PleaseRecycle
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Quote:I'm not going to argue that blaster secondaries are particularly good, the only ones I can personally stand to play being EM and MM. Even with those I only take the utility powers, slot up the mandatory attack, and forgo the melee and psi aoes. Instead of looking at blasters as half an archetype, I see them as meant to do everything in their power to leverage the hell out of the primary and those utility powers. To that end, blasters in general get more freedom than most combinations in any other AT to pick the pools they want and slot them as fully as they want.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Blaster secondaries don't match other powersets. At best they borrow bits and pieces likely to cut down on the cost of creating something for just one AT.I don't remember the specifics offhand but didn't that chart show that blasters at level 50 were still in the top five most played ATs? A drop in popularity from number one at low level of course, but the majority of ATs didn't even make the list. As we know from other dev comments, several ATs are in the neighborhood of 1.5% usage. Maybe it varies by server but I rarely see a trial team that doesn't have more than one blaster, and possibly never one that lacks any blasters.Quote:It really was just an aha I was right moment when I saw the devs data dump to kotaku was in alignment with what I had been saying. Unfortunately I lack mids but I assume the blaster has huge recharge and ranged and/or s/l defense and the brute has an inexpensive softcapping build. I have a lot more level 50 and IOed out scrappers than blasters myself so I know how that can be. For instance, Spin can do 300ish damage every five seconds without even that much recharge while Fireball struggles to keep pace for thrice as much bling. Meanwhile the meleer is not at risk and the blaster occasionally is.Quote:Edit: here is a point of comparison for you
My fire/mental blaster likely the best performing blaster I have
I really would have loved to squeeze aid self in here but it would have gutted the offense and a good portion of the defense.
vs My claws/sr brute.
For about a tenth the effort I get considerably superior performance.
The tradeoff for me is that Spin is basically the sum of the meleer's tricks in practical circumstances, by which I always mean speed TFs. It's a doozy, of course, but here's an example of what I mean from last week's WTF that I ran a hundred freaking times. Full team, +2 level, DP/EM blaster admittedly more incarnated than my KM/FA scrapper. Mission 1: Both characters are equally good at running directly to the end and wiping out the Penelope Yin guards and surrounding spawns. Getting mezzed hardly matters when a single window of opportunity results in a hail of bullets which kills everything and knocks the bosses onto their butts. Mission 2: Whee, the riders. My blaster has no problem taking on the rider spawns solo. Why? Cause famine can't terrorize and drain what isn't standing next to him. My scrapper basically has to sit around for teammates to catch up and then we all bum rush. It works but it is less amusing. Mission 3: Both of them are great at rescuing the poor, trusting hostages. Mission 4: My scrapper can kill a yellow in five seconds, but after that he's basically a cheerleader for the rest of the team. No room in the build for holds, either, as I bypassed an epic to softcap s/l more efficiently. I'm pretty sure that my blaster could solo hami if I could figure out a way to handle the final phase. Mission 5: No difference. Oh, and my blaster has vengeance and resuscitate, while my scrapper only had room for the former.
Blasters are great if you ask me. All you need is extreme damage baked into more than one or two single great powers and the high level game is your oyster. One thing I am starting to come around to is the idea of turning all nukes into crashless nukes. Why should the weapon sets have all the fun? -
You guys should consider continuing to play, because that was the level where it became clear that I could buff my own damage to the point where one hit would do about half again as much damage as a built up assassin's strike, every eight seconds. If anything the hand waving should simply make the strikees feel worse about themselves.
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At any point between your initial realization that a particular character wasn't meeting one or more of your expectations and your eventual declaration that the entire archetype is useless, Another Fan, did you wonder if perhaps your problem is an internal one?
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Actually yeah, if the AV combo is worth one entire damage scale, nimble slash will not do you any favors. Just roll that additional damage into vengeful slice and it suddenly looks a lot more appealing! And it's aoe, and the entire team can see how much behind you're stomping thanks to the convenient floating words. I hadn't realized that AV causes sweeping strike to hit as hard as headsplitter. Just, you know, in 1.23 seconds and with a 90 degree arc. DB is so great.
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Rebirth in particular would be pretty cool on elec as it would be a second, more powerful version of energize on a similar timer, sans the endurance discount. It also goes quite well with elec's high resistances and a bit of defense. Ageless, on the other hand, would be quite nice if you went radial as that would let you kill defense debuff cascades on a set otherwise vulnerable to them.
