Nemu

I was around when this information was documented. Blasters generally do enough damage not to be overly reliant on procs. A lot of the build meta for solo play leans towards tank mage nuke machines and a lot of set bonuses and thus slots are dedicated to survival. If there were any powers deserving of procs it would typically be the 16 second recharge hold in some secondaries or an epic hold. I wouldn't go out of my way to invest in those. Mez is a part of blaster life and builds will never 100% solve for it. Inspcombine breakfrees during downtime and proactive usage of them should be second nature to you when playing a hyper-aggressive blaster. If you really want a partial solution for mez, get rune of protection down the mystic flight pool instead of acrobatics. 4 points of kb protection is enough to prevent you from chain KDed and there are only a few kb powers that will actually knock you. If you need more, then you can always get the base craft or stick another kb prot IO somewhere. I honestly have not seen that power taken since 2020 when people figured out how easy it was to kit out their characters on homecoming. I think over time you might change your outlook on slow resist. You don't miss it when you don't need it but when you get hit by -recharge debuffs or caltrop patches, you'll wish you had more. I'd also not get overconfident about ice patches ability to protect you in melee, with 34% S/L defense I'd still joust frozen aura to minimize exposure. That way if you happen to get mezzed while executing your melee attacks, you will put some distance between you and the enemy when you finish execution.

I have been saying this to people that justify taking hotfeet on blasters because "damage auras do so much damage over time" for fucking years. No blaster is going to wait for a damage aura to finish off a mob, they are getting another fireball to the face NOW! As for VG, it requires synergy within the build and it's a power to be built around. In today's fast moving meta where everyone is throwing their judgements, exemped blasters nuking by level 21, I can see how it or any of the Poison debuffs fails to add much value. But at least you can use the spits before you get to the mob, and you don't have to adjust your build to make sure survival is taken care of when you hop into the fray with VG on. The biggest problem with PBAOE auras for squishies is that they don't account for stuff outside of their zone of interaction (in addition to not having a standard radius across the board). Why invite yourself to danger when things are dying quickly, a lot of times before you even get to the danger zone anyway? Having said that I would make poison builds that are built around VG, controllers are better because of stacking auras from the primary such as incendiary aura or arctic air. Those builds are super gimped on damage but I enjoy the passive "I neuter mobs just by playing walking simulator" playstyle every once in a while.

The typical pairing of proc heavy builds is to use Musculature to improve the damage slotting of proc powers that have lower damage enhancement. You don't want any alphas that increase recharge because those act as slotted enhancements and that will skew your proc rates for the worse. You will notice that instead of a 6th proc, I added a +5 Apocalypse damage IO because the damage average is higher with that IO than with another proc. But if I add a second 50+5 IO instead of another proc, the damage average between the 2 slottings are negligible. Muscalature will bring the damage enhancement level of dehydrate close to the ED cap.

