Obitus

Recipes are almost always cheaper than crafted enhancements.

As for the build, if all you want to do is farm missions in the AE, then -- no offense, Insanity -- you'd be wise to disregard just about everything that was said in the first reply.

The idea is to soft cap Smash/Lethal DEF, which basically requires Stone Armor. The idea is also that, since you're fighting huge groups of opponents, you don't need damage enhancements in your powers, because with sufficiently large spawns, Fulcrum Shift will cap your damage anyway -- which is convenient, because a number of the best S/L DEF IO sets reside in non-damage sets. Plus, those sets are generally orders of magnitude cheaper.

If, on the other hand, you want a build for more general purpose play -- a build that doesn't assume full Fulcrum Shift at all times -- then you're going to have to pay a lot more to achieve similar results on the farming side. Slotting damage sets in some of your key powers is not only much more expensive; it's also in some cases going to cost you DEF bonuses that you would have otherwise.

Something like this would work, for instance:

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Technology Controller
Primary Power Set: Fire Control
Secondary Power Set: Kinetics
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leaping
Ancillary Pool: Stone Mastery

Keep in mind that this build was thrown up haphazardly; it's meant only to be an example. There are some expensive IOs in there; Basilisk's Gaze, for instance, wasn't cheap the last time I checked -- but on the whole the build is cheap by forum-post standards, and barring some huge shift of whch I'm not aware, you should easily be able to afford something like it on your budget.

In any case, you can see how the principles behind such a build work. You take advantage of Fulcrum Shift, Rock Armor, and to a much lesser extent Siphon Speed to mitigate your level of reliance on IO set bonuses. The build could easily be improved through the addition of LoTGs or what have you, but those aren't by any stretch important to overall performance.

I recommend you read around. You can find better versions of the build above in several places on this forum; just keep in mind that prices constantly fluctuate, so in some cases what may have been touted as cheap in a given post might not be cheap anymore.

Freezing Rain is a fantastic power, but contribution is in the eye of the beholder. If a player feels like he's hand-cuffed in the vast majority of the fights his team faces, because a large portion of his powers are either troublesome or outright counter-productive, then he might not be inclined to play that character in that setting.

I know I don't play my Ice/Storm anymore in most team settings. It's not that the character is ineffective; on the contrary, she's extremely good at limiting incoming damage, and is very nearly unkillable through normal content thanks to IO bonuses. My problem is that the character is just dull as dirt to play in many team situations. Her average per-spawn contribution consists of: Drop Rain, possibly drop slick, hover around with Arctic Air. (With slight variations here and there, of course.)

Which isn't to say that she's incapable of doing more than that, but most of the time it isn't worth it to bother. More interesting tactical maneuvers featuring some of the jewels of the Storm Summoning set are usually reserved for solo encounters, or for encounters which will obviously take the team a long time to finish otherwise. The latter rarely occurs in high-level team play, unless you're in an AE boss farm, or fighting an AV or whatever.

Like I said before, it's largely psychological. I know that almost any build can feel marginalized in a good team, even if they aren't contributing any less or any more than most of their teammates. I also know that I'm probably, in part, simply bored with that particular character, having played it almost exclusively for more than a year.

Somehow, though, I never feel quite as superfluous on other characters in large teams. It probably has something to do with my damage having so much reliance on the circumstance.

I obviously can't speak for the OP, but it's pretty clear to me that Ill/Storm, while an extremely powerful build, isn't ideally complementary of a static team composed of Tank/Empath/Blaster.

Sure, keep the Ill/Storm, but if the purpose behind the team is to play exclusively (or near exclusively) together, then he'd very likely be happier in the long run using a less chaotic build with that team.

Whether it's noticeable or not is subjective. My gut reaction is that, yes, a decent-sized global-damage bonus will be noticeable, especially if you're just soloing missions -- but it won't make much practical difference in terms of AoE kill speed.

Sure, play style is a factor. But when I think Fire Blaster, I think primarily in terms of Build Up and/or Aim + huge alpha strike. In those scenarios, the relative benefit of IO damage bonuses is negligible. On my Fire/Ment, for instance, I can farm the Cimerora wall at a rate of about 10-15 seconds per spawn, and IIRC I only have a 5-7% global damage bonus.

The biggest factor, for a glass-canon type in a game which predominantly features high-volume, low-hp opponents, is how many attacks it takes to drop your enemy. With that in mind, the only time a ~23% global damage boost is going to provide practical results is when you're fighting a hard target, usually a lone hard target. And that's not really your specialty as a Fire/Fire Blaster, anyway.

In other words, I don't think it's cost effective to chase after IO damage bonuses. You will often end with a few incidental +damage bonuses in the pursuit of other goals (+recharge, +DEF, +end/recovery, whatever), which only lessens the comparative gain for a build who pursues +damage as an end in itself.

There's a difference between noticeable and appreciable.

As always, YMMV, but I really would encourage you to take a second look at certain build options if the lack of +damage has been the deal breaker for you in the past.

