Doctor_Kumquat

I didn't get a chance to mess with it at all in beta, but I plan on making a Fire/Earth dom because having a lava beast with two damage auras amuses me. I'd take very little from Fire and almost all of /Earth while I level, and then respeccing Mud Pots in once I get Powersink. On top of Stamina and hefty endrdx set slotting, Powersink should alleviate the endurance crunch of running Mud Pots with Hot Feet in target-rich environments. I really wanted to go with Soul Mastery instead for Soul Drain, but with Dark Consumption at 3x the recharge time of Powersink, I didn't think my blue bar would handle it well. Maybe once (if?) I get fully IO'd, I can try swapping it.

I agree that Mud Pots alone looks pretty pathetic with its low radius and high cost, but stacked with Hot Feet it should completely floor their runspeed to help keep them bundled up, and Tremor + Fissure + Ball Lightning + 2 damage auras should help clear crowds pretty quickly.

If you come across AVs or just some crunchy higher level bosses, Ignite is still the highest single-target dps you'll be able to provide the team, as long as the enemies are immobilized or immune to the afraid effect. I could see pushing it back a few levels instead of grabbing it right at 26, but I wouldn't skip it.

I was really surprised to see this change. The one and only problem I have with it is that the whole concept of my bane is that he's a snake-man who specializes in doing ridiculous amounts of toxic damage, and so was locked into Mako's pool for the silliness of Venom Grenade - Bile Spray - Poisonous Ray. With the awesomeness that is Shatter Armor (ANOTHER -20% res debuff that lasts 20s, and with really solid damage to boot?!), I might have to actually drop Mako, or at least set up a dual-build with a more single-target focus.

Way back in elementary school, I wrote some silly story for class in which my annoying science teacher was actually an mad scientist from outer space that was going to destroy the earth as part of a crazy alien science experiment. However, I decided that blowing up the earth was too cliched, and so she would instead transform the planet into something weird. After pondering for a few moments, I said aloud, "Hmm... kumquats." The confused stares of the classmates around me were priceless, and I started using kumquats as the go-to funny-named fruit of choice for whatever situations I could fit it into, and it sort of stuck. Many years later, when confronted with the daunting task of creating a global name, Dr. Kumquat just seemed to fit, and even came up with an appropriately bizarre song detailing the Doctor's backstory and plans for global domination (involving genetically modified giant kumquats thrown from trebuchets) back when my friends had a band in highschool.

The Thing That Should Not Be In My Pants - Metallica
Me, I'm Not In My Pants - Nine Inch Nails
We Believe In My Pants - Red Hot Chili Peppers

To this end, I have found popping Shivans for the towers to be even more helpful than usual lately, as they pretty reliably trash the repairmen before they heal, even with the current targeting issues. Typical strategies of spamming location-based AoEs (rains, bonfire) or using repel effects (force bubble, tornado, hurricane) on the towers still work well also, though you need to keep an eye out and make sure you kill any repairmen that get flung off before they have a chance to wander off and rez another tower.

Most of the DB-hate is because in regular pvp against non-melee-focused opponents, they'll never sit in melee range with you long enough for you to chain combos together. If you're in a melee-vs-melee duel, and the DB brute can just happily build up his fury and you don't bounce around at all to pop other powers and delay his combo timing, then DB can do fairly decent damage.

Benjamin Decker is pretty much the shortest and simplest arc you could ask for, esp. since you already said you were stealthy.

Pick your favorite lethal damage primary, and pair it with either /Dark, /Electric, or possibly /SR. Voila, your very own Carnie annihilator. Carnies actually have negative resists to lethal damage, so take advantage. Both Dark and Elec pack powerful resistance to energy drain and psi damage; /Elec will cap your energy rez while /Dark has a hole against it, but a superior heal to cope with it. /SR would be quite viable against *most* of the Carnies' effects, especially pains like Dark Ring Mistresses since you will be able to avoid most of the crippling debuffs, but will have more trouble against the Illusionists with their non-positional psi attacks. Solo missions, I'd lean towards one of the more ST-focused sets since you won't be able to leverage the AoEs as well unless you go herding the Carnies up. Something like Kat/Elec sounds like it would work quite well.