Building for S/L/R softcap is more conducive for blaster builds that NEED to go into melee range. The rationale behind investing in those 2 vectors is that Range defense covers stuff outside of your zone of interaction, and S/L will cover a lot of incoming melee attacks to give you enough time to kill what's in your face. You take your melee attacks to accelerate the death dealing to things in your face, especially when water blast has a pretty weak suite of single target attacks. Your S/L defense is not a fail safe but a means to buy you some time, and you supplement that S/L defense with additional melee range soft/hard control like ice patch so you can stay in melee range longer and kill the things in your face. Your build doesn't need to go into melee range. And if enemies get close you don't haven any intention on standing your ground and going toe to toe with them. Range defense is important and should be softcapped based on your game plan, but all that S/L def set bonuses you are building for has very little ROI. You can probably get away with the base value that you have after your take and slot maneuvers/weave/frozen armor. Any defense above 32% means you can softcap it with a single luck, and that's a happy medium for your build and allows you to allocate those precious slots to other bonuses. When you hover over an enhancement you can push + to increase the level of the enhancement. There are enhancement boosters you can use in game to increase the enhancement level of IOs by up to 5. Do this for the level 50 recharge IOs in hasten and you will not need to waste a third slot there. This is what I would do with a game plan like yours. Tactics is essential for proc monster dehydrate to have max hit chance against +4s, which is my metric for to hit chance for all my builds. Some people settle for max to hit change (95%) against +3s due to incarnate shift, but I exemp often and +4s mean +4 for that type of content and sometimes even +5s. Blaster (Water Blast - Ice Manipulation)_updated revision.mbd Steam spray is a mule for range defense bonuses, but it's also a decent attack that rounds out your ranged AoE arsenal, you can either use it or take it off your tray, but the 4% range defense set bonus and the incidental 9% global acc boost for targeted AoEs offer a lot of value for the build. There are some power picks I'd push back for my own preferences. I like to exemp so I want to make sure I have my range defense setup by level 30. Dehydrate as it is slotted requires tactics to function (76% chance to hit without vs 96% chance to hit with), so I'd make room for tactics and weave by level 30. I'd most likely push out hasten to a level 32 pick and build up into the 40s. The only power that really suffers during those levels without hasten is Geyser, but typically you use your nuke ever other fight and 10 seconds doesn't make a meaningful difference in how quickly you are able to use that power again. I doubt you'd spam Geyser when you are half done with your in between spawn.

You as a human can dictate the flow of the fight by moving, whereas the mobs have but one choice to come after you. S/L is also no longer the catch all it used to be after the damage type revamp. Now mixed damage type attacks will check against only the highest damage type for that attack. Also, based on your statement of using ranged attacks in melee and that melee is an inevitability, why not take more melee attacks? At least frozen aura allows you to slot Armageddon if you really wanted to chase all the recharge. My first post there highlights my thoughts on why range defense is more important even on melee focused blaster builds Nowadays experienced builders don't chase perma-hasten just for the sake of perma-hasten. Liberal use of the force feedback proc can also help you achieve perma-hasten without over-investing in recharge bonuses. Honestly if hasten is a few seconds off perma it's OK, you are investing A LOT into getting those final few seconds covered via set bonuses and there are better ROI for those slots elsewhere. If high recharge is a goal, then there are opportunities to proc out a few attacks to get more damage out of them, since most high recharge builds will have a good amount of +recharge and +acc set bonuses which are per-requisites for proc monster powers like freezing touch. More and more builders are starting to see value in slow resistance and take steps to get a decent amount of it via winter IOs in their builds. A few -recharge buffs can dramatically impact a perma-hasten build with no slow resistance, so it's wise if you are going all out on expenses to invest in a respectable amount of slow resist. If you really want to solo hard stuff aggressively and have most of your survival bases covered via a build instead of inspirations, this is what I would go with. As I said in my post above, range defense is a better catch all for things outside of your zone of interaction and you will need that buffer. This build is designed so that you will have softcap range defense by level 30. You can also forgo theme and take scorpion shield so you don't have to wait until level 41 for your S/L shield, and take and slot steam spray instead of flash freeze. You can get additional slow resistance and recharge through base crafts. Ironically this build will be sub optimal for hardmode team content like 4 star TFs. Water ice Ice - Blaster (Water Blast - Ice Manipulation).mbd

Why do you build for S/L defense when your game plan is to obviously stay at range, since you skipped pretty much all the melee stuff?