It's not that I hate Combustion, though it does have a rather long activation time. It's just that I don't believe there's much practical benefit in having so many AoE powers; after a certain point, you can have a near-continuous AoE attack chain with three or so. Most minion-centric spawns will die in the first three-AoE salvo anyway, and those spawns that aren't dead by that point can usually wait an extra second or two for your powers to recharge.

To put it another way, I don't find anything particularly objectionable about Combustion. If you like it, more power to you. It's just the one I'd choose if I had to drop an AoE power. You could just as easily make a case for dropping Inferno or Fire Breath, depending on playstyle -- but Inferno is one of the better wow-factor powers in the game, hilarious though not particularly important in fast-paced team play, and Fire Breath does nearly twice as much damage as Combustion, with a shorter activation time, and can be cast from range.

Like I said, though, if you're more set on staying in Hover more or less full-time, then I can see why you'd be more prone to chain Ball + FSC + Combustion -- as Hover doesn't lend itself to zipping in and out of melee range to position cone powers.

Personally, I like to mix it up, and with a little practice (and maybe a range enhancement in Fire Breath), it's surprisingly easy to jump away from a spawn which has gathered around you, queue Fire Breath just before you land, and hit the whole group with it. Then you can either toss Fire Ball from range before you rush in to FSC again, or (and especially if Ball is still recharging) you can run back into the center of the mob to Ball + FSC. Ball is certainly your most flexible AoE power.

Hover is great to have, very nearly essential in my book for a Blaster, but I'm also of the school that believes a Blaster with melee-ranged AoEs should be equipped to jump/run to and fro as the situation dictates.

Yeah, I'm a little foggy on the details. All I remember is that, for whatever reason, I just couldn't leave the character creator on a non-buff melee toon. Whether that's because the comic-book aesthetic tends towards the buff look, or whether it's because the textures and the proportions of the low-slider toons didn't appeal to me visually, I can't say. (In fact, to this day, the scrawnier male types you can make look a little off to me.)

Truthfully, for the first year or so, I overwhelmingly played two characters, both male, both buff, and both meleers (a Tanker and a Scrapper) -- so whatever experimenting I did in the character creator with different concepts isn't fresh in my mind.

At any rate, thanks for the correction.

The build you posted has a global damage bonus of 33%, including Assault, and a global recharge bonus of 61.3%.

Neither of those figures represent a night-and-day offensive disparity with a soft-capped S/L build. In fact, the recharge figure is surpassable on a soft-capped S/L build.

As for the global damage -- well, let's just say it's not that important, relatively speaking. Every time you click Aim and/or Build Up, every time you build up your Defiance bonus, you're diminishing the relative benefit you derive from your global IO damage bonuses, because all of the above modify base damage, and any Blaster is well above his base damage scalar to begin with.

100% base damage + 95% ED-compliant slotting + 40%ish from Defiance = 235% of base damage. So your uber-on-paper 33% bonus shrinks, in an absolute sense, to a ~14% buff -- and roughly a third of that is from Assault.

That's just with constant attacking, no Aim or Build Up or buffs from other sources. Assault is not a toggle I'd probably take on a soft-capped build, because I believe that if you're going to go the defensive route you might as well also get the immob protection from Combat Jumping, and it's about 1/5th the cost in terms of endurance as are Assault + Manuevers slotted with gobs of end reduction. That said, Assault is also not a power you can't take on a soft-capped build.

The big bar to entry on the S/L DEF approach, most likely in your case, has more to do with the fact that you'd be stuck with the Cold APP. That, and you might have problems fitting Combustion in. I don't know how deeply your affection runs for that power, but personally I don't see any need for it. Breath + Ball + FSC + Rain of Fire is plenty of carnage, in my view, but I can see why you might prefer the stay-in-melee-full-time approach.

I can see why you'd want both powers, partcularly RoF. It's a great soft control in a solo situation, and it's pretty Snipes are not my bag, but they do have occasional uses, and they tend to make for excellent IO mules.

Flares is the better of the two powers, I agree, for general purposes. Further, Ring of Fire actually smokes the crap out of both in terms of DPA -- so if you are in a protracted fight against a single target, like an EB or an AV, then the slow-DoT nature of Ring won't matter, and therefore you're not likely to miss Fire Blast all that much.

Presumably, most of the rest of the time, your fights will consist primarily of AoE carnage, with the occasional Blaze thrown in to catch a straggler, or even with the occasional ST chain or two to finish a boss or whatever. In almost every non-mezzed situation, Fire Blast wouldn't be very important. Even if all you do is chain Blaze + Flares + pause + Flares, at sufficient levels of +recharge, you're not doing all that much less DPS than the dude who chains Blaze + Blast + Flares.

Fire Blast is nice to have, though, if you can find a way to fit it in, if only because it gives you a nearly contiguous attack chain even while you're mezzed.

Like Fury, I don't see any compelling reason to slot six Gaussian's into Build Up; it's a huge slot investment for very little return on a non-ranged-soft-cap build. The proc is nice ancillary bonus, but it's more useful in a toggle like Tactics than it is in a power you're only going to activate once every ~30 seconds.

