Nemu

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.

I should clarify my stance on hover blasting. There's a difference between blasters that know what they are doing and choose to hover blast and those that endorse the idea that blasters are a pure ranged AT and one should skip any melee attacks in the secondary in favor of hover blasting. The latter wrongly believes that hover blasting is the most important aspect of blaster survival across all stages of a blaster's career. Most of the rhetoric I see on hoverblasting are rooted in the latter. It is the inspiration for the hundreds of hover blaster builds I see here on the forums. While I have a severe distaste for that rhetoric, I understand that my view on blasting endorses a very frantic playstyle compared to hover blasting. It's not everyone's cup of tea and some players simply don't have the mental or manual dexterity to play like that. I also fully concede that this game is easy enough that hover blasting and not using half your toolkit can still get the job done with a modicum of range defense so nowadays I don't fight that sentiment anymore. Still, mobs will still get in your face, you don't have the luxury of playing on open maps all the time. You need to learn blaster survival tactics regardless of your decision to adopt either playstyle. For example, instead of jousting you can still fly and pick opportune times to unload melee range attacks or just use lucks to make sure you don't get hit, but you need to understand those mechanics to be successful. I agree on the virtues of staying in one place for certain content, hover blasting or not. This is much more evident on higher difficulty content where blasters need to stick with the group for buffs/support. That falls under the first point under my list of blaster success criteria - knowing when and where to move (and when to not move). As for lost time during jousting and target priority, I solve that problem by landing right next to the target I want to punch/blast while I'm bouncing around the battlefield. This way I don't have to play whack a mole with the tab key. If I were less lazy I'd make a targeting bind for all the problem targets. TL:DR Hover blast for the right reasons, don't be that guy that stays 30ft in the air all the time missing out on team buffs because "hovering keeps you safe"

My first 50 on homecoming is my Fire/Elec blaster. Like you I had no funds and I had to start out from scratch. I've noted in many blaster posts in the past that blaster success is a combination of understanding game mechanics: -knowing when to move and where to move -inspiration combination and usage -prioritizing targets -using distance and line of sight -leveraging synergistic soft/hard controls in your toolkit -living by the mantra "kill things before they kill me" Regardless of builds or budget. If your idea of engagement with blasters is to hover and open with snipe and stay in one spot and blast you are doomed to fail. If your idea of nuking with pbaoes is to slow walk up to the mobs and endure them shooting at you as you plop down near the pack and stay animation locked for a few seconds before payload, you are going to fail as a blaster. People that espouse the "hover blasters is the only way to play squishy blasters regardless of budget and build" playstyle are lazy or ignorant people still living in the past, that haven't taken the time to learn and master how to play blasters. Builds contribute maybe 25% to your overall success, defensive builds gives you some cushion/tolerance for making some survival mistakes but they don't make you immortal. Back to my Fire/Elec, when I leveled it I was using SO/DOs, which ever dropped for me. I also didn't avoid melee but actively sought out opportunities to use my punches because they are my highest damaging attacks, because dead things don't fight back. I used combat jumping and jousting to take me in and out of melee range quickly and I used build up/aim for burst damage to end the fight quickly. I never stop moving, engagements is a fluid mix of punches and blasts with me not being in one place for more than 1-2 seconds. This keeps mob AI constantly switching between chase mode and shoot mode and seldom melee mode, where they do the most damage. If you want a tutorial on jousting watch the videos I posted earlier in this thread. There's also no shame in hiding behind obstacles. Using line of sight is fundamental to blaster success and what a lot of hover blasters don't get. Hovering in the air still makes you a sitting duck, but if you hide behind line of sight you control how mobs engage you. Use that time to pop lucks, buy yourself time for buildup/aim to recharge, etc... During downtime I was actively converting my inspirations into lucks and breakfrees, it's difficult at first due to lack of inspiration slots but during the mid 20s you should be able to always convert 1-2 at any given time. I used them prior to engagements that I knew to be tricky. Monitor your range and S/L defense, for those tricky engagement pop lucks till those defense values reach mid-high 30s and unless you are running +4/8, you should be able to do some "watch this!" shenanigans. One of the first IOs I got was the sudden acceleration knockback to knockdown procs. I put that in thunderstrike and force of thunder as I leveled up. So in addition to leveraging movement, inspiration usage, I also had some soft control tools to help me survive. And I was doing all the things I did on my level 50 before I even completed my build. It just took more prep. Target priority comes with experience. You play this game enough then you should know to burst Tsoo sorcerers ASAP, kill Sappers, interrupt sky raider engineers, etc... Also on teams, do not run away from the team and isolate yourself. If you get in trouble kite the mob back to the team. Summing it up, being agile and use lucks/breakfrees - blaster success. Staying in one place and not using inspirations - dead blaster. Most of the Hover blasting rhetoric I see in game and on the forums is from people that don't know or care to learn how to play blasters.

