Obitus

I haven't had a chance to look over your build in Mids', but just a point of clarification:

The global damage bonus display can be misleading. There's no way you have +228% damage in that build. Mids' default position when you put a Build Up proc in your build is to toggle it on, so check to make sure the little green button in Tactics is off before checking your damage bonus.

Also, the latest versions of Mids' seem to start you off with 100% damage, which can be confusing if you're used to the old way of doing things (starting at 0%). I'm guessing you have Tactics toggled on (which adds the Gaussian proc's bonus as if full-time), which would put your actual global damage at 28%, which is definitely a nice boost, but keep in mind that Defiance by itself can give you a pretty consistent 40%.

The BU proc, btw, has a 5% chance to fire per 10 seconds, and the damage buff only lasts for about 5 seconds, which puts the over-time +damage benefit at something like:

(0.05 * 100 * (5 / 10)) / 10 = 2.5%.

That's not a net boost. That's an expression of base damage. Now, is it quite fair to quantify a random, heavy burst of bonus damage as an average over time? Probably not, but I would counsel against getting your hopes up too high. For that matter, I'd counsel against Gaussian's generally on a Blaster. You can boost ranged DEF, or you can boost S/L DEF (through Scorp Shield or Frozen Armor) -- you can even potentially soft-cap ranged/Smash/Lethal/Energy all at once if you're inclined to do that -- but going for any melee/AoE positional DEF seems like a wasted effort.

I think so, but I'm not certain HoB's DEF is modified by Power Boost. It probably is, but then you're potentially looking at stacking positional DEF with typed DEF, which doesn't work.

Even the meager hold protection Acro offers is well worth the price of admission on a high-defense Blaster. It gives you some extra breathing room against what is, to me at least, bar-none the most annoying thing about playing Blasters at the high end. The KB protection in Acro is secondary, but it's also much, much stronger than a single KB IO will give you (12 mag versus 3?).

Oh, and Power Boost enhances all of your DEF powers (but sadly, not Frozen Armor because it has a RES component). It's pretty easy to make a ghetto Super Reflexes Blaster with EM.

So every time anyone uses the indefinite male pronoun as she was taught to do you assume she's a chauvanist pig? If someone uses the female pronoun instead, as I just did, do you think it's reasonable for other people to assume he's a frothing-at-the-mouth feminist?

Personally, I like to alternate. That seems to be a popular way of dealing with readers' potential sensitivities. Trying to shoe-horn politically correct pronouns of your own into the language seems rather self-important (some might say self-defeating, given all of the failed attempts to create a standard gender-neutral set of pronouns over the years) by contrast.

Interestingly, from what I was able to dig up on the subject, sie and hir are apparently out of fashion given their decidedly feminine tone. So the roller coaster of alleged victimhood goes.

Regardless, it seems pretty obvious that the OP knew her repeated use of those non-standard pronouns in a post where she implicitly touts her own skill with the language (sending unsolicited spelling corrections to total strangers in an internet game) would provoke commentary, or at least questions. And so, what you may regard as simply an appropriate nod to political correctness may look to someone else like a naked plea for attention to the OP's preferred political narrative in a non-political forum.

The purpose of langauge is to communicate. As Zombie rightly points out, language evolves based on widespread and accepted use. The objection here isn't some antiquated prescriptivist screed taken as if from the lecture of a third-grade Catholic school teacher. The objection is based on a tiny fringe group trying to inject their own personal preferences into a language spoken by billions worldwide -- and in the process, casting aspersions on most any attempt to communicate in good faith.

That's what you just did.

Sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check it out.

That's true, but you're also describing why Tornado and LS can't (or usually shouldn't) be counted as straight DPS. The fact that running targets give you a backhanded benefit by minimizing the bug with FR doesn't offset the fact that you're losing some amount of your damage potential via your pseudo pets.

Either way, you're losing something. Or gaining something, depending on you look at it -- but by Korith's reckoning, we're losing, and losing a lot, given that he assumed full-time double-stacked FR and the full potential DPS of the Storm pseudo pets.

All of that said, I did make an error in my previous post with respect to the recharge cap. The recharge cap is +400% (500% total), rather than the total of 400% I groggily referred to earlier. So in theory you could stack FR full-time if there were no bug, but it's nearly impossible to get to that point on your own.