However, I wouldn't worry too much about slotting Aim + Build Up for full recharge. At the levels of global rech you have, the extra two slots in each power (four slots total) would account for a little less than six seconds difference. If, as Fury notes, you'll be running mostly in a team and therefore bound to a team's pace, then I very much doubt the extra six seconds of uptime is going to make a huge difference in your damage output.

Again, nice to have, but not essential. Once you have each power up roughly every thirty seconds, you're good, as far as I'm concerned.

YMMV.

Apparently, you don't know how to read for context. No big surprise.

It would have been a waste of time to try to quote everything you've said in this thread, so I just chose one post at random and wrote a reply to them all. Context.

Just as, when the OP asked for suggestions, he was clearly referring to ranged-DEF slotting schemes -- as those are the subject of his post. Context.

Correct. Your opinion is worthless, because you've supplied no substantiation for it -- except for barely coherent, and vaguely insulting, generalizations.

By the way, an argument is just a process of reasoning. My use of that word doesn't necessitate acrimony; in fact, if anyone can be seen to have encouraged acrimony in this thread, it's you.

"Only people who don't know how to play their blasters cap ranged DEF. Enhance your attacks for damage, acc and recharge. Play how you want; I'm just warning you that you'd be an idiot to try soft capping."

Yeah, that's real helpful. Your posts suggest only that you have no clue what you're talking about. If you wish to disprove that natural conclusion -- based on your scatter-brained prose -- then supply a pure-offensive build for a Fire Blaster, and demonstrate how it's light years better than a soft-capped version.

Otherwise, you're just playing that dimwitted game of, "my opinion is just as valid as yours even if I can't explain why I hold it." Your equal right to express your opinion does not carry with it the presumption of equal value. Your attempt here to play the victim, as if I'm some sort of free-speech suppressor, is unintentionally hilarious.

This isn't about my shouting you down. It's about not having rational discussion shouted down by those like you. I'm perfectly happy to discuss differing viewpoints, as long as they're discussable. Saying that everyone who builds for soft-capped DEF is a noob or an incompetent -- and virtually nothing else -- doesn't encourage discourse. Quite the opposite.

Fair enough. Perhaps I got a little too annoyed with the general tone of some of the other naysaying replies in this thread, and wasn't reading carefully enough. Anyway, you were right in the sense that Fire/Fire/Fire is probably among the hardest Blaster builds on which to soft cap ranged DEF.

I also agree that if you can't keep at least your ranged AoE powers, then you're cutting your nose off to spite your face. The trick is to add soft capped DEF without giving up the very reason you'd roll a Blaster in the first place -- namely, great offense. Personally, I like to hold onto at least one PBAoE power for situational use, but sometimes that isn't feasible; in this case, it's probably essential, as there aren't really any better options in */Fire for +ranged IO set bonuses than Fire Sword Circle and Consume.

If you wish to build for general-purpose, Blapper-style DEF, though, the way to go is Smash/Lethal. Something like this, for instance:

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Natural Blaster
Primary Power Set: Fire Blast
Secondary Power Set: Fire Manipulation
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Ancillary Pool: Cold Mastery

The downsides, of course, are that you can't exemp as well as the ranged DEF Blaster (at least pending the changes in Issue 16), and that you aren't quite as survivable through the full range of content; when S/L DEF is good, it's very very good, but when it's bad, it tends to be horrid. The other obvious downside is that you're stuck with the Cold APP, which may or may not be a big deal. For the OP, I imagine it is a big deal.

The upside is that you can more easily fit in +recharge bonuses to go along with S/L DEF, and you're better able to leverage your full (or very nearly) offensive power. In fact, you're probably often safest in melee range with the S/L approach, because most of the non-S/L attacks in the game are not melee, and you can sometimes trick the AI into melee-only mode by closing distance.

Personally, on my Fire/Ment, I have one build for each purpose. The S/L DEF gets trotted out whenever I'm feeling adventurous, or in obvious S/L heavy scenarios (like the ITF or wall farming in Cimerora), or in places where I know that most of the non-melee attacks are AoE.

The ranged DEF approach is better for general purpose soloing. Even when your ranged DEF doesn't protect you, simply by hovering at range you're cutting incoming damage down significantly.

The OP never asked for opinions as to whether it was good to build for ranged DEF. He asked for suggestions as to how to do it.

Even if he had asked for the former, it's a good bet he wouldn't find much value in your brand of argument -- for which, thus far, you've provided zero substantiation. "Blasters are fine without ranged DEF," and "only noobs want ranged DEF," are not a good basis for discussion. They're the desperate pleas of a troll for attention.

It isn't as if a character who can toss out Build-Up-and-Aim-powered Fire Breath, Fireball, Rain of Fire, and Blaze is precisely weak offensively. Somewhat weaker, perhaps, than a character who constantly dances in and out of melee range, but then he's also far more survivable.

And with IOs, there's no reason that even a Blapper can't have soft-capped S/L DEF and maintain levels of global +recharge that are commensurate, practically, with those achieved by pure offensive builds. A Fire/Fire Blaster doesn't have any crucial powers with extremely long recharge timers, after all -- and the difference between a Fireball with an 8-second cooldown, and a Fireball with a 6-second cooldown, means virtually squat when you have two or three other AoEs to throw.