If you want to be a hipster, make a regen/staff tanker with whirlwind and show your devotion to the church of SPIN!

I prefer cryo freeze ray to Ice Arrow. It has a longer recharge meaning your procs are more likely to go off, and it's a good place for the decimation chance for build up proc. That proc has a proc rate of 1 trigger per minute, so you'd want to put that in your longest recharging ranged attack. Cryo also uses the gun so it fits well into your regular attack rotation. My take on surveillance is: You are a blaster, you are not a debuffer. If you debuff as a byproduct of attacking, so be it, but going out of your way to debuff a single target is something you can leave to teammates that do that better than you. The things that you will need that single target debuff for are usually things you tackle as a team. If you want to make this blaster an AV/GM soloer, then this power brings more value. I would also not go out of my way for +dmg bonuses. Blasters get a damage buff just by attacking, and going 5 slots deep just for a 2.5% dmg buff with shield wall is wasteful. I would just stop at 3 pieces, 4.5% energy resistance is not going to do much for you when you have less than 20% even with the 4.5% bonus. Weave provides more base defense than Maneuvers. I would slot shield wall in that so you can +5 the PVP IOs and not lose the set bonus, you get more ROI with +5 IOs in a power that offers higher base values. I'm also not a big advocate of 6 slotting reactive defense for the recharge bonus. Usually I stop at 3 for the HP bonus IMO there are usually better ways to get more recharge. For example if you dropped ice arrow and surveillance you can fit in cryo and ignite. With the slots you recover you can put a set of Ragnarok in ignite which gives you even more recharge, and additional global ACC to assist with proc monster cryo accuracy. My accuracy benchmark for all builds is against +4s. So I want to make sure this number stays above 95% when I set enemies relative to my level to +4 in Mids. The thing I don't like about flight is that both hover and evasive costs more endurance than just a simple combat jumping (and the fact that I am a big fan of jousting). Even though blasters have a lot of endurance recovery via their level 20 sustains, all those toggle still add up. I shuffled some slots around in the below build to add some more endurance reduction in your toggles. I'd consider musculature radial for more damage and more endurance modification as an alternative to intuition. In this case perhaps a miracle is called for in health, but I can see a preventative med proc in its place just as well. scoutythespeedyv Nemu edit.mbd