Where are you getting that number? Do you have testing to suggest that the bug only applies 40% of the time? I know it doesn't happen every time, but I've not seen any conclusive data on the matter.

But even if we accept that you can pin down the exact rate that the bug will occur, you still have to contend with the power's cooldown and activation time. At the recharge cap, you can get FR to recharge in 15 seconds, which is exactly half of the debuff's on-paper duration. But you also have a 2.244 second activation period (including Arcanatime), which means that you can only cycle the power every 17.244 seconds.

2.244 / 15 = 0.1496, or approximately 15% of your up-time is therefore consumed by the cast. In short, you couldn't perma-double-stack Freezing Rain even if the bug didn't exist.

In order for us to achieve 60% up-time on double FR given the above, we'd have to get non-buggy behavior out of FR's debuff ~70% of the time. That seems like a rather optimistic number to me based on experience, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that point.

Regardless, assuming perma-double-stacked FR is over-optimistic, just as calculating Tornado and LS's DPA in a vacuum is potentially misleading. The comparison between those two powers and regen debuffs is apt, because they're subject to a similar set of situational caveats that set them apart from straight DPS powers. Those caveats are particularly relevant for any character who doesn't have an anti-knockback immobilize.

You're also going to have a hell of a time double-stacking Freezing Rain given the long-standing bug (feature?) with its duration. Solo EB/AV fights probably describe the only situation where you can count Tornado/LS as straight DPS as Korith did, and even there it seems he overrated their appeal.

Storm can work for an AV-soloing Controller. If I were determined to make such a character, though, I'd have to go with Cold instead.

Even with the explicit comparison edited out, the fact that the two numbers are still included in the article betrays the author's original, face-palm-worthy mistake. Why even mention the number of atoms in the universe at all unless the author thought that the Zimbabwe currency were anywhere near it?

The first number is soooooo much higher that it isn't even worth mentioning. It'd be like my saying that I have 13,000 dollars in the bank and then later mentioning just for reference that the United States Government is $13,000,000,000,000 in debt. To call it a non-sequitor is an insult to Pauly Shore (the most random person I can think of).

Four tens? That's like ... *ticks fingers* $1,300!

Sign me up!

Wait. You mean 10 isn't 1/3rd of 1,000?

In cases where I want the Apocalypse proc to go elsewhere, I'd still slot the rest of the Apocalypse set in Blaze. Using the other five Apocs overcaps Blaze on damage, but it overcaps you on the highest damage attack you have (~10% of ~188 damage is 18.8, not a bad improvement). I mean you're spending all that influence anyway, right?

In any case, as you point out, proc placement only cares how often the attack is used, and Blaze should be used as often as anything else in the OP's build.

All of that said, and with respect to the OP's build -- Ring of Fire has spectacular DPA, much better than either Blast or Flares. It also happens to animate faster than Blast. So if he were to switch his attack chain to Blaze-Ring-Flares he could, in fact, benefit quite a bit from the extra recharge enhancement in Blaze. (And save a power pick in the process, or hold onto Blast because a larger up-front chunk of damage is nice to have through most of our minion-centric game content.) Toss on a Very Rare Spiritual Boost, and you'll be flirting with the recharge cap on Blaze and a gapless ranged attack chain that outpaces any other Fire Blaster's.

I'd also question the decision to take Mace Mastery without taking Web Envelope and Rain of Fire, the combo of which is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the primary benefits of that APP (apart from the S/L shield, of course). And I'd question the OP's apparent fascination with low-end +regeneration bonuses. (The difference between his slotting scheme in Health and no slots at all is a whopping ~5 hp/sec; the difference between his four-slot scheme and the standard two-slot Miracle/Numina scheme is ~3.5 HP/sec. The bottom line is that this build will have to rely on inspirations and/or teammate heals to get by.)

Also, Breath really craves range enhancement. At 40', the cone covers ~418 square feet, and is ~20 feet wide at its widest point. At 60', the cone covers ~942 square feet and is ~31 feet wide at its widest point.

A lot of the above comes down to preference, though. Just some thoughts from someone who's fiddled endlessly with his own Fire Blasters.

