Obitus

Yeah, it's a lot like the comparison between Steadfast Protection's unique and the Gladiator's Armor unique (both +3% DEF). On the one hand, Steadfast is infinitely cheaper (last I checked, about 50 million versus 2.5-3 billion), so some people will consider the Glad Armor IO a waste by comparison. On the other hand, you can only slot one Steadfast.

So you have to pay a massive, massive premium for the ability to slot a second copy of the same unique bonus. There's nothing wrong with that design. Call it a luxury tax.

In any case, there are very few singular IOs that provide a distinctly noticeable effect on gameplay, for any price. Miracle on an otherwise generic build is probably the best example, but it's an example that tends to prove the rule: the effect of that one enhancement is noticeable in that case because the character has so few resources to begin with. At the other extreme and by the same token, a character who's 3% from the DEF cap can notice a pretty significant performance boost from Steadfast Protection or Gladiator's Armor, but that's more a quirk of the build in question than it is anything to do with those particular IOs. Without any other sources of DEF, either of those enhancements would require you to log several hours of gameplay with Herostats to notice their benefit to survival.

That's the beauty and the beast of the IO system. It's enormously deep because it's enormously complex. Huge performance leaps can only be achieved if you plot out a build that layers many bonuses together, and the planning stage is infinitely more important than how much money you have to throw at the problem. If you plan carefully and have loads of money, then of course that's the best scenario, but there generally isn't a night and day difference between the most expensive build and a build that costs comparatively little. Again, there's a sort of luxury tax for being uber.

Repetitive is an inherently subjective term in an MMO context. All MMOs, after all, arguably require repetitive tasks from the moment you log in. The strength (or weakness) of an MMO generally hinges on how well (or poorly) it disguises the grind for its core audience.

A player can reasonably find content both repetitive and fun. Take level 50 content, for instance. You seem to dislike playing at level 50, which is fine, but even before Incarnates were a glimmer in the Developers' eye, there were plenty of people who genuinely enjoyed playing at the level cap. Sure, playing at the cap will lead you to repeat content, but there are probably as many TFs at level 50 than there are in the rest of the game, combined -- and in any case, sometimes approaching the same challenge in a different way (with a different build, with different teammates, with a different strategy) is as much fun as facing a different challenge altogether.

For a lot of those people, simply having new options to progress their level 50s is a big deal, even if those new options are tied almost exclusively to two specific Trials. Adding an extra one or two 30ish-minute tasks to their already repetitive level-50-TF schedule is at worst an incidental inconvenience. Others would prefer to have all of the existing level 50 content contribute meaningfully to the new progression. Still others (apparently, like you) think of level 50 as the end of the journey, and thus wouldn't be satisfied with an end-game system with anything less than a full game's worth of content at that level.

To the extent that there are any pertinent facts in this discussion, about the best I can come up with is the old truism: "You can't please everyone." Personally, I think the conversion options for post-Alpha Incarnate components need to be rethought and reworked, but I fail to see how or even if the devs could satisfy you, even in theory.

It's good for surviving S/L farms, but I don't think anyone would recommend an Invulnerability Tanker for running (solo) farms. The offense just isn't there.

You can plod through, of course; I just thought I'd throw out that bit of perhaps unnecessary clarification.

Yeah, and for the same reason, I think Invuln gets a little more benefit out of high-end IO investment in practice than the spreadsheet might show. The 50% DDR and the potentially huge buffer against ToHit buffs in Invincibility are hard to quantify; by contrast, a soft-capped Willpower gets full credit on a spreadsheet for the similarly crowd-boosted regen from Rise to the Challenge.

Seems to me that the ability to hit ~60% DEF to S/L/E/N/F/C, unbuffed, will be even better in upcoming Incarnate content. I already laugh at Paragon Police Peacebringers, which absolutely wreck DEF characters that don't have functional debuff immunity. Cimerorans likewise, but that's not exactly a surprise given that Invuln is RES-capped to their damage type. The thing that's particularly annoying about Peacebringer NPCs is that every single attack they use carries a massive DEF debuff, and AFAIK they're all typed as Energy attacks.

