Novacat

We need a shield secondary. Bit more protection than usual, and of course with that charge.

Power Selection: Don't always take ALL of the attacks. While it depends a little on individual sets, there's often one or two that are either very redundant, or don't feel quite right for you. There's also the fact that later as you start to IO up some will simply fall behind as the recharge rates of the ones you REALLY care about improve and you need a bit less filler. Take Shadow Maul, for example. It has a long cast time, locks you in place for some time, so while it could do pretty decent damage if you catch two or three targets very close together, if you want AoE you have a lot of other options. An M30 AND Buckshot could've been fired in the time you throw those punches, with far more targets and less having to be up close. Over in Soul Mastery, Soul Storm may seem attractive at first glance, but you can't stack it. You have no other holds anywhere and the cast time is pretty long too. You could, however, get some decent stunning out with Dark Pit and Beanbag. Beanbag may talk about how it stuns, but also note the damage it does for its animation. It's better than Burst, albeit shorter range, so while I certainly want one Stun/Range from the IO sets in there, it's a good idea for the rest to come from the damage side. Which brings us to one of the other reasons you want to "make some space"; your defenses. Squishy is one thing, but you don't want none. The lynchpin of the modern blaster secondary is the Sustain. The amount of regeneration (or heal or absorb) and recovery (or endurance discount in Energize) they offer is nuts for a single power, but given that's all we get and how badly off we were before i-24, they're not broken like they would be in any other archetype. Always get your sustain and reinforce its health/stamina type qualities. Touch of the Beyond is considered the worst of all sustains due to having to be reused so constantly, but even it is there for the regeneration and recovery it offers, not the weak Fear effect that may make one minion hesitate a little while. If you make a little space you can grab things that will greatly reduce your reliance on those accuracy slots, such as the Leadership pool. Thanks to our sustains keeping the whole pool up while firing everything we have is little to no concern by endgame, so feel free to at least grab Maneuvers and Tactics (Assault's nice solo but if you team a lot, you may often be damage-capped, so up to you if you have a 'spare' power slot for it or not). Some prefer (or ALSO get) Tough and Weave as well. I like to stick Combat Jumping in despite having a strong tendency to hoverblast, because it's so cheap to keep toggled on and has no prerequisites, especially if a power I don't want during the early levels would be the only non-pool alternative. Slotting: First, get some Heal in your sustain. A single +3SO in a regen sustain (the regen ones all give 225%, of which 112.5% is enhanceable) already gives more regeneration than the entire Health inherent. One +3 Endurance Modification SO nearly matches the entirety of the Stamina power; two 50 IOs will leave it in the dust. Damage is important, and even in sets where you're not going out of your way to get the 5pc/6pc, it's a good idea to at least get it "in the yellow". The fewer hits you need to take something down, the less extra attacks you need, the less time they have to gun you down, etc etc etc. With sources of to-hit and/or accuracy from IO sets and powers like Tactics, you won't need or want anywhere near as much Accuracy. The game caps your chances at 95% anyway, so a good way to verify when in mids, is to check if, say, against relative enemy level +3, you have at least that much. IOs also give a bit more than SOs too, and the sets tend to have multi-attribute stuff like Acc/Dmg, Acc/Recharge/Dmg, and so on, so by the time you've got 4-5 pieces in there, the power's likely capped against +4s as well before you've even joined a team. I'm also a fan of the Overwhelming Force set, but not in a cone that doesn't do knockback. If anywhere, this should go in your M30 so that it doesn't split the enemy group in half with the 50% knockback chance, instead putting them to the floor more reliably. Keeping groups packed together will mean people in Ignite stay in Ignite too. The other set; Defiant Barrage (or superior version), is often well placed in a 1st or 2nd level power so that you can fire it off and maybe get its mez protection effect to proc WHILE mezzed. If you really like your immobilize (Penumbral Grasp in Dark's case) and use it a fair bit, it could go there too, like if you're not a fan of Burst and don't want to put it in Slug. I'd put it in Slug but that's just me.

In fairness, "tank-mage" stopped being a worry when Tankers got a 0.8 damage multiplier and fireballs while still able to herd and tank entire maps at once. So that ship sailed over a decade ago.