As the happy proprietor of a fire scrapper and an elec scrapper in heavily ioed form, I'd say a case can be made for each, especially with a great aoe primary like spines. It's basically what it says on the tin - elec is sturdier, has excellent psi protection and is immune to end drains (which is all incredibly relevant in high level content going forward, from what we've seen so far), while fire is "sturdy enough" and is the most offensive thing out there since Dick Cheney left office. D-Void definitely would not feel sluggish and weak on a spines/elec, let's put it that way. -
The thing about gaussian's in feint is, if you really want the CFBU effect in the power, feel free to throw that into the fifth or six slot. That's really the only good thing about the set compared to the alternatives. If you put hecatombs in there you get radically better recharge, plus the global bonus, or if you put kinetic combats in it you get much more of the kind of defense that, with fire armor, you most want. Either way it does like 70% more damage than it would with GSFC in it.
I will also say that while you should try it yourself to see how you feel about it, the CFBU is really not very good even in blinding feint, which is basically the best possible place to put it. With a five percent chance to fire and a duration of five and a half seconds, the buff over time is not insubstantial but I would argue probably not worth a slot. I realize that that slotting gives it more chances to fire than putting it in something like tactics, but of the two I'd still put it in tactics because then you do get the defense bonus out of it but without the cost of sacrificing slots on a key attack, and it still activates a couple times per mission while in combat.
So yeah, in short it isn't that you're wrecking your build with GSFC in BF or anything, and with global acc bonuses you're probably still fine for hitting stuff, but I can pretty much guarantee that increasing BF's damage will have a larger impact than the proc by five to ten times, especially since you can still put the set somewhere else if you do want it.
edited for bizarre mental math error heh -
Cardiac is an attractive option for ElA if you wanted to skimp a little bit on end redux slotting but still avoid putting power sink on auto. Going body mastery probably enables you to slot musculature or spiritual instead, so it comes down to how you want to balance your power selection versus your alpha. You could even contemplate ageless, but rebirth would be awfully tempting if you can get your endurance elsewhere!
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One thing to consider is that while dropping VS could possibly increase your single target damage slightly, there's just no way that anything other than the top chain is going to outdamage BF -> AV versus all targets in the cone. So to more directly answer your question I don't actually know how much the AV bonus contributes, other than "a lot" which I can only report anecdotally.
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I can't see the build as I don't have mids but to answer a couple of your questions...
Kinetic combat is a great set because if you slot all four non-proc pieces of it you get very reasonable enhancement values, for four slots, and you get the largest available s/l defense bonus. I softcapped my KM/FA's s/l defense (and to say it's worth it is putting it extremely lightly) in large part due to five sets of kinetic combat.
Obliteration is also a great set and six slotting it in your average pbaoe gives great damage and recharge values as well as bonuses, so doing so should never hurt you. The one exception is if that aoe is endurance-expensive as oblit barely touches that. As oblits and KCs are in separate categories though, I don't see any reason why you should have to choose between them or why slotting more of one or the other should have an impact on your damage.
Blinding feint should be slotted as an attack for three reasons. Possibly even more reasons but three leap to mind. First, you're using it constantly. Every six seconds. If it isn't doing as much damage as it can, that is a hell of a lot of dead air. It would be comparable to inflicting the rage crash upon yourself voluntarily. Second, GSFC is a cool set for tohit toggles, or even build up if you're feeling randy, but its enhancement values are garbage for an attack. Third, more of a corollary to point two really, melee sets are awesome and any chance you get to slot one without compromise should be taken. Might I suggest kinetic combat? Or, if you are slotting a set of hecatombs, I would stick those in BF and something else in AS as BF has much higher recharge requirements to use in the chain than AS does and hecatomb is peachy on that front.
Starflier is super-correct, combat jumping not only is far cheaper than stealth and without its drawbacks, but it enables the hyperactive style of play that leaves me with little choice but to take cj at level 6 on every single character I create.
Melt armor is crap, it isn't worth redrawing your swords to use it on anything lower than an AV, but it's a good set mule if you really want it. -
Fire, Archery and Sonic all pay for their shorter recharge times on their respective tier 1 and/or 2 blasts with reduced damage, but not consistently. For example, fire blast has significantly reduced damage for a tier 2 but flares is by far the best tier 1 despite its short recharge. Dual pistols has a 6 second tier 2 and appears to have reduced damage but does normal damage when fire ammo is factored in.
