Obitus

Yeah. Drain Psyche offers +75% Recovery per target at its base value. So if you slot DP and Stamina for the ED cap in EndMod, then you'll need to hit (1000 - (100 base + 50 Stamina)) / 150 = 5.66, or six targets rounded up, to negate the recovery debuff. That only puts you at roughly 0% net recovery, though, so in practice you'll need to hit seven.

If you add the Recovery bonuses from Miracle and Numina (and whatever incidental bonuses you may have) onto the above conditions, then hitting six targets with Drain Psyche should result in a positive net recovery value after the Nuke, but not a very large one (25%+ recovery, or about 0.42 end per second).

On the other hand, it's generally more useful to slot Drain Psyche for heal, both because high regeneration adds to Blasters' spotty survivability, and because the -regen debuff is also enhanceable (useful against the occasional hard target). Rightly or wrongly, you'll probably never hear a team complaining about the lack of -recovery debuffs present. You are likely to hear team members fret about -regen debuffs at least once in awhile.

Depending on how tight your build is vis-a-vis set bonuses, you may very well find that you can't slot Drain Psyche for both EndMod and Heal, so you have to ask yourself how much you care about recovering from your nuke. It's also worth pointing out that hitting six or seven targets consistently with a ten-foot-radius power is not a trivial task.

For comparison purposes, an unslotted Drain Psyche gives you ~750% extra recovery if you hit the max of ten targets, which means that you basically can't reover from the Nuke's debuff without EndMod slotting. Or, I guess, the Musculature Boost's +recovery bonus, which would put an unslotted and fully saturated DP at about +1,000% regen.

At the risk of nitpicking, the above just isn't true. RoF delivers ~50% more damage in ~2/3rds of the activation time of Subdual. If you want the best possible ranged single-target attack chain, then you basically have to go with Fire Manipulation just because of RoF. It's that good.

Subdual is a better situational supplement, though, in the sense that its damage type usually bypasses the foe's defenses in situations where your Fire damage is heavily mitigated. In almost any other situation, incorporating Subdual into your attack chain will lower your DPS considerably.

The rest of your post is spot-on.

Arachnos would be impressive, given that they have counters to just about every build in the game. If I don't pay enough attention, a single Tarantula Mistress in a spawn can cause my IOed Invuln Tanker to faceplant (heavy psi-based DEF debuffs). Perversely, the Boss-tier Tarantula Mistresses are probably easier, because they don't appear to have that particular power (according to City of Data).

But yeah, you're not going to find an NPC faction that doesn't heavily feature Smash/Lethal damage. You're also not going to find an NPC faction that can't be soloed by a crafty player of almost any build (and especially if we're allowed to use inspirations, which Aliana didn't but which anyone else realistically can and should use when soloing missions). Ryu's original complaint held Invuln to a standard that manages to be both ridiculously high and hopelessly unrevealing at the same time.

But that's Ryu. He's always been the forum mascot to me -- the guy who's always negative, but never leaves. And sometimes there are kernels of truth and insight in his posts. People who put him on ignore are missing out.

All of that said, and to revisit the Arachnos example for a minute, I can sympathize a little bit with complaints about Invuln. The set is so freaking strong most of the time that the few occasions where you run into a natural counter and die can be a huge shock. I think some people are put off by that perceived unevenness in the set's performance, so much so that they might be happier playing a different build that's less powerful in the general case, as long as the alternative has a more level success rate. It's more of a personal, qualitative complaint than it is a mechanical one.

To the extent that any measurement of solo capability is relevant, I think the forum as a whole can give people the wrong impression about appropriate build standards. You'd almost think, reading the forum, that somewhere there's a vast segment of the player base soloing +4/x8 missions as a matter of course, regardless of the enemy faction. I don't think that's true. Every build has at least one weakness, and content is sufficiently varied that if you just take a pot-luck approach to mission selection (doing story arcs or tips or whatever indiscriminately as opposed to cherry picking opponents), then you're going to hit a wall eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.

