Fulmens

Hey, I didn't do the math on my Dark Astoria runs. Instead of burning a hundred million, I may only have burnt, like, eighty.

I like the "pattern on the ground" idea. Especially since you can add to one letter to make another. World's most labor-intensive graffiti.

"B, U, L, E, 8, H, I, T."

Urk! That was me. Accidentally logged in as my wife.

There's a tag, in square brackets, called "url" and another called "/url" which give you the pretty green link.

Use the quote button above this post to see an example:
Your picture
"Squarebracket"url=http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb295/jcmcg128/supergroup%20pics/cool%20sg%20rooms/overview.jpg"unsquarebracket" your picture "squarebracket"/url"unsquarebracket"

Lakanna asked:
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Since you can honestly say (although you made qualifications) that you were "poor" once, did you ever feel that no matter how long you played, you would never be able to afford to outfit your character? That things were just too expensive and would be forever out of reach?

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I never owned a single Hami-O until I bought one in issue, I think, 11. On the market.

I heard about the raids, frame rates in the seconds/frame range and three hours of misery, and just gave up without trying one.

So there was high end stuff I was never going to have. Explain the difference.

(P.S. The equivalent of "two hami-os per power" can be gotten just through frankenslotting, and you can do that at level 32 for the price of, I dunno, four SO's per power. )

There are a lot of people who come to the Blaster forums with questions like "How do I play a Blaster?" And they get a lot of answers that boil down to two categories:
1) Very carefully.
2) Like an absolute maniac who doesn't care about dying.

You may have started a blaster and thought, "Why, this isn't hard at all! This is EASY! What are they on about?"
You may have played it a little farther and gone, "Wait. No. This sucks!"

Basically, this is a brief guide to what Blasters can do, how they can do it, and what to expect when.

1. OVERVIEW.

Blasters have a primary that is all about damage, and a secondary that is about, allegedly, "utility." That's a lie. Almost every secondary consists of melee damage that works very well, one or two utility powers, and a bunch of things stolen from Tankers that do nothing but get you aggro at pointblank range from lots of people at once.

This leads most people to conclude that Blasters have a Primary that does damage, and a Secondary that does ... damage. I pretty much came to this conclusion several years ago and have seen no real reason to change. Other archetypes have a primary or secondary which, umm, keeps them alive... I have four level 50 Blasters, so apparently I consider this to be overrated.

2. HORRIBLE DEATH SYNDROME. As mentioned in the intro, Blasting goes from "really really easy" to "startlingly difficult" somewhere around level, say, 26. The reason for this is a matter of game design. In the low levels, everyone is about the same. Everyone does about the same damage, everyone has about the same HP, and nobody's all THAT much tougher. The only real difference is outgoing damage, at which Blasters are king. (This is why low level tanks die all the time, because they're trying to take point and they don't have the tools yet.) So enemies are designed to be slow to kill tanks, which means "slow to kill everyone."

By level 35, Scrappers are about six times tougher, and Tanks are maybe ten or fifteen times tougher, than Blasters. So if it takes an enemy group a minute to kill a Tank, it takes them about five seconds to kill a Blaster. one mississipi, two mississipi, three mississipi, four mississipi, OW.

For the first 25-ish levels, Blasters get more damage while everyone else is getting "defenses" and "mez protection" and wimpy stuff like that. They win the war of attrition by just blowing stuff up THAT FAST. Then they run out of damage... and the enemies still keep getting tougher... and other people start filling out their attacks.

On top of this, because Blasters haven't ever really had to do anything but throw damage, they usually haven't developed any other tactics than "Blow everything up RIGHT NOW."

Added to this is the team dynamic. When you are level 16 it really kinda feels like you're carrying the team. So you don't need those guys, so you don't team with them. Then, when you're starting to think "Maybe I need a team" they're all starting to think "Maybe we don't need a blaster."

It's all very sad.

3. SO WHAT DO YOU DO? First, understand your role. Your role is to shoot people until they drop. This means very different things if you're soloing or if you're on a team. When you're soloing, you want to roll out the big hitters as soon as possible, because it's not like you're going to get shot LESS if you're passive-aggressive about it. When you're on a team, you probably can't drop the entire spawn in your opening salvo. So you let someone else start the fight. There are archetypes whose entire job description is " Jump in and get shot." Let them do so. Your job description is "finish them." So you maybe start out with a couple single-target attacks while the badguys are taking their initial hits. Then you do the last half, or 75%, of the damage in a series of big, impressive explosions. Think of yourself as the cavalry. When the cavalry shows up, the fight is over. Sometimes (Inferno, for instance) you can start and finish the fight at the same time. That's perfectly valid. But if you take someone down to 25% of their hit points, and do not kill them, that's a mistake. They will blame you for some reason, and you will die.