The Romans, again AFAIK, only debuff DEF with their melee attacks.

Invuln's comparative weakness to psionics is almost a blessing in disguise, I find. When making an Invuln build, I can leave psi DEF at ~19% (the amount needed to put me two small Lucks away from the soft cap with the Inspiration-boosting Vet badge) and then call it a day with a clear conscience. Likewise, gameplay tends to be pretty cut-and-dried on Invuln -- "If lots of psi = true, then pop Inspirations" -- whereas other sets tend to make me sweat the decision to build on whatever innate psi mitigation they have, and tend not to present such a clear pre-emptive choice with respect to Inspiration use.

As always, YMMV.

Oh, and for what it's worth, in my experience, psionic is probably the fourth most common damage type (after smash/lethal/energy). Subjectively, I'd have to say that psi is actually far more common than the next closest category (negative energy). And just to throw it out there, here's my INV Tanker build, which trades some of the defensive potential in other posted builds for a little more offense:

Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.92
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Almidon: Level 50 Natural Tanker
Primary Power Set: Invulnerability
Secondary Power Set: Super Strength
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Fighting
Ancillary Pool: Soul Mastery

If I'm doing my numbers correctly, we're looking at about 160 DPS (running Jab-Glood-Haymaker-KO Blow-Gloom-Haymaker-pause 0.44 seconds), once Bruising and the Rage crash are taken into account. It's not infinitely end-sustainable, but it's close enough for my purposes; if you stop attacking during the Rage crash (and take pains only to use one instance of Rage, as I try to do), then we're looking at almost 4 minutes of sustainable endurance running the above single-target attack string and Darkest Night. (That's on average, and assuming your timing is absolutely perfect, which of course aren't realistic assumptions.)

It's probably a needless addition to this thread, what with Iggy_Kamakaze throwing out his build magic, but I thought it might be worthwhile to add some data points showing some of the defensive trade offs people are likely to make (in my case, taking the Flight Pool and Gloom/Dark Obliteration).

Apologies for rambling.

You don't get out much then, frankly. I've had my Controller turned down on the basis that the team "needed" a Blaster.

Occasional ignorance aside though, and as Uber said, bona-fide AT discrimination (as you put it) is very rare. More often, it's a matter of a team having an over-abundance of one thing or another, and only one spot left with which to fill in other areas of capability.

Personally, I never ask for anything in particular before I fill the team -- but I'm probably biased by years of watching in frustration as team leaders held everyone up needlessly waiting for a Tanker or a healer. Now that TFs are the norm rather than the exception, team composition is more important than it used to be. Most TFs are doable even with heavily sub-optimal teams, but on a team of eight, it's usually a safe assumption that at least one person is time-constrained.

It's entirely reasonable for a team leader to be a little choosy when it comes to the last spot or two. Generally, the only people who are choosier than that are ignorant of the game's mechanics.

The earlier you ask for a spot, the more likely it is you will be welcomed with open arms.

Do all of those 36 level 50 characters have 10+ billion-influence builds? I have a couple myself, but I wouldn't want to outfit all of my characters like that even if money were no object. It just takes too much effort to tweak and retweak (and each respec is a bit of an odyssey by itself). After I20, it's also going to take too much effort (for me) to work up all of the various Incarnate boosts on more than a couple of characters, and if I'm not going to bother doing that for most of my alts, then those characters probably don't deserve loads of purples and PvPIOs, either.

Don't recall anyone complaining that they couldn't earn influence, even a crap ton of influence. I do recall people pointing out the relevant differences among different builds at different investment points. You can't honestly be arguing that cheaper-build performance isn't relevant to a comparison of different power sets, can you?

We get that you play a high-end Fire Tanker and that you play it very well. I happen to think that at the high end, Fire Tankers are among the best in the game -- given good Inspiration management and given the growing emphasis on large-team content (where buffs are generally plentiful). It would be misleading near to the point of irresponsibility to say in a defensive comparison that Fire Tankers are anything but mediocre, though.

