Obitus

He did not post the Blaster build with the original attack chain of Flares-Blaze-Flares-Fireball. He said he lost it, then posted a different build that incorporated most of the recommendations his critics, including me, had mentioned. As I said, I was happy enough to let him slide on that, after he offered a tepid acknowledgement that he might've been wrong. But then he goes to Sovera's thread and makes a passive aggressive comment about how "other players" too often fail to take into account the Fire DoT, etc. This is pretty obviously a reference to his debate with me, in which he tried (poorly) to argue that the Fire DoT should be added on top of his numbers. (And by contempt-laced implication, that I was stupid for not realizing that.) In any case, his assertion in Sovera's thread is provably false, as I showed. Whining about my tone, from him or you, won't change that.

Considering that he goes around in other threads passive aggressively insulting the rest of us, this is a pretty mild response. I notice that neither you nor he addressed the substance of my posts. Whining about my tone won't change the facts. Do you dispute that, contra @modest, the in-game display does, in fact, include the average Fire DoT? Do you dispute that 457 damage is an outlandishly high number for Blaze, if you don't include the Fire DoT, among other things? Do you dispute that @modest has yet to provide any evidence to support his numerical conclusions, despite all of his posturing earlier about how everyone else had the burden of proof? On that note, do you dispute that he suddenly lost his build when people asked for some evidence?

I'd be happy to stop replying to you, if you'd stop making obviously dumb, tendentious, and passive aggressive claims like the following: I conclusively proved that this quote is false in the linked post. You've now replied to me twice without even trying to address the evidence.

Posting screenshots of your character-select screen doesn't explain your errors. You made a specific claim - that everyone else is too stupid to include the Fire DoT, in fact that everyone else assumes the in-game display includes the Fire DoT. As I showed, the in-game display explicitly includes that DoT. You have no rebuttal to that. Instead you wriggle around picking at irrelevancies. Proving that you've been on Justin doesn't substantiate your numbers, nor does it give us any idea of how you derived them. You're trying to tell me that you recorded your character hitting for 457 damage with Blaze, before the Fire DoT, unbuffed, and before procs? How? Were you fighting debuffed targets? Far more likely that you read 457 average damage from Mid's. Occam's Razor. Edit to add this pic of my build with Musculature, a purple proc in Blaze, and Assault turned off: 449.7. Pretty close to 457.

lol, no

I'm going to revisit the @modest debacle, because now he's off in Sovera's thread posturing again: lol, still trying to pretend that everyone else is too stupid to understand your numbers? After your tepid acknowledgement that your numbers were wrong, I was happy to let you save face, but c'mon dude. We both know you didn't pull those numbers from "in game." You pulled them from the Hero Designer, without understanding what the numbers mean, and then when people challenged those numbers, you made up a post-hoc story about how you did exhaustive testing on Justin. Yet somehow, when you were asked to post your build, you claimed you lost it. Why do I not believe your story? Well, for one thing, because your numbers don't make any sense otherwise. This is what you listed for your attack stats, with Musculature and slotting: From this listing, I extrapolated 211 standing DPS, which is a far cry from your claim of 427 DPS, without Aim or Build Up. Then you wriggled around trying to add the DoT and various other things on top of the 211 to post-rationalize your absurd conclusion. Anyone who's the slightest bit familiar with Fire Blasters can tell you at a glance that 457 damage on Blaze includes the DoT (and possibly a bunch of other things, as Mid's includes just about everything, albeit in a flawed way, by default). Your assumption that 457 is before the Fire Dot, before global damage bonuses, and before procs, is completely outside of the realm of possibility. But here, if you still think you can wriggle out of this, here's a screenshot of my Fire Blaster's in-game display for Blaze. This includes Musculature Core Paragon: And here's the coup de gras. Notice the red circle I drew? The in-game display flat out tells you that the "average damage" value at the top of the window includes the average value of the Fire Dot. Or did you simply not bother to scroll down? Hell, just comparing different powers in different blaster power sets would reveal to you how silly it is to assume that the Hero Designer, the in-game display, and most importantly people on the forums, aren't taking the fire dot into account. Of course we take the average Fire Dot into account. How stupid do you think we are? And how could you really think that Blaze had a 385 DPA before the DoT? No wonder you thought Fire Blasters could effortlessly score 400+ DPS! I really have no wish to continue feuding with you man. Just stop insulting people who are more informed than you are. Thanks. EDIT: By the way, if you're still confused, let me spell out the math in the screenshot for you. The "average damage" at the top is the initial damage value of 309.70 (which I circled), plus the average value of the DoT, which goes like this: (32.87 * 0.8) + (32.87 * 0.8^2) + (32.87 * 0.8^3) + (32.87 * 0.8^4) + (32.87 * 0.8^5) = 26.296 + 21.0368 + 16.82944 + 13.463552 + 10.7708416 = 88.3966336 88.3966336 average DoT + 309.7 initial damage = 398.09 average damge

