Moridin_

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Untrue. With a build containing build-up as a secondary (despite losing a slot to acc), you can 2 shot equal minion groups with Ice. I would suspect energy can do the same but might have issues with knockback moving groups out of a tight bundled with no followup AOE or second cone (until late levels). Without buildup in my secondary, I can 2 shot -1 lvl groups of minions. I am still left with any lts/bosses, which also happens with my fire primary. Additionally, I could argue that the cone is instant, instead of DOT, and actually kills faster... but I would have to digress as rain then takes it's time to finish them off.



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I can’t talk about ice, both energy torrent and explosive blast do less damage then their fire blaster counterparts. (IIRC, both are moderate for fire, minor for energy) The fire blaster will therefore always be able to kill higher level mobs with the 2 attack combo then eng blasters can. This will result in at least 30% more HP for the fire blaster, and therefore 30% faster leveling.

Presumably the eng attacks have shorter animations and recharge times to compensate for the lower damage, but if you are power leveling you do your combo and move on so the shorter recharge is irrelevant. If you are playing in a group with longer, tougher fights, then there is a substantial chance you will get to use torrent/blast one extra time making up for the difference but this is not a power leveling mode of operation.

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Just play a blaster and get over it. Seriously. I recommend this to all whiney scrappers out there. Come back to your scrapper when they "fix" everything for you.

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You reinforce my belief that you are nothing but a FOTM player. Only a FOTM player would say something as ridiculous as "if you think X is powerful then just play it"

You really just don't get it. I don't like to play a class just because it is more powerful. Rather, I want ALL classes to be balanced and equal so that my choice of playing one archetype over the other will be based purely on style rather than on power. Its a simple concept but will forever be beyond your ability to understand because you don't care what archetype you play as long as they are the most powerful.

FOTM players don't care what archetype they play, heck they can have fun playing any archetype as long as they are powerful. Not all of us are FOTM nuts that's why we care about such things as balance because we really don't want to quit this game but would rather quit it rather than be forced to play a blaster just to be competitive. Stop being an idiot and start realizing that just because someone doesn't want to play the most powerful class it means he has no right to bemoan an imbalance!



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I simply do not understand what you are trying to get at. If you are not a power leveler you can safely ignore this thread as it does not pertain to you. If you are a power leveler you will select whatever AT can be best tuned towards that end, it just so happens that AT is a blaster.

Given the dynamics of the game power leveling is linked to kill times and blasters are by design the AT that kills fastest. It seems unlikely then that you could ever change the fact that blasters are the best power leveling AT without redesigning the whole game or breaking the whole blaster AT. Either of these would simply make some other AT the power levels AT of choice and change nothing.

Since you seem to be saying you are not a power leveler my advice to you is to compare your scrapper to blasters who are similarly not power levelers. I think you will find they are much more comparable.

Put another way, what you seem to be doing is saying hey that guy is playing a blaster and made it to L40 in three weeks, while my scrapper is going to take three months. What you are missing is that that guy happens to be power leveling while you apparently are not.

He isn’t making it to 40 that fast because he is playing a blaster he’s making there that fast because he is power leveling, playing a blaster is just one step down that road. Blasters played the way you play your scrapper would take the same 3 months you do.

If you wanted, you could even build a power leveling scrapper. My guess would be that it would do about as well as the single target blasters and use much the same techniques. But from a true power levelers standpoint, tanking 3.5 weeks to reach 40 simply isn’t as good as taking 3 weeks.

Nice post. It’s really nice to see some posts that come from people who really understand how a blaster works, and what they can and can’t do. In particular the single target blaster advice nearly mirrors my own experience/technique exactly.

Just a reminder to some people complaining about specific issues. This is a pure power gaming build. Some, and perhaps even many, things will change if your gaming has a different focus. This includes things like elc blasters, and eng blasters AoE’s. While note as effective in a power gaming, solo/small group where your goal is to kill everything in one salvo the do in fact do just as much damage/second in longer fights since recharge and animation time are tied to damage.

From a strictly power gaming perspective how fast you can level is closely tied to short kill times which is of course where blasters excel. Having short kill times means that how fast you gain experience varies almost directly with how quickly you can find mobs to kill. (The latter of course is critical as well, but except for selecting super speed or perhaps super jump has little to do with your build.)

It’s this effect that makes blasters the best for power gaming builds. other then the now nerfed burn tanks which could kill higher level mobs and do it just as fast.

If you are not a power gamer there can be, and in fact there are almost certainly will be things you may want to do differently. Don’t confuse the two types of gaming. I am not a power leveler, and have a made a number of different choices to that end. But, for the times I am soloing my technique is almost identical to the single target technique outlined here, just not as fast since I don’t have super speed to get from mob to mob as quickly.

This does not mean there are not a lot of things you can take away from this excellent post/thread. The information on slotting is bang on for nearly everything, except for possibly travel powers. In larger groups I find that no one even bothers with their travel powers because the teleported can move them where they need to be far more quickly then they can move themselves.

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But the second thing to consider is that blasters are simply so much better than scrappers.


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I disagree with this. It’s true that blasters are the best AT for power leveling thanks to their low kill times, but for power leveling some class will always be the absolute fastest and therefore the “only” choice. This is inevitable and unchangeable. It just so happens that blasters are the best for this style of play.

This doesn’t make them overpower or better from any other perspective, and it doesn’t even translate in saying “they are the best solo class” since solo does not have to be synonymous with power leveling. Scrappers can and do have the ability to solo a greater variety of different types of mobs then blasters. When you are power leveling, of course this isn’t relevant since you only want one type of mob, the type that provides the best xp/hour.


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It's because I want to play a scrapper but at the same time don't like to play an archetype that's gimped relative to Blasters.


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This is totally and utterly irrelevant to what this thread is about. This thread is about power leveling and that is all choosing everything, let me repeat EVERYTHING, for the fasters possible leveling. It is simply not possible to create a situation where there isn’t one AT that is the absolute best for power leveling and the true power leveler will always choose that AT no matter what it is.

You simply cannot take the things in this thread out of the context of power leveling. Just because blasters happen to be the AT that power level the best does not mean they are superior or unbalanced in the normal, intended style of play.

If you want to power level as a scrapper you can in fact do so, in fact you can pretty much cut and paste the advice for single target blasters, and get nearly identical results. The only that may change is the target level of the mobs may be slightly higher. In this mode scrapper can power level better then any other AT in the game.

With this in mind, therefore, the way your statement reads to me is that you want changes made to your AT of preference so that it is the best for power leveling rather then the second best, which is frankly quite sad and something I hope the devs have no sympathy for. As has been pointed out most reasonable people will not enjoy a power leveling style of game for long, so you need to stop using it as ammunition to have your own preferred AT changed.

Power leveling is strictly a sideshow. It is not how the game is meant to be played nor is it (IMO) the most enjoyable way to play it. If there are issues with scrappers in the normal mode of play then you need to balance them against blasters in the normal mode of play, and this thread is simply not about that.