Obitus

That's interesting. I haven't tried Bonfire in a genuine farming map, but in general content in my experience it's spotty--effective mitigation, and some decent scatter control, but mobs have a tendency to run out of it pretty fast. Some mobs fall over constantly, others seem immune. Much spottier than, say, Ice Slick. Combining it with a powerful slow would help I'm sure.

Then you should have an easy time countering my numbers with math of your own. I even provided you a link to all the data! Enjoy!

I don't doubt it. Like I say, it's possible. Durability isn't the problem. I'm assuming you use Hot feet to mitigate scatter? I know some people favor Ice/Fire for farming. But if you want to do farming fast, easy and cheap, you can't beat a Brute. And scatter remains an issue for Blasters, generally. Farming builds typically don't do so well in generalized +4x8 content.

It's really simple man. This is the Blaster section of City of Data 2.0. All you have to do is pick a Blaster power set combination, and construct an AoE attack rotation that can, with Aim+Build Up, deliver 4,136 damage, to multiple targets within 10 seconds. Your smugness suggests this should be trivial. Can't wait to see your results! To everyone else, I'll just take a moment to point out that this is the problem with internet discourse. ScarySai's a decent poster, or at least that's my recollection, but in this case he was in such a rush to mock me for saying things he didn't like that he ended up arguing that survivability is a trivial consideration for Blasters, even in a solo context at +4x8 against varied villain groups. This argument is, of course, self-evidently absurd. Like, we're talking dancing-with-your-pants-on-your-head-on-the-shortbus levels of nuttiness. But this being the internet, instead of backing down or at least trying to discuss things like an adult, he decided to flood the thread with substance-free smugness, to distract from what his opponents were actually arguing. As oldskool said, "Every single time." That's where these threads end up. Anyone who's played a solo Blaster at even moderately high difficulty would have a hard time mocking the content of this post, over-long though it may be. Quick, let's bury it in flames and distortions!

#1 is a dumb joke, and #2-3 are transparent deflections. "Less squishy" does not equal "can roflstomp everything," and careful readers will understand that you just handwaved the survivability question not just for solo Blasters, but for solo anything. #4. Speedrunners stacking a billion temp powers and mailing themselves inspirations to perform the CoH equivalent of party tricks aren't relevant to balance discussions. Not saying that what they do isn't cool or impressive, but c'mon man. This isn't good faith argument. "If we bend over backwards to cherry pick situations that eliminate all of Blasters' weaknesses, what do you know, their weaknesses don't matter!" (EDIT: To be clear, I'm referencing solo speedrunners here. Group speed runs are even more off-topic to the original dispute.) #5. I already posted numbers. But sure, feel free to post an example proving that a Blaster AoE rotation can kill multiple bosses with ... ... in the time it takes a Sentinel to get off his first nuke, as Monos King suggested. Or hell, I'll be kind and give you ten seconds. Feel free to post the "objective" numbers! Hey, maybe I missed something. It's just barely possible that you might find the magical powerset combination that can do it. If you really think that solo Blasters have the kind of burst AoE damage to drop multiple +4 bosses in a handful of seconds, and more to the point that they can maintain that pace consistently over the course of an entire mission, then I can only assume you've never tried it.

So just to be clear, you're saying that all of the following statements are 100% wrong: Varied maps at high difficulty settings present challenges that can occasionally kill just about any AT, no matter how well built. Solo Blasters don't have a trivially easy time surviving in those environments. Mob scatter is a problem that can vastly reduce the practical kill speeds of characters who don't have taunt auras or AoE immobilizes. Farmers favor Brutes over Blasters. Blaster burst damage isn't high enough to kill multiple +4 bosses in a handful of seconds. Thanks for the insight!

