Obitus

Impressive. I usually try to do Super Strength because it's my favorite melee set (especially after power customization). Mace isn't my bag. I like your approach to the PBAoE attacks (hadn't realized you could slot PBAoE sets in Shatter, either). I can't see the build as you intended though, because I'm using the patched version of Mids Designer. I assume you took Fitness, and that the two powers with three blank slots each are Health and Stamina.

Personally -- and at the risk of beating a point to death -- if I wanted to eat 5 billion influence almost purely for defensive bonuses, I'd roll something with a better taunt aura. Then again, I'm probably biased; my Tanker builds are always a little on the Scrapper-ish side, because I like to solo, and I figure that I'll usually have support for situations that require the best possible defenses. YMMV.

It'd be interesting to see an Issue-19 version of your build.

Unless I'm missing something, High Pain Tolerance is only worth about 600 HP. You may end up with a greater HP advantage than that over a given Elec build, but only because you took different set bonuses than he did.

I don't disagree about the build constraints, but an Elec Tanker really doesn't need high defense across the board. Fire/Cold defense is questionable on almost any build; there just aren't enough attacks in the game that are typed purely as Fire/Cold. S/L/N/E are way more important. And as an Elec Tanker, you have capped Energy RES without even trying -- along with very high S/L RES and decent Dark RES. The main thing is to soft-cap your DEF against the most commonly spammed DEF debuffs, which are generally packaged with Lethal attacks. (knives, swords, machine guns, etc.)

Elec also has near immunity against the most dangerous energy-typed attack you're likely to see (endurance drain). It's probably best to max S/L DEF and call it a day.

The WP Tanker (by your build) has a total of ~150 hp/sec, using several powers and assuming 10 foes in melee range. Comparing that total with the benefits of one power isn't quite fair.

That said, the Elec Tanker does have ~30% fewer hitpoints, and Energize's +regen effect isn't all that much stronger than Fast Healing's (~175% versus ~140%). So even if we knock RttC down to one foe in melee range, WP pretty clearly wins in the regeneration contest. There is something to be said for burst heals too, though.

After messing around endlessly with various WP Tanker builds and ultimately discarding them, I have to nitpick here a bit: You can soft-cap to all damage types on a WP Tanker (or at least all damage types that matter), but you have to make serious sacrifices to get there.

Juggling max S/L/E/N DEF and +HP bonuses and offensive priorities just isn't worthwhile, IMO. Who wants to spend several billion influence to end up with a character who hits about as hard as he did with SOs? If you do, then more power to you, but if you're going to go all out to make a pure meat shield, then wouldn't it make more sense to select a build with a stronger taunt aura?

At the end of the day, that taunt aura issue is always what makes me discard my WP Tanker ideas. WP is awesome on a Scrapper or a Brute. It's great on a Tanker too, in terms of ease-of-leveling and ease-of-play -- but it doesn't lend itself very well to a clear high-end plan. IO bonuses pull you in too many different directions.

Suffice to say that all of the things you describe aren't exactly handed to Willpower, which doesn't mean that Electric Armor is better or even superior; the two sets are at least competitive with each other at the high end, though.

Certainly Invulnerability has its weaknesses. It wasn't all that long ago that Invuln was considered the red-headed step child of all melee secondaries, in fact. Invuln still isn't the best choice if you want the most consistent performance across all content. It's still comparatively weak to psionic damage, which isn't nearly as uncommon as I believe the devs originally intended. And at best, Invuln is middle-of-the-road with respect to ease of leveling (though inherent Stamina will help there).

But with the introduction of IOs, and with the addition of considerable debuff resistance (IIRC, ~50% DEF-debuff resistance, 20% slow/recharge resistance, 25% endurance-drain resistance -- all Tanker numbers btw), Invulnerability has become quite competitive. The most recent buffs Invuln has gotten are heavily back-loaded though, either attached to low-priority passive powers (Resist Elements/Energies), or attached to IO bonuses (which tend to favor sets with a combination of RES and DEF, and some DEF resistance).