All right then, excellent. That wraps up the only real point of contention. No hard feelings. o7 As to the Blaster build you posted, it's a good Pylon build, basically a rehash of the Nihilii approach. We can tweak it a bit, but your scoring 400+ DPS with the new and improved attack chain wouldn't really demonstrate anything novel. If you do want to max Pylon damage, though (and don't care about soft-capping Ranged DEF, which is currently sitting at 39.5% in your build, with suppressed Stealth active), I'd do the following: replace one of the damage procs in Inferno with a -RES proc. add a sixth slot to Char for an extra proc, which would have to be a Decimation BU proc, or at the very least a damage enhancement. You have two free slots so this shouldn't be a problem. Replace the ToHit enhancement in Aim with a 50+5 Rech enhancement, and add another slot to Ionize to add a 50+5 Rech (while keeping the Guassian's proc, naturally). You might want Leadership to improve the Snipe's damage, though you shouldn't have too much downtime on the full bonus given your potential ~77% uptime on (either of) Aim/BU, with the slotting change above. in any case, a Kismet proc would help and it wouldn't require a massive rework. If you really wanna go whole hog on the Pylon killing goal, then you could even break the Blaster's Wrath set to slot a -RES proc in Fireball. You'd lose the excellent ranged DEF bonus, of course, but you'd retain the global recharge. From a general usability standpoint, I would say that the build isn't one that I'd like to play. Among other things, it could use some Endmod in your sustain power (which would allow you to drop Ageless for Clarion); personally I'd focus more on defenses, and of course it seems like a waste to take Flame Mastery but skip out on Bonfire with a KB-to-KD proc, not to mention the lack of Beta Decay - but it's a fine build for a niche application, and you say that you have an alternate for general play anyway. (You could gain a fair bit of build/slotting flexibility by dropping Negatron Slam, which really won't add much given that your big three ranged attacks all have higher DPA. Something like Beta Decay 6-slotted with Cloud Senses would give you slightly less global recharge, but also extra ranged DEF - in fact, just barely enough to get you up to the Ranged soft cap if you switch on suppressed stealth and swap the Blaster's Wrath set in Fireball to the Superior version.) That speaks to one of the points in this thread, which is that Sentinels can more easily afford to skimp a bit on DEF. I accepted long ago that I'll never achieve peak Pylon DPS on my Blasters because I don't run Pylons on builds that I wouldn't want to use in general gameplay. I can possibly get close, at least on paper, which is a nice little motivator for refining my builds (endlessly), but I'm never gonna be the guy who designs a build specifically around Pylon hunting. If you'd like to talk through more general builds, I'd be happy to do that, but this probably isn't the thread for it. As long as we're laying our cards on the table, though, here's an export of my Fire/Temporal, below the spoiler:

To echo Hopeling, I think you vastly underestimate our collective skepticism. If someone posted a Pylon score of 427 DPS using your original Fire Blaster attack chain, and then claimed not to use Aim/BU to boot, people would laugh him out of the thread. Tell you what, post a full build export. Then we can compare/contrast with in-game numbers if you're concerned that Mid's is inaccurate (as it frequently is). At least we'll have some way of evaluating where your numbers come from.

My first reply to you was perfectly polite, then you hit me with a smug response about how you had provided "evidence" and I hadn't. Then you started lecturing me about being behind the times on the mechanics, all while doubling down on your original, silly claim that a Fire Blaster using your old attack chain could do 427 DPS without Aim and Build Up. Suffice to say that the tone policing isn't useful or constructive, nor does it help your argument. Your claim was based on your original numbers, using your original attack chain (Flares-Blaze-Flares-Fireball). The post I responded to concerned that attack chain, and so this aside about your new attack chain (based on recommendations that I also mentioned earlier in the thread) isn't relevant. Or let me put it this way: until you admit that Flares-Blaze-Flares-Ball isn't going to get you to 427 DPS (without Aim or Build Up, no less), you can't swap out the goalposts like this. So far, you've defended that number to the hilt, and you continue to do so, even when it's obvious that you're not working with a full understanding of how the mechanics work. Reread the post you quoted. That's exactly what I said. You can only slot Apocalypse and Blaster's Wrath once each, though, and putting them in Flares would be a terrible decision. My bad. Fixed. This is a misreading of what I did in my little calc earlier. I simplified the calc because all four attacks in the chain have the same activation time (1.188s), and therefore you can just add up their DPA and divide by four. That's what DPA is - the DPS value of a single attack ignoring recharge time. In other words, if you had a 100 DPA attack with zero recharge timer, spamming it over and over forever would yield 100 DPS. Go ahead and calculate it yourself if you don't believe me. Given your numbers in that particular post, you end up with 211 DPS no matter how you slice it. I did not assume that all of your attacks took 1 second. In a different post, I did refer to a 1s activation time, but only because I was calculating proc chances; the PPM system doesn't acknowledge Arcanatime. In fact if you use Arcanatime when you calculate proc chance, you'll (slightly) overestimate your proc values. I'm the one who mentioned Nihilii's Pylon scores, earlier. Of course I acknowledge that it's possible for a Fire/Atomic Blaster to score over 400 DPS. But not with your original attack chain, and I think even @nihilii might say that his Blaster build compromised on survivability - which isn't as big an issue for Sentinels. He's also an extraordinary player. FWIW, my best score with a similarly built, ranged-only Fire/Temporal Blaster, using the same attack chain (comprised primarily of procced out Char, fast snipe, and Blaze), doesn't quite reach 400 DPS. That's probably because I skipped out on -RES procs (hard to incorporate them and soft-cap Defense), but also probably because I can't execute quite as well as he can. Regardless, 400+ DPS is an exceedingly high number, even for a Blaster; it almost requires melee attacks. Maybe I overreacted a bit to your original claim because I spent so much time over the years marinating in attack chains, and I know that the chain you posted originally is pedestrian. The key issue here is that you keep suggesting not just that 400+ DPS is possible for a Fire Blaster, but rather that it's easy. And I agree that if your original chain could achieve 400+ DPS, and particularly without Aim or Build Up, then that would mean it's easy. But sadly your original chain can't even sniff those numbers. Most any ranged Blaster build will fail to reach them. How many samples do we really have, though? Very few people have ever played a Sentinel, much less taken one up against a Pylon. Few people have Pyloned even their Blasters since Homecoming's public release. And that thread has a selection bias towards extremely high-end or hardcore players, more so than we even did on the live servers, because tepid or casual fans of the game are less likely to chase down a player-run instance of a long-dead MMO to begin with. I fixed on Nihilii's Blaster and Sentinel scores in part because they're extraordinary, but also because they offer the best available like-to-like comparison. They use very similar attack chains, similar slotting schemes, and they're piloted by the same player, so there's no skill gap to speak of. In that comparison, we come away with the Sentinel's best score at 401 DPS, and the Blaster's best score at 519. 401 / 519 = 77.26%. That's before we get into more practical issues, like the Sentinel having more breathing room to blast away without care. I'm afraid that if you want to prove a two-fold advantage for the Blaster, you're gonna have to do better than you have.