The only noobish opinion displayed here, in short, has been yours. There are diminishing returns on +recharge bonuses. Likewise, IO +damage bonuses, while nice, are relatively weak when you consider that they're measured on base damage -- and when you consider that Blasters have a multitude of other damage bonuses from Aim, Build Up, slotting, and Defiance.

There is a place for the total offensive build, most usually on teams with sufficient buff/debuff support. It's not in this thread.

Good points. I have to say, though, that the complaints on the Tanker boards have always been the most amusing to me.

I don't think it's observer bias, or even that you and I disagree all that much. My posts in this thread haven't been to argue that there's any pressing need to buff Blasters, nor that I'm bitter about their condition. In fact, my first character in this game was an MA Scrapper, and while I don't play Scrappers all that much these days (possibly burnt out on melee after the first couple of years -- which is a huge testament to the entertainment value this game offers), I do have a soft spot for the AT.

Scrappers as an AT, by the way, have enjoyed massive buffs too. Perhaps it's my own observer bias kicking in here, because Martial Arts at release was a far, far cry from Martial Arts now. The animation buffs alone, on that set, probably outstrip any of the AT-wide buffs Scrappers have received for those who were playing an MA character.

In any case, back to Fulmens.

The only point I was trying to make was that there is a legitimate case to be made that the damage vs survivability equation is off. There is also a legitimate case to be made that it doesn't really matter, after all these years -- and after the considerable buffs Blasters have enjoyed, as Blacksly noted, since their inception. After all, the defense-vs-damage equation is only relevant on an inter-AT basis if you're looking at each AT, each build, as a self-contained unit -- in other words, in a soloing context.

I'm not in the slightest bit surprised that you feel your Blasters, speciically your Fire Blasters, deliver far more damage than your Scrappers. On the whole, Blasters have greater access to AoE attacks, and their attacks cover wider areas. Spines is a bit of an outlier.

Ranged damage is also generally at an advantage in team situations. All you have to do is target and let fly, whereas the meleer has to run from target to target.

You seem to acknowledge that Blasters are fragile, which I would have thought was self-evident, and really half the reason I posted was simply to argue against the knee-jerk, lrn2play and blasters-are-uber-survivalist posts that seemed to have arisen all over the thread. To be fair, I also see the same sort of thing in reverse on other AT boards; I believe I alluded to one such post on the Scrapper forum which intimated that somehow Blasters with soft-capped ranged DEF were more overpowered than Scrappers with similarly tricked out builds.

And honestly, I think that uber tricked out IO builds are among the main reasons we're even having this conversation. If a player has invested so much time and influence on a single build, it's only natural for his/her mind to examine the build's strengths and weaknesses, and moreover, to wonder at and investigate what other builds can do with similar investment.

Uber builds, in other words, tend to encourage the player to think in terms of self-sufficiency, or solo ability.

In that context, Blasters don't do very well, IMO. You can definitely shore up some of the Blaster's inherent survivability issues with IOs, but you will always have glaring (defensive) weaknesses, or else risk compromising the very purpose for which anyone would want to roll a Blaster in the first place, huge offense. Almost any other AT, due to the way that IO +DEF bonuses were assigned, will require less sacrifice vis-a-vis their traditional, primary role in order to make a defensive beast, too.

And that's fine. Blasters are a high-risk, high-reward AT. IOs don't, and shouldn't, change that, relatively speaking. They've never been billed as a particularly self-sufficient AT, and I don't believe the devs will ever allow them to claim that label.

Which isn't to say that Blasters don't solo well; many of them do. It just takes a little more finesse than it might on another AT. The main difference, when I discuss self-sufficiency, is that many of the challenges the uberized melee characters are routinely sent to meet would be absurdly difficult, if not impossible, on most any Blaster.

None of the above strikes me as a terribly good reason to go off half-cocked about Blaster buffs or Scrapper nerfs, or whatever. I just thought the topic was interesting, and I didn't feel that some of the things that were being said about it were entirely accurate.

Blaster cones do not typically have a wider angle, though they do end up encompassing a pretty wide area at max range, which is why I enhanced Fire Breath to have a similar range as Psy Scream. It works just peachy.

That said, a 90-degree melee cone (like Ripper) is pretty darn easy to use, too.

Having ranged attacks is an inherent advantage, but it isn't such an overwhelming one that you can simply handwave melee defensive secondaries.

And at range, a Blaster (if not /Devices) sacrifices a large portion of his damage potential.

Force of Nature? Seriously?

Literally nothing a Blaster does will give him "roughly comparable" survivability except in isolated circumstances. Do you really want to compare a Blaster under Force of Nature with a Scrapper under Unstoppable and Invincibility?

They don't "make up for" anything. They're for the most part very light, proactive mitigation tools which can be used by the canny Blaster to survive quite a bit. In terms of actual mitigation and/or survivability, though, Blasters as an AT are clearly at the very bottom of the list, on both hero and villain sides of the game.