Soloing at that level can certainly be done, but it's unlikely to be efficient unless you're farming a specific map that plays to your build's strengths.

LOL.

Nice summary.

"Blargh! Cake Room!"

"You know what? I hate this room and I'm bored, so that's it!"

Preach on.

Fair enough.

Not to belabor the point, but I feel this bit above is worth fleshing out just for anyone who might actually have the patience to have read this far.

Assuming you're already at the ED cap for recharge enhancement on every relevant power, the Very Rare Spiritual Alpha is worth as much as (0.66*45) + (0.34*45*0.15) = about 32% in global recharge.

So the difference between your DEF build with 70% +recharge from IOs and your recharge build with 110% +recharge from IOs works out to about 110 - (70 + 32) = 8%. That's basically one Luck of the Gambler proc, a difference but not a terribly significant one once we've finished stacking all of the various bonuses elsewhere.

Now as we all know, recharge benefits long-cooldown powers more than short-cooldown powers, because the former are farther away from the bottleneck of the cast time. So let's look at a typical nuke with a 360-second base cooldown to get the best possible upside of an extra 8% recharge:

• Recharge build: 360 base recharge / (1 base + 0.95 ED-compliant slotting + 0.7 Hasten + 1.1 global recharge) = 96 seconds.
• DEF build: 360 base recharge / (1 base + 0.95 ED-compliant slotting + 0.7 Hasten + 0.7 global recharge + 0.32 Alpha) = 98.09 seconds.

So in basically the best possible case, you're saving 2 seconds. Needless to say, 360-second nukes come with other, significant downsides that might prevent your wanting use the power as often as possible, but they provide the most extreme example. That said, there are technically no diminished returns on recharge rate except where you begin to collide with the power's activation time. There is, however, a diminished practical return in the sense that players aren't robots, and thus it's easy to lose a 1 or 2-second recharge advantage (getting caught in the activation of another power, not paying rapt attention, heck, even sneezing at the wrong time).

A couple more examples: For a 60-second-cooldown power (like Rain of Arrows), that 8% gap in recharge translates into a ~0.35 second difference. For a 16-second-cooldown power (typical targeted AoE power like Fireball), that 8% gap in recharge translates into a 0.09 second difference.

Small differences in global recharge are mainly relevant to the extent that they affect your most commonly used, seamlessly-strung-together and (pre-)queued-by-rote powers, as in an attack chain. Unfortunately, those powers are also more prone to diminished returns because their cooldown starts to run up against the cast-time bottleneck faster. Suffice to say that it's very unlikely that these builds would have different attack chains as a result of the recharge disparity in this case. (Both can run the much-touted Blaze-Blast-Flares chain with no gaps, for instance.)

The main advantage for the recharge build is that it can afford to take Musculature instead of Spiritual. How much difference does that make in practice?

Welp, you're looking at the same ~32% bonus from the top-tier Musculature boost assuming all of your attacks are already at the ED cap. But that's not a net bonus, it's stackable with any number of other bonuses:

• Recharge build: 1.125 Blaster damage scale * (1 + 0.95 slotting + 0.32 Alpha) = 2.59 standing damage, with no Defiance, no Aim/Build Up, no other global damage bonuses of any kind.
• Damage build: 1.125 Blaster damage scale * (1 + 0.95 slotting) = 2.19 standing damage, same as above.

So best case, the Musculature Alpha gives the Recharge build a 2.59 / 2.19 = about an 18% damage advantage, a sizable bonus. But Blasters generally care most about their damage output when they're spiking, and if they're DPSing, they generally try to use their large damage buffs as often as possible.

With full Defiance (which can be estimated at about a 40% damage bonus), we're looking at an advantage for the recharge build of about 13.6%. With Aim and Defiance, we're looking at an advantage for the recharge build of about 11%. With Build Up and Defiance, we're looking at an advantage of about 9.5%. With both Build Up and Aim (no Defiance because we're probably starting a fight here), we're looking at an advantage of 8.9% for the recharge build.