What are you bringing to the table in this epeen comparison? If you want to get together sometime on Beta, shoot the shit, and have a friendly race between your Blaster and my Sentinel, then I might be game. But if all I'm gonna get out of you is, "lol, prove it to me, idiot," then I won't waste my time. What I said isn't even controversial, if you don't willfully ignore the context, which was clear speed in difficult and varied solo content, not "the fastest possible speed for a glass cannon Blapper on easy maps," which I begin to suspect is your standard, if you even have one. As noted, there is a reason that farmers don't favor Blasters. I won't say it's impossible to make a Blaster that is competitive with a Brute for the purpose, but it's much much more difficult--and I have tried, spent billions on such an experiment, way back when. The idea that Blaster offense is so awesome that they can brute-force their way past the scatter problem is just knee-jerk wishful thinking, from the same sort of people who insisted for years that Blaster single-target damage is unparalleled because, uh, no reason or evidence given. You put forth a scenario earlier, in which your Blaster performs ~4x better than "my" Sentinel ("a blaster will dance on the mobs' corpses in half the time it takes you to nuke half their health"). Leaving aside for a moment that this claim is brutally absurd just from a damage-numbers standpoint, it also ignores the practical problems of a Blaster trying to clear the average +4x8 map. In reality, this is roughly how things go: Blaster approaches spawn, which may or may not be spread out to begin with. Aim+Build Up, then the nuke goes off, followed by 1 or 2 smaller followup AoEs. Most if not all of the minions are dead, depending on how many were clumped together, and you most likely have 3-4 seriously injured lieutenants and 2-3 less injured bosses left over. These then scatter to the winds. At this point, you have a choice. If you're trying to maximize clear speed, like for some dopey internet-epeen competition, you might just move on with the idea that the mobs will follow you, or with the idea that it'll be faster to come back later. Or if you're doing missions normally, you'll more likely sit there and pick things off using a mixture of single-target attacks and whatever AoEs the current positioning incentivizes. It is this clean up stage that is the great equalizer. Notice that I haven't even brought up survivability yet, or time spent using control/mitigation powers (e.g. IO'd Bonfire), which contrary to the hand-wavey nonsense in this thread, actually do matter when you're soloing +4x8 against varied villain groups. I admit that I probably don't use Inspirations to their fullest; a solo blaster stacking defensive inspirations constantly, maybe using a combining macro (something I've only ever used on farming maps) might do better, but still. If your claim is that it's trivially easy for Blaster builds to be made "sturdy enough" to ROFLstomp, say, a +4x8 solo tour of Arachnos, Malta, Carnies, to say nothing of Incarnate content like Knives of Vengeance (I won't even cheat by naming PPD or Rularuu)--then the burden of proof is on you, not me. You're the one who's making extraordinary claims in that instance. "But MUH softcap" doesn't fly; I've built too many soft-capped Blasters over the years. It helps, a ton, but soft-capped DEF to limited positions/types and without DDR can be very brittle unless you're cherry picking easy villain groups to fight, and sometimes even then you roll snake eyes. In fact, if all you wanted to do is maximize clear speed, you're probably better off building for ~32% DEF to more positions/types, so that you can max out with a single Luck. I generally don't do that on Blasters, because I prefer to maximize non-inspiration performance, and maybe that's a flaw in my approach to this argument--but even if so, the people who scream about IO'd softcaps, as if they were a panacea, are wrong. Truth be told, even Sentinels will occasionally struggle to survive in the environment I've described. Hell, even IO'd Tank builds usually have some sort of serious weakness that a given villain group will exploit. Listening to people act like survivability is a trivial problem for solo Blasters only reinforces my prejudice that many forumites only solo easy content. Seriously, it's like taking crazy pills. This sort of thing would be much easier if we were still allowed to post videos.

The first statement, WRT to "potential" is probably true, given limitless team support. The second statement just isn't true in my experience, and the numbers quite frankly don't bear it out in the general case. You ain't dropping multiple +4 bosses (+3 after Incarnate shift) in a handful of seconds with any solo Blaster. Been through this debate many many times before. While it's true that Sentinels don't have an analogue for, say, a balls-to-the-wall PBAoE Blapper wielding the /Fire secondary, most Blasters don't have that kind of AoE in their secondaries. On a hat-picked Blaster build, you're probably looking at a nuke, a TAoE or two, maybe one PBAoE attack, and/or a cone. Most of that stuff will be available to an analogous Sentinel too, and only at a ~20% damage deficit. And the Sentinel will have his nuke up much more often. And the Sentinel has more defensive leeway, which might allow him to slot more procs. (Needless to say, taking every available AoE attack on a Blaster probably isn't the most efficient build strategy for most use cases.) I find that most of my builds end up clearing spawns in the ~30s range in general content (i.e. not on builds or maps specifically geared to farming). Builds like Tankers and Brutes tend to be fastest and certainly the easiest to play. Blasters tend to seesaw; faster when the nuke is up, slower otherwise, oftentimes delayed by scatter/stragglers. The Sentinels I've tried aren't noticeably slower than the Blasters, largely due to the faster cycle time on their nukes. Again, all of this is solo, and I try to maximize my ability to do this with minor inspiration use and against the widest possible range of the game's enemy groups. Now this may be chicken-and-egg syndrome; I may just be in the habit of targeting the ~30s threshold as "good enough" for my builds. And part of it, I suspect, is that we're talking past each other to some degree based on differences of preference. Anyway, to echo mac and Myrm, there's always room for any AT in most any team, and certainly in all of mine. This is part of the reason I am biased towards solo ability; it usually translates into the ability to carry teams.

