BellaStrega

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Try to think of a single team, a single situation, a single time in game where a team trying to decided between two potential teammates would say "No, lets not take the scrapper, let's take the blaster!"

[/ QUOTE ] Arakhn. You were trying to make a point that I'd like to agree with...but you overdid it a little.

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Why? AoEs? So in effect the scrapper will die as fast as the blaster? I'm still not seeing preference.

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Dark Regeneration. HowEVER, I have recently seen a handful of tankers say that scrappers are too much of a liability in AV fights as compared to blasters because the AV's AOEs do too much damage and thus take up too much defender attention. I disagree that scrappers are that high-maintenance, but it does come up.

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No AT is "needed".

Worring about the small number of Scrapper ranged attacks is focusing in the wrong place.

"Blasters have way more range and have more cones/AEs than scrappers, and it's not enough because..."

There's how you begin a reasonable discussion on this topic.

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Pilcrow for teh win!

I'd hate to see this game become one in which any specific AT is necessary for a majority of missions.

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I can verify disco_'s claim. I've pulled aggro'ed off of a taunting tanker many times. Full auto and flame thrower seems to do it quite easily. This is even after the tanker has established aggro attraction. And these guys weren't novices either. Their taunts were well slotted.

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I use icicles, chilling embrace, taunt, and punchvoke from six-slotted AoE and single target attacks, and Doc Spielmann tells me that she didn't typically peel aggro away from me. I think that again, this is a matter of the tanker more than the blaster powers. But again, I think it shouldn't be that risky for you to use your powers on a team.

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Saddly, not many tanks are that good. With my tank, blasters almost never fell any heat, if ever, and they certainly don't take it from me, I hadn't gotten it yet. However, with my blaster, I can't always rely on tanks to be as good as mine is.

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I completely agree, which is why I still think blasters could use reduced aggro generation compared to other ATs and especially tankers. Naturally, blasters need more than that to be able to blast and thus use their powers without the constant risk of near-instant defeat.

To be honest, because of what I read in this forum about tanker-blaster aggro issues, I've tried to make sure it doesn't happen around me - Doc Spielmann's been able to safely use full auto around my tanker because of that, and I can hold aggro through nova.

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Try a simple test... make a Blaster with a couple of pool defenses like Hasten, Stealth (or Tough and Weave) and Hover. Also make a Scrapper with standard defenses (including a pool power or two). Have them both at the same level around level 35 to 40. Now have the Scrapper jump into a mid-sized group of +2 level enemies and aggro them... then time how long it takes them to kill him in melee (if they even can). Have the Blaster hover above an identical group and aggro THEM, and see how long HE lasts at range. After you do that a few times, you won't be saying Scrappers face more danger any longer...

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Depends on the scrapper, though. Some won't last a lot longer than blasters (although they will certainly last longer) in that situation.

Greyhawke, my experience is not that blasters can easily pull aggro from me when I'm tanking. It may be that you're teaming with tankers who aren't that great with aggro control, or don't care that much about keeping aggro off blasters.

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And oh wait, whats this? Scrappers can get bonuses from their melee, indirectly or directly. Soul drain, Invincibility, Soul Consumption, Dark Regeneration, Cloak of Fear. Not to mention the fact that certain powers are better suited for melee types in the first place. Transfusion, Transferance, FULCRUM SHIFT!!!! The power that lets scrappers exploit their 500% cap :OOOO

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Pseudotron, some of those powers aren't really as good as you think they are.

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I've used all of the scrapper powers I've mentioned. Dark armor, DM, and Invuln. I know what I'm talking about.

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All right then, you're deliberately exaggerating.

Dark Consumption is nice - /Fire blasters get something much like it, I believe.

Soul Drain is good, but it's just not going to cap your damage consistently. Most of the time I use it, I get maybe +37%, which balances it with build up.

Cloak of Fear is a nice power, but given that it's in Dark Armor, all it does is make DA competitive (while sucking its endurance down faster than everything else). It's by far not the great power you're making it out to be - and it's getting nerfed. Dark Regeneration has a base end cost of half your total endurance.

Invincibility and Soul Drain are the two best powers you list that are exclusive to scrappers...well, except Soul Drain is available to Defenders and Warshades, and the latter can double stack it with Dwarf Form, but who's counting? It's scrappers who are the villains in this piece, right?

Also, please feel free to notice that I have a DM/DA to 50, so I have direct experience with most of the powers in your list.