And of course, the Musculature boost does not affect damage procs, though Blasters probably don't use those as much as other ATs do (due to a relative lack of opportunity if nothing else).

But hey, let's assume that the average relative benefit of the Musculature Alpha is 15%. That's still a good large number, at least in principle.

Defensively, the recharge build (assuming 20% DEF) takes six times as many hits as the DEF build, provided we're looking at the right type of attack. We will not always face the appropriate attack type, so it's kinda hard to draw a direct comparison between the two builds -- but it's pretty clear that the defensive benefits are numerically superior to the offensive benefits provided your play style favors the attack types to which you can stack DEF.

That's the big caveat. As long as we're making disclaimers, it is true that the DEF build's big advantage can be marginalized in a team with the right (or wrong) buffs, but it's also true that the recharge build's Musculature boost can be trivialized by team buffs. The unfortunate bottom line is that highly optimized Blaster builds, even the best of them, are at a general disadvantage relative to highly optimized builds of other ATs.

As far as the Incarnate content goes, my understanding is not that DEF is rendered meaningless in the new Trial. The only hard numbers we have now (as far as I know) indicate that the ToHit is simply higher in the new content (64% versus 50%), which actually tends to favor IOed DEF builds over non-DEF builds, because the former are more likely to reach the higher Incarnate-content soft cap through team buffs than a build with no DEF at all (or none worth mentioning).

As always, you will never find a build, and particularly a Blaster build, that derives maximum benefit in every situation. All you can do is firm up your own self-contained performance.

It's not a matter of style. Clearly, some tactics and some builds will favor some players more than others. Player skill or preference certainly influences performance, but ultimately we can't quantify those things. If you divorce the build from the player and just look at numerical trade offs, then DEF comes out ahead once you've passed a certain point with global recharge.

That doesn't mean that your approach can't be equally or even more effective for you (though your approach doesn't entirely eschew DEF, or AFAIK make loony-toon sacrifices to push recharge into the stratosphere). It does mean that preposterously high-recharge build recommendations have to be viewed with a heavy dose of skepticism. Sometimes such recommendations come from legitimate insight into the particular player or build in question, but more often than not they arise from a kind of knee-jerk fixation on the presumed role of the Blaster, and/or from an ignorance of the game's mechanics.

[Bolding used above simply to help navigate my embarrassingly long wall o' text, not for rhetorical effect. Sorry for the ramble.]

So basically your secondary build is exactly the kind of build I was advocating. The only true difference in your approach, then, is that you feel comfortable doubling your investment for a balls-to-the-wall offensive build too -- and not even a balls-to-the-wall offensive build that doesn't have a good deal of DEF (20% is more than incidental on a Blaster).

I don't know what power sets you're using; if you've mentioned them earlier in the thread then I apologize for not remembering, but mine was a generalization, and not a controversial one either. Your apparent, initial premise -- that going for mondo recharge is equally rewarding as going for DEF -- is an on-its-face falsehood for most players and most builds, but only because there is literally no build that can't have some measure of both, and from a purely numerical standpoint, the available IO +DEF bonuses are more beneficial, point-for-point, than the available +recharge bonuses beyond a certain, relatively easy-to-achieve, level.

That is even more true on a squishy AT with no mez protection. The ability to avoid anything that could, even for a split second, delay the delivery of more offense is not to be under-rated or under-sold.

How much faster, exactly? If you're including the Musculature boost for the recharge build, then you can't ignore the Spiritual boost for the DEF build.

That much is true.

It's proportional mitigation. Factoring in the inherent miss rate is a misleading way to evaluate DEF. 30% DEF is 60% avoidance. 15% DEF is 30% avoidance.

It's half as many hits, whether we're talking about mezzes, debuffs, or just generic damage powers. That's a significant difference.

And this is where the conversation gets really interesting, for me, anyway. At what point does the extra DEF actually improve your practical damage output because you're spending less time on proactive defensive measures like single-target holds and the lovely but still rather time-consuming (3+ second activation) Bonfire?

Honestly, I think we're all talking around in circles here about the DEF versus Recharge issue. All I take from your post is that you love your Blaster more than other people might love any one particular build, which is great.

