i24 Blaster Changes

With the change not being made yet I am still willing to call for it to be rethinked.

If the intention truly was just cutting downtime and making it more likely to go into a fight at full health then a base change would allow them to use every secondary to get the active mitigation that I think is needed. Changing these powers now means everyone is pretty much forced into at least one particular power and cuts down on interesting ways to revamp the rest of the secondaries.

By revamp what I mean is that each power should either boost damage, or provide some kind of mitigation through short stuns, +def, +res, kb, -range etc. Then you can pick the secondary you want based on how it mitigates damage rather than because you refuse to take Handclap.

Edit: Also how are they going to balance the regen and end costs of powers that have different requirements? For example if Energise is going to need recharge slotting does that mean it gives more regen because you can't slot that as much? In which case builds with global recharge will get more out of it. Will Handclap get a large endurance cost to be equal to the cost of running some of the toggles? Will the toggles get endurance discounts for those that only want them as +regen rather than caring about the damage they do? Etc.

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Archery is 1.67s
Assault Rifle is 0.67s
Beam Rifle is 1.4s
Dark Blast, Electrical Blast and Energy Blast are all 1.33s
Fire Blast is 1.67s
Psychic Blast is 1s

The interrupt time is currently 3s for all Blaster snipes.

Just adding the regen or whatever to the base values of Blaster does 2 things, IMO, that simply fail:

-It goes against their concept. Blasters aren't 'just' survivable. They don't 'just have' shorter downtime. Just like everybody else, they should have to take powers for their mitigation.

-It's not at all interesting. With how it's shown implemented, you have varying things from control powers that add to your survival, from regen to healing to absorb. It could very well be possible for new manipulation sets to have varying combos, strengths and applications of survival mechanics that would be much more interesting than just adding onto their base HP/regen values.

That said, I concede that you don't like where the devs placed the sustain mechanic. I don't like every choice either. We'll just have to wait until Hawk sits down and listens so maybe he'll change some stuff.

I am happy and exited about these changes.

My Energy/Energy/Power Blaster just had to clean out his powered body armor.
He doesn't use (or need) a snipe, will LOVE the extra range on Power Burst and just has to make a small build concession to fit Conserve Power... oh wait, there is that Repulsion Bomb power that I was thinking of respeccing out of... BAM ! Better blaster without breaking a sweat.

My EMP/Electric Defender on the other hand is a sad Panda. His team build includes all of the leadership powers AND the snipe, so that will be fine, but.... I have spent the last year sinking Billions into a Purpled-out Solo build that has over 30% defense to all damage types and some super mitigation effects to back it up. He went from solo-ing +1/x3 (previous solo strategy) to +2/x6 with this build. The ONLY thing he needs is a Hard-hitting ST attack to help take down Bosses faster to feel "complete" and adding a perma-fast Snipe would absolutely "GUT" his solo build.

So.. Yes very happy for Blasters, the Range and Survival changes are very nice, but totally disappointed with the snipe proposal. Work on that one some more Devs. Please ??!

There are many methods of increasing the desirability of specific secondary powers without attaching heals to them. If the sets in general were better, it wouldn't be necessary to give them one overpowered heal. Also, most of the people mentioning tight builds are doing so because the opportunity cost of building around the enhanced snipe isn't worth the benefit.

Well, now we have a reason to overslot a power. 4 level 50 Generic IOs and you are at 22.52%.

I have to agree with Starsman's points on the snipe. Even with these changes the snipes are not really all that attractive. Just look at them - they don't do ANY more damage than a standard tier 3 blast, slightly less in fact. Which means that unless the set doesn't have a tier 3, taking them and 2-3 other powers just to be able to fire them off with reasonable frequency is a huge hack.

Folks in this thread keep trying to compare them to the stalker changes and point out how stalkers had to take AS in order to benefit from its changes, so its OK for blasters to have to take manuevers/assault + tactics and slot a kimet or live with an attack you can only use once every 20 seconds or so. The problem with that arguement is that AS is a sweet attack inside hide - and when you can get a guaranteed crit every 4th attack outside of hide it is even more valuable.

