Not sure what the point of this is, but I'm going to guess it is a comparison test to see if blasters are still measuring up.
If that's the case, it is going to be skewed no matter how you slice it, since the Devs are the only ones that have access to real data mine results. BUT, if you are gung-ho about this, I'd say you chose a legitimate match up, so long as you don't use Swap Ammo. That way it's 100% lethal vs. 100% lethal for the primaries.
@Winter. Because I'm Winter. Period.
I am a blaster first, and an alt-oholic second.
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Well I figure if I keep track of the amount of times I die and how long it takes to complete the exact same content on both, it should at least be one example of the supposed performance differences between Blasters and other AT's. And rogger that, I won't use swap ammo. Thanks.
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Originally Posted by Winterminal
Not sure what the point of this is, but I'm going to guess it is a comparison test to see if blasters are still measuring up.
If that's the case, it is going to be skewed no matter how you slice it, since the Devs are the only ones that have access to real data mine results. BUT, if you are gung-ho about this, I'd say you chose a legitimate match up, so long as you don't use Swap Ammo. That way it's 100% lethal vs. 100% lethal for the primaries. |
The Stalker will outperform the Blaster doing solo content. The Blaster will outperform the Stalker doing team content. It's really not a good comparison, and the results are already pretty obvious.
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Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
The Stalker will outperform the Blaster doing solo content. The Blaster will outperform the Stalker doing team content. It's really not a good comparison, and the results are already pretty obvious.
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Feel free to suggest different sets. I don't know why it's not a good comparison. The argument presented by most has been "Blasters don't keep up with other damage AT's." Followed by "If you use IO's, that doesn't count." "If you're only considering level 50 content, it doesn't count." This seemed like a fair way for me to gauge the level up performance. Of course it's a lose/lose because no matter what, people will still find excuses and ways to say there's something wrong with Blasters. I guess that's the ultimate point of the experiment, to show that no matter what actually playing the game has to say, when people are intent on begging for a buff to an AT that is overall fine, with yes, some secondaries that need work done, people are going to keep doing it no matter what.
If you want this to be a balanced test you should compare similarly oriented sets, Dual Pistol is aoe oriented, Try electrical melee on the stalker side for a similar focus.
I would also suggest Ninjutsu for the secondary over Dark Armor. Ninjutsu is less dependent on an IOed build.
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That's ironic, given that you are attempting to use a single example to prove false something that has been determined by simply measuring the performance of everyone that plays the game. That Blasters underperform is true when you take into account all the people that play the game. Its actually others that keep trying to come up with excuses for why that assertion doesn't actually represent the real performance gap between Blasters and other archetypes. The devs datamining counts everyone. You're implying counting yourself is better than counting everyone.|
Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
Feel free to suggest different sets. I don't know why it's not a good comparison. The argument presented by most has been "Blasters don't keep up with other damage AT's." Followed by "If you use IO's, that doesn't count." "If you're only considering level 50 content, it doesn't count." This seemed like a fair way for me to gauge the level up performance. Of course it's a lose/lose because no matter what, people will still find excuses and ways to say there's something wrong with Blasters. I guess that's the ultimate point of the experiment, to show that no matter what actually playing the game has to say, when people are intent on begging for a buff to an AT that is overall fine, with yes, some secondaries that need work done, people are going to keep doing it no matter what.
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The best you can do is determine whether you are representative of the average player or not, and by extension whether your impressions are representative of the average player experience. That would be useful information both to me and to the devs, although probably not in the way you intend.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
If you want this to be a balanced test you should compare similarly oriented sets, Dual Pistol is aoe oriented, Try electrical melee on the stalker side for a similar focus.
I would also suggest Ninjutsu for the secondary over Dark Armor. Ninjutsu is less dependent on an IOed build. |
That's fair. I already finished the first hour of the Blaster and was just making the Stalker. I'll go Elec/Ninj.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's ironic, given that you are attempting to use a single example to prove false something that has been determined by simply measuring the performance of everyone that plays the game. That Blasters underperform is true when you take into account all the people that play the game. Its actually others that keep trying to come up with excuses for why that assertion doesn't actually represent the real performance gap between Blasters and other archetypes. The devs datamining counts everyone. You're implying counting yourself is better than counting everyone.
