Radiaria

Some sets will make blapping more favorable: Fire/ Energy/ Dark/ Psychic/ DB/ Rad/ Sonic/ will all more or less "force" you into the middle of a battlefield to get the most use out of their T9 nuke. Some sets: Water/ Ice/ Beam/ Archery/ Elec/ AR/ will be much more "range favoring" and unless you take a secondary that strictly reinforces blapping e.g. fire, mental, ninja, you'll be good to permanently stay at range and have no business entering melee at all which does help you survive quite a bit. Is blapping viable? Oh yes it is. I ran an LGTF today on my Ice/Fire blapper and was the only one on my team (as a blapper) out of 8 people, two of which being tanks, who didn't die and that is not because I was a "good baby blaster." I was always ahead of the pack blasting down the Rikti while everyone else lagged behind me. How do blasters become that survivable? Incarnates, IO's and good defense to range/S/L/E RoP and Melee Core will make you pretty damn tanky to where these stupid "blasters don't survive as well as sentinels" rule doesn't apply anymore at 50. There's an endgame to blasters, you've just gotta hang on tight until then.

Most builds skip Jacob's Ladder, while it can technically be a cone, rarely does it hit more than 2 targets. As for the AS, it's likely lag as others have said. Elec is still a great Stalker primary, you just need to work on getting used to the "ropes" of elec. Chain induction is quite nice btw, 1 second cast and it's a great proc monkey that can potentially hit others enemies with the "jolt," it often hits more enemies than Ladder would.

They do, especially in ST powers. An excellent "proc monkey" is Dominate. That power can get 5 extremely good procs and do 400-500 damage mostly from procs and significantly improve a controller/dominator's ST chain or even those with access to a psychic pool to get that. This question is highly dependent on the build. Sometimes the procs far outweigh the benefits of getting a 4 or 5 set bonus, sometimes they do not. It depends on what you're sacrificing and gaining. There's lots of proc information out there, @Booper has spoken at length regarding proc information if you're curious :)

This is typically the new "right way to do it"

So I was looking into Elec/Shield... I came across Fortunata Hypnosis: Chance for PLACATE as a proc... if this is so... wouldn't that practically be yet another source of guaranteed critical damage if this procs?!

Yes Rad/ So much simpler, easier, and faster. Yeah you technically "theoretically" may be faster choosing spines with the cone "throw spines" but honestly... not really. I have both, pimped out, and I know how to play spines, I've played spines before the rad as well so I'm even more familiar with it and still vastly prefer the Rad/ variant.

Right at the start of an animation or midway through it sadly, your attack could very well eat into the opportunity you have for the 3-second interval.

Go /Rad, once you go, you never go back. Better in AE, and PvE.

Frostweaver is correct, I really should've worded that more nicely, I didn't mean to personally attack the poster, that really wasn't my intention. I was just trying to point out building flaws and ways to improve the build. If you felt offended, I'm dearly sorry, I did not mean for it to come off that way! Frostweaver is keeping your theme and his build is decent.

Honestly, there's not much benefit out of this for a brute. Brute is not optimal for this combination because Scrappers get a naturally higher 1.125 damage base versus brutes (0.6-something?) - normally this doesn't matter but in the cases of psuedopets, this is where scrapper shines a lot more than Brute does. Although the pet can't be critical'd it can be used this way, fury doesn't affect psuedopets to the degree that base damage does. Also, with shield, unless you really really go ham with it, you're probably not going to reach the resistance cap - that's okay! But, because the softcap is the same brute vs. scrapper, there's really very little difference in survivability. Roll it on a scrapper, it does more damage and plays a little more smoothly than a brute. Stalker variant is good as well only slightly less damage but a lot better ST.

