Call Me Awesome

Glad you're having fun, that's what you're here for after all 🙂

I generally level to around 20 then respec with decent sets to carry me into the 40's. A few things get slotted ASAP like the Miracle +recovery, usually the +tohit defense IO (name escapes me ATM) and a Stealth IO... all of these get slotted in the teens. By the time the character's approaching 30 I'm usually mostly slotted with sets that will see me most of the way to 50. Unfortunately with different sets having different minimum levels it's not easy to have an endgame build while leveling up. Usually my builds have about 75% of their capabilities once they hit 35 but there are going to be sets I'll replace while leveling. You could get by with Unslotters, they're cheap enough and I frequently use them for that to avoid the hassle of a complete respec. Still, it's not unusual to need to shift slots around in the build as you level up. I don't often need to respec at 50 though, usually the build is mostly complete in the mid-40's

I'll certainly agree with the ET animation change killing the set; it really killed it for all AT's not just Stalkers. Back in the day I had a Stone/EM tanker that was fairly effective pre-nerf. Then the ET change came and a mediocre set lost the only redeeming feature it had. That was the only level 50 I ever stripped and abandoned. I never played it in anything but the Tanker version but as it is today I'd generally rate it dead last in the melee sets. Pre-nerf it kind of sucked before you got ET, then it redeemed itself somewhat. Today I'd play literally anything else instead.

I really doubt you'd be able to hold aggro with any Stalker; the AT completely lacks the tools to do this. I was playing my Fire/Regen stalker today in a Summer Blockbuster and was unable to hold aggro off of the squishy toons despite my best efforts and a considerable damage output on my part. I could get the attention, but they were remarkably fickle about who they attacked. A second or so of gap on my damage would have the mob turn on the blaster. Of the combinations you listed I'd think StJ/Shield would be the best pairing for damage and durability. Admittedly my experience with StJ is on a Scrapper and it's a helluva lot of fun. There's just something that makes you want to snicker when you kick the bad guy in the balls. The downside is limited AOE of course. Shield just plain works well no matter what AT you run it on, I've a mid-30's Elec/Shield Stalker that's quickly becoming a beast. One of my favorite pairings is Broadsword/Shield; I've played that to 50 as a Scrapper twice and a Tank once... from what I gather it's even more of a beast on a Stalker thanks to the 'on demand' criticals.

Pair it up with Shield. It's an awesome combination on any melee character... I've played it on a Scrapper and Stalker. On a Tanker I've played both sets individually but not as a combination.

And Yellow inspirations will solve the blindness problem. Since it's fairly rare to encounter just carry a few yellows in your tray.

Probably just an example of spaghetti code in the way enhancements are set up. I remember hearing Devs talking about the strangest relationships between completely different parts of the game.

That's what he's saying, apparently it has something to do with how Converters work. From the description it sounds like the converter would need to treat HO's like Set IO's and limit one of each type in a given power.

Really take your pick. Scorpion Shield is a nice chunk of S/L/E defense so it's one possibility. I went with Flame on my Fire/EM blaster for Bonfire... toss a KB-KD proc into it and it's a nice damage burn patch that knocks mobs on their butts. Fire Shield is S/L/F resistance so it doesn't stack for you but it's a resistance power you can use to mule a Steadfast 3% defense unique and the Gladiator's Armor 3% def unique. Unenhanced 20% resistance and 6% defense in one power, not too bad a choice and it's not easy finding a place to slot those two IO's. No matter what you take there's going to be trade offs to consider. Cold has some points to recommend it, most of the others have potential. IMO however Munitions is a dud.

I'd support this idea; of course with the incredible mess of spaghetti code that makes up the game it could be trivial or it could be nearly impossible. I think I saw one of the Dev's back in the day mention changing how something worked would break something else completely different. It wouldn't surprise me if HO's were connected to something silly like the chat window. I seem to remember that the issue back on live had an equally silly dependency.

I agree with that and I considered it, but ultimately decided against it on my Fire/EM. With IO bonuses and the Leadership pool (mostly for Tactics) I'm sitting at 35% ranged defense, 30% E/N defense, 12% all other defense along with 34% S/L resistance. I've though of reworking a bit for more defense but I'd loose other benefits. I did try changing Flame Mastery for Scorpion shield and while it bumped up the S/L defense quite a bit it cost me Bonfire which is something I use every fight along with Rain of Fire. For me I'm not sure the trade off was worth it.