Are you talking about the spooky ghost that Stan's Dad accused when the world lost internet in South Park? Definitely water blast

It is generically true that more recharge is better. But the fixation on hasten and perma-hasten is just another one of those conventional wisdoms that players parrot all over in game, in the forums and on discord. There are merits of chasing perma hasten for certain builds, you have to understand the purpose of why you would want to do so. Everything has a cost, extreme recharge builds sacrifice a lot of things to get there. See this post on my take on perma-hasten. TL/DR hasten is not the end all be all. Some builds don’t need it and you can do just fine. @Kalean I can’t name the builds that I’ve built for other people that are memorable mechanically because those builds are tailored to their needs, not mine. There are some builds threads where I go in depth on the methodology I use and I’d like to think those are good blueprints for people that want to dive deeper into making builds themselves: I have posted a few of mu own builds that I enjoy and I can certain share those here, starting with the reason I came back to this game: This is a straight forward softcapped melee blaster build. Rotating knockdown powers feels like cruise control when you dive into the thick of it. It is the blaste I enjoy the most. then there are the ones that veer a bit off the beaten path: There are more builds that I’ve postedfor other ATs but I’ll keep this response blaster specific. I will say I’m especially proud of my batpanda (stj/nin scrapper) and cowardly panda (kin melee/stone armor hover blasting ranged scrapped) builds.

Long gone are the days where experienced build makers chase recharge bonuses just for perma-hasten. Diminishing returns means that level of recharge only benefits 1-2 very long recharge powers like atomic blast and is wasted on everything else. Extreme recharge focus benefit ATs like dominators or controllers more because their toolkit consists of a lot more powers on long recharge timers. Nowadays you need a better reason than "I need perma hasten" to make extreme levels of recharge a focus for most builds. A better reason would be to supplement some of your attacks with procs to augment their damage potential. Proc builds don't slot recharge reduction in powers that need to be procced, and a high density of procs in those powers means you have less room to slot ACC and end reduction in them as well. Those types of builds need to be supported by recharge set bonuses, acc set bonuses, and end management tools, the first 2 can be acquired via building for recharge, as quite a few purple sets and the blaster ATOS offer ACC bonuses along the way. Compare this build to yours Recharge helps proc builds.mbd Still perma hasten, I gave up 3 seconds of recharge on atomic blast to improve the damage potential of 4 other powers. Added Aim so you now have two sources of burst damage and improved the recharge time on chronos itself, because that buff also improves your recharge for 10 seconds and it makes sense to have it up asap I take it that your intent with this build is damage and not survival so I'm not going to go into survival. You sound like you got it figured out, but if you don't, then you can come back here and we can talk about that too. I forgot my comment about power sequence to make it smoother for exemped content. You are not going to use end of time by itself before you get atomic blast and other tools so I wouldn't take it at level 16. Based on your described playstyle, you are going to be staying at range until level 30+. I swapped in cosmic burst, neutron bomb and your sustain to be taken as soon as they are available. I also subbed in aim to give you two sources of burst damage at early levels. I prefer the gaussian's proc in aim because that can help you cut through paragon protector mog. Leveling Sequenced Recharge helps proc builds.mbd

When you hit the view active sets button you see the pop up window to the left. It tells you there are bonuses over the cap of 5 of the same type. That's the rule of 5, additional set bonuses of the same type after 5 do nothing. I posted my comments before you made your last iteration. That one doesn't violate the rule of 5 anymore. The more interesting questions to me are: 1 - why do you NEED perma hasten? 2 - Time shift only stuns minions, end of time has a tiny 7 foot radius meaning you have to hug enemies to hit as many as possible, Atomic blast locks you in animation for about 3 seconds during which, assuming minions are stunned, anything that's not a minion is still attacking you. Factoring the cast times of the 3 powers you mentioned, you are looking at 7 seconds in which your enemies can get hits on you. How do you expect survive the crack back during that time? 3 - mob range will equal yours except in very rare instances. Also, what if you can't fly high? What if they toss a web grenade that grounds and immobilizes you? 4 - if you are planning to farm, do you know what makes a build suitable for farming? Are you aware of this thread? You can make a second account and make a dedicated farming alt if you want a farmer. This also allows you to powerlevel your alts on the main accounts should you wish to. Farming builds are very different than builds for regular content. While you can farm with your blaster in your current state, you are jumping through a lot more hoops than you need to in order to be successful at that activity.