How about this--you tell or show me how fast a Blaster can clear 4x8 content, against a wide variety of NPC factions and without routinely chewing floor, because clearly I'm doing something wrong, if you think that Blasters are some sort of untouchable gods of clearing speed. I will happily admit that "at the high end" may have been a poor choice of words, though. What I meant was that Sentinels are perfectly capable of matching most of the high-end IO'd Blaster builds that I would personally play, which tend to emphasize range and survivability over WTFPWN PBAoE damage. That's what "IME" was supposed to mean. I'm sure there are builds that can clear faster, though I'm not sure exactly what their existence would prove, with regard to the overarch of my argument. On average, i.e. with powersets that aren't your bespoke Ice/Fire or whatever, even highly IO'd Blasters don't clear 4x8 content particularly fast. (And chances are, your bespoke Ice/Fire would have survivability problems unless he's cherry picking enemy groups or gulping down temps and inspirations like a drunken sailor.) Anyway, even really good PBAoE damage Blasters, which I have played in the past, tend to get slowed down by scatter, against mobs that don't die in the first salvo. This is why most farmers prefer Brutes, Tankers, and even occasionally Controllers for the task. Sentinels who opt for the AoE immobilize have an advantage here, as noted. All of that is very impressive, and I appreciate the link. But I already acknowledged that Blasters shine in high-end speed runs. Do you think Blasters are actually the best soloist AT because a tiny handful of people who've memorized the content and made it a priority to refine the process down to its most minute detail, use Blasters to shave seconds off their best times? Am I supposed to cede the balance argument because stacking every temp power available, mailing yourself inspirations, and so on and so forth tends to favor ATs with a high damage scalar and damage cap? To put it another way, if you were soloing something for the first time, or even the third or fifth time, and you had your pick of any build in the game, would you pick a Blaster?

The main problem with pretty much all balance discussions on the forum is that a large portion of the playerbase doesn't seem to do or care about content that isn't Council farms or the ITF. Or they run exclusively in 8-man Incarnate teams when they do harder content. It never ceases to amaze me; you make an uncontroversial statement about e.g. Blapper durability, and like clockwork fifteen dudes will jump in with variations on, "my blaster never ever dies," "learn to play," etc. Meanwhile, if you've spent any time at all trying to solo at high difficulty levels across a variety of the game's content, it should be obvious to you that just about all builds have pretty glaring weaknesses, which will be emphasized against at least one or two NPC factions. This is doubly true of builds that rely almost exclusively on IO +DEF bonuses, which are very strong; don't get me wrong, but by no means are they comprehensive. With regard to Blasters specifically, you also quickly realize that their clear speed isn't actually very high in the absence of Controllers or Tankers/Brutes (or anything with a taunt aura) to prevent scatter. Incidentally, Sentinels have a huge advantage here because their Epic Pools give them access to AoE Immobilize powers. Even without taking one of those, though, Sentinel clear speed is at worst tied with Blasters at the high end, IME. And all of this is before you get into some of the more advanced soloing tricks, e.g. soloing AVs or even TFs. In keeping with the theme that all builds have weaknesses, the best builds for soloing hard TFs are also terrible at AoE clear speed (Illusion Controllers and Mind Dominators)--but if you want something that's good at both, a Sentinel's a pretty good choice. That said, and in the general case, meleers are the true tank mages, as Oedipus said above. This has been the case, more or less, from day one.

