So how do blasters feel about nukes going from scale 6.0 dmg to scale 4.0?

Melee classes effectively having the same ranged and melee modifier is arguably somewhat silly, but it's not very comparable to Rain powers. Brutes using their .75 melee mod rather than their .5 ranged mod is kinda weird, but they still don't get to use some other AT's much higher modifier instead of their own.

That's more a function of melees not being given sensible ranged modifiers in the first place. Scrappers should have a 1.0 ranged modifier like Blasters have a 1.0 melee modifier. Stalkers should be around .85-.9, Brutes and Tankers at about .65-.7.

Setting the melees' ranged modifier at .5 ensured that they could never use that modifier lest players ignore the power with it. I suspect that this was part of their general overvaluing of ranged attacks.

Those modifiers were sensible, they encapsulated the fact that melee archetypes were not even supposed to get ranged attacks, and when an exception occurred they were supposed to do a lot less damage.

Setting it that way, and then ignoring it, was one of the original sins that melee perpetrated on ranged archetypes, and one they might still one day regret.

Yep. If you want melee classes to do decent ranged damage for their handful of ranged attacks (a not unreasonable request) then give them decent ranged damage modifiers and balance any ranged attacks that they do get around that. Don't use a work around.

Since people seem unduly curious about what things annoy me with how the power system is set up here is a partial list to save people from needing to ask me "does this annoy you?"

• There is no Ranged_Hold attribute and ranged holds use a horrible mix of Ranged_Stun, Ranged_Immobilize and Ranged_Ones with what appears to be complete randomness.
• Every AT has the same values for Ranged_Stun and Ranged_Immobilize except for Masterminds and Corruptors (which exacerbates the previous problem for those two ATs). Also Masterminds for some bizarre reason have Defender level Ranged_Stun but only Blaster/Corruptor level Ranged_Immobilize
• Single target mezzes for non-control ATs are horribly inconsistent.
• Several Epic Pools and Patron Power Pools share powers but have them implemented differently (examples: Charged Armor and Soul Drain).
• The damage done by Detonator varies WILDLY between the human-pet sets (Thugs, Mercs and Ninjas) and the non-human pet sets (everything else).
• Blasters have the worst self To Hit buffs.

Ok, that's all I can think of right now. I'll update if I think of more.

That one's always irritated me too - most of the others I never actually noticed. But it always seemed odd that Blasters had their ability to apply one of the self buffs most critical to dealing damage crippled out of fear that they might use Tactics effectively. Or am I missing something and Tactics is not actually the only to-hit buff Blasters can use that is not self-only?

This is exactly what I meant. Also they did themselves no favors when they gave melee toons Fireball with a 32 second recharge instead of a 16 second recharge. They should have left the recharge where it belonged at 16 seconds and let the ranged damage modifier be the limiter instead of deciding to use the melee modifier for ranged attacks (duh moment there) and then doubling the recharge instead.

The only reason I could see for such a "we aren't going to follow our own rules" change "might" be that having to cast 2, 16 second recharge fireballs at 1/2 damage instead of 1, 32 second recharge fireball at full damage was that they didn't want melee toons to burn the massive amount of endurance required to cast it twice. Which really should have been another limiter they used rather than ignored.

Actually Tactics uses a different attribute than Aim, Build Up and Targeting Drone so it would be perfectly possible to increase the To Hit Buff that Blaster's get from Aim and Build Up without buffing their ability to use Tactics (although if this were done I think that it might be necessary to "nerf" Targeting Drone so that it retains the same final To Hit Buff value).

In general Epic powers have twice the recharge and twice the endurance cost of Primary/Secondary powers. That being said it is applied somewhat inconsistently and speaking for myself I find that they don't apply it to powers that really should get it (such as Sleet only getting a 50% recharge increase) and do apply it to powers where it isn't really needed (such as the single target holds in epic pools which are balanced around the single target mezzes in blast sets rather than control sets anyway and then have their recharge doubled).

Frankly I think that the Epic pools in general could really use a good balance pass. Nerf a few powers that are a bit to strong, buff the ones that are a bit weak and reconcile the inconsistencies in cases where APPs and PPPs have the same power (except maybe Soul Drain, I can accept that one being balanced based on the tier it's in).

aaaaaagggggghhhhhhh!!!!!

EDIT: Turns out these forums will change your post to lowercase letters if your entire post is in caps.

A lot of -normal- Mastermind blasts do that too.

Yea, but those are supposed to only be useful early on, whereas you can only get the epic blasts at 35, at which point they're useless.