Blasters suck, the movie.

I was speaking generally, not about any specific case. Definitely a neat thread, I looked it over earlier. Fire is a much better choice than Archery for ST damage and compared to todays game I would say that the liberal use of small inspirations (I'm assuming reds? Haven't read too much into it) is totally fair given the absence of Alpha and Interface. I know Fire/Ment has better ST potential than Archery/Ment, I just chose Archery due to the superb nuke and knowing that the -regen from Drain Psyche would be enough to cover my ST anyways, so it is perfect for my purposes.

But that's not really a problem is it? Some powers in this game are just super awesome and I don't see why that's a bad thing. I don't think Eclipse or Light Form should be nerfed because the AT's have other limits in place and are balanced around those very strong powers. Same with Drain Psyche... Sure it's a great Dominator power, but other Dominator secondaries are very strong also. I believe /Fire is considered by many to be the strongest Dominator secondary. Different build strategies call for different things. Just because one power is good doesn't make it the only viable choice across all the powersets... Unfortunately the issue for Blasters is that really no sets besides /Dark offer any benefits worth not having Drain Psyche. The other sets need to be made more competitive. There are compelling reasons to make Dominators with non-Psi secondaries, Blasters need to have the same amount of viable options.

You perceive a problem where there is no problem. I am more than sure if it was NOT WAI that the devs would have done something more about it. You have to keep in mind Blasters and Doms had this power more than looked at in the past few years by the devs and I don't think they feel they missed something as implied.

The "multiply offense by mitigation" theory is something I wrote up in late 2006 and early 2007, shortly after my PeakDR series (because it used PeakDR, which despite the name was actually a damage metric). To say its "your" theory sort of ignores the fact that that very thing has been discussed by me and others even in the most recent threads on blasters as a component of the problem.

Its also not a theory, just an assertion, until you put real numbers on it and attempt to actually prove it convincingly.

No it doesn't prove that at all. Archetype performance, as you've acknowledged and dismissed before, is based on average performance using primarily SOs across all set combinations, not a single outlier using a highly leveraged build. Furthermore you're attempting to claim that it proves that Blaster DPS is superior by replicating an achievement usually accomplished by ATs with much lower DPS than Blasters or most other "damage focused" archetypes. Quite frequently in less time than your Blaster i might i add. That seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. "I managed to do something most other high DPS ATs can't do, but many lower DPS ATs can. That proves Blasters have superior DPS." Um, what?

Sorry, that dog still won't hunt.

Edit: FWIW i liked your video since it's an interesting demonstration, even if it isn't showing what you appear to think it does.

As soon as I'm finished with it: actually THB deserves credit for me thinking about making something that isn't a challenge mission in the classic sense of being able to outlast or outmitigate a monsterously lethal mission, but to design a set of missions that represent something perhaps slightly higher than normal difficulty, but based on in-game challenges so as not to be too outside the realm of testing for things that have any practical value. Something that tests offense, defense, and tactical options.

I've decided to combine that with Aeon's request for ideas on making scaling missions whose difficulty doesn't require throwing a bunch of AVs at the players: I'm using most of the scaling tricks I know (including with AVs, but also without) so the arc also works as a -1x1 through +4x8 scaling test.

I hope to have it ready for initial testing in a couple weekends.

While that is true, it would not solve the Blaster problem in and of itself. Even if all the secondaries were as powerful as /Mental, how many players would be able to pick one up and play it well? Blasters are the most often created characters, and the most often abandoned. They are created by new players mostly due to them being so obviously Comic Book-like.

Even giving all the sets powers like Drain Psyche doesn't fix the inherent problem of Blasters- That they are meant to have the highest damage, and yet do not. They gave up nearly all of their survivability, even in the case of /Mental, just so they could have a title that they no longer even possess. Giving them a tiny amount of utility and survivibility does not fix this problem- they still lack their title as Damage Kings.

And as has been so oft poitned out, you cannot simply increase their damage until it makes up for it, at that point you fall dangerously into the territory of oneshotting entire mobs constantly.

