i24 Blaster Changes

Do you actually mean removed or do you mean make everyone's modifiers the same? I don't advise the former since they're convenient ways to quickly proliferate powers from one archetype to another. I don't advise the latter because then you have tankers, scrappers, stalkers, and brutes being exactly the same except for inherents, which means that the brute is doing twice as much damage as everyone else.

That, or you could simply add your archetype-wide fix to the archetype inherent.

Around CoH launch one of my suggestions was redesigning the AT inherents to be slottable with generic or special enhancements.
I still stand by that one.

That would seem to be impossible, since inherents post-date launch by a significant amount, and even then the first bunch were not really logical to slot: gauntlet, criticals, defiance, and containment.

On my Blasters who would be building for Defense anyways, Yeah. You seem to think Kismets are out of reach at the moment... I just checked the AH, crafted they go for 20mil for lvl 30s

...and let's not forget converters... buy the much cheaper, less useful Kismet IOs and convert them into the +Tohit proc. Problem solved.

I should have phrased my point better.
Let me say that archetype mods work against the point of power pools and remove diversity from the game instead of adding it.
I would like to see AT mods not applied to power pools in any kind of revamp scenario.

As for the other side of this topic where we talk about some archetypes being too similar without AT mods, let me point out that over time these mods got closer to each other already.
This is a can of worms though and a whole big discussion that we should save for its own thread.

Oooohhh. Yeah, I see your point now.

Sorry Mystic, I think you missed my main point. Availability of the IO or even choosing to take the powers is not the problem. It is the fact that you NEED to do all that in order to satisfy the requirements for the snipe that I find a problem. You see, adding snipe into a tight build is not a problem, but adding snipe, finding the slots to add to it, and THEN squeezing in Manuevers or Assault before taking Tactics. That is a HUGE effort to try and add Snipe into an attack chain. I suspect those sets with a solid attack chain already will just say screw it. Sets like my favorite Electric Blast are in for some frustration.

What I would rather see is a way to leverage the snipe in normal combat by choosing ONLY powers in the blast set (that last longer than 10 seconds). That is my issue with the snipe proposal. Better explained ?

The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. With no Defiance stacks, the Snipe works like normal. With even one defiance stack it has the new mechanic,, but.. its damage scales up with the number of defiance stacks currently effecting the Blaster. Vioala ! The blaster only needs to work ONE power into his build and no expensive IOs or pools required. It even plays into some strategy. Do I hold back the snipe for more defiance, or fire it now. Build Defiance, Hit Buildup, Snipe = Highest Ranged attack in the game

I totally understand what you're saying, but I just don't see how Tactics is an absolute 'must'. My name sake just happens to be Electric Blast and I have no intentions in Taking Leadership, after all I gotta leave room for that elusive and yet to be announced Sorcery power pool. So if I manage to find a suitable build for Mystic Fortune without leveraging Tactics I will be glad to send a mids build your way via PM.

P.S. No sarcasm intended, being honest and true.

You're not forced into taking Tactics. As has been said above, pick 2 ways of boosting tohit and run with it. You've still got build up, aim, inspirations. you don't -have- to perma the short snipe. And the only times it's going to be -needed- in an attack chain is against a boss where you want to maximize DPS, against lower level pleebs even electric blast can take down a basic +0/x1 mob of 3 minions or a minion and a lt.

ROFL, Irony is lost on you I see.

Fair enough, but an alternate perspective is that the sniper mechanics can be easily leveraged to at least some extent by almost any build, builds that focus on leveraging it will do better, and the highest invention builds will tend to do even better. This feature is, speaking generally, a laudable feature for archetype features to tend to have.

The source of frustration in this situation tends to be when a player knows what the best possible outcome is, but either cannot, or doesn't not want to, satisfy the prerequisites to realize it. But not everyone sees it that way. This same source of frustration is a source of entertainment for many other players, including those that never achieve the highest possible performance.