Yes, I know that the link I provided isn't directly relevant. It's an old link to show that I've been hip deep in these numbers for years. And given that you had to have the value of procs and fast snipes explained to you (by me, among others), I'm not sure why you think you're in a position to tell me to "read up" on the game's mechanics. You were, I assume, quoting Mid's numbers earlier, when you detailed your build's DPA figures. Mid's incorporates the average fire-dot damage from Fire Blast attacks, and it incorporates global damage bonuses, so you can't add those on top. Mid's also incorporates proc damage, albeit incorrectly. If you were using some other methodology, then that's fine, but you're severely overestimating how much mileage you'll get out of global damage bonuses and a single purple proc per attack. Let's go down the list here: It's a neat trick that you managed to slot "at least one purple damage proc" in all three of your Fire Blaster's attacks (Blaze, Flares, Fireball), because there are only two purple damage procs available for those attacks. (Blaster's Wrath and Apocalypse; the TAOE purple set, Ragnarok, comes with a knockdown proc.) BTW, I've made a helpful spreadsheet that will allow you to calculate exactly how much average damage you can expect from procs in each attack. (I also linked the spreadsheet earlier in one of my previous replies, which is notable only because you've decided to characterize all of my posts in this topic as entirely lacking in substance.) Already covered the DoT effect on Fire attacks. Suffice to say that it's exceedingly likely you're counting it twice now. Yes, Defiance is very nice. 40% is a decent estimate for single-target chains Where to begin? This is exactly what I was talking about, @Sovera. As I said before, we all make mistakes, but I've rarely seen someone double down so fiercely when he's clearly out of his depth. A 40% global damage bonus isn't net. It's additive with your damage bonuses from slotting, Musculature, the passive boost from Hybrid, etc. So let's say you have 95% damage slotting in each power, and another ~33% from Musculature Core Paragon (remember, 1/3rd of the Alpha obeys ED rules), for a total of +128% or so in +damage. That means that your +40% in defiance bonuses is worth 40 / 228 = 17.5% net. And that's pretty much the best case net for a build using Musculature; the net benefit will diminish as you add more damage bonuses, e.g. things like the average benefit of Aim/BU. You also can't just add the average proc damage per attack to your DPS, because each attack has an activation time that exceeds 1 second. That is, assuming that 53.5 were an accurate number in the first place, which it isn't. Here, let me use my totally ignorant noob proc knowledge to help you out: (Blaster) Blaze has a base recharge timer of 10 seconds, and a non-Arcanatime activation time of 1 second. This gives us a Modified Recharge Time of 11 seconds, which means that by default, a purple damage proc slotted in Blaze will have an 82.5% chance to fire, and thus an average damage per activation of 0.825 * 107.1 = 88.36 proc damage, if we assume zero recharge slotting in the power, which isn't practical. Instead, if we give Blaze 90% in recharge slotting (roughly what you'd get from a purple set), then the proc's chance to fire drops to ~47%, for an average damage of 50.337 in Blaze. Flares has a base recharge timer of 2.18 seconds, and a non-Arcanatime activate period of 1 second. This gives us an MRT of 3.18 seconds, which means that by default, a purple damage proc slotted in Flares will have a 23.85% chance to fire, and thus an average damage value of 25.5. You'll probably have some recharge slotting in Flares, though (and it's worth noting that the Blaster's Wrath damage proc actually has +rech attached to it), so let's say 50% in recharge slotting, which would lower our average purple-proc damage on Flares to 19.7. Fireball is more complicated, because it's an AoE. As you can see with helpful spreadsheet, at Fireball's default recharge+activation time of 17s, the chance for Fireball to fire a purple proc on a single target is 65.8%, but of course it isn't practical not to slot recharge in Fireball. Ideally you'd want a purple set in that power, so let's assume ~90% recharge, which would lower our chance to fire a purple proc to ~36.5%, for an average purple-proc damage of ~39.1. The effects of Hybrid Assault Radial on your build will be more complex, though again my handy spreadsheet will give you the numbers. Are you convinced yet that I a) know my stuff, and b) that the matter is significantly more complicated than you might like to think - not least because our info on Sentinel powers is frequently erroneous? This is why my first reflex was to point to the Pylon thread, because although Pylon tests are flawed as predictors of general performance, they do provide an easy sanity check when someone makes a facially silly argument like yours, apparently based on little more than half an hour of playing around in Mid's. If you really want to prove me wrong, then go ahead and record a video of your blaster build at 400+ DPS using that Flares-Blaze-Flares-Fireball chain. I'll even let you use Aim and Build Up 😉 Like I said, man, I don't want to be mean. I make math mistakes all the time, and I'm sure if you keep reading this forum, you'll catch me in one - but your preachy tone is unwarranted. You may think that my criticisms were baseless or evidence free, but from my perspective (and the perspective of many long-time theorycrafting nerds here), you made an extraordinary claim and provided precious little in the way of substantiation. Sentinels have a 0.95 damage scalar. Blasters have a 1.125 damage scalar. All else being equal, that means that Sentinels are at ~85% of Blaster damage. Of course all else isn't equal; as noted earlier, Sentinel blast sets are different from their Blaster analogues in seemingly arbitrary ways. (Sonic Sentinels, for example, may even have an advantage in single-target damage, due to the fact that they get high damage attached to Screech.) And we also have to contend with Defiance and Opportunity, the Blaster's access to Build Up, etc. It isn't straightforwardly a matter of comparing AT damage scalars, but in the absence of any compelling evidence, ~85% of Blaster damage is the most obvious default assumption. So your simply saying that "Blasters have twice the single-target damage of Sentinels, and here's my ludicrously over-estimated 427-DPS double-Flares attack chain to prove it," doesn't fly. It's possible that you could find a like-to-like build comparison that features a Blaster at double the Sentinel's ST damage, but acting as if yours is the reasonable position that everyone else must spend vast effort to refute isn't appropriate.