The thing about psionic damage is that it rarely comprises 100% of an encounter's damage output. Psionic damage rarely comprises even half of an encounter's damage output. If you can effectively ignore all the rest of the incoming damage (which Invuln can do as well as or better than just about any other defensive power set), then you are protected from the practical threat of psi damage except in corner-case scenarios. It may annoy you; it may even make you sweat a bit where other sets might not, but you're probably not going to die as a direct result of psionics unless you're facing something like a psi AV.

Inspirations will generally be enough to carry you through psi-induced rough patches.

As far as DEF debuffs go, they're really not much of a problem for Invuln anymore, at least not at the high end. It's pretty easy to get to the point (through supplemental DEF powers and IO set bonuses) where Invincibility soft caps you to at least S/L attacks with one foe in melee range, whch means that Invincibility will scale much higher than the soft cap with multiple foes around you, which means that your DEF-debuff resistance doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting.

Also of note is that DEF debuffs are often packaged with lethal attacks, against which Invulnerability is crazy strong even with no DEF at all. Cimerora is a great example: The Romans' sword attacks deliver ludicrously high DEF debuffs, but an Invuln Tanker with Tough can basically laugh his way through all but the largest Roman spawns even without toggling Invincibility. When he does toggle Invincibility, most of those debuffing attacks are likely to miss.

If you want to go the extra mile with IOs, it's not terribly difficult to soft-cap to Energy/Negative attacks, too (though I'd say high-30s is more than fine with 1 foe in Invincie). Because pure-fire and pure-cold attacks are exceptionally rare, you can safely ignore that area of defense.

At the high end, Invuln is a monster against most of the game's content. Against the rest of the game's content, Invuln is comparatively weak, but it also scales very well with IO investment and buff/debuff support. To the extent that there are counters to any defensive set, Invuln is actually pretty well off in the sense that even worst-case foes typically won't spell instant disaster (unlike, say, SR in the Shadow Shard). Easily capped max HP + high common-type Resistances + self-scaling DEF makes for a pretty tough nut to crack.

That's true. Happily, teaming is also the only scenario where you're likely to feel like you have to face non-favorable matchups.

(Emphasis mine.)

Definitely not safer, you mean. And given the scaling in this game, there quickly comes a point after which more offense does almost nothing to save you -- and thus very little to improve practical kill speed. Rightly or wrongly, complaints like the one in this thread are based on high-end (and usually solo) capability, not on anyone's subjective idea of what is or isn't enough for them.

That said, Blaster control cannot be entirely ignored in practical gameplay, but it's difficult to gauge how meaningful it is in any survivability comparison. Just because Blasters rely on what control they have -- perhaps moreso than any other AT barring Controllers -- it doesn't follow that Blaster control is an advantage or even a worthwhile consolation prize for the AT relative to others.

It just means that Blasters have very little else going for them, from a defensive standpoint. Bringing up Controllers and Doms is an obvious loser; Controllers and Doms are orders of magnitude better than Blasters are at control. To say that both Controllers/Doms and Blasters use control is a little like saying that both Bill Gates and I have disposable income; the observation may be technically true (is, in fact, a truism), but it's so spectacularly misleading an over-simplification that it doesn't even satisfy the lowest standard of relevance.

In terms of by-the-numbers control abiility, Blasters are much closer to Defenders (who also have an entire Primary devoted to buff/debuff -- which is often very control-like in purpose), and even Scrappers/Tankers (who also have an entire powerset devoted to defensive abilities, which are effectively multiplied by any proactive mitigation you can layer on top of it).

Of the above ATs, Scrappers have the closest-to-Blaster levels of damage.

So with that in mind, we basically have two choices in pursuing this sidebar about control. We can either hash out endless comparisons between this-or-that Scrapper/Defender/Tanker build and this-or-that Blaster build, or we can stipulate that on the whole, the two parties are comparable if not exactly equal in terms of the control effects they can bring to bear, either selectively or as a natural consequence of attacking.

In other words, if Archetype A has X attribute going for it, and Archetype B has X and Y, then to compare them we simplify by eliminating X. It isn't disingenuous to disregard like terms in a comparison; it's just convenient.