This isn't subjective. It isn't a point of contention. It's a self-evident fact. Doesn't mean that Blasters suck or that people need to lrn2play or any other such nonsense; it just is what it is.

Defiance is very nice, but almost all of the really good mitigation powers you cited earlier occur after the first tier of powers -- which means that yes, you can attack while held, but if you were depending on the ability to hit Freeze Ray or Telekinetic Thrust or even Energy Torrent right before you got held, then you're SOL. And god help you if you just hit Build Up and you were one Fire Breath + Fire Ball combo away from killing the entire spawn.

Quicksand and Caltrops can be a PITA for Scrappers, but they really rarely get immobilized. Hell, all you need is Combat Jumping to be virtually immune to immobs.

Good advice, though you seem to have typed "Scrapper" in that last part where you probably meant to type "Blaster." Still, it's all irrelevant to the discussion.

This isn't a matter of comparing epeens; no amount of skill or the lack thereof can prove or disprove anything, here. Anyone who wishes to deny that Scrappers have vastly more survivability than Blasters across the full range of in-game content isn't just contrarian. He's delusional.

Blasters are fun to play. If played well, they can succeed at most anything. But in general, any well-built Scrapper can do the same things with half the effort and probably less than half the risk. It just might take a little longer.

Thank you.

My Fire/Mental clears the wall in Cimerora in record time too. Most spawns don't survive past Concentration + Breath + Scream. A Fireball usually mops up whatever's left, and if not, I hit Shockwave.

It goes very fast. In fact, just earlier today I was amused to watch another group of players (three, among them a hovering ranged Blaster and a PB) struggle to clear a single spawn on the top of the wall in about he time it took me to sweep the bottom shelf by myself.

That said, AoE Blasters will typically deliver a much better (faster) alpha -- which is part of the reason I tried to give the Blaster the benefit of the doubt in my napkin comparison -- but the subject of sustainable AoE output is slightly different. Probably the clearest in-game indicator of that is in the boss farms that have become so popular of late; no build can clear a spawn of level 52 bosses in one salvo, or even two or three, and it's there that the relative speed of Spines really becomes apparent.

I can kill a spawn of 52 bosses relatively quickly on my Fire/Ment, but I need someone else to keep them clumped together. Otherwise, they scatter to the four winds, eventually. Even Snow Storm is very little help here.

Of course. I also, it occurs to me now, left out Rain of Fire, probably because I rarely use it myself. If I do use it in a solo setting, it's usually more a mitigation power than a damage power. In any event, its sustained damage output is actually pretty poor, even if you assume that the whole of its damage applies.

The intent behind my haphazard comparison, as you know, wasn't to predict with any kind of accuracy in-game performance; it was simply to draw a rough comparison to show that the disparity is actually pretty small.

Smaller, at the very least, than it might at first appear.

Sustainable AoE damage? A very rough calc, below, gives the lie to your statement -- which is, I think, an understandable and likely widespread misconception based on anecdotal experience.

Spines:

Spine Burst - damage 82, rech 16 , act 3, end 15.2 (radius 15)
Quills - Act 2, end 0.52/s, damage 10.3 (radius 8)
Ripper - damage 167, rech 11, act 2.17, end 11, arc 90 degrees

Fiery Aura:
Blazing Aura - damage 13.8, act 2, end 0.52/s, radius 8
*Burn - damage 166.8, rech 25, act 2.03, duration 10, end 5.2, radius 8
*Fiery Embrace - dam buff 100% for 10s (non-fire attacks), dam buff 120% for 20s (fire attacks), rech 180, act 0.73, end 7.8

Fire Blast:

Fire Ball - damage 78.8, rech 16, act 1, end 15.2 (radius 15)
Fire Breath - damage 109.8, rech 16, act 2.67, end 15.2, arc 30*

Mental Manipulation:

Psychic Scream: damage 65.1, rech 12, act 2.67, end 11.9 (arc 30)
Psychic Shockwave: damage 68.8, rech 20, act 1.97, end 10.2, radius 15

World of Confusion - damage 7.51, act 4, end 0.13, radius 8


Thus, with ~140% recharge (which is approximately 2 generic IOs worth of recharge in each power, plus Hasten):

The Spines can run an AoE attack chain of Spine Burst, Ripper, wait ~4.5 seconds, repeat

If we assume that Build Up is up 1/4th of the time (which is what 140% recharge would get us, roughly -- a 37.5 second cooldown), that Fiery Embrace is up for ~13% of the time for non-fire attacks and 26% of the time for fire attacks -- and that each attack power is enhanced to the ED soft cap of 95%, then:

In a space of 9.67 seconds, Spine Burst and Ripper have delivered an average of 191.06 + 389.11 = 580.17

Quills delivers an average of ~12 DPS, and Blazing Aura delivers an average of ~17.3 DPS.

580.17 / 9.67 = ~60 DPS

60 + 12 + 17.3 = 89.3 AoE DPS

That's without Burn, and without crits.

The Blaster, with the same amount of recharge, can chain together Shockwave, Ball, Breath, Scream with a 1.96 second gap between cycles.