Again, it isn't about piling on. We all make mistakes. But after he tells me to supply evidence that he's wrong, when the truth is staring him in the face, I feel like I have to dunk on him a little.

We debated Blaster offensive capability endlessly on the old forums. This is a dead-horse argument that I don't feel compelled to rehash. It's mostly moot at this point anyway; Blasters got some great buffs, post-i24. I still think they pay too high a price in the abstract for their offense, but they're strong when played well, and they maintain their distinctive feel. I have a fair bit of experience theory crafting this stuff. Your numbers are wrong, not in a gee-let-me-recheck-the-details kind of way, but rather in a lol-wow-holy-moly sort of way. I don't say that to be mean; we all make mistakes. Your numbers are just so dramatically inflated for Blasters, and likely deflated for Sentinels, that you may mislead readers. So I would ask you to show your work, because you really haven't shown any so far; you've just thrown around facially silly numbers, along with a few screenshots of Mid's flawed DPS calculator. A brief skim of the Pylon thread proves my point. The most impressive Blaster scores rely heavily on melee attacks. They're not Flares-ing their way to greatness. Think about it; here's your listing of your Blaster build's attack numbers: Since Flares, Blaze, and Fireball all have the same activation time (1.188 seconds, Arcanatime), we can simplify your attack chain (Flares - Blaze - Flares - Fireball) as (149 + 385 + 149 + 162) / 4 = 211 DPS. You said you could score 427 DPS, without Aim or Build Up, using this build! Sure, you disclaimed that these numbers are only with Musculature, but if you can get 200+ DPS out of Hybrid Radial Assault, then I'll eat my hat. I'm not taking crazy pills, nor am I knee-jerking. The napkin math I've used above is far from perfect, but it's good enough to show that something's way off in your model. Recheck whatever method you used to come to your conclusion. I'm also not sure why you think "Sentinels" should be compared to Fire Blast Blasters specifically. If you want to compare ATs, then you compare like power sets and builds. All else being equal, Sentinels do quite a bit more than half of Blaster damage. Yes, Fire is an outlier for both ATs. As I said, Blast sets are notoriously uneven performers. That's one of the historical problems that hurt the Blaster AT, and now by extension also the Sentinel AT. Nihilii is an extraordinary player. What I want to emphasize is that both of his results are extraordinary. Your average endgame Blaster build isn't chucking out 400+ DPS either, certainly not from range. The average endgame Fire/* Blaster build can't even reach those numbers - and certainly not with @modest's Flares-Blaze-Flares-FB attack chain. Both builds in this case lean pretty heavily on procced out Char/Dominate, the Sentinel more so. But it's an option that's available to everyone, and thus we have to take it into account. (I'm also not sure that Nihilii even soft-capped his Blasters for the Pylon experiments, which is a bigger deal when you don't have a whole defensive secondary to fall back on.)

