killing those things that don't matter.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Thank you, Arcana! That's very well said. It's both painfully true and damn entertaining

And while that's the heart of the problem of what Blasters in general are most at fault for, you have to admit that that's not really the whole story, or even most of the story. Blaster design is a mire of unknowns, but it's also plagued by a series of problem power design decisions which contribute to the problem and which would likely survive any AT-wide design.

Blasters are an AT cursed to be "hard mode" in return for performance which fails to impress, that much is true, but on top of being hard mode, they're also cursed with powers they plain can't use, and that aren't all that amazing even when they're used. Blasters are an AT which simply got crowded out of the game and now exists in a limbo, and the tools it is given to try and carve some place for itself are flawed at best.

Think about it realistically - of all the ATs out there, which is the one which has the most attacks which come with penalties to them? Blasters. Their nukes have hideous crashes, their Snipes are "situational" and one whole secondary is full of powers that are either useless or cumbersome. No other AT has to suffer as many indignities as that. Scrappers and Brutes have crashing T9 powers, sometimes, but that's about it. Rage kind of crashes... Sort of, but it's not that bad, and that's about it. Stalkers are right now cursed with a "melee snipe," but it's stronger and faster than Blaster snipes... And it's getting fixed. OK, I suppose Defenders and Corruptors are somewhat in the same situation, but at least their AT isn't full of holes.

To my eyes, though, the concept of cumbersome powers with drawbacks and penalties needs to be re-examined separately from the larger problem of Blaster balance, partly because it affects more than just Blasters and partly because Blaster changes likely won't focus around it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think this dev team is sufficiently distant from the original one that they are more amenable to questioning and reevaluating past decisions. For example, why does power burst have shorter range than power bolt and power blast? What's the specific point to that? Its really a completely arbitrary decision that creates issues when it comes to actually using the powers in the current game - you can't chain powers with different ranges together without running into issues. I think this dev team is willing to ask questions like that and as time permits try to resolve them.

The problems with crashing nukes has already been aired, but I'll mention a related point. (Some) nukes crash and (some) tier 9 defense powers crash but the crash isn't the same for this simple reason. Question: what are you supposed to do after the power crashes? Simple question. In the case of Elude, it has a simple answer: we gave you three minutes of near invulnerability and unlimited endurance, when it runs out and crashes you're supposed to have killed everything already and be standing in a safe spot. If you're not, tough.

Nova? It goes boom and then crashes. If you haven't killed everything yet, you're supposed to - use insps or die I suppose, because Nova doesn't actually give you any time to do anything. Either it kills everything or it doesn't, and if it doesn't the explicit *intent* of the crash is to make you vulnerable to getting killed.

I mention this because it occurs to me that "use insps or die I suppose" is the most common tactical answer to most Blaster questions now that I think about it.


I think the real fear surrounding blasters is that they are Mages. And what I mean by that is that there is a legitimate but irrationally handled fear of Tank-Mages, and the mental picture of a tank-mage is a ranged attacker with high defense. So you need three components: range, high damage, high defense. Blasters actually have two out of three. On paper nothing else does. No matter how much damage we give Tankers, they won't be Tank-Mages because they won't have range. Brutes can be farming whole maps of critters without dying but that's not a tank-mage because the brute has to walk to the targets, rather than shooting them from a distance. Controllers don't even have a damage powerset: they only have control and buff. They are fortunate they at least have brawl. Stuff just magically dies all around them, but they can't be tank-mages because they don't have a damage set.

But Blasters? They are already 66% of the way to tank-magedom. If we're not careful one day they'll discover Combat Jumping and the world will end.

Ok that last part was hyperbolic. But I'm serious about the idea. City of Heroes revolves around melee damage, ranged damage, buff/debuff, control, and defense. Blasters have Ranged Damage and Melee Damage. All that's left is Control, Buff/Debuff, and Defense. Giving them Control makes them Controllers; can't do that. Giving them Buff/Debuff makes them Defenders; can't do that. Can't give them Defense, because that makes them tank-mages.

That's a bit oversimplified, but I believe there's more than a germ of truth to it. And that's not to say there aren't creative ways around the problem that could work, but that perception probably works strongly against Blasters and any suggestion to help Blasters.

And I think that's also why they are saddled with the funkiest powers in terms of usage and tradeoffs. Because they are the most dangerous archetype to balance, if my theory above is correct, and that means in all seriousness they have to be constantly put down by The Man, lest it achieve its full potential and go tank-magey on everyone.

Which begs the question - is the "tank-mage" as it's traditionally defined, a misnomer in the CoH paradigm? Certainly you can't have a class that has the best of all possible worlds, but is it a matter that Blaster's are hamstrung more by the concept of tank-magedom, or is there a legitimate design issue inherent to Blaster's that they are relegated to piecemeal and uninspired secondaries, because it would simply make them the only legitimate playstyle in the game?

In lieu of VEAT's, I'm inclined to believe that the overarching fear is the mental construct, rather than any given potential reality. In any case, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Problem is, Blasters were designed when Mobs did not have ranged attaches (at least most of them). The all range = defense does not work anymore now. They need to seriously look at Blasters.

I say they need to look at each individual Blaster set, i.e., their primaries and secondaries. An Elec/Pain corruptor has alot more trouble handling the game's content while soloing than an Archery/EM blaster (or, for that matter, a Dark/Pain corr). It'll be hell to fix, but the solution lies in minimizing the disparities between the good sets and the bad.