What are your expectations for success for this build? Are there thematic elements you'd like to stick to/pet powers that you want keep? Looking at the technical elements of the build, you are over the cap on 10% recharge set bonuses. I also think aim deserves a power pick. I think some powers can be sequenced to give you a better experience for exemplaring down to do lower level content. The current build goes all in on recharge bonuses, why? What's your plan for survival?

Details like that go a long way towards a build more suited for you. I'm going to walk you through the build I put together. Besides the requirements you listed, I added a few more: 1 - Build should be exemp friendly and have most its core complete by level 30. This means power selection sequence matters. 2 - Build should have at least 95% chance to hit against +4 mobs. 3 - Build should have at least 50% slow resist. If you want to be mobile on the ground during combat, getting stuck in a caltrops patch or other slow patches will spell death, especially if you don't have high defenses. You could use burst of speed or mysic flight teleport to get out of the patch, but the other benefit of slow resist is that it also combats recharge debuffs. Since you want to stay at range, I made sure you have a decent number of single target and AoE range attacks. You can "spam" empty clips as part of your AoE rotation, and act as a single target filler, and you have a late game Proc Monster char with a build up proc that can proc about 50% of the time to round out your single target ranged attack rotation. Survival wise you will need to stay on your toes. Get used to inspcombining lucks and breakfrees during your down time and use those inspirations accordingly. This build has about 30% Range and AoE defense by level 30, Hail of bullets bumps this up to 40%, 30% defense is ok, but you will start to really notice enemies missing you more when you eclipse the 40% range. I didn't place as much emphasis on melee defense. Below is why If you plan to open with burst of speed, I added an avalanche KD proc so that it can give you some breathing room to chain into hail of bullets. I also put a Ragnarok KD proc in Bullet Rain for some incidental soft control. It's not super reliable, but nice when it happens. The Burst of speed->Hail of bullets sequence should be enough to wipe out enough fodder and then you can softlock your melee opponent with storm kick->dragon's tail->storm kick to keep them knocked down. Range defense and AoE defense are more important because you have the tools to deal with stuff in melee range via soft controls and just killing them, but you don't have direct means to deal with threats attacking from those two other vectors. If you minimize your exposure to melee by jousting then you can get by with lower melee defense. Know when to move and where to move, that's the number 1 rule of being a successful blaster. This build can solo the default difficulty with little issue. If you are diligent about inspiration usage you can probably go up to +2/8 once you get Bonfire. That power is a huge upgrade to your survival against multiple foes. The build also has 2 breakfree clicks in Inner Will and rune of protection. The latter is why I took mystic flight instead of fly as your travel power. I've seen people put inner will on auto as a auto breakfree every 30 or so seconds. Speaking of auto powers... Noticeably the build does not have hasten. You can fit it in by dropping a pool like leadership if you so wish, but I compensated for the lack of hasten with liberal use of the force feedback proc. Lastly, you don't need miracle/numinas in health like most builds that auto cram those IOs in. Reaction time is your sustain and it does one thing really well - end recovery. Some people go half heal and half end mod in that power but I opted for a full set of pre-emptive for the range defense bonus. Just a few details on what you want can get you a build like this. And I would like to think that this is a much better use of your time for a small up front investment of telling people your definition of success. Now you don't have to comb through a bunch of builds trying to figure out which works for you. I'd hate to see you blindly copy and invest billions of inf on black assassin's build, perhaps without ever realizing that his is a build tailored for hardmode content and requires a very mature understanding of the game and command of blaster fundamentals to be successful for regular content. If you want to deep dive into how to create builds like this, how to optimize your builds, or even how to be successful playing blasters, I can help you too. All you need to do is provide me some details. DPMartial Zoom Zoom Boom.mbd

