Paraphrasing (perhaps badly so) what I remember on the topic:
Blasters were underperforming all other ATs based on the overall leveling speed and number of deaths. This was determined through datamining by the developers.
Be well, people of CoH.
When you realize that blasters in this new world of barely any debt were significantly underperforming enough to rank dead last as leveling speed behind Kheldians who were thought to be the worst - you understand.
Blaster get defeated and regularly so and they do so because the game changed and they did not change with it. Mez is commonplace now with even minions stunning, slowing and holding you. Once held or mezzed - you are helpless except for low damage attacks and you get whittled down and a free trip to the hospital for green jello follows.
Play a blaster and find out for yourself. Infernus summed it up pretty well but you won't know the true agony until you've tasted it yourself.
http://www.virtueverse.net/wiki/Shadow_Mokadara
In the days I used to keep track of such things as leveling time to 50, my Blasters were always the fastest to level from 1-50 of any AT I had. Even as recently as this past spring I went from 1-50 with a DP/MM (all the cool kids had one...I wanted one too!) in less than 25 hours of total playtime. No PL'ing on that toon, although I do with some. I also took an Archery/Energy from 32-50 (PL'd to 32 just to see if I liked her) in less than 8 hours of team play, mainly running TF's and Radio/Tips with a few AV arcs thrown in towards the Portal Corps late 40's teams. Both of these were slotted entirely via SO's...no IO's at all.
Now having said that, I recognize if others seem to have difficulties playing the Blaster AT. That's apparent from the datamining. But I suspect its a player issue, not an AT performance issue, with melee-centric playstyles not really leveraging the strength of the Blaster AT.
A different issue is the versatility of the AT in the game. There is none. If I want versatility and blasty-blasty ranged damage I go Corrupter. Blasters are just damage and that's it. No other value from the AT to teams at all and everyone else contributes damage.
I'll play your game, but I won't hold back from typing an essay. In fact, with as many categories you've asked for information on, I'm gonna need a series of essays. Essays are short, after all.
Leveling Solo (1-49)
Lvl 50 Solo
Soloing for Blasters, more than for any other "Damage Dealing" archetype, is defined by how low the threshold for "Mistake" is. For my Brute, Tankers, Dominators, Controllers (1.1 damage mod under containment! Sounds like a damage dealer to me!), a fatal mistake sounds like "Tried to engage multiple x8 spawns", or "Didn't apply AOE control with enough prejudice.". A "Blaster Mistake" sounds like "Tried to fight the boss without maxed out inspirations", "Focused on dealing damage instead of applying controls", "Allowed the ambush to initiate combat". When a Blaster sizes up a spawn, the judgement of wether they can "Take it" is based on a very short timer.
Can you 1 shot it or otherwise neutralize its key threats in 10 seconds or less? No? You're probably dead. And even if you have the resources to do that once, what about the next spawn? And the next one? Unless you're gonna make insp runs all day every day, it's not happening.
And as your primary resource, your health bar, the all governing "time before death" indicator, dwindles, you have the distinction of being the archetype with the least tools to protect it, and the least tools to recover it.
Leveling teams (1-49)
Lvl 50 teams
The difference between bringing my Blasters to a team and bringing any of my other AT's to a team is that the occasion where I think "This team NEEDS my blaster to operate on this level" is a rare one. My Illusion/Storm controller, Fire/Stone melee tanker, Sonic/Sonic defender, Plant/Thermal controller, Ice/Kinetic Controller, Claws/Electric Brute, all have, can, and frequently served as the lynchpin of the teams I run/join. The final push that takes that team from struggling to succeeding, or succeeding to steamrolling.
Meanwhile, bringing my blasters is dependent on all the pieces already being in place to leverage them. My Ranged Cone specialist Ice/Energy/Soul blaster at least can operate more safely than my PBAOEing Electric/Fire blaster, but for them both to shine, they need to be using Ice breath and Nightfall, Fire Sword Circle and Ball Lightning, not Tesla Cage and Freeze Ray. More commonly I'm giving my Rise of the Phoenix a work out.
Rare is the team that actually has inadequate damage. And those teams that do? Tend to benefit more from a good debuffer more than a damage dealer, with their widely more versatile toolkits and "One Power = 100 DPS" magic bullets, and the nature of the "You need X damage" hurdles that exist in this game.
