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

I think your best bet would be to go make some noise on the Kheldian forums. We're probably the strongest interest group for toggle suppression tech, and for good reason.

Well if that is the case, and given the lack of blaster access to meaningful levels of resistance to anything but smash/lethal, it just helps make my initial point "Energy Manipulation or you are doing it wrong". Energy gets regeneration and has the built in means to leverage it with defense.

What I took from this line is that one of the design goals is to reduce blaster downtime. If I misunderstood and we are talking purely about in combat mitigation then that's cool. It just seems like each time we talk about mitigation the subject of between fight recover kicks in and muddies the water.

Between combat recovery is a nice perk, but a neutral alternate animation for Aid Self would, to me, also be effective at doing that.

WARNING: Rambling thoughts ahead.

What I would like to see for blasters is two things: better single target ranged damage and mitigation tools to prevent face planting and/or allow blaster to operate in the mid range game as well as most of the other ATs. What I am seeing is a lot of changes with alternate design goals that are getting thrown into the "make blasters better" pile when that's not really their primary goal.

If I had to guess what is going through the designer's minds here's what I see is happening:

Goals:
~ Bring the blaster AT as a whole up to par with other characters.
~ Make Snipes worthwhile.
~ Make Nukes worthwhile.

Although these are really three separate goals it makes sense to link them all because both power specific goals affect blasters. Do the current proposed changes do that successfully? Maybe not. As evidence I point to the fact that blasters are the least likely to leverage the Snipe change. Is that an overall issue? Not to me - the change fulfills its desired goal of making Snipes more useful. Will blasters see a benefit? Yes, although only a couple of secondaries will be able to fully leverage it. Am I okay with that? Yeah, even though the changes seem "gimmicky" to me because I see making Snipes useful as a separate design goal that crosses the boundaries of many ATs.

As for Nukes, while I fully understand the design goal of making them useful, and they will be useful to blasters, I think the problem with them is that the original launch design for them isn't good for game play. I don't find the strategy of using them to annihilate 1 out of 4 (or 3 or 2) spawns to be compelling, particularly on teams. But it definitely *does* make blasters more effective, and it benefits them most out of all ATs.

Are the new regeneration/Absorb mechanics enough to solve in combat mitigation issues so Blasters faceplant less and edge closer to mid game effectiveness as other ATs? I honestly won't know until I test them.

As for the "Wow" factor, the nuke changes will certainly help. My preference is to see a lot more single target "wow" factor, like I see on my stalker when I spin and one shot a minion with an in combat Assassin's Strike crit. The secondaries that can leverage fast-snipes will certainly get some of that.

If I had my druthers I'd like to see these changes:

~ The ability to eliminate a higher spawn Lt. immediately by opening with a Snipe. Even if the snipe has the interruptable animation, if it did enough damage to one shot a problematic orange Lt. from the spawn that would probably make it worth it.

~ Better single target ranged damage. If I am flinging around single target ranged attacks I want to see stuff dying quick like my stalker's larger attacks.

~ Better combat mitigation. I actually think that between the new Blaster Set and regeneration this might be accomplished. Blasters will gain a mez resistance proc in a fast attack and good regen. I wouldn't mind each blaster getting one decent 3.75 defense power to help them along but it's a start.

I think you're whipsawing between two extremes of possibilities. The base strength of Absorb is intended to be numerically higher than the numerical strength of the +regen sustains because the presumption is that you don't get the absolute full numerical strength in actual play due to the mechanics of Absorb. So they are numerically higher to equalize their value relative to the +regen sustains for normal play.

Once you leave normal play, the min/max opportunities for something like Energize and Frigid Embrace split: Energize can improve its performance through heightened recharge, and endurance discount becomes more meaningful at higher recharge where offense can burn more endurance. Frigid Embrace can improve its recovery a little through things that buff recovery powers, as nothing buffs endurance discount itself, and it can do much better at improving its defensive strength because it has far more room to improve absorb.

You seem to be suggesting that either one has to be vastly superior to the other, or vice versa, but I don't see that as being obviously true. I can't actually obviously demonstrate which is better at SO slotting, nor do I see which one will have the ultimate advantage at the very high end of building. For whatever builds you're contemplating, its probably true that one or the other will end up being better, but that's not likely to be consistently true across everyone's I24 builds.

1. It might not help your blasters. If more than 1% of all blasters follow that build trajectory I would be tremendously surprised.