It certainly isn't my intention to hype Sentinel damage output. I've been fairly bear-ish on Sentinels overall; I think Sentinels are stronger than Blasters as a self-contained unit - i.e. that their defensive advantage dwarfs Blasters' offensive advantage - but that's not saying much. Just about every AT is stronger than the average Blaster in those terms. Even now, after the most extensive Blaster buffs in the history of the game (which, as we often jokingly predicted on the old Blaster forum, only came just as the game closed). So you could argue it either way. You could say that Sentinels have stronger numbers, overall, which I think is indisputable. You could also say that Sentinels' lower damage and lower target caps rob them of a proper niche or role, besides solo shenanigans. If you wanted to be especially pessimistic, you could say that Sentinels are just lower damage Scrappers. Still, I take issue with numbers like @modest's, first of all obviously because they're wrong, but also because they perpetuate the popular misconception that Blasters have far and away the best offense in the game. That just isn't true, at least in a general sense. Sure, in examples like your nuke comparison, the Blaster comes out looking badass, but comparing nukes ultimately isn't any better than comparing Pylon times, and I would argue it's actually far more misleading. Re: Pylon times, using my lazy method of simply searching the Pylon thread for keywords, the best Sentinel performance I can find is Nihilii's Fire/Rad/Psi (note, not Bio) @ 2:20, or 401 DPS. Granted, this run included a melee attack, but I think we can all agree that this score is more than competitive with the average Blaster build, and particularly the average ranged Blaster (i.e. without melee attacks). Quite frankly this score will blow away most ranged Blasters, as the balance between Blast sets is extremely uneven. For contrast, the best Blaster score I found using my lazy method is again Nihilii, this time with an experimental Fire/Atomic/Pyre build, at 1:39, or 519 DPS. That is an amazing, amazing score. It's also highly atypical, and relies on the aforementioned proc-monstering approach. I believe he also stacked -RES procs in Inferno and Fireball, which again is atypical. The point isn't so much that Blasters can't get good offense on top of soft-capped DEF; they clearly can. Mature Blaster builds just have less wiggle room to slap in situational offensive boosts like those RES procs, which are quite frankly relevant mostly in long-term situations like Pylon tests. Blasters need set bonuses more than Sentinels do. As you point out, Blasters also need Clarion more, which again limits their flexibility relative to high-end Sentinels. Anyway, the idea that Sentinels do half or less of Blaster damage, on average and in practice, is completely wrong. The best case you can make for that position is when you compare big AoE attacks with full target-cap saturation, and as Hopeling points out, melting minions is rarely a concern at end game.

Yes, this is the same reason that Storm Defenders and Corruptors don't typically solo AVs all that well, despite their WTFPWN numbers in Pylon tests. You haven't seen AVs run for their lives til you've played a Storm toon with no immobilize. Lightning Storm goes from an essential weapon to a glowing ornament in such engagements. This same problem affects Blasters in an AV-soloing context, though not in exactly the same way. Most Blasters do get a single-target immobilize, but spamming one of those will lower DPS. Of course, Blasters have a harder time surviving an AV's attacks than a Scrapper or even a Defender would, so the concern on their end isn't so much the AV running away as it is the AV getting in their face. Oddly enough, the tendency for AVs to run for the hills is an advantage for solo Sentinels, who have (very near) Scrapper-tier durability and ranged attacks. Sentinels can therefore not only survive up close; they can also use the AI's headless-chicken quirks to catch a breather, while still putting out respectable damage of their own from range. Still, in the end there's a good reason that builds like Ill/Cold are generally regarded as the best AV soloists. Pylon tests aren't a very good proxy for AV-soloing; they're a good proxy for "how much ST damage can I sustain against an extremely hard target in a situation where its movement is controlled in some fashion." Ice Sentinels get boned on their version of Freeze Ray, so they're not going to win any prizes in the single-target comparison. On the other hand, having Blizzard's massive debuffs (most notably the -20% ToHit debuff) up nearly full time is a really nice perk. I'd say that Ice/* synergizes especially well with the Sentinel's faster nuke CDs, even if the damage isn't spectacular.