You simply can't assume that everyone who goes through character creation is going to put the maximum possible investment into a build (or that they start at level 50, for that matter).

Your attempts to pat yourself on the back by inventing shortcomings in other people are growing stale. It seems like every time I come on this forum, I see you beating that drum in one topic or another.

My minimum bid, lately, is 20,000. To the extent that I bid creep at all, it's in huge proportional chunks -- 20k to 100k, 100k to 250k, 250k to 500k, etc. If I'm crafting recipes in stacks to sell for a profit, then of course I'm not going to purchase loads of white salvage for half a million a pop, but if I'm buying to craft something for my own use? Yeah, why not?

As you say, slots are at a premium, especially -- and perhaps perversely -- for those who are just playing the game in a so-called "normal" way. (Not going to any especial effort to marketeer, not using alts except to sell their own drops.) It's nice to reward people for listing salvage. You have to craft an awful lot before even ludicrously high prices for common salvage will begin to make a noticeable difference to a player with any considerable wealth -- or even for most any player who spends any considerable length of time playing level 50 characters semi-efficiently.

The thing about the market that is most difficult (I think) for some people to grasp is that we're using fake money. That may sound like a painfully obvious point, and on a superficial level, it is painfully obvious -- but what's perhaps less obvious is a natural consequence of that basic truism: There is no firm basis to assume that players on the CoH market are rational actors. If overspending by a factor of 10 or even 100 or 1,000 saves me a minute or two of my coveted game time, then I may very well decide to save the time. The only truly valuable asset on the CoH market is time. The cost of CoH items in pixellated cash is only relevant to the extent that its value correlates with time spent earning it.

And in the case of common salvage, the time we're talking about is almost always vanishingly small. That rule generally holds true whether you're the seller or the buyer. And that's largely to blame for the sometimes wild variance in salvage prices. It ain't conspiracy -- which is by definition a carefully considered process. Quite the opposite.

Ehh, in my experience the closest you can get to a good option is to play contrarian -- following a given faction through its arc and then betraying or disobeying when the game allows you to do so.

All of the factions are morally problematic. Praetoria is shades of black.

It's fascinating how people can look at the same things so differently. Yes, the foundational plot(s) in CoV are weak, and fairly predictable. There isn't a whole lot of suspense, though to be fair that's partly because a lot of us already had a pretty good foundation in the (spotty) lore of the game before CoV even launched.

That said, each Villain arc is, if not more tightly paced, then at least more obviously self-relevant from start to finish. There aren't (as a rule) gratuitously repetitive filler missions padding each and every one.

I'm sure a lot of this has to do with play style. If, for example, you only have an hour to play at a time, you're less likely to be able to complete a hero-side arc in one sitting. In my case, I can go literally weeks between sessions in a given hero arc. So whatever admirable pacing is written into the story is lost on me, because I'm lucky if I even remember what the heck is going on by the time I pick it up again.

By contrast, I can typically play at least one whole villain arc in a one-hour play session. Ditto for Praetoria.

Even ignoring game time constraints, given the speed with which characters level these days, given that you could join a team in the middle of any arc (and particularly any hero arc) and come back to find you've out-leveled it, I find the hero-side arcs are just too long.

It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would defend original hero content on the basis of implementation, but hey, variety is the spice of life. Thanks for sharing an interesting point of view.

Heh, yeah, wasn't there actually a quote from a former CoH developer basically laughing at the absurdity of a self-contained City of Villains? A quote from long before even CoH launched, if I recall.

Well, it's not like I've leveled a lot of characters lately, but I can't imagine myself not going to Praetoria first, and from there there really isn't a so-called native side. The beauty of Praetoria is that even good-hearted characters could plausibly fool themselves into going to the Rogue Isles, simply out of a distrust of Marcus Cole.

It's definitely more engaging, IMO. I may not like the plotline as a whole, but at least it's clear that you are playing a story of some sort, Villain side. For that same reason, I find it easier to stockpile merits V-side too, even though the merit rewards for each individual arc are pretty pathetic.