Incarnate Trials
And here we have a mixed blessing, our slap in the face with a gold plated gauntlet. Hordes of uplevel bosses just lying in wait to punish the blaster foolish enough to initiate. AV's with PBAOE's and Cones that 60-99% our health bars. Enourmous labyrinths full of boss dense spawns designed to face down 24 people that we're expected to "walk past on the way to the objective.". Enemies who, if we gather their attention, chain mez and 2 shot us with impunity.
Coupled with events that highlight our ranged offense as an actual functional advantage.
Meanwhile other archetypes complain about having to move to maintain their functional invulnerability, and ask for damage that can legitimately threaten them "without cheating", where cheating is defined as "Using anything but a damage type I'm capped against", never mind the trail of nontanker corpses that would be left in the wake of such a change.
AV's and GM's
Half to 2/3 of Blaster's superiour damage is tied up in attacks that must be used from 7 feet away. GM's all have footstomp. AV's have a plethora of similarly threatening powers. There's the one that doesn't take an essay.
PvP
I am wildly unqualified to comment on modern PVP.
Mission Arc: Metatronic Mayhem (Id 1750): A tale of robots gone wrong, rogue robots gone right, and madmen gone every which way but loose.
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I could argue that the problem could have equally been that your playstyle was inconsistent with leveraging the best out of the other archetypes. However, it would be better to simply presume that the average player is the norm by which archetype performance should be balanced around. Whether that is because the archetype is more difficult to play than anything else or lower performance than everything else is somewhat irrelevant.|
Originally Posted by Crysys
In the days I used to keep track of such things as leveling time to 50, my Blasters were always the fastest to level from 1-50 of any AT I had. Even as recently as this past spring I went from 1-50 with a DP/MM (all the cool kids had one...I wanted one too!) in less than 25 hours of total playtime. No PL'ing on that toon, although I do with some. I also took an Archery/Energy from 32-50 (PL'd to 32 just to see if I liked her) in less than 8 hours of team play, mainly running TF's and Radio/Tips with a few AV arcs thrown in towards the Portal Corps late 40's teams. Both of these were slotted entirely via SO's...no IO's at all.
Now having said that, I recognize if others seem to have difficulties playing the Blaster AT. That's apparent from the datamining. But I suspect its a player issue, not an AT performance issue, with melee-centric playstyles not really leveraging the strength of the Blaster AT. |
I can say that "melee-centric" playstyles are unlikely to be the sole or primary cause of the problem, because if it was you'd expect that variable to vanish for new players playing blasters as their first character. But I don't believe that segment of the player population overperforms with Blasters.
As to the original question, that blasters are likely to be underperforming at this moment is a conjecture on my part, based on the following observations:
1. We know Blasters underperformed** by a very large amount prior to the D2.0 changes. Not only that, but to repeat something I said then, I was allowed to state that according to the devs datamining, all powerset combinations for Blasters underperformed the average performance of all players by a significant amount, and this was true at all level ranges, and for all teaming situations from solo, to small team, to large team. That's actually an amazing statement, because its a difficult thing to do that deliberately. Just the variations in powerset performance alone would make that very difficult to do.
2. This means Blaster performance has always been overestimated, at least up to that point, because almost no one attempted to objectively argue that in all facets of the game Blasters underperformed. No one, not even I, would have had the guts to claim that all blaster powerset combinations significantly underperformed the average performance of all players while solo while the defender archetype on average did not.
3. We know Blasters have, historically, been popular archetypes to make but less popular archetypes to level: the archetype creation and population statistics we have from the past show blasters created at a higher rate than any other archetype but their popularity drops with level.
4. Of the two hero-side archetypes I originally cited as the ones most statistically likely to be abandoned from initial creation, one of them - Scrappers - was stated to be the most popular archetype at level 50. Conversely, Blasters shift from first to third in the same data. This suggests that the slowdown in Scrappers from 1 through 49 is more than made up for by an increase in viability or desirability at level 50 - and this statistic precludes the incarnate end game. This reinforces the hypothesis that Blasters have the *highest* problems with performance over time, because while some archetypes get better as they level, and Scrappers (probably because they start off so good there's not as much room to get better) don't but are otherwise highly attractive, Blasters have an intrinsic problem that makes them slower to level, more likely to be abandoned before 50, and much less attractive to play at level 50.