4. HOW DO YOU DO THIS? There are several crucial powers to being a Blaster- well, I lie. There are two. Build Up and Aim. Sometimes they call it something else, like Amplify or Concentration, but they all work the same. They all last ten seconds. Build Up is a medium ToHit bonus combined with a 100% damage bonus- not "double damage" but like four red insps- and Aim is a larger ToHit bonus combined with a 65% damage bonus. In combination they give you eight seconds of 165% damage bonus- almost double damage once you have SO's. This is what lets you do things like 1-shot Sappers and, with Nova, destroy up to 16 +2 minions before they know you're there. Depending on your attack set and their level, you may be able to destroy all the minions, from full HP, with only one of these buffs (or in some cases with none.) At that point it's a much more even fight ... damn the aggro, full speed ahead. Besides, you probably have teammates to clean up that one smouldering boss.

5. SO WHY WOULD I WANT TO GET INTO MELEE RANGE, ANYWAY?
Ah yes. The "Blapper" build. (The Blaster that plays like a Scrapper, in case the name isn't obvious.) The root of this is that the Melee attacks were originally designed to be "emergency" powers, or else generally higher-risk. So they do more damage, with very low activation times. Charged Brawl hits like Power Burst. Havoc Punch hits like Sniper Blast. You can throw them both and be running back out in two and a half seconds. Remember how I mentioned wiping out the minions with your Area of Effect attacks? This is what you can use on the guys who are left. Whether you use them only in emergencies, or whether you actively seek out trouble, you have an impressive burst capability in those attacks. Fire Manipulation and Mental have actual melee AOE attacks. That means "running into the middle of a lot of guys who aren't dead yet" but sometimes, you can do that.

6. WHAT CAN I DO TO SURVIVE?
* There are builds that, at high levels, can rummage together respectable levels of defense. This doesn't help in the first 40 levels, though. I wouldn't rely on it.
* You Are Not Iron Man. You're more like James Bond. Sneak in, sneak out, run if you have to and always try to leave impressive explosions behind you, because if they shoot you, you will die. There are individual bosses in the 35+ game who can hit you for around 80% of your entire health bar with one shot. Don't let them.
* Break Frees Are Your Friend. Chemical dependency or none, you _need_ those inspirations. Yes, you can shoot some of your attacks while stunned, but that doesn't help you get away from the horrible death. Other good inspirations are purples (try taking three Lucks at a time for 60 seconds of bulletproofing) and of course greens.
* Blastersense. If you've been playing Blasters a while, you may sometimes get the feeling that "In about four seconds, I'm going to die." Listen to that feeling. Run. Run far. Do not stop. Most of the time I die it's because I turned around and came back to a situation that was bad enough to run from in the first place. And it hadn't gotten any better.
* Know Your Threats. Crey riot cops, for instance, will stun you at melee range. Rikti, on the other hand, stun you MORE at range than in melee. Not that the sword half of the gunsword is a treat either.
* You usually have SOME kind of active mitigation- mostly mezzes- in your primary or secondary. Energy blasts do a lot of knockdown. People falling down or getting up are not usually shooting at you . Elec has the lovely Tesla Cage, Sonic has a huge sleep AND a stun, the slows in Ice are surprisingly good mitigation; everything's got something. Learn who needs mezzing, and mez them. Preferable first.
* I mentioned "sneak in?" Blasters do much better at delivering alphas than receiving them. Stealth (I like the travel IO's but they're expensive; superspeed or the actual Stealth power also work) is VERY useful to a Blaster who wants to get the first shot.
* Another useful IO- I would say crucial- is some sort of knockback defense. It will cost like ten million inf with careful shopping, but it is worth it. They say that "you don't need IO's to play the game" but in this case I would disagree. Karma in something like Combat Jump or Hover, or Blessing of the Zephyr in any travel power, is the usual thing. Some people pick a power that does knockback and slot several Kinetic Crash IO's in it. If you do that make sure you either get your damage up to 95% or pick a power you can afford to do less damage in.

7. ANY MORE ADVICE ON TEAMING?

Yeah. Try to not assume that your teammates have razor-sharp reflexes and that they're reading your mind. I've played with an Empath that was so good they could keep me alive no matter what I did. I actually apologized for working them so hard and they said "No problem, it's fun!" OK, I've played with four or five Emps that good. In five years. The rest were... mixed. Take credit for your survival, and take blame when you die.

