Honest Blaster Questions/Research

That's calling the strawman yellow. Any needed fixes for soloing will be just as valuable while teamed. What you really want is for the blaster to be a damage deity and AT balance is getting in the way of your desire.

For a quick snap shot, check your friends list. Typically about 1/2 of my friends are solo while the rest are in teams that average about 4 members.

My friends on Freedom are teamed more often than solo. My friends on Triumph are solo more often than teamed. My friends on Justice are split about evenly between solo and teamed.

Ok, so my first joke thought is that blaster's are great at being vengeance bait. I'm drawing somewhat of a blank as to what you really mean though.

Lol, was just getting ready to post that and saw you beat me to it.

That is kind of what I was getting at actually. Not vengeance bait, but their fragility. The need to be protected by others. No other AT is truly as weak as a blaster while also generating large amounts of aggro.

Obviously on a team everyone should be watching each other, but blasters just have that heightened sense of need. Whenever I play a tank or buff/debuff set I default to watching the blasters more (although HEATs also get some extra attention). When I play a blaster, I seem to see many people pay extra attention to me (or they don't and I get in trouble a lot).

Since I enjoy the interplay of teammates, I actually quite enjoy this aspect of the AT, both when I play a blaster and when I play with blasters. That doesn't mean I am opposed to changes or buffs, just that I am content with the current situation.

"Without really anyone noticing" is a weird statement, variations of which appear frequently in this and similar conversations.

A lot of people don't have much situational awareness. The team that "is really rocking" and then kicks the Force Field defender for being a leech is a classic from the old Defender boards.

If people can overlook being five times as tough, it's no surprise if they don't notice someone else's character doing 1.3 times as much damage. (From a few years back, when I was that force field defender, I estimate a blaster playing full offense is about 1.3 scrappers worth of damage through at least the low 40's. )

... in other news, I'm DYING to know how StratoNexus is finding a scrapper. It was you, right, first winner of the Blaster RWZ challenge?

And any fixes for teaming will be just as valuable while soloing, what's your point?

Yes, I do want blasters to be the best at damage. That's what blasters are supposed to be. It always has been. AT balance doesn't get in the way of that. AT balance happens with that as the goal.

The problem is that many players wouldn't notice the difference if the Blaster had to bail and were replaced by virtually ANY OTHER AT. Wait...they might notice

1) New guy is a Tank. Good, don't have to babysit him
2) Good, new guy is a Scrapper. Does damage and I don't have to babysit him
3) New guy is a Brute. Good, read Scrapper above.
4) Good, new guy is a Controller. We get some buffs and controls. Not quite as much damage but MUCH safer now.

and so on and so on...

The ONLY time I've noticed the absence of a Blaster was on a lowbie dream team I was PUG'd into one night. My Tanker, 4 Controllers, a Defender and 2 Blasters, all pre-17 before Stamina was inherent and Inventions was just getting started. It was a typical situation...I ran in and herded, the Controllers locked down the room, the Defender kept me alive and buffed the Blasters and they dropped Rain of Fire on everything. Spawn melts like butter...move on. The blasters had to go and we kept going...at a much slower pace.

Now, nobody seems to spend more than a day or two below SO levels. By the 30s players are beginning to get into Inventions. Teams in the 40s, led by a 50, can steamroll the ITF in less than an hour. I have a buddy with a Brute that stays at the damage cap pretty much all the time except for Rage crash. He can do this with defenses and Mez protection.

If Blasters are supposed to be kings of damage then they NEED a change to regain that title. Either that or they need something else...a NEW title to hold.

Yes please.

My point is that this is not the case. On a team the aggro goes to the tank (if its a good tank) solo the blaster gets it all. A team fix may still not solve the solo problems. The converse is not true.

Have to keep the horse in front of the cart.

It is as much the case as the ridiculous assertion that ANY fix that improves soloing will improve teaming as well.

Well, the tank gets the aggro IF there's a tank on the team, and IF the tank is in the same place as the rest of the team, and IF the tank is playing intelligently, and IF the tank's taunts overcome the threat generated by the blaster's damage, and IF there aren't more enemies present than the aggro cap. There are plenty of opportunities for a blaster to get plenty of aggro even on a team, and a lot of those if's are out of the blaster's control.

