Blaster Changes Don't Fix Electric

Sypher, are you a native English speaker?

I thought plenty of people were happy with these buffs.

Electric Blast's problem in my opinion is the effectively non-existent secondary.

End Drain means nothing until its all gone.
The -endurance on all powers is pretty much negligible apart from Short Circuit, to the extent that an Electrical Blaster will drain an enemy's health bar well before they drain their endurance bar.

Short Circuit requires standing in close with a 3 second animation.

I'd compare it to Ice Blast. By attacking, the enemy's damage output is gradually reduced. No slotting required, no extra animations to do this, just a free debuff as you do your primary goal of damage.

Electrical Blast should work the same - attacking say an even con boss with your single target and AoE attacks should cause them to be drained
around half way through their health bar, thus halving their damage output over the fight?

That would be worth giving up a Tier 3 blast for.

I also completely approve of reducing the cast time on Voltaic Sentinel.

BTW, I think the fast-snipe change is a brilliant idea on the whole. The fast-AS change has made my Stalkers a joy to play, I expect to get some of the same feeling on Blasters when this rolls out.

Unfortunately if they were going to put the time into changing how NPCs use endurance to turn sapping into a more workable debuff/control mechanic it would likely have been done for Elec Control. Instead they met the problem during Beta and the solution was to change what the power in question was for.

This leaves Elec/ being very similar to Radiation, the secondary effects being largely irrelevant and the most of the powers being broadly similar. 3 ST including a mez, 1 PBAoE, 1 TAoE, Aim and Nuke. Elec gets Voltaic Sentinel, Rad gets a cone.

The does give us an obvious and consistent fix for Elec's lacking single target damage: give Tesla Cage the same treatment as many other low damage single target mezzes have gained over the last 11 issues. Bump damage up to ~122.6 as befits a 10s recharge power and cut the hold effect to ~9.5s. Basically a slightly less powerful version of post i24 Cosmic Burst.

They know it, just don't have a need to do anything about it, typically. They can set the hold duration to match the power.

I did see, above, a poster outlining that Electric Blast and Energy Blast do near the same amount of damage. I don't have a lot of time now to follow up on that, but in the morning I'll be checking it out.

EDIT: No offense to Umbral, but I don't know where he was getting his numbers for an Elec Blast attack chain, so it's hard for me to use it as a point of emphasis.

How about giving all of E's attacks (STs and AoEs) a chance to Chain/Jump (like Chain Induction) its damage and drain/recovery debuff? And increasing it's chance to return End to the user?

Rebuttal to Ball Lightning:

Putting Ball Lightning in the chain doesn't allow Elec Blast to compete with the likes of Ice, Fire, and Beam Rifle for the following reasons.

It is not easily attained, making using it during the leveling process quite silly.

It does not enjoy any significant benefit from Hybrid Incarnate powers (the same can be said for Voltaic Sentinel, a fact I intend to point out to the devs in a powers breakdown, because it needs to happen).

It does not contribute effectively to Defiance.

Its' DPA is not good - it's sitting at 48.34 DPA when using Arcanatimes' activations. That's not a good attack. A good attack is at 65-70 minimum. Gravity Well is 74.57. Smite is at 76.64. Bitter Ice Blast is at 108.1. Blaze is a staggering 159. Assassin's Strike in Kinetic Melee is at 166.1. No Electric Blast attacks exceed 55 DPA.

Ball Lightning is not a power that brings Electric Blast into real competition with other blast sets.

Let me make one other thing clear: using Energy Blast as a point of comparison with Electric Blast is a bad idea, because Energy Blast is also bad. Power Burst needs a new animation. I say this simply to show that comparing Electric Blast to Energy Blast and calling it "good" is a logical fallacy, because Energy Blast is *also* bad.

If the development team is serious - and they appear to be - it's time for them to catch up with the player base and include animation times in their balancing formulae. Doing it otherwise is willfully being bad at their jobs, and I think they've moved past that now.

EDIT: To be very blunt about how bad Ball Lightning is, I'd use Electric Fence as filler first. It has virtually equal DPA (lower by a point), lower endurance costs, faster recharge times, benefits more from Hybrid enhancements, can be used while mezzed due to Defiance, better Endurance Drain, and a status effect to boot.

Tyrant has tons of mooks around him, which the VS would be targeting all the time.