PleaseRecycle

I'd like to know what you guys are running where you can get every spawn bunched up for aoe in an efficient manner. Enemies always stay where they are during the alpha and only about half of the enemies in a spawn that are set to prefer melee will attempt to do so at one time. Enemies that prefer range, which make up a substantial portion of virtually every high level group other than Cimerorans, will often ignore even taunt in their fervor to remain distant from you. The upshot is that a perfectly herded spawn is often only possible with a corner pull.

Why is that relevant? Well, corner pulling takes time. In many cases it isn't even possible and the closest analogous tactic available is pulling the spawn into a slow patch and grouping them up that way. The common feature of any pulling strategy, though, is that it is inherently slower than a strategy that kills the enemies where they stand without manipulating their AI.

How is that possible, though? Melee aoes are almost all melee ranged! Even foot stomp can't reach the edges of a standard x8 spawn when placed at its center! Oh, if only there were an archetype which specialized in aoes that were large enough to hit an entire spawn at once, possibly with the tradeoff of requiring intelligent positioning of cones. What a wonder that would be.

In my own experience, it makes very little difference what type of blaster is doing the blasting as long as they're willing and able to apply their attacks to the most targets that they can at that moment. This is an inherently adaptive tactic and can be applied to situations where crap is not conveniently stacked upon itself. One might even say it is a superior tactic as it works both in stacked-crap scenarios and the equally-if-not-more common scattered crap eventuality! If we suppose the existence of this mysterious player who can reposition herself as needed to maximize damage without waiting for crap to collate, exciting new realms of possibility arise.

What then to do with the meleers? Even those poor souls have a place of honor in this bright future of ours. You see, they can leap headlong into the fray and begin attempting to apply their own powers to as many targets as they can. This may require leaving the safe harbor of standing in one spot and entering the stormy seas of moving around while hitting things; the terror you feel is normal. Calm yourselves, friends, for in time it will pass and the wondrous warmth of not being stationary all the time will envelop you like the most joyous of aoe buffs.

Please skip combustion if you go /fire. I implore you.

DP/ice would be good. DP/EM and DP/MM are the old standbys, if a set that's about one year old can be said to have such things, but ice does offer build up and a couple of quite nice control powers. Fire is fine too but I don't see a lot of value in adding tons of attacks from the secondary myself given how DP works in the first place.

In the spirit of minimizing redraw, my philosophy with DP is to take as many of the attacks as are useful. For me this meant everything except for executioner's shot. Empty clips is a very average cone, it's true, but consider the alternatives. Fire sword circle, for instance, does about 25% better DPA than empty clips. That's a significant difference, but one of them is a medium range cone and the other is a small pbaoe. Combustion actually does worse DPA than empty clips and locks you in one place for longer, in melee range. Yowza.

Then take suppressive fire. It's just a medium range control power, so nothing earth shattering for a blast set, but unlike any other comparable power you can choose whether it's a hold or a stun. One thing this gives it is an amazing range of slotting options, but it's also great for stacking with secondary and APP control powers. In general I wouldn't skip some kind of hard control on a blaster if I had the option to take it because there are cases, such as the LGTF, where it is just not a good idea not to have something of the sort.

Executioner's shot, meanwhile, does basically the same DPA as pistols and dual wield. This is a problem for it since they have 80 foot range and it has half that. They can also be used while mezzed due to defiance, and shorter animation is generally more desirable, DPA being equal. The other big issue is that piercing rounds also does essentially the same DPA, except when it hits more than one target in which case it does either two or three times better DPA.

So! I'd skip that last one and take the rest. If you do want to focus more on your secondary it could make sense to skip empty clips. By no means should you ever consider skipping pistols, dual wield, bullet rain, swap ammo, or hail of bullets. Piercing rounds isn't a set-defining power but wouldn't you like a tier 3 blast that moonlights as an aoe?