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And oh wait, whats this? Scrappers can get bonuses from their melee, indirectly or directly. Soul drain, Invincibility, Soul Consumption, Dark Regeneration, Cloak of Fear. Not to mention the fact that certain powers are better suited for melee types in the first place. Transfusion, Transferance, FULCRUM SHIFT!!!! The power that lets scrappers exploit their 500% cap :OOOO

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Pseudotron, some of those powers aren't really as good as you think they are.

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meanwhile the Blasters are getting no love and the tanks and scraps are getting squeaky wheel greased all they want, to the nerf and detriment of other AT's

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To be fair, Statesman said he wants to use tankers and scrappers to set the baseline. It seems to me that defenses are likely to get adjusted soon to make that work, and I suspect that means we're going to mostly see reductions to bring tankers and scrappers in line with what he wants for the game.

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That is not entirely true. A regen scrapper can afford to spend alot more slots on his primary in the lower levels than most scrappers. Even so a scrapper does not need to slot his attacks and can afford to slot his defense unlike a blaster that HAS to slot his attacks or he is a dead man with nothing to fall back on.

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My fastest-leveling scrapper at low levels was my regen scrapper. At 20-22, things got a bit more difficult as my only defenses were mez resistance and a self-heal. At 28, things started to change completely, and at 31, when I had IH six-slotted, it was a vastly different game.

Regen scrappers are certainly an exception that tests the rule, but I think it supports the sense that the early game is easier for blasters because they can focus on offense and don't need defense.

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There's a slight difference. Scraps and Tanks dip into the fighting and jumping pools to augment their resists and defense. Blasters don't have other powers that these augment (until at least L41 and the APPs), but we also get lower bonuses (in the base numbers), lower effective enhancement (as a %age off a lower base), and a lower (resistance) cap.

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Actually, pre-stacking, my dark armor scrapper used the fighting pool to have resists in the first place, so yeah, I do kind of think that there is a similarity. I couldn't run a shield that gave smash/lethal resistance at the same time as a shield that gave mezz resistance without tough.

And you completely bypassed my point, which was "blasters should have the tools they need to function in their primaries and secondaries, and the power pools should be nice options, but not required."

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Can I ask why are blasters solid up to say level 20?

What makes their damage good till then but fall apart later?

The cap is in play then as it is later, so it can't be that can it? Or is it that you don't really keep getting better attacks while the scrapper does?

I don't know for real but could better later attacks be the problem. Hack is much weaker then headsplitter. But you get snipe one of your best damage attacks very early. Maybe what's needed besides mezz defense is better late attacks.

I don't know just asking.

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My theory which has every right to be wrong is: The lower-level game is balanced for low defenses (since no one has really matured their defenses...tankers come close, scrappers not so much) and immature offense. Blasters can fairly rapidly slot out their main attacks and don't have to worry about defenses, so the lower-level game is practically tailor-made for them.

It gets harder later as the game adjusts to try to keep up with tanker and scrapper defenses and defender/controller buffs/debuffs.

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Frankly, I have no optimism at all that things will turn out well.

[/ QUOTE ] Cynic (n): a person who learns from experience

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Ha ha. However, as I point out later, things tend to turn out well anyway, and I really am just being pessimistic when I say that.

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And, of course, there's the complaint that some Secondaries have too many melee attacks - something that the Blaster avoids at all costs.

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Though a lot of us blasters have found a perfect balance between melee and range and love our melee moves. We could use a LOT of love in the post 35 game, but I don't think taking away our melee moves would be that much of an improvement unless you also added some kind of new secondaries that involved ranged damage. Though that seems like a lot of work.

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Yes, but that balance usually requires SS and stealth or things along those lines (like teaming w/ a controller who locks down everyone.

Scrappers and Tanks don't *need* any particular pools except for say Stamina which is pretty much and all-AT issue.

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IMO, no AT should need any particular pools to function. My scrapper needed the fighting pool to function (and still needs leaping to acrobatics) well in fights, and I think that it would be much nicer if all of these pools were groovy bonuses instead of necessities...because your primary/secondary already covers those.

But I'm not sure how to go about that.

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How about losing Power Thrust, Stun, and Boost Range from the /Energy powerset and adding things that help more than a few power sets....maybe put some form defenses there. I like Energy Punch/Bonesmasher/Total Focus, but the three I mentioned are situational at best.(yeay yeah, some people use them, but most that I have seen have no use for them besides punching people 200 feet for fun at lvl 50)

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Many of the /energy blasters I team with are very happy with boost range.