8. ANYTHING ELSE?
I'm sure I left something good out. Set up a bind for just before you nuke. Change it often. Something like this:
/bind numpad7 "say Alert the hospital. I'm going to do something cool."

9. WHAT IS THE BEST BLASTER?
The non-answer is "The one you like." Unfortunately this is true. I would recommend something with decent mitigation, which means [for me] Sonic or Ice primary, or Mental or Ice secondary. My personal favorite is Fire primary with Ice or Elec secondary, and my personal least favorites are Energy primary and Dev or Fire secondary, but that's like telling you my favorite flavor of ice cream. It only helps if you're me.

[Edited: active mitigation, point 9. ]

BurningChick: Fixed.

Everyone else: It's a lot less boring with, like, five Blasters on the team. Plus, I'm trying to prevent people from playing force fielders and NOT bubbling their teammates, cause it's boring and stuff. And yet, there they sit, making ME look bad. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BUBBLE YOUR TEAMMATES PLAY SOMETHING ELSE. Or I'm gonna cut you. Out of the will.

Have you ever had a thought, laughed at yourself, and shared it with friends?

... guess not. Yesterday I was on a team with 4 OTHER blasters, a tank and a TA/A defender. And just for one second I thought "I should slot range in my attacks, so I can beat them to the punch."

According to you that's gloating about my faceplanting skills.

... Don't let anyone know that sometimes we buy high and sell low. They might hold it against us somehow.

It is an investment. And not a very expensive one, as I recall. When I was doing it, it was something like "buy at 511, sell at 100" until all bids for Improvised Cybernetics were filled, repeat with Spirit Thorns and Regenerating Flesh, come back later and do it again. That gets you a couple of slots (one at 250, one at 1000 according to the wiki) for about half a million inf.

Pricing has changed, the "low cost high turnover" items have undoubtedly changed, and it may be less practical now in general.

To the OP, on the original question... I've never found a villain that was easy before SO's. They have a huge unpleasant pit from about 10 to about 21. Admittedly the only things that I"ve managed to get through that pit are two stalkers, two brutes and one corruptor... I might have missed the "easier mode" characters.

Good luck on the slog!

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However, it terms of nukage, does irradiate work well or is that something to mess with later?


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"Nuke" in this game has a specific meaning. I am told that in other games it tends to mean any AOE, but I could be wrong about that.

When people talk about Nukes in this game they mean things like Inferno, Nova... most of the tier nine attack powers. They have long recharge times, significant downsides (like draining all your endurance when you're in the middle of a crowd) but they will usually kill all minions and mess up the management really badly.

I think this game has more AOE for more damage than most MMO's but again... I'm inexperienced in the wider world.

Just think of it as a "local dialect" thing for CoH/CoV. Same with "recharge" vs. "cooldown".

Welcome to the Rogue Isles. Watch your wallet... we do.

Continuing the tangent...

I half-remember something where Scourge might get applied as a "lump sum" for some powers. So if Gloom hits for 10,10,10...10 (totalling 80) you might get 10, SCOURGE ! 80, 10, 10... 10 (totalling 80 + 80 scourge).

I might be misremembering, because that's how [all] Scrapper crits work, but I thought I saw this on my Dark Blast/Traps a few months back.

It's in the patch notes.

By the way, my global is @Boltcutter, not @Fulmens.

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Before I9, did you hear people complaining that things were too expensive? That they could not outfit their character in whatever way they wanted with no effort?

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Yes, we did.

Every person without a high level character had this exact problem.

Remember being broke at 12? 17? 22? 27? 32?

To think that the good ol' days featured no one suffering because of lacks of funds is silly.

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I remember it quite clearly. The only period I felt my first toon EVAR, a SS/INV tank, was short-ish on cash was around 22 when I was upgrading from DO's to SO's. Before that, I took everyone's advice and sold things at the proper stores and upgraded/combined stuff to make it last. After my first 50 I never felt any of my twinked toons were short on cash. By the time I was in my 30's I felt like I could go out and earn anything I wanted to buy just by playing normally.

Just one players experience since launch.

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I had the problem at 22-24 ("do I really want to buy this? It's about to go white...") and 27 on my first character. I think at 32 I just about broke even. My second character was built before my first character got out of the cash crunch. At 37 I was "rich".

A lot of it depended on how you were slotted. A low level INV tank had a lot of Damage Resist SO's, which only cost 60% as much as Acc and Damage SO's. Go ahead, look that one up- it's still true.

Some of it depended on how much dying you did, intentionally or otherwise, on your way to 22. And, yes, some of it came from whether you combined DO's that were already in your powers, and went half a mile out of your way (each way) to sell to the right stores.

