Obitus

Assuming that those level 50 damage IOs are boosted to +5 (to give you +95.9% in damage enhancement), then I'm getting an average damage of 542.8 on the quick-snipe version of Ranged Shot, with that enhancement scheme. Remember that the Blaster's Wrath proc comes with 23.19% in recharge enhancement, and that the fast-snipe version of the power loses 3 seconds of activation time, which both lower the chance to proc. I presume that you mean 3 "typical" 3.5 PPM damage procs and two purple (Apocalypse and Unbreakable Constraint). If so, then the average proc damage on Freeze Ray is 343.45, the base damage on the power is 125.1, and a +5-boosted Acc/Dam IO gives us ~33% damage enhancement - for an overall total average damage of 509.8. If, on the other hand, you're talking about 2 "typical" 3.5 PPM damage procs and three purples (Apocalypse, Unbreakable Constraint, and Blaster's Wrath), then the overall average damage actually falls, odd though it may seem, to 494.9. Why? Because of that crucial Recharge enhancement that comes packaged with the Blaster ATO proc. Anyway, I apologize for the nitpicking. The numbers above are still hugely impressive. To echo @Coyote, I think it's undeniable that proccing out an attack or two is absolutely 100% worth it. The most obvious generic example for Blasters is probably Char from the Fire Epic pool; it's an ideal proc super-mule, and it's available to all Blasters. There are three problems you'll run into if you try to build a Blaster around procs, though. The first is simply that Blasters don't have a lot of defensive wiggle room; Blaster build with soft-capped DEF to a favored position/type are already very tight. This is all the more true if you e.g. break up the Blaster's Wrath set, which has excellent boosts to global recharge and Ranged DEF as a set. The second problem is the obvious complication in constructing a seamless attack chain. Blasters are actually pretty well off here, because although they have higher base damage than other ATs, which lowers the proportional benefit of procs, Blasters also have gobs of +Recovery, so they don't have to worry as much about losing Endurance enhancement in some of their attacks. They do still have to worry about making their strongest attacks recharge fast enough to fit into a good chain, though. There's a natural tension between Recharge enhancement and proc chance. Leaning on global recharge is ideal, of course, but that brings us back to problem #1 - losing set bonus opportunities by slotting procs. The third problem is just a limitation of all proc builds - i.e. that there are only so many purple procs, and you can only use each of them once. These unique procs are almost twice as strong as "typical" 3.5 PPM procs, when slotted in the average attack ((4.5 / 3.5) * (107.1 / 71.75) = 1.92), so in a sense you could say that there's a natural diminished-returns effect to any proc-heavy build. To put it another way, the wow factor when you quote the damage on a single attack with a bunch of uniques slotted in it can be a bit misleading as to the overall effect of procs in your build. You're not wrong though. Procs under the new system are a game changer. They force us to think about building in a new and sometimes counter-intuitive way.

Good point. Yeah, the devs have changed the plan since my last post. The snipe changes will be a pure quality-of-life buff to any Dom who has the current requirement of +22% ToHit; you'll get the same amount of damage, but now you no longer have to worry about losing fast snipe e.g. when you get hit with a small ToHit debuff. Fire Blast is still a beastly attack on a Dom, though. Worth emphasizing that, because other ATs often skip it, and for good reason. Doms have a different situation.

The villain-side grind for Freedom Phalanx/HPT really is a lot easier and faster. The guide in the OP is great for the other three Accolades, though.

Yeah, it appears to be base HP. At the moment, my Blaster has 1697.2 max HP, once you account for IO bonuses, temp powers, and accolades. With 95.9% heal/absorb enhancement in Temporal Healing, I get 118.01 absorb per tick, which is just under 10% of the default Blaster max HP of 1204.8. The number was 118.01 before I got those accolades, the other day.

