Dev Chat Summation: BLASTER CHANGES

Stalkers were my favorite AT, but even I concede that their change is overpowered.

I don't think so. As long as they don't add anything else to snipes, like some OMGWTFBBQ UBERZDOOB3LH1TZx2!!1 to it, snipes will be just fine. If anything, it will just mean those yellow inspirations won't be as much a waste as they used to be. I'll actually have something to plan around them for ATs with snipes.


Well, AS doesn't 1-shot minions. It 1-shots Lts.

And I find it arguable that Stalkers should have aimed for DPS in the first place rather than burst. It just edges out ATs and devalues their burst at the same time. And please do not read my point as like those idiots who hyperbolize everything and say 'they nerfed AS's burst', no, they just devalued it. It's not important anymore. Because if you've got DPS, nothing else matters. Not burst, not circumstantial advantages, not awareness. It all just comes down to pressing buttons and makes all those other little things like Hide, Placate, Demoralize and the like non-factors. They're there but they don't matter.

I'd agree. "Way too much" is a good approach. But it's better to gate those behind circumstances rather than conceding to the dumbed-down style of Brutes/Scrappers. At that point, whatever you gate it by can be adjusted to make it easier or harder depending on how much "Way too much" you add on. IMO, the changes to snipes seems easy and the power they grant gives just about right of benefit from how easy that gate is. If they just made all snipes insta-cast? Well, that'd be too easy...at which point, adding a gate to it (that disables insta-snipe for a period afterward which then would force interruptibility) would be needed or the cost of the power (the recharge) would need to be re-evaluated (I wouldn't want the damage to be lowered).

As is, the gate is easily surpassed. Just use Aim or other +ToHit powers or the mostly-useless insight inspirations. But that said, I would like a better buff to ToHit on the smaller inspirations so I only need 2 smalls. I think how it's set up, we need 2 smalls and kismet to get to the required gate.

I've made suggestions regarding Snipes, and one of those was to drop the interrupt time and up the damage to scale 3.56 to match Dominator snipes, this making them regular attacks with longer range and heavier damage, with only cost and recharge serving as balance. If that means longer recharge, then so be it. It's not like Snipes before this change can ever really stick to their cycle anyway.

To me, the "minigame" around gaining three or at least two stacks of Assassin's Focus is just the right kind of gate for a Focus critical as big as this one. Clearly, I'm looking for an easier game than most people and have admitted to in the past, but to me, Assassin's Strike ought to set the example. To me, it's just the right kind of balance between awesome and annoying. It's one of the few powers in the game where the limitation actually makes it BETTER, as opposed to feeling like a millstone around the neck.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This sort of came to my mind before; I wonder if it would be possible to use the "change what's activated by the a power's button" tech present with Titan Weapons and the revamped Assassin Strike, along with the instant-recharge trigger in Water Blast to basically turn the planting power into a triggering power once a bomb was set?

They could probably use a variation of the vanity pet toggle. Power on, blow it off/up.

Or the Hybrid cloggle.

I don't know if that's possible because of the issue of range and target type. But taking Time Bomb could automatically grant a separate power called Detonator which, when clicked, sent out a wide PBAoE pulse that killed your time bomb, causing it to detonate on command. You could set this power to only affect your pets, so it would not detonate other players' time bombs.

Kind of like a PBAoE Mastermind -> Traps -> Detonator, only just affecting the Time Bomb. It ought to be doable with two powers, and we already have more than enough precedent for one power pick granting several. And I'd still restrict the bomb to blow up 15-20 seconds after it was set even if it weren't detonated to preserve a similar dynamic to the old one, where you could have it blow up mid-way through a Full Auto.

Speaking of blowing up other Blasters' Time Bombs, wasn't it fun when one Mastermind's pet commands could bleed over and command the pets of another Mastermind on the team?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yeah, the timer would still be there so that the bomb would behave just like the current one does, and the detonator would be an added feature. So people would not need to use it if they did not want to, and anyone unaware of the change would not be negatively affected.

While we're talking about time bomb, here's another change that would be useful to combine with the previous one. Instead of having a gigantic 9 second cast time, have time bomb have a 1.67 second cast time, but for the first five seconds after activation its damage is reduced. It starts off at half damage, and gains 10% more (base) damage for each second that elapses until it reaches full strength. Any detonation that occurs after that happens at full power. Any detonation that happens earlier than that happens at less than full power, but that detonation would have been happening during the original cast time of the power - in effect, you can have it go off faster than it does now if you're willing to accept less damage, but either way you will be rooted for less time and anyone that ignores the detonation mechanic gets basically the same power as now just with a vastly shorter cast time.

Too tired for the rest. Will take word for, will point out "Binds = Micro Managing", but this I wanted to touch on.

Not true. At all. They either have equal to Corruptor/Controller values, and sometimes actually weaker (Nature Affinity as an example has much lower values for Masterminds.)

So, "nearly full-strength" is "Cut by the same, if not more, from Defender Values as Corruptors/Controllers."

The difference is insignificant, especially considering the henchmen themselves bring a lot of support of their own a lot of the time. I quoted Bots/FF because a large part of my robots' total defence doesn't come from my Forcefields secondary, it comes from the bubbles the Protector Bots hand out. Same with Necromancy and how the Lich doles out both control and support. I don't know if Masterminds have enough support to support an entire team, but I do know they have more than enough to keep their own henchmen alive even when they really shouldn't. For instance, the Huntsman has this really devastating tree stump toss that deals enough AoE to close to wipe out all my henchmen. My solution? Have him run through a has trap and two Seeker Drones while my own henchmen stood back under the Forcefield Generator. The result? He'd miss nearly every time.