When you chart out the lifespan of the game, it's actually kind of amazing that V-side content is as good as it is. Subjectively, I'd say that the V-side story arcs are far closer to the Praetorian story arcs in terms of polish and execution than they are to the Hero-side story arcs -- and yet, City of Villains is far closer on the calendar to the CoH launch than it is to GR launch.

So whatever flaws the original Hero content has (and there are frankly too many to list), the devs learned the important lessons fairly early on.

The only thing that kinda rankles me about CoV story-arc content is that the devs were clearly way, way too enamored with the (then-new) escort mission when they were designing CoV.

FWIW, I can't stand leveling hero-side anymore, even though Paragon is more visually attractive, and even though teams are easier to find. As for whether Red is harder than Blue, eh, probably a very little bit harder, but it's honestly hard to tell these days given all of the various tools we're given to ease the discomforts of leveling.

Yeah, as much as people complain about the evil marketeers cornering the market and making ungodly amounts of influence, seems to me that a hardcore AE farmer can make more, on average, than most anyone who plays the market.

The advantage for the marketeer is that she probably spends less in-game time, but even that's not necessarily a hard-and-fast rule. I know that during those stretches of time when I was really into the market, I wasn't spending a whole lot of in-game time on it in an absolute sense -- but logging in/out on half a dozen different characters every day sure seems like it takes forever, at times.

And a good farmer can hit the ticket cap in probably half an hour, if that. That many Bronze rolls ought to yield at least 250 million given that you craft the right recipes (and with the understanding that sifting through that many recipes can be a giant PITA, but if you do it often enough it should become second nature).

FWIW, and back on topic: The best I've managed is about 20 billion over a 20 day span in January. I've since dialed it down quite a bit, almost down to nothing now that Issue 20 looms, and I find myself with not a whole lot of motivation to kit out my alts. So, anyway, that's about 1 billion per day, but it wasn't all marketeering, and I could never keep up that pace for any great length of time. It's just too much effort.

If people are keeping up with that effort, then kudos.

If you don't enjoy crafting, then that's certainly relevant. Heck, on the occasions when I farm AE Bronze rolls, I don't always craft them. Sometimes I'll knowingly sacrifice 200 or more million because I just can't be bothered to craft. As someone on this board recently pointed out, it's less annoying to craft in stacks of ten (as in marketeering) than it is to craft ten different recipes.

For that reason, I for one am interested to see how your little experiment pans out, but there really isn't any need for an exhaustive statistical analysis of crafted versus uncrafted listings: where the crafted IO is better, it's better, and since people who craft their listings generally check the recipe's price beforehand, there isn't any case to be made that vast swaths of the playerbase are losing money by crafting IOs for sale. You're basically asking whether x + y is greater than x, where y can only be a positive number.

You can't divorce the player's common-sense discretion from the analysis, nor can you quantify it. Is crafting everything always going to be better than crafting nothing? Probably not. Is crafting everything that's worth crafting always going to be better than crafting nothing? By definition, the answer is yes.

You make a good point. Let me back up a second: when we discuss soloability as a distinct and separate category of performance, what are we really measuring? I guess we could be talking about speed, which was probably the most common metric before the new and improved difficulty slider was introduced. After all, when the highest difficulty was Invincible @ +3/x1 (or Unyielding at +2/x2, basically, depending on how you look at it), it was a pretty clear-cut matter that competent Blasters were better soloists than most support ATs. (Or at least, Blasters seemed to be much more pleasant to solo for most people.)

But I'm not talking about speed. I'm talking about self-sufficiency. That is, how much stuff you can handle, and how nasty that stuff can get before you're in danger. How well you can adjust to different situations. How reliant you are (or aren't) on external influences.