I don't know what the 6023.8% number means. There's probably some arcane explanation relating to the inner workings of the game's code - but for all practical purposes, just treat it as gibberish. I can tell you that the Sustain power from Temporal Manipulation (Temporal Healing) gives you an absorb shield worth roughly 5% of your base max HP, refreshing (but not stacking) every 3-4 seconds. The absorb grows to about 10% of base HP when the power is fully enhanced. I imagine that other Blaster sustain powers offer identical amounts of absorb. That's a pretty big number, equivalent to 600-800% in regeneration. But of course absorb and regen aren't directly comparable. Absorb numbers tend to be higher, at least among the Blaster sustain powers, because absorb can be wasted, whereas regen never is. If you have an absorb sustain, and you get hit for 30% of your health in one blow, then your HP bar loses 20%, and your sustain will do nothing to heal you. By contrast, a character with a regen sustain will take more damage, but he will also recover from it a lot faster. Absorb sustains are probably superior at the low end. At the high end, where you might start layering Defense or Resistance on top of your sustain, regen is probably better. Both are good, though.

Big fan of the snipe changes. It's a quality of life buff; there's no downside, people. Everything else looks good too, though I'll cop to not having much interest in or personal knowledge about the affected sets.

As Nihilii mentions, this game actually has a fair bit of under-discussed difficulty, in the form of enemy groups that people don't often play against. Try soloing Rularuu on +4/x8 with, say, an SR Scrapper. For all of the talk about how overpowered we are, there is basically no build in the entire game that can easily solo at the highest difficulty indiscriminately. (The closest thing we have to a build that can solo all NPC factions more-or-less equally well is probably an Illusion Controller, or a tricked out perma-dom Dominator with a diverse Primary like Mind Control - but a build like that won't kill large spawns particularly fast. There are always trade offs.) In a good group, it's harder to find a big challenge at the high end. Incarnate powers just scale absurdly well in teams - but there's still fun/challenge to be found in running random pick-up groups, which may not have all of their Incarnate powers, and probably don't have tricked out IO builds. To me, one of the most appealing aspects of this game is the prospect of designing a build that can get a team through tough situations. Exemplaring to do lower level TFs at high difficulty levels can be very interesting. But the most challenging thing about CoH these days is trying to get a donation in before the window closes. The game's doing something right.

Yeah, it depends on the parameters of the question. Storm will perform much better in a ranged-damage role than Empathy or Thermal, for example - so even if Storm had five skippable PBAoE effects (on top of the four key powers I already mentioned), you could make a case for it. On the other hand, if all you care about is whether the set functions in a range or positionally agnostic fashion, then Empathy or Thermal are fine answers. I would lean in the direction of the former interpretation, personally; it's not that Empathy or Thermal are particularly well-suited to a ranged play style, but rather that they don't care one way or the other. The main consideration for those sets isn't whether you want to stay at range; it's whether you want to be geared towards ally-only buff powers. By contrast, Storm is straightforwardly a damage set, specifically a ranged damage set, designed to keep foes on their butt and out of your face while you wreck them. Though of course I should have mentioned that you really do need Sudden Acceleration procs to make e.g. Tornado work as a consistent damage power.

This is my take too, for what it's worth. Hurricane used to be considered the core Storm power, in part because the leveling game was slower, in part because we didn't have IOs to provide DEF and +recharge to juice long recharge powers like Lightning Storm, and in part because powers like Tornado were largely unusuable unless you had an AoE immobilize. (And sometimes even then.) Now Hurricane is largely incidental. As Hjarki said, it can do some fun and impressive things when you're lower level, and it can help you through the occasional bad spot even later on - but it's entirely possible, even potentially quite pleasant, to ignore Hurricane for a Stormer's entire career. Most of the time, it's more trouble than it's worth to use Hurricane proactively. Better to build so that you don't feel you have to. The signature powers in Storm go like this: Freezing Rain > Tornado > Lightning Storm. Toss Steamy Mist in there somewhere - hard to rank it directly. Everything else ranges from optional to eminently skippable. The TL;DR of all of my ramblings is that Storm is exceedingly well suited to a ranged-only play style; it might even be one of the best Defender sets for that purpose. Actually, Hurricane only reinforces this conclusion, because its main use is to keep insistent melee opponents out of your face.