The best you can do is determine whether you are representative of the average player or not, and by extension whether your impressions are representative of the average player experience. That would be useful information both to me and to the devs, although probably not in the way you intend. |
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Convincing you doesn't help me that much. Convincing the devs helps me more. For an experiment like this to have any chance of outweighing the devs' own data, you'd probably need to get data from at least a few hundred players, all with objective evidence that they were performed with reasonable care.
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Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
You're free to join in the experiment too. I think I would trust the results of players actually comparing and contrasting through gameplay like this more than I trust some information that the devs gathered god knows how long ago, the details of which I have no access to. I encourage everyone do to exactly what I'm doing and share their results here so that we have some concrete information to work with rather than broad assertions with no direct evidence.
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Here are the results for today, one hour of play on both characters. This obviously isn't saying much since the low levels are about the same for everything, but I still want to collect all the information during this process. I should be able to spend an hour on each character every day this week.
These were both entirely solo on the default 0x0 setting. Both used a Nemesis Staff and Sands of Mu. Once I get to level 17 on each, I'll slot generic lvl 20 IO's and post both builds updating as they progress. I won't use enhancements up until that point.
DP/Dark Blaster
Total levels: 7
Total defeats: 1
3:48 tutorial (0 defeats)
lvl 2
3:56 Operative Kuzman (0 defeats)
4:01 lvl 3
4:06 Fire Wire (0 defeats)
4:08 lvl 4
4:22 LT Harris (1 defeats)
4:22 lvl 5
4:35 lvl 6
4:46 LT Harris complete
4:46 lvl 7
Elm/Ninj Stalker
Total levels: 7
Total defeats: 0
6:00 tutorial (0 defeats)
lvl 2
6:07 Operative Kuzman (0 defeats)
6:13 lvl 3
6:16 Fire Wire (0 defeats)
6:18 lvl 4
6:29 LT Harris (0 defeats)
6:29 lvl 5
6:44 lvl 6
6:57 LT Harris complete
6:57 lvl 7
As you can see, both characters have made the same amount of progress, while the Blaster has suffered one defeat and the Stalker has suffered 0. So far, pretty even.
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A single example can be a more powerful statement than reams of statistical data.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's ironic, given that you are attempting to use a single example to prove false something that has been determined by simply measuring the performance of everyone that plays the game. That Blasters underperform is true when you take into account all the people that play the game. Its actually others that keep trying to come up with excuses for why that assertion doesn't actually represent the real performance gap between Blasters and other archetypes. The devs datamining counts everyone. You're implying counting yourself is better than counting everyone.
The best you can do is determine whether you are representative of the average player or not, and by extension whether your impressions are representative of the average player experience. That would be useful information both to me and to the devs, although probably not in the way you intend. |
I am certainly not in the blasters don't need to be fixed camp but statistical sampling of performance is certainly going to be way off. People make choices based on their abilities and resources about what they play. This inevitably skews any data you might get from taking a snapshot of the AT. I am a prime example of this phenomenon. After I played my first blaster to 50, I stopped with the AT until I felt I was able to kit it out sufficiently to overcome the difficulties. Even at that point, I went through combinations of primaries and secondaries that both performed well and were fun to play. There was also the fact that certain combinations like Energy/Energy (an above average survivor) had to be excluded because of KB and the prejudice against it.
The only way to do the job right this time, is to model the problems blasters have versus other ATs on a primary and secondary powerset basis then see if the sets need reworking or you can slide by with a minor adjustment.
I freely confess to not having done the work. (If you understand how much work it is you can see why I wont do it unpaid). My gut feeling looking at how blasters work is that they need equal to slightly better damage output than the melee damage types, limited mezz protection, a 50% base boost for their pool defense/resistance numbers and a look at secondary sets that dont offer AoEs.
Yes I understand that is much to do, but if you look at this games history it is resounding proof that the most expensive effort is wasted effort, and it is wiser to get things right the first time instead of trying to correct over and over.
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I find that this makes statistics on poor Blaster performance rather more powerful than not, actually.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I am certainly not in the blasters don't need to be fixed camp but statistical sampling of performance is certainly going to be way off. People make choices based on their abilities and resources about what they play. This inevitably skews any data you might get from taking a snapshot of the AT.
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If you assume players will gravitate to the best of an AT, then statistically that AT's performance data should be clumped around the performance of the best sets. If that's true for Blasters and they're still lagging, that says quite a lot.