My friends and I were moving to another server, and I built a streetwalker so we wouldn't start poor and miserable. (She was a forcefielder. She was 22, hanging out with blasters in their 40's and asking for tips. What would YOU call it?)

Villainside was even worse- due to the lack of "Saved pedestrians" and the late arrival of the 40+ game, among other things. My wife was around level 32 before she was fully SO'd out. (I was slow coming around to V-side.)

So, yeah, hate to answer your rhetorical questions, but "Yes. We were poor once, before issue 9."

OK, Force Field Defenders got mini-guide #1.

tadaaa.

My fire/Elec. Or fire/energy. Or ice/ice, or maybe sonic/mental. Or fire/ice, that's moving up fast.

I wouldn't say "I like 'em all" but I like a LOT of them.

It's like pinball; every time you think you're doing well you discover another factor of 2 or 5 or 10. Glad you're having fun, but don't give up on the "regular" game until you get SO's and try at least one fast-moving group.

Champions Online was designed from the ground up to have some stuff that they couldn't do with this engine. Someone said "They used our complaints list for their feature list" and that may be alarmingly true. Remember they started coding a couple years before the game went live... so some parts of this code were written in 2002. Maybe earlier.

I can do inviter duties as well, if needed. I've got good hero coverage, not so much v-side.

A money surplus is not problematic; an severely uneven money surplus might be. Nobody likes being the loser.

Fire/Mental, I choose you! Or Fire/Elec, or fire/en.

OK, if you're interested in Force Fielding, you've probably found The Force Fielder's Bible.

I've been arguing with Philotic Knight for five years... and here's my side of the story. Call it the Satanic Bible of Force Fielding.

1. Don't Do It.
You don't want to play Force Fields. That's right, you don't. I didn't play 133 levels of FF defender because I know some grand secret, I just have a high tolerance for boredom and an appreciation of efficiency. You don't get dramatic last-minute saves. You don't get people thanking you, humbly, when you screw up and let them die and rez them. If you're doing your job right, people take you for granted. All Force Fields does is keep the team from losing, ever. Make a Rad/Sonic. It's better.

2. You ARE a buffbot.
You can provide most of the benefit of being a Force Fielder with four powers, in 25% of your time. Those four powers are: Dispersion Bubble, Deflection Field, Insulation Field, and Maneuvers (from the Leadership Pool.) If the whole team is bubbled, within the radius of the two toggles, and you are not stunned, dead, or in Personal Force Field, you have raised all of them to the Defense softcap from about level 17 on. Blasters are ten times tougher, Scrappers and Tanks are between two and ten times tougher [depending] and anyone up close has mez protection and you don't have to lift a finger beyond that. The only one on the team who is NOT a tank is you. Let me reiterate: If you do NOTHING besides keep the team bubbled and stay close to the guy on point, you are a good Force Field Defender. If you do everything else in your power and do not bubble the team, you are a bad Force Fielder.

3. Most of the rest of the set isn't much to write home about. You have a lot of knockback/repel, one enemy phase/team griefing power, one "Oh s***" and one actual damaging attack.

So why, you may ask, do I do it?
4. YOUR TEAM IS IDIOTPROOF AND INDESTRUCTIBLE. While Rad is a very good set offensively and defensively, and Dark is a very good set offensively and defensively, Force Fields has nothing to go wrong. If you put bubbles on someone, they're at least twice as hard to kill for the next 4 minutes, no matter WHAT. This includes stray Archvillain aggro, Blaster falls down a hole, you fall down a hole, unlucky mez, monster knockback, hitting the "R" key at the wrong time... everything. And if you haven't done ALL of those things, you haven't been playing very long.

5. So what do you do?
5a. Regular buffing. Playing FF isn't tricky but it's hard. If you miss a buffing cycle, people may start faceplanting very fast with no warning. So you just have to be OCD-level consistent in rebubbling. I use a digital kitchen timer and every 3 minutes, I reset it and start rebubbling. Some people use Herostats. Leave "gather" for the Empaths and drama queens. Rebubbling is your JOB and you can do it so smoothly that people don't stop shooting for a second. I use keyboard shortcuts- shift-1 gives you the top person on the team, shift-2 the second and so forth. I have 6 and 7 set to insulation and deflection shields. So my "reshield cycle" goes shift-1, 6,7,shift-2,6,7 and so forth. You get good at it fast.
5b. Relax. This is the thing that makes Force Fields different from any other Defender primary: once you've rebubbled- an eight person only takes 45 seconds- you have literally done everything you can to keep the team safe. If they STILL manage to get horribly maimed that isn't your responsibility. And trust me, even through the considerable protection you provide, someone will still manage.
5c. Don't tell people what to do; tell them why. This one was hard for me. If someone runs off away from the group, and you can't FIND them to rebubble them, don't. Just send a tell saying something like "/t $target, your shields are going down soon." If they want new shields, they can come get 'em. If they die, that was their choice and their responsibliity. I also tend to give a message when I join that says something like "For best results, keep arms, legs and tentacles inside the big bubble. Oh, by the way- it gives mez protection." Last, I tend to be the [passive-aggressive] leader of the split party. I will click on the person I believe should be leader, and say something like "Following $target". People can either come find us and live, or wander off and take their chances.