Rather, I am still like Arcana's suggestion of change Damage King to Offensive King, where each of their single target attacks has a small mez effect. In this way, they lose nothing, but gain the ability to hold down a small number of enemies- but only if they fire constantly, which is what Blasters are supposed to do anyhow.

Well, Drain Psyche isn't "balanced" because the devs never get regeneration correct. If it was, Dominators wouldn't have a stronger one, given they have far more control to use to leverage it.

Rain of Arrows isn't balanced as an offensive attack in the extreme recharge case because it was given to Blasters back when Archery really sucked. Archery's been buffed twice since then, but at one point Rain of Arrows was the consolation prize for having extremely slow and low offense outside of that. Whenever you trade single target for AoE, there will always be a point where given high enough recharge your AoE damage will outstrip any single target sacrifice you could have made, or in the case of archery not even made as much anymore.

The devs just don't care enough about the extreme recharge case to nerf that case if it would cause problems with the lower recharge cases.

I know I haven't demonstrated this yet, and it's not a "blanket observation," but a "max potential" observation, I am willing to record AOE spawn melting times of 54x8 enemies on my Blaster vs. my SS/Fire Brute. The Blaster kills noticeably faster without inspirations, the Brute pulls ahead at the damage cap but is evened out to around even overall killing time due to the downtime from stacked Rage crashes. To me, this shows that Blasters do in fact retain the potential to hold the damage king crown.

I know that the ST argument is controversial, and it's just my opinion that temporary powers like daggers should not be considered, but adding something like Posion Trap to Devices and similar powers to other Blaster secondaries (like Drain Psyche already does) would give Blasters the potential to have more personal Single Target output than other damage oriented AT's also.

Now, none of this accounts for the level up process, and that's why I'm doing my experiment in the Blaster forums- To gauge for myself the level up discrepancies between a Blaster and a Melee oriented damage AT on an even playing field and without IO's or anything of the sort being taken into consideration. I haven't finished the experiment yet, so I really can't speak definitively about that until I do.

But do you feel that in the extreme recharge case, RoA is enough to give Blasters the "King of Damage" crown, and would normalizing other nukes around RoA for Blasters (same base recharge, damage and end cost) not be an effective way to make Blasters perform at a standard that you'd consider appropriate?

King of Burst Damage, maybe. King of Damage? Not in the least. If I recall, Rain of Arrows isn't that good of a DPA attack anyway. Good opener, but not something you want to fire mid-combat on an AV, I think?

Well that would depend on the build in question. My survivability is high enough on my Blaster that against 54x8 spawns I can generally use it comfortably every time it's up. Basically if you can survive the cast time of RoA, you can survive anything.

Doesn't mean it's DPA is worth the Arcanamation time. And it's not. But considering your alternatives are Snap Shot and Aimed Shot...

Yeah.

I don't use ROA against ST's, but as an AOE power it's absolutely worth the cast time.

Tried it last night and managed it in just under nine minutes (8:42 or so) including clearing some DE around the quarry - I put a Quarry into an AE arc I was working on and did that instead of running out to Monster Island. I capped it, but my fraps is set to cap at full resolution, so I converted it to something youtubeable before I went to bed and now I'm uploading it to youtube, which will take about an hour and a half (its still plenty big: compression reduced it from 13 gigs to 550 megs). Youtube will then do its processing thing, and it should be viewable a bit after that.

Its been a while since I tried this with an intrinsic level 50 GM (I've taken down the Jack/Eochai pair solo not that long ago, but those are far lower intrinsic level monsters) so I almost messed it up: I got greedy right at the end and thought I could finish off the Quarry without using one last PA. Mistake. Fortunately I deployed them fast enough to prevent a catastrophe.

Although it would have been less of a problem if I had been running my defense and resistance toggles. I deliberately attempted to do this using no insps and without using my Destiny (Ageless Partial - End/Rech). With unlimited endurance, I could have gone faster, but I wanted to see what the build could do intrinsically. You can see spamming fireball slowly drains end, not spamming it slowly recovers end, so there's a balancing act there. This might be a good place to consider using enhancement boosters: specifically targeting endurance reduction. Maybe I can get away with going full speed even without Destiny.

