PleaseRecycle

Well, all I can say is that to me it makes more sense to go by either the position the attack is defended by or the applicable invention set category you can slot in it. Otherwise by similar reasoning it seems that you'd have to call a power like focus a melee attack.

The higher tiers of ageless core are significantly better than cardiac at mitigating calamitous endurance usage. The only drawback is that rebirth is soooo freaking good for a secondary like shield. If you don't have any survival issues and want to use spiritual, though, ageless has got you covered. An added bonus is that it also gives you a sizable recharge bonus. Doesn't hurt, eh?

A strange sense of deja vu washes over me as I type this: I still don't understand what your point is.

You have forbidden the use of specific examples of effective blaster play because that doesn't represent Joe Everyblaster, an elusive character whose traits are murky at best. Those of us who report positive experiences with the archetype are said to be outliers, if not simple liars. Perhaps we don't understand the actual badness that we're really so immersed in. The fact that blasters are among the most popular archetypes is presented as evidence of their actual unpopularity. This whole discussion is beginning to look like a thinly disguised cover story for your secret passion of coming up with boxing-related analogies, A_F.

What could anyone present to you at this point that would have any chance of changing your mind?

Try it!

I don't like it. It fills the same basic niche as oppressive gloom, but in a very different way. As you are no doubt aware, cloak of fear has a hefty endurance cost, abysmal accuracy, and basically only the -tohit portion of it has any effect whatsoever for practical purposes unless you plan to be a vigilante forever. On the other hand, accuracy is easily made up through set bonuses and made less important by +tohit powers, there are numerous ways to alleviate endurance concerns, and -tohit is pretty desirable in many circumstances. It also accepts a variety of very nice sets.

Oppressive gloom is cheap, has normal accuracy, can be stacked with a more common and reliable status effect (though not by a DB/DA), does a small amount of damage to you, and only has the one trick up its sleeve. Werner has demonstrated that if you build your DA scrapper to be survivable enough, OG may actually become a bigger threat to you than the minions it disables by itself.

The reason I prefer OG is that it's good to go with just one slot. In my view, neither power is something that you will want or need to run all the time. If that's true for you, how many slots do you want devoted to it? Cloak of fear requires at least two or three to even be worth toggling on. OG is perfectly fine with a single common accuracy enhancement. Indeed, enhancing its stun may be counterproductive as the quicker each pulse wears off, the quicker the stunee runs back to you.

At this point on my MA/DA, I virtually never use OG. It is reserved for situations like fake nemeses, where it plus cobra strike equals quicker kills. Of course, that's not really an issue for DB/DA so if anything you might consider forgoing both of them.

Well, fair enough, I can see preferring the big hit to the big area. Lately I tend to view blaster aoes as proc delivery systems as much as they are damagers in their own right. Between posi's and reactive, things like fireball, ball lightning, bullet rain and the actual rain powers are just going to apply a lot more bonus damage to a lot more targets than any secondary aoe can keep up with. If you more often run on higher difficulties and have no problem with hanging out in the middle of spawns I could see the attraction to having bigger initial impacts.

Recharge/heal is awesome for blasters. It lets you do great things with one or two slotted aid self, and turns rebirth into basically a 100% heal at tier 3 or 4 followed by even more pronounced durability thereafter.

For someone who laments the damage focus of blasters, why would an alpha that mainly boosts their damage be bad? They don't have many non-damage traits to usefully boost, apart from recharge, heal, endurance and range, all covered in the other two good options.

Speaking of trial performance, would you say that defenseless dom is going to be locking down lambda spawns with no risk? How about a scrapper who hasn't built up to or past the soft cap? I suspect not. It seems that you are keen to compare the performance of a purpled permadom and a softcapped scrapper to that of what you consider the average blaster.

On the contrary, I've found that a range defense build allows for exceptional survivability on lambda for blasters. It enables you to escape from most of the mez heading your way, especially since you typically need only survive the alpha before the spawn has melted in the face of the league's fire, particularly your own. In my experience it's actually one of the places where blasters most excel - team buffs are thick in the air and all anyone really wants is overwhelming damage.

/bind c "powexecname Ninja Run$$powexecname Combat Jumping" and ne'er again encumber thyself with the burden of a travel power!

Permahasten takes about 100% in global recharge bonuses on top of ED capped recharge slotting, or a little less if you also go spiritual. It really isn't worth the hassle in most cases unless you specifically need it to be permanent for some reason. DP is so much easier to perma than hasten that just achieving that first goal should be plenty good.

