Rumored Scrapper "Rebalancing?"

Thank you for the explanation. This is significantly worse than I thought it would be (and I did not have high hopes at all).

Hopefully, it will get addressed. Of course, I've been saying that for years.

Blasters bring 1 thing to the table that they do better then others. And it's something that's highly valued in this game, too. The radius of their AoE damage combined with the amount of damage they do allows them to blanket spawns with big orange numbers in ways nobody else can.

The problem with that statement is this:
1. It's not really true for all blast sets... it's just true for the AT in general.
2. Footstomp. It really needs to have it's radius dialed down to 10'. This 1 power makes the unique property of blasters I described obsolete.
3. Blaster AoE damage isn't all that high relative to other ATs... it needs to be turned up just a bit.

When a team is looking for more "DPS" to round out their task force, their first choice should be blaster because they SHOULD bring the most damage to a team. Right now, I'd take a scrapper over a blaster every time. (odds are, most high level teams of 8 have at least 1 if not 2 or 3 footstompers before filling that last position anyway)

Ehn.... Maybe so. I'd almost always take more buff/debuff over a damage toon any day.


Moar ranged damages, pls!

Also: Blasters have a very large area of battlefield effectiveness. Without moving, a blaster can be effective over an area 150-200 feet in diameter. That is a serious advantage...or at least I think the Dev's believe it is. The flaw with this reasoning is that a buff/debuff toon is ALSO effective over that large of an area, and buff/debuffs stack ad nauseum, and you get into multiplicative effects, etc, etc, etc.


Please don't call for nerfs, it's uncool. Instead, I would lobby, as I have been for months, to have the damage caps of Blasters, scrappers, stalkers, and tankers increased by 100 percentage points, to allow the 'damage at's' to be more competitive against the buffers. It gives a solid reason to bring along a blaster, to give the buffers somebody to work on.

See above. I could also see an argument made to raise Blaster's ranged attack caps from 15 to 20. But I'd have to mull that one over a bit. A sturdy Blaster is a pretty fierce beasty already.


Of course, by 'footstompers' you're mostly referring to brutes.

SS needs to be nerfed. It has needed to be nerfed for most of the life of the game and the fact that it hasn't been is in my opinion the source of the most severe balance issues still extant. The fact that you have to propose huge buffs to a handful of ATs as an alternative to nerfing SS should be illustrative of the problem. By the same token the game has done fine even with the noisy, smelly elephant in the room that is SS so one could argue in favor of the status quo.

(sigh)

Okay, if you're gonna go there....

Super Strength is fine on tankers. The lower damage cap and base damage on a Tank make it right in-line with what it should be.

However.... Brutes are better. Nobody seems to like it when I say that.

And to be honest, the issue is even more complex than that. I point you humbly to stone melee. I feel that rage+fury is the root of the issue, exacerbated by inspiration drop rates.

What's that Lassie? Stacking buffs are causing issues?

The biggest issue in the game right now (in my opinion) is the way buffs stack ad-nauseum. The Dev's aren't gonna put in diminishing returns on buffs/debuffs, so how ELSE do you address this?

SS on a tanker outperforms other tanker secondaries by an even larger margin than Brute SS outperforms other Brute sets.

Whether that's really a problem, or whether it should really be fixed, is another question, but it definitely overperforms on both ATs.

Why not? They could replace Rage on Brutes with Build Up, and leave Rage for Tankers. I'm not suggesting that's a good idea by an stretch, but they totally could if they wanted to.

That's working as intended.

Clearly, Blasters are supposed to faceplant.

If Blasters need more damage to be competitive on teams, that's fine. They're supposed to be the most damaging. I don't dispute that

But to die less? To solo better? No. They're supposed to be fragile and they're supposed to need others to succeed. The description lays it out plainly. They don't need buffing if their survival is bad because it's supposed to be.

Just like Tankers are supposed to have crap melee damage, right? So if Blaster damage is going to be increased, they need to take a hit to survivability so they don't start soloing well.

I can imagine some people want Blasters to be less of the Glass Cannon the devs intended it to be. And that's fine. They can get it as soon as Tankers don't have to be the Stone Wall.


And in case you didn't pick up on it, I'm being ironic.


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Because of the way recharge bonuses work and how high base damage means a ton of damage after enhancements and buffs.

What, numerically, makes a set just right/balanced for tankers that breaks it with brutes? How is it possible to make a set so strong you shouldn't give it to damage ATs, but is still balanced for a tanker? I have seen this logic advanced for years, but the explanations always sound like pure rationalization to me.

See, the problem with your whole position, really, but especially with this little analogy, is that Tankers DON'T have crap melee damage. They have less melee damage than some ATs, but still enough to defeat nearly any foe in a timely manner.

When tanks frequently lose fights against small-to-moderate numbers of common enemies due to their low damage, you can talk about that as an analogy to blaster survivability.

And Blasters DON'T have bad survivability. They have less survivability than other ATs, but they're tougher than Red Wisps buff pets, and that's enough for them to spam Fire Ball on teams, and that's all they're supposed to do according to the old description. They're not supposed to solo well or even survive, remember?