Also, with smart placement of the pets its actually more efficient to let the Phantasm die and recast him than try to keep healing the moron, which is why I let the fool die in the video. He has no melee attacks at all but he insists on standing almost directly under the Quarry. Maybe he's aiming for the Quarry's crotch or something: he did seem to knock the Quarry down often.

Incidentally, I really need to spend more time on Aurora. Not only did I not finish slotting her (I mostly finished that last night, although she's still missing some inventions I thought were not necessary for that test) I also have a gigaton of incarnate components and yet I haven't finished up her incarnate powers either. She only has Spiritual Total Radial (tier 3) and Reactive Interface (tier 1!), plus Lore pets that aren't used here and the aforementioned tier 3 Destiny. I really need to craft a tier 4 reactive and try again at full strength.

Its not that I don't play her, its that I keep forgetting to finish her because its normally hard to notice her build isn't finished in regular play. I can't believe I played this long with a bunch of placeholder SOs in Blind (that was rectified with Apocalypses before the attempt).

In any case, 8:42 implies about 136 DPS plus regeneration debuff (or 490 DPS if you prefer to count that way), which is so-so because it includes the enervating field debuff. I gotta believe that among regen debuffers that's probably just average. I'm thinking a soft-capped Fire/Psi dominator could beat both builds.


Another thought occurred to me last night. If we're going to consider -regen to be equivalent to damage in the single target case, then we have to consider another potential sideways challenger to the AoE case: mass confusion. Suppose we had a perma-dom mind dominator that could perma mass confuse (its possible). That could translate into huge kill speed and effective damage. You would not get 100% rewards for that, but if you tossed in your own damage enough you could get the majority of the rewards, at essentially zero risk.

If -regen on a GM counts as single target offense, shouldn't mass confusion count as a form of AoE? It kills the targets, and if used correctly you still get most of the rewards. If, say, you only get 75% of the rewards per kill but you kill 33% faster, shouldn't that essentially be a tie? (0.75 * 1.33 = 1.0).

Which then brings up this question: is a really odd but actually legitimate challenger to max recharge Archery/Mental Blasters a max recharge Mind/Psi/Fire dominator?


Edit: youtube link now working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDaUBCT_GM4

List how many -regen powers are slottable for -regen, then.

[EDIT] And my perspective is, Drain Psyche is awesome but only if you have mitigation to utilize the +regen. It's great on Doms *IF* you can lock down the foes to take advantage of it. DP on a Blaster is probably not as effective.

I don't have any experience playing confuse-heavy sets so I honestly can't comment on this. Something I do want to add in though is that I find the /Mu tacked on the end of Arch/Ment is invaluable, Fences allow you to get the most out of Explosive Arrow and by extension the Force Feedback proc. The best metric I can think of for measuring AOE damage is the amount of time it takes to cap AE tickets without red inspirations or accepting the 750 bonus (so don't hit the glowie, reach the ticket cap just by defeating enemies on the map.) I'm curious to see the impact the confusion would have on rewards earned, since like I said it's not an approach I'm familiar with. Do you have a Dom of this brand that we could compare times on?

So, Build Up and Aim shouldn't work with powers outside of the power pools they come from either?

No, but I don't think we're going to come to agreement on this. You view the blaster archetype as containing powerset options for the players. The decision is to play a Blaster, and then its up to the player to pick the "right" powersets to deliver the performance they want. If even one single powerset combination delivers a particular desired performance level, you view Blasters as an entity to be "fine" overall, and the only problem really is the diversity of options available.

But I don't view Blasters that way. I think they should be represented by their average, not their highest possible options. The blaster archetype should have a set, or a set of sets of features that every powerset should contain and be able to leverage. Otherwise, assuming Archery and Mental didn't exist, you could say Blasters were not the king of damage, but if I buff just one powerset, well now they are.