You were responding to me, and you criticized me specifically (and Nihili) by saying the following (and I quote):

"People are making more, and spending more for the things they buy and that isn't inflation for you or nihilii"

It is not my responsibility to defend one small segment of another person's post, but I think the point Fourspeed was making was that the staple, bare-minimum items in our game economy have not inflated (comparable to milk or bread or whatever), and thus the hyperinflation analogy is misleading, or at least unjustifiably alarmist. Regardless, we don't need SOs/TOs/DOs (or any other fixed-price, infinite-supply item) to make the case that earning power has grown more than -- or at the very least, as much as -- the price for most items on the market.

Then why quibble with my post when my point was that inflation isn't a widespread problem? Why accuse me of having "wave[d] it away as being a problem" if you don't think it's a widespread problem?

That is why I asked you to clarify, because frankly it remains unclear what your purpose or indeed your position really is.

That's nice. Me? I just worry about outfitting each build that I care to outfit. Inflation takes care of itself, because if worse came to worst I could always strip those toons later and sell whatever items have skyrocketed in price. More likely though, I won't ever feel the need to do that as long as I'm playing actively.

1. Having more than 45% DEF does help against ToHit buffs.

2. Having more than 45% DEF does not help against Accuracy buffs.

It's probably a murky distinction (certainly counter-intuitive if you're not familiar with the game's mechanics), but it is an important distinction. Any buffer you get on your SR Scrapper is good against either ToHit buffs or DEF debuffs. Your native DEF-debuff resistance will help you a lot in the latter case, as Syntax pointed out, but there is no counter to opponents with unusually high ToHit except to stack more and more DEF.

That said, ToHit buffs are comparatively rare, the new Incarnate content notwithstanding -- rare enough that an SR Scrapper is probably okay leaning on Luck Inspirations and/or the occasional use of Elude in those situations. Examples of ToHit buffs include, but aren't limited to the following: Super Strength's Rage, Leadership's Tactics and Vengeance (which comes up a lot when you fight Nemesis), Build Up and Aim, Empathy's Fortitude.

There are also various powers that have inherent ToHit bonuses. Martial Arts attacks, for instance. Knockout Blow is another prominent example (a good number of PvE enemies have that power, and when it hits it surely hurts!). Various single-target control powers. And while we're on the subject of ST controls, there are also a handful of powers that ignore positional DEF (that's what you have -- melee, range, AoE DEF), like Mesmerize and Dominate from Mind Control, which are fairly common in the PvE game (most prominently among Rikti).

Then you have a couple of NPC factions that are just designed to give DEF-based characters fits. Rularuu have obscene ToHit natively. Devouring Earth have those little Quartz pets that give everyone in the area obscene ToHit (and DE spawned in Praetorian/Tip missions already have a high native ToHit).

I hate to ramble, but the point here is that you have to understand what you're up against in order to figure out the outliers in your combat logs. If you're at the soft cap, then you should never be surprised by any ToHit roll below about 10%, because Accuracy alone can plausibly push even floored ToHit up that high, and Accuracy bonuses are very common. If you see any ToHit roll higher than 10% when you're at the soft cap, then chances are you were facing one of the above examples or something similar.

You're wrong in the general case. This isn't a shades-of-gray issue unless you engage in the wild flight of fancy that pits +recharge against DEF as if they were mutually exclusive.

You can have 60-80% in global recharge on top of soft-capped DEF to one position or two types (generally ranged or Smash/Lethal, sometimes both if you're very very crafty). That's before we talk about Hasten. If your content with some reasonably high DEF number below the softcap, then your recharge can go a good deal higher.

Without making fruit-loop build sacrifices, you're not going to get much more than about 100% in global recharge (before Hasten) on a build that concentrates on +recharge exclusively. Leaving aside for a moment that high-end +recharge sets tend to be very expensive on the market, this sort of build pays a high-premium opportunity cost for a very small practical benefit with respect to offense. And anything above 100% (which is the mark for perma-Hasten with three recharge IOs slotted) is even less valuable.

