Breakdown of Blaster i24 Performance

Interesting, thanks. I'm wondering how the survivability numbers would compare to similarly budgeted melee characters, and how much of a pain it would be to factor in outgoing damage output when considering the survivability totals. You mention stationary non-offensive Tanking as the assumed scenario which isn't an accurate reflection of how the game is played in practice- Is that because of limitations or an excessive amount of extra work on the part of your analysis?

Edit: Also, just for fun, I know you've mentioned performance deficiencies between Blasters and other primarily damage AT's. I'd be interested in knowing if you still see that gap comparing a Blaster like this to the mentioned AT's with similar budget, etc. I would personally find it hard to believe that there was still a performance gap- That, to me, at least suggests that for end game purposes (admittedly the only purposes that interest me) the Dev's would do well to leave /Mental alone- Based on what I've seen in your numbers so far it isn't unfairly survivable- And normalize the other secondaries around it.

Of course during the level up process and on lower end builds there would probably be a much greater disparity between Blasters and other damage dealers, but that's where we already discussed our fundamental difference in opinion. To reiterate for a second, your position is that accessibility should be even across the board as Blasters are not considered an advanced AT. My position is that there's nothing wrong with 'earning' good performance through investment, namely time and inf. Would a good compromise between our two POV's be that the other secondaries, when normalized around Mental's level of performance at the high end, have less potential survivability but more steady and user friendly activation methods? This seems like the route the Dev's are going, and given that, I don't think it's unreasonable for an AT that admittedly isn't considered advanced to have one more challenging secondary to choose from that pays higher dividends after increased investment.

I can do such calculations by hand for a given methodology that factors in offense in a particular way (itself a matter of some debate) but the spreadsheet I'm using comes from my I13-ish work on comparing sets for proliferation purposes: its designed to show the performance of all defensive sets relative to all others hypothetically proliferated to all four melee archetypes, with some others thrown in for comparison (i.e. kheldians, soldiers).

Given its intended purpose, the number of variables and conditionals its designed to deal with is rather high: trying to add in offensive pyramiding or other means to show spawn by spawn offense plus defense would probably be a bit too much for the format. 'Cause right now it looks like this:



See the box in the far upper right corner? The last two rows are your build, along with the two columns to the right of the orange and red columns. Lets just say this is *not* the starting place I would pick for a defensive comparison that factors in offense. This is a cap and modifier-aware what-if analyzer for defensive sets that happens to be reasonably ok for looking at defensive numbers in general. If I add any more rows or columns I'm going to have to start using photo-lithography to store the spreadsheet.

Ok, I just had to turn you into Sheldon really quick. I hope you understand.

I would be interested in seeing those hand calculations if you can find the time to do them. I definitely don't want to make your City of Higgs Collider explode.

I have a copy of that spreadsheet. You are not exaggerating as much as you may think you are. More than one spreadsheet program has crashed under the weight of it.

Well, logically the thing to compare mental manipulation blasters to are psionic assault dominators. Dominators have a stronger drain psyche, higher resistance modifier and higher defense modifier. A comparable /psi dominator build to a /mental blaster build should be significantly stronger even factoring in the lower health, and it will have a control set stacked on top of that.

See I agree with you semantically, but when we consider the primary role of an AT we need to compare Blasters overall to other damage dealers- Doms are not considered a damage centric AT IIRC. In order to properly gauge Blaster performance we need to compare both damage output and survivability to Stalkers, Scrappers and Brutes, otherwise our analysis becomes convoluted.

Dominators are explicitly designated by the devs as damage dealers. That was the explicitly stated justification for the Dominator changes that changes the up and down domination-based damage design to constant always available modifier-based damage design. In fact, Dominators have a higher melee damage modifier than Blasters do (1.05 for Dominators, 1.0 for Blasters).

And in fact Dominators have a lot in common with Blasters in the broad strokes. First, they have both melee and ranged attacks. Second, they have *two* powersets designed to deliver damage - remember, control sets are Controllers *only* means of offense. Third, they have relatively high damage modifiers: Blasters have 1.125 ranged and 1.0 melee; Dominators have 0.95 ranged and 1.05 melee.

Beyond that, however, Dominators actually go farther than Blasters in terms of being designed as effective damage dealers in one specific way. The devs have stated categorically in the past that the design reason why melee archetypes have mez protection and defenses is to allow them to fight effectively in melee range. Those are considered design prereqs for fighting effectively in melee range. Blasters don't have those tools intrinsically, so while they are designed to fight in melee range they aren't - by dev decree - designed to be effective at it (skill can overcome that design flaw, thus blappers). Dominators are given mez protection in Domination, and they get high levels of control in lieu of defense. In fact, under domination Dominators have one-shot disable ability on bosses and elite bosses, something even Controllers don't have, much less Blasters in general.

