-
Posts
1653 -
Joined
-
Blasters are actually terrible at any level, but especially at high level. Incarnate powers make them obsolete as do all fourteen of the fourteen archetypes. The only way justice will be had for blasters is if they are combined with tankers into a super AT that does the best dps at range and has the best survivability.
There you go A_F, I took care of that for you.
Fire/EM is a particularly rough combo as your primary offers almost no mitigation and your secondary isn't so hot for it either. My suggestion would be to dip into the epic pool of your choice at level 41, as the blaster APPs are pretty much all designed to increase your toughness in one way or another. All of them have at least one control power available at level 41, for example. My pick would be flame mastery and I would take bonfire at 41, and char at 44. These powers respectively allow you to keep almost anything out of melee range and lock down almost any dangerous minion or lieutenant. They also set you up for rise of the phoenix at 47, my favorite self rez in the game.
It's also worth pointing out that your example groups there are Crey, a group particularly laden with mez, damage resistance and hard hitting melee attacks, and Carnies, who are actually pretty easy except, as you say, the bosses who are notoriously annoying. When you're up against things like that, another thing to remember is that at level 40 you got five additional inspiration slots for a reason. Even just one medium luck on a character that isn't IOed for defense makes a world of difference against something like a ring mistress. Carry breakfrees if you find yourself running something like the Madeleine Casey arc. An ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, and all that.
Of course, the solution that many of us adopt is to simply use inventions. Not sure how you feel about that but they make a giganto amount of difference. One thing any blaster can easily and fairly cheaply build for is ranged defense, another thing is smashing/lethal defense. Ranged defense keeps you safe from most ranged mez powers, and most ranged damage as a happy side effect. S/l defense largely protects you from melee and quite a bit of ranged damage as well. Get a -KB io, they can be had cheaply and just a single one of them, stuck into combat jumping or hover, prevents 99% of knockback effects from working on you.
As I see it, you have loads of options. Sure life does get a bit more complicated for the modern blaster past level 40 but that's part of the fun in my opinion. -
Mind Control
You can manipulate and control the City of Heroes forum into debating for years whether you are in fact helping or harming your team. Your lack of visual feedback will cause creatures without minds, such as annoying team leaders, to accuse you of being AFK.
To be serious, though, do you think people read the blurbs? I didn't actually know that they still gave those to new sets. -
I see people tank with SOs, or generic IOs I guess, all the time. However, why do inventions have to break your theme? Their names are so abstract that they don't really indicate much of anything, other than informing the player of which set she's looking at. Surely your crushing impact could be attributed to your tanker's development of some new chemical treatment just as easily as someone else could decide that it's obviously because of a powerful spell they've cast.
-
One of the numbers the devs look at for this kind of thing is the popularity of the archetype. Lacking an exact quote for you, I seem to recall their i19 publicity chart showing that blasters are the most popular archetype at mid levels and still like #3 at 50. Surely they're not exclusively played, or even played well, by players who would call themselves superior.
-
Even if they did want to reemphasize the set's single target dominance, I don't think they would do it by just increasing the DPA of its attacks. Yes, currently total focus is mighty sad, worse than the basic or next best attacks in most scrapper sets, but it just seems like the devs are a little more creative than that. Look at KM, for example. Pretty much all of its attacks are in a very consistent, slightly above average area with their DPA. The reason it can do impressive single target is of course that instead of build up it gets mini-brute mode, with particularly good uptime for scrappers. Clearly they wouldn't want to repeat that exact solution for EM, but something a bit more flavorful than just "now it's slightly faster" could only help.
-
What if I do have a few billion inf? Instead of making a badass blaster, should I save it for five discount brutes instead as an austerity measure?
-
But if you remove the crashes of real nukes, what happens to the poor archery, AR and DP blasters? Suddenly unloved, they'll be forced to wander the land in solitude, their only companion their crashless nuke on a 20 or 40 second timer. Actually, maybe they'll be okay.
