Fulmens

Comments on the OP:

Generally good. Have some minor points to mention.

1) At the risk of adding too much detail, you may want to clarify some of the AOE damage.

From the descriptions, it's hard to tell that Fire/Fire Breath does something like three times the AOE damage of Sonic/Shockwave.

2) On Blizzard and Rain of Arrows, you may wish to point out that they can be cast from around corners, for 100% damage mitigation.

3) Ignite: I'm told that AV's don't run no matter how much you light them on fire. I have not personally confirmed this.

4) Blatant judgement call: I tend to weight rains very lightly because the damage is so slow and so avoidable. My blaster has a half-life of about 5 seconds, so damage over 20 seconds is rarely my friend.

5) Ice, and this seems petty to mention, can be slotted for MOVEMENT slow only. RECHARGE slow stacks, but cannot be slotted, and can provide spectacular mitigation by blaster standards- and it's entirely free because it happens while you're shooting badguys. Which you would be doing ANYWAY.

6) Renamed Aim powers ("psychic focus") might be worth mentioning, as might the surprisingly good bonus Aim gives to damage. I don't know if the latter really belongs in a comparison, but it's easy to overlook for a new blaster.

We used to run a series in the City Scoop called "Myth Smashers" and at the time we found out that there was weapon redraw time penalties... sometimes. Pretty much killed the series.

The current situation for Broadsword, Katana and Dual Blades is that there IS a weapon redraw penalty. There was a deliberate decision to make the attacks faster and smoother, in the non-redraw case.

I do not know if AR and Archery has any weapon draw penalties, but given that this was the "left-handed flying girls get penalized" game... I'd like to see an official Dev post (or better, an Arcanaville post) before believing that there are none in those two sets.

Why do I think Blasters are, approximately, at a good place? I'm going to label my points so you may tell me where your experience diverges from mine.

1. In my experience: there is such a thing on a team as "more than enough protection." It's very easy to acheive a team where as long as a couple brain-dead primitive rules are applied ("Don't leave the team and start a fight") nobody's health drops below 75%.

2. In my experience: it is harder to acheive a team that kills so fast that you have "more than enough damage". I've been on about three of them. (one team could drop an AV in 30 seconds. I timed it.)

3. Therefore: Beyond a certain limit, easily acheived, your team is only held back by killing speed.

4. In my experience: if the team is otherwise safe, and if the blasters FEEL safe enough to let loose at full power, a blaster will do about 1.5 times the damage of a Scrapper or Tank, and about twice the damage of a typical Defender (whatever that is.)

5. Therefore: within a team, Blasters may die more than other teammates. But a team with several Blasters will hit harder and therefore move faster than a team with less Blasters.

Is my view skewed by my 135+ levels of Force Field defender? Perhaps... or maybe it just lets me see the actual level of damage disparity. When you want damage in a Force Fielded team, and you bring Scrappers, they slow the team down.

Is the Blaster solo experience worse than average? Well, I soloed a +2 Rikti boss once with a Force Field/Rad defender and it took 54 damage-dealing shots to drop that boss. I counted. That did not count Force Bolts (which do nearly zero damage.) And I think there was a moment where I took a break inside Personal Force Field for ten or fifteen seconds, let my endurance and health come back . It was safe, though. So there are some pretty bad soloing experiences out there.

I believe one of the things they put in to cut down on problems like this was a sortable record of who reports things, 0-stars things, 5-stars things, etc. so they can find problem players and destroy them.

I don't know if they DO find problem players and destroy them, but they had plans and built tools to do it.

So there might be an automated smiting coming their way.

Good luck and good hunting!

I think the GM's only follow up if you protest; silence is assumed to be an admission of guilt.

I assume you received an email (not in-game, real email) and the correct thing to do is reply to that email explaining to THEM what you just explained to US.

We, on these forums, are players. Maybe on a good day a mod will look at this post. But the forum mods are not the game GM's.

huh.