With some of the recent changes to it, it's a wonderful pick. The base long recharge is if fired, Sniper Shot style (less bonus damage but slightly wider AoE) from outside of combat. But once the yellow ring appears, it's an 80ft range, 32s recharge, 12ft AoE with solid damage, although you might want to use the OF set for knockback-to-knockdown in this one to keep it clean. Although the 'sniper mini-nuke' mode does lock you out of the other form for its full time, there's no trap involved in its usage, and it's easy to find this one a good home for either or both forms.

Because -Regen, -Res, and -Recharge don't get any benefits from Power Boost, and because of what Boost Range can do to a cone, I'd say a great pairing for /Energy would be Dark/ More for soloing than anything since teams tend to have defenses capped anyway, but you can get Umbral Torrent to over 120ft with -9.38% to hit and over 30s of base immobilize duration. Life Drain (including its heal), Abyssal Gaze, everything in the set gets the treatment. The slows and holds of Ice certainly love this stuff too. As Kelika2 has noted, Electric Blast is in a similar situation with Power Boost, ensuring Shocking will happen a lot.

The blast sets aren't all that bad. Range increases like in Artillery can do wonders for your cones, as do general range increases (these are additive, not multiplicative, with the snipe buff). Many offer some ranged defense, which is the most important positional if you spend a lot of time hovering or at least letting a tanker eat the brunt of enemy fire.

Personally, Beam. While early-on it's more of a single target set, overcharge is a brilliant, quick-charging ranged nuke, Piercing Beam is effectively a decent single target with -res that just happens to hit a 2nd or 3rd enemy when fired into packs, and at higher difficulties/parties, disintegrate will spread as you shoot into the fray, causing DoTs and bonus effects as time goes. A bit of -regen is always nice, and the whole set just plays well.

Don't forget Snipe's range buff helps ensure a decent followup before you round one of them corners. That 10s of +50% means a base 120ft for fireball (or for ranged-nuke sets, something a little meatier).

This was very common back on live for those who played the melee ATs. It took so much to mez a tanker that for many enemy groups there was nothing to learn; some mobs just sometimes used a different animation that often hurts much less. To Blasters with virtually no mez protection (when any), however, knockdown early enough in a fight was dangerous (everyone gets 1-2 seconds of bashing you where they aren't dead), and a lowly Warriors Crusher getting their disorient off would likely be fatal. Those lessons were carved in the hard way. It also kept caltrops around corners so very popular.

The grand majority of blaster defenses come from IO sets. The changes in/after the fall of the original live game, were that minor chipping damage no longer fatally accumulates in ways it never did for anybody else, that firing off your attacks no longer wrecks your endurance more than those with many times your defenses, the first two blasts and that first immobilize in your primary and secondary always working while you're mezzed, massively buffed snipes, and crashless nukes. Blaster survivability until you're covered in endgame bits, is a mix of positioning (often the other word for that is running, especially around corners), damage, and control. You gotta be able to hit for that though, as your offensive output, not some stacked shields and resists, is your first line of defense. Dead things don't hurt you. Aim + Ionize + Inferno SHOULD equal a dead spawn. A single elite boss will not be happy if you start at over 150ft and use the temporary range buff to keep firing after that Blazing Bolt before they can even get started with you. In your case, things getting close should have serious issues hitting you through your Beta Decay, if you've slotted it up a bit. But if they're shooting before you inferno, that's less fun (there's ranged nukes on other sets, but Inferno makes up for that if you can get there) and makes you think of stealth. Even a little stealth goes a LONG way with a blaster; there's nothing we love more than being the one to dictate when and how the fight begins. /Devices for example has their cloak as their sustain (their version of your Metabolic Acceleration has no +recharge or speed but gives defense and stealth), which with pre-emptive non-aggroing smoke grenades lets them walk into the enemy's face and leisurely plant tripmines under their feet. Literally. I will echo some of the suggestions that you try a Sentinel; while they lose a bit of range they're far more of an intermediate step - a "ranged scrapper" with defense sets you already know well (they've their own variants but you probably remember more about them than I've ever learned) while still offering a taste and glimpse of the front-loading, area-loving soft-control screwjobs that are at the core of the blaster game. No snipe, somewhat smaller target caps, and the nukes are a fair bit weaker but recharge a lot faster. OR try a more defensively capable combo. Dark Blasts don't have a 'ball' (more cones) but EVERYTHING in there debuffs to-hit. Ice slows in every way, carries powerful holds (and most epic pools have one more hold to stack with this), and while it has no snipe does offer about as much AoE as Fire did.