I enjoyed playing Water blast on a Water/Rad corrupter and the set worked quite well. I haven't looked at the blaster version but it's just scaled up damage?

Defense above the soft cap is helpful if you get debuffed, however higher level mobs are still at the tohit floor with soft capped defense. It's a bit complicated but it works like this: Mob ToHit = 50% for almost everything in the game. LT, Boss, AV all have an Accuracy bonus that is a multiple of their tohit. Thus an AV hits more than a minion. However, any tohit debuffs and your defense all are applied to the mob's ToHit BEFORE the accuracy bonus is applied so instead of the accuracy bonus being a multiple of 50% instead it's a multiple of the mob's current tohit (5% against a soft capped character). That's why more defense than the soft cap is wasted outside of debuffs. Higher level mobs get an Accuracy bonus, NOT a ToHit bonus. Yes, a +4 mob hits you more than a +0, but he's still floored with 45% defense. Speaking of debuffs, in my experience mobs that debuff defense tend to REALLY debuff defense. Cimeroans for example can strip you from 45% to -50% in a big hurry so having a bit more than the soft cap is of limited benefit; once they start stripping you it quickly drops you to less than nothing. Circle of Thorns with that damned Quicksand and Earthquake will also drop you to nothing in defense and they're autohit. Possibly someone more math oriented can give the exact numbers. I seem to recall years ago seeing that extremely high level (+5? +8?) mobs do start getting a tohit buff but you likely won't be able to scratch them anyway due to the way your damage and tohit chances go down as relative levels go up. I'm sure you've noticed you do less damage against a +4 than a +0, and it's harder to hit them as well. Broken down to the basics that apply to you, more defense up to the 45% soft cap is good, after 45% it isn't very useful. Different attack types need different defense to protect from, and they don't stack with each other. Smashing/Lethal defense is great against most attacks but does nothing for a fire based attack. Ranged defense works against any Ranged attack but does nothing for Melee or AOE attacks. The game picks the highest defense that applies to a given attack and uses that. For example, let's take a ranged attack that does 100 damage, 50 of it Energy and 50 of it Smashing. This isn't unusual by the way, many attacks have multiple types, this could be an energy blast. Your character has 15% smashing defense, 20% energy defense and 40% ranged defense so all of those apply to this attack. No, they don't stack together; what the game does is take your 40% ranged defense since it's the highest and uses that to determine if you get hit... the mob has a 10% chance to hit you. As another example, let's say we have another attack with the same damage types, but it's a melee attack instead. In this case your Smashing and your Energy defenses apply but NOT your ranged defense... since your energy defense is the highest that applies (remember, this second attack isn't ranged but instead a fist to the face, think a Tsoo ink man) the game uses that 20% defense and the mob has a 30% chance to hit you. Most attacks will have one or more Typed flags (Smash/Lethal/Energy/Negative/Psi) and a Positional flag (Melee/Ranged/AOE) If you have defense against any of the flags then the attack is more likely to miss. If your defense succeeds against any of them then the entire attack misses.

