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[Vee]

I was under the impression that Blasters outperformed everyone in acquiring Debt. Was I wrong?  :P

They might've been edged out by petless masterminds.

[Arcana]

I was under the impression that Blasters outperformed everyone in acquiring Debt. Was I wrong?  :P

Well, there was a debt cap, so its hard to say.

[Arcana]

They might've been edged out by petless masterminds.

I doubt anyone ever looked, but if I had to put money on it I would still in all seriousness take Blasters.  The numbers I heard regarding average Blaster under performance were so high they were actually shocking.  I actually considered the possibility it was an error, except no methodological error I could think of could single out Blasters the way the numbers did, across years of statistics and across all combat levels.

[Vee]

If we're talking solo the most I ever remember dying was on lowbie khelds. Teaming it was definitely blasters unless you count my early first troller before I figured out how aggro and aoe worked.

[Taceus Jiwede]

I doubt anyone ever looked, but if I had to put money on it I would still in all seriousness take Blasters.  The numbers I heard regarding average Blaster under performance were so high they were actually shocking.  I actually considered the possibility it was an error, except no methodological error I could think of could single out Blasters the way the numbers did, across years of statistics and across all combat levels.

Even though it was obvious that blasters didn't seem to match up in a lot ways.  They were still my favorite class.  I was really excited for i24.  My main was an Energy/Devices and ended up becoming a really good character, could even solo AV's (Did Jurassik once with Warburg and Shivans and lore pets never could do other GM's).  The changes in i24 would have made that character great.

[Ankhammon]

If we're talking solo the most I ever remember dying was on lowbie khelds. Teaming it was definitely blasters unless you count my early first troller before I figured out how aggro and aoe worked.

Over agro was the bane of all of my lowbie characters. Mostly when I got up to SO levels I had enough different powers (and durations) to start playing with larger agro amounts.

Then again, the only time I hit the debt cap was on my Dark/Dark fender at level 47... Yellow Dawn and me on my first Hami run. Ouch. :)

[Arcana]

Even though it was obvious that blasters didn't seem to match up in a lot ways.  They were still my favorite class.

The statistics say you were not alone, at least in one respect.  Blasters were the most popular archetype to roll up.  However, the same statistics say that Blasters were likely one of the most abandoned archetypes at higher levels.  According to the archetype popularity stats that were released around I13ish, Blasters had a huge lead among low level characters, and continuously lost ground at increasingly higher levels.  To me, that suggested that more players wanted to play blasters than any other archetype, and more players got disillusioned over playing them over time than any other archetype.

The archetype that gained the most ground as you leveled up?  Controllers.

[Surelle]

The statistics say you were not alone, at least in one respect.  Blasters were the most popular archetype to roll up.  However, the same statistics say that Blasters were likely one of the most abandoned archetypes at higher levels.  According to the archetype popularity stats that were released around I13ish, Blasters had a huge lead among low level characters, and continuously lost ground at increasingly higher levels.  To me, that suggested that more players wanted to play blasters than any other archetype, and more players got disillusioned over playing them over time than any other archetype.

The archetype that gained the most ground as you leveled up?  Controllers.

Haha! My first main was an electrical blaster (mothballed at 36), but 5 of my 8 level 50s were trollers.   ;D

[Kaos Arcanna]

I doubt anyone ever looked, but if I had to put money on it I would still in all seriousness take Blasters.  The numbers I heard regarding average Blaster under performance were so high they were actually shocking.  I actually considered the possibility it was an error, except no methodological error I could think of could single out Blasters the way the numbers did, across years of statistics and across all combat levels.

I wonder if it was ED that caused the under performance of Blasters. If your thing was damage and you suddenly did less damage ...

I soloed a lot-- at least for most of my career in COH-- and around 32 or so there pretty much wasn't a mob who didn't have a means to sleep, stun, or hold you.

