PleaseRecycle

Ill/rad's strength against hard targets has been mentioned but what I don't believe has been pointed out yet is that illusion is a proc machine. Specifically, reactive 75% chance for fire damage. I happen to know someone with an ill/cold who got bored of soloing level 54 AVs because it was too easy.

Two things:

I think you can say fire wins out if you consider its amazing single target damage coupled with its good aoe. If the main thing you care about is aoe, other sets are superior. If you care about overall "best damage" and do not value the tricks that other sets get in addition to their damage, you absolutely would do well with fire blast.

My problem with fake hunting in PI is that too many cooks spoil the broth. That is, most of the fakes spawn on the docks and the rest spawn in a circuit in the middle of the island. One fake slayer can cover all of these spawn points in a figure eight and it will all have respawned by your next pass. If just one person is AFK at ghost falcon, that interferes with like eight of the potential fake spawns. If a whole team is canvassing the island, how does anything get a chance to respawn? Or do you try to stay together? A team in FBZ is another matter because you can each have your own island.

Thank you for noticing that I don't give a damn what anyone thinks when what's at issue is what is true.

If you're not familiar with the damage scale talk, think of it this way. Fire breath takes well over twice as long to deliver not quite twice as much damage as fistful of arrows, and you can only use it half as often.

Okay then let's try this from another angle.

Take the cones. Fire breath does .66 damage scale per second. It is beaten by fistful at .78, buckshot at 1, flamethrower at .83, and full auto at .71. It beats electron haze at .56 and empty clips at some laughably small number. It recharges in 16 seconds, the same as electron haze and twice as long as buckshot and fistful at 8. Empty clips is at 10.

Take the taoes. Fireball's DPS is great at 1.26, hands down the highlight of the set. Bullet rain's DPS is significantly worse than that, yet it does manage to do the same amount of damage. M60 and neutron bomb are comparable to bullet rain in DPS but lower in damage. Explosive arrow does .9, respectable. On this one, everything is at 16 seconds recharge apart from bullet rain at 18.

Take the "other" category. Here we see rain of fire doing something like scale 2 damage for a two second animation - pretty good, except it has a 90 second recharge and takes 15 seconds to apply its damage. This is a good power for corruptors because it scourges, and it will be good for defenders because it will do blaster damage, but for blasters that is really not impressive. More of a nice addition to the ranged chain when you have an opening for it. It is up against irradiate, which does scale 1 in 1.07 seconds and applies its damage over 5 seconds in addition to a significant debuff, on a 20 second recharge. It is also up against rain of arrows and hail of bullets, and next to those it is simply pathetic. Rain of arrows and hail of bullets do approximately scale 3.3 and 4.3 damage respectively and are up basically as often as rain of fire. Oh, and I think ignite also hits about that hard if you manage to plant something in the patch. Not useful that often but a very damaging power for AVs and things that won't run away.

Fire also gets inferno, a lame power that throws away all of your endurance for 20 seconds and even if you mitigate that with a blue or with ageless drops all of your toggles, which you must then toggle back on for some substantial number of seconds. Inferno is better than atomic blast, which has the same downsides but only hits just slightly harder than hail of bullets. Whee.

So there you go. Fire is a perfectly fine set for aoe but it isn't the best. Neither is it the worst. If you really enjoy lining up cones that helps a bit but of the sets I named only dual pistols and rad have worse cones than fire breath.

Oh, and let me add that when one considers procs, the fact that the other four sets can throw out more aoes works in their favor regardless of how much damage the aoes do. This is particularly significant if you consider armageddon or reactive, which rapidly widen the gap between a fast-aoeing set like assault rifle and fire even further.

The dominator attacks also cost radically more endurance, up to nearly twice as much in case of psi shockwave, in exchange for a furious base damage increase of two.

My main problem with dominators, one that has thus far left my highest level dom my now-deleted issue 6 ice/ice who made it to 40, is that unlike blasters there is no apparent rhyme or reason to their attacks. One thing all of the sets share is absurd endurance costs, but beyond that anything goes. Power bolt 53 DPA, stone spears 23, why not! What's really appalling is their aoe, though. If you want to do any aoe at all on a dom, you're going to be doing it with plant/, fire/ or epics. That's essentially the antithesis of the blaster.