It's not my intention to attack you, but I want you to think about it this way: A lot of people have posted builds that work for them, but does that mean those builds work for you? How do you know if the builds people posted are even good? I see that you've been to JJ's thread. Do you harbor the notion that just because someone is willing to post a build then their build is automatically "good?" If you go shopping for a car you wouldn't just take the salesperson's recommendations for whatever car that fancies them would you? Surely you have a specific budget and requirements for your dream car. Good salespeople will do discovery, find out what you really need and tailor their recommendations to those baselines, then try to upsell. That's what I'm trying to do, trying to find your baseline. I can make any build from softcapped - super survivable blaster to balls to the walls proctastic blaster and anything in between, I can make billion inf end game builds or SO only leveling builds with specific power and slot pick progressions to ensure a smooth leveling journey. But I prefer not to throw shit on the wall and see what sticks until I hear from YOU what you actually want. At the end this is about YOU, if you give more details on what you are trying to accomplish, then I can help you get there. So let's start with these questions: What is your budget? What is your benchmark for a successful blaster build? - do you want to do the most damage, survival is for your teammates to cover - do you want to turtle up and be as sturdy as possible? - do you prefer to solo or team, or do both? - do you prefer to fly or stay low to the ground and bounce around the battlefield? - do you want to stay at range and not go into melee range ever? - do you feel adventurous and wouldn't mind punching baddies in the face with some melee powers? - do you intend to level this blaster up the old fashioned way, doing missions and such? - do you intend to fast track the blaster to 50 and then make the build at that point?

Then you are either very smart and can figure things out all on your own or you are trying not to offend the other posters that offered help. I'm going to give you some time to stew on that answer. No disrespect to the other people that offered their builds here. The option is always on the table to go into more specific details on what you want to accomplish, so people like me can craft a build tailored to your preferences and budget.

Now that you have a bunch of people throw builds at you without asking what you are actually looking to accomplish with the build based on your playstyle preferences an budget, do you find it helpful?

I wouldn't use any of the finished builds from build makers as a template for your leveling build. Those assume a few things: 1 - You have money to kit out your build 2 - You are level 50 and have gotten all your powers You will fall into the trap of trying to slot and enhance your survival tools early on as a Tanker because that's what they should be good at. But the reality is that early game they are just as fragile as any other AT. It took me a long time to figure out that dead things don't fight back and that is the mantra that ALL ATs will have to adopt during the low levels. At those levels damage and killing stuff faster than they can kill you is the ONLY thing that matters, not how much you can heal/resist damage/debuff. Those other things will manifest later as your build matures. A few tips on making your early leveling smoother: 1 - go all in on attacks and damage until your mid-late teens, you can defer some survival tools until later (do take your mez protection0, and you can respec at an appropriate milestone to fit those powers into a cohesive finished build. 2 - run content at -1/0 notoriety. At lower levels its not killing stuff that gets you the most XP, its finishing mission and story arcs. You can change notoriety (mission difficulty) by clicking on the speech bubble icon next to the chat input box and selecting the notoriety option from the Menu. There is a setting that adjusts the level of foes you fight relative to your level, set that to -1. There is another option sets the density of mobs you encounter solo relative to team size. You don't have to mess with that one for now but once your build matures you can tune both options as you see fit. 3 - run story arcs, those will have a blue title highlight when you select your missions from your contact, the story arc completion xp bonus is sizable and you get reward merits when you finish the arc. Think of reward merits as in game currency that you can trade/convert for most things you need in game and make influence with. 4 - you don't have to kill everything along the way. A lot of missions require you only reach the final objective, at -1/0 you can skip past mobs in your way, even if you run past them they will only give chase for a very short distance before giving up. Again, most of the xp comes from mission completion and story arc completion. A template savage bio early leveling build running at -1/0 difficulty would look something like this Focus on getting at least 3 attacks by level 10 and prioritize on 3 damage enhancements and 1 acc enhancement in all your attacks. I wouldn't bother with evolving armor and genetic contamination early on. Those drain a lot of endurance, and serve only as a distraction for where you should allocate your slots. They are also taunt auras, but right now you just want to kill stuff to level up, and you have nowhere near the survival that's needed to actually make use of those taunt auras for large groups. Once you get past the lower level content and your build starts to mature with more attacks that you get at later levels, you can do a respec and swap out some powers.

