PleaseRecycle

Since EA doesn't really benefit much from divine avalanche, a case could be made that DB is the better pick. It's not that katana without DA is horrible compared to DB, but one of the sets essentially gives up one of its main gimmicks and the other does not. Both sets respond well to either a medium or a huge amount of recharge to create either a good or a great attack chain so in that sense they're not far apart. DB is going to be doing better aoe than katana while running its single target chain, katana arguably has more solid aoe all things considered.

I'd say play whichever you think looks coolest.

I've got it on good authority that the devs are about to remove meleers from the game because they interfere excessively with ranged knockback powers.

I've run the hero arc twice. Both times on a blaster, first time it took me twenty minutes as I read everything and took it slowly, second time it took me seven minutes. No deaths either time. I suspect I can break five minutes easily with favorable load times, cutscene included.

The rewards for the arcs are disproportionately huge and that right there offers added value that will broaden their appeal well beyond players who care much about the story.

To reiterate something which I feel like I must have said in that giant, awful thread that we're not to speak of again, Grey, I think the devs don't care as much about AV soloing and other feats of general sturdiness as players think they do. In fact, as we've seen just lately but also years ago, their main thing seems to be how fast players are earning prizes, regardless of how they do it. Brutes and scrappers may be quite good at crashing through most types of content but the fact that they do it with sheer dps and determination, or to put it another way a very even performance curve, means they're not much of a threat to the kind of game balance that is actually at issue.

By contrast, take squishies. They get debuffs. That's scary. Do people use scrappers and brutes to do the really game-breaking TF and trial runs? They certainly do not. Sure, one or two might tag along but they're not doing any heavy lifting.

Where I am apparently going out on a limb is in saying that I think blasters more resemble the latter group than the former. Under the right circumstances blasters can do things that make the ability to ae farm look maybe not quite so impressive. Judging by the state of the game, it seems that I am more closely agreeing with the devs than those who feel that blasters need huge buffs.

On the other hand, I love the rusty katana. I used that on my old kat/elec because gosh, wouldn't it be tough to keep your sword shiny if you were always ionizing everything? I don't know how the person who thought of adding it thought of adding it but I'm glad he or she did.

Who said that was a farming build? It has ranged defense, recharge, and damage regardless of what you're running.

To offer a counterpoint to C&E, broadsword is among that coveted cadre of sets that has the oldest animations in the game. It does go crunch, but does it do it with elan? Katana, on the other hand, has slightly more recent animations and more of them look good. It's unfortunate that sting of the wasp sucks because it looks great, and the last two attacks are hard to top. One look at whirling sword next to the lotus drops, though, is what should seal the deal.

I'm with Nihilii on this one. I'll add that if you look at the game without the context of MMORPG tropes, it is laughable that enemies just stand there gawping at you when you're thirty feet away from them. It's ridiculous that you can kick down the door to their HQ and start throwing hand grenades at them and the only ones who respond are the ones who are currently being converted into wallpaper. It makes no sense whatsoever even as video game AI behaviors go, and the bar is not very high in that realm.

Obviously realism isn't the top concern for something like city of heroes, but anything they can do to improve such glaring flaws is something I personally welcome. The fact that it makes the game more challenging is the main thing but that it makes the game less stupid looking is a great bonus.

Like a complete nimrod I slotted a GSFC when I already had five 2.5% ranged defense bonuses, unaware that it counted as three separate bonuses and not one unique bonus. The risks of not using mids. Here's another at-risk demographic, your eyesight: http://i.imgur.com/5cJjI.jpg

I have no idea what your goal is but I've been enjoying this character so much I feel compelled to share. Once I drop the GSFC for trap of the hunter in subdual I'll be range softcapped. Haven't really been keeping track but I believe it cost less than one billion. The basic strategy, approaching an un-aggroed blob, is to BU or aim, neutron bomb while in the air, land in the spawn and start hammering them with pbaoes. I'd be lying if I said I never died but I'd also be lying if I said it happened with any regularity. Priorities have been to grab all the passive accolades, get spiritual alpha to tier 3 (and next week tier 4), and to focus internally on impressing the hell out of pugs. So far it has been working quite well. This will hopefully end up being a good speed TFing character but you never know eh?

I would absolutely be willing to say that psi is simply a terrible blaster set because it only has one non-nuke aoe. I count archery and dual pistols not as marginal performers but as competitive with fire for aoe because their mini-nukes pick up that much slack and they already do pretty well with their cones and taoes. Ice and elec have bad reputations for aoe but really they do have two functional aoes each before the nuke. Psi stands out for me as the one blast set that really breaks the rule.

You could be right that the average blaster doesn't know or care how to get the most out of ranged aoe powers but I'm not sure that invalidates the fact that blasters generally get them and they generally can be very useful in a wide variety of circumstances.

