Fulmens

Funny how much time people have spent talking about the 57 month, and not mentioning 12, 18, 33, 42, or 63...

A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter.

Now THAT'S art!

Amateur market transfers produce amateur results. *clucks tongue, sadly*

Glad I could help you.

People say that you can do amazing things (Aid Self while standing in a damage field) with two interrupts in Aid Self. I tend to run one interrupt and that seems to be enough, most of the time. I don't push Aid Self that hard in soloing- I usually cheat and have one of these running.

/ice is a very solid secondary. Primaries that are also relatively strong for survival are Sonic/ and Ice/ .

Also, and I don't know if this will help, I have a Blaster mini-guide in my sig.

I strongly disagree with Mr. Heat Stroke on the Elec aura. The melee damage is spectacular- I think everyone agrees on that.

Edit: more generally, Ice gives good protection (-rech in Shiver is huge, and ice patch is good). Mental gives ranged and melee AOE plus a couple good utilities. So there are other secondaries out there that I would recommend heartily.

Full Auto has a bad reputation among some because it's a long, very narrow cone (and it also apparently hits only 10 targets.) I don't use the power, I'm just passing on rumors. AR also doesn't have Aim or Build Up. Rain of Arrows is a nice big circle you can put anywhere.

The traditional start is Tough/Weave [5.6%] with a Steadfast [3%] and Combat Jumping [2%ish]. That's 10.6%. Admittedly, that's also three power slots. If you don't mind waiting till the 40's, you can put the Steadfast into Fire Shield and try to get the other 5.6% somewhere else.

6-slot Thunderstrike in Flares, Fire Bolt, and Blaze for 3.75% each (11.25% total) for 22.1% .

2-slot Combat Jump and Super Jump with the cheap Zephyrs for 3.13% each (6.25% total) for 28.3% . There's a lot of ways to get the last couple percent- I'd probably slot Char with three Thunderstrikes, possibly slot three Eradications in Fire Sword Circle, like that. I'd actually go for 32.5% because then you are CAPPED with a single purple insp of any size.

I'm overcompetitive, I fear- dying = losing for me, even if I get back up.

Fire/Elec/Elec, maybe? You'll (eventually) have the ability to AOE down +1 minions without touching BU or Aim, almost nothing is significantly fire resistant, you have Havoc Punch/Charged Brawl/Blaze for the tough guys, and your only real problem is that death comes quickly and often to both sides of the fight.

... oh, you DON'T want "nothing but attacks." That's much harder for me to answer. Good luck!

The difference between 44.4 and 45.0 is 5.6X% versus 5.0X% getting through, where X is "some value based on the level and rank of the thing shooting at you." So you'll take around 1/10 more damage. I wouldn't stress. You're 9 times as hard to hit as "no defense at all" instead of 10 times as hard to hit.

Disclaimer: I tend to approach Blasters from the standpoint of "All the damage, as fast as possible, on a moderate budget". Even though I am TRYING to keep in mind that your priorities are different (RP, hovering, ranged defense) it may leak through.

My tendency would be to worry less about ranged defense, which will free up an enormous amount of flexibility in your build. I'm going to put some "markers" up for defense and what it means:

25% - twice as hard to hit.
32.5% - almost three times as hard to hit. At this point you can "hit elude" and cap your defense with a single purple inspiration for 60 seconds, if you haven't been Defense Debuffed.
37.5% - four times as hard to hit.
40% - five times as hard to hit. This makes you roughly as tough as a level 35 scrapper with SO's and no pool defenses, discounting their superior mez protection.
45% - softcapped. Ten times as hard to hit. Twice as good as 40%.

For my playstyle, 37% plus carrying a few purples is plenty. That's a very personal statement and your results will undoubtedly vary.

But cutting back on Defense probably means you can slot Aid Self and Health. Aid Self is huge for keeping yourself alive. You might even be able to get Aim in there! (I love Aim and Build Up.)

I never saw it in person, but people I trust told me stories of crashing Crey's Folly from herding 600 Freaks and someone hitting a nuke.

It's because marketeers take 9 million of every million a farmer makes. *nods*

My advice is to pick two powers at a time to improve, of different types (one ranged, one melee, or whatever.)

Why?

1) It's a manageable number of different recipes to look at and learn.

2) It's a manageable number of things to bid on. (You can bid on three or four levels of a recipe to get it faster/cheaper, and if you get extras you can usually resell them at a profit. Let 'em sit for a week. )

3) You're not trying to get, for instance, four Ruin triples at the same time.

4) You can hold ten IO's in your tray. That's ROUGHLY what two powers take. So you don't have to juggle a lot of IO's at once, and you don't have to run around with a power that's half IOs and half SO's- sometimes you end up short on damage or short on accuracy or have some other crucial problem when you do that.

I was going to say "Sorry we backed up the dump truck of information" but... I'm not really. Too much is better than not enough. My mini-guides also have info on using the market, if you're from the pre-market days. Do not stress about things costing a million inf. I can kick 10 million over to you if there's a problem with starting money, and you can SELL as well as BUY things at those prices.

Ice Breath isn't actually a turd. It's damage scale 3.1 (it has a bad rep on the Blaster boards because it's slow-activating and gets Blasters killed, plus it was no good for PVP back in the day.) I don't know if you can cover a spawn with it, that's kind of your problem.

As far as farming, I don't do it so this is all theoretical.

Dark/Arch sounds good, with a whole lot of recharge. I had heard, but haven't checked for myself, that RoA _does_ do Blaster level damage.

Kin runs into the damage cap early (195% with slotting +80% Aim = 275%, about 2/3 of the 400% cap) and it appears from Red Tomax that Siphon Speed is only a 20% recharge boost. So you get slightly better damage (1.5 times as much, compared to 1.3 times as much for Dark) and slightly higher speeds in return for 1/3 or 1/5 the survivability.

Welcome back.

Basically it's "Building a monster out of spare parts." The example I always use is 5-slotting a ranged damage power:
Level 35 Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End/Rech
Level 35 Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech
Level 35 Maelstrom's Fury Acc/Dam/Rech
Level 35 Damage IO

This gives you (level 35 IO's are about equal to +1 SO's)
One SO of accuracy
Three SO's of damage
One SO of endurance reduction
Two SO's of recharge reduction

Total: "Seven slots" in five slots.

I haven't checked recently, but you used to be able to buy all five recipes, the salvage, and craft them for well under a million inf. You could slot them at level 32, and use those same IO's until you got bored. (You can buy whatever's cheap and available, whether that's level 32, level 36, level 34, whatever.)

My miniguides thread (in sig) has an example of frankenslotting a Claws/Dark Armor scrapper.

A lot of it depends on what holes and why.

I _always_ use IO's to cover a KB resist hole, because that's a fundamental imbalance in the game, in my opinion; it is entirely plausible in the late game to spend 75% of your time falling down or getting up.

The rest depends a lot on mechanics- the more Regen you have, the less adding Regen will help you. On the other hand, the more Defense you have [to a point] the more adding Defense helps you.

So in this specific case I'd recommend building up Defense or Recharge.