Other note on Hot Feet/Blazing Aura: While my fire/fire blaster is still L30ish and hasn't actually unlocked Hot Feet yet to test it firsthand, I have heard they can be brutally effective in conjunction with Invisibility (ACTUAL invis from the concealment pool, not just stealthiness) or an alternate power with the Only-Affecting-Self tag. That way, the damage ticks won't aggro anyone until you are in position, and the Avoid effect from Hot Feet will trigger as soon as you drop invis. The enemies will start fleeing at a snail's pace before they fire a shot, leaving you to pummel them with all of your AoE attacks like FSC with significant safety and extra aura damage. Teleport should work reasonably well for this too.

Additionally, if this testing was in the MA, many custom enemies with an attack set from Blasters would receive the Defiance bonus, letting them fire even while mezzed.

Yeah... Handy as debuffs are and all, Melt Armor (in the epic pool versions) is pretty worthless. Force mastery got more compelling with Repulsion Bomb, but Fire still has RotP as the core reason to choose it.

Pretty much everyone bashes on Lightning Field; I've almost never heard it really recommended it in the past 5 years. The general complaint is that it's a damage aura on a squishy blaster instead of an armored meleer, without any of the control aspects something like Hotfeet would provide. Many blasters would consider it crazy to stand in the front lines with a dozen angry villains ready to rip you apart for extended periods, even if they were willing to joust in for a split second to lay down a Bone Smasher or something.

However, let us assume that our blaster is fearless, and thrives in melee range to beat people upside the head with Havoc Punch and the rest of /elec's beefy attacks as often as possible. They have been buffed to the gills by their fellow Forcefielder, their tank has never ever lost a shred of aggro in his life, or they are confident in their ability to sap their enemies' endurance to nothingness, or they just like being different. Whatever the reason, the tactical hazards of sitting in melee for all/most of the battle are accepted. Lightning field has an impressive radius for a damage aura (20ft) so it'll hit pretty much the entire enemy group unless they're spread across a large courtyard. It has effectively the same damage-per-endurance as any other single target attack with one target in range, and much better DPE assuming a large crowd. The damage looks puny, but slotted up it's dealing a hair above 9 damage per second. Assuming we are on an efficient, higher level team battling sensible foes (not +5s to half of the team or an all-boss AE farm or something equivalently silly), the average battle will probably last 10-15 seconds. In real terms, using Lightning Field to its fullest is effectively doing an extra AoE attack's worth of damage during the battle, for about half the endurance. It'd really be more like full endurance though, unless you're compulsive about toggle management.

Additionally, it will sap enemies of one endurance per second, unslotted. This is generally of less utility, since Short Circuit or Powersink alone are insufficient to fully drain a spawn. You'll need to use both (or SC twice) to finish the job, and Short Circuit has a 10 second recovery freeze which can ensure that once they drop to 0 they will stay at 0. If you wanted to rely on it as an artificial form of -recovery rather than recast SC as needed, remember that a single tick of endurance is often enough for them to get a basic hit off. The difference between full endurance and almost 0 is less dramatic than the difference between almost 0 and 0. For the extra drain ticks from Lightning Field to become meaningful, the opponents must either be significantly higher level so they resist a large portion of the initial drains.

Anyway, since it's long since become apparent that I'm tired and rambling: Lightning Field exposes you to much greater risk in battle in exchange for an extra AoE attack worth of damage that does not take up activation time. If you are going to embrace the Blapper mentality wholeheartedly and practically put the tank on follow, it's probably worth it. If you are going to stay a reasonable distance out of the center of the battle and occasionally run up to punch something, skip it.

If you've run a respec trial at some point and used the Coolant Belt temp power to repair the reactor core, that would count, and bring up the badge progress bar. Pets like Amy would count too, if you've summoned them before. My blaster has around 40,000 points of healing progress on it, and has never taken any healing power.

Skipping Shadow Maul will not break you, but it's still a very useful attack. First off, it has a better damage-per-endurance ratio than a normal attack even against a single target, and radically better DPE than your other attacks when you catch multiples in it. For brutes who habitually have endurance crunches, this is a good thing. While the DPA versus single targets is uninspiring when you could be busy chaining MG, Smite, SL, and Gloom in some fashion, it is your highest DPA attack assuming you can get just two enemies in the cone (other than Gloom which is just stupid awesome), and MUCH higher DPA if you can get 3+. If you are going up against large numbers of enemies on a regular basis, it's a very handy thing to have around. If you're mostly into PvP or AV soloing or something like that, or you just can't get the knack of lining up the cone in a split second, then it won't break your build if you pass it up.