Your point about Task Forces is frankly mystifying. Yes, you're more likely to have your DEF buffed in a TF, but you could also have your recharge buffed. And though it's certainly true that you shouldn't have to soak aggro in TFs, it's nice not to faceplant instantly when things go wrong too.

Blasters are already specialized enough. They need every scant bit of general improvement you can give them to perform at the highest level. If dual builds are your preference, then that's fine, but most people don't want to bother with multiple IOed builds. In any case, you border on contradicting yourself when you talk about having a cheap build for DEF, because if it's truly cheap then it has balls for +recharge -- which means that you have two builds that are less effective than one build that mixes both together.

The existence of inflation has never been in question. In the very post you quote I acknowledge inflation.

People are making more, but for the most part the increased spending is concentrated on the extreme high end of items.

Even if people do not run tips, they can sell the items you think are so disastrously inflated for mondo cash - and then use that cash to buy a comparatively larger quantity (relative to a few years ago) of the almost-as-good stuff that comprises a high-performance build. We are not talking about a situation where some higher authority prints money and uses it for its own ends -- effectively stealing money from the citizenry. We're talking about a situation where everyone makes more.

The side effect is that some things are more expensive. That's only a problem for you if you banked large sums of influence a long time ago and then sat on your hands. For the game, from a design perspective? Not really a pressing issue, at least until we start to hit the influence cap (which would crash the market's supply).

Perhaps this discussion would be more productive (to the extent that any conversation here is productive) if you'd reveal why you think the inflation we've seen thus far is a widespread problem.

Yeah, and in any case, sets like Crushing Impact have inflated by an insignificant amount in comparison with players' earning power.

As noted previously, ~50 million per day is basically guaranteed if you spend half an hour a day running Tips, on one character. Based on the OP's premise, 50 million was a lot of money a few years ago.

Now as before, that 50 million is enough to buy several sets of Crushing Impact (or similar). Proportional increases are useful when measuring inflation, but they're only relevant to the extent that the increase is numerically significant. Even if Crushing Impact (and the like) had gone up 300% (which they haven't in my experience), 300% of a very small number is still a small number when earning power has gone up for the average player by a factor of five or more.

Likewise, even the highly desirable Rare proc enhancements (Luck of the Gambler, Miracle, Numina) haven't risen so much in price that they outpace earning power. Yes, they're more expensive on average than they used to be, but in comparison with the ~70 million you might have paid before, the ~200 million you'll have to pay now is actually less valuable. Nevermind that Alignment Merits give you quick access to those previously-thought-to-be-high-end items without even touching the market.

So again, we clearly have inflation. No one's disputed that. The question is whether that inflation is a widespread problem, and that's pretty clearly not the case -- not yet anyway. Happily, the effect of inflation seems to be drawn disproportionately to the highest of high-end items (purples, PvP IOs) as if by a magnet. In the meanwhile, wages continue to keep the pace, which is in stark contrast with what happens in the real world when massive inflation hits an economy.

At the risk of belaboring the point: for a ranged Blaster, almost every Secondary only has a couple of in-combat powers -- Build Up and usually one or two others at best. People usually argue (and I think rightly) that Devices' main flaw is the lack of Build Up on a burst-damage-reliant AT, a singular lack for which Devices never truly compensates despite the set's high situational utility.

But it is a singular lack. Simply tallying useful powers is rarely a good measure of inter-set balance.

This is usually where the discussion veers off into a heated debate about whether or not Blasters should be played as a ranged AT, which is a fine subject for another thread. The bottom line, though, for me, is that all Blaster Secondaries could use some revisiting -- not with an eye towards eliminating or invalidating the Blapper playstyle (though frankly it's always seemed a rather clumsy aspect of the AT's design), but with a view towards providing more general utility on an AT that seriously lacks for a proper role of any kind, at least at the high end:

Pure damage dealer is well and good in an MMO that incentivizes that sort of thing, but we don't play one of those (and by incentivizing I don't mean to suggest that CoH should enforce hard-and-fast team-composition requirements). In any encounter where damage output might actually be the difference between team success and team defeat, a debuffer is almost always a better option than a Blaster -- and not just a better option. A much better option. Likewise, few if any competent high-level teams have any issue clearing large spawns of normal opponents quickly, with or without so-called dedicated damage dealers.

