Crashless Nukes WOOOOOTTT!!!

Not atm, but Synapse said that would be the next logical step to fixing crashing powers.

(Power boost + Tactics + kismet) -> (build up + kismet) = permanent 22%+

You can theoretically just have Power boost+ tactics + kismet and 300% recharge in power boost and have permanent fast snipe. But seeing as you have build up you only need Powerboost and build up on a 25 second recharge (with allowances for cast times)

Not difficult at all and for your trouble you get gigantic AoEs and the best single target damage.

Regarding fire, It's showing exactly how crazy /energy manipulation is going to be. You have blaze, blazing bolt, Fire ball repeat as an attack chain. You have aim in addition to build up so you don't need as much recharge in power boost to have your permanent snipe. With the new conserve power its not difficult use fire ball as a single target attack.

ONLY 300% rech. Only. I said the same if the blaster thread..talking best conditions is totally fine..but Id love to see teh % of AR users who have 300% rech. Nevermind the people playing the toon..you know..before 50..

Just say no to drugs son.

I guess I missed this one?

I hope that you are wrong as well haha. *crosses fingers*

Part of the change to the support sets is conserve power is becoming some sort of energize clone. Can be permed and gives a large regeneration buff.

I am really surprised people have been going ape over the changes to devices when energy manipulation really is the break away winner. Conserve power is even more valuable because of the new nukes. Nothing like having an extra free 120% end reduction for powers that cost 27 end.

It seems highly unlikely the end reduction in Energize will remain that high. I fully expect that value to drop to 60%, just like every other Conserve Power to Energize change has done. That is still very good, of course.

It is possible the value may end up lower than 60%, since the recharge is going to be lower than the standard 2 minutes of Energize.

Probably because managing all of those clicks is going to be more annoying than simply running Targeting Drone. Also, Energy Manipulation was always considered among the best Blaster Secondaries (damning with faint praise, I know) -- and so the perceived improvement that EM is slated to get in I-24 is less impressive than the perceived improvement to Devices, which has been roundly derided for several years.

Personally, I think Mental's the big loser in I-24, given what I've heard as of this moment. Drain Psyche is too good for niche builds and play styles, but in comparison with the new survivability clicks in other sets, Drain Psyche will be too weak for everyone else, post I-24. It seems backwards for the developers to preserve DP's current mechanics for the sake of the former group and at the expense of the latter.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Probably so. Even at 60% I expect it will be trouncing drain psyche for everyone except people spending all their combat time in melee

Oh, very cool. I pretty much couldn't care less about the Snipe change (my Blaster's Sonic/EM), but that's excellent news right there.

EDIT: Hm...so then, should Power Boost affect the Regen?

I couldn't agree more with this. It's amazing that they have decided to cater to munchkin builds that need a customized play setting to work while ignoring the people that took mental to round out their ranged aoes, or for the immob or any of its other features.

We can still hope they fix Drain Psyche and maybe even fix things like WoC; wouldn't that be nice at a 15 foot radius?

I've been saying Energy looks to be the overall winner in I24 buffs from the beginning, but I don't think the gap is as large as you think it is. For one thing, the conserve power effect in Energy is going to be partially offset by recovery buffs in the sustain toggles. For example, Field Operative was showing effectively +92% recovery in the stream demo (1.53%/sec recovery). That's not *quite* as good as a very strong conserve power (although we don't know the Energize numbers yet) but its really really good: even if that's a slotted number its twice as strong as slotted stamina.

The reason they are called sustain powers is that Arbiter Hawk wanted Blasters to still be vulnerable to bursts of damage, but outside of that he wanted them to be the energizer bunny: go and go and go.

they decided to cater to people who like mental rather than cater to the people who do not like it.

you can use disparaging terms like munchkin to try and dehumanize other players to help you feel like they are not important, but that just shows the weakness of your position.

This isn't a matter of partisanship; it's a matter of mechanics. Drain Psyche is a short-duration regeneration buff that scales with spawn size and requires melee range to activate. By definition, DP is a heavily context-dependent power, given that it appears on an AT whose best defense, up til this point, was supposed to be range.

What is the weakness of regeneration as a mitigation mechanism? Time, or if you prefer, damage spikes; regeneration needs time to work. What is it that DP doesn't give you, unless you have near-absurd amounts of IO-derived recharge bonuses? Time -- or more accurately, consistent uptime. The fact that Drain Psyche scales to crazy levels of regen at the high end can compensate for that short-coming, but it is an inherent short-coming in the power, a short-coming that is in direct opposition to Arbiter Hawk's stated intentions vis-a-vis his proposed Blaster survivability buffs in I-24 (see Arcanaville previous post, quoted below).