I'm going to politely disagree that in a lot of cases there are substitutes that make the AT almost entirely different from the original AT's intention. A TA defender is going to play more like a combination of a blaster and a controller really rather than a defender. An illusion controller is not going to play like a regular controller. A lot of scrappers are built around being extremely survivable and not damage-based to the normal degree and are going to tank. The above is especially true with Brutes (especially with stones) but I don't feel like that's fair because the game intended for Brutes redside to be "redside near tanks." You can build a blaster to hardly deal "enormous damage" but have heavy CC mitigation and really play like a lot more like a controller with actual blasting power (think dark/TA). VEATs and HEATs aren't built strictly for one purpose. You can build a corruptor/defender that hardly "defends" the team whatsoever and goes for damage almost exclusively (think /stormies). You can make totally petless MM's for teaming that rock or maybe only take the one final pet or only the last three. Especially with /kin. It actually works. Really, my dominator in most situations now doesn't use dominate to even try to hold an AV, I only use that power as a proc monkey to improve her DPS, she's really more of a blaster now. You can build tankers that actually deal great damage especially Fiery Aura/SS but they won't be so hot to tank hamidon or LRSF with by themselves (usually). The point of this post was to point out to you, as well as others, that stereotyping AT's by strict "hard and fast" definitions leads only to frustration. This game has a beautiful way of saying "hey, you may be this AT, but you can have another purpose instead." Especially for those who end up hating their AT and wish they were something else. This game gives you options. Maybe they're not the absolute most optimal combination of powersets and AT but does it really matter that much in the grand scheme of things? In most cases, even if you are the most contributing member on a team, you're still 1/8 players on the team. Enjoy the game YOU want to play it, learn the best way to make it out of a bad situation, and remember that if you don't like how it's going, you can always make a new char and do some research on things that interest you!

I don't believe it stacks, also, worth noting this "buff" only lasts 3.5 seconds. This is really only enough time to get off one possibly two if your set is extremely fast hits.

There's going to be non-permanent PA options for Ill/Storm and while OF is on the expensive side it's not *unobtainable* if you just do a hami raid and a tf. Really. It's not that bad although, I'd buy a winter-o and then sell that on ah and then use that to buy OF for tornado and then purchase whatever enhancements you'd like for the /stormies. Fire/Rad I think would be almost more expensive... to get perma Accelerated Metabolism while not super difficult, is costly, to really get the use out of most of rads powers (other than the debuffs and heals) you'd really need to dig in with IO's, with stormy you can get a lot more for free for soloing, and it teaches you a lot about the game. People will gladly teach you how to properly play one. So to answer your question about which is better paired with stormies.. This is going to be personal opinion and which you personally like more. Illusion is all about soft controls that work on literally everything but lacks medium and hard controls. Illusion really helps with hard fights and AVs, although this option tends to scatter mobs with stormies. However, the disorient in /storm can stun most things from minion-lei so it'll still prevent things from running away from you quite well :) and give you a harder control that illusion doesn't offer which is great especially when you can now feel inclined to make use out of the mass hold. Fire/Storm is going to be quite amazing. You get immobolizes which prevent mobs from running away which means they get guaranteed synergy with /stormies. Lightning Storm causes fear and so does Tornado, if you immobolize them though, this completely negates that :). You also get the clap which can disorient (stun) along with flashfire, and you can basically disorient entire groups of enemies (including boss-level) all the time once this is IO'd out, again, the synergy between these two sets is pretty amazing. There's really not much better than this. This one is going to be very good with crowd control and AOE damage.

I'm mainly asking this as a way to debuff enemies for teams, I'd think this would be very useful if it works out to be that way?

Yes, absolutely, snipes are not represented properly for their damage.

Ice does not have bigger numbers. Mids/Pines does not accurately represent Sniper numbers. Blaze is 170 damage base (no enhancements/etc) vs Bitter Ice Blast's 142 damage base (I'm comparing 2nd most damaging powers). Fire's sniper is A LOT more damage in DPA and damage number than Bitter Freeze Ray which base is 172.7. (To put this into perspective because the numbers aren't accurate, if Blaze is dealing 300 damage, sniper is doing 400-500.) Because Blaze's base is already 170, you can see that fire's sniper is a lot more damage than Bitter Freeze Ray. With procs and slotting and counting blizzard yes ice may even out but the poster is asking for the LARGEST NUMBERS. The largest number is ALWAYS fire. Yes there's enhancements, but for the "biggest number" fire will clearly win.

Curious to know if this is a good or bad idea... and why...