Two things:

Unless I already have a to hit buff (i.e. Targeting Drone or Farsight) my builds already have Tactics and Kismet so I'm fine with it .

On a more serious note they will not all have it because Blasters cannot hit 22% to hit using just Tactics and Kismet. If you six-slot Tactics with 50+5 to hit IOs and take a T4 Alpha with To Hit Buff you get 13.3% from tactics which with Kismet gives you 19.3%.

At the moment there are only three secondaries I can see that can mathematically get Perma-FastSnipe. Devices can get it easily with Targeting Drone. Energy can get it using the Aim/BU/PB cycle stacked with Tactics that Arcana discussed. Dark can theoretically do it with Soul Drain but given the insane focus on Recharge this would require is probably better off without it.

If the buff is spread out amongst powers in a set, the only people who will get none of it are those that take none of the of the powers. This is opposed having it in one power that you must take.

I am sure you could also see lots of room for speccing and customization in those inherents with a bit more of an open mind.

Off the top of my head:
For Gauntlet I could think of taunt AoE, duration and magnitude. Could work in Bruising enhancements into this to expand it.
For Crits I could think of crit chance, crit damage, crit scaling, options could be separated into ranged/aoe and melee variants.
For Defiance I could think of bonus stack chance, stack duration, boost amount. HP/DMG conversion rate for old Defiance. More room to put more game into this with the upcoming changes.
Containment is more of a one trick pony but even that could be expanded with containment damage, crit mez chance and something more out there like aoe splash chance for the damage or mez effects.

Keep in mind I mentioned redesigning the inherents to be slottable, so you would have more decisions to make as a player.
I would have loved to see mez protection being made a slottable attribute for (at least melee) inherents as well as special enhancements made for each archetype's inherent power.
The way I see things something like Fury could have been simply a slottable archetype enhancement for Tankers instead of an entirely not-new archetype.

I never liked IOs and would have preferred a more elegant solution that would have been more in line with the simplicity and accessibility of CoH.
Maybe too late for all that but I like to remember old ideas.

Anyone who tries to is going to be very disappointed I think. It's a situational single target attack. It's going to require you to be aware of your own power use, your teammates' buffs, and your enemies' debuffs.

For the record, this should not be construed as my support of the current implementation.

I am one of those players. Already have begun the re-tooling of my name-sake with these changes in mind( only in MIDS), but can still hope that they improve on the proposal before it goes live. What really worries me, is this ; after spending all the effort to add in this wonderful snipe power to my build, will one Spectre reduce my attack chain back to its former un-glory. You see, so far the cost of adding this snipe into my attack chain appears to be loss of tough and weave. That is a HUGE survival hit for a *maybe* full-time T3 blast :/

Not too impressed.

The other two changes they proposed are AWESOME ! 2 out of 3 aint bad for a start.

These changes helped EVERY Stalker improve.. regardless of build or power choice...

I looked over my blasters today...

How did my Electric/Electric Blaster improve with todays news...

a) I didnt take a Snipe.. and I wont take one.. that doesnt improve him..

b) I dont have a tier 3 heavy hitting blast to equalize the range on.. and that is a weakness of Electric already..

c) I am NOT going to take Lightning Clap.. so I dont get a regen recovery boost..

So THIS blaster gets ZERO benefit from these changes..

but EVERY Stalker benefitted from the changes of the AT.. NOT the changes in powers.. changes in the AT..

Now conversely my Arch/Devices Blaster will get LOTS of improvement. He will drop GunDrone to add a Snipe because he has Targeting Drone, @ 21.9% to hit buff now and with one Kismet he will have a 1 second Snipe ALL THE TIME and will benefit GREATLY from the Snipe changes and the buff to Targeting Drone.. Not to mention that he has a crashless Nuke.. so he will get better..

Does that seem fair.. One blaster improves greatly simply because of build choices while one gets NO benefit because of build choices..

This is NOT the answer.. ALL Stalkers improved with the changes made to them.. But These Blaster changes are not changes to the AT.. so depending on my choices I can still suffer from the VERY SAME ISSUES that affect blasters now... This is NOT what the AT needs..