Compared to AS the blaster snipes are just sad and certainly not worth several power selections and IO's just to use more often than after aim/build up. Either the snipes themselves need to be improved so that they do a lot more damage or the requirements for using them need to be lowered considerably. The suggestions in Starsman's post are good one but other options such as adding an auto-crit to snipes if fired with the interrupt or allowing them to have a chance to crit based on defiance stacks would actually make the attacks WORTH spending the power picks and IO selections on.

Really folks - I get that some of you are happy with the current changes, my archery/dev blaster is going to profit from them considerably since I already have all the powers in question and my TD is slotted to have 22% to hit. But I think everyone who is fighting against making these changes more universal to all blasters is falling into the same trap as the folks who used to argue that because their tricked out archery/mental blaster was insanely good that all blasters are fine. Its not exactly the same, but its pretty close. We need to fight for BETTER changes that affect all blasters equally.

I do like the secondary changes so far, although I think we need to test those hard to make sure they are roughly equivalent over all sets, so I will save any comments on those for the actual i24 beta - but the snipe changes are far to incomplete and unbalanced for my taste. They are a giant hack that I can easily see backing the dev's into a corner they can't get out off - once they "improve" snipes this way they won't be able to make a better, more generic fix without undoing a lot of existing builds.

What happens if the Stalker has Tough(3so), Weave (3so), Combat Jumping (1so) and Ancillary Shadow Meld (3so (recharge)).

In fact, snipes deal 30% more damage than most tier 3s. Only Blaze can out do a snipe, and only if most of its DoT hits (and Fire's Snipe also gets DoT, so it will generally outdo Blaze as well).

We really need to remember that the snipe changes are mostly just to make snipes better. They should not be viewed through the nightmarish prism of fixing blasters. Do making snipes better help blasters? Well, it gives them more interesting options and it is also likely to add a small amount of potential DPS while making the pick of a situational power reasonable, since it has more situations where it can be useful. But it doesn't do a whole lot else and it is not intended to do more.

Other changes are for that purpose and I agree we need to discuss BETTER changes, I'm even willing to expend modest energy testing and typing to try to get those improvements (but I ain't fighting for it ).

Other than running out of endurance with that number of toggles and being forced to pass on a lot of attacks or epic powers?

Let me see with Electric, that can leverage Tough best:

83.22 DPS against Smash/Lethal
111.02 DPS against Energy
68.03 DPS against Negative
70.73 DPS against most other damage types

This is spamming Shadow Meld on top of Spaming Energize, and making an average of the effect over time.

lol. You suggested an Electric stalker can run out of endurance but aren't worried about my /Fire manip blaster's endurance concerns. Too funny.

Thanks for the information, I appreciate the time you are spending checking this out. Understand, I added no extra powers beyond the same number you added to the blaster, so any complaint of the Stalker missing out on taking other powers applies to the blaster equally (but you probably think a lot of blaster powers should be skipped anyway, whereas the stalker has lots of good stuff to take).

Actually, there is a reason on top of the synergy with Tough that I rolled the Elec armor numbers instead of the Willpower ones I actually think that one set may be able to run all that.

But at least in my experience with blasters, not having many natural toggles to keep running does free a lot of endurance for ofense or for stocking up on Pool and Ancillary toggles.

There is that. Not just THAT THAT, there are a lot of fun toys in the blaster pools, but none are as necesary for the blaster as armors are for a melee character. Heck, just to run all that the elec stalker cant even skip on the optional utility tool either: Power Sink

Edit:
Also, you went with Shadow Meld there. Thats just one very specific Ancillary pool. Nearly every blaster Ancillary pool has options to Charged Armor, some stronger in certain aspects (Like Temp Invuln that cuts down the energy to pump up Smash/Lethal a tad more) or ones that give Smash/Lethal defense, great for stacking on top of IOs and that have the potential to protect you from any attack that contains smashing or lethal (a huge number of attacks in the game.)

I am not trying to make the build you propose irrelevant, just noting that it's no huge sacrifice for the blaster to get these powers, not even a concept breaker.

OH and also: I was analizing the only Blaster secondary I have numbers for: Devices.