Blasters typically have access to large ToHit buffs (in the form of Aim/Build Up) at least 2/3rds of the time. ToHit buffs are more potent than Accuracy beyond a certain, relatively low point. If you already have an optimal attack chain and no endurance issues before you even get around to the Alpha boost, then chances are you also already have quite a bit of global Accuracy. Blasters don't have a whole heck of a lot of DEF powers to enhance, either.

ToHit buffs and DEF debuffs also tend to be pretty common among teammates, in my experience.

I can see where Nerve might be useful to some builds. Blasters generally don't fit the bill, though. For what it's worth, my biggest complaint about Nerve is that it does nearly nothing for you against opponents with lots of DEF unless you already have more than enough ToHit to fight +4s. Even if we ignore the side benefits of increased recharge and concentrate instead purely on your chance to hit, you're arguably better off using Spiritual to increase the availability of Aim/BU than you are using Nerve to increase your Accuracy full-time.

Apocalypse should always go in Blaze if you don't already have ED-capped recharge enhancement in that power. Blaze needs to recharge as fast as possible.

If you're relying on capped ranged DEF, then AoE mezzes will still hit you. Unfortunately, so will Mind Control single-target ranged mezzes (Mesmerise, Dominate), because they're non-positional attacks.

Otherwise, you should be good.

Longbow are a PITA on higher difficulties for Blasters.

Yes, it's a 33% chance to hit each foe in range per ten seconds. And because the confusion proc is itself a small AoE effect, you'll see the proc affect everything around you fairly often. In other words, the more mobs around you, the more likely all of them will be confused by the proc.

The proc is basically better than the power. Both together are pretty potent.

You can also a cheat a bit by waiting until you're in melee range with a spawn before activating the power. That'll give you a chance to proc immediately and on demand. Leaving WoC on full-time is, unfortunately, an exercise in frustration because any tiny mez will detoggle the power.

I would very strongly urge you not to try to buy a full set of Coercive Persuasion with Alignment Merits. 120 A-Merits are worth a whole heck of a lot more than the ~600ish million influence the set will cost you on the market. Buy something else with your merits and then sell it. Three or four LoTGs will net you enough to buy six Coercive Persuasions, for instance. That's 6-8 AMerits versus 120.

That might have been an intentional design decision, though -- a developer-approved trade-off in non-Incendiary damage in return for extra flexibility.

Whether you agree with that design decision is another matter -- and I think there's room to argue that the devs have always been a little too wary of buffing Blasters, have always been perhaps too eager to give Blasters big trade offs. But that's more an issue with the AT than it is with any particular power set.

The pattern in this thread seems to be that even those who dislike Dual Pistols on a Blaster (generally) like it on a Defender or a Corruptor. It's a small sample size, sure -- but for what it's worth, that trend jives with my own personal experience with non-DP Blasters, which goes back to launch day.

Yeah, and even City of Data's Dual Pistols info is a little difficult to interpret at a glance. It seems like Pistols doesn't get any extra Fire DoT from the Incendiary Ammunication. (Nor any slow or -damage from cold and toxic rounds.)

The rest of the powers don't seem to follow any clear pattern at a glance either. Dual Wield gives you 82.58 damage base, plus 4 * 7.07 extra fire damage with the Incendiary rounds, which is a 34% bonus. Empty Clips gives you 56.92 base damage, plus an extra 3 * 7.07 fire damage, which is a ~37% bonus.

Bullet Rain gives you 62.52 base damage, plus an extra 3 * 7.07 fire damage for a 34% bonus. And on and on. All of the above assumes I'm interpreting the numbers correctly -- that the second set of PvE lethal numbers is replaced by the first set of PvE fire numbers, with the second set of PvE fire numbers representing the bonus (corresponding to the cold and toxic debuffs).

I'm also not sure from reading those entries what the probability of the fire DoT is. I guess it's probably 80% to follow Fire Blast's example, but I can't be sure. If so, then the over-time benefit of the incendiary rounds hovers between ~24% to ~32% extra damage. Both are tremendous numbers, though it's arguable that Dual Pistol's generally long activation times diminish the extra damage available to the set relative to the damage of other (non-Fire) blast sets.

