What should the blaster role be?

�If we would come together and be great role models, it would be amazing to see how the next generation turns out.�

Though if you think about it, if a person has been blapping long enough and is confident enough to do so in trials, they probably understand how and why they die (if they do). Some type of mez protection will only help relieve one of those reasons.

To a degree, you can apply the marginalization logic to a few other ATs, mainly because they're not all necessary and definitely because they all can deal damage. The difference with my blaster, is that while a debuff or control AT is setting up debuffs or control, I'm outputting damage. Especially on trials, where I'm built, conditioned, and buffed pretty well, damage is pretty much the only focus.

That said, it is narrow, but only slightly more narrow than anyone else running in and firing off a cast or two of AoEs, before we're all cleaning up a boss. That said, I don't think blasters really need a niche, so much as the devs need to stop providing so much more damage to other ATs, while leaving blasters to rely on crutches to output theirs. Make blasters more self-sustainable, so they can focus on damage, the same way a tank/brute will want to focuses on aggro, or a controller will want to offer control/debuffs.

This. This right here is refreshing. I think you and I have gone back and forth a number of times already about our views on Blasters, both currently and what they should be in the future, but it has consistently been a discussion, an exchange of ideas, which is great.

Personally, I do not want the melee abilities gone either (despite generally not using them), and quite frankly, I do not think they will be. Getting rid of the melee abilities means the Devs would have to revamp and re-balance seven power sets. Let's be realistic here: between the amount of work that would require, the number of power sets that we know they are currently working on (nevermind what has not been publicized yet), and the fact that the player base is *looks at numerous threads* obviously split on their feelings about Blaster secondaries... that is not going to happen. Maybe if the general consensus was as unanimous as we were when the original draft of the CoT revamp was published, but as it is...

Look back through the years: there have been no archetype modifications to the point that the archetype was redefined, or its power sets were all drastically changed. Most changes have modified an archetype's inherent abilities or stats, and the few changes that have been made to power sets have been universal additions that, I'm sure, required testing, but did not redefine the power set as a whole. (See: Tanker Bruising on their Tier 1 attacks, Blaster's gaining temp. damage buffs on their attacks, and the more recent changes to Stalker's Assassin moves and the building of Assassin's Focus.)

I honestly think further discussion will be more beneficial if we focus on what the Blaster does well (i.e. basically the archetype's definition), how we can make that even better, and what changes can be made to the archetype's inherent abilities/stats to make it better fit that definition.

ok I was wrong there. Only scrapper clobber and follow through are very close without damage buffs. Also some assassin strike powers. That is the exception across blaster tier 3 powers however.

this really got me thinking about it.


How is ST supposed to be balanced other than fire is supposed to do more damage? See the corrupter thread, "is there a point to anything but fire".

We have
60% chance for KB in Power burst at 59.1 DPA
100% mag 3 stun in cosmic burst at 59.1 DPA

While
60% chance of knock back in Psycic blast is 103.2 DPA
-20% slow -7% to hit in BIB at 108.
and Blaze at 159 DPA if all ticks go. (so at average slightly less)

Also whatever is going on in Beam Rifle. lancer shot is 75.36 DPA with Disintegration going while also providing a mag 3 stun.

What should blaster DPS at range be in the first place? Is it supposed be as broad a range as it is across the power sets?


Side note I just noticed.
Why does Dominator Gloom have a DPA of 70.4 while blaster gloom has a DPA of 59.58?

This is from Mids btw.

Gloom, Fire Blast, and Ice Blast all had legacy animations that were faster than the decided on standard blaster tier 2 time of 1.67s. When they were normalized for blasters, the other ATs that had those powers were left with the faster cast times. Check out Gloom on a brute and think about it with Fury, then compare it to the blaster version.

For a long time I had a note in my sig referencing the Fire Blast change (something like ".47 seconds, the difference between life and death"). I almost always take Flares now anyway and when I get on one of my characters with the better Fire Blast, I sigh wistfully a little.

But these little things really are not the problem, they just sometimes irk.

I mentioned this in a bunch of the other threads, but to me the blaster "role" should be: Offensive Specialist.

Its obvious that Blasters are designed to be essentially all offense, but the problem is that the offensive tools they have aren't sufficient to do the *two* things all archetypes have to do: kill, and stay alive.