A few notes on Bane Spiders to help sell it. Of the three armor passives, Bane Spider Armor is best: On top of the same mez protection as the Crab's, it acts as a half-strength fortification and serum, with a 7.5%(all damage) resistance and hitpoint bonus. Certainly not as good as the trio but for a single power? This also makes fitting that spare wolf armor easier. Unfortunately you're not wrong about the mace beams; at range the Bane is best still used as a Wolf Spider. Their slight range reduction is consistently annoying, including Poison Ray's which stinks of Blaster T3s from the ancient time with their own inexplicable 40ft. I don't use poison ray for that reason (although it's a fairly solid attack up close) but there's room for the Achilles Heel in Single Shot. That utility does shine, though! Cloaking and Placate are versatile and double as melee buffs; the latter granting a few seconds of breathing room while also letting you re-fire a critical shatter or crowd-control mid-fight. Surveillance doesn't aggro, and so can always be up on whatever you need it to be before the fight begins. Web Cocoon's hold is somewhat lonely, but a second stack of -recharge and slow is never bad. From afar, the epic pools will complete you in ways the mace admittedly could not, and you may have a tiny bit more power room to play with than a Crab (albeit due to having more skippable things...) Mu Lightning may not total as much damage as Gloom, but it isn't a DoT. Ball Lightning doesn't carry the -hit, but does pile a little more damage, being a DoT. Their recharge and cost are a bit high, but nothing good slotting won't handle. If you go Mace Mastery, Disruptor Blast IS better than Beam Blast, but the Mace Beam is better than Mace Blast. In that case, Web Envelope will stack stupid amounts with your base Wide Area Web.

For Health I usually try to go for Numina's. Since Health's +regen isn't all that high, a second Heal IO, on top of starting to reach ED, would give a little bit less. 2 Heal IOs = 73.33% regen Numina Heal + Regen/Recovery = 56.96+20=76.96% Regen, plus the +10% recovery and +12% regen doing this nets you. That said I always need to find a place (whether a third slot in health or into another power somewhere) for Panacea's proc as soon as I have it.

Hey every hero's got a hobby. Besides, who else is going to save you in the nick of time from that masked shower-knife killer? Only Binocular Man, who saw what was going on, that's who!

I do feel conditioning is quite underwhelming; it barely even exists by mid-levels. There's also the issue that the soldiers suffer from some serious redraw, and the Bane ranged attacks are just trash, plus none of the ranged attacks can even take advantage of the cloak. The Spider's Bite proc is quite weak and tends to end early; what if instead of the terrorize, all attacks had that instead? Feels like it combined with the minor recovery/regen of conditioning would fill things out nicely.

The Bane Spider Primary's 'Mace Beam' series have a special, glaring badness to them. The T1: Mace Beam, has range 70 instead of 80, and a 2s cast time. You can fire both Single shot (which hits as hard) and Burst(which is even better) together in less time than just Mace Beam alone. Mace Beam Blast is a radius 10 AoE with just over half the damage of a Frag Grenade, and also has Range 70 and a 2s cast time. Mace Beam Volley is a short, relatively narrow (45 degree and 40 length) cone of a little over half the damage of Heavy Burst. Poisonous Ray has range 40 T2 damage, but as a slow, Toxin DoT (thus VERY heavily resisted by many). Also a 2s cast time. Now none of these are looking all that hot compared to the faster animating gun abilities, especially on the AoE front. But then the AT rubs it in with the epic, whose Mace Blast(yup, same name) and Disruptor Blast (AoE radius 15) are both stronger and further-reaching... not that I'd ever take it over other alternatives like Mu or Soul (who animate faster and aren't half smash damage).