You can argue the degree to which this affects actual gameplay (I argue it does a great deal) but there's no arguing with the fact that the devs have said being an effective melee damage dealer means having X, Y, and Z, and Blasters have Z (strong melee attacks) and Dominators have all three (mez protection, high damage mitigation, and strong melee attacks - stronger point for point than Blasters).

I've just never seen or heard of a Dominator competing with a Blaster in terms of damage output outside of leveraging confusion- I've always viewed them as the worst half of a Blaster and the worst half of a Controller paired into one Archetype, but that's clearly just a case of personal bias. Have you run numbers comparing Dominator damage output and survivability to the melee-centric AT's I presumed to be the core (Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers?) I'd be particularly interested in Dominators' max AOE damage potential, as the only example I've seen of a Dominator competing with Arch/Ment numbers is Plant/Psi and that was leveraging mass confusion, which nerfs reward rates- I don't remember who it was, but a prolific fellow who was posting on the Kheld boards had extensively tested his high end Plant/Psi and pointed out that, at the high end, the Dominator can leverage confusion in order to keep up with high end AOE sets but the reward rates were noticeably lower.

The question in my mind if we're going to add Dominators into the equation is first and foremost, how does a high end Dom's survivability (going to be tricky as you'll need to find a means of calculating the natural predisposal to mitigation) compare to other damage dealing AT's- Remember, Melee-centric isn't the qualifier here- Damage dealer is; Playing a Blaster in melee should not be mandatory for the majority of sets, I agree, but see my earlier risk v. rewards and higher dividends for higher performance standards statements. I digress though- Do Dom's do comparable damage with reference to the conventional melee AT's, and if so, how much of that damage output is reliant upon confusion, and if enough of it is, how do they compare in term of reward rates?

Once we establish Dominators' position relatively, we can go back to talking about Blasters. Personally, I do not feel that Dominators can do enough ST or AOE damage to compete with the high end melee dealers and the maximized /Mental Blasters without relying on confusion, but if you can prove me wrong, go for it.

Actually, given the fact that Dominators are declared damage dealers by the devs, have comparable damage modifiers, and can choose the best offense from two different powersets without most of the problems blasters do in generating hybrid melee/ranged offense, the burden of proof is on the people who want to claim Dominators *aren't* damage dealers for the purposes of game balance, and given devs statements that declare them to be such the burden of proof is very high.

Moreover, my own Energy blaster with close to 200% recharge cannot reach the maximum damage potential of the top end Archery Blaster, but I don't think that means I'm not a game-designated damage dealer.

In either case, you seem to be jumping between topics. I never said blasters mandatorilly needed to fight in melee. I said, in response to your questioning whether dominators are a valid damage dealing class or not, that dominators are explicitly designed to be effective damage dealers in melee and ranged combat, something blasters cannot claim. Which means its a bit nonsensical to question Dominator damage dealer credentials when they are, from a game design and dev position perspective, superior to Blaster credentials.

If I say birds are more qualified fliers than primates, one man on a jetpack doesn't contradict that statement.

I didn't realize they were classified as such- I didn't believe they were but you already established that was the case. It's not a matter of 'burden of proof' at this point- you seemed willing to objectively run some numbers, so I was curious as to what the results would be at the high end.
Personally when I think of high end play and Archetype balance, I feel that the best way to approach it across AT's is by taking the best combination with the best build per AT. Think of it like the playoffs in sports... The best team wins each division and goes on to compete with the others. So, it would be max potential Dom vs. max Blaster vs. max Brute, etc. Obviously the secondary question is how balanced the AT's are internally, and that's a separate issue which I've talked about a bit too.
No, but for Mental Blasters, Melee play is something that I advocate, hopefully for obvious reasons. Sorry for the confusion.
Are you arguing versatility vs. functionality? I'm talking about max potential, not versatility- Versatility seems way too subjective of a subject imo because there's really no conceivable way to quantify it. I think the ultimate comparison should be gauged by contribution- Can a Blaster or Dominator deal more damage is the first question. The second question is how much of the rewards will be earned in case of the Dom, and whether Dom's relying on confusion can be so much more efficient that they make up the reward rate gap. The third question is how well the former survives vs. the latter- Obviously, you can't kill stuff if you're dead, so that's important.

