so what is the revised, revised view of blaster primaries i24?

If we use cloaking device as the baseline, then it would be reasonable to think that it would be getting considerably less. I don't consider this a prediction because it is pretty clear that the buffs to the blast sets/blaster secondaries aren't being done all that well.



To truly perma yes, to get up to 90% + levels of availability not so much. Just looking at my Ar/energy/mace I get +6% def to everything, and roughly 14% def to s/l when it is active.

Boost range is a gem for those that leverage it. Prior to I24 I used to give mental the edge over /Energy because it had a cone with good range and the only health/endurance recovery power available for blasters. Energy always made short cones into long cones but didn't have a health/recovery power.

Multiples ? I was only thinking in the range of 25% to 50% but on a very steady and consistent basis. Perma fast snipe, end management to run the snipe chains, best use of the nuke changes. In the cases of devices or possibly /mental it might very well be more than 100% as effective.

I am curious why you think that. /Dev and /Ice are the only two secondaries that lacked end management; since /Dev is getting some added, it seems reasonable that /Ice would get a similar amount.

You could be right, but I am curious what makes you think /Ice is going to get considerably less, since I see no obvious reason it should.

I am kind of sad that /Fire and /Dark are going to be left with the long recharge end management powers and I am sure I will lobby for a change (again).

You don't really need soul drain fully saturated to work but generally, it's a 'look at that sweet huddle' buff. You can use it when you want and more likely it won't be something you're waiting on to charge. Someone else can huddle them for you and it lasts for 2 spawns. If no one can herd for you, just pop some inspirations.

Also, dark has an AoE stun. While energy's synergy with stuns is there, dark can fill that good enough and offers alternatives if stuns isn't keeping you alive. Touch of fear is easy to stack and slotted, debuffs tohit by around 15%. Soon it will be castable from range and buff regen too.




Touch of fear works and doesn't really require stacking...just saying.

Setting aside the judgment of the changes announced to date, I don't think it would be reasonable to assume /Ice would be getting significantly less recovery. The intent is for the sustain powers to all provide very strong recovery, or in the case of energy endurance discount.

The overall intent is to make blasters the masters of sustained combat. Their vulnerability will be burst effects: burst damage and to a lesser extent mez. But any fight they can walk away from is going to be a good one, because they'll have the healing and recovery to face the next one at full or nearly full strength. And during combat the intent is to ensure that blasters can wield their full arsenal against the enemies at very high levels of activity in a sustained fashion.

Incidentally estimates suggest that if blaster energize has a similar endurance discount to melee energize and a similar endurance cost, its net endurance management effect when used perma would be comparable to a power that offers about 1%/sec of recovery which is in the ballpark of the recovery value of Field Operative.

Hopefully Drain Psyche will get nerfed at the edge-case high end, so that it can be buffed significantly for the general-case Blaster (low-to-mid-range builds with less recharge and DEF, and range-biased builds of all stripes).

Otherwise, the peak performance of a power that requires heavy IO investment and nearly full-time maintenance to exploit will have prevented Mental from receiving its due share of the I-24 Blaster buffs. It will have become a boutique set, the go-to choice for farmers but heavily sub-optimal for everyone else.

All of your bluster aside, you must realize that the AT isn't, nor should it be, balanced around multiple-billion-inf blapper builds. Regardless, I'm sure Arbiter Hawk will come to remember that even if you don't.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Do you have any idea how wrongheaded this post sounds to people who aren't you? Me, for instance?

Here is my issue with this goal. I have that already with Aid Self. While it is annoying to me that I feel compelled to take Aid Self on all my blaster builds, especially since the only animation for it is tech/science specific, it completely solves the issue of between fight health. If blasters can't leverage the coming buffs for substantial in fight mitigation then they really haven't gained anything except a moral victory for people who don't like Aid Self.

