Novacat

I have the left 3-4 powers in each of trays 1 and 2 for ST and AOE rotations, with ` as the trigger for attacks I use in both such as BR's Piercing Beam. Tray 3 is set for popup, with all the toggles (like maneuvers, assault, targeting your sustain, tough, weave, your patron armor if it's not Munitions...) I set two more for mouse-hunting on the side of the screen where they don't get in the way: these contain the various travel powers and stuff like Ouroboros or Mission Teleporter as well as any temporaries/revives/etc. Back up on the first two trays I do have a handful that are more of a mouse-click thing as well; notably things like Surveillance, the Hybrid's activation and patron summons or LRM or the such; things you generally don't pop once in combat.

While I voted for "optional" on the difficulty change, I do believe there's a small amount of global fixing that would be needed - might make the optional changes simpler too. Right now IOs are a bit of a crutch; some sets would still not quite be competitive were they not completely loaded with Sets and Incarnate abilities(both the Alpha and the extra abilities to round out its toolkit) while others are simply taken to new and greater heights or refined a little but overall functional on their own. So adjusting difficulty would be similar to Live before i24; with everyone and their mother getting improvements and demanding something harder than +4/x8 while blasters were being reminded of their place at the bottom. It wouldn't really be ATs anymore (I hope) but particular sets are sure to have their weaknesses exacerbated. As for what to fix on enemies, I like the idea of specials that mix things up a bit. Global health/damage increases would just screw people who aren't overpowered, and merely make it take longer for those who are. That's not difficulty that's grind. Special enemies with all sorts of fun stuff could both double as prototypes for future player ability ideas, and give some life to tired old groups.

Seems decent enough. I can assure you you'll not be let-down by this power-set combination. I would, however, urge you to give Piercing Beam a chance if you haven't before; It's consistently one of my highest performing attacks due to inflicting Lancer(well a teeny bit more than Lancer) damage to two (sometimes 3) targets at a time, with a slightly higher bonus from Disintegrate and the -res for tougher mobs.

Don't discount Piercing Beam. I usually use it before or instead of Cutting; hits just as hard as Lancer (actually like 1% harder or something base) but exchanges the Stun for slightly higher on-disintegrate damage AND the ability to do that same heavy damage again to a second or third target (two is very easy, 3 is more for tight packs) with just the lightest moving or aiming.

While Blasters do help mostly through improving clear speeds for the group, there's also a good amount of soft control and debuffs going around. With every hit you may be dispensing -Hit, slows, knockdown, -recharge ... it may not be as high a value as on a defender or corruptor's especially when applying -regen and -resist, but there's no denying that it's there. With Tactical Arrow, while it's fairly self-buffing, Flash (usable pre-battle), ESD (area hold + drain) and Glue (slow/caltrop-panic/-recharge) Arrows are particularly debilitating affairs that will do a real number on whatever you're facing.

Having many times the faceplanting rate and risk was the devs own words on the matter. It was why the i24 changes were so heavy (+50% recovery and 225% regen is no small tweak)

Crawling at a fraction of the speed anyone else can with many times the risk and faceplant rate is not 'soloing' in anywhere near the same sense as those other ATs were soloing. And most of that was thanks to IOs, whose defense and resistance bonuses were often larger than what their own powers had to offer.

Good changes overall. The old quick/slow snipes weren't that well executed anyways. Self-contained rather than dependent on a specific, arcane pool-power and IO combination most of the time? Incomparable. And these slow versions are stronger too.

Numbers on bomb and mine seem to be about what the tooltips promise before any slotting. Disintegrate seems to spread even on kill shots once more, so that's fixed. Trips however don't always seem to trigger as toebombs unless the thing's moving.

Back in the day before i24, that was a spurious claim. Blasters could solo just like how I can play when on satellite internet: Technically. I can log in, technically I can get past the character select screen, technically I can run around on the map and do things... just ignore the 750 or so ping and mapserver disconnects if I dare try to team on top of that... A Blaster's ability to solo was nothing compared to basically every other AT - difficulty and time required were magnitudes worse than anybody else. Today it's an entirely different affair. Sustains and crashless nukes both helped here. IO sets helped catch-up a little but they were also helping catapult everyone else to even greater heights. But the i24 changes? What used to be quickly-lethal chipping by minions can now be recovered or shielded-against relatively well. The occasional heavy attack by an AV or GM when you're in a team no longer keeps you in the red until the next one that finishes you off - you might even be near-full again by then. The modern blaster is no Scrapper/Brute, but they can actually do the content by more than the most technical of definitions. Blasters still want to make good use of terrain (if you have trip-mines, ice patches, caltrops or others that corner is your friend), and target priority's certainly a thing; you want to wipe out the mezzers or sappers just like anybody else (and may one-shot a lot of those with your alpha-strike which others may not pull off), vaporize as much of the group as possible, and then take out the hardier higher ranked things with a good attack chain. Still fragile, but manageable nowadays. Portal Jockey for example, I did with AVs rather than elite bosses, all solo, though I had to bring it down to +1/x2 since I wasn't fully IO'd at the time.