If the guy on the jetpack is faster, and we're gauging max potential flying speed, I say the human wins.

I hate absolute statements like that. But there are peculiarities that are noteworthy in Dominators. They have stronger snipes than Blasters, not just in scale terms but also in pure damage point terms, even accounting for the higher blaster damage scale. Powers like total focus seem oddly harder hitting and possess higher DPA than Blaster versions (even with the associated increase in recharge, this is a significant advantage).

Conversely, I can think of no serious example of a case where a Dominator power was made weaker, or a blaster power made stronger, to make blasters deliberately superior to dominators in any way. The presumption historically seems to have been that dominators need help to be effective damage dealers, and by definition they cannot encroach upon blasters because both lay equal claim to the same territory: ranged and melee offense.

Its just that Dominators just happen to also have a second career.

That doesn't mean all Dominators out damage all Blasters: that's highly unlikely even for competent builds on both sides. But its almost certainly true that all Dominators are vastly more survivable than all Blasters piloted by any mammal that's awake, and average Dominator damage is probably very close to average Blaster damage just because the numbers make it almost impossible for anything else to be true.

No, I was discussing the qualifications for Dominators to be classified as damage dealers at all, and in that post I'm discussing my discussion on the qualification for Dominators to be classified as damage dealers at all. Which means I am now discussing my discussion about my discussion on the qualifications for Dominators to be classified as damage dealers at all.

Let me revise my statement:

"If we compare the best Blaster combinations to the best Dominator Combinations, the Blaster does not do anything the Dominator can't do, better or at least on equal ground, or slightly less in terms of damage. Maybe. Arguable. And then there are still things the Dominator can do the blaster cannot do."

While it is still absolute, it is absolute only at the very peak. I do think we can agree that at peak levels, there really is no place for Blasters, at this moment, against Dominators. At least, not one I see.

There is, I think, ONE thing that a Blaster can do that a Dominator can't and that is use a nuke. While there are arguments for and against nukes they are a viable means fo killing most of a spawn and not something that Dominators have access to.

That seems a bit specific: I wouldn't claim one thing Dominators can do that Blasters can't is use Domination. I do claim they have access to a significant amount of mez protection, which is a more general benefit that Blasters theoretically have a shot at equaling (Scrappers can do better without Domination itself, for example).

We need to carefully define what the nukes actually do. In the case of Nova, you could claim it kills most of a spawn composed of minions and Lts if its buffed enough in about three seconds. But that's not a fair assessment, because it crashes. It actually kills those things in three seconds out of the twenty three seconds the power imposes on you. And I think dominators are capable of killing a similar sized spawn in a similar amount of time, just with more button pushes.

Or you could claim that the nuke allows a blaster to burn a bunch of inspirations to blast a large group of targets and then recover relatively quickly with those inspirations. But then that has to be compared to what a dominator could do with those same inspirations and its own set of tools.

I got that part, but I was inferring your perspective about the Dom/Blaster comparison in hopes of getting some further insight out of you. You've successfully confirmed a point that I wasn't basing any solid argument off of disagreeing with.

This is what I was asking Arcana to compare as I feel like she would be a great medium for this debate.

I personally believe that Dominators can only compete with Blasters in terms of damage output (once again, to clarify, I mean an optimally built high end Dom v. high end Blaster) when it comes to both ST and AOE damage, by relying on confusion. The followup statement to that is I believe that confusion damage's rewards will suffer from enough of a decrease that, even if the Dom can compare AOE/ST DPS, the lowered rewards will be enough of a detriment that the Blaster is still earning more.

I will give the nod to Dom's in survivability for this hypothesis, because I'd be silly not to, but I'd also argue that any gap in survivability is ultimately irrelevant at the high end- I believe that if Arcana is willing to look at 54x8 survivability with attention to killing speed, both will be able to survive, thus cancelling each other out. Damage output would be the only remaining point of contention in terms of primary function, and at that I believe the Blaster wins.

I disagree. Unless we assume all Blasters are Archery (IE: Rain of Arrows), Dominators are more than likley going Fire or Ice Mastery. If they don't, fair enough.

I would say Dominators can easily rival most Non-Archery (and even then Plant Control arguably BEATS Archery. Arguably. We've had this debate before, so not again.) sets in AoE damage as long as they went Fire or Ice Mastery. Single Target I feel is always going to be matched as long as the Dominator can leverage the ATE Proc. Especially if they went either Fire Control or Dark Assault.

But it's really no surprise Dominators can do the majority of Blaster jobs, better.