As for endurance management, blasters are the lightest in terms of using endurance. A buff to that is cool and all, but it won't make blasters more fun leveling. They just don't have enough in set toggles to need that much endurance recovery. I don't even notice endurance recovery until the forties when I have Tough, Weave, my Epic defense toggle, and maybe Manuevers if I built that way.

The reason /Energy is a beast is because Scorpion Shield plus Power Boost can pretty easily reach the soft cap, and even if Power Boost isn't perma it is up enough to absorb each alpha. Not only will that defense stave off CC, but it also means I don't have to waste animation time on mitigation tools (outside activating Power Boost as I approach a spawn) when I could be dealing more damage.

But I am in the minority in that I am not impressed with Drain Psyche. I understand it can be awesome if leveraged with high defense against specific groups while farming, but anything substantially less than soft cap (so you can survive the incoming damage from a group large enough to leverage the full effect) and the power just can't be leveraged to full effect. It's the kind of power I would spec into once I hit 47.

I am interested in in why you think toggles are what eats endurance. Attacks eat the most endurance and blasters are compelled to attack or die.

I am not claiming they don't spend endurance on attacks. Every DPS character is constantly attacking. That is the norm for this game. Blasters don't have more endurance cost than other DPS classes, and they have substantially less toggle costs. Solving their endurance issues is easier, at least for me, than for toggle hungry DPS classes.

Dark Pit should allow you to get quite a bit of use out Soul Drain.

Admittedly my Sonic/Dark has Siren's Song to work with too, so the routine is Amplify->Siren's Song->Dark Pit->move in->Soul Drain->hop out->Dreadful Wail, but even without Siren's Song you should be able to avoid attacks long enough to leveral Soul Drain. The problem is that Dark Pit leaves mobs moving towards wherever they were moving when you hit them. Still, you should be able to pick up quite a few.

No you are not in the minority...i too find it...kind of pathetic really....but also a bunch of players i have played with and play with actively....feel the same way.

Only the forum number crunchers think its really good....I personaly think they should actualy use the power...but thats just my opinion.

A lot of the forum crunchers who sing the praises of DP do actually use it. What you have to remember though is that they sing its praises when used with a really high end, top of the line Blaster build.

It is legitimately very good in that situation but it's a power that you really have to design your build around if you want to use it to good effect.

I feel the need to state for the record that this game is not composed of 1 second fights surrounded by one minute travel. I feel compelled to state this because almost everyone that comments on regeneration seems to believe it has no significant in-combat benefit. In a 30 second fight, the 1.5%/sec regeneration of I24 sustain powers will be almost as strong as popping two small greens. That's a huge benefit *in* combat, and it happens continuously with no activation cost.

Aid self is currently interruptible, and to gain the same benefit from it as from the regeneration in the typical sustain toggle in combat would require using it once every 25 seconds. That's about 4.5 seconds of idle time every 25 seconds when you cannot act due to Aid Self's cast time, which is a whopping 18% idle time when you can't attack.


I can run out of endurance at level four once I have three ranged attacks if at least one is an AoE. Certainly by level six when I can have four.

The only way to not notice the endurance costs of offense without having a very strong recovery power is frankly to be idle much of the time.


I'm aware of Scorpion Shield. Scorpion Shield has 10.5% defense base. Power Boost will boost that by 78.7% to about +8.3% higher defense. That's the incremental benefit of power boost on Scorpion Shield. If we throw in CJ and weave in there the total base defense is about 15.8%, and power boost is offering an additional 12.3% defense, which is substantial.

But lets compare to /Devices. Cloaking Device offers 1.75% defense (suppressed) or about 2.73% defense slotted. Smoke Grenade has a -4.9% tohit debuff slottable to about -7.6%. Against even con critters without tohit debuff resistance that's a total of 10.3% additional effective defense.

Energy's defensive benefit is slightly higher and is immune to resistances and combat modifiers. But it can't generally be up all the time. /Devices benefit is slightly lower and drops with resistances and combat modifiers, but its effectively up all the time with minimal effort.

I was using /Dev as the baseline for the combination or regeneration and recovery. Dev has the end management with the new cloaking device.