Build Up and Aim are each up 1/4th of the time. For the sake of simplicity and to give the Blaster the benefit of the doubt (because a strict average of Build Up/Aim/Fiery Embrace tends to diminish their actual effect on AoE output, given the time spent walking between spawns), I'm going to pretend that Aim has the same damage bonus as Build Up (100% versus 62.5%). Further, I'm going to assume a constant 40% damage buff from Defiance, which I believe is a very liberal estimate.

I'm also going to pretend that the Blaster doesn't have to jump in and out to position those cones.

Shockwave becomes 68.8 * (1 + 0.95 + 0.5 + 0.4) = 196.08
Fire Ball becomes 78.8 * (1 + 0.95 + 0.5 + 0.4) = 224.58
Fire Breath becomes 312.93.
Psychic Scream becomes 185.535.

Total is 919.125 over 10.27 seconds. 919.125 / 10.27 = 89.496 AoE DPS.

If we wanted to add World of Confusion's average contribution, as if the Blaster were standing in melee the entire time (and as if anyone would actually enhance that power for damage), then we could stick on another 5.35 DPS.

And that would basically account for the entire difference.

In real game terms, things are of course slightly different. I usually have either Aim or Build Up up to start my AoE chain, whereas for the Spines/Fire it wouldn't be a given, and I didn't bother accounting for positioning time or for Arcanatime.

That said, the case I'm making here doesn't require a great deal of rigor in the analysis, and I believe that the allowances I made in the Blaster's favor -- assuming basically max Defiance, raising Aim's average contribution to match Build Up's, failing to give the Scrapper the benefit of criticals -- more than make up for any practical, comparative inaccuracy. Where I rounded any number, it was for the Scrapper, and always downward.

The fact is that we're talking about an eyelash's difference, practically speaking, between the two builds' AoE damage output. The main offensive advantage the Fire/Mental Blaster enjoys over the Spines/Fire Scrapper is that the Fire/Mental still has very good single-target damage, relative to other Blasters, whereas the Spines build is only a mediocre ST damage dealer by Scrapper standards.

But when comparing supposed strength to strength, it's pretty clear that whatever advantage the Fire/Mental may enjoy is near imperceptible.

As I said before, I don't personally think that Blasters are in particular need of anything, and I don't believe that -- even if it were proved beyond doubt that Scrappers always match or even slightly outperform their Blaster counterparts (which clearly isn't true) -- the devs would feel, or even should feel, compelled to do anything about it.

I also believe that, on the whole, Scrappers have less AoE damage available to them than do Blasters, and that as a general principle, Blasters have an easier time of delivering damage in teams which offer a sufficient amount of buff/debuff support.

That said, if you are just looking at damage output versus survivability, it's pretty clear that Scrappers are far closer to Blasters in terms of the former than Blasters are to Scrappers in terms of the latter. By orders of magnitude, in many cases. This should come as no surprise; it's always been this way, and in fact, before the Defiance buffs and accompanying buff to the Blaster damage scalar, the balance was even more skewed in favor of Scrappers.

It's not debatable. What is debatable is whether you think anything should be done about it. Except for maybe some very minor tweaking here and there, I don't; I personally enjoy playing both ATs, and a marked survivability boost for Blasters in the name of balance would also make them less distinctive. A marked offensive boost would make them ludicrously powerful.

Obviously, he went back in time and added it.

And I have 72.5% global recharge and 45% S/L DEF on my Fire/Mental. It isn't that totally offensive builds are bad; it's just that there comes a point after which more recharge is almost superfluous -- and you really can, with a little thought and a lot of influence (lol) get a good mix of both.

(With purples, I could get my recharge and global damage a bit higher, but I don't think it's worth spending ~2 billion more for such trivial gains.)

The downside is that you can't, on a Blaster, cover all or even most defensive bases. Whether you go the S/L route or the ranged route, there will still be encounters that can tear you a new one, and in that sense the DEF is almost a disadvantage; it can encourage a false sense of complacency at times.

It isn't my intention to criticize your build or anyone else's. I'm sure it's very good, and all that really matters is that you're happy with it. Part of the appeal of Blasters is the low margin for error, the feeling of flying by the seat of your pants.

The big difference, in my mind, between a soft-capped ranged DEF (presumably +Hover) build and a purely offensive build doesn't even have a whole lot to do with set bonuses; it has more to do with the fact that the pure offensive build will be more comfortable with using his melee powers, which in many cases are more powerful than their ranged analogues.

Otherwise, from a pure cost/benefit perspective, there'd be no reason not to go for ranged DEF, and as many offensive bonuses as you can muster besides.

This is probably truer of Blasters than it is of any other (high-level) build. Meleers are almost exactly opposite; while there are advantages to be gained through good use of tactics, a great build with a mediocre player driving it will do just as well or better than a great player driving a mediocre build.

A great melee build almost allows you to sleep through most any normal content, even what others might consider extreme content -- all the while dealing damage that is comparable, if not exactly on par with, Blaster-level damage.

