Honest Blaster Questions/Research

That's because numerically they don't. Blaster don't out damage them and don't have anything to make up for it.

So what do you do when you admit that a blaster hasn't really ever had a functional core concept? At this stage in the game they most certainly don't. Their role of "damage king" (a canard by the way. Damage king has always pretty much been lip service in describing them, part of that has to do with the ZOMG no tank mage business) has been usurped by most of the other ATs so that those other ATs can solo reasonably well. The blaster all ready had enough damage to solo, what they lacked was mitigation.

Glass cannon. That gets bandied about so much that I am quite frankly sick of it. The entire idea is absurd. NO one would ever cast a serious cannon out of glass. It's not even reasonable think of it that way. Besides which, who ever heard of a cannon being locked into place by a wussy little ring of fire? What cannon isn't going to fire if you put ice around the outside? What chance does a mind control ray have of putting out the fuse and stopping the cannon from going boom? Contrary to the bugs bunny cartoons, sticking your finger in the barrel of a gun doesn't prevent it from going off nor does it make the gun explode.

You know what adding damage to it makes it? A glass howitzer. You know what the problem is? It's still made of freaking glass!

Glass cannon goes hand in hand with the other equally false platitude of range = defense. Range only equals defense if you have a ranged advantage. The blaster doesn't have that advantage, the mobs do. The blaster can't even keep the mobs at range to preserve that fictitious advantage. Only Dark Blast and blaster PPPs have the tools to attempt that, they are both fairly new additions, and they don't have enough range in those powers (excepting Mace mastery) to succeed.

The other famously ridiculous thing is Jack and the "just ask the defender not to heal you" stupidity of D1.0.

The real problem is that the devs can't come up with a working core concept for blasters because the cannon you can break easily is not a cannon, it's cannon fodder.

The other metaphor that I really need to bring into the discussion is this.

The tanker AT used to be a Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle - now it's an M1 Abrams.
The scrapper used to be the 2000 pound bomb - now its a 2 megaton nuclear warhead.
The controller used to be a tax collector - now it's the entire IRS with the secret service and US Marshalls thrown in gratis.
The defender used to be a shield wall and blood letters - now it's the patriot missile system, MRIs and micro surgery.
The blaster is still a cannon.... and it's not even cast out of Bronze or Iron.

Except that you just said that they need increases in both. In actual fact blasters have enough damage to solo effectively since other ATs that have less can do so. The blaster lacks the ability to continue to apply that damage which is why they fail.

This should concern me why? I pay to play VIP. I'm not getting VIP service where my blasters are concerned. I play this game for fun and to escape the pressures of the daily grind of work and the economy.

You know what isn't fun? Being defeated. Repeatedly. Especially if you equate it to losing as I do. Being defeated on this AT more than any other AT. Having to repay more debt than any other AT I play. Having to return from the hospital more than any other AT I play. Having to stand there stunned, held or slept more often than any other AT and and for longer than any other AT and not having the tools to prevent it proactively or fix it reactively in my powerset. Being able to use 3 powers while mezzed when all the other ATs I play get to use all of them because they rarely get mezzed in the first place.

Notice that nothing in the unfun list has anything to do with lacking damage. I think that it is a pretty reasonable conclusion that adding a little damage or even a moderate amount of damage isn't going to solve any of the not fun issues. Especially when mez and defeat prevent you from using increased damage. It might reduce the issues slightly but it can't solve them.

I can just about guarantee you that getting the amount of damage buff required to fix the problem is FAR more than the devs will ever consider giving to the blaster. You CAN'T balance low survivability with high damage. This game has spent years failing to do so. The fulcrum is just too far from the center of the lever. The weight you would have to add to the short side to achieve it is too much.

The best I can see the devs doing is making ranged 1.25 and melee 1.125. That would be spitting in the wind.

Except that a damage buff won't make up for the lack of survivability.

At least we can agree on this.

This here is really the crux of the problem. While I would argue the point that blasters haven't ever had a functional core concept, I agree with you that they don't really now. And that's why I think fixing blasters is going to be so hard. I think to really do it right you would almost have to redesign the AT from the ground up, and I don't picture that ever happening.

I don't think it's meant to be realistic.

The range = defense thing has been crap for a long time now. Back before they gave every enemy a ranged attack of some type it conferred some advantage, but now it's meaningless.

