What do you think of Water Blast?

Sylvia is a B no matter what you're slinging at her. Need that -regen.

Also, how many "Tidal Forces" chases have gotten you killed yet? I've died about 5 times, and I'd say that was all due to "I GOTTA GET MAX DAMAGE!" or "Look at that group of Malta over there. They're so smug with their fancy hats... I'm about to ruin their day: Whirlpool! Hydro Blast! Water Bu... Oh, stunned. Oh, dead. Oh man, team, that ambush - It came out of nowhere!"

Had a much slower day yesterday... Just soloed a couple of tips.

Now I see where people are saying Water Blast isn't that great for single-target damage. The disappointment certainly cut my night short by a bit.

I love water powers. I have 8 water toons@ this makes my 9th. (@water muse )

That being said, I have some biased towards the powers, but I went water/mind blaster and she is rocking. I really wanted to do /ice, but I already have an ice/ice blaster. (my only other one) After many hours of playing yesterday I got her to lvl 22. Drain psyche and dehydrate work really well together. The -regen from drain psyche helps a lot for the single targets and the endurance boost is nice too. Timing dehydrate and knowing when to go for the 50% boost is important. Has me watching my health on the blaster more than I ever have. (esp since we drop like flies) I'm just doing generic slotting for the baby lvls and it is really helping me stay alive. (so is the knockdown)

overall, it's nice! with /ice as my epic I think she will be prety survivable, while still providing quite a bit of damage...but who knows...i'm biased!

Once I have the 800 points to pick up the power I grab Water Blasting. One question I have is how well does it work with /Ice as a secondary power set?

I chose to roll with a Water/Cold Corr and it's decent. The ST damage needs some love. I'll be rolling a Fire/Time to compare or maybe wait for Nature.

i am now 50 +3 on my water blaster and i can say that it is quite fun. my main is a fire/fire blaster so i am quite spoiled by that. but water is quite fun. you have to play it alittle different, but still fun none the less. it does kd foes which is nice, and yes even whirlpool dmg output is also quite nice, which i didnt think it would be, i highly recommend it. i did water/ice, i was gonna go water/fire, but wanted something different. so instead of dropping burn i drop ice patch which helps alot in incarnate trials with the escaping prisioners. im not sure why were into the whole ,click this power to get this power to do more thing, but when followed it does work nice.

Even though I don't like Water, that's only because the buggy Tidal Power stacking annoys me. It's perfectly good at what it does, which is AoE, crowd control, and great damage typing. If I could hypnotize myself into not seeing any of the Tidal Power fluff and just play it as a straight non-combo set, I'd probably play it.

I imagine he's referring to how tidal power stacks can end up expiring at unexpected times because of the slightly odd way they were implemented.

A stack of tidal power has a strictly set duration. The problem comes in that an old stack cannot be 'refreshed' by a newer one and that the maximum number of stacks you can *have* is equal to the maximum number of stacks you can *benefit* from. Between these two facts, you can get a situation where you drop below 3 stacks even though you just got finished using 3 stack-builders.

Imagine you build a stack of tidal power, but then have to spend a number of seconds using powers from pools or your secondary, before restarting to the beginning of your attack chain and using three more tidal builders plus a finisher. Since you already had one stack, only the first two of the builders actually build stacks - the third does nothing since you already have 3. However, one of those stacks is old and about to expire, so if the timing works out wrong you can suddenly drop to 2 stacks just before your finisher goes off, even though you just got through using three builders. (Alternatively, replace 'use three builders' with 'hit tidal power' and you can get the same results.)

It's not really a 'bug', per se, but it *is* an odd quirk of design that can produce counterintuitive results. Unfortunately it's apparently not possible to fix within the limitations of the power system and tidal power mechanic as designed. This was brought up in beta, and Synapse did lengthen the duration of an individual tidal power stack in an attempt to mitigate the issue. This did make the problem come up less frequently, but it's still an occasional annoyance.

Hard to beat, yes. But not impossible. Fire Ball - RoF - Fire Breath - Fire Ball is 384.14 average damage, base. To compare the directly analogous chain, though, Water Burst - Whirlpool - Steam Spray - Water Burst is 376.57 damage if you have zero Tidal Power for the first shot, and 390.64 if you have 3 Tidal Power. The Fire chain takes 7.524s, the Water chain takes 8.976s. And it's also worth mentioning that Steam Spray has a significantly larger area than Fire Breath. Also, although it doesn't show in calculations, the knockdown in Water Burst helps prevent enemies from running out of the Whirlpool.

They're pretty close in terms of AoE power before even counting Geyser at all. Once you add in a full extra spawn wiped out every ~60s, Water is quite clearly ahead. i24 will narrow this gap considerably, of course, when Inferno no longer crashes (and Water's healing advantage will also be diluted by the addition of Sustain powers), but for now, in my direct in-game experience, Water has even better AoE damage than Fire does.