It seems unlikely to me that if AR were to be rebalanced for shorter recharges it would keep its standard damage values on both of its single target blasts. Perhaps one of them, but I doubt both. I don't really see the problem with using an aoe attack for filler though, especially since buckshot is so great and is also on an eight second timer. -
Blazing aura and fiery embrace are incredibly necessary, and along with burn are basically the entire reason to use the set. If you do go DB/FA, one of the primary benefits is that double stacked blinding feint will really kick your blazing aura into high gear. Temp protection is not essential but slow resistance doesn't hurt and it's a nice place to stick a steadfast.
You can of course take whatever DB attacks you please, but the best non-silly chain is Blinding Feint -> Ablating Strike -> Vengeful Slice -> Sweeping Strike -> repeat, also called BF->AV. This does great single target and cone damage so a case could be made that the combos apart from attack vitals can be ignored, and their powers skipped. This saves you a few power picks and a ton of slots. However, if running such a terse chain is unappealing, sweep is also a cool combo. I believe that if you want to run both AV and Sweep there's still at least one power you can skip but I don't recall which one it is. -
My most recent regen is Elec/Regen, constructed to have about 35% melee defense as this was before I became fully converted to s/l for scrappers. I'd say it's pretty tough compared to the average scrapper you see on pugs, but does it compare to my softcapped DB/Inv? Not even close. Of course, the latter has a much better build, too. The regen was even squishier before I got tier 3 spiritual but now it is again pretty tolerable, usually with at least two clickable countermeasures on tap whenever anything is needed.
I'd be surprised if your DB/Regen ended up "as strong" as your DB/WP but I also imagine it should be plenty fun anyway, and it should be fine for whatever content. There's something to be said for having more to do than just attack. I haven't even unlocked any post-alpha slots on my regen, though, and it is conceivable that destiny, especially barrier, would have a bigger impact on a regen than any destiny would have on an already-solid WP. -
Dual blades is great and fire armor is great but the reason I wouldn't use them together is that DB benefits from limited redraw and FA is a redraw fiend. To get the most out of DB you should be trying to keep blinding feint double stacked, probably in combination with attack vitals. To get the most out of fire, you usually want to be throwing down fiery embrace and burn as often as possible, plus you have the second quickest recharging heal that I'm aware of in an armor set for some additional redraw.
It's not that it couldn't work, indeed I'm sure you could do spiffy things with it, but it would drive me crazy to be redrawing my swords three or four times per spawn. Instead, consider making two scrappers - DB paired with something along the lines of elec, invuln, wp, or sr, and a FA that uses a non-weapon primary such as elec, MA or KM. -
I would think it would be about as good as KM/Fire at applying ouchies to varmints. AAO is kinda sorta like FE, and shield charge is a lot like burn if you squint. Shield gets a little more variety in IOing than fire too, I bet you could grab a considerable amount of +hp en route to softcap.
I'd certainly recommend KM/Fire (and likely also KM/Shield) to anyone who's looking for "that special scrapper," KM seems really underplayed in general for the amount of damage it is capable of pumping out. -
Wow, it sucks when the forum decides to eat an extra-long post!
The gist of what I had been attempting to post was this: I know precisely what you mean about the appeal of bringing a little bit of confident swagger to a TF. The earlier the better, but you want it to last to 50 as well obviously. Most of my 50s are scrappers and I delight in being able to either hang with the team and chew through spawns or sneak to the end and finish a troublesome boss room by myself as necessary. It becomes increasingly apparent to me, though, that it doesn't take a scrapper to be able to stealth objectives on TFs and trials.
Take my dark/sonic defender, for example. Permahasten and 35% ranged defense down to level 30. No mez protection at any level. Does that stop me from killing half of the shadow cysts, or finding the real security chief, or killing groups during the "find the scientists" phase of the TV trial by myself? It does not.
Surely that is an unfair example as it has huge debuffs and an expensive build. Well, I ran a Moonfire the other day with my pistol/energy blaster and it sort of looked to me like I was doing the same thing on that. Thanks to laziness while ioing, at 28 I've got a mere 15ish% ranged defense, but I make it a point to ideally carry 16 phenomenal lucks at any given time on my blasters. Between that and hail of bullets' defense boost, it went well enough for me. I used two phenoms and combined four, for a profit of two, died once thanks to my own silly behavior, and we finished in about 35 minutes. I had a couple speedy scrapper friends on the team and we simply split up whenever it was expedient to do so, without issue.