I think this kind of goes to the core of our disagreement here. You clearly want improvements that will make blasters easier to solo. I couldn't care less about that. I don't play this game to solo. 90% of the time I'm playing, I'm on a team with at least 6 people. Generally on a team that size, I can survive okay. Maybe not as well as a scrapper or brute, but it's not like I'm dying constantly. What I really want is for my impact on a team to be felt more. I don't want to be interchangeable with every scrapper or brute. I want there to be a fair tradeoff to playing a blaster. I want the team leader to say "Okay, it will be harder to keep the blaster alive than a scrapper or brute, but the blaster will do a lot more damage".

I do realize that the devs have mostly tried to make sure soloing was a valid option as well, but this is still primarily a multiplayer game, and I feel any fixes should be focused primarily on the multiplayer aspects of it.

I'm not saying it should. I'm just saying that "Giving blasters mez protection and nothing else is good enough for me, so by god it should be good enough for everyone else too" is a selfish argument, and isn't likely to convince a lot of other people.

Uh huh, which is why I've repeatedly said that blasters should get survivability buffs as well as a damage buff. I just don't want survivability buffs instead of a damage buff.

I agree with you that at the moment blaster survivability is too low to balance strictly with a damage buff. I am not, nor have I at any point said that the devs should buff damage and be done with it. I'm not sure how to get that across to you any more clearly.

I see no reason why it couldn't be a bit higher than that.

It will if you also increase survivability a bit at the same time.

Maybe I can explain a little better what I'd like to see done. The example below may not hold 100% true to reality, but hopefully it is close enough that you can get the point I'm making.

If you look at the 4 melee archetypes, they sit on various points along two spectrums, damage and survivability. If we say the high end of those spectrums is a 10, and the low end is a 1, then for survivability, you have tanks sitting at 10, brutes at maybe 8, scrappers at 7, and stalkers at say 6. For damage, you have stalkers at 10, scrappers at maybe 9 (I realize stalkers may not be higher damage than scrappers, but bear with me), brutes at 8, and tanks at 6 or so. For the most part, the archtypes are balanced, because tradeoffs are fair. For any given archetype, the higher they are on the survivability spectrum, the lower they are on the damage spectrum. If you add together the damage number and survivability number for each archetype, you get 16 for each one, meaning they're pretty well balanced.

Now if we add blasters to that spectrum, They sit quite high on the damage spectrum. Probably a 9 or 10. On the survivability spectrum though, they sit at about a 2, maybe a 1. So the combined number for a blaster is 10-12, well below the other archetypes, meaning blasters aren't balanced with them, as everyone is perfectly aware.

So if we're going to fix blasters, we need to bring them up to a 16 somehow. You could leave their survivability at 1 or 2, and bring their damage up to 14 or 15. That's very unlikely though, and may not even fix the problem, since you'd still get mezzed a lot, and die frequently. So overall that's probably not a good fix. You could also go to the opposite extreme. Leave their damage alone at 9 or 10, and bring their survivability up to 6 or 7, on par with a stalker or scrapper. I think that's just as unlikely, and I don't think that's a good solution either, since other than having more ranged and less melee attacks, I'm not sure the blaster would play much different than the stalker or scrapper. And then there's the combined approach. Bump the blaster's damage damage up a modest amount, say to 12, and bump their survivability up a modest amount as well, say to 4. Then you have an archetype that is to scrappers as scrappers are to tanks. They'd be more survivable than they currently are, but still less survivable than the melee archetypes, but there would be a reward to balance out that risk as well. They'd do more damage than the melee archetypes. And that I feel is the best solution to fix the issues with blasters.

To quote someone, "This just seems selfish."

Actually I want blasters to be able to both solo and team effectively. On a well balanced team they do "ok", solo they don't have the tools. Giving them the tools to solo isn't going to harm them on a team. Since not all players play on high pop servers, or live in time zones where teaming is convenient, this is the item that should get the highest priority since it is the very reason that blasters are no longer the kings of damage. The other "non-soloable" ATs have been given the tools to solo (in their case it was damage) and marginalized the blaster.

I used to feel that way too but several things have demonstrated to me that it's not the case any more:

• CoV and the release of the "self reliant" "villain" ATs.
• The solo-ability buffs all "hero" ATs except blasters were given.
• PvP changes that took the focus of PvP away from team tactics and base raiding and turned it to solo tactics and zone play.