Hello, My name is Nemu. You may recognize me from my world famous builds such as Princess Spinaroonie or Cyclone Panda. Over the years I've become wildly successful in my mastery of fucking around and today I'm going to share with you my secret! Behold, the secret to success! Hanky Panky Panda - Tanker (Regeneration - Staff Fighting).mbd This is the end of my guide. I wish you become as wildly successful as I have become.

I stand by what I said, and I said what I said in the context of a beginner with no funds. The leveling woes in the early teens to mid 20s are mostly attributed to endurance and the penchant to divide slots between armor toggles and other survival tools and attacks. Regen provides an answer to endurance at level 4, no other set offers a "hands off" solution like this that early. Most of the other examples you pointed out come online later in a build's life cycle or requires additional investment via IOs to really be consistent. So looking at my statement as a grizzled veteran of this game that only considers final builds, your statement certainly has merit, but that's not my context. Given that most casual players abandon builds before level 30 I'd say that what I said is quite on the mark with respect to low-no funding early level quality of life considerations.

I did the comparison before in Mids and saw similar numbers. My conclusion is that: 40-50 total or 8-20 additional hp/s isn't doing much for blasters when things get bad. Never in my blaster career have I ever thought in retrospect "man that last encounter, if only I had 8-20 more Hp/sec passive regen I would still be alive!" I consider the endurance management aspect of blaster sustains a more substantial benefit to blaster builds. Other ATs would kill to have that kind of consistent end management proliferated across the board to each of their respective power sets. Given the popular build meta of heavily armored softcap hover blasters that take a lot of pool toggles, or softcap melee blasters that also take a lot of pool toggles, or the balls to the walls blaster with heavily procced attacks with no end reduction + high recharge, or a hybrid of the 3, It makes more sense to me to focus on endurance management to make sure I can sustain all the toggles and my no-end redux attack chain than squeezing 8-20 more HP/sec out of my overall performance. I can see a pure hover blaster doing this though, they skip so much of their secondary that they most likely have slots to spare. I would also bet that if the average pure hover blaster build invested in healing in the sustain, they are also dumping extra slots into health for miracle/numina out of habit, and maybe some in stamina too to help with endurance management.

Not all fun is measured by DPS. Especially for a game as easy as this, and especially on a damage AT like a scrapper. You to need a basic measure of survival though, survival also comes from killing stuff before they kill you. If you want to chase the sweatiest content this game has to offer, know 2 things: Builds for that type of content deviate from builds more suitable for regular content SOOOO much that you will make a second build tailored for that type of content, which is the only type of content that measures success by DPS There is a defined meta for that type of content such that build discrimination becomes a real thing for optimal runs Regen is perfectly fine for the standard difficulty of even to +1 mob level with 3 minions in a spawn. As long as you don't ignore your attacks and slot them adequately, you should be able to kill spawns like that before they kill you. Most players will struggle with endurance during leveling and regens solves for that with quick recovery. There's always teams if you wish to tackle harder content or battle a higher density of spawns, and regen is the best at soaking up all the buffs teams has to offer. Leveling slows down in your 30s, at that point you can either join teams to increase your xp multiplier or turn up difficulty solo, the latter is where you will start to encounter issues with regen. Regen does fine against a few opponents, but a higher density of mobs means more chip damage and that will overwhelm regen. For beginners, endurance management is usually the number 1 quality of life impediment to an enjoyable experience on any build. Regen gives you a leg up on that starting at level 4 Taunt auras are only impactful when you face higher density of mobs. Against a standard difficulty of spawn you should not need to chase running mobs too much. Protip - at lower levels set your difficulty to -1/0 (mobs generally 1 level below you, standard spawn meant for solo) and run story arcs. You get most of your xp from mission completion and story arc completion, not killing mobs. Regen should excel at this due to early endurance management, and carry you through those early levels with little difficulty.