De minimis non curat Lex Luthor.
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Only if you want to get a "neutral" view of the archetype; sort of a how would it perform if everyone was forced to play it at gunpoint.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
A single example can be a more powerful statement than reams of statistical data.
I am certainly not in the blasters don't need to be fixed camp but statistical sampling of performance is certainly going to be way off. People make choices based on their abilities and resources about what they play. This inevitably skews any data you might get from taking a snapshot of the AT. |
But I don't think that's all that useful in practice. I think in practice its much fairer to say that how good an archetype is is directly related to how much players actually squeeze out of it. If they get more out of Scrappers or Controllers than Blasters, how they do is not as important as the fact that they do.
There is a train of thought that suggests its actually possible to construct two archetypes that are "fair" in the sense that they have equal intrinsic power, but A underperforms B because people don't know how to get the most out of A. I think that line of thought only has merit when A and B are both options for which people have had a limited amount of exposure to.
But when A and B have been around for eight years, its likely that the average player is not going to suddenly get any better at either. Individual players may get better at A or B or both, but the average player probably stays mostly the same.
In that circumstance, I believe that A and B are equal if players actually get equal results from them, regardless of how they do. Its basically judging the two archetypes in the grand totality of their intrinsic power, their gameplay, their build options, and the degree of difficulty they present.
An analysis can show why one thing performs better or worse, but it won't dictate values. If what this game values is presenting players with a choice of archetypes, each of which presents approximately the same chance to succeed at earning in-game rewards, then measuring in-game reward earning is the best way to know if they actually present that choice correctly. Player behavior can skew the statistics in certain directions, in particular by altering performance at different security levels or by teaming at different frequencies. But when the statistics factor those things out, the only remaining player behaviors are the things we don't want to factor out. If players slot Scrappers better than Blasters, the question is why should Blaster encourage that behavior. If players learn to play Controllers faster than Blasters, again the question is why are Blasters so much harder to learn. But most importantly, even if we cannot figure out why these things are true, if we intend to present the proper gameplay choice to the players, the ultimate question is do we need to know. And the answer is no, we don't. It would be nice to know, but in the absence of knowing we can still try to compensate for those failings.
All I really assume is that most players try to have fun, and within that context try to do well. Every archetype gives them a different set of options for accomplishing that, and there's no need to normalize for that fact. The different options people exercise within each archetype is part of the value of the archetype we're trying to measure.
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Personally I would have gone for a combination you're not 'on record' as having said is on-par with the other damage ATs; to be honest I'm not really sure what you're trying to accomplish with this specifically in the first place. You acknowledge that there are more than several sets (both secondary and at least one primary) that don't perform well by your standards so why bother creating a blaster that you've said you expect to perform well and comparing it to a Stalker?
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Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
Feel free to suggest different sets. I don't know why it's not a good comparison.
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MA Arcs: Yarmouth 1509 and 58812
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I would hold that the neutral view of the archetype is required as the starting point no matter what. Without the model of why the AT is underperforming even a perfect set of statistics of the performance won't necessarily give you any insight in what to change to fix it. At that point you just have a guessing game of what to change. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Only if you want to get a "neutral" view of the archetype; sort of a how would it perform if everyone was forced to play it at gunpoint.
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Just as an example here but I don't think its a great stretch to say that snipes are the least taken of all the powers in the blast sets. That statistic doesn't tell you anything about why nobody likes snipes. If you go over to the fix snipes thread there are 50 different ways to fix snipes. If you examine how well the people who take snipes do, you get a strange mix of people that don't think snipes are bad, people that are using the snipe for outlying purposes (set mules, pulling av's on a baf, blowing up bombs on an underground, etc) . You just haven't gotten anything but that there is a problem and some confusing information about the problem.
An easier way to see this problem is how using average times to adjust the merit rewards have completely broken the payouts for them. You have the redside SFs all having disproportionately low payouts because originally redside attracted more power gamers. If instead of mining the average run time for the activities and then adding in a fudge constant, the devs had of worked from a minimal amount of kills/effort to complete then added in a fudge constant for difficult to quantify items (travel time, difficult AV etc) we would have a much better reward system, and one that wouldn't start activities at 2 merits because there wasn't run statistics.
Edit: If you just look at THB's results you see the blaster has one more death than the stalker. These days that is no big deal at one point that would have been a problem. Does nerfing the effects of death constitute a buff to blasters relative to other ATs ? If it does is that the way anyone wants to fix an AT ?