Well simple balance reasons. /Ice is hardly a bad secondary to begin it hardly needs a larger HP recovery/loss avoidance power than everyone else.

This is a really big problem with many of the changes. Endurance recovery/management powers that don't need enemies or can be left toggled on are significantly better than those that need enemies and require combat time to use.

I don't know if its deliberate but it seems like much of the changes are meant to upset people's apple carts and leave them dissatisfied with the blasters they already have.

Well if /Ice gets a much larger HP Recovery/keep tool and its get a similar recovery tool that implies a few possibilities, /Ice was thought to need more ,it is a bad balance decision or it was meant to mess with people.

I don't know how you arrived at that, here is what I have for my planned AR/EN in I24



This is running the snipe attack chain and using 59.6 % for the end reduction from energize and assuming energize has no cost to activate. The actual attack chain is a little faster than what I am using here so the benefits of end reduction are actually a little greater.

The situation is a very limited one. People that are using those highly optimized builds can have their play style broken by adding people to the team. If they are deprived of their insp flow they wind up with a much more restrained play style.

Or, as I mentioned when mentioning Absorb numbers, its because on average Absorb's efficiency is going to tend to be less than 100%, at least insofar as the devs believe (and its a reasonable belief) so that will tend to balance out. Where it will not balance out is in people who actually try to optimize their builds to leverage absorb. I assumed balancing with SO slotting, where the average blaster primary generates approximately 1.0 DS/sec and burns about 5 to 6 eps, with 0.333 end reduction on average and is in combat approximately 75% of the time within a mission. The in-combat ratio is significant when comparing recovery to discount because discount can only work during combat while recovery can continue to increase endurance during inter-combat travel. The more endurance you burn and the faster your offense is accelerated, the better discount looks relative to recovery. But there are other offsetting factors that complicate this comparison at higher end builds, such as the fact that there are incarnate powers that apply both +recovery strength and +end discount, both of which increase the benefit of recovery powers relative to discount powers (the latter by diluting discount). For example Musculature Radial would add at least 0.17 eps recovery to a blaster with +recovery sustain (it depends on whether the demonstrated blaster had sustain slotted or unslotted for recovery, if it was unslotted this would be closer to 0.33 eps).

A specific hitch at the high end is that while Spiritual Core might be the obvious Alpha choice for most Energy Manipulation blasters (assuming survival was being optimized) for Ice, say, Vigor might be the logical choice: it has more +heal strength than Spiritual and Absorb is fully enhanceable. Vigor Core also has significant endurance reduction. So the question is whether Ice with Vigor's discount and CE's +recovery ends up similar endurance management-wise, all other things being equal, to Energy's unenhanceable Energize discount.

If I understand the Absorb mechanic correctly its a pulsing virtual hit point shield. Every cycle you get a refresh of a fixed size hit point buffer. In the worst case that looks slightly superior to an equivalent fixed amount of regeneration per time.

It should be especially powerful for characters that have been hit with DOTs because they will be impacting the shield without causing an interrupt.

I see where you are coming from but the incarnate abilities tend to overwhelm non incarnate build problems. Personally I spend most of my time playing exemped below the incarnate levels. A fully incarnated blaster really doesn't need fixes, its just a different flavor of incarnate.

It can be significantly worse. The base absorb pulse is going to be 5% of blaster health refreshed every 3 seconds, enhanceable to about 10%.

Without stacked resistances many attacks hit for more than 10% of blaster health; those will eat up all the absorb and then hit the blaster's base health. On the next tick, the absorb shield will go back up but the damage done past the shield will only recovery at normal recovery rates, not the very high absorb rate. If you end a fight with half health, you'll start the next fight with a strong absorb shield and still about half health.

Regeneration can bring you back to full between fights in theory: it will certainly recover more than 5% health between fights normally. Absorb can't do better than refresh the shield.

