Fulmens

Spitting Trashcan:

I remember trying to solo Siege with a Dark/Traps corr and being totally unable to do it. It may have been much more about my inexperience in AV soloing than about my powersets, however.

Two Empathy/Sonic defenders. Empathy is full of ridiculously powerful buffs that you can't cast on yourself...

I think people have been [relatively] quiet on the "Defender" front.

It varies TREMENDOUSLY based on the defender type. Scrappers play more like Tanks than Kinetic Defenders play like Force Fielders. (which don't play like Storms, which don't play like Empaths, none of those play like Rads, etc.)

If you play a Rad/Sonic defender, you will have a lot to offer a team AND you will do solid damage with good safety soloing. It's a tremendously good combo for a tremendous number of situations. You will need to know what an "anchor" is [you have various toggle powers which you can put on enemies, making them weaker, making them hit worse, etc. - that enemy is called an "anchor"] and you have to accept that your anchors are mortal. If my anchors last into the second half of the fight I call that a win.

Dark Miasma also makes a very good "convertible" defender. I have a Dark/Ice that's quite effective.

The "Standard disclaimer" for Defenders in this game is: Healing is a minor part of your effectiveness, and as you go up in levels and in experience it becomes less important, compared to your other tools. Anyone who screams for a healer in this game doesn't know what they're doing, and will generally get you killed.

Well, if you're going to play like that, why not add Flurry to that combo? Sorry for the rhetoric, but Combustion sucks so badly that I consider it to be the CoH equivalent of suicide by cop.

I can't tell if the hybrids are overpowered until someone explains to me how regular medium insps are NOT overpowered.

You'll have to excuse me; I'm a little late to the /Elec Armor discussions. Several years late, in fact. I agree with previous analysis: It's a very strong power in a, currently, very weak set.

The recent analysis I did [my wife started levelling one up, dual blades/elec; I'm an RPG accountant for my friends] made me go "It's about as survivable as Fire Armor without Healing Flames." On a Brute End Drain looks like it only works if you go Elec/Elec or possibly */Elec/Mu, and End Drain is tricky mitigation [although I have no personal experience of it on a brute.] In a slight tangent, anything that doesn't work until level 41 or higher is broken. From a game design point of view, anything that works against "This game is fun from level 1 on" is strongly to be discouraged.

So yeah, giving it the rough equivalent of Healing Flames makes it the rough equivalent of Fire Armor. Which works for me.

Go team.

Ever feel like there's a whistle that only you can hear?

Here is the guide I consider standard.
This is the guide I wrote when inventions were new and shiny.

I think every "Frankenslotting" build should have a couple of set bonuses or uniques. If you don't have knockback protection, get it. Game changing effect for a squishy. Karma, Steadfast, Blessing of the Zephyr, Kinetic Crash are good IO's; I've never run Acrobatics because Superjump is not the travel power for me. Also you should have somewhere between one and two "SO's" of accuracy in every power- generally I try for one or two global Acc bonuses and at least 45% slotted Acc in a given power. Most people like more Acc than I do.

Other than that, if you figure that each part of a triple is "half an IO" and each part of a double is "a bit more than half an IO" (three gets ya two) and an IO in the 30-45 range is "close enough to an SO" that makes the math simple and almost right.

An example of the math- I usually do this at level 25:

Acc/Dam (Any set, whatever's cheap)
Acc/Dam (any other set)
Dam/End [or Dam/Rech for a really juicy power]
generic Damage

Gives you "Bit more than 1 acc", "about three damage", "half an End."

have fun!

My wisdom! It is increasing!

AIEEEE!

How do you even see your own rep as a number? I'm still finding my way around these boards.

I've bought and sold many thousands of items on the market. Possibly hundreds of thousands.

I may have seen a couple of glitches where the market, in front of my eyes, didn't work as it was supposed to.

The rest of the time it has been "highest bid gets lowest listed."

The number of things that looked like glitches is far lower than the number of things where I clearly made a mistake... so I've sort of assumed that the "glitches" were user error as well and I didn't see what I thought I saw.

People have reported, first-hand, a lot of things that looked like market bugs to them. I can't prove or disprove those bugs; all I can say is "It pretty much always works for me."

OK, I want you to clearly visualize Michael Caine in your mind's eye.