I gravitated towards Scrappers, Brutes, (and to a lesser extent Tanks) because they had innate mez resistance. Controllers had Controls of their own to counter the NPCs so they were good too.
(My Crab Spider was fun for me at the end because he had ranged attacks and mez resistance.) :D

[HEATSTROKE]

I wonder if it was ED that caused the under performance of Blasters. If your thing was damage and you suddenly did less damage ...

I soloed a lot-- at least for most of my career in COH-- and around 32 or so there pretty much wasn't a mob who didn't have a means to sleep, stun, or hold you.

I gravitated towards Scrappers, Brutes, (and to a lesser extent Tanks) because they had innate mez resistance. Controllers had Controls of their own to counter the NPCs so they were good too.
(My Crab Spider was fun for me at the end because he had ranged attacks and mez resistance.) :D

The main problem as I saw it with blasters wasnt ED. The main issue I saw was no way to mitigate incoming damage, heal from that damage, or to resist mez.

In the late game EVERYTHING mezzed the heck out of a blaster. I remember doing my first Banished Pantheon mission with a group.. I spent well over 50% of that mission mezzed. It was not fun and it was an eye opener. I didnt stop playing blasters but it did make me change HOW I played them.

Controllers and Dominators can mez first..
Controllers, Defenders and Corruptors can buff, debuff and some can heal.
Melee AT's have mez resistance.


Blasters had damage.. and little else.. They were definitely a challenge in the later parts of the game.

However NOTHING was as satisfying to me as playing a blaster well. When you knew your limitations and could push the envelope and sometimes even go beyond them. But that definitely wasnt everyone's cup of tea.

And every blaster I had made it to level 50.. |

Nrg/Nrg
Rad/Fire
Fire/Psi
Rad/Psi
Elec/Elec
Arch/Dev
AR/nrg

all made it to 50..

[blacksly]

I was under the impression that Blasters outperformed everyone in acquiring Debt. Was I wrong?  :P

This post seems to use the old Defiance.

[Shibboleth]

I tried several blasters and felt many had promise. . .only for it all to seem frustrating by the mid-20s.

I am not sure what possessed me to try Sonic/Dark but that was the one and only combo that work well enough for me to keep at it with, despite feeling that other power combinations held more promise at the start.

[ivanhedgehog]

The main problem as I saw it with blasters wasnt ED. The main issue I saw was no way to mitigate incoming damage, heal from that damage, or to resist mez.

In the late game EVERYTHING mezzed the heck out of a blaster. I remember doing my first Banished Pantheon mission with a group.. I spent well over 50% of that mission mezzed. It was not fun and it was an eye opener. I didnt stop playing blasters but it did make me change HOW I played them.

Controllers and Dominators can mez first..
Controllers, Defenders and Corruptors can buff, debuff and some can heal.
Melee AT's have mez resistance.


Blasters had damage.. and little else.. They were definitely a challenge in the later parts of the game.

However NOTHING was as satisfying to me as playing a blaster well. When you knew your limitations and could push the envelope and sometimes even go beyond them. But that definitely wasnt everyone's cup of tea.

And every blaster I had made it to level 50.. |

Nrg/Nrg
Rad/Fire
Fire/Psi
Rad/Psi
Elec/Elec
Arch/Dev
AR/nrg

all made it to 50..

blasters and scrappers were both supposed to be uber dps classes. scrappers had mitigation, mez protection and full damage. blasters had damage, nothing else. with IO's you could mitigate a little bit, but scrappers were using IO's to cap mitigation and damage.

[blacksly]

I wonder if it was ED that caused the under performance of Blasters. If your thing was damage and you suddenly did less damage ...

It wasn't. Blasters had problems before ED, and had problems after ED, and before being able to set the difficulty modifier to +4/x8. And after the level/number difficulty slider was added, I bet fewer Blasters played at +4/x8 (at least by %) than any other AT.

