Kaballah

Everything pairs well with Shield, if AOE damage important to you then pick really just any set/epic combo that has a lot of AOE. I gotta laugh at the idea one of these choices will be "bad", SD is as superb set and there isn't a wrong answer.

On my DP blaster, switching to fire ammo disables the KB. I actually have some of my DP attacks fitted with a KB set (Force Feedback) because it's useful to have strong, reliable KB when you want it, and KB definitely does not happen with fire ammo toggled. Oddly the KnockDOWN from the nuke does, but that's the only thing.

Damage auras are neat in principle but in practice they're really annoying to keep going because they get detoggled whenever you are CC'd, which is very frequent until late in the post-50 game.

Capped fire resistance is only part of it, if you have no fire def then you're going to be busy doing active things to avoid defeat. You can pile up all the fire def in the world though and fairly easily cap it both on brute or tanker (easier for tanker tho). Tanker has an advantage due to larger base life, which is magnified by resistance and later by bonus life added by percentage of base, from accolades or IO set bonuses and uniques. Various things that grant absorption (temporary health increases) like the proc from Preventive Medicine or Gauntleted Fist are a percentage of base health. Regeneration (even the base amount from your intrinsic but also the little bits you get from set IO bonuses) depends crucially on total health. The flat health from Panacea's proc piece is a percentage of base health. All this adds up, large base health is very powerful.

The animation can be turned off, but the time spent running it is still there from what everyone has told me.

Be aware you're going to have to live with weapon redraw for both sets, whether that bothers you or not (It bothers me). Water/Psi is really strong DP/Energy is also pretty great

I don't agree about Super Strength, I have seen Foot Stomp post-patch and it is utterly bananas in a character built for damage. Not sure about Psi Melee, I haven't seen anybody built to really optimize that yet (my own WP/Psi tank isn't that for sure). For most people though, I think the change is less about doing damage to stuff (which it definitely improves, sure) and more about applying Gauntlet to more stuff in a bigger area, in a fun way.

Post 50 the Blaster can reasonably have capped s/l resist and high defenses or vice versa, always-available status protection with Clarion, while Sentinel is stuck with that low base damage forever. Especially if you're supported by teammates, it's not a very even comparison. IMO Sentinels need some more design effort, I feel like they were designed previous to the Blaster changes in I24 that made them so much stronger.

I stuck with Combustion because even though it has a long activation time it still does very good damage and is painless to apply to max targets, unlike fire breath (which I skipped but sure, take it too if you like).

The attack chain is way more satisfying for sure, you can cycle 3 large-radius 16 target AOEs with a tap of Incinerate or whatever here and there, forever. If you wanted to break theme you could take Mu instead and have a really powerful cone too.

Echoing the sentiment that you shouldn't worry too much about people telling you what powers to use and where to be unless it's for a very specific thing like Lord Recluse perhaps. Also KB attacks can always be fitted with Sudden Acceleration, which can turn a really annoying power into an amazing one that breaks the game in half (bonfire).

Uh, no, there are like 3 sets that have shorter recharge for tier 1/2, and 16 seconds for targeted AOE is very normal, few exceptions. Can you highlight some sets besides fire that are faster? e: in any case rad/rad is a very good combo, -def is a useful secondary effect and you can put Achilles' Heel proc pieces on most of stuff if you like. My own rad/atomic blaster is one of most satisfying characters to play, good luck

"long recharge times" compared to what?

The really blatant IO uniques are: - Gladiator's Armor +3% all def - Steadfast Protection +3% all def - Shield Wall +5% all resist - Reactive Defenses "scaling resist bonus" - Unbreakable Guard +7.5% life Practically all of my characters slot all of these regardless of their AT, they're just really strong as Novacat says Blessing of the Zephyr 4 pt KB protection for characters that don't have it built into their primary/secondary sets

I get it that Fire is not the best in one category or another, but you're saying that 4 sets are better wrt endurance drain and the other 7 are worse. Every set has some sort of hole or drawback. The point is not that Fire is "better" than the other sets at whatever specific category, but that it's good enough for the great majority of content, and has problems with a few things the way most sets have problems with a few things. Even my electric armor tank can eventually get overwhelmed by big enough piles of malta, even my ice armor tank would get mashed by stuff like Rularuu mobs. e: huh I just noticed Fire/Temperature Protection also has 20% -recharge resist, go figure

What's your point?

Fire armor actually has 50% end drain resist on Consume while it is up (2 minutes, easily perma) and practically no sets have any -recharge resist (only Electric Armor that I can think of). Only a couple of sets have tools vs psionic dmg. What does "lesser mez protect" mean exactly, you have the same 13 points of status protect vs everything except KB as other tank sets? and the KB you can easily fix with gear anyway e: well okay not vs "everything", no protection vs confuse or terrorize, but I cannot recall that ever being a big deal

Sad that this doesn't work any more 😞

I agree my fire armor tank feels very capable vs. almost all of the content, except the stuff that most other tanks have problems with (malta, some combinations of IDF spawns, the like)

I made a fire/fire/pyre tanker to examine this and while I'm sure my build isn't hyper optimal, it's reasonably comparable - inf/hr is something like 80% of my spine/fire brute, using no insps or outside buffs. However if you have some method of keeping your dmg bonus high without effort I have no doubt they'd be very comparable or perhaps the tanker would end up being even better. The tanker is way more comfortable to drive though, can go AFK in a crowd of elites and has better endurance sustain despite having an attack chain that on paper should be more expensive.

Fire/Fire/Pyre went from one of the most frustrating combos pre-I24 to one of the best. Bonfire + Sudden Acceleration is extremely good, powerful soft CC, it's so good I have to force myself not to take it on all my blasters. Consume can be fitted with the Energy Manipulator proc piece which turns it into a pretty reliable PBAOE stun. It won't stun bosses and isn't going to stun 100% of a full group of enemies but it definitely will stun most, and you can also put a Fury of the Gladiator -resist proc piece on it to make for a very good opener for your nuke.

I put a higher priority on capping s/l resist than a defense, and if you're exclusively teaming with your blaster imo the defense you'd be better off stacking is AOE, unless you are regularly doing without tank/brute and/or CC.

The P2W self rez powers have a 30 minute cooldown that ignores recharge bonuses, Rise of the Phoenix has a base cooldown of 5 minutes and that can be shortened with recharge bonus to something like 90 seconds.

re: 1, Yes I'm pretty sure you can. re: 2, I have no idea but considering you just died that's not a really big concern, put health (unslotted it only heals you for 50%) or something on it the cooldown is much shorter and the untouchable period is EXTREMELY useful, the P2W self rez is a little bit better than using an awaken insp but only a little bit.