And Blasters at the high end really aren't very good at soloing, comparatively speaking. Sure, they can kill stuff fast. Sure, any half-decent player can sleep walk through normal content at base or even slightly above-base difficulty levels with any build. That said, any melee build is miles better given equal amounts of investment. Most any well-IOed buff/debuff/control class is far better in terms of success-failure capability, too.

So the Blaster is an ersatz support AT, with no bona-fide (or if you prefer, uncommon and clearly defined) support capability. I guess the best term for the Blaster's role would be "artillery," but their practical damage advantage relative to their foot-soldier counterparts doesn't meet the analogy's standard. Heck, even the medics in our tortured metaphor can rival the Blaster with respect to their practical contribution to team damage output.

With all of that said, and with a mild cringe at the semi-derail and all that may come in response to it, I have never understood why the developers are so afraid of Blasters -- why non-IOed Blasters are basically required to use melee attacks to create a full attack chain, why their best ranged attacks have such short range (40' now was actually 20' at launch), why the craven AI actually penalizes AoE Blasters far more than AoE melee builds (when I do get the urge to blap, I see so many sliver-of-life runners on my Blaster that I'm half-tempted to ask for a freaking taunt aura), why Blaster nukes, which are only good for one spawn per several minutes, generally carry a massive crash with them, why the intersection of Primary and Secondary must always resolve into a false dilemma pitting overpowered control/debuff against a slew of largely redundant attack powers. For a more recent example, someone obviously took some pains to make Targeted AoE IO sets the red-headed step child of defensive bonuses -- an elegant move if taken in isolation, but all of the above applies all at once, turning Blasters into the closest thing we have to a hard-mode AT.

And if that's what people like, that's fine. I'd just like to see some more interesting build options than, "Take a zillion attacks." And I don't see the harm in buffing some of the AT's under-appreciated powers and sets, which in my opinion include nearly every Secondary. We've clearly reached (or nearly reached) the limit of the devs' inclination to boost our damage to differentiate us from other ATs. We've also clearly seen other ATs break the set of rules that are supposed to have restricted Blasters from receiving more (or better) utility powers for all of this time. (Play a Dominator or a Widow or any number of Controller builds if you haven't realized that already.)

If the concern is that adding more general utility to Blasters would make them as tank-magey as, or even more tank-magey than other ATs, then we've got a lot of room yet to work with.

Sounds good. Exchanging a Build Up power that would be available every 20-30 seconds for a high-powered (and not-buffable-by-the-absent-Build-Up) pseudo-nuke every couple of minutes sounds like an entirely reasonable trade off.

I asked you to post a build with no weaknesses because you said that we shouldn't generalize in build discussions. My own play experiences are irrelevant; the point is that you have to make trade offs in crafting a build -- any build -- and that therefore generalizations are necessary.

In order to understand whether the trade offs in question are worthwhile, we have to understand how often we'll face this-or-that situation. I can't say that S/L DEF is always better than Fire/Cold DEF, for instance, but I can say that S/L DEF is far more useful over the vast majority of the game's content.

It seems clear that you came into this thread looking to pat yourself on the back for being an uber player. Congrats; I'm sure your Fire Tanker is the best of the bestest ever.

But your build does have holes in it, whether you wish to acknowledge them or not. The idea is to minimize your build's weaknesses, and when necessary (as you say) adjust your play to compensate for them. That's all anyone can do.

Bears repeating. Also there are very few attacks that are classified as Melee and not also classified as Smash or Lethal.

A lot of squishies focus on Ranged DEF exclusively, and that works for them because a mob at range can only use ranged and AoE attacks (AoE being comparatively rare). A mob in melee, by contrast, can use melee, ranged, and AoE attacks. Melee DEF is nice, but it's not all-your-eggs-in-one-basket nice, not even close.