Market dilettante though I am, I don't think Fulmen's quote can be over-emphasized. Averaging per-merit worth based on the Gladiator's unique seems little misleading. Or, if you prefer, a little too optimistic.

If you went all out with one character, diligently running Alignment missions and Task Forces (or story arcs) every single day and taking the once-daily R-Merit to A-Merit conversion, then unless my math is off, the fastest you could earn the GA proc is about 20 days.

20 days doesn't sound terrible, given that we're talking about the rarest of the rarest enhancements in the game, but it's a pretty grueling 20-day grind in what is otherwise a fairly casual game environment. And after all of that, either you end up with one IO to use yourself, or you have to arrange an off-market trade with someone who might not be trustworthy in order to get full price for it.

With less effort, I can run two or three mid-level characters through their daily Alignment missions (which seem to be shorter and easier at lower levels), gain a lot of highly marketable recipes on piecemeal random rolls or 2-merit purchases, and level up in the process if I so desire.

Because I'm not saving up for anything in particular, it doesn't really matter which characters I choose to run on a given day (as long as they're over SO-level), and failing to log in for a day or two doesn't interfere with any established plan. Hell, it doesn't even really matter if I suddenly lose interest in (or flat-out delete) one of the characters in question. I may end up with a slightly lower per-merit value per character with that approach, but by the calendar I'm getting very close to the same reward in far smaller chunks of time.

Long story short: There's something to be said for liquidity. The less flexible, longer-term option should be more profitable over time, when you really think about -- but even then, it isn't necessarily better.

For what little it's worth, I'll probably save up for one Gladiator's Armor unique for my Tanker just to say I did it, but it ain't likely to happen in less than 100+ days. The single-minded grind required to go much faster than that just sounds too much like work.

YMMV.

Yeah, the thing about Invuln though is that Invincibility makes it more likely those endurance drains will miss you. WP has some decent defense too, but it's harder to get WP up to sky-high numbers when the fit hits the shan.

Doesn't mean Invulnerability isn't still susceptible to end drain -- and I definitely agree with you that extra recovery (or, as in this case, less endurance use) is analogous to drain resistance -- but Invuln is generally a little better off against Sappers than WP is.

DA is better still at resisting end drains, but it has its own issues. DA is not quite as user-friendly to play out of the box.

QFT.

To the extent that Controllers rely on soft control, that soft control is usually more consistently available than hard control. That's sorta the point. An Ice/Storm Controller, for example, has access to two huge area-of-effect chain-knockdown, slow powers (Ice Slick and Freezing Rain).

With no IO bonuses and no Hasten, Ice Slick has a 66% up-time ratio. (90-second cooldown becomes ~45 with three SOs, and the duration is 30 seconds.) It's not hard to make Ice Slick effectively permanent, and there simply is no comparable option available to Blasters. Ditto Earthquake (which is basically Ice Slick with a -DEF debuff instead of a slow).

At the high-end, many Controller builds aren't exactly terrible for damage output, either. Doms are certainly near the top for DPS.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Someone tried to make the laughable comparison between Blaster controls and Dom/Controller powers in a similar thread more than a year ago. Or rather, someone inadvertently made that comparison because he (or she) was too close to the argument and lost track of what he was saying.

Similarly, it was popular some years ago (in the wake of the great AoE-hold nerf) on the Controller forum to complain about Blaster control capability, simply because certain Blaster builds could theoretically take more hard-control powers. Unfortunately, it's very easy to take even a valid argument too far.

Counting control powers is misleading. Neither hard control nor soft control is categorically better than the other; which is preferable depends on the situation and the specific powers in question. Some powers affect more targets, are more consistently available, provide a more useful effect, etc. There's also an opportunity cost for applying pure control powers. For example, a Blaster with three single-target holds may look like he has more control than an Energy Blaster, but the latter can keep an opponent on its backside as a natural consequence of attacking, whereas the former has to sacrifice DPS (and/or reposition himself) to apply a hold.