Fire has: rain of fire, fireball, fire breath, crashy nuke
Radiation has: irradiate, the cone thing, neutron bomb, crashy nuke
DP has: empty clips, bullet rain, piercing rounds, hail of bullets
Archery has: fistful of arrows, explosive arrow, rain of arrows
AR has: buckshot, msomething grenade, flamethrower, ignite, full auto

So no, fire does not "most definitely have more aoe than any set besides archery." Archery is in fact the only set there with less aoe than fire, which is why I said "more or better" as rain of arrows is better than anything fire can do. I also consider crashy nukes useless for normal play which is why I feel that the weapon sets pull so far ahead of fire for aoe. Radiation only has as much aoe as fire but I think irradiate and neutron bomb are arguably more interesting than rain of fire and fireball, if not outright superior.

You must have been out of town last weekend, plainguy.

Fire is good for aoe and is a very straightforward set but if you want something a little zazzier you should consider radiation or the weapon sets. All of the weapon sets have more or better aoe than fire unless you really want a crashy nuke, while radiation pretty much keeps pace with it. Fire has the best single target damage but that wasn't the question!

By what measure exactly are dominators better than blasters? They get mez protection, which if we're speaking of the "average dominator" by your own standard isn't permanent so it is in many ways less useful than defiance. Their attacks are universally lower DPA than blaster equivalents and they don't get access to the really huge aoes that allow blasters to destroy full spawns at once. Control powers are all right but largely irrelevant in the late game. The one real advantage doms get is sleet in their epic pool and that's a big advantage, but does the average dom always take that specific pool? Surely not.

Sorry to keep harping on it but it really does seem like you guys just don't know what you're talking about.

Oh right, and dominators as a "ranged AT?" lol

Point Sierra has been my go-to place for fakes but my new favorite way to get them is Maxwell Christopher's arc. If your character can handle x8 nemesis in the 40-45 range you'll easily get the badge just while leveling up. Even if you wait until 50, you can still do it in ouro. I think maybe three warhulks spawned for me on the entire arc, every other boss was a fake.

"IOs are irrelevant to whether blasters are under-performing in the late game" is a comical statement. Where do most people use IOs? The late game. Where in the game does pretty much everyone have IOs as it stands on the live servers today? The late game. In fact, it's really only on the forums that I see people advocating SO usage at all. You can pretend that the game is balanced around them but you're not talking about the same game that the rest of us are anymore.

You know, now that I've said that, maybe that gets at the problem in this thread, in a way. The anti blaster crowd will grumpily acknowledge that things like IOs and incarnate powers exist, but their expectation of performance is based on the exclusion of any player advantages that have been added in the past twelve issues. In that sense, ignoring the fact that there are myriad ways to alleviate whatever setbacks blasters may encounter in frequently elegant ways, blasters are weaker. Of course, so is everyone else - scrappers only have as much defense as comes with their secondary, nobody has any recharge bonuses, and...

Why do I get this weird feeling of déjà écrit as I type that?

In any case, feel free to dwell in the pre-IO world of the ancient past, but know that nobody else does in practice. Even if you refuse to use IOs, you cannot avoid benefiting from teammates who don't share your eccentricity. I don't see how you could even argue that this will be an issue when the free players arrive, which I'm not sure anyone has done yet, since the free players will of course be crap at the game regardless of their AT, as everyone is the first time they play.

Microcosm, my rationale for preferring dark is thus. Both of the sets are "easy" to softcap. Both of the sets have some measure of endurance protection which I value far more than I used to given the direction highbie content has gone lately. Elec's advantages are clear - recharge is never bad, and infinite endurance certainly doesn't hurt either. I disagree with you, though, that energy is the damage type least often coupled with smashing and lethal - in my experience, that would be psi. Indeed, not only is it hard for non-positional characters to defend against psi, you get literally no psi defense from set bonuses, whereas e/n defense naturally comes along with s/l defense to a somewhat lesser extent. Dark does have a relative weakness to energy but its relative strength to psi balances this to some extent.

