i24 Blaster Changes

There is a huge difference between not taking a snipe and not taking AS. you have alot of stalkers who simply gimped themselves by not taking. Not taking it now its even more gimping than before. The issue with stupid powers like thunderclap is the accuracy penalty these powers get, the knockback and the fact that it only works on minions means this power is utterly garbage. I never quite understood the point of accuracy penalties on powers that meant to help keep you alive. Its like they punish you for doing your job if your a control AT and in the case of blasters and everyone else its punishing you for trying to stay alive.

You can use Power of the Thunder (new Lightning Clap) outside of combat and it will still give you the full boost without hitting any foes, from the information given. The buff lasts for a full minute so it won't disrupt your sapper lifestyle at all.

OK, I will concede a lot of ground here mainly because I may be basing my opinions too much in how melee archetypes build their defenses and how “fun” it is for those ATs to build them up as they level, but got to remind myself these are not melee ATs and their secondary should not suddenly have a complete meaning change.

However I do will add one more point/option, as I still feel abit too much is relying on a single power: what if any additional boost needed didn’t come from a single power, but from all powers? Have every single power (perhaps in the primary, only for blasters) grant or refresh a mitigation buff for a few seconds?

Every blaster, would suddenly get at least some benefit for one. No blaster would have to wait until level 20 to get his survivability tool either.

I mentioned something similar to this in another thread, although there I was talking about bulding it up. Here I just mean that using a blast, will grant defense, resist , hp or a combination. A fixed amount defined by power set, not enhance able.

Would you consider such a secondary source to be counterproductive?

Allow me to rephrase. In order to be the real improvement blasters need, regeneration based mitigation needs to be backed up with something to stop bursts.

Of course the +regen is going to be useful, Heck, it is even almost the same amount that I chased on my favorite blaster in order to make it more survivable back in Issue 9. I acknowledged +regen would be useful in the post you quoted, "People will still push the envelope and when they do, regen will not help when they get unlucky (OK, of course it will help sometimes, but there will be plenty of times where it doesn't)."

Because it isn't? I don't have anything to back that up with other than a few characters who rely on mostly regen to survive not being nearly as survivable as those who rely on other means. There are probably a variety of reasons why that is true, but my experience leads me to this conclusion. So when I say regeneration needs something to help it through bursts, conclude what I mean is it needs something more than what every character has just because they exist.

I don't normally make statements assuming the baseline is every minion hits 100% of the time, because that isn't the baseline I normally experience. But one only has to fight some DE and let a quartz drop to know that our baseline is not insignificant compared to everything hitting 95% of the time. Yet the normal 50%ish we do get hit +300-500% regeneration is only go to encourage us to move faster and still die often.


Sure, but I wasn't really trying to be that absolute, I was just trying to say that my experience with +regen as mitigation leads me to believe that it alone will not be the fix many are looking for (and that includes you, this will not accomplish your goal, IMO). Since I will still be playing with tankers and defenders keeping me alive, this isn't a huge deal to me, but if I wanted blasters to be on par with other ATs outside of team assistance, I would not be content with what we know so far (even assuming a modest amount of additional smaller changes).

Since you brought up numerical validity, how does Regeneration rank in your scrapper comparison if you just use Fast Healing, Health, and Integration? Add in Tough and Resilience, how does it look now? I look at the 30 second numbers in your comparison and those are the scenarios I am thinking of.

"Clearly, DA and Regen are emerging as the obvious leaders. A significant part of that comes from their powerful heals. However, because those heals are only usable at intervals, its possible for a critical amount of damage to outrace the heal and kill the scrapper before it can fire. Doing so can "break" the heal, by defeating the scrapper before it can be used: the scrapper will perform significantly lower than the "naive" averages would predict. We're going to look at two situations: first, the amount of damage necessary to kill the scrapper in 30 seconds with no click heals."

Also, on the topic of dying quickly and what quickly might mean:
"One thing my testing shows (I've tested essentially all of the scenarios depicted in these calculations in-game) is that 30 seconds seems like a very long time on paper, and its a very short time in-game when things are shooting at you and health is dropping fast: unless you time things with a clock, I wouldn't trust intuitive judgement for how long you think you're surviving under pressure. When someone talks about a scrapper "being killed in seconds" that is quite uncommon - it takes massive amounts of damage (or really bad luck) to accomplish that."