Barring maybe Darkness Manipulation's version, Blaster sustains pretty much all ensure that under most circumstances you never need to worry about your blue bar. If you're both toggle-heavy AND AoE heavy AND throwing all those AoEs at an AV for several minutes then MAYBE depending on your enhancement sets you'll need to pop a blue lest you run out... unless of course there's a Sapper obviously. My experience has been that, solo, the Absorb shields are a tiny bit better overall than the Regen versions against low numbers of heavy hitters, in exchange for not filling you back up as quickly between spawns. Really shine in groups with even a quarter-assed healer on the job though. In big farms Drain Psyche's rather spectacular, and the end-redux on Energize is probably the strongest blue-savings in a general sense, but really you may as well pick by theme or secondary effects (such as Frigid's delicious debuffs), they'll all do their job admirably... except for Dark. That one will let you down eventually.

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." In related questions, are the beta server's changes indefinitely put on hold pending results of these talks? It's been deathly quiet there after all.

Actually it's dead-standard for Sustains which is why I didn't mention it - they nearly all count as a double Stamina by default (just like the regen types are 225% +regen half of which is enhanceable). Drain Psyche and Energize are the two exceptions for that. You're not wrong. It does provide slightly more than standard regen types - although all Regen-class sustains cause your green bar to visibly replenish over moderate amounts of time that way. With two 50 heal IOs your Cauterizing aura reaches 2.75% healing every 2s, separate-from and in-addition-to any regen you may have (at a strict minimum you have 140% regen from being alive and having Health). If you have nothing other than Portal Jockey, for 105% max health, this means that every 2s you recover 34.794 HP, or basically 17.4/s, plus your base regeneration of 7.38/s. Total 24.774 or thereabouts. A standard +regen type on the other hand with two 50 IOs this way (healing bonuses do affect +regen) will be at 459% regeneration, which for 105% max health is 24.18 HP per second. So Cauterizing Aura's about .5hp/s stronger, but also a tiny bit better at scaling. Just a little though.

Atomic: Metabolic Acceleration: Toggle, Type Regen. 27.7% resist to Hold/Sleep/Stun/Immob. +20% Global Recharge This is a good one. The recharge is a boon, and the resists won't really be all that noticeable but every little bit helps. Darkness: Touch of the Beyond: Click, Type Regen. Inflicts Mag3 fear on a single target and grants the bonuses for 60s to self. Technically grants Defiance 7.7% due to being an activated one. Worst in Slot. Short duration, 1.32s cast time, and its whole special effect is a crappy single target fear that you'll be a bit too busy filling with heal and endmod to properly expand upon. Devices: Field Operative: Toggle, Type Regen. 1.75% Defense(All) and some Stealth. You can always use even just one more slot to fit Luck's global recharge, or scaling resist(all) or some other set global, and while not spectacular it's a mild extra bit of defense on an AT for whom every little scrap needs to be gathered up, and stealth's a handy utility often sought for by Blasters, all packed into a single level 20 pick. Electrical: Force of Thunder: Click, Type Regen. 15ft PBAoE Mag 2 Stun with 50% Knockback chance. A significantly improved click over Darkness; this one helps ensure that things around you get debilitated for your efforts - if only mildly and temporarily. Energy: Energize: Click, Type Regen. 119.2% Endurance Cost Discount replaces +50% Recovery. 10% Heal Another click more worth its time than Darkness'. Energize vastly diminishes costs, and both the regen AND heal components are affected by your heal modules. Make sure you get its recharge times cut by at least half (as if you weren't going to in the first place) though. Fire: Cauterizing Aura: Toggle, Type Heal (base 1.5%), minor fire DoT. A slightly more powerful heal than the regen types far as I understand it (it's not like your .58% health per second base with Health has disappeared), accompanied by a rather small 8ft damage zone. Not that it's bad, but terribly overshadowed by... Ice: Frigid Protection: Toggle, Type TempHP. 30ft Radius -Dmg, Slow, -Recharge. Available at LEVEL 10. One of the top contenders and the true power behind blapping with the Ice secondary. No one in your party will complain about you blanketing clusters of mobs with this. Absorb shields offer better protection than regen types especially vs counter-alphas, but does nothing to recover from large hits far apart (such as the occasional AoEs of an AV) or green in between battles. Overall though, slightly better. Martial: Reaction Time: Toggle, Type TempHP. 30ft Radius Slow, -Recharge. +40% Recharge (Self) A strong one to be sure. Rather than -Dmg to enemies, this one gives you higher recharge speed yourself. That's right. Your Sustain is just over half a perma-haste all on its own. Psychic: Drain Psyche: Click, Type Regen (Variable). 10ft Radius -regen/-recover The original Sustain. Before there was that word, there was Drain Psyche. Shortest duration of all clicky Sustains, but increases in value with every target hit for overwhelming results. Which it is going to need because that 30s duration is up against a 120s recharge time - Energize is easy to perma, but this one's going to need haste first before you start to pull that off. Ninjas: Kuji-in Toh: Click, Type Regen. 8.3 Fear protection, 7% Psi resist. The longest of the clickies. Protects from fear (meh), protects from psionics, and lasts 3.5 minutes so you don't have to click it again every other fight. And despite that, still one of the faster clicky Sustains at 1.19s. Can be Perma out of the box, the duration's 10s more than its base recharge time. Plants: Wild Fortress: Toggle, Type TempHP. confusion protect, 13% toxic resist Well, it's not bad. Again not the most useful of mez protections, but toxic res ain't bad and worst-case scenario you could use one of the slots to fit a Resist global or something. TacArrow: Eagle Eye: Toggle, Type Regen. 20% Accuracy, 60% perception, resistance to debuffs against both those things Well, it's not a targeting drone, but 20% accuracy is 20% accuracy. Nothing spectacular on its own as a Sustain, but this IS the same set that also offers Upshot (Build-Up + 30% recharge) the auto-power Agility (+fly/run speeds and +20% recharge) as well as the Gymnastics (defense, KB/Kup protection, hold/stun/immob 83% resists, jump height up) toggle, so the set as a whole adds up to serious buff-happiness Time: Temporal Healing: Toggle, Type TempHP. Gives -Regen and Slow resists. unimpressive, but like TacArrow, the set as a whole offers more buffs elsewhere to take advantage of (notably Time Lord at 38 here). While under Accelerated (Chronos, its build-up equivalent) there's about 40% more total absorption too. So, depending on what you want to be doing, the best sustains are probably Reaction Time for the toggles, and Drain Psyche for the clicky types.