In my mind, that's a useful standard of performance because it speaks both to solo capability and general team usefulness. When I talk about soloing in this thread, I am, if you like, trying to sidestep all of the questions about what the Blaster's teammates may or may not be doing for him. The quote of yours that follows sums that metric up nicely, just in a different way:

That said, I would add to your quote perhaps an unnecessary qualification, but one that seems nonetheless to have been glossed over in this thread: that is, when we're talking about the relative unimportance of AoE damage in higher level teams, we're not just concerned with force multipliers. We're concerned with linear increases, too.

Most high-level characters have at least one good AoE power. FWIW, in my experience, most people past Patron/Epic level have at least two good AoE powers. It doesn't take a particularly large team before the sum of those AoE powers begins to trivialize any numerical advantages that Blaster AoEs might enjoy.

So yeah, if the Blaster can cut loose, he should be comfortably atop the AoE damage list on a given team of non-Blasters. But even if the Blaster outstrips his nearest competitor by two or even three times, the total AoE kill speed of an eight-man team is not going to move a whole lot one way or the other due to the Blaster's presence or absence.

That's why I don't like crashing nukes; in theory they're a great supplement to a steamroll team's exp-over-time. In practice, the nuke only means that a given spawn will die while some of my teammates' attacks are still animating. For all of my trouble, I save a second or two of time for the team, and cost myself several seconds in retoggling time.

So long story short: the Blaster is a specialist that relies heavily on teammate support. The Blaster's contribution isn't particularly important to the team, though -- inadequate when compared with the support it requires.

You're right about slotting as you level, though of course Doctored Wounds is dirt cheap; the only real impediment you have as a lower-leveled character is that the supply of recipes in the mid-level range is spotty.

Drain Psyche is nowhere near the best regen debuff available, though. Slotted fully with heal enhancements, DP's debuff becomes competitive with powers like Lingering Radiation (500% regen debuff), though of course Lingering Radiation is easier to make permanent (requiring less global recharge), and doesn't require a squishy character to close to melee range to use it.

On Dominators, Drain Psyche is significantly more powerful than it is on Blasters (100% base regen per target versus 75%, 500% base regen debuff per target versus 250%, IIRC). For Doms, then, DP can become one of the better regen debuffs in the entire game, but again -- there are still practical considerations that may make the debuff less useful than support-AT analogues.

In any case, Drain Psyche is a great power to have in your back pocket. And yeah, unless you're trying to circumvent a nuke's crash, slotting for endmod is inferior to slotting for heal. As a Blaster, you want every extra bit of survivability you can get. If you use DP regularly and against more than one target, the endurance will take care of itself.

Yeah, no offense to Arbegla, whose posts I generally admire, but that entire passage read as a desperately rosey way of saying, "My Blaster is only capable of one thing; therefore my Blaster does more of it."

There is a nugget of truth there, but I think Arbegla took it one step too far. A debuff build has to spend at least a couple of seconds prepping a spawn in order to reach the lofty heights of Blaster-competitive damage (and/or in order to proceed safely). It is largely for that reason that Blasters can solo faster than a lot of debuff builds, assuming the Blasters don't die more often.

By the same token, my Dominator, which is in basically every way superior to my comparably built Blaster (Mind/Fire versus Fire/Mental), takes an extra second or two to prep a spawn by tossing out magnitude 6 mezzes so her opponents don't move out of her AoEs or fire back.

I don't believe it's reasonable in either case to count that extra capability as a burden simply because it can eat up time. This isn't a witch hunt aimed at support ATs; it isn't even a fixation with support ATs. The point is that most ATs are especially good at either teaming or soloing, or they're decent at both. Support ATs are obviously very good at teaming, and Blasters pale by comparison. That's not a problem in and of itself; it's only a problem because Blasters aren't particularly good at soloing either.

I think the really pertinent question is whether the AT-specific strength we're discussing is all that important in the first place. The discussion has, in large part, been derailed by this side issue of whether or not Blasters will be passed over by, or whether Blasters are relevant in, teams.

Those are fine issues to discuss, but in my view they miss the forest for the trees.