Sure, but Opportunity also isn't completely worthless. And Sentinel blast sets are different from their Blaster cousins in ways that aren't always immediately obvious: Sentinel Electric and Sentinel Sonic are better at single target damage than their Blaster counterparts, for example. Sentinel Fire is slightly worse at single-target (no snipe), and the Sentinel version of Ice Blast got screwed on its Freeze Ray analogue, etc, etc--but then again, both ATs have the opportunity to proc out a single-target hold (e.g. Dominate for Sents, Char for Blasters), which helps to even the playing field. And of course, there's the nuke issue. I'd rather have a nuke that recharges reliably within 30 seconds than a nuke that recharges in 45+, even if the latter delivers ~120% damage per blast (more, in practice, given Blasters' access to Build Up, but still). Sentinels' rock-solid every-spawn access to the nuke does a lot to paper over their deficit in AoE target caps, and depending on the set, it can give the Sentinel more wide-area utility. Take, for example, the absolutely enormous debuffs (-ToHit, slow, -Recharge) attached to Blizzard, which a Sentinel can maintain almost indefinitely on a given target (or group of targets, if they stay relatively bunched up). Then you get into the issue of what it is, exactly, you're comparing. Ranged Blasters have never done particularly impressive damage relative to melee ATs and VEATs and even certain Corruptor, Controller, Dominator, and now, yes, certain Sentinel builds. Blaster damage has always been overrated in a single-target context, and even in AoE Blasters weren't all that until the extremely recent (in terms of the game's development cycle) revision towards crashless nukes. The big Blaster numbers you see in e.g. the Pylon thread come from Blapper builds. You might say, "But Obi, Blasters can blap so their blapping prowess is relevant!" And it is relevant to a point, but there are two things to consider: Blapper builds have a harder time achieving the allegedly supreme IO-DEF durability that everyone seems to take as given for Blasters when they complain that they're better than Sentinels. A Blaster can, of course, grab Scorpion Shield and quickly cap S/L/E, but that still isn't as safe as soft-capping to range (on a ranged build); it's brittle because you lose access to S/L Resistance from a different Epic Shield, because you don't have DEF debuff resistance, and because there are more mez effects and more incoming damage when you play in melee range. Oh, and it shoehorns you into an otherwise underwhelming epic pool. (No procc'd Char for you!) More to the point, if we're comparing like-to-like in the Sent-vs-Blaster showdown, then we have to confine ourselves to ranged blast sets. Though I haven't posted much lately, I have beat this drum quite a lot in the past: I think the Sentinel's weaknesses relative to Blasters are heavily overblown, but I admit I'm biased because my play style skews towards building solo/carrying monsters, and not so much towards optimizing team compositions for high-end speed runs (arguably the one area where Blasters really shine). Purely in terms of self-contained capability, i.e. the balance between a single toon's offense and utility/durability, Blasters still don't quite get enough of an offensive advantage to justify their monstrously huge durability deficit--certainly in comparison to melee ATs, but also in general, in comparison to many if not most control/buff/debuff builds, and in comparison with Sentinels as a whole AT. And I say that after taking into account a fully blinged out IO build and Clarion to deal with mez. But it isn't strictly a solo game, so c'est la vie. I'm not arguing for Blaster buffs here, just trying to keep things in perspective. Sentinels on the other hand suffer from a number of frustrating little wrinkles, among them the seemingly slipshod manner in which their blast sets were adapted to the AT, the clunkiness of Opportunity, and (IMO an underrated issue) an unusually crowded powers/build progression; like melee ATs, Sents have to take more-or-less their entire (armor) secondary, but unlike melee ATs, they don't have the Primary power/slot efficiency of a lot of melee offensive sets. Add to these complaints the (IMO) arbitrary pre-emptive nerfs both to Sentinel attack range and AoE target caps, and people have cause to be underwhelmed. To be clear, though, Blasters had it way worse, for way longer, and it still isn't obvious that they're better off on the whole. Fair to say in fact that a lot of Sentinels' valid complaints are, or stem from, long-standing problems inherited from blast sets. Certainly it's fair to argue that, to the extent Sentinels were under-tuned, they were under-tuned for much the same, irrational reason that the Paragon devs refused to buff Blasters for so many years. "Range is soooo uber in and of itself that we have to be extra extra careful," to paraphrase. This isn't directed particularly at Myshkin, btw. I have a great appreciation for much of his work on other subforums. I just used his post as a jumping off point for my contrarian rant here.

I didn't say that the new Afterburner has the same functionality as the old Afterburner. I said that the new Fly power, by itself, basically gives you the same travel functionality--that is, the same speed--as the old Fly+AB. The new Afterburner, which comes free when you select Fly, is gravy. You are, of course, welcome to feel that the developers should be doing something else instead of buffing travel powers, but that doesn't speak to the quality of the travel-power changes. And given that devs work for free, on this game that you can play for free, waxing curmudgeonly because your own pet ideas weren't implemented first isn't terribly compelling. It isn't as if this version of CoH is littered with game-stopping bugs that have been pointedly neglected. I have yet to see a valid complaint about the Fly changes on their own merits. "Speed number bigger, but no longer blue," isn't a reasonable objection. Neither is "I'm just as fast now without touching Afterburner, but I don't like that now Afterburner is a zero-investment click power that gives me even more peak speed." At this point I'm convinced that the tiny handful of relentless complainers in this thread are performing an elaborate Andy Kauffman routine.

I don't understand complaints about the Fly changes. If you have Fly + AB now, perhaps with Afterburner as an LoTG mule, the patch will give you Fly + Evasive Maneuvers, which slots the same sets that Afterburner used to do. And you'll get more travel speed in the bargain. And you'll gain massive amounts of in-combat speed with Hover + Evasive, if you're inclined to use them. If you didn't already have Afterburner, or if you want to drop it post-patch, the benefits are even more obvious: you're basically getting Afterburner's old travel functionality (sans LoTG mulehood) for the price of one power pick instead of at least three. And you're getting a peak speed increase in the bargain. Let me emphasize: if you already have Fly or Fly + Afterburner, you don't have to change your build, at all. At worst, you should see a minor improvement if you stand pat. The patch's update to travel powers is actually ingenious. I can't remember the last time a patch in any game managed to offer so much qualitative goodness, without a single downside to players, without even a need to respec, while at the same time avoiding huge combat buffs. (This isn't to say that there aren't any nerfs at all in the patch; I'm talking Travel Powers here.) In fact, aggregate player strength may actually go down at the high end as an indirect result of the developers making theme-centric build choices much more attractive with the travel power changes. I've been having a ball on the test server, combining Hover + EM (at ~50 mph) and Combat Teleport to zoom around on my tank bashing baddies like Superman. By spreadsheet, my build would be better with Combat Jumping and Leadership, but the fun factor of this new setup blows them away. YMMV, but I really couldn't be happier. Although I haven't spent a great deal of time testing the other travel pools yet, those changes look unambiguously fantastic too. Now, a couple of minor bugs I encountered: The Fly Speed from Evasive Maneuvers seems to shut itself off at random intervals, most often after zoning, but it also seems to happen occasionally mid-combat. De-activating and re-activating fixes it. This is an older bug, but as long as we're on the subject of Fly: certain toggle powers prevent flypose emotes. The one that concerns me is the Tanker version of Lightning Field; another poster reported the same problem WRT to Shadow Fall on a Defender.

