Rumored Scrapper "Rebalancing?"

Actually, no, I was being serious.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

In the real world, when someone runs away from you that generally means you win... granted if you're arresting them you have to chase them down, but if you're saving granny from getting mugged, once the mugger turns tail, granny is saved.

Furthermore... if someone whacks your leg off with a sword... even if you're not "defeated" you're not running very fast... reducing the "speed" that these guys run by 75% may be sufficient for eliminating the annoyance factor.

Hold that thought.


I don't think on average SR needs to be *buffed* in the sense of having its overall performance improved. I think its weak in some areas - too many, probably - but also very strong in others. When we're talking about leveling and SO performance, you can get away with that: it tends to average out and the lows aren't too low when you're dealing with what people normally deal with in SO builds. But when we get to the higher level builds and the end game, what SR lacks more than anything else I believe are *options*. I mentioned this when ED went in, and when the invention system went in. Being (almost) all defense doesn't just make SR's defenses one-dimensional. It eliminated options for reslotting under ED. It limits options for slotting invention sets. It keep winnowing down options until the only thing you can do is soft-cap, take tough, and get as much regen as you can. Its no coincidence that all high end SR builds seem to be soft-capped with tough and a lot of regen: there's nothing else you can do: the only option seems to be whether to take aid self or not.

And SR tends to burn a lot of slots besides, which means even if you were to add slotting options, most SRs would have only limited ability to take advantage of them.

You can make SR stronger: add +health or regen somewhere, for example. But I think the real problem, one that would require a set redesign that is not going to be forthcoming, is that it lacks options. More than any other defensive secondary, its build choices are extremely constrained if you are building for performance of any kind.


You could say that other sets have the same problem: the best option tends to be a singular one: soft cap the set. But that belies the fact that soft-capping non-defensive sets is huge: they essentially get to wrap Elude around their already strong defenses. But when a defense set soft-caps, they are only increasing their already strong defenses by a much smaller amount. Soft cap Willpower and you reduce incoming damage by a factor of ten *and* you also have Willpower itself. Soft cap SR and you reduce incoming damage by something like a factor of 3 to 4, and that's basically all you have. Everything else has other options, and they also get to have the best option defensive sets especially SR have.


But as I said, I don't think this is fixable without the kind of radical changes the devs frown upon when they don't think they are necessary.

Yes.

But when has that ever stopped us?


... or them?

Never. Nothing can stop people from rampant speculation about these kinds of things in games. This one is no where near the kind of stuff that floats in the cesspool(forums) of other games.

Nerf power pools!

May need to... Houtex has a brawl only brute that's almost level 30.

As an archetype, Blasters do.

Completely and totally agree with this, Bill! I agreed with that a year ago, too.

Unfortunately, this too is right. There are many who understand nothing more than: "Now I have 45% Def and am invincible!!! Muahahaha!" And will go bonkers if a change like this gets announced.

Doesn't make the change wrong, just much harder to implement... safely.

My dark/dark blaster is waiting...

Still?

I am so tempted to ask what kind of buffs they need (they do need something), but that'd be semi-derailing, maybe.

But wait... they need blasters to be the way they are so that the crowd control and taunting ATs are important.

Higher damage mods on all AOEs!

Defiance expanded to tier 3 (Primary) and tier 2 (Secondary). ^_^

More true than you probably intended.

Still. Perhaps now in some ways more than before.

Since the last time Blasters were looked at, they actually dropped from second in melee damage modifier (Scrappers are higher) to third (Dominators now also higher). Controllers and Masterminds got specific iTrial buffs (autocontainment, level shift mechanics) but Blasters did not.

The best thing they ever did for Blasters was let them shoot tier1/2 from mez, but the primary benefit of that is to reduce the chances for mez to kill a blaster. No one else dies often to mez, and we know this because in I13 we found out no archetype dies remotely as often as blasters under any circumstance. We still don't know if the Defiance 2.0 changes actually brought blasters *out of* the balance hole they were in: they uniquely among all archetypes *significantly* underperformed *everyone else*. And that was *before* Kheldians were buffed, Dominators were buffed, Stalkers were buffed, etc. If those buffs actually did anything at all, any ground Blasters might have gained with D2.0 has been offset by significant gains elsewhere. Even Brute average performance might have gone up because while the absolute top performers performance dropped slightly with the new mechanics, fury is now more sustainable for probably a lot more players. Max fury went down, average fury probably went up.

