New efforts!

[brothermutant]

Blaster Life for me.. was fun.. liked living on the edge.. Loved moments like this...

Nrg/Nrg on BAF..
Me. Rad/Fire Blaster.. I can do it..
Elec/Elec Blaster on Mission with AV..
Arch.Devices.. planting Trip Mines.. (ridiculous recharge in trip mines btw)

I am totally stealing these types of toons, just so you know.

Never considered Rad/Fire (always shied away from fire builds, I'm a rebel). I did the Elec/Elec/Elec thing a ton, but never considered Devices to be paired with EM pulse, brilliant! And I did hear some blasters really went nuts with the +range moves on their ranged builds, what better way to stay out of harms way than to make them run to you while you pick the crowd away to a minor threat.

[ivanhedgehog]

we need to remember, the balance point was enhanced with so's solo. not a blaster with an IO build in a team. a blaster could build for defense with IO's, but it would cost them offensive power. a tank or scrapper could build in a little more mitigation and be fine, and still build up a lot of damage.

[Shibboleth]

IMO Blasters require more thought and planning than mindless attacking..

Mindless attacking would have gotten any AT killed at the top end of things.

But yes, Blasters often had limitations to work around that were less of an issue or were a non-issue on other ATs.

[Shibboleth]

That self-sufficiency may be why I tended to like the Redside archetypes better than Blueside.

Gotta say I did enjoy Corruptors, Dominators and Brutes quite a bit, but there were power combos unique to either side and specific capabilities that could only be had with a single AT--nothing tanked like a Tanker. And even when primary and secondary powers could be found on both sides, you had to also consider the impact of a powerset being used as a primary as opposed to as a secondary. I am pretty sure that is why my character Hypershout (Kinetic/Sonic) ended up a Defender instead of a Corruptor (not that a Corruptor would have been worse off but rather it would have played differently both solo and in a group).

Looking over my blaster's build it again dawns on me why I chose Sonic/Dark--The -To Hit, Disorients, and -Res. I know I told the story just a post ago about the guy I know who enjoyed substantial dirt nap time due to his desire to run into melee range, but I do have fond memories of taking my  Blaster up into melee range after suitably pacifying a group and letting loose with Shadow Maul.  ;D

[LaughingAlex]

Yet it rarely did, which as a Blaster Primary, was kind of a shame. I liked blasters, rolled several and got more than a few to 50, never seriously played them on teams for incarnate stuff though, which should tell you something.

The "fixes" coming to Blasters were a nice future addition to a dying set, but too little to late for most. To their credit, the devs really tried to make Blasters viable on multiple occasions. The original Defiance (the more damage you take, the more damage you do) was a very NICE idea in concept, but was abused (who here remembers grouping up baddies flying real high, dropping so you take all but one point of damage, then nuking EVERYTHING into oblivion?). I personally liked the one where your first power choices (tiers 1 and two for primary, tier one on secondary) could ALWAYS be used as they were so innate to the blaster, you can do it in your sleep. That one helped a TON. And the future buffs of no end crash nukes and insta-snipes paired with a single +regen/end power in each secondary was a great step in the right direction.

Although, I think they should/could have done a couple of things better.
   1) They could make it so the FIRST attack that hit you could not be an Instant Kill (ala the falling till you take all but one health in damage). It would have to be two or more hits that brought you down. The timer on this would have to be adjusted so that it resets per bad guy or group I would think though.
   2) I think Doms got the "holy grail" when it came to mez protection; a power button that gave you massive mez protection AND refilled your end bar?!? Wtf man, that is nuts. I can see why, once going rouge was available, I saw a MASSIVE drop in Blasters and a huge increase in Dominators. Blasters should have gotten a power that was similar, sure they could change it up, but the same overarching theme could be used. OR, it could have been a progression. At level 1-10, your tier 1 and 2 powers could be cast whenever you had the juice; levels 11-25, freed up tier 3; etc all the way to tier 4 or 5. I think that would have made for a much better Blaster buff.
   3) Blasters really needed that better regen; I would have made it so that they regen OUT OF COMBAT faster than any other toon OR increase their out of combat regen proportional to their Health (not counting healers/regens/WPs). This would have encouraged them to go from group to group a little quicker solo. Another alternative is kind of like what they did for defenders (man I loved that +Dmg buff when solo) so that blasters healed better when solo. Just a thought.
   4) Really, blasters just had too little health and too little resistances (yes, not defense, resistances). Lets face it, you are gonna get hit at least a couple of times in a big +4x8 solo fight with no one to take the beating (not counting the ability to snipe/send in pets/and many other cool "tricks" employed by some of the sets...not all blaster sets had "tricks"). So defense, which was relatively easy to IO set bonus for, was not really the Blasters main problem; it was their health and resistances. I don't see why something with such LOW health, even at their Cap, could not have had Tank/Brute level of resistances. A BETTER alternative to me that I posted when the game was running was an obvious superhero caveat was the "I am immune to FIRE damage (mostly) as I am a FIRE/FIRE toon. And for those that say things like "what about Archery or AR? What about them?", I say give those classes (LAME) resistances to all damage types. Now I am not suggesting that a Fire/Fire Blaster should be immune to fire damage, BUT for your Primary, they could give you an inherent 10% resist to Fire, and if you chose Fire as the secondary, it would jump t0 20% (unaugmentable, of course). If you SPLIT your primary and secondary (say Fire and Ice), you would get 10% fire resistance and 5 or 7% Cold Resistance.