I was already in love with this patch after reading the notes on travel powers. Then I logged in to the test server, and I discovered that the booster/catalyst UI is much faster now, too. This is the greatest patch ever conceived.

I haven't read the whole thread, but I want to echo this sentiment. There was a time when tier 3 blasts were all set at a range of 20 feet. After years and years, the devs finally and correctly reversed this decision, though it took a few revisions before we got them up to 80'. Blasters specifically and ranged builds in general were saddled with inexplicable drawbacks to compensate for what the original developers saw as an apocalyptic threat to game balance: range as a defense (!!!). Meanwhile, tankers were herding entire maps to be nuked down. The fixation on keeping ranged Blasters' power in check has always been bizarre and out of touch. Just make every Blaster ranged attack 80', already. I promise you the game won't break if ranged characters with terrible durability (and now, once again, mediocre control) gain the ability to toss a T1 immobilize into their ranged attack chain without having to worry about where they're standing. The concern that "all blaster immobilizes have always had shorter range" isn't at all rational; as Chris says above, it is simply a matter of institutional inertia, and in this case the institution was off its rocker from day one.

Just want to note here that higher-conned enemies only get Accuracy buffs, not ToHit (up to +6, anyway). So yes, a higher conned minion will have higher than a 5% net chance to hit you when you're at the soft cap, but its net chance to hit you will always be 10% of its initial value, absent other buffs/debuffs. In other words, 45% DEF is always 90% mitigation against the generic (and non-Incarnate-content) NPC. For example, if we give a minion a 50% Accuracy bonus, then its default chance to hit rises to 50 * 1.5 = 75%. If the minion's target has 45% Defense, this drops to (50 - 45) * 1.5 = 7.5%, or 1/10th of the initial value. Therefore when a player is at the soft-cap, losing 10 points of DEF results in a three-fold increase to damage taken, regardless of the enemies' relative level: (50-35) / (50-45) = 3 = ((50-35)*1.5) / ((50-45)*1.5) = 3. We often default to discussing even-con minions for the sake of simplicity, but nothing significant changes against higher cons in the generic case. What does throw a wrench in all of our DEF discussions is that we don't often fight "the generic case." Many NPC factions have either ToHit buffs or DEF debuffs. Some of these effects are too small or sporadic to make a huge difference most of the time, but they can add up. Others can be mitigated through target selection (e.g. killing Nemesis Lieutenants last, or Tarantula Mistresses first). Others can be managed through smart positioning. Still others are absolutely devastating and without much in the way of a useful counter (e.g. PPD peacebringers, Rularuu). And then of course we have Incarnate content, which not only raises the soft cap by 14 points, but is also chock full of NPCs with nasty buff/debuff effects. In short, there are already a lot of NPCs out there that counter DEF, to a greater or lesser degree. Soft-capped characters can find challenge even now, and they don't have to look particularly hard for it. (This goes double for soft-capped characters without high DEF-Debuff Resistance, i.e. pretty much all builds that derive most of their DEF from IO bonuses, which draw the most ire from forumites.) Adding another anti-DEF mechanic across the board seems excessive.

IOs dropped in Issue 9, which launched in May of 2007. That was roughly 3 years after the game's launch, and more than 5 years before the game's sunset. Even if we disregard the ~7 years of nostalgia-tinged darkness afterwards, and the year or so of Homecoming's existence, IOs have been a part of CoH for far longer than they weren't. So whether the pre-IO (or anti-IO) group is "correct" about the game's balance scheme, which is an unanswerably subjective question, they have a pretty weak case when it comes to defining the essential character of the game as most players know and love it. Keep in mind that a sizable portion of the people who experienced the game prior to IOs also stayed for years afterwards. I'm one of those; my subscription was active from launch day to sunset. You can't convince me that the game would be more interesting or fun with only SO-era build options, even if you could somehow craft an intellectually unassailable argument that the game's balance would be "better." You'd have a hard time convincing me that such a game would even be recognizable as City of Heroes, anymore. I believe that was the point. We're playing an extremely old and officially dead game. There are changes you can justify, to improve, refine, or expand the experience, but for the most part people are here because they like the game for what it was (and is). This isn't a situation that lends itself to sweeping revamps.