This is a ridiculous assertion. There are absolutely things that would benefit solo players that wouldn't benefit team players, or wouldn't benefit them as much I know this because I've thought of some. Just like there are things that would benefit team players but not solo players. I consider both these cases unlikely though. I think it's far more likely that any changes that benefit one playstyle will benefit the other roughly as much, and these are the sorts of changes that should be pursued.

Pursuing changes only with the end goal of improving soloing and just assuming that they'll fix teaming problems too is a terrible idea though.

That was me, yes. I do not understand your scrapper query, but I want to know what it is you want to know.

Can you construct a performance improvement that helps soloing, doesn't help teaming and is actually active and behaving the same way both solo and teamed ?

I can't think how anyone would manage it.

At first, I thought that was impossible. But after thinking about it, I think it might be possible. But it it would not be likely to be stumbled upon either way: it would have to be engineered that way.


Edit: the game mechanic that occurred to me could theoretically be manipulated in this way is phasing.

Not so weird when taken in context with the rest of my post.

Comicsluvr elaborates a bit 2 posts after yours so i dont feel the need to. Suffice to say, I find the "not noticing" concept as a whole to be a good thing- but you should still notice, just a little, that the team dynamic has changed.

Well if it was personal phasing it should help in both. KB might be a better candidate because if you use it, it might annoy people enough to kick you off the team.

Edit: Thinking about it both are cheats. They would have to be advantageously used solo, and detrimentally used on teams.

Vigilance...

You could increase the damage of AoE immobs by 30%.

Increase Trip Mine damage by 25%.

Create Stalkers as originally implemented...

Vigilance stops working on teams. Well the +dam part. The end red still provides a benefit.

Being that guy that gets hurt really easily isn't exactly what I'd call a positive team 'role'.

I agree that ideally there should be necessary interplay between the ATs in a team. Fragility however is a fairly negative thing in terms of game mechanics and should really be offset with a reason the rest of the team would actively want to keep them alive. The problem being that some people (myself included) don't really feel that blasters don't really have enough extra to counterbalance their fragility.

But yea, the whole thing is in debate obviously. Still if the thing an AT brings to a team that's different from everyone else is that they tend to die a lot; then that's probably something that needs looking into.

Hyperbole much? Strawman much?


So tell me exactly how adding damage as you want helps the blaster teamed in these situations? These are the EXACT teaming situations that the solo performance buffs we've been talking about will be useful on a team. Right now blaster damage is almost high enough to steal aggro even from a good tank. Buff the damage as you want and it very well could mean that the blaster could steal the aggro even from a good tank on a consistent basis (I'll trust Arcanaville to run the numbers on that I don't have her gift where that is concerned) this makes survivability buffs even more important than any damage buffs especially of the level that you are contemplating

I notice that you didn't deign to share. Perhaps because they are trivial or not germaine to the real issues?

You mean like adding damage will fix them? You can pour gallons and gallons of water into a 16 ounce container.... it will still only hold a pint no matter how hard you wish for it to hold more.

Since blaster problems on teams and solo boil down to being mezzed too much and being defeated too much I don't see how you could even spout such nonsense. Any fix that addresses these 2 issues will provide benefit solo and teamed.

There is a difference between a fix and a buff. I want the broken parts of the AT fixed. You just want a damage buff.

A power that simultaneously phased the player and the target(s), like a combo dimension shift, would help the player solo by eliminating all the other targets from being able to shoot at him or her, but in teams that would be counterproductive because the team couldn't help you kill your target, you couldn't help them kill anything else, and they couldn't otherwise buff or heal you.

In effect, its making the teamed player effectively solo. But it does not explicitly require using it badly to generate that result.

Immediately made me think of a bunch of hitbox sounds followed by this:


Maybe that's something stalkers should get instead...

I think that would still be beneficial . It would allow the blaster to take out problem targets without incurring added agro. They would be able to isolate any target with AoE buffs and take them out before they were able to buff the spawn.

True, there are circumstances when it would be useful. I was thinking it would overall hurt more than help in most teams though.

I suppose in a strict logical sense anything that helps you solo and has the same effect on a team will by definition help sometimes, even if that sometimes is when the team otherwise wouldn't be helpful to you. I think the loophole though is that without explicitly stating so there might be effects which benefit the solo player and hurt his team mates, which in the degenerate case of having no team mates is a net plus and in most teams is a net minus. Either way, though, as I said previously it seems unlikely the devs would stumble into one by accident, it would have to be deliberately engineered that way.