nooblike help for a new blaster.

so, though i have been playing for years, and have a handful of 50's, and consider myself pretty good at this game, i have never been able to get a blaster past the early 20's.

i most play melee, but i do play defs and cors, and i have always had good survivability. i need some insight to blaster power sets that could help emulate this as best as possible.

i understand that the primary powerset's secondary ability can help, but for concept reasons i have limited it to Rad, Nrg, Psi(though i hear bad things about blaster psi), and maybe sonic. with those options the only active help i can get from the primary side is Nrg's KB, which i have become pretty adept at over the years(not screwing up team play by utilizing positioning and angles). so it's the secondaries that will be doing the lions share of saving my clueless rearend. so what would the blaster community recommend for the biggest safety net type of secondary?

You're sort of asking the wrong question (at least this month). "How can I live longer on a Blaster" is like "How can I kill faster on an Empath".

Having said that: Blaster secondaries have a remarkably sparse set of tools worth using.
* Build Up or equivalent
* High powered attacks, usually melee/single target but sometimes not
* Single-target mitigators
* A few actual mitigators that you can use to live longer against the whole spawn.

I'm going to suggest three: Ice, Mental and Energy.

ICE: IMO best for surviving the fight, period. The gem of this set is Shiver, in my opinion. If you survive the alpha, you will live two to three times longer than with any other set, because it's got THAT much -Rech in it. It also has -RunSpeed, so you may never get melee'd at all if you don't want to. (That's like a second alpha, with higher damage...) It's a ridiculous enormous cone, so you may aggro people you can barely see, but it's totally worth it. Ice also has solid melee/singletarget damage, Ice Patch, and a melee hold . The only slight problem is that active mitigation takes up time, and for a typical blaster your half-life is like six seconds.

MENTAL: A latecomer set, so better designed. Has an actual ranged cone, so if you can survive for three attacks you can drop big batches of minions with nearly any primary. That cone *also* has a very good -recharge component, which literally translates into longer life in combat. It has Drain Psyche, which is potentially ridiculously good. I have never been able to get it to work that well, but top performers do crazy things with it. Either of those powers would make it a top performer in my book. Oh, and it's got a big PBAOE hitter. Minuses: not a lot of single target melee damage.

ENERGY: If a Blaster is "damage with damage on top", /Energy is the classic "Damage on top". Two fast, very hard hitting melee single target attacks that also have a good chance of stun are the core of this power set. (Elec has the same attacks but sleep; MUCH worse defensively, even if I do think it's prettier.) It has perma-able Boost Range, so you can hover hundreds of feet in the air and actually outrange some enemies for once. (Range is a defense, for this and only this set.)

The main plus for Energy, to me, is "I have more big hitter attacks than some Scrappers have attacks, period." If you take the risk of running into melee, which I do frequently, you can inflict terrible damage in about a second and a half and then fire brutal ranged attacks on the way out. And anything that survives might be too stunned to shoot.

Oh, and Sonic primary has a spectacular AOE sleep that lasts a lifetime, if you don't mind bopping badguys on the head individually.

I've just levelled an En/En to 50 and +3'd it because it is sooo much fun.

I've found the mitigation from KB is great help solo, and on teams, careful placement of blasts to blow stuff back into the melee is not so hated.

Then if anything gets close, it gets the old 1-2 from those Energy Melee punches.

I built for speed, relying on T1 & T2 blasts, Torrent and Explosive blast with Energy Punch & Bone Smasher for melee. Have 4 Force Feedback procs in the build helps too.

Open with BU, Torrent & Ex Blast, then finish off by chaining power Bolt & Blast on the slivers of health the baddies have left. Doesn't matter if I get mezzed, because I can still use 'em both.

It's close to becoming my favourite toon.

-H

Fulmens did a good job covering the secondaries.

But contrary to what you think, a primary can play a big role in survivability. Well, one primary can - sonic. It's a very safe playstyle, as you simply sleep the entire spawn and then take out everything one by one. It's not my idea of fun, as I like to kill stuff faster with AoE's. But if you're ok with it, sonic can be extremely safe.

Blaster psi is not bad, but there is an exception - mobs with high psi res. When you run into them, it's very irritating, because for the most part, mobs either have no psi res, or extremely high psi res. But other than that, it's a good damage set.

I am against energy. It can be fun solo, but on teams, having to constantly worry about the KB really takes away from your effectiveness.

Rad's biggest strength is the ability to slot a lot of procs, including the achilles heel -res in all attacks. That can add quite a lot of damage for both you and your teammates and almost make it feel like a sonic blaster (with better AoE but no sirens song).

for survivability solo the best is sonic with its sleep. Sleep everyone, pick one foe and defeat them, work your way down.

ice is maybe next with its holds.

energy is a good solo secondary, especially if you can get close

sonic/energy and ice/energy are both fairly survivable with good damage

To clarify with energy, here's how it helps (at least with my limited experience with fire/energy)

1. Melee attacks all do some kind of mitigation (1st tier does very reliable knockback, 2nd and third tier have stunning effects, although not reliably, capstone does both stun and knockback. There is also a low damage, reliable stun). Something annoying gets close to me, I punch it and it leaves me alone for a while. I just use the first and third tier attacks myself, but tastes vary.

2. Build up starting from level 4 = bigger alpha strike = less live enemies to hit you back.

3. Power boost multiplies the effect of any defense you have briefly, giving you an "oh crap" button

4. Boost range can be made permanent, allowing you to start the fight from a lot farther away when terrain permits, plus greatly improving your ability to hit everything with your cone attack in the early going.

5. Conserve power lets you pretty much do whatever you want without having to worry about the blue bar for a few minutes. This usually translates into "you get to keep killing things that might have hurt you because you ran out of end", or keep more defensive toggles up.

This is the kind of thing you get with Blasters. You don't tend to get +resist, +def or healing (or if you do, you get maybe 1-2 powers along those lines). What you get is powers that add some control, often melee range powers. (eg, /fire gets a hold as its tier 1 power, several "it sucks to be near you" melee and pbaoe damage powers, a "damage people and get endurance" power and a "fear/slow/avoid" pbaoe toggle)

This is probably why it is so difficult to defense cap a blaster, is the devs assumed that these secondary sets would have enough mitigation that they wouldn't need softcapped defenses or resistances. This is similar to why the TacOps Lt Minion (Mercenaries) is considered inferior to the Thugs or Robots Lt, which provide straight up +defense modifiers to henchmen instead of random stuns/webs/etc.

Most people who play this game seem to prefer things that give +defense to say, an aura that causes fear. This is likely because in the game, +defense and +resist not only work predictably, they work better to keep damage off you, especially if you ratchet up the numbers and power of opponents.

Has anyone mentioned that in issue 24 all blasters apart from /mental, which does not need assistance, will be vastly more survivable? Cause they will. I made a beam/dev in anticipation of the next issue. No, I'm not being sarcastic.

The basic thinking is thus: if cloaking device gives ~200% regen and some quantity of recovery, it's really good. I don't see how that could be found to be unbalanced in the general case in comparison with the other sustain powers in the beta, thus it is likely to survive testing. Moreover, Hawk's reports of the solidity of the tohit mechanic based on internal testing is the most confidence I think I've ever seen the devs express in any single balance change before setting it loose for open testing. Between all that and the nebulous threat of time bomb buffs, what's not to like?