So which of those two is better in practice? It depends on the situation. Sometimes a discrete hold is better; sometimes a consistent soft-control secondary effect is better. The only thing that's absolutely certain is that any Controller/Dom has light-years better control than any Blaster.

Health is most valuable on highly defensive builds with very little regeneration -- SR, Invulnerability, etc. Bonus points if you can significantly improve your max HP. For instance, an IOed Invuln Tanker with 40ish HP/sec effectively regenerates 4000 HP/sec against Smash/Lethal attacks. That's an extreme example, but it's a good illustration.

(90% Resistance and 45% DEF with one foe in melee range: 40 / (1 - 0.9) / (1 - (45/50)) = 4000.)

Of all melee defensive sets, Willpower and Regen benefit least from enhancing Health. Those builds are better off exhausting every option to layer defenses on top of their already-strong regeneration. Or improving offense. Most non-melee builds will also tend to have vastly superior alternatives to slotting out Health.

Health is best used as an IO mule for most builds, if even that.

Yeah. I've been away for awhile, and my offhand knowledge of the game isn't what it used to be -- but it sure seems like Regen has the least upside of the Scrapper secondaries. And that's fine if true; Regen is very easy to level, after all, and it performs pretty well at the level cap even without a single IO.

But the complaint that Regen is more survivable than anything else -- especially Tankers -- is at least four years out of date. Regen's maximum capacity (including IOs and whatnot) seems not only lower than most everything else's; Regen also seems to have more glaring situational holes than a lot of other sets (-recharge, -regeneration, -DEF, -RES). That's a little amusing, given that consistency used to be Regen's greatest strength -- the Regen trait most often complained about, especially by the predominantly Invuln-using Tanker constituency.

Meanwhile, Invuln has gained considerable -DEF debuff resistance, decent endurance-drain and recharge/slow debuff resistance, and it gains indirectly from the predominance of IO +DEF bonuses. I'm not trying to say that Invuln doesn't have its burdens to bear too, but I'd say that Regen's weaknesses are roughly on par with Invuln's much-bemoaned weakness to psionic damage (which also penetrates Moment of Glory, and often carries hefty recharge debuffs, incidentally).

Tankers of all stripes have a night-and-day survivability advantage over Regen Scrappers.

I think he's saying that a Tanker/Scrapper who gets his toggles dropped by a Sapper will be chain stunned, and thus, he might as well not have had mez protection.

Which would be an absurd argument, but there you go.

Heh, I recently had an encounter with someone who insisted that Fortitude should always go only to meleers. I didn't really argue the point, because whatever my reputation on the forums may be, I'm usually not that contentious in the game, or in life, for that matter.

There is a rather strong strain of the opinion that Blasters should be responsible for managing their own aggro, though -- and it's not an unreasonable opinion on its face. The thing is, that if a Blaster's constantly on tenterhooks, his (particularly AoE) damage advantage basically goes out the window.

It works fine for the most part. Almost all I do are PuGs. That said, there is a rather large range of experience for builds that are unusually reliant on their teammates.

Which other powers in Storm offer -RES?

The powers only conflict if the situation dictates that you want the knockdown from FR as much as, or more than any other effect. Which is not a particularly useful observation, because obviously, if you skipped FR for fear of its conflicting with Fire Cages, then you can't use FR as a knockdown patch, anyway.

On the other hand, if you're using FR primarily as a -RES and -DEF and -recharge power, then Fire Cages actually helps, in the sense that it will keep your opponents within the area of effect. Also, FR's -DEF debuff helps Fire Cages (which comes with an innate ToHit penalty) to hit, which is helpful when, say, you're counting on consistently applying Fire Cages to tether the targets of your Tornado.

It's not that a Fire/Storm without FR will be totally gimped, in the sense that it will be unplayable, or entirely ineffective. It's that there's very little point in rolling Storm in the first place if you skip FR. It is, bar-none, your most consistently applicable debuff power. To me, that translates to, "best debuff power," but I understand that some people may regard Hurricane as the best under appropriate circumstances.

