Judgement vs Crashing Nukes

They were supposed to be looking at blaster nukes awhile back, I wonder whatever became of that ?

Blasters aren't a benefit to a team?

Of course they are


Vengbait!!

Not anywhere near the same levels as 2 years ago though. Back in
'tha day' Blasters shined at one thing and one thing only, making things drop quick.

Then power creep started coming into play with IO's levelling the playing field. Eventually culminating with I-Powers making Blasters, as designed, obsolete.

Why invite a Blaster when a scrapper does the same amount of damage and can actually live long enough to dish it out?

Why invite a Blaster when a defender can dish out the same amount of damage, and provide team support?

Why invite a Blaster when a Brute can dish out the same amount of damage, can live long enough to dish out non-stop and can tank for the team?

Blasters haven't evolved to keep pace with the current game. The old excuse of us being so weak because we're the damage kings no longer hold true. Yet nothing has been done to re-balance this.

IO's and I-powers let the AT's flesh out all aspects of their builds. For most AT's this means they can ramp up the damage and recharge while also gaining impressive defenses. Blasters are far more limited in what we can build for. When you give the same amount of damage to every other AT...

The simple fact that Blasters don't even have the highest damage cap in game anymore inidicates the entire AT needs to be looked at, not just the nukes and snipes.

Either give Blasters back the damage king crown
or
Give Blasters better #'s on the mitigation tools.

Nah you know what, just give Blasters back their damage crown.

This. If you feel like you're not contributing to a team then you're doing something wrong.

Doubling up on Nukes is all it takes? Really? Think about that for a moment, your suggesting that in order for Blasters to be able to contribute like we used to, we have to go thr.... yeah, nevermind.

It's not that we don't feel like we're contributing to the team, it's that we can remember, not to long ago, when we contributed a lot more than we do now.

We (Blasters) can remember the days when the sacrifice we made by being weaker than wet tissue paper was made up for by the fact that no other AT could dream of out damaging us.

We (Blasters) can remember the days when the sacrifice we choose to make, going 1-50 without mez protection, was worth it because we could do what no other AT could do, melt mobs with a quickness.

Sure, we (Blasters) still bring a good chunk of damage with us to the party, we can even double up on Nukes now! But that still doesn't change the fact that every other AT can do the same, with the same amount of defense they had before. What good is having 2 nukes available on my Blasters when the Stalker next to me wipes the spawn with Judgement, while I'm judging how bad the alpha will be?

/Facepalm...

IO's and I-Powers allow:
Tanks to become High Defense/High Damage
Scrappers to become High Damage/High Defense
Brutes to become High Damage/High Defense
Blaster to become High Damage/Medium Defense


So sure, we can now increase our meager defense up to a decent level, but that still doesn't change the fact that in the end, the core 'feature' of my AT of choice, the fact that I'm a glass cannon, means that when everyone else can become a Steel Cannon I'm left with having to settle for Brass status... That's the issue, Blasters are no longer kings of the hill when it comes to damage. That isn't a problem, I like all AT's having damage. The problem is Blasters haven't been compensated for the lack of defense like the other AT's have in the damage/recharge areas.

If you take away our crown, then you also have to take away the penalty we had to endure to wear it.

I'm a bit confused as to why this is so hard to understand.

Snipes aren't a benefit to the team. I beg to differ when I am hovering above the team fray laying lethal snipes.

If you're using snipe in combat, could you tell me how you manage to get around it being one of the worst single-target damage powers for DPS and damage per activation in a blaster's primary? That's an honest question by the way. If you've found a way to make snipes not suck when used during a fight please share.

Pretty much any time I ever thought about using a snipe in-combat it occurred to me that I'd be able to do more damage faster by just using my normal blasts instead. That's pretty much the big problem with snipes. There's really no payoff to the big long windup.

Lets just say you are an Archery or Fire blaster, with the "worst" snipes.

You could spend the better part of FIVE seconds casting an oh so lethal snipe doing 172 and 229 base damage at max, respectively. Ooooor you could use blaze/Blazing arrow.