What's the standard performance of a blaster, Elecric/Devices or Fire/Mental? I honestly don't know. Add to that a bunch of weird quality of life issues - Arcana suggested the 40ft range thing on Power Burst and Nova's crash, I'll add the 50ft range on Fire Ring and Webnade, plus the lack of damage in blaster mezzes like Tesla Cage and Taser - and you'll come to the conclusion that ALL blasters need help, but some do alot more than others.

It's not really an Archetype problem, me says, it's some of the old set designs that are slowing blasters down, and to a lesser extent, also corruptors and defenders. The devs already fixed Dark blast recently, maybe they'll fix the other primaries in time.

What the standard performance of a Blaster currently is, is something that might be calculable.

The real question is what the standard performance of a Blaster ought to be compared to the other archetypes; particularly Scrappers (and therefore Stalkers and Brutes).

I've been quite impressed with especially the powers team in just this regard, by the way. Synapse doesn't post much and doesn't go out of his way to start threads prompting feedback on abstract notions like David does (Thank you, David! ), but from everything he HAS said, it feels like he's very much open suggestions and interested in designing powersets around how people actually tend to play them, as opposed to an idealised prognosis of how people might play something like this.

As for Power Burst, sometimes I chuckle to myself when I remember that power used to have a range of 10 feet. Yeah, the same as Titan Weapons' melee range right now. The same range as Head Splitter. That's what made me scratch my head when Jack Emmert insisted that range is a Blasters' defence. If it were, then why the hell did you make some of their most powerful attacks have to be fired either point-blank or from a range so short it may as well have been point blank? That's what I mean when I say powers that are supposed to be strong become weaker because of the "tradeoffs" they are given. And Blasters are the AT with the most "tradeoffs" of all.

That, really, is something which bugged me about Blasters pretty much since day 1 of playing them... Well, week 1, at least. They are capable of doing so much, but they are simply never given enough time to do most of it, because none of their tools are capable of buying them time. With a Blaster, if you screw up, then your failure is immediate and decisive. With a Scrapper, if you screw up, then you have time to recover from it, time to run away and even time win before your mistake catches up to you. This kind of safety net, this kind of margin for error, is what makes them so much easier to play and so much faster to level up. It's much harder to fail with a Scrapper for about the same degree of concentration, preparation and knowledge.

And the worst part of it, that seems to have been intentional. As you say, "use inspirations or die I suppose" is more or less what Blasters end up falling back on more often than not. They simply don't have the tools to do anything else, because their secondaries do not help them.

And that's the big problem at the end of the day, and also a problem which feeds back into what I was saying before about "out of combat" powers. Blasters in general and Devices in particular are seen as so dangerous if allowed to actually work, that they are hamstrung by limitations intended to do nothing more than annoy you for having to deal with them. And the real kicker is most of them wouldn't be all that out of line if they were freed from this burden.

Trip Mine is seen as a big problem if it were usable without the interrupt. But the thing is, even without it, it's still a slow power you place at your feet that doesn't even always trigger when things walk over it. And all of this when a Shield Scrapper can do almost as much damage with about the same radius, but nearly instantly and at a significant range and do so in the air. And what we have now is the WEAKER version of what this was when it was first introduced. Or, even simpler, Spring Attack from Leaping that's available to just about everybody, but which does more damage for Scrappers than for Blasters.

I realise that overpowered characters and powersets are a bad thing, but the fear of it in some cases is irrational and damaging to the subjects it's applied over.

Which brings us back full circle to the large number of powers which are seen as so good that they are counter-balanced into near uselessness, as this is apparently seen as the only way to offset their power. The problem is that, after a certain critical mass of countermeasure mechanics applied against a particular power, it no longer matters how good it is. If it's a pain in the *** to use, then it's just not worth using and, worse of all, not worth taking and slotting. The only way such powers ever become useful is if someone finds a way to harness the supposed awesome potential of the power, but in a way that circumvents its limitations. That's what happened to Trip Mine - it's a decent power if you can actually use it, and learning to toe-bomb is using the power without suffering many of its drawbacks.

More than just idle contemplation, though, I do seriously question if this sort of approach to power design is even merited at this point. I know it's not something I should be saying, but at this point, people are used to this game being convenient, and inconvenience is seen as a massive, massive tradeoff. Just look at Masterminds - they ARE tank-mages able to deliver massive damage at range, survive hideous punishment and wield support powers, yet you almost never hear anyone complain about them. Because so few people play them. And it's not because they're paid or because they're weak. Almost universally, it's because they're a pain in the *** to play, especially if you don't have the right binds. Henchman AI is kind of dumb, they draw a lot of aggro, henchmen keep falling off things, you spend a lot of time giving orders and it's just cumbersome overall.

Trying to counter numerically superior powers behind *** backwards limitations doesn't "balance" them. It just makes people not bother. Not all people, obviously, but I can say this for a fact - I have not seen a Devices Blaster in a very, very long time, my own notwithstanding.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Plus you can't compare Kinetics to Devices. Kinetics is awesome.

Devices is balanced around blaster secondaries = it must suck or the world will end.

Ranged softcapped Device blaster with Caltrops is win I find.