This is not to toot my own horn, as obviously a better player than I with a more solid build wouldn't have died at all, and sub-30 is very doable on Moonfire. My point is simply that having any kind of specific pronounced advantage, in this case aoe damage, means you can play on that in some way to achieve good results with soloing TF and trial objectives. Further, it is my view that the harder you have to "work" to get the same result in this game, the more fun you are likely to have been having. Can my blasters do everything that my scrappers can? Well, I'll just have to guess that they can't solo AVs because I've never tried, because it sounds painful without a bigger bag of tricks than blasters get. On the other hand, I don't care to solo AVs in the first place. After the first few I lost interest in the concept. So, in terms of game content that I actually want to do, blasters are just as good, though more challenging and thus more rewarding.
Bringing this feebly back around to the actual topic of the thread, this is why I don't think you need clarion on any 50(+x) blaster. The barnstorming playstyle continues to work at any level, in my experience. -
Well the aoe's amazing, thanks for asking. Single target is passable, enough to take down a boss before it causes trouble, but that's not really what I'm after from a blaster, personally. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your argument but it sounds like you're saying blasters should both do the best damage and also not have weaknesses? I completely agree that teaming is about helping cover one another's deficiencies, so why do you not give blasters the benefit of the doubt on getting some team support to allow them to make full use of their uniquely potent powers?
Take a team of seven that already has high aoe damage between them. I'm not saying they need a blaster and can't possibly get by without one. What I will say is that if they get a blaster in that last spot, things will go even faster. And, assuming the team is thus-far blasterless, that blaster will get plenty of backup from his more support oriented cohorts. People talk about force multiplication a lot, especially on the debuffy types' forums. Blasters don't multiply very much at all, but they do bring a large constant to the table. Combine multipliers with that and you're cookin' with gas. Or, add incarnate abilities for a little bit of self-support.
I used to mainly team with my blasters as they weren't all that great at soloing. That isn't really an issue anymore, though I still tend to team with them because I'd rather run the new team content than tips, scanners, and ancient arcs. Speaking only for myself, the teams I run with make me feel neither like a non-contributive member nor like an especially vulnerable character. -
Why not take clarion for, say, STFs, and rebirth for less mez-heavy content? I disagree that you're forced to take clarion at all, I certainly don't plan on taking it until I have threads to burn, but it's maybe three or four trials to get it in tier 3 form in addition to whatever else you'd like to use in the destiny slot.
I'd also note that the praetorian content radically diversifies the threats players face. At one time I would have bought the argument that the devs lean on mez, especially in the wake of cov's launch, but lately they've gone out of their way to threaten everyone in equal measure. I never get mezzed on BAF and mez on Lambda is evitable by judicious termination of augurs before they cause problems. At the same time, the new content is more dangerous to someone who has just barely permanent domination, for example, as the warworks throw around slows like mad.
Finally, it seems to me that some people undersell the value of aoe damage on purpose. You won't hear me complain about a permadom on my team, yet are most dominator combos really going to be running with aoe blasters? I guess they added sleet to the epics at some point and I haven't seen the impact of that, but the last time I checked most of the secondaries have, at best, mid-range-damage-for-a-blaster aoes on timers that are all several seconds longer than any equivalent blaster version. Obviously a dom brings additional value to a team on top of that, and as you say can be made to rarely have any issues with mez, but in my experience at least I don't think you can compare them for spawn vaporization efficacy. -
Are you guys really having such a bad time with your blasters in i20? For me it has been a riot. My only post-alpha characters right now are my dp/em and my db/inv and while it's true that judgement and destiny push the scrapper into the stratosphere, my blaster feels even more improved by the new stuff and that's without destiny unlocked yet. Between hail of bullets and ion radial I can clear ITF, KTF, et cetera spawns faster than teams can keep up. Who cares whether my character is as durable as melees when everything dies instantly anyway? By comparison, my scrapper is untouchable to almost any AV in the game anymore thanks to rebirth, yet takes far longer to do the basic spawn clearing that still makes up 80% of the high level game even on speed teams.
As for the destiny I'm choosing on my blaster, that's easy, rebirth. Mez isn't a big deal in most situations and when it is, well, there's insps. Barrier is just overkill. I don't need to be that invincible for ten seconds when I could be generally sturdy permanently and still essentially invincible for the first ten seconds. Ageless... maybe on a blaster that has endurance issues, but that's part of the magic of dp/em. -
The cooldown on the jump pack is 120 seconds.