What I'm saying is that Masterminds have enough support between their own secondary and their own henchmen's level of integrated support to reach melee character levels of survivability and sometimes even beyond, all the while being able to support a team AND deliver quite impressive damage at a quite impressive AoE range. They may not be the best AT out there and there certainly are HORRIBLE situations for them (Mako's "fonts of power" suuuck!!!) but they're one of the most versatile, most solid and most dependable AT in the game. With a few very rare exceptions, I have yet to find a task that my Brutes can do that my Masterminds can't do just as easily.

Again - I don't know enough about Trials to speak about Mastermind performance, and I DO know that Nictus Romulus is considerably harder to kill with pets around since his Healing Nictus heals off them. That, and henchmen tend to not be very good around rope bridges. Like any AT, they have shortcomings and bad situations, but aside from ONE (Mako's fonts) I've never felt like the game was cheating against me. Sure, I've died many times over, but more often than not, this is the result of aggroing three spawns at once and discovering one of them summons ambushes. That, or accidentally taking on +3 spawns on the way to a mission and deciding to be an idiot and fight them, despite my minion henchmen effectively conning -5.

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On binds: This is a problem primarily because the game has never provided the tools to control your henchmen officially, and there's no reason why those can't be under Keymapping somewhere. Simply allow the user to pick buttons to command each class of henchmen and each henchman individually and then let the user map multiple buttons to each command and the same button to multiple commands. You know, like MAME does.

For instance, in Marvel vs. Capcom, my heavy punch button is typically bound to E R 3 and L, where R is also bound to light punch for a super move, 3 is also bound to heavy kick for a character change and L is also bound to light and medium punch for a pushback action.

Simply give people the following 6x7 options in the menu:

Henchman 1 Attack
Henchman 1 Follow
Henchman 1 Go To
Henchman 1 Stay
Henchman 1 Aggressive
Henchman 1 Defensive
Henchman 1 Passive
etc...

And let people bind as many keys as they want to each and bind the same key to as many of these as they want and you're already 3/4 of the way to a decent Mastermind control scheme. Especially considering all you'll really need for the most part is three stance commands and three action commands (excluding Stay) for all the henchmen. It's very rare that you need to control them individually, and it's even rarer when it makes a real difference.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

So Water has the good AoE and a nice heal. Maybe this will be impetus for them to lower the tier 9 recharge to 2 minutes.
Ice has lots of mitigation and will still be decent single target.
Sonic still improves team damage very well and has lots of mitigation.
Dual Pistols... We will have to see how good the animation changes are, but even I think this could be a problem (and I am a defender of Pistols generally). Maybe this will finally be the impetus to buff Swap Ammo's effects.

My musculature backed tier 4 Pyronic doesn't work nearly as well as this claim lays out. And I have never seen 1 judgement handle mass mobs in the game's harder content. Oh sure, fighting in the ITF at low difficulty, but fighting level 54 IDF or DE or BP? Not as much handling on its own.

I know I'm late to this, but mostly the issue seem to be that the fast snipes only have to be situational solo for dominators and non dev (and EM apparently with a decent investment in powers) blaster. Any corruptor or defender can get there with just the leadership pool, slotting tactics and a kismet. Also there's some talk of looking into letting dominators use the improved snipe whenever domination is active.

Now in order to get those all the time requires IOs to be sure and we really shouldn't design around the assumption that everyone has access to them but shouldn't it be equally possible for all the ATs to have similar access to the buffed snipes? Otherwise it ends up being more of a buff for the ATs that can get consistent access to it than it is for the average blaster and blasters are the AT that's commonly perceived to need buffing the most.

I don't think everyone has to be exactly equal, but I don't think Blasters as a whole should have any strong disadvantages relative to other archetypes.

This may actually be a good opportunity to examine things like the totally inexplicably low blaster melee tohit buff modifier, and perhaps how buffs like tactics work with regard to ally vs self buffing.

Let me be a bit more precise, then.

"1 Judgment and your average in-set AoE" is usually all it takes for me to wipe out Level 54 Non-Bosses. Bosses take a little more love, obviously, but I'll have target-cap Minions and Lts. dead from my hit alone.

Hmmm, that did sound like I wanted homogenization didn't it. That's not really what I was going for.

It's more that this is a change that seems like it should be at least as available to the more damage oriented ATs as it is to the more support ones if not more available to them. How it works out is (obviously) that it's more available to the support ATs due to their higher buff values. Honestly barring specific sets like devices I kind of wish the target to-hit value could change per-AT so that nobody could easily build to have it always on when solo.

While I would be fine if they upped the required to-hit for defenders and corruptors, I am also fine if they get more benefit from the snipe change than blasters and dominators. Of course, I have now long argued for the damage of defenders and corruptors to be increased.

Which is fine, but if you do that then at some level you'll need to do something for blasters too. I know in the chat the other day they kind of laughed about balance suggesting that fun should be the most important factor, which makes sense, but at some point a people playing blasters aren't going to be having fun because that defender or corruptor over there's going to be so much more useful to the team and dealing similar damage to boot.

I'm not saying it's an immediate thing. Buff defenders/corruptors and blasters immediately suffer but after a point you'll end up back at the current situation with blasters.

I wasn't really suggesting that this change makes defenders do blaster level damage. Just that if you buff defenders/corruptors enough then you'll end up with a bunch of complaining blaster players again because they feel trivialized.

Also I'm not suggesting that it's not a hefty price for defenders and corruptors to get fast snipes all the time (or for dominators if it ends up getting tied to domination). Just that it's a price that's completely out of the realm of a blaster that's not /dev or /em to pay and that seems a little odd to me.

I believe its debatable whether blaster ranged damage is high enough relative to defenders and corruptors. If both were increased in any material way, from my perspective the debate would be over for me.