5. Its unlikely D2.0 could have completely reversed these issues. It certainly could have helped, but if the largest contributor to Blaster underperformance was mezzing as the devs suggested, D2.0 doesn't eliminate that problem, it only reduces it. And its not the case that the other squishies could have possibly been getting mezzed and then killed at a similar or even lesser but appreciable level because if that were so they would also have seen a significant performance penalty due to that. If almost everyone is very infrequently killed due to mez and blasters were, D2.0 is not likely to have reduced that number to the same trivially low level.
6. Datamining performance can only understate performance differences, not overstate them. There's no way for someone to earn rewards slower than the game records them to. Its possible for someone to earn rewards faster than the game records them to, if the game incorrectly accounts for the time necessary to earn that reward. Diluting reward earning rates by overcounting the amount of time it takes to earn them necessarily reduces the gap in performance for everyone.
As an example, if one character earns rewards twice as fast as another character while doing the same mission, but the devs count travel time to the mission in their statistics, then the first character will not be datamined to be twice as fast: he or she will be datamined to be somewhat less than twice as fast.
7. This means however badly Blasters underperformed everyone else prior to D2.0 they almost certainly have to be doing even worse because their methodology dilutes differences.
8. This also means if you do only enough to make the difference disappear from your datamined statistics you're guaranteed to have not done enough because you would have to have placed Blasters at the lowest possible performance which fails to show an underperformance in the data.
9. Since the data behind D2.0 was collected, other archetypes have had changes done which are likely to have improved their average performance. Brute Fury is now easier to sustain, and that would likely average out across the entire playerbase to a net benefit relative to the loss of the ability to sustain extremely high Fury levels. Defenders have had their damage increased, at least solo. Tankers have gained Bruising. Stalkers have had critical mechanism improvements. All these things are far more likely to have shifted overall average performance upward rather than downward, and that increases the likelihood that the D2.0 benefits were further reduced on a relative basis.***
Therefore, without contrary data, I believe the most likely scenario, by overwhelming odds, is that Blasters still underperform, by probably a lesser amount than before, but still do.
** Performance, as defined by the devs, is the rate at which a character earns rewards such as XP, influence, and drops.
*** This is not a case of "if everyone else goes up by 5%, Blasters must also" - the power creep argument. If Blasters underperformed by 5% and everyone went up by 2% so Blasters were now 7% under average, that would not necesarily be significant. Nothing is perfect and someone has to be on the bottom. But if Blasters were underperforming by, say, 30% and that was considered too high, then if D2.0 reduced that to 20% and everyone else went up 5%, that 5% would be very significant because it would be undercutting a mandatory performance adjustment, not just a desired one.
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but what does underperforming mean?
how do you underperform in a team?
you earn less xp?
you do less damage?
you die more?
teams with blasters earned less xp than teams without blasters?
I fully believe that blasters are a poor AT, especially having played a Crab with amazing AoE, mezz protection, defense, and team buffs and debuffs.
I agree with what Teeto posted. I find a corr much better than a blaster because with a self heal a corr can recover when a blaster can't. And a corr can do something about the tough fights that the blaster can't. Likewise a corr adds a lot to a team that a blaster does not.
I think I am in the small minority.. I started playing with a blaster.. got used to how a blaster plays so to me the gameplay is quite normal.. i learned what to do and what not to do.. How to control my aggro. I learned which foes mez and which dont.. and this was before there were even breakfrees and no such thing as defiance ( even the crappy one )
I think that the people that play blasters make to much of being mezzed in all honesty.. last I checked Defenders. Corruptors and Controllers can all be mezzed. The blaster isnt the only AT dealing with mezz..
The major issue that I see is that over the years with Power Proliferation and APP improvements and not Incarnate powers there really just isnt as much of a NEED to have that blaster on the team because other players can do as much damage..
You can build a very effective blaster but its more challenging to do so rather than say a scrapper, brute or a dominator.. in fact I would say that dominators are the biggest problem, because they are literally the AT with two primaries.
Blaster secondaries unfortunately dont always compliment the Primary or even the AT.. They should help the blaster BLAST better an in reality most of them do not..
