Blasters suck, the movie.

I'm seeing lots of posts about DPA, DPS, synergy and on and on. I'm seeing THB raving about his build and others asking for buffs to Blasters and many players saying 'Why whould you do that when THIS is so much better?'

How about FUN people? Doesn't anyone play this game for FUN anymore? I don't spend weeks on planning and millions on PLing (seriously THB? You wanted to get a concept toon to 50 SO BADLY that you PAID a friend to PL you 11 levels? You didn't have the patience to get it through play or, at worst, find a friend to PL you for free?) a new character. Truth be told the three things I spend the most time on are the name, the concept and the costume.

I once made a SG called the Misfit Gestalt. The only rule to be included was that you had to have a build that WASN'T fotm...preferably a build that others said sucked. There were 7-8 of us that met once a week and we had a BLAST! We were having FUN! It didn't matter if our sets weren't optimized or we didn't have expensive IOs.

Too many players (many of them on this thread) are treating this like it's a contest. You're the kind of people who HAVE to dial everything up to 11 in order to get any thrill. Have you ever thought that you might be a bit jaded with all the PLing and billion-plus builds? When was the last time you played a character through actual content without racing through the DFB ten times to get the early levels out of the way?

So you built a Blaster that doesn't die every time he pokes his head in a mission. With 2+billion Inf. AND arguably the best Secondary the AT can have. AND a crashless nuke. Ok...SO WHAT? Was it FUN to get him there? All the weeks of planning and plotting and testing and marketing and PLing just to see if it worked? It was? GREAT!

Now do it with a Beam/Ice and then get back to me...

Where is the fun people? Is this your idea of fun?

I'd like to see a Fire/Fire blaster do that.

Call it hating if you like, but doing something like that with a very specific build does nothing to prove that an AT doesn't need help.

I could have just as easily posted video of my Rad/Sonic defender doing the same thing and said it was proof that Defenders were the best soloing AT in the game. Yes, one specific build is good at soloing, and my video would have proven that much. But it isn't proof the whole AT is good at soloing.

Similarly, your video of one specific Blaster combination doing something doesn't prove that the AT as a whole is fine. Especially when you consider that you spent billions on your build.

I might just have more blasters than 99,9% of the population. Ofc someone could quite happily go make several new levels ones, but that's cheating.

Not one of them doesn't have their own concept.
Not one of them has their entire playstyle matching another.
Not one of them relies on the exact samethings for survivability or providing team support.
I wouldn't want to log into any of them and have them all be the same thing with different graphics. I liked soloing Frostfire with each of them and relying on different things to survive the ordeal.

Some people made a mistake with their powerset choices. That's usually what happens. Maybe there should be power trees within a secondary so that just because you made a Blaster with /Ice Manipulation doesn't mean that you can't equal /Mental Manipulation at defeating a GM.

It's too late probably to sort certain things out, to help people undo their powerset selection choices and if I am being honest, not worth it neither.

There are still Incarnate powers to come and those that prefer to do above and beyond expected things are likely to do the incarnate trials anyway. Let the incarnate powers sort things out. I'll image Omega to be the I Win Button people are looking for, just in different flavours.

The burst AoE, anyway. I'm not denying Archery is better, but saying Fire's AoE can't compare is just silly. And you PROBABLY base it purely off Build Up + Aim + Rain of Arrows, which is the only scenario in which Archery TRULY leads.

... Although then you fire off two Fire Balls and Flame Breaths during that and?

Anyway, good for you for liking the proc!

I swear I've read this thread before. Oh yeah, it reminds of the oldschool scrapper threads of folks bragging about their regens soloing multiple AVs. When I piped up that my SR scrapper couldn't get past +2 bosses without a bucket of inspirations I was told "simple solution, roll a regen".

And I've little doubt the same general outcome is going to happen, outliers are going to get swatted down. It might be some time before the devs get around to it but they always do eventually, much to the chagrin of regen tankers and other equivalents (15 fire imps comes to mind).

It certainly is amazing what can happen over a weekend, isn't it?

It's an interesting topic you have here and I'd hate to see it get squashed because of the tone some of the posts have taken. Keep the conversation on topic and away from the personal attacks so I don't have to lock the thread.

Thanks,

Mod 19

Just thought I would throw my own little anecdote out here for people to consider...

I have 3 particular characters that I have IO'd out for similar Inf costs, much much less than THBs GM soloing blaster, but they are pretty fun in my own mind.
For a quick comparison, the highest defense numbers for each:
Claw/regen/fire scrapper: AoE def 20.9, melee 19.9, ranged 17.4
Plant/psi/fire dom: melee def 15.9, ranged 14
Fire/fire/fire blaster: melee def 28.2, ranged 27.5

None of them are softcapped, yet the scrap and dom can run missions at +4x8 fairly well with insps, the blaster struggles at +0x5. This may be because I don't play blasters correctly, I wont argue against that. I just don't see how a blaster's "high damage" can compete with the tools available to other ATs. Even regen, the black sheep of melee, does better.
I imagine that the obvious response to this is to softcap my s/l, but that just seems awfully expensive when I could just roll some other AT and do better for less.

Im not trying to make any point here other than blasters definitely suck when I am behind the controls, but Im thinking that if it would take me 20 billion inf on a blaster to do what costs <2 billion on a dom then something might be wrong. Maybe.

The reason you were able to accomplish this has already been stated: most of the difficulty in soloing a GM is in beating its 350+hp/sec regeneration, and DP properly slotted outputs more -regen than even debuff sets can manage. Any character can make itself seem strong by cherry-picking situations tailored to its specific strengths (e.g. the emp defender that soloed a pylon with buffed warworks pets, trying to prove that empathy is a good soloer), but performance must be measured against a wide variety of content and situations.

This video is an impressive-looking soundbite meant to stifle mention of the AT's weaknesses, but it doesn't address any of the issues that blasters have, mainly offering only damage where other ATs offer comparable damage plus much more (e.g. aggro control, support power - little of which is required or evident in this video). You do have some worthwhile suggestions that would be a good first step to making blasters balanced again, such as the changes to blaster nukes and secondaries in general.

nice vid THB !

i can understand why people are upset, i suppose not everyone can invest in large amount of time to build such a beast, but thats the challenge for everyone isnt it?
why have everything done on a plate for you, it seems that just because THB was able to do this and put time and effort into, everyone else just wants for free, i agree on sets need to be balanced, but this is a fine example of how blasters should be, how they need time and attention to detail to be powerhouses, i think you all are forgetting one thing that if we go about nerfing everything that we see somebody accomplish then whats the point? really i mean yeah i envy THB this is a good accomplishment, more so that the fact he spent 22 minutes on a GM just shows that blasters infact may need more work on rather than nerf.

I hope to get a blaster up to this level of awesomeness and it may take me a while but hey anythings possible in the world of coh lol.

Anyways grats on the vid THB nice job.

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