A great Blaster build, even one with high ranged or S/L DEF, will still require a much greater degree of attention and positioning to succeed. The question, then, isn't really whether high-damage melee builds have the better end of the stick; clearly they do, by the numbers. The question is whether it's really even desirable to turn Blasters into a similar play experience.

Personally, I say no.

Fireball + Psywave isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, "almost equal" to Inferno's damage. Two of each would be closer.

Unless that's what you meant, of course.

I don't feel there's necessarily any buff warranted either, but it does make me snicker a little when I see comments on, say, the Scrapper boards claiming that Blasters with soft-capped ranged DEF are somehow overpowered.

The damage-vs-defense equation in this game has always been very screwy with respect to ranged ATs versus melee ATs. I expect that will never change, and I'm fine with it -- but the truth is that Scrappers and Brutes are almost as good as Blasters are in terms of damage potential, while maintaining vastly superior survivability.

The OP doesn't prove anything in particular, and I probably would have chosen different sets for comparison purposes if I were inclined to make the same case -- but his conclusions aren't totally wrong, either. They're just really old news.

There are two different approaches you can take.

One is to go for the more exemp-friendly, more consistently survivable, ranged DEF + Hover approach. There really isn't much downside to this, except that you will likely be sacrificing (voluntarily) some of your damage potential in the form of melee-range attacks.

Occasionally, you will get pwnt by AoE damage. Case in point are the maniac slammer missions in the AE which seem to be all the rage now; the slammers all use shotguns, so as far as I can tell (and admittedly, I'm far from expert on the subject of AE farms) ranged DEF is pointless, there.

On the whole, though, for general purpose play -- across all types of game content -- the ranged+hover approach is probably the safest overall.

The second approach is to pick up the Cold APP and soft cap S/L DEF. This is actually somewhat easier to do than ranged DEF (IMO), because you pretty much start halfway to your goal just by taking Frozen Armor. Since you're using fewer slots to reach your DEF goals, you also will likely have more space to fill up on +recharge bonuses elsewhere.

The other, perhaps most important, upside of the S/L DEF approach is that you can more confidently enter melee range against most critters. The downsides are as noted earlier: Exemping is painful, and when you do encounter foes that don't deal S/L damage, you're more likely to get your backside handed to you.

Issue 16's changes to sidekicking and exemping may very well eliminate or at least mitigate the former issue -- and of course, some people prefer not to exemp very often. Personally, when I'm IOing out a toon, I like to make sure that the bulk of its bonuses are still good down to about level 30 or so.

That said, the ranged DEF approach, on average, is probably going to be far more expensive, and will likely require far more patience in finding the IOs required. The specific IO sets which offer the best ranged DEF bonuses aren't terribly expensive themselves -- but in order to get a comparable amount of +recharge to the S/L build, you may have to start dipping into extremely expensive sets (like LotGs).

All of this depends very much on the specific build, but having messed around more than I care to admit with different Blaster builds, I feel pretty confident in saying that you're never going to be able to plug all or even most of the holes in your survivability. The name of the game is mitigation through offense, killing stuff before it kills you, and the addition of soft-cap DEF to one position or a couple of types doesn't really change that much of the time.

The more (targeted) AoEs you have, the harder it will be to get meaningful amounts of DEF without using mule powers or slots. That appears to be an intentional design on the part of the developers.

I've wracked my brain trying to come up with a way to soft-cap ranged DEF and also achieve significant amounts of AoE DEF, for example, but I just can't do it on a Blaster without gimping other areas way too much. My Controller, by contrast, soft caps ranged and very nearly soft caps AoE (43%) fairly easily, though not inexpensively. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, a Scrapper or a Brute or even a Tanker is still the way to go.

In any case, this is a long ramble without any particular point. If you've a specific powerset combination in mind, I'm sure many people here would be happy to offer advice on your build.

The reason we could hit hundreds of mobs with a single target attack was that there was a bug with Gaunlet when it was first implemented (then called colloquially "Punchvoke"); it wasn't only because mobs were stackable in one place.

Unfortunately, the same tactic didn't work on my Scrapper.

Most likely, except in extreme cases. While it isn't possible to hit more than 16 foes with your average AoE anymore, there are AoEs which bend the rule a little bit -- and in theory it might be advantageous to have that many mobs in one location just waiting to be slaughtered.

The biggest challenge to that sort of gameplay if the aggro cap were raised or eliminated would likely involve the Tanker's actually holding all of the aggro; after all, I havent' heard anyone suggest that Taunt should be given infinite targets, or that taunt auras should be massively improved.

An added spawn is supposed to be a threat, obviously. It is not a Tanker's right, nor is it his obligation, to expect to hold all aggro, 100% of the time, no matter what.

If it's that big a problem, then you have ample cause to recruit a second Tanker - the uselessness of which has been a constant cause of complaint on these forums for untold years.

So, herding was not more rewarding; it was just a more efficient way to receive rewards. Gotcha.

My Tanker could solo Crey's Folly, back in the day -- herding up half the map, maneuvering everything into one tight little ball, and at one point, KO Blow actually would hit stacked foes. It was sickly more rewarding than just about anything else I could have done at the time on that character --

Excuse me; it was sickly more efficient at providing rewards than anything else I could have done on that character.