Oh yeah don't get me wrong, I'd listen to the other advice in the thread and fix up the build a bit before going to the trouble of building up an ageless, but if he were opposed to that for whatever reason it'd sure solve the problem.

If nothing else you should just buy miracle: recoverys instead of lotg globals and at least make the 2.5ish billion you'd need to simply buy the dang io. At least, I always seem to sell those for a lot more than lotg globals lately!

On the subject of switching sides as a ruse, it doesn't seem like you'd even have to be all that subtle about it given the intellect that Black Scorpion is implied to have. You could probably get away with just jingling your car keys in front of him while you reached into his pocket and grabbed the shield were he not standing in the same room as all of his coworkers.

If you did nothing else to that character buildwise, even that crazy single target endurance usage would be doable if you acquired ageless destiny. "Ageless: Wowie!"

Two things: I'd lose the ragnarok: damage and replace it with the ragnarok proc. The damage remains essentially ed capped and those procs are nutso, man. Also, being nine seconds off permahasten is effectively meaningless, especially since willpower gains no benefit whatsoever from recharge in the first place. The only thing that signifies is that you have slightly less than 100% global recharge. I don't see a reason to sweat that unless the OCD-piquing nature of a tiny gap is going to bug you.

The new build looks good to me. Two reasons to use erads in hail: previously, you essentially had its recharge unenhanced, eradication fixes that big time. Also, slotting level 30ish erads should actually increase the damage enhancement compared to your old slotting - for it to drop by 60 would be a 23% reduction. Are you sure you didn't flag incendiary ammo as off or something? I don't know how mids works but I assume that's a thing that you can do.

Not being exactly softcapped isn't really a big deal in my opinion. For one thing you're going to kill things so rapidly that even on a team inspirations will be copious. Beyond that, the softcap becomes more of an issue for endurance-based (as in time consuming, not the blue stuff) challenges. 5% off of softcap can definitely mean the difference between soloing an av or not, but is that something you plan to do with a blaster? Actually, that isn't even especially true anymore what with incarnate powers - anyone can grab a Victoria, or now the longbow heavy I hear, and rip anything a new one.

To put the incarnate issue another way, I recently got tier 4 rebirth on my dp/em and most of the time I use it to heal teammates rather than myself because aid self is still good enough for me even though I only have like 37% ranged defense. Full disclosure, I did take rise of the phoenix and I do have the occasion to use it now and then! If I played even a little bit more conservatively it wouldn't be necessary at all though.

There is indeed an easy way to get lotg globals: alignment merits. You can trade in two hero or villain merits for the rare IO of your choice, including lotg globals. Just in the process of leveling up the character you should easily get ten or more alignment merits if you run story arcs, tips, and tfs, so that's them right there.

Hail is such a significant part of your arsenal that it isn't worth making major compromises on its effectiveness for the sake of bonuses, but the nice thing is that eradication gives you some ranged defense itself so there's no real reason not to use it.

Power boost does buff defense powers but it does so for iirc ten or fifteen seconds. Shadow meld is an example of a power that gives a significant enough defense boost for that time period that it's worth taking, slotting, and animating. A couple percentage points doesn't really cut it by comparison for something so very far from permanent.

Basically executioner's shot is no better than pistols, dual wield, and piercing rounds. Therefore, most of the time you can get by with just those instead of taking a fourth power that fills the same niche but not as well as the other three you already have. It is true that your attack chain will not be as smooth without executioner's shot but in my view it isn't worth the opportunity cost. Suppressive fire, meanwhile, will take a pesky minion or lieut out of action immediately and most likely permanently, and if you slot it with lockdown it has a 20% chance to instantly hold a boss. I like those odds. I admit it is more attractive if you also take a second hold from an epic pool however.

If you can't stomach losing any of those pools for leaping that is fair enough. I can hardly imagine not taking cj myself but I will try to get past it just this once!

When I think XXX super reflexes I don't think T for Teen.

