Attention Blasters!

Never taken it on any toon and never will...

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

No, that train's right on time.

Whatever the -change- let's hope it makes all the secondaries just as appealing as the top contenders (Energy, Dark, Mental and Fire)

Excellent news! Thanks, very much.

Not to be greedy but any chance this could be "Youtubed" for those of us that will be working at the appointed time?

You can set the forum time settings to whatever you want through the User CP link on the top. Specifically from the 'edit options' page.

You can watch past episodes on Twitch. We'll provide a link.

Arbiter Hawk's TwitchTV announcement.

And then something about Blasters.

Well if i'm awake i'll try to watch just so i can make a small summery for the forums. I won't be able to do a VK'er and post tons of screens and a long list of well everything said. No guarantee i'll do good at it ether.

Thank you.

Not likely.. and some of us very much like the secondaries we chose and dont want a total revamp.. which is why I have always said that a total secondary rewrite wont happen. The same way some people wont want their nukes to be changed.. some people would rather have more damage and a crash which they have learned to manage quite well than less damage and no crash..

That's essentially a paraphrase of the cottage rule, and that's probably exactly why that won't ever happen.

But that doesn't mean you can't alter powersets in dramatic ways that nevertheless obey the cottage rule. It just requires the need to do so, and the will to do so. Look at Stalker primaries, for example, or sets like Energy Aura and Electric Armor. All significant changes, but within the limits of the cottage rule.

I believe it would be fair to say the goals were:

1. Blasters be dead less.

2. Blasters be shooting better.

3. Arcana doesn't go 0 and 2.

No disagreement there. You can alter powersets in some ways.. Those were good changes.. as were the changes to Gravity and Kheldians.. didnt break anything.. in most cases I am aware of made them better..

I think people are expecting massive rewrites and changes to secondaries and I just cant see that happening...

What blasters need to do IMO is pump out more damage consistently over time because its the ONE thing that they do and when they cant do it.. they are at a serious disadvantage...

AND FIX SNIPES !!!!!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Dominators were broken enough to be revised. Stalkers were broken enough to be revised. Kheldians were broken enough to be revised. Gravity was broken enough to be revised. Electric Armor, Energy Aura, Force Fields. Tankers were revised. Brutes were revised.

By the standards of what has been revised in the past, Blasters have needed revision at least as much, if not in most cases vastly more than virtually everything that has ever been buffed in the history of the game.

Some people genuinely do not understand where the problems are. Everyone sees things differently, and some people either have the skill level to swamp the differences or simply happen to be people who like the quirks of blasters more than the other archetypes to the point where that counterbalances any objective difference. If so, an explanation may help, but historically speaking it generally doesn't.

Nevertheless, its obvious to the point of excess that when looking at blasters objectively, by reasonable design criteria, that blasters have always had a perception problem working in the opposite direction; that they were *supposed* to be fragile and *supposed* to be more challenging and *supposed* to have higher offense even though every developer design rule actually tells them to make blaster offense *lower* than melee archetypes - which is actually one of the biggest perpetual lies about the design of the game since its inception: that blasters are *designed* to have far higher damage than other archetypes. They in fact don't. If they do, its because of an amazing and mathematically inexplicable anomaly - or players just convince themselves they do because its a pleasant fiction.

How, exactly, they were "broken enough" to need "another tweak" is something I've spend hundreds of thousands of words over the last year or so explaining. It isn't any one thing. Its actually practically everything. Its the fact they historically have underperformed, and the odds Defiance 2.0 corrected that problem is low. Its the fact their damage is hampered by a lot of design rules that hurt them relative to other damage dealers, particularly melee damage dealers. Did you know there's an actual rule that states melee attacks are supposed to have higher DPA than ranged ones? Probably not, but it exists, and that's why they actually do: anyone with access to City of Data can check for themselves. Melee is given defenses to deal with "higher risk" and then even though they have a tool to mitigate that risk (defensive powersets) they are then rewarded again and again for assuming risk the devs designed them to ignore anyway.

Everything has benefited over the years from the devs' shift to a solo-friendly design principle that says "everything must have enough damage to solo effectively." Everyone's damage now falls within a wide but not excessively so range. But there's no rule that says "everyone should have similar damage mitigation." The range of (designed) offense in this game is measured in percent: the range of mitigation is measured in double-digit multiples.

The cottage rule prevents massive redesign of the manipulation sets, but every designer from Geko to Castle to Black Scorpion to Synapse to Arbiter Hawk has implied publicly or privately that those are not designed very well at all. And a critical design flaw exists in Blasters from 2003: every hero archetype (and villain one in CoV) was designed with at least one powerset that delivered damage, and one that offered a survivability benefit. Every archetype except blasters. That was not a problem when the devs were thinking that controllers, defenders and tanks would not be dealing very much damage due to trinity balancing, but in retrospect that was an enormous error. An error that years of post-launch balancing has continued to rub raw.

Blasters have the most problematic attacks with snipes and nukes, they are the only archetype given significant melee offense and no damage mitigation to leverage it (which the devs themselves have stated is a *prerequisite* for melee offense- its even the original justification for melee archetypes to have mez protection), their proscribed ranged advantage was mostly eliminated because the devs were uncomfortable with it after launch even though they were also advocating it at the time.

The problem with blasters is that they have so many problems. We can debate individual ones for years, but no archetype can be reasonably described has having so many problems that can be objectively tied to non-subjective design rules of the game. If only a third of them stick, and I think I can make all of them stick, they would qualify as the archetype with the most issues.


Is it realistic to expect that blasters will get some sort of damage buff and some sort of survivability buff? Well, as we actually are getting both, I would say it is in fact realistic to expect.

Yep, my history is eight long years of greedily demanding ridiculous and unjustified buffs without any basis, experimental data, quantitative analysis, or in-game experience-informed judgment.

At some point, you have to draw the line: you can't save everyone. I could work towards addressing defense issues in the game, and I could explain why the ultimate solution to those problems was fair. But at some point, I had to conclude the people saying it wasn't necessary, and I should learn to play with the game as it is, and if they don't see the problem I must be wrong, were not in the grand scheme of things necessary to convince. At some point, I simply had to let it go. The game is better off now: that's what matters.


I said, when I first decided to start talking about Blasters, that not everyone would agree there was a problem, and would probably never agree that any change made was necessary, or judicious, or even a good idea. And that was ok, because my goal was getting them fixed, not convincing the entire world they needed fixing. The devs have taken a step. Maybe its enough. Maybe its not. Maybe blasters will need even more. If so, my priority will be to convince the devs to do more. It will not be to convince everyone they need more.

The people who don't want these changes, or think they are excessive, will just have to learn to play the new blasters. And just like everyone could learn to play them the way they are and survive, everyone can also learn to create the appropriate level of challenge for themselves. Being unable to challenge ones self in this game is no different an intellectual failing as being unable to overcome those challenges when presented.