PleaseRecycle

Heh, sorry Stryker, I guess it may have helped if I'd said I was specifically responding to "min/maxers" who think DP is terrible, rather than simply thinking it to myself very clearly. You have a point about cheaper builds, but I suppose all I can say to that is that it would probably drive me crazy to play a squishy blaster in the first place so my first order of business would be to pick up some ios.

Looking at my pistols/energy build right now, this wouldn't cost more than a billion inf even if you straight up bought everything. Mostly posi's blast and thunderstrike, several lotgs, a celerity, some botzs, gaussian's... I would personally call this a cheap build, in that I don't see how you could reach level 50 without being able to afford pricier if you run a lot of tfs.

This gives me 35% ranged, 40% global recharge, and enough endurance to be permanently sustainable with conserve power, spamming aoes or not. Perhaps it's no coincidence that hail of bullets' defense boost is enough to softcap me for ranged, as I cannot recall ever dying during its animation. Not that I never die, but with rise of the phoenix, who cares? It barely slows down the mayhem.

If anything, I wonder if dp's detractors have ever even tried it past level 35 or so. At that point not everyone has started ioing yet, which underlines the above-average recharge times of most of its best powers at a time where you also lack much of your coming survivability. If I had tried to do nothing but solo the painful old midbie hero content on x4 on a half-finished dp blaster, I'd probably be angry with it too.

Fortunately for us all, there exists a thing called "tee-uh-ming." Tea Amming? Oh, teaming! That was it. I don't see the point of running any blaster solo in the first place, if you're farming you can do a lot better than that.

Really, what I use blasters for at all is what I find dual pistols to be best at: high speed, high level, high impact task forces. It does things most blaster sets simply cannot do in the world of aoe damage and in trade gives up having a top end single target chain, which it turns out is almost useless in the aforementioned task forces. I find anyone's claims of it being unsatisfactory to min/maxers to be questionable at best, unless their definition of min/maxing is radically different from mine, which would be weird because mine is probably the best way to earn huge amounts of merits.

It goes without saying that you will use incendiary ammo 100% of the time. It is conceivable to switch to standard ammo for soloing but a heavily ioed level 50 blaster is probably not going to have trouble with anything that would be fixed by occasional knockback.

Energy's single target chain is passable if you, for some reason, want to do the 40 foot dance with the caveat that you WILL knock whatever you're attacking, short of a triangled AV, further back into the spawn with every other attack. Its aoe on the other hand is absolutely pathetic. Empty clips hits harder than energy torrent, and bullet rain hits much harder than explosive blast. Further, as we are both well aware, explosive blast in particular has the charming side effect of scattering things out of energy torrent's cone and vice versa. Energy has no analogue to piercing rounds and no analogue to hail of bullets.

Hail of bullets: We are going to count this power because with moderate recharge, by which I mean ~90% in the power itself and ~50% global, it will be up every spawn or every second spawn, depending on whether you're running regular tfs or the new tfs. It very often hits substantially harder than rain of arrows and virtually always harder than full auto and is capable of going way up from there. Between BU, defiance and procs, it will regularly wipe out everything but bosses in a 25 foot radius. The only set that can compete with this is archery and rain of arrows often hits for only two of its three tics, as I understand it, hampering its effectiveness greatly. "Dangerous to use" would be relevant if you didn't have a load of defense and if, due to bizarre complaints, the devs hadn't caved and made it buff your defense for its duration.

I am not sure why anyone cares about the lack of aim. Frankly, it is a crap power. Its best use is what it says on the tin, boosting your tohit radically, but that doesn't come up very often. Between defiance and enhancement, aim should be boosting most attacks by something like 20%, at the cost of having taken the power and whatever slots you've given it. On the other hand, I could see wanting it as a place to stick rectified reticles so fair enough on that front, but dp is anything but lacking for esoteric set slotting options.

It is also interesting that you think stunning shot is better than suppressive fire, considering it has a longer animation and a trivially longer duration. Enhanced for mez, both of them will keep a lieutenant locked down for more than long enough to kill it just as part of an aoe chain. Suppressive fire, on the other hand, is better in a pinch because of the animation time and most importantly is actually a hold when using the only ammo type you'd ever actually use, thus stacking with holds from assault sets and ancillary pools.

Archery is a good set, of course, and remains underrated, but I would take bullets rain over explosive arrow and hail of bullets over rain of arrows any day of the week. Fistful is much better than empty clips but you can't have everything, eh?

I don't particularly care for posting on internet forums but the repeatedly poor analysis of dual pistols on this forum has inspired an exception. I find its comparison with fire blast particularly interesting because fire is typically held to be the "average" blaster set, when in fact it sacrifices having a single trick up its sleeve in exchange for fireball and blaze. If we compare dual pistols to, for example, energy blast, it wins by a mile in either single target or aoe.

With a modest amount of recharge, assuming most high performance blasters will focus largely on softcapping ranged defense, the average fire blaster ought to be chaining flares -> blast -> flares -> blaze. DS of 6.8 in 4.67 seconds.

With comparable recharge, dp lacks a smooth single target chain assuming one skips the total stinker that is executioner's shot. Great animation, garbage power. I typically find myself chaining pistols -> dual wield -> pistols -> piercing -> pistols -> dual wield -> pistols -> bullet rain. DS of 11.2 in 12.24 seconds, clearly inferior to fire which has done about 18 DS in the same time frame.

What this obviously ignores is that about half of dp's animation time here was devoted to aoe powers. If you are, to pick an incredibly unlikely example, targeting the boss in the middle of a x8 spawn, suddenly you've more than doubled your damage, as bullet rain will likely have hit at least ten targets and it takes virtually no effort to ensure piercing rounds hits two.

But wait, you say, surely the fire blaster in the same situation would mix in aoes of his own. Without a substantial boost to recharge, fireball is not going to replace one of the flares in the chain I entertained above, leaving you with, at best, flares -> blast -> flares -> blaze -> fireball. That's fine and dandy, hardly any loss in st dps and a great gain in aoe, but add any aoe on top of that and it goes down the toilet. Fire breath can best be described as glacial, slower than any of dp's staple aoes and in my opinion not a good fit with the rest of the set which otherwise lacks powers that require you to set up a cone. Rain of fire is great but recharges rather slowly for what it does and is unlikely to apply its full dps to a normal spawn in my experience, though the bosses may eat it all.

A dp blaster focusing on aoe is most likely going to be "chaining" empty clips -> bullet rain -> empty -> piercing. With moderate global recharge this is of course a gappy chain but that's fine as you will be jumping around to line up the cones, which handily enough you have two of and spend most of your time with. If necessary though you have two aoes that work from an actual distance as opposed to one, meaning your time is going to be better spent both at long range and at mid range. A fire blaster forced to hang back due to melee danger or some such doesn't have much beyond fireball, flares and fire blast while the pistolero still has the entire "single target" chain which happens to be half aoe.

This already daunting wall of text aside, I haven't even mentioned suppressive fire or hail of bullets yet, to which fire blast has no answer at all. Suppressive fire is an excellent control for a blaster set, stackable with anything and slottable with some fantastic sets. Hail of bullets is, in my opinion, the best blaster tier 9, arguably besides rain of arrows. One thing fire blast certainly does not have is a way to wipe out every second spawn with two clicks and have half of its build up time left over to unload aoes onto the next spawn.

I'm not saying fire blast is garbage and nobody should use it for anything but raw single target dps, I'm just saying it isn't really very impressive on speed tfs compared to dp, "the bad set." The above is based on a purpled out fire/mm which now gathers dust because of a half as expensive dp/em.