Lots of primaries are good, of course, but I hope your experience ends up more on the kinetic end than the fire melee end.

Okay, looks good for the most part but just a few things. I would skip the acc/dam in posi's blast as the six slot bonus is useless. Five is all ya need and the set gives you global acc anyway. Speaking of bonuses to shoot for, four slots of red fortune in weave doesn't accomplish a whole lot. Good values, sure, but if you aren't shy about using lotgs, well, four lotgs including the global give better bonuses, similar values, and a lotg global. The most egregious error I see in the build is the slotting on hail - do not treat it as a standard nuke! I could see slotting nova for kb because one of nova's perks is how amusing it is to send people flying, but with hail you want it to only knock them down because it will do so multiple times per enemy per application and this keeps you safe from reprisal while it animates. You'll also get the best values out of a set like eradication or obliteration since those give fantastic bonuses and good damage and recharge enhancement. I personally chose eradication, my hail is well below the ED cap for damage and it still kills everything it hits.

I wouldn't take power boost. It doesn't do much for DP and it doesn't do much for EM, rendering it a somewhat odd power to exist in the set. You also have conserve power and boost range overslotted. Boost range will be perma with either one or two slots but you won't want to use it perma anyway in any but extraordinary circumstances. Conserve power could use two slots at most, with two level 50 generic recharges in it. I would swap executioner's shot with suppressive fire, also - you don't even have to change out the thunderstrikes if you don't want to, but if you slot six lockdowns instead you still get the 3.75% ranged defense out of it plus better hold duration with incendiary rounds. Six slotting stealth is kind of weird too. It gives the same defense as combat jumping yet slows you as opposed to speeding you up. By all means take stealth if you want, but it would be fine with three lotgs, for example. Absolutely take combat jumping too however. It can take a lotg, a karma and a kismet, and if you put two level 50 generic jumping ios into hurdle you get unsuppressable 50some mph movement in combat between the two.

I swear I didn't intend for the first line of this post to seem ironic. You would do fine if you went ahead as it was, but, you know, consider alterations.

MM is a lot like EM in many ways. They both get a few core buffs that are the main reason to take em. MM is the only blaster set that gets a regen debuff, and what a regen debuff it is, so most people would probably tell you that MM is the best blaster secondary and I can't really argue with that. They aren't radically different in performance most of the time though, again that's more of a hard targets only kind of thing. Both give you build up, both give you some sort of endurance management, EM gives you boost range and power thrust while MM gives you world of confusion (to be used as a purple mule) and a completely average immobilize.

I don't take the melee attacks, but it's having all of your damage baked into your character or relying on pets and pseudopets to do a lot of the work. DP/EM buffs itself as needed and is good to go. DP/Traps obviously has to spend some time laying the traps. For example, you're going to hit force field generator every three or four minutes, and often you need to wait for it to catch up to you, you'll drop an acid mortar basically whenever possible, trying to cover two or three spawns when you can, PGT and seeker drones are worth using very frequently, and caltrops isn't often necessary but against certain types of enemy it would be silly not to use it since you've got it. All of those powers are great but they don't activate themselves, you need to take a couple seconds to place them when you want them.

That said, when you're sitting in a cloud of poison gas with two acid mortars plinking away, seekers whizzing around and all of it covered by your force field, you're both more durable than the blaster and contributing more to the team's damage, especially against an AV. My question therefore was which situation would you rather be prepared for? Pulling your friends out of the fire, or shoving most non-AV groups directly into it?

Excellent points, teflon.

Saying that death shroud is the worst damage aura is like saying that the Gallardo is the slowest Lamborghini. Most people would still take it.

To answer some of your questions in no particular order...

The pros of DP/EM will be a lot more damage, more range on tap as you say, and a lot more mobility. That last one is really important to some of us but perhaps not as important to you. The selling points of DP/Traps are of course mez protection, defense, powerful debuffs, and controls. The corr will solo safer and maybe even faster prior to incarnate abilities, and will also bring more to AV fights and such.