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As I said, an analysis of the details can give you greater insight into the best way to address the problems, but they aren't as good a starting point for determining *if* there is a problem because it can be impossible to know how those details fit together holistically.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
I would hold that the neutral view of the archetype is required as the starting point no matter what. Without the model of why the AT is underperforming even a perfect set of statistics of the performance won't necessarily give you any insight in what to change to fix it. At that point you just have a guessing game of what to change.
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First we find out that there is a problem, and then we break the problem down into its component parts. If Blasters underperform, they have a problem by definition. If they are getting mezzed far more often, that suggests that mez is a component of the problem. But going the other way around suggests that if Blasters get mezzed second most often, and controllers, say, get mezzed even more often, that implies controllers have an even bigger problem than Blasters do. But if that mez issue doesn't translate into a performance issue, then it may not be a problem given all the other weapons at controllers' disposal.
What few people possess, and I assert no one possesses, is what things actually constitute real problems. The fact that they could underperform by the enormous margins they did, moreso than any other archetype, with no one being able to prove it and few people even daring to express it, suggests that the statistics are extremely important to inform everyone's intuition. Because everyone's intuition collectively failed Blasters. Even I thought they underperformed, but not as severely as they turned out to.
Using individual anecdotes will likely tend to reinforce everyone's preexisting notions of blaster performance, and prior to Defiance 2.0 everyone's preexisting notions of blaster performance were wrong.
If your model of Blaster performance doesn't predict I10 Blaster performance, saying you don't trust the data and so are going to invent your own suggests that you'll reject any data that contradicts your intuition. At that point, all the modeling in the world is not likely to generate a reasonable solution, because the data its based on is strongly skewed. Models are constructed from data. And the statistics of the entire playerbase are a perfectly good starting point for that model, and probably better than a single player's experience.
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| Just as an example here but I don't think its a great stretch to say that snipes are the least taken of all the powers in the blast sets. That statistic doesn't tell you anything about why nobody likes snipes. |
Conversely, when the data says Blasters earned XP, inf, and other rewards slower than other archetypes, that they did so in basically all security level ranges, that they did so while solo and teamed, and that they had more debt, died more often, were mezzed more often, and died while mezzed a high percentage of the time, *that* statistic does tell you something. It says no matter how much people say that mezzing is not a problem because of insps or Clarion or anything else, and no matter how many people start bragging about their own blaster performance, you know that blasters are vulnerable, they die, mez is often the cause, and tools to counter that will almost certainly help, if players can make good use of them. That statistic overrides anecdotes to the contrary.
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Because the general response was "Mental is OP, it's broken, it's performing above average, it's an outlier." I certainly don't see anything out of the ordinary or OP about /Dark, and Dual Pistols is a very middle of the road set. In other words, there is nothing "outlying" about this Blaster combination, nothing OP in the primary or secondary and no IO sets are being used in this experiment. The purpose is to illustrate that a perfectly middle of the road Blaster is not at a disadvantage compared to a middle of the road melee damage AT. That's just my hypothesis, and I could be wrong. That's why I'm doing this, because overall (as everyone should know by now) I don't want to see any global AT changes to Blasters. I think some of the secondaries could do with a boost, but I don't think a total revamp is necessary. There's a reason why Energy Aura got buffed and all Scrappers didn't get a blanket buff instead. There's a reason why Gravity got buffed and all Controllers didn't get a blanket buff. Sometimes sets under perform and the Devs seem to be willing to fix that. I just feel like Blasters are in that same boat.
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Originally Posted by Oliin
Personally I would have gone for a combination you're not 'on record' as having said is on-par with the other damage ATs; to be honest I'm not really sure what you're trying to accomplish with this specifically in the first place. You acknowledge that there are more than several sets (both secondary and at least one primary) that don't perform well by your standards so why bother creating a blaster that you've said you expect to perform well and comparing it to a Stalker?