I'd rather it simply be a passive benefit just for taking powers, if we are going to be this generic. I argued against this type of thing when Miladys_Knight suggested it, but in thinking about it more, I would be fine with it if it capped at ten powers. This means take any ten blaster primary and secondary powers and you get the full effect of whatever buff you are suggesting (of course, at that point you could just have it be a passive ability that ramps up with level).

I am pretty much opposed to a defensive Fury type thing for blasters, I like the idea the attacks can control or debuff enemies, I am less thrilled with them buffing the blaster.

I think Hawk's suggestion is much more interesting and I actually like that these specific powers all got solid ability added to them that makes them much more interesting to take. I don't think it is enough, but I also think it is the proper direction to take rather than a plain AT wide buff, give specific (different, but similar) powers to each secondary.

I would like that, but every other power in the sets can't be brought up to the bar set by these powers, and that means it would still be a situation where most of a set's use is in one power.

Bad Decision on the Devs on this one.. You know what I see here.. People not taking Lightning Clap because IT SUCKS.. Hey lets put something that they want into something that sucks so that it doesnt suck as much and people will start taking it..

Why not put it in Lightning Field like Blazing Aura in Fire ??? What was the specific reason THIS power that almost no Electric Blaster I know takes chosen ??? Devices gets their buff in Cloaking Device.. Toggle.. Ice get theirs in chilling embrace.. another Toggle... AND they increase the radius of Chilling Embrace ???

This should be placed in Lightning Field.. something that would benefit EVERY playstyle..

Thats just my opinion.. but I am mostly unimpressed with these changes..

Eh, bad example. Blazing Aura Sucks, with puny damage on AoE at 8ft radius instead of 10 or 20 like other powers, being the reason why it's skipped a lot, so I could go and say "why wasnt it placed on consume to make it like drain psyche?", so i dont think only Elec got screwed.

^^^This. We will be going thru this all over again in a few more issues. Just wait and see. Personally what I would have done is grant blasters partial immunity to what ever damage type they do. Like fire blasters get 20% inherrent resistance to fire and lethal and additional 10% if they go with fire manipulation. While this does not fix the issues for all damage types its a big help compared to these crappy changes to ****** powers no one takes anyways.

Improving a power that is weak is a bad thing. You heard it here.

Look, I understand what you are saying. Snipes are a situational power like Lightning Clap. I figured they would improve snipe by making it more useful in those situations and possibly adding something so it was useful in a few more situations. Instead they decided to vastly increase the situations it is useful by making it an obnoxious DPA power. Crap, it can still be used situationally from long range but now I also likely want to use it after every Aim or Build Up.

It can be frustrating when powers one has skipped become appealing. That doesn't mean they should leave often skipped powers unappealing and instead buff the powers everyone already has.

If these are kneejerk, they have really poor reflexes, because this problem has been tapping their knees for a long, long time. A kneejerk reaction would have been adding 20% defense all as a base buff and increasing the damage mod a bit. These are targeted, thought-out, and conservative changes. They may not be enough, but they do address some of the problems.

But they should buff what the power was originally intended to do so it works, not tack on a desirable effect to an otherwise undesirable power.

I don't know about Lightning Clap but it sounds like on of those god awful PBAoE KB powers and without fixing that then you are forcing people into bad powers. Also a lot of these changes force blasters into melee even more than before, which beggers belief in all honesty.

Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

Are you farking KIDDING ME?!

As of i24, my Fire/Fire/Mace blaster will become a GOD!

Softcapped to S/L/E AND a heal over time?

*laughs maniacally*

This is gonna be AWESOME.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I've wondered the same thing for my main. There are powers that are not affected by the boost (like Ice Armor, the regeneration from Health or recovery for Stamina), but most others that full get the boost where you have no way to improve them othewise (such as temp powers).

A blaster gets just under +80% from power boost to secondary effects - I'd say power boost either fully helps (on both the unenhanceable and enhanceable portions) or doesn't work on Energize at all.

My issue with this is that about half the time I use AIM with a snipe, my snipe misses. I don't have this problem with BUILD UP. That's been my experience.