The hard things I can do--- The impossible just take a little bit longer.
If numbers are so much more important than a teammate who is fun to play with, forget about the game altogether and go play with a calculator instead. -Claws and Effect-
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Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
but what does underperforming mean?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
** Performance, as defined by the devs, is the rate at which a character earns rewards such as XP, influence, and drops.
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| how do you underperform in a team? |
And given how rewards are doled out in teams, the fact that blasters underperformed even in teams says something extremely dramatic about how blasters functioned before D2.0, and how they likely perform now.
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People have been saying this for years, but now there is an objective response. The response is: if your perspective on blasters is accurate, what in this perspective explains why blasters were dying at far higher rates than everyone else prior to D2.0, and coincidentally were spending far more time being mezzed?|
Originally Posted by Airhammer
I think that the people that play blasters make to much of being mezzed in all honesty.. last I checked Defenders. Corruptors and Controllers can all be mezzed. The blaster isnt the only AT dealing with mezz..
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Incidentally I like many players used to wonder why the game grants a badge for being mezzed. I wonder if it has occurred to anyone besides me that that badge exists because how long a player spends mezzed is actually a performance metric statistic the devs monitor, so it was just easy to make a badge for that.
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I think the reason blasters spend more time mezzed and defeated in teams is because they spend more time attacking their foes without preventing a counter attack, simple as that.
controllers/dominators can spend their time mezzing foes
defenders can be buffing allies or healing
blasters just attack. Which means if they are doing anything useful in a fight they are running the risk of getting aggro back.
I had an ice/emp controller. In a team he dropped ice slick, turned on arctic air, and then did block of ice or heal other. He contributed massively but every foe he attacked was held. He could draw aggro but it was rare.
A possible fix for this would be reduced aggro for blaster damage. Say they only get half aggro for the damage they do. They can still draw aggro, but it would be easier to unleash their attacks without getting attacked.
There is a much simpler way of understanding how blasters are underpowered.
Imagine that CoH is a tabletop miniatures game and you are playing the part of the adventurers the devs are running the monsters. You get to pick 8 units for your party and all the picks cost the same, but you are scored by the number of deaths you take and how quickly you finish.
Do you rush to load your team up with blasters or are they more at the bottom of the barrel ?
Personally even for things that have gimicky mechanics meant to emphasize range, blasters come out very near last.
Another way to look at it that also illustrates the point, is rate blaster survivability on a scale of 1-10, rate their damage output, multiply the two numbers.
Do the same thing with scrappers, brutes, tanks, khelds and any AT that isn't oriented towards force multiplication. See how the numbers hold up.
If you work really hard to skew things blasters come out 25% below anything else. That's doing things like saying "figuring a value for mezz resistance is hard so I will set it to 0", "Blasters can achieve defense against x and can select for x when fighting so I can give them full value for that". In other words making every assumption favorable to blasters.
Using observed performance data for anything but the peak achievable performance isn't a very sound idea. For all we know there may be a large segment of masochists in the CoH population that gravitate to blasters or any number of other things going on that influence people's choices.
What is telling is that people who start to play blasters stop playing more than any other
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Does nothing for the solo blaster.
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Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
I think the reason blasters spend more time mezzed and defeated in teams is because they spend more time attacking their foes without preventing a counter attack, simple as that.
controllers/dominators can spend their time mezzing foes defenders can be buffing allies or healing blasters just attack. Which means if they are doing anything useful in a fight they are running the risk of getting aggro back. I had an ice/emp controller. In a team he dropped ice slick, turned on arctic air, and then did block of ice or heal other. He contributed massively but every foe he attacked was held. He could draw aggro but it was rare. A possible fix for this would be reduced aggro for blaster damage. Say they only get half aggro for the damage they do. They can still draw aggro, but it would be easier to unleash their attacks without getting attacked. |
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That would address underperformance in teams to some degree. It would not address underperformance solo. Anything done to blasters should attempt to address their issues everywhere, and unlike any other archetype its been proven that they actually have issues everywhere. Everyone's common sense about Blaster performance is outright wrong. Even in the under level 30 game where people think, ok, blasters might underperform in the late game but here they obviously work better, Blasters have been datamined in the past to underperform. A solo blaster at level 20 is more likely to underperform a solo defender at level 20 than overperform it, or at least this was true prior to D2.0. That's the facts. *Why* that's the case is not entirely understood precisely, although there are lots of potential reasons. But that it happens is no longer debatable, at least to me, without strong evidence to the contrary.|
Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
I think the reason blasters spend more time mezzed and defeated in teams is because they spend more time attacking their foes without preventing a counter attack, simple as that.