I don't remember the bonuses you get for performance shifter's last few slots as I've never felt it worthwhile to go that far, so unless they're life changing I'd suggest dropping at least three slots from QR. That frees up slots for hasten and then some. Ah okay, just a little aoe defense. Yeah, ditch that and keep aegis in tough. That costs you a tiny bit more aoe defense but leaves you with more useful power slotting and shouldn't cause any problems recovery-wise.

Oh and actually, on the subject of weaknesses vs fun, one of the things I most enjoyed about playing a warshade was voids, quants and cysts popping up when you least expected them. Not only is it conceptually fun, there being a whole secret organization that wants to kill you in particular, it adds a serious dash of spice to otherwise humdrum missions. Especially at low levels, when they're a somewhat credible threat.

If I had the option to give myself a similar vulnerability to a clique of fancy looking stalkers on any archetype, I would take it on almost every one of my characters.

Could have sworn the "other ATs are always better" thing was put to bed a couple hundred posts ago...

I wouldn't take a corruptor over a blaster because I wouldn't take one archetype over another, period. Sure, I love it when I get a bunch of blasters, scrappers, defenders and corrs on a team because those ATs are a lot of fun and I enjoy seeing others bust heads with them as much as I enjoy doing it myself. If I get a team of tankers and PBs, that's great too! I enjoy playing neither of those but if that's what people want to bring, more power to em, it'll still be as amusing a team as ever.

No AT is required for any content with the possible exception of MMs on Cuda, which is irrelevant to those of us who don't play red side.

You did say that, and then you said this:

Are you aware that if you target the furthest enemy you intend to hit and then spend a quarter second or so backing up while you fire a cone, the cone's range becomes larger? This has a very minimal impact in terms of time spent positioning but it pays big dividends for damage. A patch in the last year or so attempted to alter this behavior but it failed to do so.

Okay but you read the rest of my post, right? I didn't specify that we were talking about a tanker and neither did you, from what I saw. You seemed to be proposing that nobody should take death-based powers because any death is a failure for the entire team. This is what I dispute. Even if the failure part were true that wouldn't be cause to skip those powers but I don't think it is true in the first place.

Someone who runs ahead and leaves their team to die is not accurately appraising the situation. Running ahead is a viable tactic if the rest of the team is doing fine and if an understanding exists among the teammates that a division of labor can accomplish the task before them more effectively than a team blob.

Vengeance happens to be a power that disproportionately rewards defeats to the point where an extremely viable speed tactic is carrying a corpse around with you and never resurrecting it. To call that bad because it involved defeat is to miss the point. Do you want to do a speed TF deathlessly, or do you want to do it right?

I should of course add that vengeance is awesome in almost any situation other than a master of or a hami raid, not just speed tfs, but they happen to be an area where it shines.

Not for a melee cone it isn't. However I suppose this is the first time a blaster secondary has gotten a melee cone so expectations differ.

Yeah really. Geez, I can hardly wrap my mind around having formations for your team! Like do you actually try to maintain a specific physical position or is it meant simply to be a mental state? Seeing it in action sounds impressive, at least. I think I'd rather just go really really fast though.

TF and TS are better than shadow maul? Now that is a completely outlandish claim. Total focus is an utterly garbage power whose sole purpose is the animation, if you're into that, but why don't we look at thunder strike? If we're to be charitable, we can compare their saturated damage: if thunder strike hits 16 targets it does 516 damage, whereas if shadow maul hits 5 targets and its damage scale is unchanged from the scrapper version it does 629 damage. Thunder strike doesn't look THAT bad, right?

Except that this implies you've got your entire aggro cap within its radius, but more troubling than that, what if each of them only hits two targets, for example? 190 vs 252. Three targets each? 213 vs 378. Four? 236 vs 504. Five? 259 vs 629.

It is trivially easy to line up two to four targets for a shadow maul even if you are approaching an untouched spawn. I would estimate that thunder strike is going to be hitting six to eight targets on a fresh spawn if you are quite good at positioning it. What you absolutely won't be doing is saturating its target cap, which is the only way for it to be anything other than a waste of animation time. And this is without even looking at its endurance cost, recharge, and so on.

Ah it's DPA isn't as much better as I remembered. I guess I'd take either one, really. One is a small pbaoe with a long recharge and one is a "large" cone with a short recharge. They do different things and I think cones are very manageable.

If some large percentage of the population of a city were super powered, tell me you can't imagine any of them dressing worse than that!

The ancient prophecy foretells its coming at the dawn of the new epoch, a brave leader having shown man the wisdom of abandoning the earth and taking dominion over the sea. The fallow land belongs to the beasts once more, and street justice is released in New Atlantis.