If the standard is "optimal team," then Defenders are basically the only AT worth playing. (In City of Heroes, buff/debuff stacking has always been obscenely broken, possibly the most overpowered long-standing mechanical quirk in any MMO anywhere. Nothing else in this game really scales up in a team setting.) We all know the comparison between Blasters and Sentinels is more complex than that. At best, you can simplify teaming capabilities into two loose categories: there are builds that are "optimal" for teams, and there are builds that can help carry a (bad or mediocre) team. Sentinels, like Scrappers, skew heavily towards the latter - but they're mostly soloists. Speaking of Scrappers, they complained for years that they didn't have a team role. You don't hear those complaints much anymore, probably because Scrappers now have so much self-contained potential that most people would consider complaints to be in bad taste, even if Brutes have overshadowed Scrappers lately in the teaming/farming niches. To me, the goal of any Sentinel redesign is to make Sentinel players feel roughly the same way, not to turn them into "optimal teamers;" the AT's bias towards solo/self-contained performance is baked in. Forumites like to talk about how Blasters are more "team optimal" than Sentinels because they do more damage and have higher AoE target caps--and that may be true on paper, but when I read those arguments, my gut response is to ask what game you all are playing. In my experience, higher level teams overflow with AoE damage. An eighth team member generally won't move the needle one way or another, in terms of AoE kill speed, regardless of build. The only difference in that scenario between the Blaster and the Sentinel is that the Sentinel is more likely to survive in the (unlikely) event that something goes terribly wrong. And in smaller or weaker teams, the Blaster's massive defensive disadvantages are more likely to define the experience than the Sentinel's relative lack of damage. Again, I'm not saying here that Sentinels don't deserve buffs, but framing the argument around Blasters' superior team utility strikes me as bizarre. The truth is that teams steamroll so effectively at levels 40+ that everyone will feel marginalized. That isn't likely to change any time soon, at least not substantially, because the mechanics that make teams steamroll are largely the same mechanics that give City of Heroes its distinctive character. The Homecoming devs might take steps to rein in e.g. Incarnate powers, but I imagine they'd consider dramatic changes to force multiplication, or to the general ratio of AoE damage to mob HP, to be beyond their mandate as caretakers for the game we've loved for 16 years now. And that brings me to this: I can't fathom how anyone can look at our present situation--playing an ancient game that was only recently resurrected, limping along almost purely due to nostalgia, gratitude, and affection for what was previously lost--and decide that what we really need is to turn CoH into something else entirely. Our all-volunteer dev team should burn the midnight oil for however many thousands of manhours it takes to redesign the game more or less from scratch, presumably in the fervent hope that they can drive their ancient playerbase to one of the other bootleg CoH operations. Seriously, can't we find a way to enjoy what we have, for what it is? It could be gone tomorrow, for all we know.

The balance between ranged blast sets (specifically with regard to DPA) has been a glaring issue pretty much since launch day. The developers acknowledged that when they standardized t1 and t2 blasts, but they never got around to the rest, which left sets like Fire and Ice (which both have a great T3 attack) with a preposterously high advantage relative to their cousins. And even at that, Fire Blast didn't compare favorably with most melee sets, in terms of single-target damage. It still doesn't, in fact, not without heavy proc slotting and investment in at least one Epic pool attack; Dominate is the standard on Sentinels, but what's often ignored on this forum is that ranged Blasters also have to take something like Epic Char to put up truly high-end numbers. Yes, that's even after the fast-snipe buff. The truly monstrous numbers you see from Blasters in the Pylon thread invariably include melee attacks from the Secondary set. And Blasters with melee attacks generally don't have great survivability, because, contrary to some of the handwaving you see on the forums, Blasters generally can't soft-cap Defense to more than one position or 2/3 types. The most durable Blasters aren't putting out world-beating Pylon times, and the ones that put up those numbers can't remotely compete with Sentinel durability. Just by way of example, my ultra-tweaked, heavily-procced, Char-wielding, billion-inf ranged Fire/Temporal Blaster scores about 365 DPS. It's a very high number in practical terms, and I have no complaints, but it can't touch Nihilii's Sentinel score. For that matter, I have an Elec/SS Tanker that can beat the Blaster's score. In short, you make a good point. More generally, I agree with @oldskool: the problems of the Sentinel AT are often overblown. I don't dispute that the AT needs work; a new or reworked Inherent would be nice, perhaps a boost to target caps or damage--but many of the AT's perceived problems are inherent to ranged ATs in City of Heroes. Too often, albeit valid misgivings are substantiated by anecdotal half-truths or misconceptions. Ideally, we'd see a balance pass for ranged DPA across the board, in addition to whatever happens to Sentinels. I'm not even sure Sentinel Primaries are all that well balanced against one another; just at a glance, it seems that some sets won the lottery in the what-will-replace-the-snipe sweepstakes, while others got the boobie prize. Electric Blast is a good example of the former, as is Sonic Attack (a set that as far as I'm concerned isn't even worth playing on any other AT, unless you're going for max team support on a Defender or something).