The developers have already stated that DP's peak values are too high. The developers have also implicitly acknowledged that Blasters deserve an across the board survivability buff, a survivability buff that is consistently available -- and by extension, a survivability buff that is (largely) context or playstyle-independent. In other words, Drain Psyche was already broken at the high end; after I-24, it'll also be broken on the opposite end of the spectrum and for every point in between.

You can talk all you like about how the developers are catering to the players who "like the way Mental works," but the entire AT is undergoing a paradigm shift in I-24. It was fine that DP was heavily situational, of very little consistent use to ranged Blasters, back before every other Blaster Secondary had a consistently available defensive power -- but now the game is changed.

I'm not asking the developers to screw a certain segment of the Mental Blaster player base arbitrarily. This isn't the my-preference-versus-yours game. I'm just asking the developers to follow through on what they've said, both about Drain Psyche's existing design, and about the proposed design of the post-I-24 Blaster in general. Your personal preferences are irrelevant.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Fixed that for you.

Just a heads up for you, before you accuse people of not liking something you should actually have a few facts. In my case I have 3 /mental blasters all fully accoladed and IOed out to the gills. I didn't make that effort because I dislike mental.

Munchkin is an incredibly accurate description of builds that are designed to do little more than fight smash lethal enemies with no defense debuffs or mezes in the AE.

It hardly dehumanizes the players because it says nothing about them, except the fact they can use an optimized build.


Really this is about the devs telling everyone that rolled an AR/Ment, ice ment, etc because they wanted the immob or the cone, or world of confusion to get the extra defense, "TAKE A HIKE YOU SHOULDN'T GET THE SUSTAIN EVERYONE ELSE IS GETTING UNLESS YOU CHANGE YOUR PLAYSTYLE". Heck not even fire is being told you have to blap.

I think that once the changes actually hit beta, a compromise can be made. Arbiter Hawk is not unreasonable about that, and I am willing to let the Drain Psyche issue drop until we actually have a better idea what everyone is actually getting, and that survives the first beta balance pass.

I accept the fact that not everyone uses Drain Psyche in a way that makes its net results overpowered, and that min/maxers have invested a lot in optimizing the power. My main complaint about DP is in fact that it has these two regimes of performance. But I honestly don't think DP will remain in its current configuration for very long once the sustain powers arrive. Given the devs reluctance to nerf it, there are still alternatives that would allow DP to retain its top end power while granting lower performance players most or all of the sustain benefits everyone else is getting. I can think of several ways to do that, but I don't know how useful it is to expend too much energy debating them in a vacuum.

We really need to see how the clicks work in I24: Energize, Force of Thunder, and Touch of Beyond. How they are balanced relative to stacking and recharge is critical to any real discussion about what happens to DP in the future.

All of that is fair. It's not my intention to argue for any specific changes to Drain Psyche; I just wanted to toss in my 2 cents, to make it clear that there's at least one more Mental player who isn't married to the old Drain Psyche, who won't whine if the power's peak performance is reduced in return for more consistent performance at the low end -- preferably a low end that doesn't require you to close to melee range.

If, in other words, the developers believe that a nerf to best-case DP isn't worth the outcry from so-called min/maxers, I want the devs to understand that although those so-called min/maxers may be most vocal, they aren't the only faction with a strong opinion on the matter.

I also don't subscribe to the notion that high-end Mental builds must take full advantage of DP, for a host of reasons that probably aren't relevant to the topic at hand. Suffice to say that there are many ways to skin a cat, and the min/maxy approach of building a strength and then playing to it isn't necessarily better than investing billions to smooth a build's performance curve, as much as possible without undue sacrifice, across the full spectrum of the game's content. And given the distribution of available IO DEF bonuses combined with the layout of Blaster Ancillary pools, I don't believe it's unambiguously true that building around Drain Psyche is the best way to smooth a Mental Blaster's performance curve.

None of the above is directed at you, by the way; I'm just noting for the room, if you will, that the presumed build superiority of current-DP proponents isn't a given. I've been around here long enough that the ability to farm doesn't impress me. I suspect a lot of power gamers are with me on that. If you'll forgive my saying so, I suspect you're with me on that.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

This whole thing is confined to the blaster AT yes.
Please leave my dom alone.

Becoming the game's best farmer means the same thing to me as becoming its most accurate superjumper. I would be impressed by the effort put into achieving that goal, but at the end of the day its more of a curiosity than anything else.

So my jumping across Steel Canyon, using just Combat Jumping and Sprint, without ever touching the ground game is nothing more than a curiosity!

Curses, I thought I'd get bonuses for it.