Got it? Excellent.

... and a big Rogue Isles hello to all of you.

Tricia was clear but I want to emphasize: The choice is per CHARACTER. You can give one person the Ghost Slaying Axe and another the Sands of Mu.

(My ratings: For most purposes, the Sands of Mu is a lot better. If you do a ton of lethal damage you may be better off with the Ghost Slaying Axe, because it is strong vs. some specific things where you're weak. Very few of my characters use vet powers consistently in their later life, but they're nice when you're starting out.)

Seraphael: Your experience differs from mine. Considerably.

You are falling into the One True Way To Play trap. The only time I can think of that blappers may have had trouble with their ST damage potential was on Noise Complaint, a team of mostly Sonic Blasts, running mostly Assault, that took down archvillains in under a minute consistently. You may not have had time to run in and hit anything in that situation. Otherwise I get good ST damage in on Archvillains, Elite Bosses, regular bosses, Monsters and Giant Monsters, anything that wasn't in the cones or fireballs, and any weirdly lucky survivors that ended up within arm's reach. Consider the layer cake room in the blue caves... "Oh darn. I fell." SMACK BAM SLAM CRUNCH MANGLE. "Fortunately these Behemoths broke my fall."

I was going with the Fire/Fire blaster until someone mentioned Elec/Fire blaster.

I think the Elec/Fire has it. Not only do you have three seconds of animation in stabbing range, but then you do nice slow damage over time so they have plenty of time to remember that they hate you.

This is like an Onion headline:

SOME PEOPLE STUPID,IGNORANT

Blasters for me "don't work" without a couple of things that should, ideally, be optional.

One is a goodly selection of inspirations. The other is a Knockback IO or IO bonus [Karma and Steadfast being the most common; Blessing of the Zephyr is a single-slot KB, and I think 4-slotting Kinetic Crash gives slightly less KB.]

Having said that, there are tactics and tactics. You are having trouble playing Blasters, so you have room for improvement. I don't know what you DO know and what you DON'T, so I'm going to shotgun out some ideas that may be helpful.

1. Build Up and Aim. If you're on AR/Dev this is not a choice, but otherwise Build Up and/or Aim often make the difference between "Every minion in this spawn has a handful of HP left, and is shooting you" and "Every minion in this spawn is dead, and not shooting you."
2. Your job as a Blaster is to drop them to zero HP. Not "almost zero". Zero. Solo, this means open up with a firestorm of biblical proportions. It's not like anyone else is going to have the aggro. Teamed, this means open up with, for instance, several singletarget attacks, killing one enemy. By this time the rest of your team has probably succeeded in doing some slight injury to every badguy there. THEN you open up with the firestorm. Then you finish off the surviving lieutenant or two.
3. Homework. I'm giving you homework- a lab, specifically. Find a large spawn about your level or a little higher. I like the big bunches in Founders' or Brickstown. Put on protective equipment [several purples]. Apply your AOE's, seeing who you hit and what it takes to kill them. Try this with combos of Build Up and Aim [as available] on zeros, +1s and +2s. MAKE SURE YOU ARE WEARING YOUR PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT. Once you are secure in your ability to alpha-strike the vast majority minions to death, you can try it for real, without the protective equipment.
4. In an ideal world, Blasters wouldn't need lots of inspirations or special IO's. You've noticed this isn't an ideal world for Blasters. I wouldn't play a Blaster without KB protection [usually a Karma IO, but there are other options] and I've gotten very used to having Stealth in a travel power. I heard a line about barfights, something like "The first punch is worth 20 pounds." It is good advice.

So that's my "General blaster advice." Shoot them until they die, faster than they can shoot you until you die. It's deep.

huh. Now there can really be a forum cartel! high rep people giving high rep to high rep people!

... to the OP: Do you even read that stuff over before you hit "post"? Seriously?

I do have issues with "copyright infringement" claims from the two companies that, for instance, responded to 'Catwoman' with 'Black Cat' . I mean, really, when DC is stealing ideas from itself, what's a superhero game to do?

Other fun stuff: Technician Naylor, 35-39 .I can't think of a 20-30 contact I really love. Diviner Maros is good. Operative Vargas is possibly the most overlooked chunk of pure evil in the game.

And all the Strike Forces villainside are really excellent. There aren't a lot but they're good.