I'll echo this. There's a lot of hyperbole out there about Bonfire, understandable given how niche the power was for years and year, prior to KB-to-KD IOs, but it isn't as good as Ice Slick, and the comparison really isn't all that close if you compare the two powers in isolation. Without an AoE Immobilize (or heavy amounts of supplementary slow), mobs will run right out of Bonfire, in my experience. The KD rate is decent on average, but it also seems spotty in a way that I can't put my finger on; certain mobs will go through periods of being knocked down near constantly, while others barely get affected at all. (If only the archived version of City of Data would still give us pet/summonable stats. It'd be interesting to compare the KD rate on these powers.) The real issue is that Ice Control has always kind of sucked, so to the extent that an IO'd Bonfire approximates Ice Slick, it's insult added to injury. You can tell from the design that Ice was supposed to give you high control in return for extremely low damage potential, but so much of Ice's compensatory control potential is tied up in slows that are scarcely relevant in most content, unless you kill at a glacial (heh) speed, which of course Ice does because of the offensive price it pays in return for all of the slows. It's a vicious cycle. Earth was always basically Ice, but better; it gets an Ice Slick analogue (Earthquake), a massive slow and -fly patch, an AoE stun that can be made available on an every spawn basis, and an AoE hold that is easily one of the best in the game. On top of that, the pet is vastly sturdier, and Earth's secondary-effect gimmick (-DEF) allows for some pretty nice slotting options (e.g. Achilles' Heel). Of course, Earth isn't exactly uber either, because even if you do get a fair deal when trading damage for extra control, the game tends to favor damage - but at least it's a legitimate choice in the case of Earth. The other sets that are supposed to offer the same trade off, Ice and Mind, are in worse shape.

I happen to agree that the set should have its damage potential turned down, and its animation times smoothed out somewhat - doesn't have to be an outright elimination of the Momentum mechanic, but we could shoot for a less drastic disparity between the two states. Still, it's funny to think about how intolerably long TW's unbuffed animation times are, given that my first character was an MA Scrapper, whose average animation time was probably worse back at launch (woo, ~4 second Storm Kick!). How far we've come. And how far, frankly, we have yet to go, to correct the original developers' oversight with regard to the importance of activation times.

Re: endurance issues, after extensive testing I actually found the opposite to be true. Corruptors get an excellent +end ATO. Plop that in Freezing Rain and your FR spam can become nearly free. I don't recall the exact numbers, but IIRC the builds I compared were looking at about an 8 point swing in terms of the cost of FR. If you cast it every ~15 seconds (and why wouldn't you?), that works out to about 0.5 EPS. For reference, unslotted Stamina is only worth ~0.42 EPS. To me, this was a pretty big deal; it was the difference between my Ice/Storm Corruptor being able to run nonstop with just Conserve Power, and an otherwise analogous Storm/Ice Defender having to pace himself under the same conditions. The former could take Clarion guilt free; the latter made me gaze covetously at Ageless. The point being that there's room for argument on a lot of these issues. Which AT will suit you better depends on your use case preferences. For me, solo play is more important than team play; in team play, Vigilance might indeed pull the Defender ahead, in terms of average End usage, but that doesn't matter much to me. On the other hand, if you're less picky than I am about using Temp powers, then you can work around endurance problems by visiting the P2W vendor every so often. Can't go wrong with a Stormer though. The AT doesn't really matter. FWIW, I would caution aspiring powergamers away from the siren song (pun intended) of the Storm/Sonic Defender. At first glance, this seems like a perfectly harmonious combination, and it is, in principle. The problem is that Sonic does so little damage that the harmonious mechanics aren't enough to save it. You end up with pedestrian single-target damage in a solo setting, an unnoticeable debuff advantage in most group settings (which are oriented around AoE), and yeah, every once in awhile you get to pwn an AV in a team setting - but what team can't already pwn an AV? (Don't mind the rant. I was just really disappointed with Storm/Sonic, lol.)