The issue that arises with Scrapper's damage though is real time in game. Scrappers lack taunt, and AV's can fly all over the place and move around quite a bit (forcing them to move around, lowering their actual real-time DPS). Scrappers also do inconsistently large damage with their crits. Over a long sustained period, this is fine, but on an actual real game period, it shows. I actually do agree with your post though, the sentinel versus blaster damage for ST dps is not far off - at least not for Fire/ now... Ice is different because Blizzard on a Blaster gets to such extreme levels and is a faster cast making it worth casting whereas Fire's inferno isn't quite the same. Because of this, the Sentinel's being half the damage of the Blaster version doesn't make sense to really cast with other powers that generally do more damage, so this does result in DPS loss on their end sadly.

My blaster permanently has 10-23 magnitude protection to most mezzes. I don't use Clarion. RoP and Melee Core both give 10 (each) to most mez. However, you can only get Melee's benefit and the permanency of mez protection once you're 50'd, so your only mez control is Hot Feet's proc at 38. That's still a long way to go but still provides you with some mitigation against enemies, even 1-3 mag protection helps a lot. In general, when building them this way, you get far more out of it and yes, you can easily go without ageless as a blaster (simple way: PS + end x2 one in caut aura/regen power, one in Stamina, and then slot panacea +end/+health in health. You'll never run out of end.) This makes Barrier the clear winner because for 20 seconds you basically become indestructible and enter "god mode."

I think there needs to be more discussion as well on the topic of CC... /Fire Manipulation is hands down one of the best secondaries if not the best one IMO for CC protection and AOE... how? why? what? let me explain. Hot feet with Blaster CC protection ATO. I never get mezzed at all anymore. It procs it. It's a godsend. It's up every mob, often procs twice or more. You've gotta put this for the set bonuses anyways somewhere, PUT IT WHERE YOU'LL ALWAYS HAVE IT UP!!!!!!!! I'm not kidding, it is TREMENDOUS, and then you get burn for max'd out AOE, it's pretty damn amazing. And you get Caut aura to combine to give you double damage AOE auras. You also get FSC. You also get a DPA attack that is only slightly behind elec's for DPA damage in your ST chain. Fire Manipulation and Atomic are beautiful. No questions about this. There's also the acrobatics pool which can help greatly with KB and Hold, combined, this can give you immediately +3-4 magnitude protection to holds. That's huge. In addition to all this, which I highly recommend for blasters, RoP + Melee Core. You can constantly cycle these together, give yourself HUGE damage resistance, and LOTS of mez protection. These are HIGHLY underrated right now for blasters. These are GODSENDS to make you unmezzable. These are 10/10 going to take your blaster to the next level and eliminate all the holes you ever had. Combine this with Mace Mastery's Scorpion Shield, you can easily softcap S/L/E which is so much of the content, and you can get pretty nice ranged defense with the blaster ATO's too and some slotting around, that's going to basically turn you into nigh-unkillable territory. There really IS a BIG endgame to blasters.

So, you're a dominator. Regardless of what control set you chose, you will have a mag 3 hold. With domination "critical" this becomes +6. Two applications and you should hold most EB's without any issues. Except... Exemp'd EB's that *should* be AV's. This is different. AV-EB's still retain the PToD. However, they DO have "down" phases. But alas, this is the downfall of the dominator. You DO HOWEVER HAVE ONE VERY IMPORTANT SOLOING ADVANTAGE THAT AS A MIND DOMINATOR ***MESMERIZE*** Mesmerize WILL make it so that if things get too hairy for you, that fight is going south, you can sleep EVEN AV's with domination INSTANTLY. You can use this period to recover, get the first hit in, etc. This is VERY important to AV fighting. You will effectively stop time and gain an opportunity to recovery from a bad fight. Use this!