-
Energy transfer on a scrapper is going to be doing something like 110 DPA on twenty second recharge. It also has an okay stun and hurts you quite a bit. Importantly, it probably won't get any chance to crit at all. Compare that to something like sweeping strike, which does about 100 DPA on eleven second recharge, is a huge cone, and does not hurt you. Or storm kick, which does again around 100 DPA but on six second recharge, has an enhanced chance to crit, and does not hurt you. Dual blades and martial arts also get honest to gosh grown up aoe powers, one of which I already enumerated as a DPA champion. So what's the point of energy melee?
-
It feels like we've been over this a hundred times before, A_F, so I'll limit myself to just one comment.
If meleers in the know being able to dodge blue patches impresses you, just imagine for a moment a blaster who can maintain constant high DPS fire on battle maiden for the entire fight, while dodging swords, warriors, and patches. This may be a radical concept but blasters don't actually have to sit still to run their attack chains. Meleers do. -
Quote:That movement bind thing is a great idea that had not occurred to me. Sounds like it'd make life easier on any character that needs to refresh lots of things all the time.I don't even know what the above means. My Rage generally recharges in about 80 seconds. For a long time I just clicked it sometime after I noticed it was recharged, kind of like I would handle Foot Stomp or KoB. If I failed to click it for 10 or 20 seconds, so be it, I lost some efficiency on my slight double rage time. I do now have files bound to my move keys which keeps Rage and Hasten going pretty much automatically, although I have to watch during some AV fights if I stop moving
What I was trying to get at but perhaps not actually saying was that having rage stacked exactly once or twice, such that you activate it say one second before its crash, is going to give you the maximum amount of buff for the minimum proportion of crash. If you have enough recharge to triple stack rage for fifteen seconds, well, you'll hit pretty hard for the five seconds of overlap that isn't within the crash period but the crash period will consume relatively more of your total time.Quote:I think you are a bit too concerned about this exact timing thing. Even if you choose to not perma Rage, at 2 minutes of up time, and a 10 second crash and then 20 more seconds before you click it again, SS is still a fabulous set and Rage is still way better than Build Up. Perhaps you are focused on perma Double Rage? That does sound like a pain to manage, because in order to keep it going I imagine you have to be right on top of it, since you will likely be very tight on the recharge. Quote:I am guessing you are one of those people who do not actually use Build Up. You kind of hit it once or twice a mission and are content with your damage output without Build Up. Its nice that BU can recharge in 22.5 seconds, but if you can't handle clicking Rage every 80-100 seconds, what makes Build Up easier to manage if you have to click it every 24? -
I figured that if anything my litany against SS would have made it abundantly clear that I have figured out many ways to dislike rage. I actually don't like any of those things I said, and you're correct, I left out the endurance penalty because I was trying to be generous. The only way you can say that rage is "more manageable" than build up is if your custom is to play the game as a robot would and you actually enjoy making the rage train run on time. Isn't it obvious that I don't?
Another thing I didn't get into is the fact that without considering the buffs, SS doesn't have many good powers. KO Blow is good and foot stomp is a slightly above average pbaoe due mainly to its extra large radius. Nothing else in the set would make the cut if you were using most other primaries and could add any SS power you wanted to them. Spines and electric melee come to mind as the only melee sets that can't put together a better ST chain than rageless SS. So in that sense, rage constrains you even more as if you fail to keep its timing exact then your efficiency drops commensurately. Most other sets don't actually need to fire BU every time it's available to continue doing good single target damage. They can, of course. Oh, and if we're talking about double stacked rage, which I was, then BU is recharging in 22.5 seconds.
To sum it up, if something stinks I don't need to put it into my mouth to know I won't like it. -
Looking at the blaster secondaries, dark pit actually would make sense as a high tier darkness manipulation power in that it is at least as bad as frozen aura and world of confusion and those continue to stand the test of time. However, if they did nothing else, they would still have to bump it up to normal accuracy for it not to be considered a cruel joke. I would hope that they either revamp or exclude the power and come up with something more interesting and useful.