One thing I mentioned to Arbiter Hawk was that by giving more offensive options with one hand, and adding survivability with the other, the net result overall won't be an increase in offense and defense identical to the strength of those effects in isolation, because its almost certainly true that blasters will have to give back something else to get them to fit into their builds. Those things might even be inferior to what we're getting new, but it would still reduce the net incremental benefit of those things. I'm jettisoning tough and weave also, and getting energize. That's a net plus assuming blaster energize isn't nerfed into oblivion. But my survival won't be me + energize, it will be me + energize - tough/weave. Ditto for offense.

Its something to watch carefully as the changes are tested when they are released for beta. There's no question its a net benefit, but how much it will displace to provide that benefit is something that I think can't really be fully answered in a short period of time, except anecdotally in very limited circumstances.

There's a couple of things I'm thinking about to improve upon what Arbiter Hawk has presented so far, and I don't think Arbiter Hawk has shown his entire I24 hand yet. There's room for improvement, but I also think we don't yet know what the full context of these changes are yet. I have a suspicion on top of the options that snipes and secondary sustain powers offer, there will be a couple more tossed our way that will complicate these decisions further, perhaps not specific to blasters but still.

That sorcery power pool is still lurking out there, for example.

I like that a little more than what we currently have heard (and of course, I24 isn't even in subscriber beta yet, so I'm not going to be too over the top with any concerns). Doesn't gate the snipes behind our few +to hit tools and favors a "charge" effect to using Snipe, which isn't that different from how Assassin's Strike works now in combat.

I'd probably go for more than 4% for each hit, though, especially since AS for Stalker requires all of 3 hits for a guaranteed crit. That's better than Snipe, I think (but memory may not serve there, and I don't have time to look at the moment0.

Good you bring up stalkers because they still need work. As they are now on live its some what ok but after they gut the procs its back to being not as good again. Blasters as a whole should be slightly worse survivability than stalkers but way more damage.

There were stalkers that did not take Assassin's strike, because they did not like the playstyle that power compelled. And not all stalkers had a +health power. So not every stalker improved with those changes.

You refuse to take the snipe and you refuse to take the sustain power. That's your choice, and you should be entitled to it. But just like a stalker that refuses to take assassin's strike, those choices may not be optimal.

Technically wrong. Although I completely turned around my Dark/WP stalker's build to take advantage of assassin's focus and assassin's strike (purely to show a couple of people that the old stalker strategies might as well be buried and dead), his original strategy had him unable to benefit from any of the stalker changes:

-He would use either Placate or Touch of fear to leverage hidden Assassin's Strike as well as his high bonuses to damage to enact bursts to kill foes outright without breaking fear.

-Touch of Fear does not grant Assassin's Focus.

-Hidden Assassin's Strike received no change.

-Assassin's Focus provides no benefit to any other power besides unhidden Assassin's Strike.

My Stalker did not benefit at all since Touch of Fear doesn't help gain focus, focus doesn't help any other powers besides Assassin's Strike, placate got no benefits added and neither did hidden assassin's strike.

Beyond that, Assassin's Strike is a power some DPS Stalkers skipped. If they chose to skip the buffed power despite the changes to it, they receive no benefit...but then perhaps I'm just one of those sore posters that still don't like Assassin's focus considering it's just another clunky add-on to an AT with a slew of other weighty junk to leverage that are basically obsolete in the new-game.

Just wanted to point out where you're wrong

Yes, It is definitely a wait and see at this point.

Your example of energize is a perfect example for what I am feeling on this whole snipe thing. If they want to MAKE Snipe attacks better, they should stand on their own without ANY other powers required. This makes more sense for the AT and for builds.

As it stands now, and if the changes went live as is, I would NOT respec and add snipe regardless of how badly I want a third attack in my standard chain. That may not be the intent of this change to snipes, but it WOULD fulfill one of electric blasts weaknesses if it were MADE to.