If your team were comprised of eight people, among them a Tanker and a Blaster, then maybe herding wasn't all that much faster than having the entire team fight spawn-to-spawn -- but if the team is just a Tanker and a Blaster, there would have been no contest. In many cases, the rest of the team was comprised of builds which either weren't capable of helping in a meaningful way (too low in level), or which had no intention of helping (afking while the experience pours in), so the alternative method of spawn-to-spawn play wouldn't have been viable, anyway.

In any case, if all you're interested in is the rewards for your Tanker, and perhaps a friend's Blaster, then there's no point in taking the time to recruit a team.

Yes, just slower. The main difference between then and now, though, isn't that the AoE caps are in place, isn't that ED and GDN took place -- isn't any of the various, albeit important, game-mechanical changes that have come down the block in the last several years. The main difference is that leveling up isn't the only reward, now -- whereas before, once you'd hit 50, anything over about 4-5 million influence (which was pathetically easy at high level to earn) was pointless to have.

In fact, given the vast array of build possibilities presented by IOs, and the (nearly) practically limitless ability of players to create alts, the appeal of gaining more and more rewards as efficiently as possible, ad nauseam, is far, far higher than it would have been back in the old days.

The rewards are the same as in normal content, except that they aren't. Yes.

The fact that we can pad missions with bosses only points to a revival for Tankers, because Controllers can no longer reliably lock down a single spawn except in pairs -- just as Tankers can no longer reliably manage multiple spawns without help, often from another Tanker.

In a team setting, you can do that now. 17*8 = 136.

So recruit some Tankers or people you know to have sturdy builds besides, and go to town.

Yeah, Devices is a bit of a black sheep in that it doesn't have any true melee powers to speak of, and it has a little more ranged control than most other sets (which is to say, not much, but enough for farming purposes). It also provides native +DEF, even if only a little.

At the risk of going off-topic even more than I have already, my current plan for my Fire/Ment experiment is to slot Snow Storm for slow (Curtail Speed has some incidental S/L +DEF and a very small +rech bonus) to keep mobs more or less in place. Remains to be seen how well it will work; I know that on my Controller, Snow Storm tends to make mobs scatter a bit, even though there's no avoid effect explicitly listed on City of Data.

Then again, Slammer bosses seem to have an unusual predisposition towards clumping. We'll see.

In any case, I pretty much have to be in melee at least part of the time on that build. While living at range is generally safer, one of my biggest mitigation powers comes from melee.

True, it's easy enough to stock up on Break Frees if mez is your primary weakness -- especially now with Insp combining. Maybe I'm a little lazy when it comes to combining, though -- because on several occasions i've found that mez-heavy maps make me chew through Break Frees like candy, to the point where I don't have one when I really need it. As always, it depends on the build and the map. The 30-freaking-second-stuns from Malta leap to mind, though.

Mind Control powers, which are quite prevalent, bypass positional DEF, too -- which means you're going to get hit with a lot of them whether you choose S/L DEF or ranged.

In any case, mez may not be a huge factor in the general case, but there is a distinction to be drawn between the S/L-DEF blaster who's reliant on toggles for the bulk of his mitigation, and the ranged-DEF Blaster (or whatever), who still can have 35% DEF even when his toggles are down.

And when exemplared. Most of my builds are exemplar friendly down to about level 30. YMMV, but I usually feel that, if I'm going to be spending mondo cash, I want to maintain maximum effectiveness when someone shouts about a lower-level TF or whatever.

Yes, that's true for most every build -- but I don't think any Scrapper will experience quite the same proportional drop in survivability from exemplaring as will a Frozen-Armor reliant Blaster. In most cases, I'd imagine it isn't close.

Regardless, the major disadvantage, throughout the wider range of game content -- and which I forgot to mention -- for S/L DEF as opposed to ranged DEF is that it covers you against a smaller proportion of attacks, in my experience. When S/L DEF is good, it tends to be very, very good, but when it's bad, it tends to be very, very bad. Assuming you play primarily at range, with Hover, the ranged DEF build provides a more consistent experience, throughout the level range, throughout most of the game's varied content, and when for whatever reason you're in danger of losing your toggle powers.

And, as previously noted, the ranged DEF approach allows you to stack ~20-50% S/L RES beneath it.

AoE attacks are pretty common, but they're also not overwhelmingly typed as S/L attacks for the purpose of opposing DEF. At least not IME.

Yeah, for farming I think it's safe to say that you can purpose-build almost anything with reasonably high damage to start. The normal case, outside of farming, was what I was addressing.

Yeah, Fire/Kin is probably the only build for which I've come close to violating my habit of not rolling anything without a concept I enjoy. It's not just that the build itself can farm quickly; as this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of those -- but perhaps most important is the build's ability to increase everyone else's kill speed.

So if your habit is to farm in a small team, as I suspect many people do, even if they don't technically consider it farming, the Fire/Kin still wins, even if Coldmed or anyone else can find a way to prove the solo case for his Fire Tanker.

I'm right there with you.