Just want to reiterate that there's something way off about these numbers. I don't have the time or the energy to go through the theorycrafting at the moment, but let's look at what various high-end builds do in the RIkti Pylon thread. If you go there, you'll find that Sentinels like Nihilii's have very good single-target DPS, competitive with most ranged Blasters. The reason for this is partially the power of procs; if you stack 6 damage procs in, say, Dominate from the Epic Pool, you end up with an attack with a 5-6 second cycle time and an average damage of 451 just from procs alone. Since that damage doesn't care about your AT scalars, this is an enormous equalizer, both inter-AT and intra-AT. (As noted earlier, Mid's doesn't calculate proc damage correctly; it will severely underestimate proc damage on any build with significant global recharge.) Then you have things like -RES procs, which may be harder for Blasters to justify slotting given that they need more set bonuses to achieve a reasonable level of survivability in the end game. These have an outsized effect in high-end Pylon runs. That said, Sentinels do have offensive disadvantages. The major one is their lower AoE target cap, which will never show up in a Pylon test. In practice, and on a solo basis, this disadvantage is mitigated somewhat by the Sentinel's faster nuke CDs - and of course the Sentinel's superior defenses tend to make solo AoE output a lot less urgent. On a single-target basis, it's harder to make direct comparisons, because Sentinel Blast sets are vastly different from their Blaster/Corruptor counterparts. In the case of Fire Blast, the most obvious difference is the Sentinel's lack of a fast snipe (and the fact that Blazing Blast is bugged). I would say that Blasters, on the whole, have a pretty sizeable advantage in terms of single-target burst or if you prefer, realistic short term killing power - but it isn't anywhere near the two or three-fold difference described earlier in the thread. In a highly theoretical long-term test like a Pylon run, the difference is reduced even further. (Ranged Blasters have always suffered in long-term DPS comparisons; it's only recently, with the introduction of fast snipes and the PPM proc system, that they've started to sniff Scrapper-competitive scores. Blasters still generally need melee attacks to put up truly impressive numbers, and even then the best Scrappers/Stalkers are markedly better.) BTW, the best Fire Blaster attack chain will be some combination of Blaze, Blazing Bolt, a proc-monster hold skill (e.g. Epic Char or Ice Arrow), and Fireball. Flares is decent filler; by no means does it deserve the lavish praise it received earlier in the thread as a DPS booster. No one would be happier than me if a Blaster could get 500+ DPS out of a pedestrian Flares-Blaze-Flares-Fireball attack chain, but it just ain't gonna happen.

Again, I'm talking about wanton, heavy, AoE knockback. If your team relies on, say, a Controller to nullify the alpha strike from huge spawns, then having the spawn scattered the four winds before he gets a chance is extremely disruptive. Or if your team relies on spike AoE damage. Or if your team relies on AoE debuffs. As always in these sorts of threads, I believe we're largely talking past each other. Personally, I've never been bothered by single-target knockback in almost any form. I've rarely been bothered by AoE knockback either. As I say, most people in game are pretty laid back and polite. But it seems like one camp in this thread reads any call for KB toons not to be wantonly disruptive as an assault on their sacred playstyle. And it seems like the other camp reads any pro-KB posts as a defense of actively trolling all teammates. We're down to the willful distortion phase of the debate.

You should adjust up to a point, because a single heavy KB toon can disrupt pretty much everything the other seven team members do. It isn't just "herders" or melee characters who have cause to be annoyed; it's anyone who relies on AoE damage, controls, or debuffs. In some cases, the team actually needs those AoEs to survive. No reasonable person would suggest that you should be walking around constantly on tenterhooks; just be a little considerate. These days, we have Sudden Acceleration procs, so if you wanna spam otherwise disruptive powers indiscriminately, you have an option to do that in an unobtrusive fashion. (That proc is a game changer for non-Controller Storm builds.) Munkilord told a fun story about a heavy KB toon, and that's great. But I think most people would say that a heavy KB player shouldn't assume that every team he joins is looking for that sort of experience. Take it slow, feel out your teammates. If someone on the team has an AoE immobilize that cancels KB, then you might coordinate. (Munkilord might've felt differently if he were playing Mind, Grav or Electric Control.) Almost everything is a matter of degree; if your idea of "fun" is to slow the team to a crawl and possibly endanger your teammates, and if you get off on annoying people in that fashion, then you're being selfish and impolite. On the other hand, if your teammates simply cannot abide any perceived slowdown whatsoever, then they're taking the game too seriously. I don't think you'll find either of those two extremes often in game, though. IME, most people are pretty laid back.

Yeah, herding effectively died with the introduction of the aggro cap - leaving aside a few niche scenarios (e.g. small spawns that are close together on a low-level map). I'm sure there are still people who talk about it in teams, but they're usually mistaken. I'm sure there are also people who complain about KB, but I've only seen that complaint once in game, IIRC. That said, there's KB and then there's KB. Most people are willing to accept that KB is part of the game, even a fun part, but if you make absolutely zero effort to moderate or direct your KB in a sensible way, then you will annoy teammates, even if they're too polite to say anything. Someone posted an anecdote earlier about a (IIRC) Storm/Energy Defender fully slotted for KB; sorry, but that's a pretty good example of playing "wrong," at least for teaming purposes. I could see rolling a toon like that for funsies, but if I did, I'd have a hard time accepting team invites in good conscience. It's basically a troll build. In that case, if the guy legitimately didn't understand why his build would anger teammates, you'd be doing him a favor by gently giving him some pointers. As always, the number one rule is simply to be considerate. If you make a good faith effort to do that, then no one has any basis to criticize you. COH is a very forgiving game.