Syntax's priorities' list is a good place to start for anyone who's looking to IO out a build for DEF.

Post a build with literally no weaknesses. Then we can talk about how generalizations are useless in build discussion.

I wish you luck with that. You're gonna need it.

I'm pretty sure that what you're describing is an interruption to the Engineer's AI, and not an interruption to the summoning power itself. The same holds true for Rikti Communicators and Sky Raider Engineers: their summoning schtick is the first thing they try to do upon being aggro'ed, but they won't do it if you hit them first.

At least, that's been my experience. In any case, the player version of the power has too long an activation time, and too short a duration. I happen to have a higher opinion of Devices than seemingly most other posters on this forum, but that's only because I like to play ranged-biased Blasters, and thus I find that almost all Blaster Secondaries are somewhat lackluster, probably the most inconsistently relevant category of power sets in the entire game. A set with native +DEF, +stealth, +ToHit, and the situational capability to lay mine/caltrop fields doesn't seem so terrible in that context.

But none of the above means that Devices couldn't use some improvements. Gun Drone is a prime candidate.

Archery has arguably the best AoE in the game, once you get Rain of Arrows. Fire is really good at AoE too, but if your main interest is killing normal spawns as fast as possible, then Archery is better at the high end. Rain of Arrows is just that much easier to apply over a wide area than Breath + Ball + Rain of Fire.

Fire has significantly better single-target DPS, though. So if you want a good mix of AoE and ranged ST damage, then Fire is your best bet.

As far as Trip Mine goes, I'd have to agree with previous posters: Trip Mine is a potent power, but it's very situational. If you want to keep the capability to lay mine fields in your back pocket, then by all means, go with Devices. The new Behavioral Adjustment Facility Trial actually seems to emphasize that tactic. But I wouldn't worry too much about finding the right Primary pairing; with either Fire or Archery, you probably won't (shouldn't) need to use Trip Mine regularly anyway.

Hyper-inflation implies that the economy is in the toilet, that everyone is poor because the currency has no value. What we're seeing in game is the exact opposite, for the most part: earning power has hyper-inflated relative to the value of goods, except for a handful of high-end luxury items.

So yeah, if you banked two billion three years ago and took a break until yesterday, you might feel cheated. You might even make rash comparisons to post-war Germany or present-day Zimbabwe.

But what you'd be missing is that it's about ten times easier and faster to earn two billion than it was when you left -- and most of the mid-range items you might want to buy haven't risen very much in price. Anyone with half an hour a day to play can earn ~50 million per day just from Alignment Merits. And if she runs those Tip missions at 50 she'll occasionally hit the proverbial lottery with one of those hyper-inflated purple recipes, which aren't necessary to create a great build. (In other words, if you feel like you can't afford to slot purple sets, then you should sell any purples you get as drops, which means that the extremely narrow band of hyper-inflated goods in the game actually benefit the so-called poor.)

Inflation in this game is only a potential problem to the extent that we start to run into the influence cap -- and thus crash the market's supply. We're not anywhere close to that point in the general case. As of today and off the top of my head, there are only two IOs that are regularly traded off-market.

With all of that said, and to answer your question: Yes, the effect you describe is game changing, but not in the way you think it is. More people, not fewer, have access to high-performance builds now.

Yeah. If anything, it seems to me that what we're seeing is the very opposite of RL-style hyperinflation. To anyone who cares to sell their goods on the market, earning power is up, and for the most part only high-luxury items cost a lot more than they used to.

I wouldn't argue that inflation can't potentially become a problem; the comparatively low influence cap sorta demands that we take inflation seriously --but as of right now it's actually easier to earn the money to create a mid-range IO build than it was years ago.

This isn't a billion dollars for a loaf of bread. This is $2.95 for a loaf of bread, and a trillion dollars for a Ferrari.

I think you only need one exploration badge from Recluse's Victory.