Not quite, 45% defense means the mobs hit you 5% of the time, but for full damage when they do. 75% resistance means that they hit you as normal but for 25% of the damage. Thus, getting hit for full damage only 5% of the time is better than getting hit for 25% damage half the time. It's not really feasible on a blaster but the best way to go is layering your protections with high defense, high resistance and high regeneration (or healing). That's part of what makes some melee characters so survivable. As an Ice blaster you're best off staying at range, depending on your secondary. I find that my Fire/Energy blaster with roughly 35% ranged defense (and about 20% to most everything else as a byproduct) is extremely durable as long as I stay out of arms reach of the mobs, which I generally do by staying in the air. There's so many tradeoffs involved in building high defenses that it's a balancing act; you want to maximize your damage output so stuff dies fast... the faster they die the less time they're shooting at you... you want to have your endurance usage under control and you want enough protection to survive until the fight's over. You can build for higher protections but that usually comes at the cost of damage output or endurance use. Build as much offense as you can with a big enough gas tank to crank it out and then enough protection to last until the mob drops dead. Ice is a set I haven' played, but from memory it's mainly single target so you've an opportunity for building ranged defense cheap, the Thunderstrike set is inexpensive and it gives you a good amount of ranged defense if you 6 slot it without detracting from the overall enhancement of the power. 5 ranged attacks slotted with Thunderstrike gives you somewhere around 20% ranged defense. (sorry, don't have Mids on this computer but I think it's somewhere around 3.5% - 4% ranged defense at 6 slots). It's been a month or so since I looked but I used to be able to buy the recipes for 10k each and each one uses roughly 3k in salvage so they're cheap to craft. I typically buy level 30 recipes for exemplar purposes... it gets you close enough to ED caps for enhancement and they're much cheaper to craft than level 50. Scorpion Shield is a good patron power, however as I recall it's Smash/Lethal/Energy defense so it doesn't stack with Ranged defense. I would build either for typed defenses (Smash/Lethal/Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative) or positional defenses (Melee/Range/AOE). On a Blapper build that spends time in Melee I'd get Scorpion Shield and build up Smash/Lethal defenses as a great bang for the buck. On a ranged blaster I build for Ranged defenses instead. Trying to cover all angles on a blaster just really doesn't work as well. You're a blaster, not a tank. Although with a good defense and staying at range you can pull off some of the "Stupid Scrapper Tricks *tm"

Resistance and Defense are two very different things, one makes attacks hurt less and the other makes you harder to hit in the first place. Resistance means an attack of that type that hits does less damage. Let's say you get hit by a rock (smashing damage) and the attack does 100 damage. If you have 10% resistance to smashing then you take 90 damage. If you have 50% resistance then you take 50 damage, and if you have 75% resistance you take 25 damage. Defense is how likely you are to get hit in the first place and is a bit more complicated to figure, if you get hit you still take full damage (unless you also have resistance) but defense makes the mobs miss you more. Without any defense a mob has a 50% chance to hit you so on average you'll get hit by half of all attacks. When you start adding defense you reduce the chance for the mob to hit you... if you have 25% defense you'll get hit 25% of the time. All mobs have a "floor" on their chance to hit you, they ALWAYS have at least a 5% chance so if you have 45% defense then you've reduced their chance as low as you can, thus 45% is referred to as the "soft cap" since while you can have a higher defense it doesn't do you any good. (Incarnate level mobs have a higher to hit floor so the soft cap for them is, I believe, 54%). All AT's have a hard cap on their resistance where you literally cannot increase it beyond that amount; if you have more than the hard cap of resistance the game disregards the extra amount unless you get debuffed. The Resistance cap varies by AT, Tankers and Brutes have a resist cap of 90%, Keldians (Warshade/Peacebringer) have a resist cap of 85% and I believe all other AT's have a cap of 75%. To summarize, for non-incarnate level mobs you get no benefit (outside of debuffs) to having more than 45% defense. Resistance helps until you get the cap for your AT, then more is basically pointless. Now, since you're a blaster you need to decide what you want to build for. Do you mainly fight from range and rarely get into melee? Then you may well want to build for Ranged defense... the Thunderstrike set is good for that. Do you mainly fight in melee? Well, you may want to focus on Smashing/Lethal defense as that covers the majority of attacks. Frankly I'm not really sure building for resistance in a Blaster is a great idea since you'd have to make a lot of compromises and likely not manage to build significant protection. The old thumb rule back on Live was that 2% resistance was equal to 1% defense. I've found that if you're playing mainly from range that building to ~35% ranged defense does wonders for your survivability, and if you get into a tight spot a small purple puts you at the soft cap.

I have a 50 Fire/Regen Stalker with about 40% S/L defense and ~ 25% to everything else; she's VERY survivable in everything I've run into thus far so even without the assistance of Parry the set's more than viable on a Stalker. One problem with Regen on a Stalker though... you loose Quick Recovery for Hide and BS isn't the easiest on the endurance bar. I made sure to slot a Miracle +recovery as soon as I could. I tossed the Kinetic Combat set into all single target attacks for most of the S/L boost... this also has the benefit of frequently knocking your target on it's butt. I also had a 50 BS/Regen scrapper on Live that I played from issue 4 to shutdown. It's quite capable although my BS/Shield scrapper was better all around... I tanked a number of TF's with the BS/SD combo without assistance.

