I'm not sure why...

So many people are telling me Blasters are awful. I think that people are wrongly accusing the AT of being bad when they themselves just aren't making wise decisions. You aren't a scrapper. You can't take on team sizes of 8 without breaking a sweat. Instead of attempting bigger sizes, I find that simply increasing the level of a team size of 2 yields a better benefit for my Beam Rifle/MM Blaster.

Without a doubt this character is easily the most powerful toon I have yet to play. Sure, he has little resistances/defenses to back himself up, but my defense is my offense.

"If it's dead, it ain't gonna kill me."

I've always saw Blasters as more of a team player anyways. Sure, one could argue they bring nothing to the team... But I can guarantee you a team with a (potent) Blaster will kill twice as fast as a team without one.

TL;DR - Stop hating on the Blasters. They aren't that horrible.

...because the other thread(s) about "my blasters are cool, you guys must suck" didn't already cover this?

Because blasters are the weakest AT, or at least the slowest to earn rewards. We actually have data to prove it.

Datamining has evidently showed that the rewards per unit time they were earning was eclipsed, on average, by every other AT and powerset combination by a statistically significant margin.

Whether or not they have more overall offense than Scrappers or Brutes is actually possible to question. Functionally, it means that blasters have sacrificed any semblance of defense for an advantage that may not exist. Blasters do not have the highest base damage absent all other factors, to be certain. Scrappers use their 1.125 melee modifier for ranged attacks, and can be considered tied, or worse, critical hits can be accounted for. Both Scrappers and Doms have higher melee modifiers.

Arcanaville says it best in "Blasters and the Modern CoH" over in Archetypes and Powers General, which is a fascinating read:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville ...when Blaster performance was datamined prior to D2.0, four things were true that are not trivially dismissable as being just a "not everyone can be above average" issue: 1. Every Blaster powerset combination was below average. You could not say that about any other archetype. 2. Every Blaster powerset was below average in essentially every teaming situation. That was also unique. 3. Every Blaster powerset was below average in every teaming situation at all combat level ranges. That was also unique to Blaster. 4. Every Blaster powerset combination was below average by a substantial amount. It was not the case that everyone clustered around the average, and Blasters happened to end up slightly below. I cannot repeat numbers, but I can say this: I asked Castle if Blasters underperformed everyone by 10% in all respects and in all areas, would that have been considered a problem. He said no. That would be considered within the reasonable range of performance allowable for different archetypes. It was actually significantly larger than that. Given the wide range in performance that different powerset combinations have, consider that the *best* Blaster powerset combination (whatever that was) was underperforming the average of all players by a lot more than 10%, in a datamining system that almost certainly understates performance differences, and then ask what the *worst* Blaster powerset combination was probably doing. Its not asking for anything unreasonable for the best Blaster powerset combination to not be worse than everyone else's average powerset combination. Its amazing to think that the best Blaster powerset combination was probably having difficulty being better than everyone else's *worst* powerset combination.

Regardless of possible imbalances against us Blasters...
Indeed, they do not "suck" and any comments as such should be dismissed (besides being entirely personal preference/incompatibility with personal playstyle/ability).

In other words... Welcome to the club!!

Been Elec/Elec/Elec Blastering since I began playing and I love it!
And hey, Electric Blast, especially, has "sucked" the entire time.

Just don't confuse those who swear that Blasters are worthless with those who do have intelligent points to raise for some improvements.
I do hate it when I see people telling new players not to play Blasters though. I started this game playing blasters and I am very happy for it. I think a lot of people start by playing on easy mode with certain melee ATs and can never seem to get over the learning curve of playing a Blaster (mainly because they don't want to, as you pointed out).

PEW PEW!!

Blasters have a harsh learning curve. When I say harsh, I mean "evil, vicious, malignant, nasty, bend-over-grab-your-ankles"

I posted a thread here last year "I failed at Blasters" This after 4 years in the city (mostly running SS Brutes...) Since then I am doing better. I think I could reasonably post a thread now "I do not completely suck with Blasters" So, I am the authority which you seek, obviously. Blasters can be a ton of fun. The trick is to stay alive AND be able to keep up steady damage per second that justifies running the crazy archetype. I got no advice that's good there. Good luck.

Blasters aren't unplayable, but they are undeniably weaker than any other AT. A War Mace Scrapper with just SO's can easily run in and one shot an even level LT with Build Up. An average Blaster would take two to three attacks to do the same, and in the meantime has no real way to protect himself from retaliation (which vs some enemies like Malta Sappers really sucks). It's not impossible, but it is harder when you have fewer options than classes who can do your main schtick better than you can.

I started the game with a blaster and, despite having a scrapper and a few other AT's on the roster now, she's still by far the most fun to play. The less rewards/damage/xp per second argument, though it might be mathematically true, is only relevant if your goal is to race the character to their max build as quickly as possible. If you have fun playing a blaster, then taking a little longer to get there just means having that much more fun along the way.

Edit: I guess it could also be relevant for team leaders who decline blasters because their calculations show that another AT could contribute more DPS, but a team that micromanages its members to that degree doesn't sound like much fun anyway.

There must be something wrong with my reading comprehension. I can't tell the difference between the original post and "Why do people tell me Blasters are awful? They just have to accept that they don't perform well , solo, and don't provide much to a team."

The AT I have the most 50's of is Blasters saying that I can tell you YES Blasters have issues.

They however do not "suck" a well built blaster can do a 8 man spawn but that is at an extreme high end build, most scrappers and brutes can do the same with half or less effort.

You can look at any of the secondary and shake your head at the problems they have atm most people swear by MM because it works better then the rest and well a massively OP ability that can -regen stunningly well.

The AT has come up in the world since defiance change but they do need another look, ONe thing that bugs me is they have this strange thing with changing blast sets when they give them to Blasters Psy, Rad, Dark, all had changes made to "Balance" them for blaster making them worse then there Corr and Def counterparts we wanted the original sets proliferated we got poor clones.

It seems to be a DEV fear to make blasters "to good" but in doing that they have made Melee AoE seemingly the super dmg of CoX.

Blasters don't need Deff or Res as they are ment to kill everything before they need it, most can't do that as easily. What then need is secondary rework, manipulations sets fail a large number of powers aren't useful a large portion of the time(devices i'm looking at you) some have tools that sound great but don't work as advertised or do so at such a weak job at what they do.

I really hated the stabilizing of the T1 and T2 blasts some sets (it really messed with Rad blast) should have had the fast recharges.

I could keep going but i'm tired and rambling :P