If it sounds like I'm recommending the corruptor unconditionally, I'm not. I love my DP/EM and I doubt I could play the set in corruptor form. It absolutely excels at the manic bunnyhopping style of play and the corr simply won't have that option. It's also the difference between being able to hit BU, leap into a spawn, and clear it with hail, and having to set up a mortar just to be able to hopefully finish off lieuts with it. DP/Traps would be a fantastic combo but I think it would require a more methodical mindset.

So, do you prefer cackling gleefully as you rain chaos and fire upon all who stand before you, or do you prefer having the absolute strongest character available? I'd say that's pretty much the difference.

Is there any reason to take shout? It does identical DPA to scream but with less granular animation and recharge times, as well as reduced range. It seems to me that the optimal chain for a soloing /sonic is shriek -> scream, and the optimal chain for a teaming /sonic is shriek -> scream -> screech -> shriek -> scream -> howl for a hard target, or simply shriek -> scream -> howl for masses of stuff. Lacking the recharge for shriek -> scream, I'd rather either accept a small gap or add howl than take an extra attack that seems to exist only as a joke. I guess identical DPA but an extra stacking of -res makes it technically worth it when soloing hard targets, but is that the only case where it's worth it?

-res is indeed more desirable in virtually all cases. The main reason is simple: -def can be replicated by anything that causes you to hit your target, and once you have a 95% chance to hit your target you no longer gain anything from additional -def. On top of this, -def effects are more commonly available to players, being built right into many attack and control sets and nearly all debuff sets. -res is available in debuff sets, sonic blast, tanker bruising, venom grenade, and some epic powers, usually but not always with relatively poor uptime or effectiveness in the latter.

In addition to the difference in rarity, though, -res is beneficial to stack all the way up to the -200% cap, a very difficult number to reach on your average pick up team. Thus the rule of thumb would be "more -res is always better." As if this weren't enough, -res and +dam are not only not redundant like -def and +tohit are, they go fantastically well together. A single kineticist can kick most of the team up to the damage cap and at that point there is no further benefit from +dam. Bring some -res to the party and you can still as much as triple the team's damage from there.

As sad as the situation is for -def, it does have one trick up its sleeve: most -def powers accept the achilles' heel chance for -res proc. What a pyrrhic victory.

I never said it was your weenie that was small...

And really? You need finely tuned non-pick up teams to do all those things you listed? Not one of them could afford to bring an energy blaster, nevermind that one flavor of energy blaster is capable of packing more -regen than most flavors of defender?

Of course that isn't what you mean. You're saying that occasionally some level of selectivity is wise on the part of the leader. I agree. If your BAF league already consists of 23 stalkers, consider inviting a peacebringer for that last slot. Obviously. There is a major difference between a team needing a specific thing and a team needing to not have a specific thing, however. Is -regen important on a kahn? Sure, it's the easiest way to resolve the fight quickly. You can get -regen from a variety of sources, including an inexpensive temp power, but the point is that it's nice to have.

On the other hand, energy blast. Is adding energy blast to an otherwise solid team going to turn a successful tf into a failed tf? No. Is adding energy blast going to significantly slow the tf? Most likely not. Will energy blast sink a team that is already marginal? I'd be amazed. In fact, in that case it is more likely to get full benefit from its knockback mitigation. My point is, energy blast is never so onerous a penalty to a team that their fortunes will change. At worst it may rub you the wrong way. Pretending that your own fragile feelings are analogous to the very essence of the team is laughable.

If I wanted to rub it in, I'd mention the STF I ran where the only tank quit after the first mission. We pressed on and while it took some doing, recluse went down at about the 90 minute mark. Oh yeah, there were four blasters and two of them were energy.