TL;DR sorry for the ramblings but I always wanted Blasters to be a little cooler.

Firstly, the most a mob could do in damage was all but one hp per hit.  So save for mobs that get extra damage over time in an attack, dying in one shot never technically happened in CoH.  Even the super walkers in the underground trial killed players in 3 34% damage hits.  Granted, resistance effected that and the attack itself hit like 10-20 times, so it was an instant death for 90% but it wasn't technically a one shot.

Second:  Dominators were made to have lows and highs, I do agree though that they were in many ways better blasters :).  Though they didn't have that burst blasters did.

You'd have loved Mental Manipulation.

I'd rather a different solution to resistances/more healing to solving blaster survivability.  I'd overhaul some secondary sets to have utility powers to assist in overall damage mitigation a bit better.  Let some powers heal, and some powers boost some resistances.  It does not nore should be as effective as a scrapper or stalker, but blasters already had as much hp as a scrapper(which felt low as heck due to zero mitigation).  Mental Manipulation had a very good power as a solid example of how to solve blaster pacing issues.  Granted, it was regen by itself, but hey, survive a fight with it and you'd be ready for the next within moments.

[brothermutant]

Firstly, the most a mob could do in damage was all but one hp per hit.  So save for mobs that get extra damage over time in an attack, dying in one shot never technically happened in CoH.  Even the super walkers in the underground trial killed players in 3 34% damage hits.  Granted, resistance effected that and the attack itself hit like 10-20 times, so it was an instant death for 90% but it wasn't technically a one shot.

Second:  Dominators were made to have lows and highs, I do agree though that they were in many ways better blasters :).  Though they didn't have that burst blasters did.

You'd have loved Mental Manipulation.

I'd rather a different solution to resistances/more healing to solving blaster survivability.  I'd overhaul some secondary sets to have utility powers to assist in overall damage mitigation a bit better.  Let some powers heal, and some powers boost some resistances.  It does not nore should be as effective as a scrapper or stalker, but blasters already had as much hp as a scrapper(which felt low as heck due to zero mitigation).  Mental Manipulation had a very good power as a solid example of how to solve blaster pacing issues.  Granted, it was regen by itself, but hey, survive a fight with it and you'd be ready for the next within moments.

Actually, the HP issue is not true (unless this link is wrong; http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Hit_Points). And I did like Mental Manip (I liked it for reasons other than Drain Psyche). MM had a really good non-Nuke nuke at the end, really good damage (probably because a lot of it was Psi), and a definite Controller feel to it (should point out I thought Trollers were the shiz back when I played, mostly cuz locking down half or more of the spawn was all I needed to survive). But I do agree that Drain Psyche (and future changes like it) was a definite step in the right direction.

[Thunder Glove]

I'd say Stalkers were more of a Scrapper+Controller hybrid, since their role was to take down a problematic target quickly.

Yeah, but they did so through a huge burst of damage, not by mezzing, which is why I likened them more to Blasters.

[Twisted Toon]

Firstly, the most a mob could do in damage was all but one hp per hit.  So save for mobs that get extra damage over time in an attack, dying in one shot never technically happened in CoH.  Even the super walkers in the underground trial killed players in 3 34% damage hits.  Granted, resistance effected that and the attack itself hit like 10-20 times, so it was an instant death for 90% but it wasn't technically a one shot.