To make a really rough back-of-the-envelope estimate, if the snipe is worth let's say 1/3rd of your total (single-target) DPS, then the full damage buff from +22% ToHit is worth ~7.3% net. Some builds will lean more heavily on the snipe, but in general I'd say my number overstates the benefit of straining for the full 22% ToHit, because you can pick up incidental amounts of ToHit with much less effort (e.g. Kismet, the sporadic benefit of things like Aim or Build Up, or even Tactics itself, with less than max enhancement). Is it worth rejiggering your whole build if you had no intention of taking or slotting Tactics? Depends on the person, but I think most people would probably say no. There are other benefits to Tactics, though; personally I think its +perception buff is a little underrated on soloing builds, for example - so you can just treat this snipe thing as gravy. Regardless, the snipe changes in the latest patch are a huge quality of life buff, even for characters that already had the +22% ToHit. My own Blaster used to lose fast snipe fairly often because he was hit with tiny ToHit debuffs. It was also annoying that I needed every bit of a heavily boosted level 50 Gaussian's set to hit the threshold; I frequently lost fast snipe when exemplaring even many levels above where I took Tactics (and the snipe itself). The old system was really clunky. I think the Paragon devs would have changed it in short order if the game hadn't been shut down.

This sums it up for me. I spend probably an unhealthy amount of time tweaking builds and discussing the game's mechanical quirks on this forum so that I don't have to care what my teammates are doing. Of course, there are exceptional cases where a player is either so clueless or so inconsiderate (or such a troll) that he is a noticeable detriment, but those situations are very rare, and they generally have more to do with the player's behavior than they have to do with his build. As far as builds are concerned, sure, bad ones exist. But, a few notable exceptions aside, unless you have access to a full Mid's data import for a given player's build, you probably don't have enough information to make a definitive judgment. Just looking at power choices doesn't tell you terribly much; one of the beauties of this game is that almost any character/build concept can work. When the topic of bad builds comes up, usually I find myself shaking my head at the examples people trot out - tankers without taunt, or blasters without snipe, that sort of thing. If you know the mechanics, then you know that a Tanker doesn't need taunt to do his job effectively. Sure, I'd prefer to have Taunt on a tanker, but the lack of it isn't by any stretch a deal breaker. Petless MMs are an extreme example of the same thing: sure, it makes sense to roll your eyes when someone chooses to avoid the vast bulk of the benefit from his Primary power set, but MMs have buff/debuff secondaries. That gives them the potential to contribute more to the average team than most other builds, even without their pets. So petless MMs are gimped in principle, and certainly they're gimped in solo play - but ironically they can perform very well in the only environment in which anyone's likely to care about how gimped they are. "Oh no, we have the equivalent of a low-damage Corruptor!" What I'm getting at here is that I agree with the spirit of the OP. People have always been a bit too judgmental in CoH, a game in which team play is extremely forgiving. There's usually no point in running a team like a martinet. Getting into a huge fight with a team leader (or rage quitting the team) over offhanded comments or guidelines is silly too. More often than not, the most angry/outspoken/critical teammates I've encountered speak from ignorance. Still, there are bad builds, and there are disruptive players. Can't get on board with the blanket assumption that all criticism is always baseless.

I quit at somewhere around 7 billion earned - hard to say exactly because a lot of it is tied up in builds, and I pissed away a fair amount on typoes in the market interface. At the moment I have about 4 billion liquid, and not too many compelling ideas on how to spend to it. Anyway, I'll go against the grain a bit; in practical terms, you're rich if you have more than enough INF to fully kit out all of the characters you've rolled or intend to roll. In relative terms, this number may or may not be enough to impress people on the forums, but that isn't a terribly important bar to clear. If you truly enjoy making pixel money, then by all means have at it, but if your marketeering is more of a means to an end, then don't lose sight of the end. You can always come back later to earn more if you suddenly find there's a new build concept you want to invest in.