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I didn't know that scrappers were supposed to be the damage kings..

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AR's reliance on lethal is a big issue, according to some AR blasters I've chatted with. My AR blaster is still low level, though, and I cannot comment.

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Translated, more damage. It seems that the king of damage is not king. Blasters already have low hit points, no status protection (not counting pools), and draw aggro like mad. We only have one way to beat these weaknesses, and that is to kill whatever is training on us. (Yes, there is the option of tank and aggro management, but even that is no guarantee)

Which is the last point, aggro. I start to wonder if Blasters are unfairly favored aggro magnets. An example, a defender shoots his electric AOE out and hits about 7 Tsoo. I throw out a single target fire blast on one of the minions to try to kill him. What happens is that EVERYONE comes running to smack me and runs past the defender (who is still shooting them).

I have seen other posts with similar stories of strange aggro attraction. If possible, can this get tweaked in I4 a little?

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I've seen strange aggro attraction happen to defenders, controllers, Kheldians, and blasters.

But... I do think that blasters could use reduced aggro generation. I suggested 75% of what anyone else would generate in Statesman's other thread. I do not know how many people agreed or disagreed with me, though - just that some did one or the other.

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Statesman said in the balance thread that a fight against +3 level (red) minions should be a fun fight in the later game. That is, that you can progressively fight tougher (level-wise, compared to you) enemies.

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Well, he says that they are looking for a baseline so I am curious to see what the new one is going to be.

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Me too. While my instinct is to be pessimistic, the "nerfs" that go live tend to not really affect gameplay a great deal (in terms of what you're normally expected to face).

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At the moment, Scrappers, and to a lesser degree, Tankers, are being analyzed. Once we establish a baseline, then we'll be in a better position to look at Blasters.

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Does this mean you are making a new baseline? Last I checked the base line was three white minions. Is this changeing?

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Statesman said in the balance thread that a fight against +3 level (red) minions should be a fun fight in the later game. That is, that you can progressively fight tougher (level-wise, compared to you) enemies.

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With all do respect Statesman, the last time you posted about looking at Blasters, you said Controllers were in front of us - that's fine. However, now you're saying that Scrappers and Tankers are in front also? When exactly are the Devs going to actually take a look at Blasters? It seems we've had issues for quite some time, yet are being pushed to the back of the line in (terms of fixes) constantly.

I'm huge supporter of the Devs in most cases, but this and you're previous statements in the "Ask Statesman" thread are rather disturbing.

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I believe scrappers and tankers are getting looked at yet again for issue 4, at least that was the sense his post gave in the regen thread. It may very well do more harm than good to balance blasters on how the game plays now and then rebalance scrappers and tankers on how they want those to play.

Frankly, I have no optimism at all that things will turn out well.

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Second, I agree completely that Ice Armor should be more defensive than Super Reflexes. I never claimed anything other than Ice Armor should not have the same defensive output through one single ability that SR has in its entire set. If for some reason you want Ice to be absolutely nothing but +def (and technically it's not), I'd suggest spreading out the defense a little more than just putting almost all of it in one ability, and I do mean almost all of it.


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Offering more defense than SR to that scale really doesn't matter unless you're tanking well above your level - that much defense is barely relevant unless you're fighting DE who have dropped two or three quartzes (and yes, I have tanked such groups before without dying).

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No one needs 500% defense. Nothing has accuracy that high.

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Just the other day, my ice tanker met some DE who were buffed by two quartzes and seemed to have little trouble hitting me through a double-stacked EA (three slots in Defense buffs, so about 30% per target hit, five to ten targets per use).

Debuffs don't scale as well as defense for level.

My DA scrapper relies (currently, but maybe not after I4) on accuracy debuffs to keep bosses from consistently hitting her. The difference is noticeable as the boss' level increases.

Just so y'all know (I should've posted sooner, but didn't remember this thread existed), there's an "official cloak of fear thread" on the training room forum. So far, all but a very few of the posts have been from /da scrappers, as we use it for a good chunk of our defense.

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(In response to those who don't like Hibernate)

Don't touch my Hibernate!

When the EA isn't strong enough, I've used my Hoarfrost and I'm still getting pummeled I need it to regroup. I get healed, let my Endurance recharge since Hibernate doesn't cost any and let all my powers recharge.

I'm better coming back as a reinforcement than lying face down in the dirt. I use it when I'm in serious peril so leave it alone!

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I've noticed that when I turn on hibernate, if I have other toggles running, my end drops very rapidly. Why is this?