All these years I've been letting one fire imp die because I can only tell "The fire imp I just bubbled" and "The fire imp I can grab next."

here are some good ideas for how to make as much inf as you need.

If you're desperate to scratch together some inf in a hurry- you have less than 100K to your name and you need a million to get SO's so you can play with your friend who's on in an hour- here's a boring, low-return, grindy way to make a million or two. Nearly anything else is less trouble for more money, but this is limited only by your desire to Make Inf Now.

Go through the level 36-44 recipes for really unpopular things: snipes, confuses, slows, sleeps. Look for something where there are 0 bids and 10+ for sale. These sell to vendors for [if yellow] 3600-4400 and [if orange] 7200-8800.

You can probably buy some for 1000 or less. Profit will be around 4000 inf per recipe. You can probably hold 10-15 recipes for a profit of around 60,000 inf PER RUN TO THE STORE. Kings Row has a store very near the Wentworth's. If you have the right contact (contacts buy recipes) there's one inches from the back of the Talos Wents.

When I tried it I made more than a million inf an hour. It was miserable and boring and stupid, but if you NEED a million inf, sixty minutes from right now, it will work.

[ QUOTE ]
What's that? You don't have any lower level toons cause you PL'ed them all?

[/ QUOTE ]

... I'm not exactly a big powerleveller and I have to say that you're making my side of the argument look stupid.

Suppose three people- let's call them "me" , "my wife", and "our friend Amy"- want to play some characters we don't pull out much, on a server where we don't hang out much. I've got a 21, my wife has a 20 (played mostly together) and our friend Amy has a 12.

Well, time for the big PL scumbags we are to start from scratch, huh?

10? You people are crazy.

I think I'm being risky if I craft TWO of the same thing.

Almost all those missions give the merits if you do them as you go.

I'd recommend Rad/Dark of the three listed.

To Hit isn't much of a bang for your buck. Most people will hit 90% of the time, or more, without you even showing up.

The cap on "final" To Hit is 95% of the time- you will always miss 5% [and always hit 5%]

Common Buffs and the caps on them:

+Damage. Most heroes are capped at either 500% total (scrappers and blasters) or 400% total (everything else)- I don't know where Kheldians fall in that.

100% is what you get for showing up. 95% is ED slotting (ED) so you can only buff that up another 205% to 305% total. Nobody gives that much buff except Kinetics -though Blasters can get close with their self-buffs.

+To Hit- as mentioned, not very commonly needed. The actual cap is something silly like 500% but, in practice, I'd say anything above 50% will come up less than once in 50 average levels.

-Resistance: This is a "multiplier" on top of damage. If you debuff a critter for -40% Resistance, anyone who hits it does 40% more damage. Commonly found in Sonic, Rad and Dark primaries and Sonic blasts.

Those are your offensive tools. Defense (Slot Fortitude for Defense and Recharge. Other people will tell you the same) and To Hit debuffs stop them hitting your friends. Damage debuffs, and Damage resistance, and +HP (only available in cold as far as I know) stop them from hitting so hard. Regen and Healing put the hit points back on.

Most efficient or most fun?

I kinda like grabbing a team and doing Sister Psyche or a respec, but that's really personal taste.

There are people who got VERY fast times on Positron, but they got annoyed after doing it a couple of times.

I think all the Ouro loopholes have been closed down, pretty much. I got some pretty quick runs on a couple of the 16-19 ones, but not hugely disproportionate, like the Negotiator badge mission used to be.

OK, bored again and buying. To repeat: level 32-35 character, 6 million per recipe, nearly any server H-side, or Infinity, Freedom, Pinn, Victory V-side.

What the heck, I'll buy gold ticket rolls as well.

If it helps, think "Regen scrappers".

(P.S. BC, I found your highway. )

[ QUOTE ]
Not dying is the sine qua non of tanking, but it's not everything.