That would depend on what time during the game's lifespan you were talking about. When the  game first launched, I'm fairly certain that you could be one shotted. I seem to recall a few instances where I or other characters I've been near were one shotted by a third party's ambush mob that were over-leveld for the zone we were in. level 35 DE in Steel Canyon for instance.

[Arcana]

I'd also say that as players learned more about the game, the more clear that blasters were just way to specialized.

Every archetype *started* specialized.  Blasters were the only one to stay that way.  And it was a very weird psychological hang up on the part of the devs collectively.  If they saw that tankers, say, had lower offense than they wanted them to have, they just upped tanker damage (they did it twice, first by increasing modifier and then with bruising).  But if they saw that blasters had lower mitigation than they should have, they refused to increase it right up to just before the end because for some reason they felt a moderate damage tanker was fine, a high damage dominator was fine, but a moderate survivability blaster was broken. 

There's a long history of how this came to be, but there's no actual *reason* why it remained so for so long.

[Arcana]

If those blaster changes ever went live, I imagine that Nukes would be popped every time they were live.

That was intentional.

[Arcana]

To their credit, the devs really tried to make Blasters viable on multiple occasions. The original Defiance (the more damage you take, the more damage you do) was a very NICE idea in concept, but was abused (who here remembers grouping up baddies flying real high, dropping so you take all but one point of damage, then nuking EVERYTHING into oblivion?).

If all of us were doing that, we'd still have that Defiance.  The problem was that it turned out for the most part it encouraged all blasters to run at lower than full health more often.  Remember that the point of Blaster buffs was to keep them alive longer, because datamining showed they tended to die more often (which then caused debt, which slowed leveling).  So what do you think happened when the devs handed all blasters an offensive tool that required you to be at lower health to use?  And that's why they took it away.  Not because it was being abused.  Because it started causing the most fragile archetype to start straight up committing suicide.

[Arcana]

Firstly, the most a mob could do in damage was all but one hp per hit.  So save for mobs that get extra damage over time in an attack, dying in one shot never technically happened in CoH.  Even the super walkers in the underground trial killed players in 3 34% damage hits.  Granted, resistance effected that and the attack itself hit like 10-20 times, so it was an instant death for 90% but it wasn't technically a one shot.

I would say the opposite.  Although it was claimed the change prevented "one-shotting" in fact what it technically prevented was one-ticking - you couldn't be killed in a single damage tick.  But anything that did multiple ticks of damage could still kill you, which means a single shot that hits you just once could still kill you.  I would call anything that can take your health from full to zero in less time than it takes to actually *see* your health go from full to zero with a single attack a "one-shot kill" and there were attacks that could do that.  The point of the "one-shot" break was to give players a chance to react to the attack, but if the attack killed you instantly or in 0.2 seconds makes no real difference since nothing can realistically happen in that time frame to save your life.  Not even regeneration ticks happen on that timescale (at ultrahigh regen rates at or near the cap you might get one tick in that kind of timeframe).

[Ankhammon]

Every archetype *started* specialized.  Blasters were the only one to stay that way.  And it was a very weird psychological hang up on the part of the devs collectively.  If they saw that tankers, say, had lower offense than they wanted them to have, they just upped tanker damage (they did it twice, first by increasing modifier and then with bruising).  But if they saw that blasters had lower mitigation than they should have, they refused to increase it right up to just before the end because for some reason they felt a moderate damage tanker was fine, a high damage dominator was fine, but a moderate survivability blaster was broken. 

There's a long history of how this came to be, but there's no actual *reason* why it remained so for so long.

Funny, I always thought it was Defenders who were forced to "stay that way". It took many many issues before Defenders got their inherent which was an end discount if their team was taking damage. I always thought that was a strange inherent... If you let your team take damage their is an end discount in it for you.
They did get a solo damage buff that didn't take into consideration their low damage ceiling nor really the fact they had a low damage modifier to begin with.

With Blasters, the devs made several changes to help them out. True, most of them didn't exactly work as intended but the intent was there.
Seems that they wanted to make more damage (or more consistent damage) the answer for blaster issues. They upped their modifier, then gave them a damage increase when taking damage and even gave then their first 3 powers mez proof.