Water makes the Sentinel shine most, as it exemplifies the differences between it and the other melees can't come close to: massive areas for its damage and effects compared to them, as the Sentinel won't quite make it to their level of single target slaying anyways. However, those same advantages mean that Blaster is what makes Water shine most brilliantly, especially in large groups. Not only does it maximize the size and power of its torrential mass-"arrest" methods (higher target caps for most powers as well), but its even higher recovery rates (and a sentinel's are already pretty good) from a well slotted Sustain ensures those AoEs just keep raining down on your victims as well.

His powers of course come in a rainbow of eye-wrenching.

Well while I did like the old style, it's an old Dr.Who reference. Could use without all the notifications though, guessing I'll be able to turn those off in the options.

Ah, you've redecorated! I don't like it.

Got some good stuff but that also makes it feel 'intensive' - hard to fit in pool powers and travel powers afterwards. A lot of its powers add a very mild -regen, but hey, that does add up over time. Quite nicely with Beam Rifle as well. Time Wall is a no-damage starter, which lowers your ability to kill things while mezzed... but with -60% recharge you're inflicting some serious slowdown. It's marginally (very) stronger than web grenade on that front, but web's slated to get some light damage later. On the other hand Time Wall buffs your other Temporal debuffs. Aging Touch is the ST-melee I do use out of the set. It's a fast hit, it's pretty average psionic damage: Temporal isn't the blappiest set but this works well enough for when you need an alternate damage type from your primary (like if you're all energy or something). It works well enough. Time Stop. Single target hold, but interestingly it can get an extra Mag-1 for half the duration if the target's already under Time Wall. It does no damage, so overall it's pretty average. Chronos: Less damage than Build-Up, but +30% recharge for its duration so whatever you fire off comes back a wee bit faster including Chronos itself. End of Time: I like this one. Cold and Energy damage, a bit of -regen, an extra 1/4 or so damage on delayed targets, and radius 10 around you. No real bells and whistles, it just... works. Doesn't let me down. Obviously Temporal healing you take no questions asked. That's your level 20, you take it at level 20, and you'll probably have difficulty keeping yourself from putting a fifth or sixth slot in there. Stick your procs/globals in health and stamina, get this thing's absorb and recover nice and high. Future Pain is just skippable to me. Rare are the Blaster's other sources of fear, so for a lot of set combos this thing would be alone. And it's otherwise not that impressive. Can't bring myself to care. Time Shift kinda depends: Many Blast sets offer more disorients. So if they do, this one's another AoE to stack with Overcharge or whatever. If you've no other stuns however (it's rare but it could happen) you might want to skip it and keep the space for something else. But if you do have other stuns this has a very light -to-hit (more for slotting categories than anything else) and further -movement speeds (add it to whirlpool or your rains). And you take Time Lord, you'd be crazy not to. It's not something to slot for the actual resistance much (7% energy only), but it's at LEAST one extra slot to stick a resistance global in and hey, -2.77 stun mag too!