[/ QUOTE ]

I tend to use the phrase "necessary, but not sufficient."

Does anyone else tend to log off sitting and watching TV?

... just me, then.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
got it. that being said, this really is the funnest character ive ever played. i dont have a 50 yet and this may be it. why doesnt everybody play scrappers?

[/ QUOTE ]
I think some people like taking more specific roles on a team, or enjoy the challenge of being a glass cannon, or like being able to go AFK in the middle of insane spawns, or what have you. While scrappers are my favorite, I also enjoy blasters and to a lesser extent tanks.

Oh, wait, that was one of them rhetorical questions, wuddnit?

[/ QUOTE ]

If you don't want your rhetorical questions answered, don't ask them.

(I "Graduated" to blasters because I am addicted to giant clouds of huge orange numbers and willing to take the red numbers that go with. )

A single luck does make a huge difference- I'd pick "tough" fights and use it on them only. Probably obvious, but use Focus a lot - it's a good attack, fast, fun [for me anyway- I always love clotheslining someone from twenty feet out ] and you get considerable mitigation out of knocking down the ugliest guy there is.

One other thing- the difference between I3-4 and I6+ in what people can take on is HUGE. It used to be that high level teams had contempt for anything that wasn't purple. This is no longer true. The flipside: they increased XP by 30% across the board when they put in the defense nerfs and ED. They also did another rebalancing of XP in the 40+ and (I think) 15-20 games.

The net result is that the infinite grind is gone and level 50 will take you under 200 hours, even playing in a "typical" fashion. (I remember, in issue 4, getting like one bubble per hour on a good fast team in the 40's. Its two to five times faster than that now.)

Welcome back!

I think Buckshot does absolutely standard AOE damage. Most of what else you have in the set does more, I think, but it's not BAD damage.

Beanbag may only need one slot, I dunno, but 1-slotted Tripmine is a waste of a power pick. For that much setup you shouldn't be doing half damage.

I am old. You may now mock my taste in music.

"Burn down the malls" by Mojo Nixon?
"Ring of Fire" (I prefer the Social Distortion version) ?
"Burning House of Love" by X?
"The Roof is on Fire" by the Bloodhound gang?

In my personal opinion, love IS a burning thing.

Fire/Mental. Remember that on a big team, it is someone else's job to take the alpha.

miniguide written mostly so I don't have to repeat myself so much.

To the OP: Perhaps blowing my own horn would help.

You've picked the zero-mitigation, massive-damage option with a fairly broken secondary. Not in the good way either.

First thing is to learn your tools. We're going to do some experiments here. Science!

Step 1. Go out and get like twelve purples.
Step 2. Find a group of six to ten badguys.
Step 3. Put on your protective gear: four purples.
Step 4. Step up to group, hit some combo of Build Up, Aim, and Fireball/Fire Breath.
Step 5. Take notes. Did the minions die? What level were they? Which buffs did it take? Did your cone hit all of them?
Step 6. Clean up your labdesk with blaze, fire bolt, more fireballs and firebreaths, etc.

Repeat steps 3-6 with different groups, different levels, different buffs until you can reliably look at a group, determine what it will take to burn down ALL the minions, and apply it. Do you get better results with firebreath/fireball or the other way around? Remember, as always in science, use your protective gear.

Once you get good at it [stealth helps in this] try it without your protective gear. You should end up with a bunch of XP and a couple badly injured lieutenants.

This is a basic Blaster drill.

If you just wanted to say "I know what I'm doing, and I die anyway" ... sorry for the constructive advice.

DrMike: Build Up, Aim, Zapp may take out a +2 minion. Watch out for energy resistance (Rikti, I think some Malta, some armored Crey) throwing off your results. Blasters have two alpha damage boosts for a reason.

Speak for yourself. Ice is good, but I find that the hard control in putting people in the Zig makes Fire my ideal Blaster set.

My dark tanker hurt for endurance from about level 10 on.