Hello. I HATE masterminds who DON'T LISTEN or are RUDE. It is OBNOXIOUS and entirely their fault if we have 3 full pet MM's that are demons and robots that clog up the entirety of a cave map and prevent the team from getting to areas needed and their damage is not compensating for lack of people being there. I ran a Citadel with 3 of those. I refuse to accept more than one in there if they don't agree to be courteous and stand back for the team to let them get to the areas needed for the objectives or don't summon their pets. Seriously, this made it 3 hours long. Most of mine are 50 mins - 1:30 tops. There's just no excuse. In most instances, I have no issues with MM's being on my team, actually, I enjoy them and think they lay waste on hard enemies. Their buffs can be great. But, there's lots of MM's who give the AT a bad rep. Although, I will say, they are not the absolute dread to teaming that is the FF/Energy defender. Dear god. Played badly, this setup is the worst headache for a team ever known. It can actually distortion field a Rikti Pylon for several minute and prevent an entire league from being able to kill it. It can do this too for "defeat alls.", it can knock enemies into walls so badly in cave maps that I've had ITF become totally uncompletable because the damned defender repelled the cimerorans needed to rescue the sybils into the cave CEILING, and were totally intangible! WTF! I understand, this is more on the individual player, but still, the incredibly annoyance some people can be...

The strongest Soloists are IMO: fire/kin ill/rad and most/storm Storm IMO does better than all others for solo. This WILL be DAMAGING! Fire/Kin has realistically little mitigation (you can't lockdown a boss instantly and you'll frequently miss 1-2+ targets in a mob) and doesn't scale well versus AV's (1 target) solo. Storm does. Granted, /storm summoning controllers are NOT ill/rad for soloing everything with ease, but they excel in actual crowd control and ability to actually kill a mob in a decent time. With temp powers like the -regen knives, they win in a lot of cases. Once you use KB -> KD IO's with storm on controller, it is just mass armageddon, and it's all incredibly beautiful. This can easily solo AV's, storm is DAMAGING. Storm offers lots of soft crowd control + damage + damage mitigation. Illusion/Storm is a *FANTASTIC* soloer, although fire/storm will be a faster killer for crowds, they're not far off at all. A fire/storm controller will be neck-and-neck if not *faster* than fire/kin - this combo actually SYNERGIZES very well because of the extra disorient in storm being able to ACTUALLY disorient a boss consistently in AOE unlike what Kin offers and it offers the storms AND the AOE tornado with knockdowns and freezing rain (-res, -def, AND knockdowns) which aid the controls to not only hit more enemies, but deal more damage, and also offer soft control if things don't go your way. Although, you will not get the fulcrum shift benefit, you will get freezing rain's -res. Illusion/Storm is extraordinary. High damage for controller, the phantom army is perfect soft control, you will be left alone from hard fights, you're extremely survivable, great debuffs, great crowd control, absolutely flawless. Immaculate soloer. Get the -regen knives temp power to solo GM's/AV's if you need to/want to, but other wise, you'll have 0 issues. In fact, I saw a pylon thread for this combo that is doing 500+ DPS, that's higher than some of the most damaging blaster builds. Seriously. It REALLY is AMAZING! Ill/Rad just does not do much for crowd damage... yeah you can weaken the out of things... but that doesn't mean you'll actually have any damage to *actually* kill a mob. Yes, you can "ghost" but solo "defeat alls" can be a real slog and pain. Fire/kin has the opposite problem. It can lay waste to a mob like no other. However, against an AV solo, it has issues. You don't have as many things to fulcrum, and your mitigation is next to none against AV's. You may be able to occasionally hold an AV but without high fulcrum this isn't the best and it's not really a good one to solo GM's with.

The primary for BIG numbers is fire. Fire's inferno is INSTANT. There is absolutely no delay in its damage, it will WIPE everything lei and under even on +4 INSTANTLY. There is nothing that compares to that. Indisputable. Sorry. Fire is THE MOST damaging single target as well. You will VERY often in ONE SECOND casts be hitting 800-1000 (I've even experienced it going as high as 1400 on snipe...) numbers with procs and -res. You are a true cannon. You can actually WATCH +4 AV content health MOVE. The "big numbers" are definitely in fire. And trust me, they're VERY impressive. Secondaries... for "big numbers" alone, Positronic Fist is 198 base Total Focus is 198. Positronic Fist is a 2.904s cast Total Focus is a 3.432s cast. Burn will somehow deal far more damage than either one of these and be an AOE but it's numbers are "hidden" and won't appear as "big numbers." Note here: I'm discussing largest numbers NOT actual DPA/DPS. Fire/Atomic is well-regarded anyways. It's extremely strong and can farm. It is a great combo. It does big numbers.