2. Even with everything you mention the only way to not run out of endurance past 22 is to hold back on AoEs, not have AoEs, or stand around idle a lot. Or, it occurs to me now, you can die a lot.

Your vision of blasters seems to be extremely specific and marginal. Kiting Medicine Pool invention proc frankenslotters that DFB to 22 and then fight +4s. Those blasters don't need help and never needed help. The changes are for the benefit of all other blasters.

First, a *lot* of people run DFB a couple of times for the buffs. This is not some edge case. I am running the content as designed by the devs. I am not running up to 22 in DFB, but I do run it two or three times before running off to the Hollows. Your suggestion that this is some farming edge case is out of touch.

Second, I am not fighting +4s. When teaming, however, I often end up fighting +2s. I side kick to -1 and at even con +1s can appear. This, again, is not an edge case unless you are suggesting that teaming is an edge case, in which case I again think you are out of touch.

Third, I acquired a couple select IOs with my hero merits. I am not farming AE, handing down influence, or playing the market. I am getting hero merits by running tips and Signature Story arcs which are advertised to new players by the game's marketing. It is my experience that many players participate in the game this way.

If you are trying to convince me that extra endurance recovery is a nice perk then no need, I agree. If you are trying to tell me that blasters *need* extra recovery and this will fix the AT then I disagree. Saying that blasters *need* extra recovery is basically saying all ATs need extra recovery. Blasters tend to have less stringent requirements than most other ATs because they lack defensive toggles and end hungry debuff toggles. You can't have it both ways.

Endurance Recovery is a nice perk. I see that it is an advantage. I don't mind blasters getting it. It does nothing to address the problems of the AT. It's like seeing a car with a flat tire and fixing the engine to get better gas mileage.

Your Aid Self comment exactly hit on my point. You can obtain out of combat recovery, you just have a fabricated rule based on personal bias that characters shouldn't have to get powers from a power pool. Well, except for travel powers. Then it's okay.

The end result of changes designed to increase out of combat recovery is that people offended by needing Aid Self don't need to take it. Look that's a good thing. It isn't giving the AT anything it can't already get.

Blasters are the most fragile AT. I think we can all agree on that. They need to be less fragile, and they need combat benefits to make it worthwhile to deal with that weakness. I just don't think the ability to recover between fights without the need of Aid Self is the silver bullet to Blaster issues.

Blasters need to be better. Enhanced endurance recovery makes them better. Suggesting it doesn't "fix" the archetype is not a meaningful criticism because a) no one thing will, but all solutions are composed of individual things, and b) "fixing" the archetype is an ill-defined problem because no singular specification exists as to state the problem. I don't even think there is a singular problem.

The ranged set improvements, the sustain changes, they are designed to work together to improve blasters. If you have a specific problem in mind that you believe blasters singularly suffer from, none of these changes might explicitly address that problem. But they do specifically address the fundamental problem blasters had, which is that they had no grounded design goal. Arbiter Hawk has created one with the sustain and ranged set changes: sustained ranged combat with burst damage vulnerability. Are the changes perfect to implement it? Probably not. But all other suggestions for blasters were chipping around the edges of the basic problem that none of those suggestions could be evaluated under the one and only important criteria for judging the balance-appropriateness of them: do they deliver the specific performance the archetype is intended to have.

Because the archetype *had* no intended performance target. Until Arbiter Hawk's announced changes, every problem blasters had could be legitimately argued to be intentional. Now we have at least a vague idea of what blasters are supposed to be. More or less very early on (certainly by 20 when sustain kicks in) they are supposed to be sustained ranged attackers. Some people figured out how to spend time and influence building towards that goal, but people figure out how to tank with controllers also. The point is that the archetype is supposed to give you reasonable tools to do that *before* you then try to enhance its performance *above* that.

Do the changes announced by Arbiter Hawk "fix" blasters? Wrong question. They *change* blasters into something else, and the only reason this doesn't violate the cottage rule is because in a real sense they were nothing else before. Arbiter Hawk isn't replacing what they were supposed to be good at with something else: there wasn't anything penciled into that blank to begin with. Now there is.

I'd say that doesn't so much solve a problem of the blaster archetype, it solves the problem of the blaster archetype.

Fortunately, Arbiter Hawk is not adding out of combat-specific regeneration to Blasters.