If any of my interpretations are close, though, it's pretty clear that Dual Pistols isn't terrible. Seems like it's most likely a middling performer, which may or may not be unacceptable to the individual player given what I believe to be the comparative weakness of Blasters as a whole AT. (At least at the high end of IO builds.)

In other words, and to make a long story short: Playing a middling-performer set on what is perceived to be a powerful AT may be easier to swallow than playing a middling-perfomer set on the game's hard-mode AT. YMMV.

It's not an either-or proposition, either. Taking Hover doesn't preclude you from using CJ and Hurdle (especially now that Fitness is free).

I have a hard time playing any Blaster build that doesn't have both. YMMV.

To be fair, Energy Manipulation can turn just about any Primary blast set into a (comparatively) long-range damage dealer. For that very reason, I've actually spent a good deal of time going back and forth about whether to ditch my Fire/Mental in favor of the Fire/EM I rolled way back when Devices was the flavor of the month.

As for whether Fire is penalized with respect to range, I confess I don't find your argument terribly convincing. Playstyles do differ and preferences vary, but I wonder: If Executioner's Shot were a carbon copy of Blaze, would you take it and use it every chance you get? I'm betting you would. So whether Dual Pistols is actually better suited to a long-range playstyle or not depends on how you choose to spin it. From where I'm sitting, the lack of a good tier-3, 40' attack isn't an advantage.

Personally, I think the whole concept of 40' attacks is out-moded, a relic of a time when the devs actually thought that range was such a massive defensive advantage that it outweighed (or at least compared with) the defenses and mez protection offered to other ATs. Actually, IIRC, powers like Blaze used to have a 20' range -- so 40' is a big improvement from Launch day, but I'm still left to wonder why the ability to camp out at 80' on a Blaster would be a major balance issue given that Blaster ranged DPS is far from the best thing going. It's actually rather anemic to my eyes (subjectively). There's not a whole lot of cannon in the glass cannon unless you specialize in burst AoE (which is admittedly very nice but usually requires a closer range at least some of the time), or unless you blap. Preferably both.

As someone whose only direct experience with Dual Pistols admittedly come from reading City of Data, I can't necessarily agree that playing Fire is less nuanced. The set's capabilities are more cut-and-dried on paper, but in my experience Fire Blast is one of the harder Blasters to play from 1-50 unless you spend all your time in teams. Granted, I cut my teeth on this game before all of the massive buffs to leveling speed, and before temp powers rained from the sky like so many hailstones.

So my view may be skewed a bit, but Fire is a rare (in this game) example of the min in min/max. What it does well, it does very very well. What it doesn't do is, well, everything else. At least until you get into IOs.

I don't know why you'd want to spend a slot (and god knows how much influence) on a proc that offers ~14 average damage on a power that already does about 450 (remember, we already have the best proc slotted if we're using Apocalypse). Seems to me that the range enhancement is a much better deal.

Hover is more of a judgment call, but I can't imagine rolling a ranged-DEF build without it. Doesn't mean you have to use it all the time; the point was that even at Hover speeds I don't find Blaze's range unworkable. The other point that occurs to me now is that Hover helps to prevent Fire Breath's activation time from forcing you into melee with angry mobs (as you noted earlier). Hover blasting is another thing that's made more comfortable by Energy Manipulation, too (Power Boost does, or at least used to, boost fly speed considerably.)

I don't disagree in principle. I'd rather have, say, a Dominator's Embrace of Fire, which (at sufficient global recharge) offers nearly the same uptime ratio of Build Up and Aim combined, for half the power picks and less than one third of the accumulated time spent activating something that does no damage itself.

Then again, my Dom has no +ToHit available to her natively, which can be pain in the buttocks on occasion.

You're absolutely right that Aim offers not a whole lot to your damage over time (DPS). Once you factor in the time spent activating the power, you're barely coming out ahead for using it on average. But Aim does help with burst damage out of the gate, and that's why you almost have to take it.

It's sorta like the Blaze/Executioner comparison above. Having to take Aim and feeling like you have to use it as often as possible may be considered burdensome. On the other hand, lacking the option to take it isn't exactly an advantage. Tomato, tomahto.

Agreed. I appreciate the thoughts you've offered in this thread, even if some of them were (intentionally or unintentionally) unnecessarily controversial. Dual Pistols never held any interest for me previously because I couldn't think of an attractive-to-me character concept for them, but seeing someone defend the set so passionately brought a couple to mind.