Blaze animates in one fifth the time and deals 88% of the damage.

Blazing arrow animates in one third of the time it takes to cast snipe and deals a whopping 93% of the damage that the sets snipe deals. Ouch.

The "Best" Snipes would be in Rad and Energy where their tier 3 attack animates in a little under half the time as a snipe, and deals 77% of the damage. Which to be fair is still pretty terrible when you are looking at ranged burst.

In the time you animate 1 snipe, a good many sets can animate 2 to 3 AoE powers and deal the same damage to everything in the spawn. If you are sitting back sniping in a team setting you are actually only slowing your team down.

Blasters are a benefit to a team, which doesn't say much. A petless MM is also benefit to a team. It's just that in both cases the majority of alternatives provide more benefit.

tl;dr version: if x > y, then for all p, x + p > y + p

Longer version:

1) +damage buffs (like Musculature) work off of base damage, of which blasters have the highest.

2) Interface and Judgement does the same damage for each AT: while you argue, "no fair, all other ATs got nukes like us", I argue "cool, now we have even more nukes"

3) Even if a scrapper/brute can out-damage a Blaster (rare, fringe cases exist) in Single-Target, they still suffer from low target caps: scrappers/brutes usually hit 1 enemy at a time, sometimes 5, and up to 7 (I think), whereas blaster AoEs often hit 10, up to 16 enemies for only slightly less damage

4) If you insist on using the IOs unbalance blasters, then I would simply tell you to build better: we can now softcap our defenses and max our HP, so the "our survivability is sacrificed for nothing!" argument is invalid: just as other ATs can build for damage, we can build to last

These are 4 solid points (even ignoring the simple "just double nuke..." argument) as to why, as DarkGob said, "If you feel like you're not contributing to the team, you're doing something wrong"

Just a note, but Blasters and Scrappers have the same damage scale mod of 1.125. Though I think blasters actually use their 1.0 melee damage mod for their melee attacks and scrappers just use their melee damage mod for their ranged attacks instead of their .5 ranged damage mod.

Not that I think the scrapper's ranged damage mod should be .5 mind you. That's too low for a damge AT. Still, a 1.0 ranged mod for them never struck me as unreasonable.

As far as being able to buff up Blasters defenses via IO's etc, as I pointed out, yes we can, but not to the same degree that the others can pimp out their damage, simply by virtue of our lower #'s.

I'm not arguing for anything to be removed, just the opposite. I'm arguing for Blasters to be brought up to speed with the current game. As it stands now, the only reason to pick a Blaster is for the range and concept as I can do just as much damage with much more safety, on nearly anything else.

This is a bit misleading, because scrapper melee mod is the same as blaster range mod (1.125), and brutes at the damage cap will slightly outdamage scrappers and blasters both.

The part about melees having less AoE power is only true if you only consider attacks from the primary. Melees get APP aoe attacks with the same target caps as well as self-buffs, damage auras and AoEs from the secondary; melees also herd better, which enhances the effectiveness of their AoE attacks. In practice, the best melee builds match or exceed the best blaster builds at AoE power.

What is true is that blasters mature earlier (a fireblaster is mostly complete by 21 or so when they can get Blaze slotted, but a scrapper or brute won't be done until they have all their toggle defenses and APP attacks).

Finally, stating that "blasters contribute to a team" is meaningless. In order for the game to be balanced, that contribution must be on par with that of other, better ATs.

Not quite nothing. The HP buff and ability to use three attacks while mezzed wasn't added all that long ago, was it?

Don't forget (as many do) about the defiance damage boost from attacking. (Or 'defuriance,' as some call it)

It was back in December of '07. The same patch also raised Blaster's base ranged damage to be in line with Scrapper's melee damage and changed defiance into its current form.

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Patch_Notes/2007-12-11

It was not a terribly recent change and the HP buff itself was even further back. Way in Issue 5 (August 31, 2005).

A lot has changed with the game since those things were added to Blasters.