/Fire with endurance problems is doing soemthing wrong XD. No, really, I love my consume and no one should ever kid with that :P(/fire already has pseudo-crashless nukes after all!)

I love my Consume too, but it is not enough, especially without IOs.

But what does that alternative entail?

You say make the set generally better but how? If the point is to help the Blaster sustain itself in generally the same amounts per set, how do you go about doing that? Make their controls better? Their debuffs? Some sets don't have controls. Some don't have debuffs.

I'm not saying the route the devs took is great, but it's probably a lot easier to accomplish and balance if they set their goal up first and add that functionality. As of now, none of the secondaries even had a means of actual personal sustenance. Making Hot Feet slow more and adding a hold to Burn isn't going to get you the same level of buff as adding more range to ice patch and giving freezing touch more range, for instance.

Basically, I hear what you're saying but without some logic, theory or method behind it, falls behind what we're actually getting.

Arbiter Hawk tells me that to prevent needing to go into melee, ToB aka ToF is going to be a ranged attack in I24.

Well, yeah, I cheated. Hey, I didn't even ask you to check out what the stalker numbers were under Power Surge (because it is pretty lame on scraps and stalkers).

Understood and your point is valid.

Well, you may not know this, but I hear Electric is actually low on mitigation in general (with IOs it gets a lot better).

Want to check out Ninjitsu or Ice?

A blaster build with Scorpion Shield could be neat too.

No matter how fantastic the secondaries were, if blasters were still insufficiently survivable there would still be a need to add survivability somewhere, and the devs believe that is in the secondaries. That's completely independent from any perceived lack of utility of the secondaries.

That survivability would either come in one power or be split up into more than one power. I would prefer it come in just one, to the point of advocating changing it if it was split up.

Its never necessary to give anything an overpowered anything. However, I don't see where that was done in any of the secondary changes slated for I24. The survivability levels being added are entirely reasonable, and in fact within the limits I calculated should be added in the past.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents to this too.

Hot Feet isn't cheap.

It did seem to be a bit weak. I thought most people sound happy with the Energize change, does not look too beefy in numbers but I understand Power Sink can actually add to some indirect survival effects, kind of like holds.

I will likely check all armors soon, right now I am rebuilding all my calculation tools and doing concessions I didn’t do in the past (from now on I will count debuffs like Chilling Embrace as "perks" and not direct mitigation due to many tiny intricacies. In short, i think I used to attempt too hard at micro-measure some effects.

Also working on some new DPS tools, got to be geared up to spam Synapse and Hawk over tankers

Edit: ARG... i forgot how ice is so debuf centric.... ugh... cant ignore that...

My /fire cycles all AoE and runs Blazing Aura and hot feet, so yeah, I have end issues. Incarnates and certain IOs helped fix that.

I can't go into great detail about it because the last giant post I made didn't get much of a response. Which is really frustrating because making a post about how something is wrong results in people pointing out situations in which my argument falls flat that don't actually exist because I can't cover everything in the span of a paragraph. Whereas if I make a large post about how I think it SHOULD be, including conceptual goals, mechanical methods, and even numbers, no one pays attention to it.

Not all secondaries have control, and not all secondaries have debuffs. That's the way it SHOULD be. Making every secondary's method of mitigation be large amounts of regeneration is homogenization. Fire is the only secondary with no form of mitigation other than hot feet and arguably burn. Every other set has powers that can be buffed into potent mitigation tools or can easily have a form of survivability attached to them without changing the concept of the power. Conserve power being turned into energize is a change that I support, for example.

One set has a heal/regen click (Energy). One set has a regeneration toggle (devices). Two have regen/recovery clicks (dark,electric). One has a heal over time toggle (fire). One has an absorb shield (ice). Mental is still mental.

The survivability levels are completely reasonable, but putting everything into one power is going to make things worse in the long run: as we can see from Stone Armor and Kinetics, powersets that have one extremely amazing power become impossible for the Devs to tweak in the future, as there is no way to buff the crap powers without nerfing the uber power. What I don't want is for these powers to be so strong that they won't ever be able to tweak Blaster secondaries again.