In one sense, that's mostly a semantic difference in terms of describing the archetype: its either underperforming with some exceptions, or it performs fine except for all the exceptions where it doesn't. But that difference also contains an approach difference that is significant. I believe when an archetype underperforms, you should try to fix the archetype with archetype-wide solutions. In your approach, there's nothing wrong with Blasters that individually buffing every primary and every secondary wouldn't fix.

The problem is one of those is practical, and one is not. The devs are not going to attempt to solve an archetype-wide blaster problem by handcrafting solutions for each primary and secondary, nor are they going to add massive tier 9 aoe and a drain psyche equivalent to each secondary. But these are such extreme outliers that there's no *other* way to really approach what they can do. You can't emulate -regen with other effects: other effects would be stronger in some cases and weaker in the extreme ones - the very extreme situations you are using to demonstrate its power. Similarly the devs aren't going to just hand a Rain of Arrows equivalent to every blaster: even if they did that wouldn't address problems below level 32, and it would force blasters to build for ultrahigh recharge to see most of the benefit. And there's a huge difference between perma DP and non-perma DP: when its perma its up when you have to use it again. If its non-perma, using it exposes most blasters to extreme vulnerability. That's probably a large part of its intrinsic design tradeoff.

And even after all of that, that would only solve the problem of making maximum potential roughly equal across the board. It would leave behind the problem of addressing normal players' blaster problems during normal leveling, which have a higher priority to resolve. I think its pushing the limits of reasonableness to say that in exchange for blasters dying more often and giving up all other options besides damage, they *eventually* and *sometimes* become the king of damage. In my opinion, nothing is worth that particular prize.


We added containment to controllers, we didn't individually tweak each powerset's damage to solve that problem. *After* we added containment as part of the baseline, *then* we can look to tweak individual powersets, like Gravity was. We added gauntlet to tankers, we didn't tweak each tanker powerset to manage aggro. In keeping with the way we do this everywhere, *first* we should establish a baseline of features that all blasters should have, and *then* we tweak individual powersets if that becomes necessary once the average is more or less where we want.

My Mind/Psi is too low, but I have a Mind/Earth I could try to do some measurements with. She doesn't have blockbuster recharge, but she is perma-Dom. I might need to boost the build by a significant amount to make her perma-mass confuse. I'll have to investigate.

Well, if Rage only lasted 10 seconds instead of 2 minutes, you may have a point.

But frankly, I never liked any of the Aim or BU powers. They're boring and don't have much of an effect besides burst damage. For an AT specialized in controlled burst damage (such as Blaster or Stalker), having a window of high damage can make a difference. For ATs focused around consistent damage, powers like Soul Drain, Power Siphon and Follow Up are more useful and interesting.

Build Up and Aim are boring and questionably useful, as Leo_G put it better (and me lacking the effort to bother).

Your logic is weak in this case. Super Strength is balanced around Rage and Rage with it. It wasn't spawned with shenanigans like Gloom and Burn in mind.

Just wanted to play devil's advocate here:

Would the devs hand every Blaster a Rain of Arrows equivalent? Well they handed every Stalkers an Energy Transfer equivalent. They handed every character the Fitness pool...

Forcing Blasters to aim for high recharge to gain high benefits? Take a look at the entire Dominator AT.

AT wide fixes, while nice, are sh*t in the long run. But then there are just some circumstances where nobody cares about qualitative differences and uniformity is just easier.

That said, I'd like Blasters to get the Controller inherent rolled into their's. Not Containment, but the Overpower (+mag mez) added to all their powers. Soloing my DP/Fire/Cold Blaster recently, I had thought to skip Suppressive Fire (DP's mez utility power) but slotted for hold (since I use either cryo or incendiary ammo) + the SBE Lockdown proc, I can 1-shot hold most bosses well enough that I can fight 2 bosses a spawn now. If I cold just do that naturally (high chance to 1-shot hold bosses) I wouldn't even need IOs.