All fair and good points. My goal is not to criticize you but rather challenge you to challenge conventional wisdom that you hear from other people. Just like you, if you ask those people why they do the things they do, the majority of them can't tell you the exact reason they did it for their specific build. But you are better than that because you are here and you've repeatedly sought feedback, so I'm going to highlight a few things to enable you to think for yourself. Conventional wisdom #1 You need perma hasten on every build, meaning you literally have to get the hasten recharge down to 120 seconds and below using set bonuses - False. First of all there's diminishing returns on global recharge bonuses, some builds don't benefit that much at all from excessive recharge Second, you can use force feedback procs to make up a few seconds gap in hasten recharge, having hasten recharge in 130 seconds is not the end of the world. You will be okay! Conventional wisdom #2 You NEED a miracle/Numina/Panacea unique in health for every build. - False I can't paste screenshots at the moment so go through this exercise in mids Open up a new blank AR/TA build, just click on eagle eye to select the power for level 20 and click on the black dot on the right of the power to turn the toggle on. That dot should turn green. Hit the view totals button towards the top of the application and leave that window open, we are going to focus on the bottom half of that window Slot the numina and miracle uniques both in health and note your endurance recovery numbers (End Rec) With a blank build with no accolades you should see 3.33 endurance per second Now unslot all the IOs in health and slot Eagle Eye with a full set of pre-emptive optimization from the endurance recovery set You should see 3.8 endurance per second You maybe saying, but eagle eye regenerates my health so I need to throw healing enhancements into it too! Let's look at the numbers then Same build, unslot all the pre-emptive optimization IOs from eagle eye. For the sake of the exercise let's just bump up your max health by taking all the accolades, so go into accolades and turn on task force commander, freedom phalanx reserve and portal jockey Hover over your regeneration stat which should show 365%, click on the regeneration stat and you will see the actual HP/Sec regeneration rate, I have 21.99 hp per second Now slot eagle eye with a full set of numina, that includes the regen proc, Your regen stat shoots up to 506%. Wow! that's a lot right? Look over the actual regen rate - 31 HP per second. So, blasters are squishy, they have low hit points and very little resists. When you are staring at the face of death do you think an extra 10HP per second is going to help you live when enemies are hitting you for definitely more than 31HP per hit? These blaster sustains all do one thing really well, they give you a lot of endurance recovery. That's the aspect I typically focus on. People get irrational around anything that heals. But if you look at blaster survival, the most impactful stat is a mix of defense and kill speed. Dead things don't fight back, but you need enough defense to ensure you avoid just enough hits to live. If you are new, then maybe 32.5% range defense is still not enough, mezzes and debuffs will still get through, and you still have to manage a combination of lucks and breakfrees at that level of defense. The difference between 32.5% defense and 45% softcap maybe stark for you, and I think you'll be more comfortable with the latter. Build optimization tip#3 One slotting certain uniques as mules Look the slotting on hover and weave. You have the Shield wall unique in hover as a one-off and you have weave with Lotg7.5, lotg def/end and a cyto Total defense enhancement value in weave = 50% Total set bonus - 10% regen If you shifted the Shield wall unique to weave and replaced the lotg def/end and cyto with shield wall def and def/end and +5 both those IOs, you get for the same slot investment: Total defense enhancement value in weave = 57% Total set bonus - 10% regen, +2.25% max hitpoints AND, PVP sets don't lose the set bonus when exemped even if you +5 the PVP IOs I see the shield wall and reactive defense unique as single slots in a lot of builds. Tiny changes like this is what separates a well tuned build from one that just blindly follows conventional wisdom. Build optimization tip#4 Synergies Ignite does a lot of damage. But it makes enemies affected by it run away. Treat it not as an area attack but a single target attack. If you want to get the most out of ignite, you need to immobilize your target so they don't run away. Take electrified net arrow, it is much more useful than ESD - you can keep problem targets at range, immob pesky runners, even arch villains with 2 applications, and make them burn. There's also synergies in how set bonuses and your toolkit contribute to your overall goals with the build. As I mentioned in my Rambo thread, Tactical arrow's toolkit provides a lot of synergies with proc monster builds, supplemented by set bonuses that contribute recharge and global accuracy. I think you have a good grasp on picking out set bonuses and stacking them to get to your goal, but if you need some more examples: Also, 75% of blaster survival is understanding game mechanics. Movement, target priority, inspiration use, positioning, timing etc... Master those and you will have no issues with any other AT, except Kheldians and Masterminds, those two present more technical challenges with binds/macros. If you ever decide to dip your toes into a melee heavy secondary on a blaster, you may find this helpful:

I am not going to focus on your choice of flight pool, you can easily adjust a build to fit those in. However, I am going to double click on your comment about fitting in those LOTG mules as a reason you took fly. Have you asked yourself what's the real benefit of cramming this much recharge into a build? Compare the recharge of full auto and oil slick, two of the longest recharge attack powers in your tool kit, you have 98% global recharge in your build vs 68% in mine, yet you managed to shave off about 1-2 seconds in each of those powers. So about 3 purple set worth of recharge nets you about 1-2 seconds off your longest recharging attacks, would you consider that a great return on investment? Finally look at hasten, my build with 30% less global recharge is still only about 6 seconds off from perma, and I can still close that gap with a few force feedback proc triggers. First of all you get diminishing returns from additional global recharge. Second, some builds benefit from perma hasten a lot more than others, like dominators, where domination changes the playstyle entirely for that AT, or a high DPS dual blades wielder that aims to achieve a very specific attack chain and ignore combos all together. If you have no such goals, and especially on blasters where you have access to more attacks than you can spam, ask yourself what's the real benefit of such high recharge?

Do you NEED fly as an actual power pick or can you just buy the temp jet pack powers to fly?

There’s only one accepted way to build ar/ta. It’s been scientifically proven.