I can't really agree that this is "primarily" a multiplayer game anymore since (with the addition of the new DA content) you can do practically every thing and earn almost all available awards by soloing. The only things that come to mind that you have to have help with is a few simul-click glowie missions, TF commander accolade, and the SG base beacon for RWZ (which kind of flies in the face of having an SG in the first place). I was going to say Hami-Os but the market lets you get those without ever doing a Hami raid, STF or RSF and there are players soloing the STF and the RSF in any case. There are even people that can, with the advent of incarnate powers, solo all the pylons in the RWZ before they regenerate and drop the shields on the ship so they could get the beacon.

I have personal data that I posted in the thread in the AT and powers section that shows that my blasters spend a much higher proportion of their time mezzed than any other AT I play. I may be alone in that but I highly doubt it, especially since Arcanaville says that the devs have data that confirms that pretty much across the player base for the blaster AT. So its not really selfish, its not really conjecture, but it isn't going to convince anyone that simply lives in denial and isn't willing to check the facts out for themselves. It is probable that this is the root cause of blaster under performance and is why I've chosen focus on that aspect rather than the damage aspect.

Throwing more damage at a blaster has about as much chance of fixing blasters as jogging through New York's Central Park at night has of improving your overall health.

And I don't want damage instead of survivability buffs. The blaster needs the survivability buffs to function properly in the current game. If your house is falling apart and looks like crap, spending a bunch of money redecorating isn't going to fix the roof, replace the windows, and insulate. Sure it will look pretty but the first strong gust of wind to come along gives you the same problem all over again and you've wasted the resources that should have been spent making the repairs on cosmetics.

If you are advocating fixing the roof, windows, and insulation first and then putting a nice coat of paint on the house and planting daisies out front if there are any resources left I am in complete agreement.

What if the devs aren't willing to have the damage scale exceed 10 or even retool the scale to make the blaster the only 10 in the game and the nearest other AT a 9? Even if they take the blaster to a 4 in survivability in that case it still isn't going to be enough to fix the issues and it still won't be comparable to all the other ATs.

If a tall structure is unstable you can't make it more stable by adding height to it. You have to broaden the base or increase the structural support first. That's the priority and it should be where our attention is focused.

You don't say, the AT with the worst status effect protection in the game suffers the most from status effects ?

I do say. It's trying to convince the people that say, "well, mine don't." That they are the exception and not the rule.

Eh, it could be. I'm not sure overall what percentage of time the general population spends teaming, and what percentage they spend soloing. I suspect teaming beats out soloing by quite a bit though.

I'm sorry, but you're never going to convince me that solo play is the most important thing to focus on in a multiplayer game. I doubt you'll convince the devs of it either. Yes, they've made soloing a much more viable alternative than in many MMOs, but at its heart, city of heroes is still a multiplayer game.

There is considerable evidence that shows city of heroes is still primarily a multiplayer game. We have:

• Numerous task forces and trials which need a minimum number of players to start.
• A (sometimes extremely large) difference in the speed of rewards gained (XP, inf, merits, incarnate drops, etc.) in teams vs. solo.
• Inherent abilities which are more effective based on having teammates.
• Powers which are more effective if teammates are nearby.
• Numerous powers which affect only teammates and not the user.
• The fact that new content nearly always comes to teams first, and soloers later (if at all). The delay between the release of incarnate trials and the release of a solo incarnate path is a good example.

It's great that soloing is a valid option in this game, but it's clear that it is not the game's primary focus.

I realize that mez is (probably) the largest problem facing most blasters and something needs to be done about it. It's just not the only problem, and giving blasters mez protection but nothing else isn't going to balance the AT any more than giving them a damage buff but nothing else will.

I'm not sure why you think it needs to be one or the other, or even one before the other. Why can't there be a set of blaster changes that include both damage and survivability buffs at the same time?

Of course if they aren't willing to give blasters a damage buff, then buffing survivability more is the only option for balancing them with the other ATs. As far as I know though, none of the devs have come out and said conclusively that blasters won't be getting a damage buff. So unless it's taken off the table, I'll keep pushing for that as part of the solution.

