PleaseRecycle

Apart from inferno and blizzard, crashy nukes barely do more damage than crashless nukes. Okay, by most standards "half again" isn't "barely" but they pay well over 50% more of a penalty, seeing as they have a penalty at all and crashless nukes do not. They recharge three times more slowly than hail of bullets, and six times more slowly than rain of arrows or full auto. Ironically, hail of bullets, rain of arrows and full auto also keep the blaster safer than many crashy nukes, between their range or their defense buffs. Only blizzard and thunderous blast have the same advantage. Thunderous blast, of course, doing less damage than its cohorts in exchange for this.

Really the main case for crashy nukes seems to be their strong thematic tie to comic books. Who doesn't love it when the hero, in his direst need, summons forth the strength to overcome the odds while being left drained? Very dramatic and all that. One cannot make an objective case against crashy nukes if the reason a player likes them is something like this, but one can point out that in the comic book it's perfectly plausible that the hero will have defeated all of the villains with his mighty attack, whereas in CoH chances are good that there are going to be some villains left, probably within spitting distance.

I was curious about that too Deus and it seems that the main difference is that suppression has a longer recharge, uses a load more endurance and has a longer animation than heavy burst. Single shot, burst, and venom grenade are identical to their arm-based counterparts apart from damage type on single shot vs channelgun. So, using the soldier attacks misses out on some energy damage and a slightly bigger cone, but what you get instead is endurance sustainability, far less global rech required, and marginally better DPA. Good trade, eh.

Heat loss is really good. Benumb, however, is really good. Cold can do things that no other set can. With poison coming to controllers in I21 that's a little less true but cold is better than buffed poison.

That said, my latest project is a plant/storm. I already have a cold defender and I kind of feel like it shines with defender values on the debuffs and simply by being the primary set. Storm, meanwhile, is amazingly good at supplementing a strong controller primary by filling in virtually every area that could be called a deficit.

My vote is for plant/storm, oddly enough, but there's a dash of hopefulness in there as I haven't finished the character yet. Shaping up nicely, however.

Burn and blazing aura deliver reactive procs, if that's what you mean, yes. /Fire doesn't make reactive better though, it gets the same benefit as any other set. Arguably more than any other set since you get two (or three, heh) aoe attacks with which to be proccing. So yes, SJ/FA looks like a beast of an aoer.

That's a trade I'd be willing to make. Less targets for ludicrous damage? You'll still be hitting five or six guys with some regularity (especially on a farm!)

He has arm lash and frenzy so my guess is that he summons pets whenever possible and then runs into melee to tank for 'em. Looks like a fun strategy and it looks like it worked pretty well!

My mistake, make that suppression instead of arm lash. Still looks like a pretty tanky tray to me!

Wow, those numbers don't look like they need much boosting to me. It already has the two best DPA aoes of any melee primary.

You don't need to build for defense for a farming blaster. Chug lucks before starting and combine all inspirations except lucks into reds during the mission. This is of course more specifically an AE farming strategy, but, well, that's pretty much where you're going to be unless you're one of those weirdos who goes for purples instead. Even then, demons or BM minions will be dropping lucks.

Fantastic build Gunmage, you're tempting me to make a DP/MM to go with my DP/EM, heh.

I vote rad/fire also! Fire blast is fantastic of course but radiation has some neat tricks of its own, and it pairs up better with fire manipulation. It also gives you some extremely cursory mitigation in cosmic burst, and the -def effect is nothing to sneeze at, especially since it widens the slotting options.

I've never done any 40-50 tips apart from blue ones, but I'd estimate that at least half of them only involve taking out one or two objectives rapidly. Polar shift, senior agent freymuth, malta plot, and council captives all involve just one or two objectives, often in the same room. The rikti hostages, DE hostages, and frostfire/miss thystle ones have three or four objectives each, usually not in the same room but often along the same path to the end and with some being optional. One of the carnie ones is beat up three bosses and the other is one boss and three glowies, there's the malta defector which has a sadly long mandatory wait, and the column/maelstrom one does have linked objectives but the only slow part is if you don't notice maelstrom's invisible butt while looking around. The one that is genuinely slow is the knives hostage mission. Looks like more fast ones than not to me (and I think I remembered most of them...) and really none of it is hard for even the squishiest empathy defender when set on 0x1 no bosses.

Then again I run them on 0-2x8 because I want purples! They still go by quicker than you'd want if you've thrown together a quick pug to run 'em.

The last time you asked me to put up numbers to justify something, you'd just come off of a whirlwind tour of ignoring my and everyone else's numbers for, well, since approximately October 2008. I wisely avoided wasting any additional time appeasing you. What I did do was accurately point out that no amount of proof from any source will ever make you happy.

It seems that you hate blasters with a burning passion. This is ironic as blasters are among the top purveyors of fire damage. Have you considered starting a thread on how badly SS/FA brutes suck? They're just about as flaming.

Okay, look at it this way: you've got purples and you've got lotg globals. Why does one get those? For the recharge. Why would you want recharge on a MA/SR? Well, nothing in SR needs recharge at all, so it would be to put together an attack chain or to get more utility out of pool powers.

It is from this perspective that I tell you that yes, not only do you have too many attacks, you have way the freaking crud too many attacks. This honestly wouldn't be a playable build, in my opinion. There is no way you could possibly use all of those attacks with any regularity. It would be like a family reunion of attacks. Some of them you like, some of them you don't, but they're all here and you have to put up with them because you're the one who organized it. Wouldn't you know it, crane kick has had a few too many and the lampshade is on the head. Why does this always happen?

My final criticism is that the only attack you managed to skip, storm kick, is the best attack in martial arts.

Other than that, solid build.