The teaming issue is only important to the extent that it describes how good Blasters are at teaming. There is another, equally important side of that equation too: how good are Blasters at soloing? It is my contention that Blasters as a whole class are unusually ill-suited for both. A Scrapper arguably isn't all that team-friendly either, after all -- but a Scrapper given equal resources is a much better overall soloer to make up for that teaming deficiency.

What do Blasters get? Well they're not particularly good at single-target damage. In fact, their best single-target damage tends to be tied at least in part to melee attacks, which are generally not a good idea for Blasters to use in situations where single-target damage is most important (AV fights and the like). Even if we ignore that little wrinkle, all of the empirical evidence tends to suggest that Blasters are by no means possessed of a huge, practical damage advantage over every other AT. In many cases (like the aforementioned AV fight), straight damage tends to be marginalized by buff/debuff capability anyway.

So we're left with AoE damage. AoE damage is kind of the de-facto Blaster AT asset because it's the only area where Blasters are generally ahead of their closest, on-paper damage-dealing competitors, Scrappers. If nothing else, Blaster AoE attacks tend to have higher target caps than Scrapper PBAoE powers. If nothing else, Blasters tend to have better burst capability because they can stack (or alternate) Build Up and Aim.

That's all well and good, but seriously, when's the last time any level 50 team found that the ability to kill a full spawn of trash mobs a couple of seconds faster was the difference between success and failure? Arbegla brings up the BAF trial escapees, which may prove to be a good place for Blasters to shine, but that one, new gimmicky encounter aside, I've never seen a high-level team have any trouble handling large spawns quickly and with ease, and without the help of a Blaster. What I have seen, on occasion, are high-level teams that lacked the support (or control, or aggro management) to get past a given challenge. What I have seen (very rarely) are Blaster-heavy teams that spent so much time getting killed that their increased kill speed wasn't enough to net a gain.

And in those few situations where huge hordes of mobs are relevant (like the last fight in Barracuda, with all the ambush waves that accompany Reichsman), a Blaster is not the key to success. On the contrary, it is precisely because Blasters' damage is not the unquestioned superior to everyone else's that brute force tends not to work in those scenarios. A Blaster cannot, as a general rule, melt mobs several times faster than anyone else. A Blaster cannot melt mobs consistently at a pace that competes with a Control AT's ability to neutralize them.

In a solo environment, the Blasters' shortcomings are self-evident. Good players with good builds can make lemonade out of lemons, but there's only so much you can do to compensate for Blasters' general lack of utility, defense, and status protection. Straight damage will carry the day against spawns of lower-HP targets, but the Blaster has very little margin for error even in favorable circumstances, and even less flexibility to adjust in unfavorable circumstances.

The Judgement slot is basically an afterthought in this discussion. The only reason Judgement is relevant at all is that it highlights pre-existing Blaster deficiencies. Blasters' already had a tenuous enough hold on their presumed specialty -- damage, specifically AoE damage -- which itself was already a tenuous enough reason for being, lacking any particularly efficient means to leverage that damage without teammate support.

The Blaster is the most needy AT in the game, generally speaking. The new Incarnate stuff isn't all bad news: Interface and Lore and Destiny will help to shore up the AT's weaknesses. But because the Blaster needs those bonuses more than anyone else, the performance gap will remain. It's not a bad idea to play a Blaster if that's what you want to do. Most teams won't refuse to invite you on the basis of perceived AT deficiencies. In fact, if anything, the general populace has an inflated idea of Blaster offense (as we've seen with Sprite Fire).

Hey, look, another semi-redundant ramble from me. Sorry.

As opposed to all of those silly people who think that damage and DEF are mutually exclusive? The poster to whom you're responding doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of the game's mechanics, frankly. He throws around meaningless numbers like +100% damage, +100 ToHit -- all without a shred of context. If he's talking about IO set bonuses, then what he describes cannot be done. If he's talking about enhancement, then fine, but every half-decent Blaster build slots ED-capped damage in its attacks. If he's talking about Build Up, then likewise: no one's skipping Build Up to soft-cap DEF.