This is like saying that PVP is the most important balance point for an AT. Even if people do PVE content most of the time, the simple fact is that PVP is a much more difficult environment because other players are much smarter than AI, and because players are directly competing against each other, so power disparities between archetypes are more noticeable, so therefore everything should be balanced around PVP.

If the general population spends 90% of its time on teams and 10% soloing (I have no idea what the actual numbers are, just a general feeling that more people team more often than solo), it's kind of ridiculous to say that soloing is the most important thing to focus on.

Now I'm not saying soloers should be ignored. And most things that will help solo play will probably help team play (and vice versa). But I feel that making sure blasters can contribute as well on teams as other archetypes should be the primary purpose of any changes, and making sure they can solo effectively should be a secondary concern. More than likely though, any changes will do both, as I don't really see a reason why they couldn't.

Ok...let me try to explain a few basics:

1) You always to try to balance the AT/powersets around the most common event in the game. This is why the baseline metric is 3 white-con Minions or 1 Minion and a Lt. Those are the two most common spawns at +0/X1. Trying to balance ANYTHING around PvP (possibly the LEAST likely event in the game because it's totally optional) would be nuts, no matter how difficult it is.

2) You can't balance anything around team play even if the team is a duo. It's tough enough to balance an AT internally with all the different permutations of Powers available. You add even 1 other toon to the mix and you've got an impossible mix of possibilities. What if it's a Tanker? Or a Defender? Or another Blaster? The sheer volume of permutations would drive you mad.

3) As was explained before, any idiot can help on a team. You can set a Blaster to Follow the Tanker, hit his AoE on auto and leave the room and the Blaster is contributing. The bigger the team, the more obvious this becomes. Ever been on a team with a single 50 Incarnate and a bunch of pre-35s? The Incarnate generally runs the table while everyone else throws a blast or two and runs their toggles. A character HAS to be able to be effective solo or else the game is punishing soloers.

I rolled a Time/Dark Defender earlier tonight and ran him through content to level 10.something. On a Blaster I would never have felt so safe. I took on Orange Bosses with an empty Insp tray and no Enhancers of any kind without fear. That's because the Defender has more tool in the box for dealing with 'Oh crap I missed with everything!' moments. Blaster only have more damage.

But 3 white-con minions or 1 minion and an LT is only the most common event in the game if people solo as much as they team. I think this is far from the case.

I was not making a serious suggestion that things should be balanced around PVP. I was pointing out how ridiculous I felt the idea of balancing everything around solo play was by comparing it to an equally ridiculous idea.

I don't think it's as different as you're making it out to be. Yes, finding inter-class balance is more difficult than finding intra-class balance, but it's clearly a goal the devs strive for, or they wouldn't have made the stalker changes they did. It's also obvious that some of the changes they've made haven't been strictly for numerical balance reasons, but because the players didn't find some archetypes fun. And especially in that case it's important to make sure team play is included in the changes, since people do more of it than solo play.

This isn't relevant to anything. I'm well aware that a blaster can contribute to a team now. Hell, a single fire imp with one attack is 'contributing' to a team.

What I want is for a blaster, played as intelligently, and slotted as effectively, as any other archetype to be able to make as much of a contribution to the team's effectiveness as any other archetype. And right now that isn't happening.

Strawman. I never said they shouldn't make sure blasters can solo more effectively. I said I want them to team more effectively as well, and that because teaming is (probably) a lot more common than soloing, fixing teaming problems should be higher priority than fixing soloing problems. I'll state again though, that I DO want blasters to be able to solo effectively. I just want them to be effective on teams MORE.

1) Unless and until you get access to Dev datamining you cannot say this with ANY certainty. None of us have any way of telling whether solo or team play is more common. We can only do what we know based on our own play style. From what we've seen on this thread (and others) I think it' safe to say that solo play is at least as common as team play if not more. If team play were the standard then I think we'd be seeing more 'My Blaster doesn't contribute to the team' threads.

2) I cannot think of a circumstance (barring some funky mechanic based on number of people on a team) where boosting solo performance wouldn't ALSO boost team performance. With regards to a Blaster a team is essentially a bunch of soloers running together because they get no exclusive buffs (by that I mean buffs that ONLY work on other teammates). The effectiveness of support ATs goes down solo because they now have part of their powerset they can't use. Blasters never suffer from this.

Therefore if Blaster solo performance were improved it would AUTOMATICALLY improve their team performance as well. Two birds, one stone.