Personally, I think the devs didn't want to change the original Holy Trinity (Pentagity?) approach from I1 with their original ATs. Remember when we were specifically told that the Scrapper was the "solo" AT?
Eventually they moved from that view with the Villain ATs, but I'm still not convinced they ever saw a real problem with the original AT formations. It did encourage teaming after all.

[Azrael]

Every archetype *started* specialized.  Blasters were the only one to stay that way.  And it was a very weird psychological hang up on the part of the devs collectively.  If they saw that tankers, say, had lower offense than they wanted them to have, they just upped tanker damage (they did it twice, first by increasing modifier and then with bruising).  But if they saw that blasters had lower mitigation than they should have, they refused to increase it right up to just before the end because for some reason they felt a moderate damage tanker was fine, a high damage dominator was fine, but a moderate survivability blaster was broken. 

There's a long history of how this came to be, but there's no actual *reason* why it remained so for so long.

I'd agree with that.  For some reason, the Devs seemed blind sided to some of the 'fundamentals' of CoH which, I felt, lead ultimately to their undoing.  'Broken' blasters was just one example of that.  Defenders who couldn't self buff another.  (Nice when you could stack by eg. Duo-ing with another Bubbler/En Defender...matters changed somewhat...but...should you have to play 'back to back' to circumvent a d short sighted design decision.  Yes.  Nice to team.  But shouldn't you be able to solo?  Yes.  And the Red side arches proved that.  Without treading on other arches toes so much...  You'd hardly confuse a Corruptor and Brute...yet...they both had that 'spark of life' that made them 'more so' and more exhilarating to play than the blue side.  Once I got into Red side arches...I didn't go back to the blue side types.  Brutes...soft capped?  Rage builder?  Dominator?  A blaster with meZ protection and controller who could melee scrap blap?  No contest...)

Somebody made the point that 'red side' had archetypes that could sustain solo ability because, basically, the one gift CoV gave to the CoH community was archetypes that eclipsed the original 'specialist' roles of 'Blue' side specialists.  I wished I'd seen this sooner.  Eg.  A dominator had decent damage, mez protection, could blast, blap, scrap and control.  The only blaster I still wanted to play after discovering dominators....was an Ice Ice Blaster.  (I'd played an Ice Controller...up to L32...before someone wryly suggested that, '...what you really want is a Blastoller...an Ice, Ice blaster which is a 'far superior' ice controller...with 'teeth.')  Ie.  Mitigation.  Control.  The only other blaster I could really play with conviction was the latter day prototype for Issue 24...the Water Blaster.  Utterly transformed the blaster playground. 

Why?  It fixed the tremendous damage 'post ED' did to blasters.  While I recognise Arcana's point about the faster you kill mobs the more you roll the debt dice and the less time you have to return what little hit points you have...ie.  Whenever you gambling a lot...eventually you will lose with the hit points of a paper bag, no mez protection, no defences and recovery toggles/powers...  My En/En blaster was played high octane with perma-hasten.  (And yes, I was 'that' en/en blaster who wouldn't wait for a tank to hold aggro and then try and rush in and Bone Crush/Smash someone...and then hit the mat after I was 'mobbed...')  But at least perms-hasten offered faster offensive capability to take the mobs down.  Without that, the mediocre hitting en/en seemed...well, mediocre.  Especially as knock back mitigation seemed to be hit and miss and more so higher up in the game.

Sure, you could mix powers.  Eg. Fire/Devices, En/Devices.  But I never did.  I liked 'single' themed sets.  eg.  Fire/Fire.  What started off early on in the game as a great even con mob killer turned into an aggro debt magnet later on.  Why?  Dam mitigation.  Russian roulette you kill them on a hair-trigger but they'll kill you if you don't get it 'just right.'  It was def' a struggle from mid-30s onwards.  On all my blasters by Ice/Ice.

Sure.  You can solo even con.  Sure you can even 0/x4-ish.  But you can't take the hits as a Defender (can't self buff) or Blaster (can't avoid Mez, 'how hard' mobs hit or how expensive 'end' is on En/en unless you purple/or IO the crepe out of it...)

Ergo.  Edge cases.  You could make a build with amusing edge case scenarios like soft capped skeleton builds.  You could use rare Hami's and do 'Boost Range' to make you a 'snipe' specialist.  I don't think that fits in which how 'most' people wanted to 'play' blasters.  Ergo the high fall off of blasters later on in the game.