Just a quibble, but Blasters generally soft-cap to one position (Ranged) or two types (Smash/Lethal). You'll occasionally see someone soft-cap to Energy too (requires Scorpion Shield), but Ranged versus Smash/Lethal is the stereotypical dilemma. Soft-capping to Ranged is generally safer, but it A) requires more IO set bonuses, because you can't lean on your Patron/Epic armor, B) more-or-less requires you to eschew potent melee-range abilities. On the upside, the Ranged DEF approach also allows you to layer the DEF with some resistance from a Patron/Epic shield. Neither approach to Blaster defense won't see you frequently get killed, either due to cascade failure (DEF debuffs), or just good old fashioned burst damage from a uncovered position/type. I basically agree with your position in this thread, but the notion that Blasters can turn themselves into defensive juggernauts passes so often without objection that I felt compelled to respond. IO'd Blasters can be quite survivable, but even in the best case their defenses are far from comprehensive. By the way, and possibly to your point, it is entirely possible for a Dominator to achieve perma-Dom and soft-cap in a similar fashion to Blasters (one type, or two positions).

Though I admire the desire to be fair in comparing Mass Confusion to analogous powers, I don't think it's warranted in this case. As the two sets stand now, you could reduce Mass Confusion's recharge to 10 seconds, double its duration, quadruple its area of effect, and Plant would still perform better than Mind, in 99% of the game's content. Seeds is a fantastic power, arguably the best control power in the game, and so it naturally invites singular comparison - but Seeds is just one part of a spectacularly strong set. In the wildest fever dreams of the posters in this thread, Mind will never be buffed to match Plant's overall performance profile - top-tier hard control and top-tier damage, which can be improved to truly monstrous levels through proc slotting. Even Elec would still have a marked advantage relative to Mind if Mass Confusion were buffed into the sky. Yes, Synaptic Overload is all-or-nothing (if it misses the first target, it hits nothing), and yes, Elec can't match Plant's damage potential, but Elec has anti-scatter lockdown (AoE Immobilize), a dose of extra soft control (End drain), pets, some solid proc opportunities, and even a tiny amount of End management for the caster. (If you commit to end slotting on an Elec Controller, you can even build a Storm character that can function comfortably without Conserve Power, Cardiac, or Ageless, which is a pretty impressive feat.) I agree with Hjarki's comment that any buffs to Mind Control are unlikely, a wholesale redesign even more so. We have a volunteer development team, after all. So, when we're discussing the simplest fixes, the adjustments that have the best, albeit small, chance of happening, let us not be consumed by an excess of caution. Two minutes seems like a fair number for Mass Confusion. Without significant changes elsewhere to the set, 90 seconds wouldn't even be grotesquely out of whack. I think a lot of us forumites, myself included, are a little too quick to assume high-end IO bonuses in these discussions; worth remembering that even powers like Flashfire aren't usable on an every-spawn basis (a 20-30s cycle time) for the average player, certainly not the average player who's below the level cap. A power like Mass Confusion, on the other hand, with its four minute base recharge, is hardly relevant at all, with average-player slotting habits. A 120-second base recharge timer would give you a ~30s cycle time at 400% total recharge, which is basically the upper bound for IO builds without outside buffs. It'd give you a 60s cycle time at 200% recharge, which is about all you can expect of the average player. (That 60s would become ~45s when Hasten is up, if the player took Hasten, but without IO bonuses Hasten will only be available sporadically.) Giving Mind access to that sort of consistent control won't break the game.

Let's back up: We aren't talking about "most cases." The specific context of this conversation was "insane solo challenges" - like the aforementioned LRSF, where confusing AVs has more utility than simply holding them. Mind Doms, like Illusion Controllers, are really good at those. This is mostly due to Mind's ability to A) stack confuse and B) insta-sleep even AVs without notifying them. Also, these days Controllers and Doms should probably proc out their single-target holds, so having an extra tool that doesn't crave damage-oriented slotting is an asset in an AV fight, where an unenhanced hold won't stack high enough. By the way, Confuse has roughly twice the base duration of a single-target hold, so no, it isn't true that "any level of Confuse you could hit is also a level of Hold any Controller could hit." Holding AVs is actually pretty hard to do. Apart from insane-solo-challenge shenanigans, Mind Doms have some appeal due to a relatively smooth performance curve across the full collection of the game's villain groups; the set's variety of control types, combined with Domination's mag boost, means that Mind Control doesn't have many obvious hard counters, if any at all - but the flipside of that is that Mind Control's performance curve isn't terribly high to begin with, in the average game play scenario, due to low AoE damage output, lack of scatter control, and (for Controllers) lack of containment. It is entirely possible that I overrate Mind Control on Dominators because my specific play style or use case preferences are biased towards its relatively modest strengths. It's also possible that forumites in general presume a level of +recharge on Mind Doms that they don't necessarily presume for Controllers, because of the perma-Dom thing. But I explicitly acknowledged that Elec/* is better in most gameplay scenarios, so this continued line of argument wears thin.