I'll give it a shot, though it may have to wait for the half dozen other alts I've in mind. Apologies for the sequel novel.

I don't want to get involved in a point-for-point comparison because I have very little personal experience with Dual Pistols. Actually, I'm encouraged to give them a try based largely on what you've said in this thread -- though frankly at this point I'm a little down on Blasters as an AT.

My Fire/MM Blaster is great in teams as a ranged AoE damage dealer though. Solo she does pretty well given capped ranged DEF and ~60% global recharge, but (much like you with your Corruptor-Rain-of-Fire complaint) I can't quite get it out of my head that any number of other builds do close-enough damage without all the sacrifices. And like Another_Fan, the fact that Blaster Fire Blast (the power) is inferior to basically every other version of the same power just sticks in my craw. All that aside, though:

There's a difference between having one attack that does huge AoE damage in ~2.9 seconds (Arcanatime), and having four attacks that each animate in that same ballpark period (ranging from 2.64 for Bullet Rain to 2.772 for Executioner's Shot). Rhetorical flourishes are fine and I don't wholly disagree with your point, but the distinction is worth noting in bold and underline.

As above, subjective preferences will vary. I can't argue with any of your criticisms here. FWIW, if you're willing to pay, five slots of Apocalypse with either a generic Range IO or a Centriole will give you 48-50 feet on Blaze, which I find more than adequate on a Hover Blaster.

For what it's worth, I got the Cardiac boost on my Blaster mostly because I had a ton of Vanguard Merits stored and wanted to slot any Alpha boost as fast as possible. The extra range is great, so great that I'm not sure I'm going to ditch the Cardiac boost for Spiritual when I-20 comes out, as originally planned. Will probably get both at some point so I can swap them in and out, but for teaming purposes I'm leaning towards Cardiac because no one's likely to care if I'm using Blaze 10% less often. They might care if I'm hitting significantly more targets with my hardest-hitting AoE power. (Also, teammates might have recharge buffs, but they're unlikely to have range buffs)

Yet another instance of a qualitative boost that may very well trump even a massive quantitative one.

Honestly, you lose me a little here. On the one hand, you dismiss Aim because Blasters already have a lot of damage boosts (Defiance, slotting), which tend to diminish the proportional benefit of a ~62% base damage buff. That's a fine argument if that's as far as you wanna take it.

But here you also imply that Build Up is somehow miles better than Aim. The proportional-gain argument goes both ways: if 62% bonus damage is negligible given all the other damage you have, then surely adding an extra ~38% isn't a night-and-day difference. At the approximate maximum-sustainable level of Defiance (and assuming ED-capped damage slotting), Aim represents a 62 / (195 + 40) = ~26% bonus to aggregate damage. Under the same conditions, Build Up represents a 100 / (195 + 40) = ~42% bonus to aggregate damage. Both of those are pretty darn good numbers.

Actually, I find that the point of Aim on a Fire Blaster is that it basically replaces Defiance, because I usually kill things so quickly that I don't have time to ramp up Defiance's damage buff. Aim gives you more-than-Defiance-level +damage for the first shots you take. Is it less useful than Build Up? In most situations, sure, but not by leaps and bounds. I'd certainly rather have Aim than not.

In any case, you can, at sufficient levels of recharge, basically chain Aim and Build Up with minor gaps for AoE and single-target carnage on a Fire Blaster.

Sorry for the novel.

Ranged DEF + Hover + RES shield is definitely safer in the general case than S/L DEF + DEF shield, not least because you're exposed to fewer high-damage attacks.

Still, both have their flaws. S/L DEF will cover you against a lot of AoEs. Ranged DEF won't. S/L DEF generally gives you a little more room for +recharge bonuses too, given that you get so much DEF from one power. S/L DEF allow you to blap (and in some cases actually encourages you to blap because some mobs only use S/L attacks in melee).

It's ultimately a matter of preference. I ended up using the dual-build option for the first time on my Blaster (Fire/Mental) because I couldn't make up my mind. In most situations, the ranged-DEF variant is more sturdy. In teams, that build is almost always better. But it's also fun to play quasi-Scrapper on occasion.