Seriously.  A blaster vs Arachnos?  Vs Carni?  Malti?  Slowed?  Dead.  Mezzed?  Dead.  Sapped, one shotted by a 'slinger' and then a pounding from a Titan.  Guess what?  Dead.  I did play my Ice/Ice Blast-troller from L41-50.  I became, ironically, a 'malta' specialist (it had become 'personal...')  And, yes.  I made to L50.  However, it wasn't the 'awesome' damage of Ice blast that did it...(and yes, I did bet heavily on AIM/BUILD UP...to pound them 1st movers advantage...) but it was holds and slows...and even the ice epics offering 'mitigation' that did it.  +2x1 was about as much as I could handle, even with hold, hide and seek and pounding 1st mover advantage on the apex mob guy with HOLD/ AIM/BUILD UP etc.

The one thing that came up time and time again with my duo partner.  Damage mitigation on blasters...  We often circumvented this by playing 'back to back' i.e. two defenders or two blasters.  'Force multiplier...' for damage or defence in the case of Defenders.

Scrappers, as noted had 'averaged' strengths.  High dam, high def, high meZ protection.  I felt, a 'charmed life.'  A dev's darling arch.  Why no such love for the blaster?  Why no radical rethink.  Especially as, in my view, ED damaged the perma 'speed' and extra dam/extra end slotting which so favoured blasters.  Now you needed 'specialist' IO builds to get those bonuses...which were worlds away from the 'pick up and play' origins.  Scrappers and the CoV arch's had so much more 'out of the box' with 'mere' SOs.

As you can tell, I'm really enjoying the vast majority on this cathartic blaster discussion...nodding enthusiastically through the posts.

Though Aggle' had me amused with the notion that it wasn't too bad being a mezzed blaster...as you could still fire off the primary two blasters and 2ndary even though your blaster looked humiliatingly drunk while doing so.  Ignominy.  Can you imagine Johnny Storm looked drunk while getting his blasts off?  That dev' kind of thinking summed up the 'pregnant pause' on blaster 'development.' 

Or who can forget the 'Defiance' kicks in when you're nearly dead.  Only compounded the blaster's problem.

Water Blaster.  The rinse repeat novas with no end dive bomb.  AoE effects with teeth.  Water cork screw to give vital ticks of healing back.  A set that was progressive and looking forward to mitigation, stacking and building on the blaster's strengths with the prospect of a proper healing and end 2ndary.

Oh cruel irony that the game was cut down at Issue 24.  The rebirth of the Blaster.  A phoenix like Rebirth.

Could you have imaged that with an IO build? :D

Azrael.

[Azrael]

...and if Blasters thought they had it rough...

...Defenders...where just a rope a dope punching bag with a costume on...solo.

-1x0 anybody?

Azrael.

[LadyVamp]

...and if Blasters thought they had it rough...

...Defenders...where just a rope a dope punching bag with a costume on...solo.

-1x0 anybody?

Azrael.

One of my best soloist toons was an ff/dp def.  slow to be sure but rarely needed help even at +4x8 and almost always an arch boss of some type when she did.  Only regret with her was I wish I'd done ff/nrg instead.

[brothermutant]

One of my best soloist toons was an ff/dp def.  slow to be sure but rarely needed help even at +4x8 and almost always an arch boss of some type when she did.  Only regret with her was I wish I'd done ff/nrg instead.

Why? I always liked Energy Blast for the look but I thought it was one of the lowest damage dealing Blaster/defender sets? I liked it for the KB myself, but wished it was more of a guarantee than a "chance of".

[Azrael]

I wish en had been a guarantee of rather than chance of knock back.  Frustratingly hit and miss.  And the damage seemed middling.

Azrael.

Yet it rarely did, which as a Blaster Primary, was kind of a shame. I liked blasters, rolled several and got more than a few to 50, never seriously played them on teams for incarnate stuff though, which should tell you something.

The "fixes" coming to Blasters were a nice future addition to a dying set, but too little to late for most. To their credit, the devs really tried to make Blasters viable on multiple occasions. The original Defiance (the more damage you take, the more damage you do) was a very NICE idea in concept, but was abused (who here remembers grouping up baddies flying real high, dropping so you take all but one point of damage, then nuking EVERYTHING into oblivion?). I personally liked the one where your first power choices (tiers 1 and two for primary, tier one on secondary) could ALWAYS be used as they were so innate to the blaster, you can do it in your sleep. That one helped a TON. And the future buffs of no end crash nukes and insta-snipes paired with a single +regen/end power in each secondary was a great step in the right direction.