Adding another 2 mag makes you immune to the first hold that lands (most holds are mag 3 with a couple of very rare exceptions). That may not sound like much, but when you're dodging most everything that comes your way -- and depend on your toggles, in part, to keep you dodging -- having that extra breathing room is very very helpful.

It's the same principle as layered mitigation, except now we're talking about layered mez avoidance.

If you have Scorpion Shield, Weave, and CJ, then Power Boost can give you an extra 12.3% in Smash/Lethal/Energy DEF. That's a considerable amount. With just Weave, CJ, and Hover, you're looking at around a 4.5% boost to all DEF -- not terrible considering that the Dominator version of Link Minds only provides 4.3% DEF to all on a 300 second base cooldown. Toss on Hail of Bullets and suddenly PB is giving you ~12% to all DEF for the albeit short duration.

You won't have PB full-time without gobs of recharge (400% total, which isn't unachievable actually), but you can use it to help you absorb alpha strikes, much as Scrappers generally use Shadow Meld. On the other hand, if you're already at or near the cap to one or more positions/types, then Power Boost will give you a nice cushion against DEF debuffs.

Power Boost also improves movement speed buffs, ToHit buffs, heals and endurance mods on top of the various controllery effects.

Is Power Boost a make-or-break power? No, but then again Blaster secondaries aren't known for having many must-have powers.

Sometimes positional DEF is better than typed. Sometimes typed is better than positional. It's hard to say that one category is unreservedly better than the other, unless you're in a position (no pun intended) to soft-cap all three positions. Even then, both categories of DEF have weaknesses.

For Blasters, I'd rank the different positions/types of DEF (in terms of safety added over the full range of the game's content) in this order:

Ranged, Smash/Lethal, Energy, AoE, Negative -- and in a distant last place are Cold/Fire.

Scorpion Shield and Frozen Armor are the main reasons that capping more than one position/type is even feasible for Blasters in the general case.

What's important to understand about typed DEF is that it covers you against all three positions for that type. Smash/Lethal covers you against the plurality of the attacks in the game, and (particularly of interest to Blasters) it covers an awful lot of mez effects that might get through your Acrobatics' hold protection, and an awful lot of the debuff effects that a DEF-based Blaster has to worry about.

We're talking almost all grenades, missile attacks, machine gun fire (usually with DEF debuffs), gun fire in general, sword attacks (again, -DEF), Footstomp and Handclap, etc etc etc.

If you want to have a hybrid melee/ranged playstyle, and you can only choose one type/position of DEF to focus on, then Smash/Lethal is far and away the best choice. I say that ranged DEF is the safest singular option only because playing at range is intrinsically safer than dancing in and out of melee, and because ranged DEF allows you to stack DEF with a resistance shield from a patron/Ancillary pool.

Blasters are brittle, though. After having tweaked and retweaked my Blaster, after having spent and respent billions on it, it's clear to me that more DEF to more types (and/or positions) is better than any amount of (toggle-based) RES in most situations. Avoidance to debuffs and mez effects is just that important on our little AT. Blasters aren't about sustained survivability; they're about killing stuff as fast as possible.

That's why I'd ditch Medicine, btw, but that's just me. I'd definitely advise against an interruptible heal on a low-DEF character like the one you seem to want to build, but even with high DEF, Blasters can and should make full use of their inspirations. They want to keep moving, keep killing as fast as they can. It's easier and faster to use the occasional green than it is to stop and hit Aid Self. The fact that Medicine doesn't offer you any particular +DEF set bonuses only reinforces the point.

10% DEF is 20% damage mitigation. It's 20% avoidance. Hail of Bullets isn't available all the time.

And though I know I've rambled a novel already here, if you take anything away from this post, I hope it's the following: The Fighting Pool and Ancillary Armors are not mutually exclusive. They stack with each other. The main reason, IMO, to take Fighting is not for Tough (though Tough does give you a place to put the two unique +DEF IOs); Fighting for Blasters is all about Weave.

YMMV. You seem like a pretty laid back guy who'll like the character regardless. I'm just trying to give you some ideas.