It would be simpler to ask: one thing I'm not known for is being particularly secretive with my opinions when prompted. Or when not prompted. Or when you don't really care at all. Or if you're even still alive.

Whether Dominators are more versatile, or equally damaging, are valid discussions in their own right (1 - they are, 2 - at least on average I believe they are close) they are not essential to the more salient point that if you're going to compare blaster survivability - average survivability, peak survivability - with its damage dealing peers, then dominators have to be factored in as one of those peers.

And Dominators are a very serious fly in the ointment, because they push the discussion into a corner. You can claim Blasters have an unambiguous ranged advantage over Scrappers, Brutes, and Stalkers. You can claim they have at least numerical advantages over Corruptors. But when you get to Dominators, you run into an archetype that has a legitimate level of melee offense, a legitimate level of ranged offense, equal or superior access to defensive build opportunities, similar offensive modifier numbers, and massive offensive control. You lose the ability to point to obvious disqualifiers: Dominators take the fight right up to Blasters' front door. That makes the balance discussion very interesting: all the easy outs disappear.

What's interesting to me is that every obvious advantage Dominators have is so obvious it doesn't take a calculator to prove the advantage exists. They have mez protection. They have high control. They get endurance with domination cycles. These are all things blasters straight up don't have in any comparable sense. But to prove blasters have a *strong* material advantage over them in any compensating area *does* require massive calculations and detailed arguments that are not unambiguous, and readily debatable.

Its easy to prove Dominators beat Blasters in at least some areas. No one has yet proved Blasters beat Dominators *unequivocally* at anything of major consequence. Even if they ultimately do, that still seems to be wrong to me. It shouldn't be that hard to prove Blasters have something they are the best at.

I believe that not only should every archetype be the best at something, but it should be obviously the best at something, even if its debatable that the something is something a particular player finds interesting personally. I think its definitely true that regardless of whether blasters are the best at anything, they aren't obviously so.

No offense, Reppu- I know we've had our disagreements. I think we've had enough of conjecture and both of our own personal bias about this. I believe it would be most logical to let Arcana run max survival vs. max damage analysis and we could take our disagreements from there. I know you're proficient in napkin math but I just trust her results more, and I think it'd be best to have this conversation on more objective ground.

Actually, something I suggested to another player was that max anything might not be the best high end analysis target. The best high end analysis target might in fact be a simulacrum of a high end spawn. Theoretically speaking, the actual amount of time it takes to defeat a spawn of, say, two bosses, five Lts, and ten minions would be a way to normalize single target and AoE damage - you would not get credit for more AoE than necessary, or for that matter more single target than necessary. Likewise, how long you can tank that spawn or how high in level you could still tank such a spawn indefinitely would also be more interesting metrics than pure dps ones.

But that would be involved to say the least.

I think that you are falling victim to your own preconceived notions here, to be honest. I believe you are trying to cover so many grounds with your argument that ultimately all add up to the same thing. If the primary function of both Blasters and Dominators is dealing damage, which is better? I believe that the best way to discuss that is by taking ideal sets on both counts and gauging which has superior damage output. I believe that Blasters would win. Even if we take two examples for each and compare the min/max'd optimal ST sets, and then compare the min/max'd optimal AOE sets. I believe that Blasters will come out on top in both scenarios, sans confusion.

Yes, Dominators have more inherent tools to survive, but all of those tools are at least somewhat trivialized when it comes to high end play. Clarion provides status protection, and 32.5% defense to all positions does enough to mitigate mez. And yes, sure. Dominators can run Destinies besides Clarion- But so can any Blaster with a proactive nature and a break free macro. You are dealing in such a way that your approach to the analysis is theoretical to a point that it is potentially irrelevant to actual in-game experience.

I would love it if you could find a way to adjust your reasoning and only consider a certain set of agreed upon high end scenarios. I just don't think that maximum sustainable DPS is the most relevant measure of survivability, and with Incarnates, I don't think status protection is much of an issue. I also don't think that modifiers matter as much when you consider the powers available- Yes, Rain of Arrows and Blaze are both a big deal.

The problem is that that is impossible to do fairly. What's the equivalent to a Fire/Psi Dominator. Fire/Mental Blaster? One is going to have imps. So you can't just do a straight up simple calculation: you have to do an in-depth analysis.

But if you believe its possible to easily prove Blasters always or generally come out on top, the most logical way to prove it is proof by example. Simply produce a proof that they always do, and you will simultaneously prove that such a proof exists. Conversely, if you can't, while that doesn't prove no such proof exists, it does prove its not trivial to produce.