Controllers are Control specialists with a secondary focus on buff/debuff. Look at what's missing from that description. Damage. Controllers "role" doesn't include damage. And yet they do it. Why? Because all archetypes must be able to kill, and must be able to stay alive. That's why all control sets also do damage. That's not a violation of their description, that's just a recognition of the practical reality that all archetypes must deal damage.

So it seems entirely obvious that even though Blasters got a "ranged damage" set and a "melee damage/utility" set that survivability still has to be in there somewhere.

So when I say that the Blaster role should be "offense" that does not in any way mean, nor should anyone presume, that means "all damage." Controllers are not all control and buff/debuff: that's why many control powers deal damage and the actual controller inherent includes a double damage effect. Controllers deal damage and controllers essentially have critical hits. If that is perfectly normal, then saying Blasters role is "Offense" shouldn't in any way limit their specialty to just generating points of damage.

Once the concept of "Offense" is broadened to the same degree that "Control" is, I think how to best improve blasters very smoothly follows the Blaster role as "Offensive Specialist." They should be good at killing, so their offense should be damage heavy. But they also need to stay alive, and that means dealing with incoming damage and mez. They just need to be given "offensive" tools to do that, no different in a broad sense than controllers are.

To me personally, "offense" translates into "attacks" and that to me implies that Blasters should kill and stay alive by constant application of attacks, which is different in nature from controllers that can incapacitate a target and leave them incapacitated while they deal with other things (in theory). Controllers control, and while controlling they also deal damage. Blasters should attack, and while attacking somehow mitigate incoming counterattack.

And to me personally, that should happen, to the greatest degree possible, by the blaster affecting the attackers, not buffing themselves to be more survivable. They should in some way neutralize attackers by shooting them, and balance dictates they can't do that by one-shotting everything in sight: they need a way to neutralize a target without necessarily killing it instantly.

From there, my "counter-mez" idea follows. But it starts, as I mentioned a few months ago, not by being enamored of counter-mez, but by asking myself what should blasters be good at? And fundamentally, I think what blasters should be good at is attacking things, and in the act of attacking things they should kill fast, and they should gain survivability through the act of attacking - the two things all archetypes must be able to do: kill and survive.

I shoot it, and it either dies or has some difficulty shooting back temporarily, while I'm shooting it. To me, that's a concept that works for blasters. Which I generalize to describe as "Offensive Specialist." Because "shoot in the face and hobble things specialist" is more evocative, but less flexible.

I thought a fire tank was the first to 40.

In either case, Fulmens referred to 2005. Scrappers had issues right at release, in the sense that SR was non-functional and Dark Armor didn't stack at release. But in 2005 you're talking about a time between Issue 3 and Issue 6, and scrappers were not having issues during that period, ED and GDN notwithstanding.

This is exactly why I never liked the blaster standardization.

One area of ... disagreement I guess you can call it between myself and the dev team - I should say, every iteration of the powers team - has been the fact that the devs have rarely spent significant time exploring the notion of normalization without homogenization.

One area in particular is the fact the devs are perfectly fine using a damage/recharge/endurance formula that we all now know is almost completely worthless and doesn't really do what the original designers intended, but have been extremely reluctant to examine DPA-based balancing that doesn't involve just setting everything to be identical - blaster tier1/2 attacks and PvP specifically. In both cases there were better ways to do that, but I don't think the devs are comfortable with non-linear balancing.


Here's what I would have done - and I proposed this to the devs several times (a hint of such a system Castle tried to experiment with shows up in Claws and Widows, albeit not exactly the same).

You start with the cast time and the recharge time of the attack. Then the standard formula asserts what the damage of the attack should be: (Recharge * 0.16 + 0.36) in scale units. So a 4s attack has damage 1.0, and an 8s attack has damage 1.64.

Then you calculate the DPA of the attack as Damage/Cast (or Arcanatime, if you like). Now, the balancing part. We pick a "standard DPA" for each archetype, based on that archetype's focus on damage. On the low end, it might be 0.8 for defenders and controllers. It might be 1.2 on the high end for blasters. These numbers are subject to debate. We then perform a DPA-compression step whereby attacks are "compressed" towards that standard DPA in the following way:

AdjustedDamage = SQRT[(Damage/Cast)/Standard] * Cast

In other words, we find the DPA of the attack (dmg/cast), and then we divide that by the standard dpa for that archetype. Suppose that's 1.0 for simplicity purposes: then the term drops out. We then take the square root of that normalized DPA, and then multiply by the cast time.

