Garent

This is exactly why I never liked the blaster standardization.

Be nice and stay on topic, please.

My experience was different. Blasters were the first people to get to level 40, and scrappers had a lot of problems staying alive. My opinion at the time was that it was due more to player experience than anything though. Most people had no clue how to properly balance a scrapper's offense and defense in the middle levels where you're low on slots. There were also plenty of armor sets that are very broken by today's standards, such as dark armor's mutually exclusive toggle with no benefit to counterbalance it. The big joke at the time was "City of Blasters".

Completely true, but to be fair, he really wanted to redesign blaster secondaries.

"Higher than average death while in the mezzed state" is exactly what shows that.

I have no facts to back this up, but I don't recall this either.

Shown here.

This has been mentioned a lot of times before, and I still think it's completely true. Blasters are in the situation they are now because they're conceptually broken, probably to an even greater extent than stalkers are. A character that conceptually only deals damage will not work no matter how you mess with them mechanically because this is a game where everyone needs to have a method of both offense and defense. The variety in this game comes from not who has what piece of the triad, but how the archetypes achieve their offense and defense.

The logic chain seems apparent to me.

If I could go back in time and design the blaster archetype before release, I would have had it be ranged primary, control/utility secondary.
Primary would be straight attacks. Any big debuffs or status effects would be a secondary effect of the attacks. None of this 20 second recharging 10 second single target stun that does no damage silliness.
Secondary would be the survivability and panic buttons. Small area controls ideal for negating alphas when solo and on small teams, survivability tools like armors or self heals, and situational offense like power thrust and nukes.

I haven't regretted taking clarion on any of my characters since it means that I no longer have to hold break frees. That frees up space for more respites and lucks.

Definitely take one of the interface powers that gives you a damage proc. It's a huge buff to damage on a defender and that feels good.

Judgements don't have one that's way better than the others, so I suggest choosing the one with an animation that fits your concept best.

As for lore, don't be afraid to pick the one that fits your character best, but if none of them seem to fit or you don't care go for cimerorans.

Force fields is still plenty strong (within its purview at least). Its biggest problem is that it's not very exciting and it only has a few useful powers. If buffing people and using five other powers to knock things in more and more specific ways sounds fun to you, go for it.

Also, sonic blast is the go-to offensive debuffing blast set for defenders if you're worried about being underpowered. Sonic blast also synergizes well with force field since sonic works best if you can constantly attack, and force field is very blast-fender friendly with its fire-and-forget buffs.

Depends, do you have the full set in there or just the proc? Proc has a 66% chance of going off in explosive arrow, so not bad, but there are better places. However, targeted area sets have such slim pickings that slotting the full set in it isn't a bad idea at all.

83% chance according to mids.

Heart! I'm glad to be made wrong. I agree with muse on sonic being third on my list after those two. Poison would be, except it was just evaluated.

It's not worth your time, man. Just move on and ignore it.

Defenders are very close to tanks as it is. There is no design intent for them to be the squishiest members of the team. Defenders share the self defense buff modifiers of tankers, so it's clear that the "reliable support" playstyle is one that is intended to be viable. All defender primaries have some method of keeping themselves alive, either through buffs that affect their whole party or powerful debuffs. Empathy is the worst at personal survivability that I can think of off the top of my head, and it still has a self heal. The main thing keeping defenders from being amazing tanks is the lack of status protection, and tanking is still very possible for many of them even though it's difficult.

Using myself as an example, my main character has 70% smashing/lethal resistance, resistance to everything else except negative energy and toxic, over 1500 hp, and uses aid self. This is on top of the ridiculous mitigation of hurricane and freezing rain. I don't consider this broken because, for one, everyone in CoH is broken at high levels compared to other MMOs (except blasters that didn't game the IO system to get defense, but that's another thing), and two, defenders have the lowest damage potential of all archetypes at level 50.

So er...I have no idea how much of that is actually relevant to what I quoted. I just kind of went off on a tangent.

Are we arguing that beam rifle has poor sustained single target damage, or that beam rifle is a terrible set that fails on all metrics that are relevant to blasters and should be given self awareness only so that it can feel shame for itself? Because I cannot agree with the second one more.

I've participated in discussions with you about this enough times before to know that you don't. The numbers are irrelevant to you. You feel that trick arrow is serviceable for your purposes when you play it, therefore it must be objectively adequate.

Blaze is where EVERY set gets trounced by fire. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

Lancer shot's animation time is not long unless you have the idea that any animation that is two seconds or higher is long. Lancer shot is the highest DPA attack in the set.

The reason why Beam Rifle's single target damage is competitive with fire's is because of bonus damage from disintegrate. Effectively, fire and beam both have a secondary effect that boosts their damage.

-Beam Rifle DPA with disintegrate active-
Single Shot: 52.66
Charged Shot: 63.85
Disintegrate: 63.98
Lancer Shot: 75.36

-Fire Blast DPA-
Flares: 53.19
Fire Blast: 50.1
Fire Ball: 66.35
Rain of Fire: 55.76
Blaze: 159

I agree, and this is what I originally proposed in my buff/debuff set rebalance proposal some time ago, but I changed it once I realized that most trick arrow players in the boards here prefer the power to have unique mechanics from other powers. I personally value intuitiveness in powers a lot, but uniqueness is important too, so I only disagree with them mildly.