If all that you can do is damage, and that is your main damage mitigation, the Devs have a problem because they cannot allow you to kill too fast... it's not only damage mitigation, it's also XP. So your damage mitigation is actually limited by the rate at which Devs may wish to limit XP gain, which is not the case for any other AT that doesn't rely on damage dealing as its primary means of reducing incoming damage.

Blasters did not need any adjustments related to dealing damage in order to balance them, they needed better self-defense. I always supported more and better active defenses (stronger mez and debuff effects on their attacks), rather than the better defenses (regeneration) that they were looking to add in I24, but it's clear that what they needed was on the defensive side of the ball, not on the damage side.

[Arcana]

I wonder if it was ED that caused the under performance of Blasters. If your thing was damage and you suddenly did less damage ...

I don't think so.  The problem is actually that there's no genuine way for more offense to compensate for lack of defense.  Its a bit more complicated than that, but here's the short version.  MMO players don't like to sit around and do nothing.  They want to be active all the time if possible.  This should be obvious, but when translated to mathematics it creates a profound numerical black hole.  You are basically always taking damage when you are standing in front of enemies.  Damage mitigation can slow that down.  The goal is to slow that down to the point where your own regeneration and inspiration use counterbalances that.  When the net damage you take is less than the damage you can regenerate, you can fight continuously.  When its not, you have to either slow down or (eventually) die.

So picture a blaster fighting a spawn.  During the fight the blaster takes some damage.  Assuming the blaster kills them before dying, at the end of the fight the blaster will have less than full health by some amount.  Now the blaster moves to the next spawn, which takes some time.  If the blaster *still* has less than full health, this is not sustainable: it will have decreasing health at the start of each fight, until eventually the blaster will have to just plain stop or die.

Okay, now buff damage.  Does that help?  Well, it helps kind of.  The blaster will certainly kill that first spawn faster.  As a result it will take less damage.  But because the fight lasted less time, the total time between fights is now shorter.  The blaster will have less time to recover health (and endurance).  And that means that while the blaster takes less damage, it also recovers less health.  The net result is that in terms of damage mitigation the net result is far less than you might expect.  In fact sometimes the math works out to where the blaster actually averages taking *more* damage, not less.**

If the player faced the same number of enemies in the same period of time, then more offense would obviously be better for survivability.  The same foes would be alive, and thus attacking, for less time.  But that can only happen if that blaster voluntarily chooses to take long pauses between each fight so that the number of fights remains the same.  With higher offense and faster kill speed, the blaster is actually facing *more* foes per unit time, and thus *increasing* the opportunities to be attacked.

The math gets a bit complicated, but the net result is that increasing damage certainly increases kill speed, but it doesn't increase survivability per unit time by much, and sometimes actually lowers it.  And since death is a huge (relative) penalty on leveling speed (debt halves progress speed, and can sometimes force unprofitable activity like going to the hospital) relatively small increases in damage can't help blasters by as much as you might otherwise expect.

Consider that tanker damage was increased by a significant amount - I think something like 23% - and no one noticed tanker survivability increase by much.  All it did was allow tankers to kill quicker which is helpful, but it also encouraged tankers to face more foes more often because they could kill them quicker.  The psychological pressure to, in effect, "spend" extra offense rather than bank it as more survivability is essentially all but impossible to prevent players from doing.  In City of Heroes, offense and defense are not interchangeable currencies, which is why tankers can't convert their higher defense into more offense, and why blasters can't convert higher damage into more survivability.  In City, offense is the currency you spend to kill things, and defense is the currency you spend to stay alive longer - so you can spend offense to kill things.  That's why when you're talking about the masters of universal kill speed, you're usually talking archetypally*** about the most balanced offense/defense archetypes.  Scrappers and Brutes are typically high on the list, followed by controllers and dominators and masterminds.