Those godawful PBAoE KB powers may not be appealing on an AT that has primarily melee attacks (but I really wanted Lightning Clap for Stalker Electric), but on an AT that mixes range and melee and doesn't always do well with 6 enemies hitting them in melee it is more interesting. Lightning Clap works now (although I think the stun chance and duration should be higher).

NONE of the known changes force blasters into melee. EVERY SINGLE NEW THING discussed so far is useful from range. EVERY ONE OF THEM. Only /mental is still forced into melee and that could be considered balanced by the fact that they can get nigh perma Instant Healing levels of regen (I don't think it is and I think the top end of Drain Psyche ought to be reduced while letting it have a bit on the bottom end without needing to charge into melee).

It's not a question of powers becoming appealing its about them not being appealing enough to justify the tradeoffs.

For the sake of argument look at a blaster with ranged def in the high 30s low 40s making snipe viable is going to cost 2 to 4 power picks and something like 3 to 4 slots. That can very easily wreck the blasters defense.

Can you build back around it ? Not easily, as it is I am assuming that you are dropping the T2 or T1 blast and replacing it with the snipe. The problem with that is you wind up SOL when you can't use the snipe in fast mode.

So instead of a situational power pick you wind up with several power picks that are just to make that situation work, and your entire attack chain being situational.

I haven't played blaster in some time so wasn't totally updated on that particular power (And mids takes ages to load at work so I didn't check) but I would never want radial KB on any character in all honesty. If the power does stun though then I would have probably been the one person who took it, assuming I could find something to stack it with of course.

The PBAoE aura's do (I think it was Fire's that provides the absorb?), even with a 30' range that isn't very much (Or people wouldn't be complaining about Blaze), and as they get the shield based on what they hit then the closer you are the more effective they are.

For blasters to be as effective from range as they are from melee then survivability powers need to work at any time, or you are forcing those who want to play ranged only even more into a narrow set of secondaries because before we could just skip Blazing Aura now we suffer for that decision.

It would have been easier just adjusting base regen initially and seeing how that helped, with a long term (And well communicated) plan of incoroprating that regen into more active powers once the effect had been determined.

Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

In my opinion, Snipe is a viable choice when the faster cast is situational, say you can use the fast cast version ~3 times a minute. Getting the fast cast available 3 times a minute is trivial. For those who already have the snipe, it is likely they could choose to not change a thing and get that much benefit.

Anything more than that is min/maxing the benefit and like any good min/max situation, you may not be able to have it all. You will have to lose some things if you want to max out the snipe fast cast, or you can settle for a situational fast cast and keep those other things.

That is a mark of great game design, not poor design.

Great game design would probably have all choices working out equally for all people of equal levels of build no matter how they try to manipulate the snipe.

Someone pointed out you might now need to 6 slot Build Up to get any use out of the Snipe at all at lower levels, and that still isn't regular use.

Princess Darkstar - Proud Member of the Handprints of Union, the #1 ranked SG in Europe!
British by act of union, English by grace of God, Northern by pure good fortune!

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

Sadly, the stun sucks. You know how Hand Clap stuns, yeah Lightning Clap sucks compared to Hand Clap. But radial KB is situationally useful to a blaster.

From what I understand, you get the mitigation benefit regardless of anything being in range. So the HoT of Cauterizing Aura works even if no enemies are nearby. The absorb shield of /Ice works even when nothing is near. Granted, their current effects work better in melee, but the idea is that these powers are useful to a ranger and situationally more useful if you risk melee (which is as it should be).

Equal is not that easy to quantify. Great game design throws out a variety of options, choices, and potential. You may like those 12 things, I'll like these other 12 things, most everyone likes these 76 things, a lot of people avoid these 24 things (while those 24 things have a modest base of fans).

Plus, I'd never want the game dumbed down to the point where my build choices don't matter because I end up just like everyone else. While some say everyone will be forced to do x, y, and z to have the snipes always fast cast, I don't believe everyone will think that is worth chasing, which promotes variety. Some will be fine with it situationally, others will have to perma it. That is the sweet spot of design.

I am thrilled that each set gets its own little twist in the mitigation area.