FWIW, in my very brief and very casual/subjective testing, Jolting Chain appeared to function as if it were a single-target attack, WRT proc chance. The chance to proc on secondary targets definitely didn't appear to be ~1/6th of the chance against the primary. @Number Sixsaid earlier in the thread that the area factor for "chain attacks" is MaxTargets * 0.75. Based on your numbers, in this case that would be 15 * 0.75 = 11.25, presumably then adjusted (as all area factors are supposed to be) to (11.25 * 0.75) + 0.25 = 8.6875. That's a pretty high number. By contrast, if I did it right, my spreadsheet has the adjusted area factor on a 30' sphere at only 3.625. Anyway, Number Six went on to say in a subsequent post that the chain-attack AF formula only affects two powers, neither of which is Jolting Chain. So for the moment I'mma assume it's working as a single-target attack, but I'll do some follow up testing too at some point in the near future. I have Elec control plans, and a procced out Jolting Chain is a very important component of those plans.

The forums are the game for work.

Of course, none of those things is even remotely a deal breaker.

I'd settle for a buff that makes Interface DoTs useful again. 😛 (Seriously, I suspect that Interface DoTs are bugged, unless there was a patch note that I missed somewhere, explicitly nerfing them.)

Yeah, this is the thing that jumped out at me. If you attack once every 2 seconds, then we can expect an average of 3.25 stacks of the Core buff. 2 seconds per attack is a pretty liberal estimate too, given that even extraordinarily fast attackers will spend a significant portion of their time repositioning and/or casting non-attack powers (buffs, etc). Of course there are a couple of heavy caveats. The first is that I don't know how Core Assault interacts with AoEs. If it's possible to proc the buff multiple times in a single AoE cast, then nevermind; five stacks might be consistently achievable. I suppose it's also possible that all stacks refresh on reapplication, though I doubt it. Great thread.

Trick question. The answer is "all of them."

Big fan of the new set suggestions. To me, the big problem with knockback, post-Homecoming, is the slotting tax; new sets with decent damage values (and decent set bonuses) would alleviate that. Null the Gull would too, but he'd prevent granular tuning. Thumbs up.

Bold mine. How exactly are the existing systems inadequate? A build full of Common IOs is a ludicrously easy bar to clear for any player. This is a 15 year old game hosted by an all-volunteer staff. In order to justify any kind of change to the game's structure, you need a little more than bald assertions. "The conversation of how to handle [the problem], and the conversation of the problem existing are two different things," is a statement for the ages, frankly. You're getting increasingly hostile responses in this thread because you smugly breeze past obvious and crucial points, like maybe whether or not a problem exists in the first place. You've actually moved from claiming that high-end builds are too expensive to claiming now that Common IOs aren't easily achievable enough for newer players. Why? Because why is a discussion for a different thread, duh. Your schtick really is starting to look like a parody, or as Nihilii put it: Perfect.

I don't have much to add to any of the excellent economic arguments in this thread. But I think the OP is making two errors with regard to character builds, and how easy it is to kit them out: He underestimates how much INF a player can earn just by leveling normally. It isn't unreasonable, for example, to expect a player who solo-levels to acquire some 500 merits by level 50, just from story arcs. That's 150 million influence, which isn't far off the average cost of a what I'd call a great non-purpled (non-ATO'd/WinterO'd) build. To put it another way, you can usually achieve perhaps 80-90% of peak performance for about 200 million; purples and so forth really aren't as important as you might think. He overstates the significance of the high-end builds posted on the forum. Such build posts are usually aspirational, designed to show what is possible, not what every character should be running from the moment he hits 50. Regardless, they don't represent an unreasonable long-term goal in an MMO context. Just because extremely expensive builds are common on the forums, it doesn't follow that they are, or should be, representative among the playerbase at large. Related to #2, you could argue that the OP misunderstands what really goes into high-end builds. Earning the influence to buy a high-end build takes far less time than acquiring the knowledge to design a good one. We post builds to judge how well they're put together, not how much they cost. Anyway, given the absolutely immense difference between prices on the live server and prices here, it seems ridiculous to argue that the Homecoming devs are less interested in maintaining a healthy market than the live devs were. "You're not following the economic guidelines that gave us PvP IOs at 2 billion inf," just doesn't pass the laugh test. No offense.

The way I see it, there's no call for concern until the population drops to a level that wouldn't sustain a single server. We're far from that point. Money is an even smaller concern; if there ever comes a day when we can't find ~500 people to toss in $10 bucks each per month, I'll eat my hat. Decline from the peak numbers we saw at launch is only natural. Gotta keep in mind, though, that the trend won't go on forever. There is a core of players who are gung ho about this game, and more or less always will be. At some point, the decline will level off. It's certainly possible that the game could die, but I can almost guarantee that a lack of player interest won't be the cause.