Energy may have had seven years to acquire a reputation, one that I've never noticed myself anywhere but on the forum, but players have had up to seven years to learn to cope with the torturous adversity that is inflicted upon them when an energy blaster (or defender, or corruptor, or dominator) joins their team. If one guy using kb recklessly is all it takes to ruin your fun, what is it that you do exactly? What are you bringing to the team that you are so easily rendered ineffective? How pro of a player are you that your bag of tricks consists in its entirety of "herd and aoe?"

There are two situations where it makes sense to shoot for a specific team composition. One is when you're working toward an unusual goal, such as a master of task force or an all-FF superteam. The other is if the composition you're after is "a team full of my friends" in which case you presumably will discuss which characters to bring amongst yourselves. In any other situation, there is no reason not to fill the team first come first served. If you're leading a team in the first place you ought to be anywhere from prepared to eager to make up for any given minor inefficiency yourself.

If you already feel like DP is outdamaging AR, the tier 9s probably aren't going to do anything but reinforce that. Not only does hail hit significantly harder than full auto, it can hit six more targets and it gives you ample mitigation while you're animating it. The drawback is of course that it takes twice as long to recharge but of the two I know which one I'd rather have.

In what way is brute spin more desirable than scrapper spin? It may be possible to get it to do more damage in one shot, but it does not seem possible to get it to do more damage over time. Sure, while you're waiting the extra however long for it to recharge compared to scrapper spin you can fit in an additional single target attack or a shockwave or something, but if your goal is to do maximum pbaoe damage over a sustained period, how can the brute compete?

While the brute will be tougher to kill, is anyone going to argue that willpower scrappers are squishy?

Stone/invuln would be pretty freaking unstoppable, all right. Can it solo too? It sure can, in the sense that the foes laid before you have no way to prevent you from eventually reaching and smiting them. One might say that a glacier is unstoppable in much the same way. If you're a tree in the valley beneath it, there isn't a lot you can do about it. Think happy thoughts about global warming, mainly.

However, if you want to solo fast, you probably will want to go for stone/elec or elec/stone, of the two. Fault adds survivability to any set, but invuln is strong enough all by itself. Elec can also be plenty strong with no primary mitigation but it doesn't hurt either, and you get a damage aura that will do far and away more aoe damage than anything in stone melee can ever dream of. I also suspect that an elec/stone tanker would solo a good deal faster than a stone/invuln brute.

The Hand of Fate.

Especially if you plan on hitting the thighmaster.

Oh I think most people in the game would be amply impressed were you to solo an AV, saying nothing of an entire TF with loads of AVs in it. Especially on a blaster, no matter how you did it. I suspect you could solo a GM if you really dialed the build in to do exactly that to a specific GM, but it would be so far beyond tedious that I'd be more impressed by your personal stamina than you blasting ability.

On a similar note, I bet a fire/mm can just fight rom on the stairs and win, especially if you have the right tier 3 and 4 incarnate powers, but man oh man you'd be engaging in some jumbo sized trial and error getting that one right. Maybe you're into that, that's cool. It isn't weird. Okay, not that weird...

Though now that I think about it... tier 4 rebirth, victoria, musculature, drain psyche, and a selection of super inspirations (not the ultimate inspiration, that would be cheating) would probably knock rom down pretty fast and at that point you're home free. This could be crazy enough to work.

Corrupter base damage is actually .75 to blasters' 1.15, a very noticeable difference. Scourge is stellar against hard targets but for general gameplay it does not make up a gap that large. The corr would also be clickier than the blaster in that you frequently need to apply your debuffs. The flipside of that obviously is that you have debuffs to apply, making you almost certain to contribute more to the damage of a full team or league than the blaster can, and even more soloable in certain cases. However, I find that defiance deserves more credit than it sometimes gets when discussing soloing - if you build for defense, you can burn down a lot of bosses with your first two primary and first secondary attacks without dying.

The corr would be a much more straightforward ITF soloist. You might not even have to try to single pull Rom; simply debuff him into a kitten, summon your victoria and light him up.