What we're doing is calculating a DPA, and then "squeezing it" by taking its square root. High DPAs get lower, low DPA's get higher. But if A's DPA is higher than B's, its still higher after this step. This compresses the range of DPA, but it retains the order. Things get closer together, but advantages and disadvantages remain.

That adjusted DPA is then multiplied by the cast time, to come up with a new adjusted damage. That becomes the damage of the power.

Assuming a standard DPA of 1.0 for the moment, this means attacks whose recharge and thus damage imply higher than 1.0 DPA get that DPA lowered a bit. If its greater than 1.0, it will still be greater than 1.0. But its DPE will drop a bit relative to normal, because its endurance is being calculated based on a slightly higher damage level. Higher DPA pays for itself with lower DPE (or higher endurance burn). Lower DPA (then 1.0) gets the benefit of higher than normal DPE. Also, the very very high and the very very low get closer to the standard. There are less excessively good or bad attacks in a DPA sense. But there are still good and bad ones, and you can still make blockbuster attacks while obeying this formula. You just have to pay for it with DPE.

What should "standard DPA" be? My suggestion: mostly, take the square root of the archetype's relative damage modifier times 1.1 as standard DPA, with some adjustments for special cases (brutes in particular).

For reference, this is what that would mean for a few representative archetypes:

Defenders: 0.65 ranged modifier, 0.89 standard DPA
Blasters: 1.125 ranged modifier, 1.17 standard DPA
Tankers: 0.8 melee modifier, 0.98 standard DPA
Dominator: 1.05 melee modifier, 1.13 standard DPA


This is a global, massive rebalancing of attacks the devs would never do on this scale, but it would have partially addressed how Blasters could have an additional edge in offense: they would have higher standard DPA modifiers, and that would tend to automatically, without the devs having to decide anything, make their attacks deal better effective DPS overall.

While I agree with this to an extent, I firmly believe that ALL sets in an AT should have some fundamental building blocks that make the AT viable. After this 'benchmark' is achieved then the set's specific nuances (Slows, -Resists, etc) can be addressed.

Blasters are supposed to do damage. Every Blaster Primary needs either Aim or Build Up.

In order to help balance the sets, all Blasters should have their first two ST attacks, one ranged AoE and one Cone. All of these attacks should start with the same range, Recharge, Damage and End cost. These numbers can change through the balancing stage but they should at least be close.

All Blasters need a crashless Nuke.

The enemy WILL eventually get into melee range so all Blasters need a way to deal with that. Either a melee attack that does relatively high damage or an attack that somehow mitigates damage like Power Thrust.

All Blasters need to have a niche that separates them from other Blasters and makes the sets feel different. However this nich should also help the Blaster in some way and not just be reskinned power effects. Slows are not very effective but -Recharge is. Mag 2 attacks are useless on Bosses unless they can be reliably stacked and so on.

I don't want all of the Blaster sets to be the same thing. But I DO want them to all have a minimum level of effectiveness. If the Devs figure out how to make a set fun and effective without Aim or BU (for instance) then that's fine. But before they pull Aim or BU they'd better make SURE that the set is just as viable to play as the others.

Otherwise we're right back to 'Archery is great for its crashless nuke but DP sucks because it has no Am' or whatever.

DP sucks for waaaay more than that lol.

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Every archetype is supposed to do damage. By explicit dev decree, and by obvious dev actions.


I actually hate rules like this.


On the other hand, I actually like arguments like this IF roughly the same number of players are on either side of it (and I'm not necessarily saying the one expressed above qualifies). If some large percentage of the players thinks a set sucks because it has Y instead of X and another large percentage of the players thinks a set is great because it has Y instead of X, I think that's actually exactly what you want in a diverse set of powersets.