That's just raw numbers. The ones that say if everyone else is 10 and blasters are 6, blasters are broken period. That doesn't touch the *huge* QoL list blasters have, at a time when everyone else's QoL list is being addressed. Dominators didn't *need* a net damage modifier boost, even factoring in Domination mechanics. That was a QoL change more than a balance change. Stalkers aren't broken: their changes are QoL changes meant to address perception more than numerical datamined performance. Certainly, Tankers didn't need Bruising to meet the balance requirements of the archetype: that was a QoL change.

The Blaster QoL issue list is a mile long. Crashing tier 9s for an all-offense archetype, inconsistent secondary performance, even the general lack of damage self buffs. Sure, Blasters all (almost all) get Build Up and Aim, but the *best* damage self buffs don't go to blasters. The best damage self buffs do not go to the damage archetype. Rage, Fiery Embrace, Power Siphon - until recently not even Soul Drain.

Power Boost just boosts my secondary effects and can't even be made perma. As it is, even trying to keep it up often means burning its cast time every 20 seconds or so, tying up as much as 6% of my time. Rage buffs damage by almost as much as Build Up for Blasters and can easily be made perma, and when its perma its only costing about 1% in cast time. Two different powers in two different sets, so the comparison isn't to say they should be the same: rather its to say the limits of what melee can have make the limits of what Blasters can have look actually pretty pathetic by comparison.

And look at average Blaster DPA verses average melee DPA. Comparing KOBlow to Total Focus is not an exception.

I love Lightning Rod. Its a great power. So tell me why the power that lets you teleport 60 feet and hit a target with a high damage attack while knocking everything else down (or at least 80% of everything) is a melee archetype power and none of the damage-only specialist powersets have anything comparable to it. Focus has a higher DPA than 90% of all blaster attacks. There is very consistent evidence that even though Blasters are supposed to be the best at damage because they do nothing else, the devs have carved out melee damage away from them and given the best "melee attacks" (because focus is a melee attack apparently) to the melee archetypes, along with the best damage buffs period. That leaves Blasters with the left-overs. The best ranged damage except for melee attacks that happen to have range, and average damage self-buff.

Blasters are, and I'm not in any way exaggerating when I say this, the archetype that gets to be whatever's left after every other archetype takes whatever they want off the table. And increasingly these days, what other archetypes are taking for themselves is DAMAGE.

Stalker says no!


Stalker still needs to go through more testings. :P Like Blasters, Stalker is a damage-first "class" but Stalker's damage is currently behind two other melee ATs that happen to survive better. Even with the new Assassin Strike, it is unclear that Stalker always beats Scrapper in single target damage department because Stalker doesn't get damage from secondary sets (minus caltrops).

Once Stalker's assassin strikes are normalized, the dev can work on Blaster. Blaster's melee modifier needs to be 1.125 as well.

zOMG, if they nerf brawl, he'll NEVER get to 50... oh, and he's officially a 30 now.

Gratz, man!

It's very fixable. They can alter the entire game as some have suggested, which would be very difficult and undoubtably piss off a ton of players, or they can redesign SR entirely, which wouldn't be terribly difficult but would piss off some players, or they can add a few buffs here and there which would piss off almost no one and would be very easy to do. And SR certainly isn't broken or unplayable, I never suggested that, I'm only saying that it underperforms vs. competing sets, all things being equal, and I think that's really indisputable.

I do agree with you on blasters, in that if an AT needed buffs, blasters should be first in line.

Maybe a few issues ago, but I'd say they did create survivability problems for scrappers with the newer content, especially with the defense busting mechanics they introduced. It's much easier to notice the survivability of tanks vs scrappers in that content. What you're describing is simply taste in that you prefer damage vs survivability, and really that seems to be the norm, which is why you see more scrappers than tanks, or really more dps vs meat shields in most games.