Honest Blaster Questions/Research

Fourspeed:

My invuln scrapper used to be TWENTY times tougher than my wife's blaster and you ... didn't think... that was broken*?

* "Failed game design" if that phrase makes you happier. Fixating on stupid BS when everyone knows what we all mean is an internet tradition, I realize.

yes, but a brand new ferrrari should not be considered broken because a 12 year old with no driving experience takes it out and crashes it.

Comparing a ferrari driven by a 12 year old without a license to a yugo driven by a professional will not give you an accurate measurement of the abilities of the cars, just the drivers.

Is there anyone here that:

a. Thinks blasters are not broken
b. Does not fix the gaping holes in blaster functionality with IOs

and meets both conditions at the same time? I haven't read all of the threads about blasters sucking, just curious. In my experience a scrapper with no IOs at all has comparable performance to a blaster filled with (non-purple/pvp) IOs. I guess I could be a "12 year old" idiot noob, or maybe my blasters were manufactured in Suck Town and I didnt have 20 billion influence to fix them.

I wonder if something as simple as increasing the range on blaster attacks would help. It wouldn't do much for blappers, I guess, but I've found my main, an energy blaster with Boost Range on autofire and extra range from Cardiac, is a lot more survivable by being able to fight not only outside the range of melee attacks, but most ranged attacks as well. Mezzers usually die running up to get in range of using their powers.

I enjoy that one plus a couple of others I've had for a while, but I doubt I'll roll any new blasters. Damage is really the one thing they're designed to do (aside from outliers like the elec/elec end drain), and the nuke makes them special, only in this age of incarnates, you don't need blasters to obliterate entire spawns, because the tank can do that with judgement.

Without reading all the posts in all the threads here are some thoughts

Blasters to me feel weak, in comparison to other ATs, in part because of their lack of overall defence and particularly mez protection.

However there seems to be a wide disparity across the different kinds of blasters. I've never played a fire blaster to any significant level, but my Ice/En blaster is pretty devastating even without Incarnate content whilst Scarlet Shocker is pretty poor and however many times I've tried to improve her, all Elec is pretty dire these days. End drain is reasonably meaningless, both in PVP and PVE and the damage that electric puts out is feeble. I've also had other blasters that Ive delted once they got to 50 because they lacked the fun that other ATs provide

There seems to be a point where Blasters change from being useful to just being painful to play - generally around lvl 18 +/- 5 and there are few other ATs that are obviously that gimped.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

And thank you for such a perfect example of "Everything is fine with Blasters if you have years of experience, build perfectly, play perfectly, and nothing goes wrong."

(see also, eight years of "Why do we even have Defenders/Tanks in this game?")

I would say that, yes, there are probably tips we can give Scarlet Shocker to make her elec/elec experience a better one. The point is not to yell UR DOIN IT WRONG. The point is that you have to be a damn good Blaster to do things that a mediocre Scrapper doesn't think twice about.

There are only two non-controversial issues with endurance draining powers.

1) Endurance drain scales per archetype in PvP. Ones is used instead in PvE. So in PvP, defenders drain better, in PvE, all ATs drain the same. No explanation has ever been given for this discrepancy. (Though fixing this discrepancy probably won't help blasters.)

2) Higher-rank critters were given large endurance pools with the explicit design goal that they should not run themselves out of endurance by activating their own powers. In other words, base recovery alone is sufficient for nearly all critters to spam all their powers, and this is intentional. Thus, recovery debuffs remain helpful, but endurance drain without recovery debuffs is of extremely limited value. (Though Electric Blast has tons of recovery debuffing.)

Other issues, like whether Voltaic Sentinel is a fair substitute for a "tier 3" style blast, are up for debate.

Here again: played my blaster up to lvl12: running the Bocor's Loa Bone mission, Radio's "arc" missions, ending on "Beat Wyvern Rep" (had to street sweep for 3 orange minions before I actually got to lvl12). With 10 bars of patrol xp, took 1hr,5mins. Somehow I messed up my HeroStats data (it crashed while recalculating), and it shows that I went from lvl10 to lvl12 in 5 seconds (I wish!), so when I combined it w/ my previous (1hr26min to lvl10) play session, I get some crazy averages. I'm about to start my MM play session, but I wanted to log the times here before I forgot them.

Edit: Done w/ my MM. With 10 bars of patrol xp, took 1hr6mins to get to lvl12 (from lvl10, that is). I started w/ Radio's arc missions (had already finished Bocor's stuff), ending w/ Force tech to get codebreakers. Almost died twice (in the last mission, walked into a room and aggro'd the whole room), but tactical retreats are my friend. HeroStats messed up again: it now thinks I got to lvl10 in 20mins (I'm flattered, though), but otherwise, nothing new to report.