There seems to be this notion that the goal should be to make things everyone likes. But I don't agree, because the things everyone likes are by definition the least objectionable things, the least controversial things, the least interesting things. They exist in the bland homogenized center of all possibilities. The moment you try to make something interesting, someone will think its interesting in a good way, and someone else will think its interesting in a bad way. Good. Rather than have everything sitting in the boring middle, make different options that exist out at the more interesting periphery, but in different directions. So some people will like this but not that, and other people vice versa. And have some things in the middle to cover that specific option, but specifically for people who like the middle ground, not as a compromise to everyone to avoid everything even a tiny subset of the players dislikes.

Subjective and qualitative arguments are good: they are a sign of a healthy powerset ecosystem. The problem is that its very difficult here on the forums to gauge whether a powerset is disliked by a vocal minority or by enough people to make it flawed. And the "conventional wisdom" of a powerset can change dramatically over time. Kinetic Melee would be a good example.

Not to mention the fact that there's just way too much inadequate quantitative analysis being used to jump to all sorts of flawed conclusions about the state of individual powersets. It almost makes me wish I didn't make quantitative analysis respectable.

Badly off-topic, but I recall it being an AR/Dev Blaster who largely mowed green critters on the streets and used Smoke Godnade to deal with everything serious.

But that's like saying I recall being told what someone said after a 100-pass telephone game. I'm passing on what my friend's second cousin's sister's dog's second account told me.

True: even if my recollection was correct, I would only be recalling what I was told by someone else who was told. I wasn't there for the big ding myself of course, and for all anyone knows it could have been an anonymous player that didn't announce the fact and none of us really knows. Its not like it was when CoV launched and most fast levelers were at least aware of each other (enough for me to be reasonably certain I was between #6 and #9 to the level cap in head start on Triumph).

Like blasting stuff?

nah, can't make them all the same yet have them be different in ways other than skins.

see above

WHAT!?! Seriously? Oh Ice/Energy such dreams...

OK, this I'd agree with. Don't they already have that.

Isn't this how it is?

What would your minimum level of effectiveness be?
All ATs should be able to engage 4 targets pretty early in the game and grow from there or a blaster should be able to go +4x8 kill everything and not get a scratch.

IMHO if a blaster can't engage 4-5 mixed targets, they are doing it wrong. If a blaster is trying to build for defense and then doesn't think they are blasty enough, isn't that a choice? It's not difficult to get a perma 35-40% damage boost from IOs, +aim, +build up, +choke down a couple reds and possibly a random build up from a proc. That's pretty blasty.

"You have the choice of doing slightly less damage than a Scrapper at 1/3 the survivability, or slightly more damage than a Scrapper at 1/6 the survivability. Happy?"

The important thing to note is that Stalkers were never broken: they worked just fine. The problem was that a significant portion of the stalker community didn't like *the way* they worked, similar to the issues with the mechanics of domination for dominators. Dominators worked fine, but many dominators didn't like the specific way they worked vis-a-vis domination, and the devs upon consideration agreed. The devs upon consideration also agreed that there were things about the way stalkers worked that were not the best option or were problematic, and so they were adjusted. Those adjustments didn't really take much if anything away from stalker capability that already existed, it just improved other capabilities so that stalkers had other valid combat options, including especially valid options for leveraging assassin's strikes.

But with blasters, its not just a case that we have problematic powers - we do: sniper blasts and some of the nukes, among others. But that's not the core problem.


The core problem is that blasters have been left behind. Blasters were originally supposed to be the damage specialists - its what they were supposed to be by virtue of getting no other powerset types - and yet they don't even have the highest unequivocal damage modifiers. Scrapper melee modifiers are higher than Blaster melee modifiers and tie Blaster ranged modifiers - assuming you don't count criticals, which are base damage increases. Dominators also have higher melee damage modifiers than Blasters and they get an entire control powerset which means Dominators prove you can have high damage modifiers without giving up anything.

Blasters don't have the best damage buffs. Fiery Embrace? Nope. Rage? Nope. Power Siphon? Nope. It was only recently that Blasters got Soul Drain, and that requires being in melee range (which is not a problem for melee classes, but an extra burden for most blasters).

Blasters do get the Defiance damage buff, but *every* hero archetype has an inherent damage buff now. Tankers have bruising, Defenders have a (de)scaling one in Vigilance, Scrappers have pervasive crits, and Controllers have containment. And of the five, Blasters don't have the strongest one: that's containment. At best, Defiance is probably roughly tied for second with bruising, depending on how you count bruising.