So if you don't have resistances, the absorb can perform worse. In fact, you can kill a blaster dealing a lot less damage than the absorb shield can absorb in theory without doing so with a massive burst of damage. The key to leveraging Absorb is in making sure that each individual hit tends to deal less damage than the shield can absorb in that tick.

Since the tick interval is short - 3 seconds - there's a big difference between stacking high resistances on it and stacking high defense. High defense will make hits less frequent, but hit for full strength. In between those high hits absorb won't be helping to restore actual health. High resistance, on the other hand, keeps the hits coming frequently but reduces their individual impact. That can allow you to get more mileage out of absorb, by in effect by spreading the damage out among more ticks rather than concentrating it into a few ticks.

I am genuinely curious to see how the min/max meta game plays out between power boost/energize and frigid embrace.


At lower levels I think for most players the amount of recharge necessary to spit out enough high DPA attacks to radically increase endurance burn enough to make discount overwhelmingly better won't be available. Although discount will still be stronger than recovery for high AoE builds that obviously burn through endurance at a much higher rate.

Another factor that will make discount and energize in general not the unambiguous run away favorite is that toggles are immune to slows, while clicks can be reduced in effectiveness by slows. When it comes to the two sustain effects other than heals (+regen and +discount) in energize, while slows can reduce their effectiveness speed cannot improve them beyond making them perma - I believe Arbiter Hawk intends to make those effects non-stacking (the benefit to higher recharge will come from accelerating the heal in Energize, but not in stacking the regen or discount).

Note that I am not criticizing the proposed design, or using regeneration as a mitigation tool. I am talking about the goal of keeping Blasters going by giving them tools to manage out of combat recovery. I am not particularly excited by that specific design goal for blasters.

Why bring it up if I have no problem with regeneration as a mitigation tool? It is because when this goes live I would like to be examining the practical effect it has on combat mitigation rather than getting hung up on how great it is recovering between fights because blasters can already do that.

I don't use Aid Self for in combat healing. It has two uses for blasters, at least before defense stacks. First, it means I always go into a fight at full health. That one fact cuts down on defeats by a large margin. Second, when I do get into trouble I can kite out of line of sight and recover health quickly. That means I can often defeat the troublesome group because I can turn around and engage the train of enemies chasing me.

For defense based defense I find burst healing to be more useful than Regeneration. Don't get me wrong, on a high resist build or a situation where you have a lot of little attacks adding up regeneration is great. And I do find situations where strong regeneration is a great tool, even on blasters. Since defense also staves off CC, however, I tend to stack it in favor of resists.

Practically speaking, I have the DFB boost to endurance recovery up to level 22, and at 20 I grab the Miracle +Recovery and the Performance Shifter +Endurance shortly thereafter from tip missions and merits. Add in frankenslotting cheap IOs and endurance isn't an issue early on. Giving blasters endurance recovery is great, especially since I can build for alternate set bonuses later on, but it isn't a pressing issue I feel needs to be addressed. It's a great perk, but it isn't a tool that I envision will help blasters from faceplanting.

If there were not severe reductions in debuffs for fighting up level I'd agree with you. Smoke Grenade quickly loses effectiveness against harder opponents while straight defense is always effective.

Two more nice things about toggles: You don't have to wait until end game to leverage them as a constant buff, and you don't have to stack +Recharge which gives you more build options. Sometimes it can be very effective to just accept a lesser attack chain at lower recharge if your mitigation doesn't require it and make up the difference by stacking damage or just hunting alternate set bonuses.

But the goal Arcanaville stated was "sustained combat", not "out of combat". Blasters are (currently) inherently better in short fights than long fights, what with burst damage and nukes and Aim/Build Up. It's after Build Up wears off and enemies start shooting back and things turn into a race between running out of enemies and running out of health that most problems happen, and Sustain will help with that nicely.

Well except for Drain Psyche the Blaster click sustains are being done so that they are permanent with SOs so you'll be able to use them effectively prior to level 50 (which is why I think that Drain Psyche should be adjusted).