It's hard to guess what the devs think sometimes but I think their recent behavior regarding blast sets supports my argument. Dark blast has two aoes and a regular nuke while beam rifle has, ehhh, sort of three aoes and a mini-nuke, but prior to that we saw dual pistols with three aoes and a mini-nuke. The last comparable set before that that I can think of is arachnos widows, who get scads of aoe and a crashless normal nuke. Dark blast is a counterexample but I still say that they're moving away from "normal nukes" as they devise new blast sets.

Oh, and one thing I will say about psi is that it was added at the same time as /mm, a very aoe-oriented secondary.

If, after taking Farmanerf, you experience purple dumping, please contact your physician immediately.

Doms do get good modifiers and they do have control but what they don't have is aoe competitive with what blasters get. It's kind of hard to compare their single target damage given how schizophrenic it is. Stone spears and ice bolt, por ejemplo, are not both tier 1 blasts by any measure aside from their literal placement in their sets. With the intensely glaring exception of sleet, doms are also kind of worse at debuffs than blasters, no mean feat.

Hehe, "risk."

You're right, sorry for being snotty, that was uncalled for.

I disagree with your appraisal of average blaster ranged DPA. The difference between blaster DPA and scrapper DPA is that blaster sets are much more consistent: 63~ DPA, or one damage scale per second, is hands down the most common arrangement. Scrapper attacks, meanwhile, vary wildly from far worse to far better than that. Here I agree that if that's all you look at, the scrapper looks better.

One difference is that scrapper sets are cluttered with garbage powers that are at best useful while leveling up. You can say scrappers have the advantage of being able to utilize recharge to boost their DPA, I can say that blasters don't need the crutch of recharge since their DPA is basically flat in the first place. There are situations where melee range is either inconvenient or impossible to maintain and they're becoming more common with every content release.

Recharge SOs alone may not make a clean chain out of t1 -> t2 -> t1 -> t3, but throw in your tier 1 secondary power, an aoe, a self buff, an inspiration click, aid self... It is really not difficult to make a solid ranged chain from the average blast set even without considering IOs. If you do consider IOs, it isn't that blaster single target DPA will be superior to scrapper DPA when both are allowed to go nuts, it is that blasters make different tradeoffs in the slotting they can do and get different benefits.

Another difference is that this leaves most scrapper sets without anything like as much aoe as most blaster sets. This is where I see the main advantage for blasters. If you're comparing all sets and not the absolute top melee aoe primary/secondary combos, there isn't much of a contest. Blasters get big cones, big taoes, big pbaoes and delightfully big mini-nukes, rains, and other such things. There are two primaries and three secondaries that don't get much aoe, as I recall, compared to most primaries and most secondaries for scrappers.

I haven't gone into blaster melee attacks as I personally don't like them very much but some of them are very competitive with the best DPA scrappers can bring to bear. It isn't difficult to find room in one's build for a blap or two if you're more amenable to the concept. My point was that picking up energy punch and bone smasher in no way precludes you from switching back to power bolt, power blast and power burst when melee gets too hot. The scrapper who is driven from melee stops doing damage entirely unless he's claws, spines or KM and the drop in DPS even for those sets is severe indeed.

As for who's best at delivering ranged damage, the only competition I see brought up is corrs and doms. I find both of these to be pale shadows at best. Doms... I think A_F and Shubbie were just yanking my chain because nobody ever defended that assertion when pressed. Corrs can do similar DPA to blasters if you figure in the effects of -regen on a GM's health or the team-wide benefit of debuffs, but if a team already has either of those things, and indeed blasters themselves can bring both of those things as well, well, they're not going to be outdamaging a good blaster on the BM fight.

Simplest buff to full auto: rename to "Rain of Full Auto," give players Primal Duray's signature attack. In exchange for the buff, maybe bump the recharge up to 75 seconds.

Shadow maul used to sound like you were tap-dancing on Humpty Dumpty's head at the bottom of a well. The fact that anyone misses that is a true testament to the power of nostalgia.

Well, look at it this way. An EA scrapper who is softcapped to s/l/e/n/f/c already is vulnerable to the following types of melee attack: psionic and toxic. I'm not aware of any toxic melee attacks, I believe they're all ranged or aoe, so additional melee defense is protecting you from melee psi, pretty much. A snarky poster might say, "and good luck finding any of those!" but that isn't my style so I'll admit that you do actually run into melee psionic attacks on incarnate trials. However, at this point you're taking, slotting and using DA specifically for one type of enemy that appears in one type of content. Why not just use lucks?

The other case you could make is that the EA scrapper probably will only reach the 45% softcap to all types, at best. In this case, DA helps you reach the incarnate softcap without even slotting it for defense. The problem here is that it does not help you reach the incarnate softcap to any type other than lethal. The melee defense doesn't contribute to the kinds of defense you already have. I-trial enemies do indeed use lethal attacks but oh, so many more types do they also use. Again, why not just use lucks? You'll probably need them anyway.