Fire is good enough on its own that you will end up with a decent character, either way. But as far as most teams are concerned, you're basically half a Controller if you don't bring Freezing Rain to the table. Most groups (unfairly, IMO) aren't thrilled by Storm to begin with; imagine how happy they'd be if they noticed you didn't have the one power in the set that everyone does like.

Concept is concept, and no one can tell anyone else how important it should or shouldn't be -- but in my view, if the concept requires no Freezing Rain, then you'd be happier rolling a different concept, for the moment. Or waiting til Issue 16.

I'm the same way, but I don't think Enan used the word "buff" to mean specifically the act of placing single-target buffs on people. I think he meant it more in a holistic sense -- as in, "if you want to be an effective Controller, you're gonna have to realize that buff/debuff is every bit as vital as control is."

Unfortunately or not, the game tends to put us in situations which highlight our secondaries. Doesn't mean that a Controller can't build or play with a bias towards control; in fact, he may have to do that, while leveling up. It also doesn't mean that teammates should get uppity if you don't keep them buffed 100% of the time.

But like it or not, Controllers are "serious (de)uffer[s]." Control often can't get the job done by itself, and even when it does, the job of proactive damage mitigation isn't always necessary or even desirable. It doesn't, as a general rule, significantly increase exp/time, unless you're in a team which would regularly wipe without it. Buffs and debuffs often do.

Yup.

Saying that they are relevant doesn't make it so. The point of a comparison is to compare -- that is, to find and measure differences. It isn't to take points of similarity and offer them undue weight on one side or the other.

You can't say that, because no one has mentioned Blasters' proactive mitigation tools, therefore Blasters are more comparatively survivable. Why? Because almost everyone else has similarly effective proactive mitigation tools.

I argue for the sake of good argument, yes -- because if any argument can be hand-waved with such loosey-goosey rationales as, "Blasters do tons of damage; therefore they're fine," then we might as well have never had such beneficial changes in the past as those made to Defiance. I know there were similar debates back then, but happily the devs sidestepped the whole thing with datamining.

The point is, though, that concerns are not automatically invalid because someone can point to generally higher AoE damage, or can list control powers without any context. I mean, for gosh sake, the post that started this little mini-conversation about Blaster controls was basically linking them with Dominator controls -- in importance, if not in magnitude.

I like the way my Blasters play, and from a purely subjective, selfish point of view, I don't want any dramatic changes to them, because if I want to play an easy-mode AT, I have meleers. That's not a position, so much as it is a personal preference.

I do worry, though, that the role of a Blaster, such as it is now, will grow marginalized with the introduction of the new difficulty sliders. We already know that teams comprised of pure buff/debuff builds are the best, but how will the new slider affect more casual team dynamics?

Will we see fewer and fewer mostly-minion-composed spawns, to the point where the Blaster's dominance in the AoE alpha department is less important? Is specializing in damage dealing really a good role in this game? Do Blasters do far and away the most damage, of any AT, under any circumstance? I'm not sure that those last two can be answered with an unqualified yes.

In any case, the importance of solo ability -- and all it implies -- may grow, or at least become more contentious, in the days to follow.

If Blasters had as coherent and distinct a role as Tankers and Defenders, I might agree with you. Certainly, Tankers have no room to complain. In practice, they do far more damage in solo play than Defenders do, and they're the most survivable AT in the entire game. If the new difficulty slider affects Tankers adversely in the solo department, then at least we can presume that it will have a correspondingy positive effect on Tankers' team attractiveness.

In the meanwhile, the only thing I can say is that I reserve judgment pending Issue 16. I had thought to respond more fully to your post, but in the interest of using fewer words, I'll refrain.

The point is that those tools offset, not that they have no practical effect. Do I really have to explain why it isn't honest to count one and not the other? Do you really insist that we have to come up with a numerical model for all proactive mitigation tools, across all builds, before we can begin to discuss anything else?

It wasn't thorough on purpose, because it doesn't need to be.