I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that solo play is anywhere near as common as team play. I also do not think what we see in this thread (or the forums in general) would be a good way to draw conclusions about that sort of thing.

No, if this were a pvp game it would be. But it is not.
Just like characters buy enhancements, but you do not balance AT's around buying enhancements.
Just because something is in the game does not make it important.

This is a pve game. Balance around solo pve is critical, balance around team pve is not very important.

Soloing is very common, but I really have no idea which is more common.

The reason people don't complain about contributing on teams is because you can't tell. People do not use DPS meters in this game. And even if you did they wouldn't tell you much. A sonic blaster debuffing the target's Res may contribute more damage via the debuff then the actual damage they do.

But it is painfully obvious if you do not solo well.

There's the problem...you THINK it is unlikely. You have NO way to be sure. Neither do I. However a good way to judge the player base is to read Forum threads. No, they don't represent every player (only about 10% I read once), but if the majority of Forumites post one thing or another then it at least bears looking into. Examples:

Blaster players said they were under-performing. Datamining showed they were right and the Devs installed Defiance 2.0

Defender players said they sucked solo. More datamining showed they were right and Vigilance 2.0 was installed.

Tanker players said they were under-performing and Bruising was invented.

Stalkers just got a huge rewrite and many Stalker players now love them.

The sum total of all the posts asking why Blasters under-perform, asking how to fix it, ranting about Mez-death and so forth could crush my house. These are (for the most part) not 'My Blaster is lagging a bit behind my Corrupter...what am I doing wrong?' sort of posts. They're more like rage and bile spewed by players tired of keeping the faith while the Devs gather data.

The AT is not broken but it sure is bent all to hell. The sets have little synergy, there are too few Secondaries and damage creep has seen Blasters eclipsed in overall performance by just about every other AT. It needs to be fixed...period.

Depending on what you mean by "anywhere near" I believe its extremely likely that solo play is about as common as teamed play, on a player-hour basis.

It cannot be exceptionally uncommon, that much I'm certain of, or certain things would not be true that are true about the way the devs manage and balance the game.

Interesting by that logic they wouldn't have left most often created, most often abandoned AT twisting in the wind for 8 years. Its a much simpler assumption that its easier to balance and manage for individuals than it is for teams.

Edit: I forget this was the company that claimed they couldn't assign any relation to their actions and people leaving the game.

Right, nor can you say that solo play is as common as team play with ANY certainty. We're both basically making WAG's here.

Likewise, I can't think of a circumstance (again, barring some funky mechanic based on number of people on a team) where boosting team performance wouldn't also boost solo performance.

I'll admit that the 'boost solo performance vs. boost team performance' argument is probably pointless, since by doing one you almost can't help but do the other. However in the very unlikely circumstance that they are forced to choose between the two for some reason, I think team performance is more important.

Nah. The blaster community was pretty quiet I7 to I10. Data-mining showed blasters underperformed, so Castle came to the community to brainstorm.

I would be honestly surprised if that were true. If you include time spent outside missions, I could see it though (crafting, marketing, respeccing, tailoring, etc. all take significant game time and are most often done solo).

That is a good point. Significant resources are put into place to allow for soloing (and I mean the fighting part of the game). I never meant to say soloing was rare, or even uncommon, but I figured teaming hours were likely to be at least twice what soloing hours were (for in-combat time). That is a large gap, but I'll likely never know the truth.

To this day blasters argue that "Their blaster is just fine and if yours isn't lrn2ply noob". It was no different before. At a guess, these people just don't like the implication that they picked the wrong AT.

BTW examining the performance data only showed that the people playing blasters weren't doing well with them*. Not surprising when so much of the community had so little idea of what good and bad was they couldn't tell they were doing poorly and needed to get bellicose when people said the AT had problems.

*A subtle but important difference.

Pretty quiet past I6. The last major blaster performance debate I was involved with on any serious scale was when Pilcrow and I were discussing Controller damage relative to Blaster damage with the pet+containment change. Just saying the last major performance discussion I had about Blasters was with Pilcrow says an awful lot about how long its been relatively quiet.

Of course, blasters do have something that is pretty unique in team play. Not everyone likes that thing and it may cause some issues in reward metrics, but it does exist. And it is not even all negative, IMO.