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Mephe is exactly right. Dual pistols is "the other aoe set," i.e. the one that isn't fire. Bullet rain and empty clips don't have the DPA of fireball and fire breath but fire doesn't get anything comparable to hail of bullets or piercing rounds either so it is mainly a stylistic choice. That said, what set says style like dual pistols? None of them. Unless you hate its style, in which case fire is clearly better for you.
I'm with BrandX on the secondary, though. MM is obviously great but I think EM is approximately as good for DP. Little redraw, early build up, and drain psyche is hard to top but conserve power gives you basically the same infinite font of endurance, just without the regen, the debuff, or having to snuggle up to some enemies to fire it off. Plus boost range is fun and unique. Those are all of the powers you need from the set, freeing up oodles of leeway for pools and such. -
Not exactly sure where you got the idea that the DM/Inv brute is going to be better at holding aggro than the scrapper, seeing as their taunt magnitudes and durations are identical. Invulnerability scrappers (and thus also brutes, I presume) are, in my experience, difficult for most tankers to out-taunt. I am also not entirely sure why you think that the scrapper's soul drain is only an advantage for them if it is saturated, given that it was not-that-recently altered to do the bulk of its buffing off of its first target.
Built identically, the scrapper will virtually always do better damage, and the brute will be sturdier by approximately the same amount. I prefer extra damage when we're talking about crazy levels of survivability for even the scrapper, but that's my opinion. -
I feel like KM goes especially well with damage aura sets, aka resistance sets, for one reason: power siphon. Sure, its damage buff is great with damage auras, but the main reason I like the pairing is that to get the most out of siphon you need to sit in one place and attack constantly for twenty to thirty seconds. This totally cancels any kind of mobility you'd ordinarily have but strongly rewards any bonus damage you can do while sitting there with your new best friends. Would KM/SR be a bad combination? Surely not. I'd consider SS/SR or MA/SR instead though, as they are sort of similar to KM quantitatively but lack anything that would hold you in place.
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My s/l softcapped fire scrapper says "Yes, it is possible!" Consider what it requires, though. You are going to need all five kinetic combat bonuses, and even if you did want to become a blapper, energy manipulation has one or possibly two, depending on your own tolerances, melee attacks that are even worth using. As Stryker said, that is burning a heck of a lot of slots.
My question would be, why do you feel that s/l is so much more valuable to you than ranged? If the answer is farming, I can't argue with that. For regular content, I find that even in melee range of a spawn, most of the spawn is not going to actually be engaging me in melee. Typically their attention is spread out across the team somewhat, but even if I'm leading the charge there is a period of one or more seconds where they're finishing their ranged attack animations against me or simply standing around in AI stupor mode. One or more seconds is more than enough time to drop the pbaoe that I came into melee range in the first place to activate and plot my trajectory out of the spawn before it begins to animate.
The point of all this is that I think you can do more with ranged defense than it typically gets credit for. Smashing and lethal is, as noted, great for farming, but wouldn't you rather force that warwolf to ineffectually hurl a boulder at you than smack you upside your head? The advantages of the ranged defense approach are that your slotting decisions are much easier, you dodge far more mez attacks and thus can consider a destiny other than clarion, and I'd say you're more versatile against hard targets: every AV is happy to throw crap at you at range, but only like two thirds of AVs are s/l based, and as a blaster you aren't going to want to be in melee with most AVs without support. -
I too can vouch for DP/EM, great combo. Easily my most productive character on the prisoner escape phase and then the final adds of BAF, and also one of my best on Lambda. Hail one spawn, Ion the next, regular AoE the next, Hail the next, and so on in that way until the rare table pops up. As Rock says, pistols' animations are incredibly compatible with the combat jumping jousting method of combat and that is truer than ever at 50. There you can back it up with some set-based defense and really go nuts. I try to be the first one to each spawn on Lambda and it works very well.
I would imagine that DP/Traps would be a "better" combination in terms of killing AVs and what have you, but you lose the extreme mobility of the blaster version and that would drive me crazy. -
When people talk about stacking power siphon, they refer to the buff that it provides. This is easy - just use five attacks in less than ten seconds and it's five-stacked. I could be mistaken but I don't believe you actually get any benefit from stacking power siphon itself - better to fire it off as soon as it wears off to extend the chain.