Ever since Comic-con, I've been rolling around the idea of making a fire/earth dom. Hotfeet stacked on Mud Pots on top of cycling three true AoE attacks (w/Patron pool) and hard-hitting melee blows inbetween them would be unbelievably painful on the blue bar, but the carnage would be amusing. I'd think that unless you had a /Kin corr duct-taped to your side all the time, you'd need heavy duty endurance slotting and Power Sink to stay afloat, but once we get some real numbers it'd be interesting to see if I could get by with Dark Consumption instead (for Soul Drain nastiness).

Ill/Rad has become somewhat cliched by now, because they just go together so well. As a control set, Illusion doesn't have all that much hard control, so the heavy debuffs in /Rad help provide extra security. Phantom army is awesome but can't be buffed and has a long recharge, so AM gets it back up faster and the debuffs help them hit harder.

Other solid options are /Kin, mostly because Siphon Speed will let you get PA closer to perma; Storm, because you are the ultimate chaos controller and it can add a lot of damage; and TA, for MOAR DEBUFFS!

We'd need to see more of your build to see what you'd be sacrificing in exchange for the extra defense. As is, you'd be able to pop some insps for the really nasty encounters, but higher is always nice. There are other bonuses that you'd want as well though, like recharge, so the opportunity cost may be a bit too steep for your liking; if so, just try to get up to 32% or so, where a small luck would take you up to 45%.

Intimidate and Invoke Panic are not the most useful of crowd control options for most characters, unless you are a Dominator and can boost their duration/magnitude, or have other fear powers in your arsenal. The main problem with these two is that they are only Mag 2 fear powers, so they will not affect anything tougher than minions unless you stack them, and Invoke Panic (the AoE) has a pretty horrible duration / recharge ratio. Remember though that they work differently from the Afraid effect in your Burn patch, which makes them run; the affected targets will cower in terror, not moving or retaliating unless attacked, and even then no more than once every 5 seconds or so. The burn patch will still make them run though.

Overall, I'd say it's probably just going to be easier to munch the minions with your AoEs in a few seconds than worry about these powers, though I suppose stacking them could potentially be useful against really nasty bosses. *shrug*

Psy/EM has very nice single target damage but nothing BUT single target damage; it only has one AoE aside from the nuke, and it's a DoT at that. Full 80' range on all the blasts plus Boost Range can make you a formidable sniper, or pull out Bone Smasher if you want to get your hands dirty. Not so hot for heavy teaming, due to the lack of any meaningful AoE (though you could get another one from the Electric epic pool), but a solid soloist or PvPer.

Energy/MM - way more AoE power here (4 plus nuke), and solid mitigation through the knockback in the primary combined with the -recharge and Drain Psyche in the secondary. Lower ST damage potential in general, although Drain Psyche can shred AV regen so it could be much higher net ST damage if you didn't have a teammate with -regen.

I actually have a psy/em in his 20s, but if I had to make a suggestion of one or the other, I'd have to lean towards nrg/mm.

Carnies are always a treat for an archer; having a target actually take EXTRA damage from lethal attacks is a rare novelty. If you were thinking of custom enemies, then the sky's the limit (though I must admit the Trogdor story sounds delightfully silly).

Dual builds are similar to respecs in that you can reselect all your power/slot choices, but instead of overwriting your initial setup, you can talk to a trainer and alternate between your two builds every 10 or 15 minutes. The dual build function is especially useful for characters like Empaths, so you could have a separate build when you want/have to solo and can drop all the temporarily useless ally-only buffs, or for setting up a more specialized PvP build without compromising your effectiveness in regular play.

As for the more specific archery advice - you seem to be doing fine so far. Basically everything in archery is useful, though some people aren't fond of snipes. The melee attacks in /Energy are incredibly powerful, and while you are perfectly capable of staying at range and filling your opponents full of holes, picking up Bone Smasher (and/or Energy Punch) could be nice. As an archer, you probably won't have as much use for Conserve Power or Power Boost; the only things PB would affect are the stun durations of the other /EM punches, Stunning Shot, and possibly the strength of your heals if you eventually take the medicine pool. Boost Range is pretty awesome though.

Also, don't be shy to chug your inspirations. While not essential to blasting, they make everything easier, and if you have a handful of lucks, you can make even the really nasty boss battles almost trivial.

What server are you on? I regularly play late nights on Freedom, Virtue, Justice, and Infinity, and if you have more specific questions, feel free to ask @Doctor Kumquat whatever you like.