Again: You give the OPPORTUNITY for people to live forever. You're not their mother. You're not their boss. They have to keep themselves alive.

6. Quick rundown on primary powers:
Deflection, Insulation, Dispersion : Take them, slot them, use them. If you don't like these powers you will be happier playing "not force fields". You may want to 4-slot all 3 by level 17, so you can load them up with level 20 Defense IOs [put in your bid early, get 'em cheap] and defense-cap the entire team five levels early.

Force Bolt: Recommended. Force Bolt is a great power because it is accurate, reliable, single-target knockback. Knockback makes people mad and you are the only person on the team who is NOT a tank. So pick and chose your aggro. It does about zero damage, so don't slot for damage. Slot once for accuracy.

Personal Force Field: The "I escape" button. It is nearly impossible to get killed with PFF up, but you don't affect the rest of the party in any way. If you are dead, you also don't affect the rest of the party in any way. Use PFF to avoid being dead. It requires no slotting of any sort, really. Maybe recharge.

Repulsion Bomb: Recommended. Force Fielders don't do much damage, but this helps. It's a "scale 1" aoe attack that does knockdown- about the same damage as Explosive Blast or Ball Lightning or any other AOE attack. Defenders don't throw up big damage numbers anyway, but this will help a little.

Repulsion Field: Not recommended. This does AOE knockback, but no damage. All this does in my experience is focus the enemy damage tightly on the only delicate member of the team:You.

Force Bubble: Much like Repulsion Field, except it is Repel and Repulsion Field is Knockback. (Don't ask why.) Which means that nearly nobody resists it; but they keep their feet and shoot you while sliding backwards.

HONORARY MENTION: Maneuvers. This only provides around 5% Defense, but the difference between 40% and 45% Defense is, literally, 45% Defense means half the damage. I recommend it.

7. What about Force Field Controllers?

I don't play controllers, so I'm not really expert here. They get about 30% from the bubbles instead of 40%, so they're letting 2 or 3 times the damage through. On the other hand, they have things to do in combat and force fields to recast outside combat, so it might be a good combo.

8. What about soloing?
You don't want to solo. I counted, once, 54 damaging attacks to drop a Boss. That doesn't count Force bolts. It probably died of old age. It's about twice as slow to solo a FF as anything else.

9. What about teaming?
Teams good. Blasters love Force Fields like they love breathing, and for the same reason: they stay alive. So if you're OCD, and the Blasters learn to love the Force Fields, you will never want for a team. If you're building your OWN team, try to get about four blasters and one to three "anything else". Once the blasters pick up on the fact that they can drop as much damage as they like and not die? The team will have a wall of bodies about eighty feet in front and will only slow down for elevators. You can even invite yourSELF to a team, if you do it carefully. Find a blaster in the level range, and ask "Does your team have any use for a Force Fielder?" Be ready to apologize for bothering them, and by all means take no for an answer. If you don't get a "yes" in three invites, go play something else. Adam Smith says: [ QUOTE ]
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest.

[/ QUOTE ] Don't ask for a handout, offer a service. Eventually you may be on the "Friends" list of every high level blaster on the server and never have to ask strangers for a team again. It happened to me; it can happen to you.

10. Any last words?
FF isn't for everyone. In fact, it's for just about no one. If you're not having fun, play something you like better. Have fun.

11. What about Detention Field?
I can't believe you even brought that up. Detention field sucks.

(edited: point 11.)

This is sort of a general heading, because I've noticed that I write the same post over and over... and I keep saying that "I should write a guide on [x]" .

The series is planned to include:

* Force Field Defenders
* How to Be A Blaster
* Mid-Price Frankenslotting With Examples
* Making Medium Money On The Market

and probably a couple of other things as they occur to me. None of them are probably worth being full-size guides.

Without further ado, here I go: Force Field Defending.

(Edited as updated.)

I need to put together a series of mini-guides for all the stuff I repeat over and over.