1. Range is only important to the extent that range offers you safety and efficiency. In the case of the former, a melee character generally has more time to react to his opponents, because of the benefits of his defensive powerset. In the case of the latter, a melee character will presumably already be in melee, so the stipulation that he has to "rush in to apply his stuns" (or whatever control effect) is very nearly meaningless, except in corner cases (like Sappers). By contrast, it is not unusual that a Blaster will find himself at range, and having to rush into melee to apply a control. See how counting these things as a wash is simpler?

2. I purposely brought up only examples from offensive melee sets, because the whole point of my post was that non-defensive-set powers should be thrown out for the sake of simplicity. So I didn't mention Shield Charge, or Oppressive Gloom, or any of the other proactive powers that come from defensive sets.

I mentioned powers available to offensive melee sets, though I certainly didn't list them comprehensively. And if you go down the list, you'll see a pretty impressive collection of proactive mitigation tools in those sets, save Fire. Notice the trend?

I reiterate: The number of proactive mitigation powers is not a good metric for determining their practical value. If an SS Brute keeps his targets on the ground most of the time just by attacking normally, and Joe Blaster has no fewer than 3 single-target holds available to him, then who actually receives more proactive mitigation over time?

It probably isn't the Blaster. Even if it were, the Blaster will still take more time and care to apply those controls, whereas the Brute has to go to no especial effort; the mitigation happens almost by accident, while he's getting down to the business of killing stuff. And the Brute gets a nice hold folded into his hardest hitter. And he has access to a large-radius AoE stun/knockback -- which most meleers don't take, because it isn't necessary, but then I suppose that's a statement in and of itself.

Incidentally, I just know someone will read my for-instance comparison above, and say, "But Energy Blasters can keep their targets KBed, too!" I know that. I'm just illustrating why counting controls isn't instructive in any practical sense. Energy Blasters are great for solo play for the very reason that i'm trying to highlight here: Having mitigation come in the course of your natural attack chain is often more valuable than having a bunch of situational, uni-tasker mitigation tools in your backpocket.

Do Blaster controls matter in actual gameplay? Of course. What I was responding to was the claim that somehow people have been wilfully ignoring those tools in discussing the comparison. Clearly, there is no purposeful attempt to conceal Blaster controls here; they are simply taken as given. All that matters, when you're discussing relative survivability, are the factors that aren't shared.

And you ignored the reasons I laid out as to why those proactive tools are not relevant.

If Archetype A has X, and Archetype B has X and Y, then you simplify by ignoring X. You cannot legitimately argue that a Blaster's proactive mitigation tools (such as they are) are relevant and then argue that a Scrapper's aren't.

Since no one has ever brought up such Scrapper tools in this thread, your post was effectively asking us to compare a whole Blaster to half a Scrapper. What makes more sense is to take proactive mitigation tools as a wash, give or take in the case of different builds, and concentrate on the crux of the matter: Damage versus defense.

Unless, of course, you can say with a straight face that the controls of a Blaster uniformly outweigh the tools in melee sets -- which would be absurd, frankly. I can stack stuns on a boss with an MA Scrapper in the time it takes an EM Blaster to cast Total Focus. I can have my target on his backside more than half the time on an SS Brute. I can keep half a spawn stunned on a Stone Brute. I can give myself ~30% melee DEF in the course of my attack chain on a Broadsword/Katana Scrapper. I can heal and debuff ToHit in the course of my normal attack chain with a DM Scrapper/Brute.

Shall I go on, or can we in good faith move past the canard that Blaster controls somehow represent a vastly underrated and undermentioned facet of their survivability? In a perfect world, if we could somehow accurately quantify the effect of these proactive tools over the wide spectrum of possible builds, then sure, that would be the best thing -- but the fact is that it would be a monumental effort to determine what is, on its face, relatively speaking a miniscule factor in any numerical comparison. Defiance is about seven thousand times easier to quantify, by the way.

Simply counting control powers or control effects is misleading. It's not that I personally disagree with your over-arching conclusion; it's that I don't think your specific argument carries much weight here.

Turn off the Gaussian's Proc.