For fast mode it's definitely the cones. That's some serious width thanks to the extra range which means that from otherwise normal-shot range you're also catching the whole group inside your cone. Slow mode, it's the snipes themselves, targeted and location AoEs, and therefore the ranged nukes, that benefit the most. If I'm over 120ft away

The fact that we've all gotten *used* to it (well, many of us - just a few weeks ago I was still seeing questions from people who'd put a whole bunch of accuracy in their snipes and couldn't understand why it still wasn't turning yellow) doesn't mean it was not a poor execution. There were two problems. Targeting Drone lost a lot of value due to accuracy in all those IO damage sets, and blast sets with snipes were generally inferior to those without due to that power itself. The >22% to-hit solution was a first-time first-try in the process of fixing an AT who'd spent more than 20 issues being told "you can't not-suck that would be stepping on anyone else's toes", with more than a little "you're fine, learn to play, devs don't buff them no matter what". And it was a valiant first shot, but it fell short as a solution: Secondaries other than /Devices had snipes because snipes are in the primary, and "everyone needs to 3-slot tactics and get Kismet" is a half-assed cookiecutter of a workaround if we've ever seen one, especially as a fix for the basic mechanics of a power whose basic mechanics were where it was having a problem. With the Fast/Slow baked into the power itself, the snipe is now self-contained. It works on its own. You don't need either a specific secondary OR a specific IO AND A POOL POWER WITH 3 SLOTS DEDICATED TO IT to gain the snipe's basic functionality. Other powers can make it better, much better, but this rectifies a bad early design. And because Targeting Drone had been made the slap-patch for all this, it's becoming a global +recharge to compensate, and STILL is the cheapest easiest way to buff the damage of said snipes. There may - probably even - be better alternatives or solutions. By all means suggest them! And if Dominators need fixes that aren't quite the same as the blasters, that's fine too and maybe they can get those instead! But "it was better for everyone the way it was in its first iteration on i24 beta server when the game shut down" is simply not true. P.S: LRM needs Snipe-treatments badly (and either half the recharge or double the damage since even for an epic it's half the values it should have).

Woohoo! That mean we can expect a new patch in the next few days by any chance?

Not just fun, strong too. Tis not for those with blapping on the brain of course, but everyone you blinded before the fight even began will be held and/or completely drained of endurance and covered in toxic glue within seconds. And them buffs...

Damage variance could be achieved through a bit of playing with the 'states' of the toxins/acids. Dealing maybe half up-front and the rest over 3-6 seconds depending would probably be a good idea though, yeah. -Toxic Wasteland could build up a few ticks then explode with fire damage. -Venom sprays frozen crystals, dealing mostly Cold and Lethal as they shatter on impact, leaving the strong toxic DoT in victims as they thaw. -Acid Splash likely bowls its initial target over as pops like a balloon when kicked at breakneck speed, splorching vitriolic supercooled sludge across those behind him. -Euthanize is like those silly 40k 'Needle' weapons, where a thin beam (energy damage) acts as a channel for the lance of poisonous material that follows. Rather than front or back-loaded it's mid-loaded: Light damage on the spot, a heavy hit and then the DoT to complete the whole process.

If I can make a few suggestions: 1) Short/Long/Verylong or "Weak/Strong/High/Moderate/Extreme"(the damage ones) should probably just be dumped. There's plenty of cases where "moderate" damage is higher than "high" because those descriptions were EITHER purposefully misleading when they were first written up OR simply ignored as beta balances went on leading to powers unrelated to their descripts. As such, those words mean nothing, best to just note a rough idea of damage at multiplier 1 and level 50, recharge time in seconds and range/radius in feet. 2) There is unfortunately no resistance debuff set category. 3) Sniper attacks also qualify for single target ranged at a minimum. 4) infection's not a reason to use knockback, in fact that's a risk of separating things away from each-other. What you want is someone else that uses taunt, rather. I do like the thought of 2 snipes (one aoe), but overall blast sets are generally identical for all ATs save for snipers getting swapped in Sentinels, and low/no-damage single target holds becoming tier 3 blasts with a hold in them as well. This also means there's no reason to mark down everyone's levels - this is something that's made automatic by the power's location in the set and whether it's being equipped as a primary or secondary.