Classic WoW and classic CoH were contemporaries the first time around, ~14 years ago. Of course, WoW was far far more successful, but it didn't kill CoH off then. I don't expect that it will now.

The Dominator version of Fire Blast is the best in the game, due to its short activation time (relative to Blaster Fire Blast - 1.452s vs 1.848s) and its relatively high recharge (8s vs 4s for the Blaster version), which raises the power's damage scale. In fact, Dominator Fire Blast will have higher DPA than the standard fast snipe, if/when the current plan for fast snipes goes live. Fire Blast DPA = 1.99424 damage scale over 1.452s = 1.373 DPA. Blazing Bolt default DPA under new system = 2.26 damage scale over 1.884s = 1.199 DPA. Even at the max damage scale under the new system, the fast snipe will only barely out-DPA Fire Blast on a Dom: 2.76 / 1.884 = 1.465 DPA. I wouldn't skip Fire Blast. It's not exactly better than the fast snipe (though you could make an argument that it will be, unless the devs' plan changes), but it's one of the stronger ranged attacks available to a Dominator.

As I said in the other thread, this number is astounding. Can't tell you how impressed I am, Max. It's a great build, but clearly you executed perfectly too. Thanks for testing it out, Nihilii. Very interesting results! After playing around some more with my Fire/Temporal Blaster, I think Atomic is still better even if we disregard Positron Cell. Just a ton of utility in that secondary. Too bad that Positron Cell can't slot Achilles' Heel like you'd expect; then it'd always be well worth using. (Imagine increasing Nihilii's scores by 15-20%!) Regardless, I'm really enthused about Blasters finally being able to put out truly impressive single-target numbers purely from range. It's been a long time coming. Even at that, though, this proc-monster approach to the game requires trade-offs. You almost have to build like a Scrapper (or, I suppose, as a Sentinel), in the sense that there's a larger focus on just establishing a core attack repertoire; hard to find the build resources to take things like Fire Breath and proc out a beastly single-target chain and achieve sufficient global recharge and soft-cap to key positions.

We are of one mind 😀 I think it's just barely possible to get that chain sustainable without Ageless, though it will be difficult to do so and cap e.g. Ranged DEF. FWIW, the soft-caped Ranged build I'm looking at right now has effective recovery at about 6.55 EPS (which is pretty ridiculous, Sustain + Stamina + Miracle/Numina + 2 Perf Shifter procs + Panacea). The same build would burn ~6.1 EPS running the above-quoted attack chain. Then of course there's the toggle cost, which is considerable - but I haven't exhausted all of the options yet either. Will give it more thought when I have more time. That said, if you swapped to Flares instead of Fireball (or the Atomic Immobilize, which has nearly identical DPA) for single-target scenarios, you'd only lose a handful of DPS, but you'd reduce end consumption by more than 1 EPS. I think End would be manageable, overall, even if you couldn't quite get the Fireball chain sustainable.

As I see it, there are two options: You can take Conserve Power to mitigate the endurance problem, and then take Clarion to cover mez (this is my approach on the Ice/Storm Corruptor that I've plastered all over the thread) You can take Ageless Destiny to manage endurance, and rely on Inspirations/Defense/Soft control to manage the mez hole (this has the added benefit that it frees up your Epic pool choice) The main problem with Storm is endurance. Everything flows from how you choose to manage that problem. There are no perfect solutions, only trade offs. Controllers are in a slightly better position, as we saw with Max's build, because they have the option to take comprehensive mez protection from their Psi epic pool.

Gotta correct myself here. It turns out that I was looking at an older version of Mid's, which is inaccurate. Atomic's hold can't take any DEF debuff sets; it can only slot damage, Hold, and ToHit/Accurate ToHit debuff sets. Confirmed in-game. So Atomic loses access to the Achilles' Heel -RES proc, but it still retains access to 5 non-purple damage procs (Neuronic Shutdown, Ghost Widow's Embrace, Gladiator's Net, Cloud Senses, Gladiator's Javelin). A disappointment to be sure, though I still like the look of this set for high-end single-target shenanigans.