If you're just worried about soloing AVs, then you can pretty well take a full (or very nearly full) Fury bar for granted, and thus, the Brute will be generally superior. At that point, the only significant difference between the two ATs is the Brute's higher hitpoints.

If there were Scrapper-only sets that have been demonstrated as superior for the task in question, then that would be one thing, but to my knowledge, no one's ever made the argument that Regeneration is far and away the best Scrapper set for AV soloing. Regen can be made to work, but it's not so good that the Brute's lacking it is a strike against him.

Oh, and Brutes have access to Gloom.

Yes, of course. But like it or not, most of these discussions comparing such-and-such to this-or-that are based, even if only subconsciously, on solo situations. Otherwise, the self-contained capabilities of a given AT would be only very tenuously relevant.

It becomes worse when you introduce IOs and whatnot into the equation.

That said, the poster to whom I responded was making the claim that Blasters' control abilities are most often relevant in solo situations. He also implied that they provide a Blaster with vast survivability in those situations. While that may be true in a vacuum, it's not particularly revelatory, nor are a Blaster's proactive mitigation tools in any way unique or even unusually effective.

They just seem that way because you don't have a whole lot else going for you on a Blaster. Having access to three short-duration, single-target holds is great, but in many cases another AT will have a single power (or a singular secondary effect) that trumps those either in terms of efficiency, or overall control, or both.

Anyone can handle EBs. All you need is a handful of Inspirations, and EBs are rare enough that that's a viable strategy. Blasters can solo AVs, even without inspirations in some cases, if heavily IO'd for (usually ranged) DEF, but even then you're looking at a much reduced range of content that is easily soloable.

Yes, Blasters will generally be able to defeat foes faster, all else being equal. The question is, and always has been, whether the role of defeating things really fast is such a worthwhile one that it justifies other ATs' having most of a Blaster's kill speed, and far more survivability, to boot. At what point is the equation balanced?

I don't pretend to know the answer to that, and I like my Blasters where they are. But to say that Blasters are obviously and perfectly balanced because they kill faster, by a relatively small and often situationally-dependent margin, strikes me as no more sound an argument than the opposite. Neither, in other words, is self-evident.

And that's even more true now that we have Dominators running around with a 12.5% smaller damage scalar. The damage scalar doesn't tell the whole story, of course, but then again Doms also have another, valuable role besides damage dealing. They can do both.

Devil's Advocate:

Melee sets generally receive significant amounts of control and/or proactive mitigation tools, too. It isn't that anyone's wilfully ignoring Blaster control powers; it's that their effect is both difficult to quantify in any meaningful way, and is pretty well offset by the proactive options available to the subjects of comparison.

Numerically speaking, you can say that the average Blaster has access to more controls than many other builds, but that's a practically meaningless metric by which to judge the actual extent of proactive mitigation. Why? Because whereas Blasters most often have to plan around using this-or-that control ability, a lot of meleers are given proactive mitigation in the natural course of their fights. Even when the control effect in question isn't attached to an actual attack power, the meleer is almost always already in the ideal position from which to use it.

It's a little like comparing the stuns from Energy Manipulation to the KB in Energy Blast (in a solo setting). Sure, on paper, the stuns are probably better in terms of mitigation, but in practice, the KB will tend to offer better mitigation over time, because it's safer and easier to apply.

Most melee sets offer decent if not truly impressive amounts of mitigation -- which, even if it's less powerful in isolation, is more powerful to begin with, because whatever mitigation a meleer can gain from proactive mechanisms is multiplied by his other defensive powers. Thus, whatever little tricks the Blaster has in his pocket are largely irrelevant to the comparison.

Same thing goes for other squishies, to a greater or lesser extent depending on AT and powerset.

And no offense, but the comparison between Dominators and Blasters is laughable. Adding in that little disclaimer, "not as much as Doms or Controllers, sure," is the very essence of understatement. No Blaster -- no matter how controllery the build -- will ever be confused with a character tossing around 30+ second, mag-6, AoE stuns.