He doesn't even mention the most significant offensive IO bonus -- global recharge -- despite that he seems to assume that Aim and Build Up will both be available for every spawn. He boasts that Blasters can kill x8/+3 boss spawns in ten seconds, but he doesn't specify whether he's using nukes. If he can consistently drop multiple bosses with an effective HP of ~4,136 in less than ten seconds without nukes, then I'd dearly love to see his build. That's 2,689 HP divided by 0.65, to account for the fact that your powers are only 65% effective against +3s.

(For reference, a level 50 Fire/MM Blaster with Aim, Build Up, ED-capped damage enhancement and enough recharge seamlessly to chain Fire Breath, Fire Ball, Psychic Scream and Psionic Shockwave will deliver 1166.11 AoE damage, on average, in the ~9 seconds of overlap you have on Aim+Build Up, assuming that you don't have to reposition to deliver the cones, and assuming that the cones don't have lesser target caps, both of which are totally abstract assumptions.

Adding an extra 100% damage on top of that would only raise the total damage dealt to 1488.6. That's a far cry from 4,136, ain't it? Even Inferno with all of those damage buffs would only get you about halfway to your target, leaving you with about 6 seconds to lop off the other 1900 or so HP, in an AoE no less.)

In the meanwhile, though, by all means: feel free to throw out baseless generalizations to bolster Sprite Fire's non-point.

Also, this: DEF-capped Blaster with 70% global recharge and the Spiritual Alpha versus High-offense Blaster with 110% global recharge and the Musculature Alpha

Except that you're superfluous. No offense; that's just the way the AT balance shakes out right now. Let's see, on the one hand, we have a Blaster, who might be able to pump out twice as much damage as our weakest damage dealer. On the other hand, we have a dude who can improve all eight team members' damage output by 30% or more. Even if everyone in the team delivers half the Blaster's damage, which is a huge stretch, 0.5 * 8 * 1.3 > 0.5 * 7 + 1, or 5.2 > 4.5.

That's the contribution of one Conroller with Freezing Rain versus your Blaster. On a team of the most anemic damage dealers you can imagine.

You know which ATs make the best AV-soloist builds? Support ATs. Go check the Rikti Pylon Results thread if you don't believe me.

Or a Storm, or a Cold, or a Thermal, or a Sonic, or a Trick Arrow, or a Traps, or a Pain Domination.

Meanwhile, whom does Fulcrum Shift tend to benefit most? Ranged single-target specialists like your Ice/Devices? Magic 8 Ball says, "All signs point to no."

They're already on the wayside. Judgement just pushes Blasters over the guard rail and into a ditch. Again, none of the above means that they can't get teams or that they can't succeed solo. It does mean that mechanically, Blasters pay a disproportionately high price for their supposedly WTF-pwn damage. You obviously have a right to disagree (or not to care), but don't fall into the irrational trap of accusing everyone else of not knowing how to play. Especially if you don't have a firm grasp of the mechanics. Saying simply that you feel like you do a lot of damage on your Blaster isn't gonna cut it when you're implicitly insulting everyone else.

Look, I don't remember the exact details of all the Praetorian conversations, so maybe you can help to refresh my memory. Doesn't Cleopatra present you with the following, alternative choice:

• Defend a person who just deceived you and tried to have you killed, and
• kill Washington to cover her status within the Resistance.

I'm not saying Washington's right. I'm saying that the player character might reasonably side with him given the imperfect circumstances, and given that the player character was raised in Praetoria, potentially having been spoon-fed the state-approved propaganda from birth.

The choice we're talking about is very early in the character's journey through all of the evils of Praetoria. The player character has just been through a rather trying and confusing set of circumstances, and is trapped in a room with two people: a woman who not only represents an organization that the PC has potentially been raised to despise, but who also just tried to kill the PC, and a man who, despite his immediate flaws, represents the albeit imperfect authority which the PC was potentially raised to trust. The PC is given a matter of moments to decide which one should live, and which one should die.

The PC can be forgiven for a reflexive reaction in Washington's favor, under the circumstances. Shades of grey.