Well, playing with terrible people and playing terribly. A couple posts ago he was arguing that blasters strictly require four lucks per minute of survival. The assumption here is apparently that ios don't exist and that doing anything other than standing in one place while enemies attack is cheating. Also pool powers don't exist and the only way to get inspirations is to buy them from a vendor, you certainly don't get loads of them for free by killing things.

The part that confuses me is arcana apparently maintaining that blasters are in fact deficient because a dev at one point said so even though her own experience contradicts that. This currently seems to be the sticking point that continues to prop up A_F's bizarre argument.

Has anyone considered that perhaps the deficiency here is in assuming that "the average player" is always the best balance metric?

Irradiate is so much better than PSW. I'd go as far as calling it one of the main reasons to go rad/ in the first place. Ignoring every other thing about both of them, irradiate is energy and PSW is psi. There are a lot more things that highly resist psi than energy, and there are fewer things that are weak to psi than to energy.

That said, I'd actually consider dropping both of the cones and keeping irradiate and PSW, depending on your feelings about being mainly pbaoe.

I honestly don't see how you could have problems with the groups you mentioned there on a claws/elec, Moon. Circle are an absolute pushover for any scrapper past level 40 but claws/elec won't even have to use energize. When I run council on mine I grab aggro from three or four groups at once so that replacements will be available for the increasingly dead gentlemen around me. With carnies I wouldn't do more than two groups at once, as more than two ring mistresses or masters can cause problems for anyone, but just one to two of each at a time is nothing. You tear them down so fast that they don't get a chance to stack debuffs or controls on you. Assuming you're doing this solo, you've also got a big fat pile of inspirations running at all times.

The only place I could really see being worried about /elec's survivability is trials, but its strengths shine especially brightly there. You might as well just ignore all the energy damage and endurance drains, and it's very solid against the psi too. The only real danger on trials is the fear from Augurs, but that's dangerous to any scrapper that isn't /dark.

If I absolutely had to do this and was not allowed or inclined to go the obvious mind/fire dom route, I would go fire/dark corruptor for sure. You'll clear spawns about as fast as any meleer is going to but as soon as you get to an AV the thing'll blow wide open in the corr's favor. I suspect that's still true if one considers lore pets. Fire/traps is possibly even more effective but traps is boring. Dark miasma is fun.

I can vouch for claws/elec. It seems like the most natural claws pairing to me - it has the least redraw among the damage aura sets, broadly sturdy (a trait it shares with dark), and the unique perks it gets such as immunity to endurance drain and a recharge boost are handy at any level but especially at the high end. That's not to say that dark doesn't have great perks of its own, both would be killer. I agree with Sailboat's rationale for AVs though.

I got mine to like 40% s/l with little attention paid to the other types and while he certainly is not my absolute strongest scrapper, he doesn't really have any problems with any particular content. Cimerorans are one of the main threats but of course if you play smart you aren't going to die on any given ITF, running ahead to solo objectives or not. So, great durability while you're kicking out aoe at delirious rates. I haven't even gotten any incarnate slots past alpha yet because it feels sort of unnecessary.

One last thing I'd point out is that unlike some combinations, claws/elec exemplars extremely well down to 30. You have all of your aoe by 32 with no real need for epic attacks, you keep all of your endurance recovery which is pretty unique given how many scrappers need to wait until epics or incarnate stuff to get that sorted, and of course building for s/l makes it easy to pack in almost all of your defense at 30. Really fun combination for sutters, and numinas, but mantis and cits are like some kind of cruel joke by you on the NPCs.

Haha, "Blasters can't farm! Why, they'd need specific pool powers and expensive enhancements!" You're so right, plainguy, that's completely unthinkable.

Fire would be fine, but rain of fire is no hail of bullets and bullet rain and fireball are pretty much equivalent for farming purposes. You're also probably not going to be using your cone unless you know something most farmers don't.

DP/MM and Arch/MM are definitely my picks. I have a sneaking suspicion archery comes ahead in ideal circumstances - rain of arrows can hit more targets than hail of bullets and is up more often. Bullet rain is much better than explosive arrow but explosive arrow is still fine.

You could even make a case for rad/MM. Irradiate is very good and neutron bomb is, again, fine. I personally would use one of the weapon sets instead but I'd imagine radiation would be the next best thing.

Ah, well, happy to be wrong about that. So yeah, I suppose you could, but the question is whether it's worth the animation time, endurance cost, having those powers, et cetera, to get that buff. I would imagine the main way to make it worth your while would be to ensure that the time bomb and the trip mine hit a different group than the one you're nuking. My difficulty is in imagining common scenarios where that's going to occur.

Unfortunately, the defiance buff starts when the power is activated, rather than when its recharge begins. This means you can only get one of those buffs at a time. You could still stealth up with a time bomb and then nuke, but the issue I have with that is, well, what's the time bomb for if you already nuked the spawn? Two adjacent or mixed spawns might make it more worthwhile if you can get to them well before your team does.

Two more recharges won't make hasten perma by themselves but what I was saying is that it doesn't really matter if hasten is perma for you. Having a gap is pretty irrelevant as long as you have enough recharge for perma DP, which you do, particularly with two more recharge enhancers in hasten.

An as yet unflaunted perk of ion is that despite the devs' best efforts, it still frequently hits the same target multiple times. This can be good or bad for damage depending on your tastes, but what it does mean is that in certain situations ion will sap targets all by itself. It happens most often if you've got a medium-large number of hardish targets for it to work with: the boss and EB spawns on an ITF and most trial spawns come to mind. If you've got radial ion it is not unusual to be surrounded by half-dead minotaurs who are consumed with a fiery hatred for you but too tuckered out to do anything about it. Actually that still sounds sort of unusual by most standards.