Combative? Maybe. When confronted with a post like yours, which offered just about zero in terms of substantive argument to back up your supercilious, I'm-the-only-expert-in-the-room tone, I more or less have to resort to mockery. That doesn't mean I'm emotional; it means you didn't say anything worth refuting in detail. But fine, here we go: Of course you're entitled to believe that Rularuu are deathlessly important. But Rularuu basically ignore Defense, so if your position is that Blaster DEF is pointless because Rularuu, then you're essentially saying that all DEF on every build everywhere is pointless - all because of one NPC faction out of dozens. Imagine if we were talking about, say, SR Scrappers. "LOL, you should never build for DEF on an SR Scrapper, because Rularuu." Rularuu are the crucial example here because pretty much every other NPC faction will give you at least a few seconds before they shred your DEF. Many NPC factions won't shred your DEF at all. Yes, it's absolutely true that other DEF builds, like the aforementioned Super Reflexes, are more robust in the face of debuffs, but Blasters aren't meant to tank over a sustained period of time. The name of the game with soft-capped Blasters is to avoid the alpha strike, and by extension to avoid the bulk of the bad effects thrown your way (mezzes, debuffs). Needless to say, that extra breathing room is extremely helpful, both solo and in teams. It allows a Blaster to focus more on pumping out offense. In effect, you did in fact say that no one should play non-Mental, or rather you consigned every other Blaster secondary to flavor/RP status, and therefore you suggested that build considerations for non-Mental Blasters are irrelevant or trivial. Why? Probably because you sensed that your argument is weak, so you distracted us with Drain Psyche. Of course, this thread, the advice in which you dismissed as "iffy," isn't specifically aimed at /Mental Blasters. Your Recharge-uber-alles approach isn't very compelling as a general build strategy, especially given that competent builders, like @TheAdjustor , above, can achieve very high levels of global recharge on top of high levels of DEF. I notice that in both of your verbose replies you've managed to gloss over that point. (It should also go without saying that soloing large crowds as fast as possible isn't the only valid approach to high-end gameplay or a high-end build. Someone who focuses more on, say, single-target damage isn't playing a joke build just because it may not farm as fast as your Blaster, which is built around Drain Psyche and PBAoE damage - and as far as I can tell, little else. In any case, the joke's on you if you think that even a highly optimized /Mental Blaster farms noticeably faster than a farming build with robust anti-scatter mechanics, like Brute taunt auras. Yes, you have more burst AoE damage; no, that burst AoE damage isn't enough to drop +3 or +4 bosses in one or two rotations, not even close. I spent a lot of time messing around with farms on a Fire/Mental back on the live servers; billions of INF spent, and the inescapable conclusion was that there's a reason farmers favor Brutes or even Controllers over Blasters. A Blaster can work, but it's sub-optimal.) And on the thread's titular subject of procs, you didn't even really disagree with the "iffy" advice posted upthread. What you advocate isn't a "proc monster," or a build that revolves around procs. You advocate light proc slotting in most attacks. I probably have more procs than you do, based on your testimony here, and I'm a gimpy DEF builder.

The first sentence sums up your post admirably. Dismissing the value of soft-capped DEF on the basis that Rularuu exist doesn't pass the laugh test. As for Cimerorans? They have to hit before you get cascade failure. Ahaha, yes, I see. The DEF-is-useless-because-no-one-should-ever-play-a-non-Mental-Blaster argument. 😛 Btw, like Adjustor, I have a soft-capped Blaster with 175% global recharge. Ohhh damn my build must suck so so bad at putting out damage!

I'm not sure I understand the question, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in the passage you quoted. I was referring to balance arguments going back to the game's birth. In those balance arguments, there was always a cohort arguing that Blaster offense was far and away the best in the game, with zero evidence. Their position was tautological - "Blasters should be the damage kings; therefore their damage is unequaled." Of course, for a long long long time, Blaster offense wasn't necessarily the best in the game, certainly not by leaps and bounds. This isn't a moral judgment; it has nothing to do with whether or not Blasters should have been invited to teams or whether they were technically capable of soloing at a decent clip. It was simply a game mechanics' question: is Blaster offense high enough to justify the AT's disadvantages? These days, I think the answer to that question is close enough to "yes." I like the way the AT performs. Sustains, fast snipes and best of all crashless nukes gave Blasters the eye-popping offense they were always supposed to have (or something close to it), along with a large buff to quality of life. Certain power sets could still use a pass, of course, particularly for DPA, but on the whole I have no complaints. But it's worth emphasizing that, in terms of the game's development history, Issue 24 was basically yesterday. My point was that there've always been people arguing, based on nothing more than their erroneous gut feelings, that Blasters have super-awesome-brutally-sick-unparalleled DPS. It just wasn't so.

Depending on what you mean by "massive hp or resistance or defense," I'm not sure your position is accurate. Sure, Blasters aren't ideal in farming content, mostly because they get much more scatter than e.g. a Brute with a taunt aura. That extra scatter can exacerbate the Blaster's durability disadvantages, which are considerable. Still, IO builds generally don't present you with a direct, 1:1 trade off between offense and defense. The idea that a Blaster built to be a "glass cannon" must have oodles more offense than, say, a build with soft-capped Ranged or S/L DEF, is a persistent myth - similar to the persistent myth on the live forums that Blasters must have far and away the best DPS simply because they should. (The latter was a common refrain going back to way before we had all of our new shiny toys, even before old toys like Defiance and the increased AT damage scalar.) Once you pass a certain level of global recharge, there isn't a whole hell of a lot you can do to improve offense. You can chase +damage bonuses, sure, but those are generally tiny unless you really sell out to get them, and even if you do sell out for them you'll be lucky to net more than about a 10% advantage over the next guy, at the high end. These days, you can also go the proc route, and admittedly this approach can be very potent, but even a (relatively) defensive build can usually afford to slot out one or two attacks with the best unique procs. Compare the net benefit of these approaches to the prospect of avoiding 90% of all incoming attacks from a preferred type or vector. There's just no contest. So it's certainly valid to build a glass cannon; if you enjoy that play style more power to you, and I'm sure you're effective with it, but I wouldn't assume that a more defensive build "can't touch your DPS." If I'm wrong about that, I'd love to see your build.