controllers/dominators can spend their time mezzing foes defenders can be buffing allies or healing blasters just attack. Which means if they are doing anything useful in a fight they are running the risk of getting aggro back. I had an ice/emp controller. In a team he dropped ice slick, turned on arctic air, and then did block of ice or heal other. He contributed massively but every foe he attacked was held. He could draw aggro but it was rare. A possible fix for this would be reduced aggro for blaster damage. Say they only get half aggro for the damage they do. They can still draw aggro, but it would be easier to unleash their attacks without getting attacked. |
I believe its better to find a solution that helps solo blasters that happens to work in teams than the other way around, because its more likely that something that works solo will also work or can be made to work in teams than the reverse.
Also, if the problem was that Defenders drew less aggro, it would be difficult to explain why their advantage doesn't disappear solo. But it does not.
I believe that the best test of any theory of Blaster performance is pre-D2.0 Blaster performance. Any theory claiming to reasonably describe Blaster performance today should be able to predict the horrendous performance of Blasters in the past. If the theory doesn't predict that, that suggests its missing something.
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well defenders underperformed soloing and the solution was a damage buff that only works solo or in small teams
I don't see any real reason to think that one solution will fix blasters in teams and solo.
I would think that a defender style solution with a buff solo which fades on teams and a buff that you get on teams would be more likely
"Another way to look at it that also illustrates the point, is rate blaster survivability on a scale of 1-10, rate their damage output, multiply the two numbers."
If you do that, then those with high damage have to come out much lower.
Imagine a character has damage 1, survival 10.
Another character had damage 2, survival 5.
The first character will take twice as long to defeat foes. Soloing you could not say those 2 were balanced. No one would play the low damage character.
The problem is that blasters want a bottom to their survival (which is reasonable) which makes the extra survival kind of superfluous. But they want lots of damage which is not superfluous.
A tanker has really no greater survivability vs a +0/x3 spawn than a brute or scrapper. They will all survive it just fine. But the brute and scrapper do more damage and finish the fight faster.
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Question: Is the Blaster situation unique? In other words, even if its true that every Blaster powerset combination underperformed solo and teamed, does there exist any other archetype for which it was true that all powersets underperformed either solo or teamed, such as Defenders?|
Originally Posted by dugfromthearth
well defenders underperformed soloing and the solution was a damage buff that only works solo or in small teams
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Answer: no.
I specifically mentioned that back when Defiance 2.0 was being adjusted as a fact I was allowed to mention that the devs confirmed.
I don't believe Defenders underperformed solo. I think the solo damage buff was a QoL buff, not a quantitative balance buff. When the devs were asked about Defender performance in the past, they've often said that Defenders were the best balanced archetype. At the time, the precise meaning of that statement was not precisely known, but in retrospect what they were almost certainly saying was that across all of its powerset combinations, Defenders come the closest to being at or near the average performance of all players. They said that repeatedly, which means that was true over a very long period of time. At least from I5 to I11 and there's no reason to believe that changed markedly.
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I see a lot of threads about specific weaknesses or perceived weaknesses in blasters. But ATs are not balanced, you cannot look at each point and make it balanced with everyone else. You have to look overall. Under performing cannot be "not enough damage", it has to be "hard to solo".
Here are a list of areas of performance. If blasters are under performing in them please say so and without writing an essay try to indicate their actual level of performance. I.E. solo +0/x1 easy, solo +2/x4 is hard, solo+4/x8 is impossible. You might also say if some sets/combos vary wildly. I.E. only sonic/ can solo easily. (Note I am just making up these examples)
And feel free to make up any other areas where they might be under performing.
Leveling Solo (1-49)
Lvl 50 Solo
Leveling teams (1-49)
Lvl 50 teams
Incarnate Trials
AV's and GM's
PvP