5 piece synapse shock for the recharge + slow resist or 6 piece pre-emptive optimization for range defense, recharge. I don't bother slotting for regen on any sustains. The return you get on it is negligible, you will sooner pop a respite than wait for any passive regen on a blaster. Therefore I just focus on endurance recovery.

Protip when you discover you are knocking things back with powers that should knock down: Jump up and attack at the top of your jump.

I agree but 4* content isn't the holy grail for everything. The majority of players aren't interested in that and 4* content presents a wholly different meta where fire/fire can go all out and enjoy the benefits of damage buffs/resist debuffs that actually stick around for more than a second, and are fed a steady density of mobs to get ROI out of those AoEs. That kind of thing doesn't happen a lot for regular content because inferno usually kills everything. All the stories I hear about how much damage fire/fire does from your average casual player starts with build up + inferno. But really anything after that is irrelevant. This fire/fire =uber damage rhetoric has been parroted by casual players, much like the generic conventional wisdom "always slot miracle/numina uniques in health." It's devoid of any additional context. FWIW /fire is the LAST secondary I'd take on a fire blaster for casual content, every other secondary offer more interesting tools for damage, survival and utility. If people truly believed that /fire does sooo much damage I'd imagine we see a heck of a lot more xxx/fire pairings in the wild but we don't. Casual players play fire/fire/fire for theme, much like they do ice/ice/cold or energy/energy/force, but they mistake the damage output of fire/ for the efficacy of the combo as a whole.

Jousting depends on playstyle and how you want to leverage your toolkit. If you take hotfeet then chances are you don't want to joust too much, as you want mobs running around distracted in hotfeet and taking incidental damage. There are complexities playing a blaster but if you want to zerg then just make sure you have a steady supply of lucks and breakfrees to softcap your defense and fight through mezzes. If you are not on a steady diet of luck inspirations then you have to learn the other blaster survival tricks and learn to play a little more tactical. See the below post on survival tips: Inferno solves a LOT of problems and even with fire/fire it does most of the work. Case and point the example in the above post. What part of /fire contributed to that story? I can get build up from a number of other secondaries. A lot of the accolades I see about fire/fire involves build up + inferno, followed up by whatever else in /fire, but inferno did all the work. Yes I'm aware you can use fireball/fsc/burn during downtime but you could just as well do Fire breath + Fireball and toss in rain of fire and achieve similar results at range while covering a larger area, and you get that chain by level 8. Given the number of hover blasters that post their builds here on the forums I'd advocate that latter chain for a blaster newbie and recommend something like fire/energy where you can skip the melee stuff if that's your cup of tea, pick up boost range and extend the cone of fire breath to make positioning a lot easier. The one place where the the claim that fire/fire does stupid damage is justified is for hard mode content where you are encouraged to stick together as a team. You spend a lot of time fighting at point blank range so fire breath is not as useful. In addition, for hardmode content, those blasters can also benefit from fulcrum shift reliably because mobs don't die to a sneeze, and a /fire blaster can actually get some mileage out of cauterizing aura and hotfeet's otherwise pitiful damage. When was the last time you waited for fulcrum shift on a blaster for regular content?

I don't know what you really mean by this, are you ok with using melee attacks in a blaster's arsenal or no? Your statement doesn't make your intent super clear. If you are open to punching stuff in the face with a blaster I'd highly endorse electrical manipulation. It has multiple tools to keep you alive in melee range and it adds another hold to your arsenal. There are not many secondaries that comes close to /Elec in terms of consistent, reliable melee range mitigation AND ST damage output.