** The short answer here is the problem source is AoEs.  The more damage you can front load, and thus the more you can kill quicker, the less damage you take overall.  But if higher base damage causes you to kill fast enough that you can't start fights with your maximum AoE potential due to recharge limits, then that frontloading doesn't happen all the time.  At that point, the average damage per spawn point per unit time actually rises even though average overall damage rises, and that causes damage spikes that increase net damage taken.

*** Powersets of course are also very strong determiners and can override archetype advantages.  But averaged across all powerset combinations within an archetype, balanced archetypes that have roughly equal measure of offense and defense typically end up being the best all around damage dealers, because their defense and offense multiply most effectively.[/i]

[Remaugen]

I wonder if it was ED that caused the under performance of Blasters. If your thing was damage and you suddenly did less damage <Snip!>...

To be specific, ED is under performance, as TV commercials constantly remind us, roughly half of all men over 40. . .  ;D

If we're talking solo the most I ever remember dying was on lowbie khelds. <Snip!>

I think I might have gotten one WS to 50, they were all very heavy debt producers.

[HEATSTROKE]

blasters and scrappers were both supposed to be uber dps classes. scrappers had mitigation, mez protection and full damage. blasters had damage, nothing else. with IO's you could mitigate a little bit, but scrappers were using IO's to cap mitigation and damage.

Depending on the blaster build you could mitigate damage a Lot.. but you would need a pretty good IO build to do so.. and the MeZ Problem still exists. This is why in the later I started to play more Dominators than Blasters. Dominators for me fused the two things I loved most.. control and damage.

[LaughingAlex]

The statistics say you were not alone, at least in one respect.  Blasters were the most popular archetype to roll up.  However, the same statistics say that Blasters were likely one of the most abandoned archetypes at higher levels.  According to the archetype popularity stats that were released around I13ish, Blasters had a huge lead among low level characters, and continuously lost ground at increasingly higher levels.  To me, that suggested that more players wanted to play blasters than any other archetype, and more players got disillusioned over playing them over time than any other archetype.

The archetype that gained the most ground as you leveled up?  Controllers.

I'd also say that as players learned more about the game, the more clear that blasters were just way to specialized.  Thing was a corruptor or controller appealed more to advanced skill levels as ranged archtypes, blasters were the "noob class".  They were easy to learn but very hard to really master, like terrains in the original Starcraft.  If you didn't pick up that faster killed mobs in the correct order was the most critical tactic to use, you died in seconds vs lots of enemies.  Many people never got that.

Course correct order varied from power set combo to power set combo, but many just played blasters like scrapers, died, then got mad at the archtype.

[Tubbius]

I'd also say that as players learned more about the game, the more clear that blasters were just way to specialized.  Thing was a corruptor or controller appealed more to advanced skill levels as ranged archtypes, blasters were the "noob class".  They were easy to learn but very hard to really master, like terrains in the original Starcraft.  If you didn't pick up that faster killed mobs in the correct order was the most critical tactic to use, you died in seconds vs lots of enemies.  Many people never got that.

Course correct order varied from power set combo to power set combo, but many just played blasters like scrapers, died, then got mad at the archtype.

Ordering makes a big difference.  And THAT difference is why I loved my Assault Rifle/Devices guy.  Either zip in with Stealth and Super Speed and drop a bunch of mines, then haul butt OUT, or hang way back and drop some Sniper shots on the early targets. . . .

[worldweary]

Ordering makes a big difference.  And THAT difference is why I loved my Assault Rifle/Devices guy.  Either zip in with Stealth and Super Speed and drop a bunch of mines, then haul butt OUT, or hang way back and drop some Sniper shots on the early targets. . . .

This^^^Assault or Fire/Devices if you have the set up time and Electric blasters that could drain whole mobs were the only sets that really made me go wow I want to try that.I know Drain Psyche was used
a lot but without a team I could never really survive long enough to leverage it.I do agree out of all the
AT's Blasters felt the the toughest to solo.I would like to add Energy had the best FX animation or
whatever you call it.The sound and look of it made it feel like it really hit hard.