-
Quote:Will you really? My initial reading of this is that you're rejecting all sets but SS as it is the only set with rage in it. Surely you don't feel that SS is so much better than every other set by any measure that it's the only one worth playing.I'll take the shorter, huge crash, over the large crash that lasts far longer and requires 2 to 3 times the animation time.Quote:Originally Posted by Von KriegerAfter certain milestones the Rage Crash's 10 seconds don't really mean much. With the Veteran Rewards powers and Judgment, due to their ignoring entirely of damage buffs and debuffs, you are still capable of putting out some damage during the crash. Not as much as you were before, but for me it's not 10 seconds of zero damage output.
-
To be somewhat contrary, followup -> focus -> slash requires very high global recharge, hasten, the whole shebang. Adding swipe to the chain completely does away with that requirement. If he's happy to run four attacks instead of three for single target, quite possibly because he has swipe slotted with kinetic combats in the first place, well, that's probably an easier solution that trying to come up with a huge recharge build for WP.
As has been established, WP gains literally nothing from recharge. The heal from spiritual also fails to impress. The question now is, what does spiritual do for the attack chain? I'm happy to take your word for the numbers you've got there, Syntax, and in that light it seems that spiritual is plainly worse than musculature. As in, you'd be better off just living with a gap and doing more damage. I find it virtually impossible to believe that spiritual could take a willpower character from a medium chain to a top chain all by itself so I guess musculature looks best? -
If they'd left dark pit in, would you use it? Blasters may be, uh, positioned better to get utility out of what some may call the dregs of the control hardness scale, but dark pit seems unsalvageable to me. With blaster values I believe it would be an 8 second mag 2 stun that does nothing else and has sub-par accuracy. I would consider taking that as an absolute amazement mule if I had a major slot surplus but I can think of nothing else good to say about it. This is particularly true because blasters are one of the better archetypes for minion massacring - if tenebrous tentacles and umbral torrent do approximately scale 1 damage, what's the motivation to stun a spawn with one click when you're only two clicks away from killing most of it?
-
Absolutely, and clearly BU will spend more animation time than rage if given the same level of recharge, producing significantly less buff for your efforts. In terms of annoyance, however, the rage crash looks like it's something else. 10 seconds of crash every 60 seconds, on the 60 seconds. To make matters worse, if you let rage lapse entirely for whatever reason you also get a big defense debuff. My third problem is that without considering rage it has exactly two powers that are competitive with those in other sets, so rage maintenance is obviously expected of you, if not technically required.
Build up is just a nice little buff that's there when you need it. Sets that have it are largely fine even if you aren't using it, and there's no penalty for its use. Is it as good as rage? Of course not, but nobody sacrifices anything to have build up.
Oh yeah, and another thing in BU's favor is that there's no compulsion to use it in such a repetitive manner. Did you let it sit fully recharged for a few seconds? No big deal, use it on this next jerk over here! Not only does rage demand more precise timing than this, if you are double stacking rage it is highly likely that you have hasten on auto already, so you're stuck doing it manually. Short of an extremely recharge focused build that manages to get exactly the right amount for exactly doubled rage without hasten, I guess. -
I think this could work, guys. Let's see...
You're going to need Field of Pistols for moderate s/l and low energy resistance, Pistol Skin for low energy and high f/c defense, and of course Pistol Maintenance, a healing flames clone where you quickly pull out a stool to sit on while you clean the barrel (John Woo style animation).
Automatic Aura naturally surrounds you with floating pistols which fire every two seconds for .2 scale damage and a light recovery debuff. Off to the Races is a solid tier 7 that grants you and nearby teammates 30% recharge reduction and 40% recharge and movement speed resistance for 60 seconds on an unenhanceable 150 second timer.
As for the tier 9, what else, an unstop clone called Hard Boiled. For its 180 second duration you're frozen in place as you drink highballs and regret your dark past, but you also gain 55% resistance to all but toxic and psi, and any enemies within 25 feet will be mag 30 stunned by the tragedy that tempers your legendary marksmanship prowess.