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The sets are fine, I just don't think stalkers were the right AT to compare blasters to, as the two ATs have completely diffirent spectrums of what is challenging and what is easy. The Stalker is going to take advantage when solo by having mez protection, armor, and the utility to remove any hazardous enemy from play. The Blaster should outperform on teams with more effective aoe. |
Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
Feel free to suggest different sets. I don't know why it's not a good comparison. The argument presented by most has been "Blasters don't keep up with other damage AT's." Followed by "If you use IO's, that doesn't count." "If you're only considering level 50 content, it doesn't count." This seemed like a fair way for me to gauge the level up performance. Of course it's a lose/lose because no matter what, people will still find excuses and ways to say there's something wrong with Blasters. I guess that's the ultimate point of the experiment, to show that no matter what actually playing the game has to say, when people are intent on begging for a buff to an AT that is overall fine, with yes, some secondaries that need work done, people are going to keep doing it no matter what.
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Honestly what I would have done was have used a corruptor or defender to compare to a blaster. On the corr/def use a secondary without mez protection (no sonic, no traps), and no massive tohit debuffing to avoid all mez (no dark, rad, storm, etc). Each AT would be able to use the same primary. So say, the closest comparison to a DP/Dark (the blaster you chose from the original post) could be compared to a DP/Kin Corr. Kinetics would offer healing, damage buffs, and end management later on, while not offering immense mitigation values that would obviously make the blaster look bad.
However, as others have said, you can do this, and share your results, and hope others share results as well, but bottom line is, the devs are going to datamine for the numbers they need anyways. This test alone, even if 10 people did it, wouldn't be enough to make changes to the game. It can get the devs to look into it, but they're gonna end up pulling their own data anyways.
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The problem is that the issue that kept getting brought up were along the lines of Blasters having a primary role of damage dealer, and under-performing compared to other AT's who shared that primary function, namely melee damage dealers. I chose a Stalker because I feel like they have the same overall purpose, which is dealing damage- Same as a Scrapper and that was just a tossup. I think the best way to do this is to just solo both characters the whole time, because it's really hard to judge individual character contributions on a team with buffs, debuffs, controls, and people to share aggro with. I'm not really sure how I could get fair results unless I found a static team of the same people on the same characters to run the same content with on both the Stalker and the Blaster. Shrug. |
Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
The sets are fine, I just don't think stalkers were the right AT to compare blasters to, as the two ATs have completely diffirent spectrums of what is challenging and what is easy. The Stalker is going to take advantage when solo by having mez protection, armor, and the utility to remove any hazardous enemy from play. The Blaster should outperform on teams with more effective aoe.
Honestly what I would have done was have used a corruptor or defender to compare to a blaster. On the corr/def use a secondary without mez protection (no sonic, no traps), and no massive tohit debuffing to avoid all mez (no dark, rad, storm, etc). Each AT would be able to use the same primary. So say, the closest comparison to a DP/Dark (the blaster you chose from the original post) could be compared to a DP/Kin Corr. Kinetics would offer healing, damage buffs, and end management later on, while not offering immense mitigation values that would obviously make the blaster look bad. |
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| However, as others have said, you can do this, and share your results, and hope others share results as well, but bottom line is, the devs are going to datamine for the numbers they need anyways. This test alone, even if 10 people did it, wouldn't be enough to make changes to the game. It can get the devs to look into it, but they're gonna end up pulling their own data anyways. |
I'm not expecting this to be some groundbreaking thing that the devs take into account, this is just me actually doing something to show my position other than referencing data that we have no access to the details of and using it to prove a point. I prefer to base my opinions of how well things perform in the game based on, well, my experience playing the game. This was the best way I could think of to share that experience with others.
You want to see how "Outliers" perform?
Try this:
1. Make a fire/dark corr
2. realize your blaster can never perform at this level.
3. run at -1x8 at level 10 solo
4. run at +1 x8 at level 22 solo
5. run at +2 x 8 with bosses at 38+ solo
6. learn how to tank AVs on your corr
That is the difference between a blaster Outlier and other ATs you can do what I suggest other than tanking AVs on SO builds. You might want a steadfast knockback if you are fighting council. I can tell you an Electric/Ninja Stalker is amazing once you get Lightning Rod and it will surpass your blaster. I used to run mine at +3x3 solo.
I understand this test is more for you - but many of us have already run these tests and have been playing since day one. Have fun learning and if you want to make a really unfair test match a BS/WP scrapper and an Energy/Energy blaster. There isn't much that can kill the scrapper once you get parry slotted with a chance to knockdown proc.