Although, I think they should/could have done a couple of things better.
   1) They could make it so the FIRST attack that hit you could not be an Instant Kill (ala the falling till you take all but one health in damage). It would have to be two or more hits that brought you down. The timer on this would have to be adjusted so that it resets per bad guy or group I would think though.
   2) I think Doms got the "holy grail" when it came to mez protection; a power button that gave you massive mez protection AND refilled your end bar?!? Wtf man, that is nuts. I can see why, once going rouge was available, I saw a MASSIVE drop in Blasters and a huge increase in Dominators. Blasters should have gotten a power that was similar, sure they could change it up, but the same overarching theme could be used. OR, it could have been a progression. At level 1-10, your tier 1 and 2 powers could be cast whenever you had the juice; levels 11-25, freed up tier 3; etc all the way to tier 4 or 5. I think that would have made for a much better Blaster buff.
   3) Blasters really needed that better regen; I would have made it so that they regen OUT OF COMBAT faster than any other toon OR increase their out of combat regen proportional to their Health (not counting healers/regens/WPs). This would have encouraged them to go from group to group a little quicker solo. Another alternative is kind of like what they did for defenders (man I loved that +Dmg buff when solo) so that blasters healed better when solo. Just a thought.
   4) Really, blasters just had too little health and too little resistances (yes, not defense, resistances). Lets face it, you are gonna get hit at least a couple of times in a big +4x8 solo fight with no one to take the beating (not counting the ability to snipe/send in pets/and many other cool "tricks" employed by some of the sets...not all blaster sets had "tricks"). So defense, which was relatively easy to IO set bonus for, was not really the Blasters main problem; it was their health and resistances. I don't see why something with such LOW health, even at their Cap, could not have had Tank/Brute level of resistances. A BETTER alternative to me that I posted when the game was running was an obvious superhero caveat was the "I am immune to FIRE damage (mostly) as I am a FIRE/FIRE toon. And for those that say things like "what about Archery or AR? What about them?", I say give those classes (LAME) resistances to all damage types. Now I am not suggesting that a Fire/Fire Blaster should be immune to fire damage, BUT for your Primary, they could give you an inherent 10% resist to Fire, and if you chose Fire as the secondary, it would jump t0 20% (unaugmentable, of course). If you SPLIT your primary and secondary (say Fire and Ice), you would get 10% fire resistance and 5 or 7% Cold Resistance.

TL;DR sorry for the ramblings but I always wanted Blasters to be a little cooler.

Holy grail.  Dominator.  :)

Sound  post.

[LaughingAlex]

I would say the opposite.  Although it was claimed the change prevented "one-shotting" in fact what it technically prevented was one-ticking - you couldn't be killed in a single damage tick.  But anything that did multiple ticks of damage could still kill you, which means a single shot that hits you just once could still kill you.  I would call anything that can take your health from full to zero in less time than it takes to actually *see* your health go from full to zero with a single attack a "one-shot kill" and there were attacks that could do that.  The point of the "one-shot" break was to give players a chance to react to the attack, but if the attack killed you instantly or in 0.2 seconds makes no real difference since nothing can realistically happen in that time frame to save your life.  Not even regeneration ticks happen on that timescale (at ultrahigh regen rates at or near the cap you might get one tick in that kind of timeframe).

True that yeah, any DoT wold bypass the one shot system.  Thats why night widows could actually and successfully pull off a one shot on the more fragile archtypes in pvp.  The rule was also why you'd see the underground bosses "one shot" the entire league; they had 10 hits of 33% damage/hit over a course of only about 3-4 seconds.  Which combined with the subtle nature of the target system and player tendency to ignore the warnings, created that level of fake difficulty that made me never do the trial or see anyone touching it.

[HEATSTROKE]

I am totally stealing these types of toons, just so you know.

Never considered Rad/Fire (always shied away from fire builds, I'm a rebel). I did the Elec/Elec/Elec thing a ton, but never considered Devices to be paired with EM pulse, brilliant! And I did hear some blasters really went nuts with the +range moves on their ranged builds, what better way to stay out of harms way than to make them run to you while you pick the crowd away to a minor threat.

Feel free. I dont own any exclusives..