I don't fully agree with this. With RoP + Melee Core and rotating the two for constant reliable +res and then taking barrier core (basically makes you invincible for 20 seconds and gives a permanent +5% defense and +5% resistance to all), that blaster becomes MEATY! If you pair this with something like /rad as a secondary that gives high regen + -to hit... this becomes even more survivable. There is a real endgame for blasters that does softcap S/L/E/N/Ranged and gets 40-60% resistance to everything just on rotating one, and will almost hardcap all damage if activated together. Trust me, there is hope and there IS an endgame with blasters. They become machines of destruction and can survive a hurricane when built right and having good incarnates. You could do this same thing with a Sentinel though and they'd be even more survivable but with them you'd sacrifice damage output a little bit, for sentinels they would really get a big benefit out of Assault Core (they don't have the luxury of aim + build up in most scenarios to rotate). Defender-level... definitely agree there. Absolutely above their damaging level, there are a few exceptions though that are strong competitors like storm/fire kin/fire defender but even then probably not. Corruptor-level... that's a different story. Corruptor-level damage is highly variant. Just from primaries alone, damage favors Sentinels. There's one catch though that most don't really pick up on. Corruptors have access to a snipe. That's pretty big... Additionally, they have a chance after the enemy's health is below 50% to deal double damage. Huge boost there. Top this off, they could run Storm Summoning and well... Storm's DPS contribution is immense, paired with the scourges and the fact freezing rain isn't a chance (reliable -30% enemy resistance... can be even more with procs) like sentinel's opportunity and it provides more team party buffs, you're going to have a hard to arguing that one. -- another interesting note if people want to argue on "effective" damage. It's not hard with storm to constantly keep an enemy where they are if you properly kb -> kd IO'd something like Tornado and then combined freezing rain + snow storm... -- another topic of discussion is -regen. Corruptors will hands down solo AV's/GM's faster than anything else. Why? Their secondaries get -regen. That's not something most sentinel sets offer much/at all. Corruptors do lag far behind sentinels and blasters though in AOE damage. But for the majority of Corruptor combinations, they won't significantly outpace sentinels or outpace at all really but do expect that some Corruptors are so significantly damaging that even Blasters cannot keep up this level of damage, that's just how damaging storm summoning and scourge really flat out is. Keep in mind that to get those to shine, they require lots of incarnates, lots of investment in IO's, and if you just started to play them, they're awful. Sentinels' T9s are far more reliable and they're constants, they're very nice, especially an ice blast Sentinel who wouldn't have gotten a snipe for the Blaster version regardless and gets their T9 cooldown shredded in half, but even a fire Sentinel, their infernos are up roughly every 20-28 seconds, thats a lot more useful even if it's not as damaging as the 38-45 seconds on blaster inferno. In their early levels too, because they're ranged where a lot of enemies need to be in melee and they're also given a defense-based secondary, they are far easier to maneuver or operate than a Blaster or Corruptor and with incarnates they will deal a lot more damage and are going to be very nice. Sentinels are always a welcome addition on any team, they're very useful, very fun, and indeed still very damaging. There's a lot of times that the tradeoff for damage is *very* worth the tradeoff for sustain and *MORE CONSISTENT AOE NUKES!* So here's an interesting point of discussion. A lot of the game's weekly task forces aren't going to allow you to run all your powers, in fact, many task forces and strike forces and ouro missions are not going to enable you to run incarnates to really fix your flaws. For these tasks, a Sentinel far exceeds blasters. In fact, the small amount more damage that a Blaster can deal versus a Sentinel at these levels is so minimal that you may very well feel the tradeoff for sustain so you can actually deal your damage is far worth it. Retrospectively, only about half of the game really exists in 50. So much of the game is 15-40's. Would you rather have power *all* the time and be good in *all* scenarios even if in some of them you aren't as obscene as others are? Or would you trade that for being a fraction as useful half of the time. This is why I've actually been making Sentinels, they really can do excellent things.