There's a few gaps in there but you need to give the devs a little room to get creative. -
I'd guess 60% chance for 5ish KB. Just a shot in the dark...
My hope would be that they normalize the set's cone areas somewhat. There isn't exactly a lot of precedent for blaster sets with multiple damaging cones, but if you compare defender dark blast to assault rifle there is a clear winner in terms of cone usability (it's assault rifle). Besides, all they need to do to establish umbral torrent's range is the ol' "combining two cones into one in a proliferated set" formula. You know the one! "Subtract The Range Difference Between The Damage Cone And The Control Cone From The Damage Cone And Add Their Arcs," or its popular mnemonic, STRDBTDCATCCFTDCAATA. It's as easy as that. -
Wow, you must be having a bad day. I hope things turn around.
Somewhere in there you did in fact hit on my actual point - claws is superior on scrappers in the context of ambush farming. I'm simply curious why that can be counted as a point in favor of other sets but none of the regulars seem to consider it in this case.
As for SS, there are no doubt many ways to technically alleviate the crash, but for my part I'll never try the set until rage is completely redone simply because it looks way too obnoxious between the constant recast and the even more constant debuff. I wasn't saying the set was bad, I was pointing out what I consider a parallel between a potential case against scrapper SS and a potential case against scrapper claws.
Whew, managed to get through that post without drooling all over myself in a fit of ecstatic troll-lust. Will wonders never cease? -
Quote:Isn't it a tad silly to say that claws is better on brutes than on scrappers in spite of the math due to intangibles after saying in the same thread that the ultimate scrapper primary would be one where you can't do damage 17% of the time because you hit so dang hard when you are permitted to attack?Theorically, if you do nothing but stand still and use Spin the scrapper would do more damage, but ingame, against moving targets with a finite amount of HP and using other powers, you get animation limited very quickly. In the end, the added damage of brute spin more than makes up for the increased recharge and then some.
-
Tell you what, if they can beat me to the spawn, then they get a say in what happens to the members thereof. Honestly I prefer it when it's a race, that's the fastest way to do TFs, but I'm pragmatic enough to be happy to settle for leading each fight. When you've got three or four team members who are ripping into spawns with judgements on top of what their purpled builds can do on their own, yes, meleers are marginalized. So's anyone.
In precisely the same way as this nullifies the positive impact of any particular teammate, it also means no one person has any hope of screwing things up. The closest anyone can get to that at this point would be if you had the build to solo Antimatter at keyes island but lacked the sense not to. Energy blasters? They're fine. -
Oh yeah, I definitely didn't mean to say that as a blaster you're not tough enough to melee, just that a tanker typically has time to let combustion work (since he's so bad at killing stuff). If you run at +3 then it certainly does start to look more viable. I prefer +0 or +1 just because it's more usually more hyperactive.
Which setting do you prefer, Kioshi? That might be your answer right there on which aoe to go with. -
Looks good to me. One tiny little change I'd suggest is losing the acc/heal in siphon life in exchange for a common heal io. Kinetic combat is a little light on acc enhancement but you also have siphon insight and ragnarok bonuses. I think I'm more comfortable with "close enough" accuracy than a lot of people on the forum though.
-
Combustion's DPA only beats empty clips' if you don't use inferno rounds. I feel quite secure in assuming that any discussion of DP's DPS assumes inferno rounds will never be deactivated. The other problem with combustion is the whole ten seconds from click to full damage thing: you're a blaster, not a tanker. Hopefully you plan on killing minions and lts in less than ten seconds.
-
If you guys don't think blasters can farm, or if you think you need defense to be able to farm, you're about three years behind the curve. Here's the exhaustive list of farming character requirements: aoes, recharge. I'd say I'd leave the details as an exercise for the reader except you can find tons of videos of it on youtube.
Oh, and to actually answer the original question, I'd probably go archery/mm if it were specifically for farming, as rain of arrows is up faster than hail and it is also much less likely to overkill enemies.