Also scrappers are suppose to be offensive melee hence the crit.
Ah, one of my many pet peeves. Scrappers were supposed to be the best soloers, back when that meant something (i.e. everyone else was supposed to not be). Fair enough. But then the dev team decided that scrappers didn't have a sufficiently good role on teams. Imagine that: the best soloer doesn't have a role on teams. So they decided that Scrappers needed something extra, particularly verses Tankers (this is what believing in Trinity play will do: make you stupid). So the devs decided that since Tankers were supposed to be better at fighting lots of things at once, Scrappers would be better at focusing damage on single harder targets. So the devs decided to add criticals.
Then somehow "criticals for bosses" became "criticals against everything, but just even more for bosses." *And then* someone decided that even that wasn't enough: to really be the best melee boss killer it was not enough to crit,
Scrappers also needed a higher damage modifier than Blasters. So Scrappers not only gained supposedly team-oriented criticals (with no explanation for how that actually made them more valuable on teams), they also gained higher damage than Blasters. Which was ok, because Blasters had a team role - ranged damage - so it was ok for Scrappers to have the "(more) melee damage team role."
Except that's *not* the Blaster role or design. Blasters are not "ranged damage:" two seconds reading the powerset descriptions in the manual will confirm that. They are supposed to be the offensive specialists, with ranged damage, melee damage (in most cases), and some (mostly personal) utility. Furthermore,
there's no such thing as the ranged damage role and the
melee damage role. No team specifically needs melee or ranged damage, they just need damage.
By the time the devs figured this all out, it was too late. And I'm not convinced all the devs actually figured this out.
Ironically, by the time the devs were done, Scrappers were indeed the best soloers. By virtue of having half of Tanker defenses and
more than all of Blaster damage.
Now, there were a lot of debates about which archetype really dealt more damage, most of them revolving around one person's anecdotes against another person's anecdotes or edge case comparisons. But here's the thing: Scrappers had the higher damage modifier (right up until Blasters ranged damage got boosted to the same modifier as part of D2.0), higher DPA single target attacks on average, and more AoE potential per set on average (I wrote several articles based on this, anyone else is free to count them up). If Blasters somehow dealt more damage on average, given the fact that the devs were required to create powers based on a formula both archetypes had to follow equally, that would have to be the most amazing coincidence in the history of game design. How does the archetype that on average have better numbers in all respects somehow end up dealing less damage? That could only happen by miraculous numerical design, which the devs were singularly incapable of.
(The other argument, that range improves offense by reducing the need to move to the target, is theoretically valid but I studied that one also: its not enough in most cases to change things enough because most of the movement scrappers have to do to move to successive targets is movement blasters have to mostly duplicate to cross a similar distance within missions, and because player base movement was fairly quick - if most missions had ambushes from behind, range would have a higher impact here than it actually did).
Since I'm already standing at Pet Peeve Podium, might as well finish the thought. To solo well, you basically need two things: enough damage, and enough defense. Stay alive long enough, shoot stuff fast enough. Notice that's how Scrappers were designed from the beginning. Setting them aside, the other four archetypes were "designed to team" by taking one of those two away. For Tankers, Defenders, and Controllers, its damage. For Blasters, its defense. When the devs decided to make "everything able to solo" they focused on offense: to solo well, you needed to kill reasonably fast. Ergo, the devs tried to add offense to Tankers, Controllers, and Defenders. In the case of Tankers and Controllers, over time they succeeded. In the case of Defenders, it was iffy. Then they called it a day. Guess what they forgot to do?
Until Arbiter Hawk started looking at them, Blasters were literally stuck in a "you can't buff Blaster defenses, because reasons" even though the rationale for that decision was broken for literally every other archetype in existence. That reason was not even carried through to CoV. Basically, the "you can't buff Tanker damage" rule was overridden by the "but they have to be able to solo" rule. Same for Controllers. But they kept the rule for Blasters, and only blasters. And no one on the dev team could ever adequately explain why. Not even Arbiter Hawk, whose answer basically was "I don't believe in that rule." Thus: I24.