Tanking with a side of control? Invuln/Stone works well here; the toughness of Invuln covers your survivability pretty well and Stone Melee gives you knock up, knock down, AOE knock down/stun, AOE knock down/damage and a MAG 4 hold with a double helping of damage. It won't outdamage a Fire/Fire tanker but it will out survive one, it holds aggro extremely well and you can knock 'em down at will as well as knocking them straight UP with Heavy Mallet for a few more seconds of control as they fly up, fall down and have to get back on their feet. Seismic Smash gives you a MAG 4 hold that will one shot hold a boss and turn out a lot of damage. The only downsides are that it's fairly end heavy and only has one fairly low damage AOE attack. Oh, and enemies that resist Smashing damage are a pain.

I kind of thought I might need to do something of the type, I'll experiment some when I get back home. I'm out of town this week without an option to log in.

No question for me, Titan Weapons. I HATE the slooooooooow animations you're stuck with most of the time, the fast animation versions don't last long and you're back to sloooooooooooow.

I don't have Mid's on my MacBook with me but from memory here's roughly how my Fire/EM was built: Fire Blast, Blaze, Blazing Bolt slotted 6 Thunderstrike Bone Smasher, Power Thrust slotted 6 Mako's Bite Maneuvers, Tactics, Assault. Tactics 6 slotted with Gaussian's Fireball 6 slotted with one of the Blaster sets Rain of Fire 6 slotted with the other Blaster set Bonfire slotted with 5 Posi Blast, 1 KB-KD proc Fire Shield, Rise of the Phoenix (forget exact slotting) No Total Focus Mystic Flight with Stealth IO, whatever the Mez shield is called. Boost Range Hasten - Not enough recharge for Perma, roughly 40% from bonuses without Hasten Combat Jumping with ToHit IO slotted Inferno 6 slotted Purple I have both of the Resist/3% defense uniques slotted as well as the Numina/Miracle uniques. The rest of the build I don't recall at the moment. The upshot gets me around 40% ranged defense, roughly 20% to most other defenses. With the Mez shield activated I'm at roughly 60% res to most damage. I find the build to be highly survivable and quite capable of laying out the hurt. I've toyed with swapping the Thunderstrike in the Snipe for the new Snipe set, it would cost me something around 2% defense to Ranged and offer some offsetting benefits. The character spends most of his time at range or hovering overhead, the two melee attacks are mostly filler... I'm not totally certain that Power Thrust is 6 slotted, that may be a memory of an older build and depends on available slots.

I was afraid of that. I'd made a bind of /bind leftdoubleclick "powexecname lightning rod$$powexecname shield charge" and it fires Shield Charge and then if I hit it again it just gives the "recharging" tone. I hadn't been aware of the powexeclocation target command, I'll give that one a try when I get back... unfortunately I'm away this week at a lovely thing called "work". I'd hoped to avoid a bind load thing, I have a couple of machines I occasionally use and I know I'd end up forgetting it on the second machine.

My default on Scrappers is Blaze; I grab Char/Fire Blast/Fire Ball. The Debuff numbers on Melt Armor weren't high enough to really be worth taking IMO and Fire Blast is a nice ranged attack that recharges fairly quickly, something that's frequently useful as Scrappers tend to be range-challenged. Char isn't much used but it's occasionally useful; I toss an Acc/Mez HO into it and call it good.

I've been trying to get a bind working to Shield Charge at a targeted mob and apparently my bind-fu isn't up to the task. Ideally I'd like one bind that would Shield Charge to a mob, then Lightning Rod on a second push of the key, is this possible?

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. Interesting thought... as if I didn't already have enough alts to level up🤫

Combinations I've played to 50 and enjoyed are Fire/Energy (Live from around issue 5 to shutdown and here on Homecoming... a whole lot of fun and highly effective), Archery/Energy (On Live around issue 18 or so, the king of long range) and Archery/Tactical Arrow (Currently leveling at around 40 right now so not 50 yet but highly survivable with a ton of control, plays like a Controller with lots of damage) If you're looking for Debuffs then Rad, Dark or Sonic would be decent choices. I haven't played the Blaster version of them but I had either Defender or Corrupter versions of each. If you didn't have the redraw issues I'd suggest Tac Arrow for a control/debuff secondary. Unfortunately Archery doesn't really Debuff anything but hit points.