Bionic_Flea

Starsman, I have nothing but respect for you and your knowledge of the game in general, but you are mistaken when it comes to PvP.

While it is true that PvP damage is based on animation time, the lack of aim hurts DP tremendously because you need to quickly eliminate your foe before they can counter or run away. Since you don't have aim to boost your initial volley a DP blaster will never be able to compete against a fire or sonic. Even psy, who also doesn't have aim, will out perform DP due to a quirk of how the set animates and records damage allowing you to basically hit your target with two attacks at once. The long rooted animations also leave you vulnerable to counter attack.

Additionally, while slows used to be a viable tactic and a major annoyance, I13 changed all that. The new PvP metric all but eliminates slow movement effects and requires heavy stacking for slow recharge. A trick arrow player used to be able to slow someone to a crawl. Now you feel the effect of travel suppression but can't even tell that you have been hit with a slow attack.

I have a friend who already leveled, IO'd, and accoladed a DP blaster to try out in PvP. He is a solid PvPer with lots of experience playing all sorts of ATs, but especially experienced with blasters and defenders. He is very dissappointed in his DP blaster's performance.

Sorry, I thought they did use mean time. Although colloquially speaking, having a time close to the median is rather average.

I understand his critique, but not your post.

Why are you upset about his feedback?

Well, not so much an edict as an occasional sledgehammer when we don't play like they want us to. And yes, they do have a vision of risk v. reward that they try to adhere to, although it is a moving target and does not appear to be the laughable 1 hero = 3 NPCs from Statesman days.

Some of the times I've gotten most upset with the devs in this game have been when they try to impose their vision on us. It was prevalent during Statesman's reign, less so with Positron, and the verdict is still out for War Witch.

/tell @Dechs Kaison, Hit 'r' on your keyboard to get out of run mode.

I was going by the Mids numbers not actual play, but are you sure about that? Just basing it on the power icon it seems to me that it starts recharging as soon as it's activated, but I realize the icon is not necessarily tied to the power to the milisecond.

Archery and Assault Rifle are 2 of the weakest single target blast sets, but they are high in AoE damage, at least per Starsman.

From a chart he posted in beta:

They start out higher than sonic, but that doesn't take into account sonic's resistance debuff nor critter resistances. You'll also note that DPs position in the chart is dependent on Piercing shot hitting 3 targets, which isn't as hard to do as it was originally, but its hardly something that happens most times you use it.

You will also note that both archery and AR are slightly ahead of DP in single target unless you use incendiary rounds but WAY ahead in AoE damage. If DP matched archery and AR in those categories, I think more folks might be satisfied (we'll never get everyone satisfied).

You like DP as is, fine. I don't. But don't try to paint me as some uninformed, rabid, idiot.

I disagree. The analyses that I have seen just did a straight damage comparison without accounting for resistances. Since lethal is the most common resistance among critters and players and since most of the damage of the set is lethal regardless of which ammo, the damage in actual play is lower than what the pure numbers would indicate.

The fact that you can change damage type to something that your enemy might be weak to gives it flexibility but does not make up for the lost damage, as I pointed out above. Here's a chart someone else compiled of all NPC resistances and weaknesses.

*Shrug* You think it's fine. I think it's just shy of fine.

I don't think that it's contradictory at all. He's not asking for every single power in each set to be the same damage/endurance/recharge with nothing but the graphics being different. But he is asking that they be somehow equivalent -- that whatever is given up for in one area is made up for in another area.

So that a set that may not be particularly strong in single target damage may be very good at AoE damage. Or you could be a little weaker in both those areas but offer a lot of control or mitigation that the other sets with stronger damage have.

We have this to a certain extent already. Fire tends to be the most damaging set because its secondary effect is damage, but it doesn't have much in the way of mitigation. Sonic has less damaging attacks than other blast sets but has a lot of control and -res.

So I understand people who argue that pistols has lower damage but the benefit of changeable damage types. No one can argue that. The set has swap ammo available to anyone to take and use.

What I, and I think others, are saying is that the different damage types just isn't enough. It's close, but a little off. There's a few reasons for that.

1) DP has a lot of long cast times. Yes, they look cool, but all that time you are juggling guns stuff can and will shoot back at you. And once you start juggling guns you have to stand there and take it until you finish the dance.

2) DP does not have aim. Without aim you miss out on burst damage. The faster you kill stuff, the faster it stops shooting back.

3) While you can change your damage type, that only makes up 30% of any attack, the rest is lethal. So in the hypothetical attack that does 100 damage, 70 is lethal and 30 is other. If an NPC resists lethal by 50% a standard ammo shot will do 50 damage. An exotic damage type will do 65 damage. If they have a 30% weakness to a certain type of damage you will cause 74 damage. Most critters have some lethal resistance.

So we end up with a slow animating, low damage set with pretty animations and a cool customization gimmick. For some that's enough. I would prefer just a little more. Either make the animations faster, add aim, add a little more damage, change the damage ratio to 50/50, a little from all three, whatever.

But it does need a little bit more, in my opinion.

No thank you. My time is valuable to me. I don't have time to spend 2 to 4 hours in a TF. Besides all your proposal would do to speed teams is make them log onto another character before completing the last mission objective until your "allowable time" clock ran it's course.

You are assuming that he PL'd to 30. Over double XP weekend it doesn't take much to get to level 30. My DP is now at 33 and most of that was solo or duo with a couple of TFs and larger groups thrown in.

I guess it depends what he meant by "a few hours." Sounds like you and your partner got close to 20 and you "hardly played over the weekend."