Adeon Hawkwood

That's a very good point. However there is one counter argument: Inspirations.

Inspirations make a major difference in the survivability of a Blaster but they have a fixed duration. Assume that the two blasters in your example use all inspiration drops in between each spawn. The first Blaster will have two spawns worth of inspirations on him at all times while the second will only have one.

In any case, I don't really think increasing Blaster damage is the way to go.

The issue I have with boosting Blaster damage (which may not have been as clear in my first post as I intended) is that I think Blasters are at or pretty close to a point where increasing damage doesn't really increase time-to-kill for a spawn enough to really impact survivability. Using my AR/Dev as an example his damage is already at the point where he can wipe the minions in a spawn in 2-3 attacks (Flamethrower + Full Auto + Buckshot) at which point I have to deal with the LTs and Bosses. Unless his damage is increased to the point where he's killing LTs as well as minions in his first attack I really don't see more damage making a real difference. If I can survive 10 seconds or so against a spawn's worth of LTs and Bosses then I'm generally able to survive long enough to kill them anyway (baring bad luck).

I think it would help a lot. Most of the time when my Blaster dies the root cause was one of three things:
1. The RNG was against me (to many hits in to short a time for me to react)
2. I got mezzed and either didn't have a Break Free or got cocky and decided to save it
3. To many defense debuffs for me to counter (or a lack of purples to counter them with)

Given that the two things I see as really helping Blasters which they don't currently have access to are some form of mez protection and some Defense Debuff Resistance. I'm not going to say that would fix all of the problems with Blasters but I think that it would help a lot.

It actually means speech intended to flatter or entice but it's a pretty archaic word.

Interestingly most of my characters are squishy as well. In general my feeling is that if I can take the spawn without using my Judgement then I don't really need the mez from the Judgement either so I might as well have more damage. If I can't take the spawn without Judgement then I'm better off lowering the difficulty (if solo) or letting someone else take the alpha before using my Judgement (if on a team).

This isn't really the point I was making. What actually matters is can a blaster destroy a spawn's worth of minions in 5 seconds once every spawn? In general most Blasters can do that by cycling Aim/BU or just having high damage AoEs (for example AR can kill most minions in 5 seconds using Flamethrower + AR which can generally be done once per spawn). Once you can do that extra damage doesn't help survivability much unless it brings time to kill for Lts down to the same range.

The problem with "more damage" is that it doesn't really make a huge difference. Time-to-Kill for minions (and even LTs) is already so low that I just don't see increasing blaster damage as making a huge difference.

As Arcana said in her post what Blasters really need is a moderate survivability boost of some sort. One option would be to change Defiance to provide more comprehensive (but still limited) mez protection in some manner such as by adding a mez protection self buff to some/all Blaster attacks or giving a Domination-style full mez protection with limited up-time power.

As a side note, reading your thread title makes me think My Little Blaster: Friendship is Magic. Blasters get a new inherent power: The Power of Friendship. All nearby allies gain a bonus to damage and the Blaster gains a different buff based on the AT of all nearby allies (so basically a combination of Assault and Dark Sustenance).

Nah, they reduced the defiance buff to match the new cast time.

I don't know if you've tried it recently but they fixed the cast time a few issues back and it now has a one second cast time. This doesn't solve the other issues but it does at least mean you can recast frequently.

I don't know exactly what he uses but I suspect his general strategy is to use a mix of Defense and Resistance IOs to build up Defense, Resistance and Endurance reduction. If you slot set IOs with Res/End or Def/End you can build up all three pretty effectively. Additionally it's a good place to stick a LotG Recharge IO.

Optionally you can also stick knockback protection IOs and/or a Steadfast Protection +3% Defense IO in it although depending on your build you may want to stick those in your Epic Pool shield.

Electrical Mastery in particular is worth checking out. It's got a VERY nice hold you can use to supplement Tesla cage (in fact it's actually a better hold than TC but it does come later) and it has Power Sink which you can stack with Short Circuit to drain foes faster (an enemy with no endurance can't attack).

Electrical Blast is actually very effective at mitigating damage by draining foes although I'll admit it works better if you have a primary that can handle aggro better than Empathy. Still if you build right it can be pretty effective. The Alpha slot is very good for this since you can add Endurance modification without sacrificing other stuff (Agility is nice for Emp/Elec since you get End Mod for the Elec powers and Recharge for the Empathy powers).

Additionally consider taking Thunderous Blast if you haven't already (I know a lot of Defenders don't). It does drain your endurance but it also drains your enemies a lot and doing Short Circuit + Thunder Blast or Thunderous Blast + Blue Inspiration + Power Sink can easily result in you standing in the middle of a group of enemies who can't attack you (the latter is particularly nice since Power Sink will refill your blue bar). Nukes are particularly good for Empaths since you don't have any really critical toggles (just pool and epic powers).

Well I'm not sure about Illusion but for MMs taking any of the Radial DoTs is a really, really solid choice. Since pets can apply the interface procs having all six pets out allows you to rapidly build up proc stacks on multiple enemies.

You know, when Staff Fighting gets released it will be possible to use that and the Animal Pack to make a pretty good Secret Cow Level in the AE.