Next, consider endurance. Elec is undeniably superior here as dark has well earned its reputation as an endurance sucker, but cardiac isn't the only way to make up endurance problems. The better option, I find, is ageless. As you say, this enables you to take musculature and enjoy all the advantages thereof while still giving you (and your team) unlimited endurance. Not only that, you get a massive recharge bonus comparable, I suspect, to a handful of force feedback procs going off for ageless' duration.

What do you give up for ageless? Well, depending on your preference, either barrier or rebirth. It is here that dark's real strength over elec becomes clear. Elec benefits greatly from rebirth and is a natural fit for it, but dark just doesn't need* that much extra survival when it already has so much in dark regen.

So, if what I've said so far is relatively uncontroversial, we're left with the dark and the elec both softcapped to at least s/l, with musculature alpha and effectively unlimited endurance and staggeringly good healing. Dark has at least as strong of a recharge bonus as elec despite not having one built in at all. Dark's ace in the hole at this point is that it can completely ignore fear and confuse. "So what," one might bellow. Well, the devs may have forgotten that those effects existed for the game's first six years, but since then they've remembered with a vengeance. Currently that protection is the difference between being able to solo the sabotage on lambda with three or four lucks and needing three or four lucks and a mess of breakfrees, which I personally don't carry on meleers as it strikes me as silly. This is for a chunk of a trial that lasts like five minutes - if in the future our exposure to fear or confuse effects becomes necessarily longer, the gap becomes impossible to make up with inspirations. Something to think about.

Holy words.

*Werner et al feel differently.

I made a new blaster because I didn't have anything else I could use to take advantage of double exp. Rad/MM, 34 at the moment. This thread hadn't even crossed my mind until I saw it again just now but once again, it is to laugh. I'm not even up to 25% defense yet and already I can do outrageous things that I sincerely doubt most other ATs will be doing at this level.

Soloing on x8? Nope, not going to happen until my build is complete, yet tanking spawns for a full task force is trivial with just the inspirations that drop. Tanking them and leaving them half dead and debuffed for the rest of the team to sweep in and mop up, that is. Sometimes they don't even get a crack at the minions! Ha!

Really the only way I could call the character weak is if the only thing I care about is solo performance, and this is during the supposed weakest level range. Here's why soloing doesn't bother me - if I want to run x8 tips, all I have to do is invite one or two lowbies. That alone provides more than enough cover to get away with unfettered blasting with a half finished build that will cost maybe 1.5 billion when it's done if I'm impatient. When it is done, I plan to be 2x8 farming-ready. Superfluous indeed.

Wouldn't you know it, this thread got me thinking and now my rad/mm is level 31. The plan so far is to stick with irradiate, neutron bomb and psychic shockwave. The cones were very handy in the low levels but it didn't take long for their different sizes to clash annoyingly. Neutron bomb is allegedly a 1.67 second animation but I swear it's actually 2.67 given how ponderous it feels. That aside, this is clearly a solid combo! As the ranged defense builds up, it can only improve from there.

Current EA does get kind of screwed on psi since it not only has no protection to that but has no other particular strengths, in my opinion. New EA looks a lot better. For one thing, energize by itself does a lot for EA's psi protection in as much as it does not discriminate the damage types it heals and regenerates against.

The only times psi is a big deal, off the top of my head, are the psychic king, regent korol and of course, annoyingly, augurs. Most other sources of psi are really pretty wimpy. When mother mayhem gets to star in her own trial things might be different, of course.

SJ/EA? Oh yes indeedy. Looks like a relatively inexpensive way to make a highly beastly scrapper.

It's also worth noting that scrappers not only benefit mechanically more from damage buffs, their self buffs get higher values. For power siphon, the difference is 125% +dam versus 156% +dam when stacked five times. Go scrappers.

The waiting sucks though, doesn't it? If you want to make a street justice/energy aura, it's even longer! Argh!