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Except that you're trying to satirically compare blasters dying all the time to tankers... doing what exactly? Dying all the time? No. What concrete measure can you produce of tankers' obvious-to-you patheticness? Seems to me that since tankers are easily made both unkillable and able to solo pylons in under five minutes without incarnate powers they are doing quite a bit better than blasters on the whole.

By what measure? Do blasters have "low" survivability compared to other ATs, but still high enough to complete most meaningful tasks? No. Especially without a high-end and high-level build. If a tanker gets separated from his team midfight, it's usually a pretty safe bet that he can defeat the spawn on his own and then join back up. He can't do that as quickly as a brute or scrapper would, but usually there's near-zero risk of being unable to do it at all. A blaster in the same situation is much more likely to end up going to the hospital or needing teammates to rescue him: there's a very good chance he cannot defeat the spawn at all.

Tankers have bad melee damage compared to archetypes that have better melee damage, but their damage is still easily high enough to complete most tasks even without help. Blasters have bad survivability in an absolute sense: their survivability is too low for many tasks.

Going back to the description, that's working as intended.

If you don't like an AT that faceplants all the time and can't solo well, don't play a Blaster. If you don't find that fun, play another AT, like a Scrapper or a Brute.

Just as if you don't think being a low damage decoy is fun, don't play a Tanker, play a Scrapper or a Brute.


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Not really. IMO, what it would take to bring Blaster performance into the range of other ATs would be eliminating the Blaster AT and replacing it with an AT that's better but just still called "Blasters". If every combo of an AT underperforms the average, that means that the AT concept is flawed. It needs to be removed.

Personally, I would just make Blasters: Ranged Damage/Control. Then I would created a new AT called Blaster Legacy. Which would have the Manipulation sets. Blaster Legacy would have BIG warning labels saying that this AT is significantly more difficult than other ATs and that the player can expect lesser performance as a result.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

If that were true, then you're saying if the devs buffed every archetype except one, and discovered that one was underperforming, the solution to accidentally not buffing it would be to eliminate it. Which is ludicrous.

But that's actually what happened to Blasters. Their realm of specialty was supposed to be damage, but just about every archetype that has ever been reviewed or buffed by the devs has had significant damage increases as part of the package. And its not enough to say that Blaster damage was increased also, because increasing *everyone's* damage serves to dilute the advantage. Not to mention the fact that many archetypes' damage have been buffed to a higher degree than Blasters over the years, like both Scrappers and Tankers.


That's an interesting idea, but I don't think its necessary. Adding control to blasters in a palatable way is, however, one of my priorities. Some sets have a lot of it in some areas, some don't. The big question is whether the extreme cases are actually closer to where we want blasters to be rather than outliers, sets like Dark and Sonic for example. If they are more like what Blasters are supposed to be, then such features can be added to Blaster sets by fiat: they do not trigger any special power design formulas (at least by design formula, mez is "free").

The text description in the dated manuals is one thing, but the developers do not design explicitly bound to them. There are, on the other hand, very concrete quantitative balancing rules they *do* follow, and Blasters as an archetype are the only archetype we know for certain failed to meet them completely across all of its powerset combinations. The devs don't just *intend* for Blasters to meet those requirements, they have a *mandate* that requires them to ensure they do. That's the only reason Defiance 2.0 was created in the first place.

The descriptions are only useful when discussing what reasonable expectations should be for players. Bringing them up when talking about balance problems with archetypes is random static.

I agree it is ludicrous. But the Blaster AT design is ludicrous. Let's go back to the beginning. 4 of the 5 ATs had at least something to help defend themselves. Even Empathy Defenders could heal themselves a little although most of their set was useless to them personally.

And then over the next 8 years they buffed just about every other AT's damage as you state, while only very slightly buffing Blaster survivability. On the basis that you can't buff Blaster survivability. If the devs are going to stick to their guns that Blasters can't have too much survivability, then the AT will always need help. Continuing to buff around the margins is a waste of time. Cut your losses and move on.

Not an argument but a question, how do you do that with sets like Fire Blast and Fire Manipulation?

In practice though, don't they actually bind themselves to those descriptions when dealing with Blasters?

EDIT: It's nice to actually discuss a game with reasonable people again.

Or I can try to change their minds about their mental map of blaster design. And it only takes a crack to get significant features into it. See below.


Good question. I'm actually discussing (off and on) exactly how to do that in a way that doesn't cause unwanted side effects with Synapse, using new mechanics.

I think you might be asking two different questions: mechanically how, and what sort of effect would you give to something that traditionally doesn't have an effect associated with it. And for that, we go to Fire control for inspiration. Two effects in particular are associated with Fire in Fire Control separate from the always present holds and immobilizes in all control sets that are fairly unique to fire, and therefore associated with Fire specifically: -perception and -tohit. Logically consistent with -perception we could add a third when used carefully and in moderation: -range. That gives us opportunities to add damage mitigative secondary effects to Fire that would be comparable to soft and hard mez added to other sets.

In many games, and for that matter even in this game, fire is often associated with things like healing and stuns, not just raw damage. Adding a Lancer Shot stun to Blaze might sound a bit nuts... but that's pretty much what Clobber does. Just as one example.