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What are you talking about? Apparently, I already know how "Outliers" perform. That's what I kept getting slack for. I was told that my Archery/Mental Blaster "doesn't count" because his sets are "broken," so the GM soloing without pets and inspirations and 54x8 stomping was irrelevant data. That's why I'm doing this now, deliberately not using any outlying or OP sets.|
Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
You want to see how "Outliers" perform?
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Try this: 1. Make a fire/dark corr |
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| 2. realize your blaster can never perform at this level. |
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Actually, the problem was slotting with extreme invention builds. And technically speaking, the performance of that build is still not actual data yet, in the sense of being analyzable.
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Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
What are you talking about? Apparently, I already know how "Outliers" perform. That's what I kept getting slack for. I was told that my Archery/Mental Blaster "doesn't count" because his sets are "broken," so the GM soloing without pets and inspirations and 54x8 stomping was irrelevant data. That's why I'm doing this now, deliberately not using any outlying or OP sets.
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I wasn't just talking about your issues with it, other people (when you weren't responding as proactively for a while) were playing the "Mental is OP so it doesn't count" card. And yeah, I'll have video(s?) for you soon. I ordered my new video card on Saturday, my current atrocity can't handle fraps without lagging me.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Actually, the problem was slotting with extreme invention builds. And technically speaking, the performance of that build is still not actual data yet, in the sense of being analyzable.
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I'd even be willing to say go all out and use Swap Ammo, heck abuse it...
I expect the results will start to skew in favor of the Stalker around level 16-18 when it comes to soloing. Teaming on the other hand, the blaster should stay competitive until the 26-30 range at least, with a small boost at 32/33 but will then start to fade fast compared to the stalker.
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That is the problem. The only thing that statistics about people taking snipes tell you is how popular it is as a product.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
As I said, an analysis of the details can give you greater insight into the best way to address the problems, but they aren't as good a starting point for determining *if* there is a problem because it can be impossible to know how those details fit together holistically.
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You are much better off listening to the people who have long complained about snipes, listening to their complaints and then checking statistics to see how badly changes to the power will affect the people that actually use them.
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| First we find out that there is a problem, and then we break the problem down into its component parts. If Blasters underperform, they have a problem by definition. |
I look at the numbers for the combinations I have run and I see a sufficient vulnerability to mez and difficulty in building for softcap defense on blasters that there is a clear difficulty when upping the difficulty and placing them in more challenging situations.
If nothing else the contortions you have to go through to make a survivable blaster build constitute a problem of their own. Being forced to take tier1 and tier 2 blasts, the tier 1 secondary attack just so you can have a little more active ride to mez death, the inclusion of damage auras on an at that will be dead before they can be retoggled all are problems. even if they don't show up in the reward/time stats.
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| What few people possess, and I assert no one possesses, is what things actually constitute real problems. The fact that they could underperform by the enormous margins they did, moreso than any other archetype, with no one being able to prove it and few people even daring to express it, suggests that the statistics are extremely important to inform everyone's intuition. Because everyone's intuition collectively failed Blasters. Even I thought they underperformed, but not as severely as they turned out to. |
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| Using individual anecdotes will likely tend to reinforce everyone's preexisting notions of blaster performance, and prior to Defiance 2.0 everyone's preexisting notions of blaster performance were wrong. |
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| If your model of Blaster performance doesn't predict I10 Blaster performance, saying you don't trust the data and so are going to invent your own suggests that you'll reject any data that contradicts your intuition. At that point, all the modeling in the world is not likely to generate a reasonable solution, because the data its based on is strongly skewed. Models are constructed from data. And the statistics of the entire playerbase are a perfectly good starting point for that model, and probably better than a single player's experience. |
Ok, I'm going to make a Blaster nd a Stalker, and play them both through the same content, keeping track of progress made, amount of time played, and content completed.
Now, I want to make characters that I think I'll actually like so this isn't a waste of my game time. I won't pick a /Mental Blaster since I know how people would react to that. I think a DP/Dark Blaster and a Ninja Blade/DA Stalker is a fair pairing of characters for this experiment. The purpose of this is to gauge how well the Blaster performs, through defeats suffered and amount of time it takes to complete content and level up, compared to the Stalker. I will only be using SO's and/or generic IO's on each character, aside from a KB protection IO for each.
I'll be spending an hour on each character starting today, not counting the time it takes me to think of names and make costumes. Before I do that, if anyone has any objections to the fairness of the sets I've chosen, please let me know ASAP.