So the presumptive damage specialist does not have the highest damage modifiers, does not have the best damage self buffs, and doesn't even uniquely have the best damage-buffing inherent. Not because Blasters were nerfed, but because everything else was allowed to pass them by.

Meanwhile, Tankers, Controllers, and Defenders were supposed to lack damage, but all of them have had their damage buffed over time. And that was easy because every one of them has a damage-dealing set to buff in the first place: even Controllers do by virtue of Control sets being defacto damage sets. But since Blasters don't actually *possess* defense, control, or buff/debuff sets, they couldn't actually *get* defense, control, or buff/debuff buffs to their capabilities as easily as the other archetypes could get damage buffs. So they just didn't get buffs directed in those areas (increased health scalers being the primary exception).


You can't fix this with a buff to snipes, or any other single power. And even if you could, blasters would just fall behind again in a year, or two, or three. To really "fix" blasters you have to put them on a path where they get what everyone else gets over time. The giant stone tablet that says "thou shalt only give blasters damage, and not too much" has to have C4 strapped to it and turned into a Mythbusters segment. *That* is the Blaster problem, and fixing it means destroying that which has held it back.

A new Blaster bible has to be written, one that says "Blasters are people too: they deserve to kill, and they deserve to not die, and they deserve the tools to do both just like everyone else."

*How* they get those tools is Chapter 2. That's how you fix blasters.


Also, a tangent on power creep. Someone asked me yesterday if buffing Blasters just makes power creep worse. Upon further consideration, I believe just the opposite. Its blasters being in the state they are in that make power creep worse. Here's why.

We all know players have been buffed over the years, probably higher than they really should be. But there's only two ways to deal with that: nerf the players or buff the critters. And we all know that nerfing (nearly) all the players ain't happening. But we can slowly elevate the critters over time to match the players.

Except that's not going to happen either, and the reason why is that when you elevate the critters, you have to be cognizant of the lower performing players. You can't just orphan them or make the game unplayable for them. Remember when the boss buff happened? That had to be unwound quickly, because while it was fine for many players who saw it as a challenge, many others saw it as making the game unplayable. And the devs can't do that that strongly to existing players that dramatically.

So the limits of how we can address power creep with environmental buffs comes down basically to the lowest performing, lowest survivable characters. And that's blasters. If blasters were not a survivability-outlier, the devs would have more flexibility to address power creep with environmental buffs. I can't say they would use that flexibility: they could just ignore the problem. But right now, they have *zero* flexibility to do much about it, and its almost certainly a large, possibly singular reason, is blaster performance.

That was... what, October 2004? We're OLD in internet years.

This is correct. There was an error in Smoke Grenade when the game was released. The ToHit Debuff was 100%. Yes you read that right. 100%. This was described as a decimal error (duh) and was corrected to 10%, and even back then there were cries of "Nerf"! But before the correction was made, SG was incredibly powerful and Blaster damage was high. Add in that you could six-slot AR attacks with damage SOs using TD six-slotted for ToHit buff and pre-purple patch, pre-ED AR/Dev was a monster. Massive AoE, you never missed anything, and with the original SG enemies couldn't touch you.

I have no idea how or when SG got nerfed to 5% debuff that it has now. Jack was still in charge, I do remember that.

I think the alternative would be a very horrible world.

BTW you bring a good point about dominators. I think the two ATs are extremely similar despite their huge differences, and perhaps Doms may be a good place to look at while coming up with potential suggestions.

Blasters already are heavily dependent on their secondary effects for survival... it may be a huge amount of work but perhaps we can convince the devs to amp up the level of control blasters get. May be an easier task if the new amplified control tools are restricted to the secondary set (since there are way fewer of those.)

I always think the Tier one Immob power all blaster get should be an AoE that affects up to 5 foes, for one.

IMO stalkers were not broken, but they were improved. The same opportunity exists for blasters with the same mechanic that now exists. Make a extremely high damage, very long activation, interruptable power, instant.
I do see how you (and others) feel blasters have been left behind and deserve to be looked at and possibly reworked. I totally agree they should have SOME top tier SINGLE TARGET damage powers.

Still they have them and they aren't the worst or terrible.

I would ask - Is it possible the lack of blaster performance is perceived more in just the higher levels and end game? Or do they under perform even in the 1-45ish levels?