Edit: It's also worth noting that the very setting you chose -- the solo setting -- is precisely where the Blaster is least advantaged in any comparison. In team play, it's pretty obvious that Blasters are the best damage dealers, generally speaking. In solo play, however, Blasters' squishiness is a larger factor than their various, often intangible, offensive advantages. No amount of single-target holds is going to make a Blaster a Scrapper's equal when it comes to the sheer volume and variety of content they can easily solo. After Issue 16 introduces the team-size slider, the disparity -- which has already been highlighted by the advent of IOs and the so-called uber build -- will only grow less favorable for the Blaster.

Any build can solo solo-spawned missions reasonably well. No one here, to my knowledge, has complained that their Blasters routinely die against a three-minion spawn. Rightly or wrongly, I believe the source of the (newer) complaints has to do with peak ability.

Fissure's AoE = 15' radius

For those keeping score, that's the same size as Fireball. A 30' diameter is nothing to sneeze at.

You could say that about anything. The fact is, if three quarters of his team are built around gathering mobs together, then a character which is predicated on copious knockback and general scatter isn't going to work as well as a more conventional build.

And he will have to sit on a goodly number of his powers, most of the time.

Now if it's your preference to have a large proportion of your powers sitting for the most part unused on your tray, then more power to you. No one can tell you you're wrong. The OP is in no way peculiar for feeling as he does, though.

Some builds are empirically better suited for a given setting or situation. To claim otherwise is to ignore the entire point of the conversation.

Your first post in this thread was a nice little mini guide describing diferent things he can do with Ill/Storm. Your second post - the one to which I responded -- implied that Freezing Rain should satisfy him that the character is useful.

My only point was that there's a difference between being useful and feeling useful. A buffbot is also useful. Heck, an Ice Controller whittling away at single targets with Air Superiority and Chilblain is technically useful -- in the sense that his team might have taken an extra second or two to finish a given spawn without him.

Whether or not your contribution is meaningful, as opposed to merely useful, is a different kettle of fish. It is that question which most closely relates to the albeit subjective perception of a player as to whether or not his build is useful.

And I have BoI and Chilblain slotted for damage, along with a purple damage proc in each. Let us not pretend that the single-target-damage contribution of an Ice Controller makes much difference in a high-level team, particularly a mid-large-sized team.

Sure, I can toss ST attacks around, and I often do -- but they don't make much difference in most higher-level teams. Part of it may be that I'm a victim of my investments; the character has been so massively improved through IOs that there's very little challenge to be found in the game, much less in team play. Most likely, though, my problem is that I enjoy Storm so much when I can actually use its powers regularly, that I feel suffocated when I can't -- or shouldn't, in any case.

Sure, I could annoy everyone by herdicaning everything into a nice little ball, immobilize all of them, and then prepare to hit Tornado and Lightning Storm -- but there's very little point to all of that when the vast majority of the spawn will be long dead 3 seconds into Tornado's duration. And then what? I have a brain-dead knockback machine following me around for the next 20+ seconds, and/or I've used 30ish endurance to summon an immobile cloud that's managed to attack once or twice for mediocre damage.

So much of an Ice/Storm's damage potential is not only situational; it's also tied to the caprices of the pet AI. You can't tell Lightning Storm which target to attack, or Tornado, or Jack Frost -- and if you're in a situation with untethered mobs nearby, your only choices are to attempt to herd them all together, or to hope that Jack finds the right target, and sit on the other two powers while you plink away with ST attacks. Or, you could just let loose for the heck of it, and disregard the likely fact that you're doing as much harm as good.

And all of my little anecdotes apply to a Controller who can restrain scatter and KB on a whim. Whether it's smart to do so is the issue for the Icer; for the Illusionist, it isn't even a question. It can't be done.

We can talk til the cows come home about subjective preferences, but the bottom line is that there are a whole host of other powersets which are intrinsically more interesting to play in a conventional, Tanker-Empath-Blaster team setting. The sad fact is that his team would probably be best off with another Blaster, or a Kin of some sort, or a Rad of either flavor. Or a Fire/Storm, if Storm it must be; that could work pretty well.