Best Single Target Blaster Build

[Frosticus]

1 hour ago, kiLLaBiyte said:

Hmmm, so I guess the "general consensus" is that, basically - Fire, Ice, Sonic, or Dark (and about in that order) paired with /Mental is the way to go for this topic?? And trying to be "different" aside and prove that other sets can find a way to do it too....the absolute powerhouse best is...this?....or what?

 

 

I'm curious on this too...

 

Would Beam Rifle fit anywhere into this equation? It has some nice -regen and effects also..

/drain psyche will put such a significant dent in the GM's regen that any primary should eventually get the job done.

ice and fire get it done much more quickly than others. Dark blast much more safely due to the heal. Water blast has a heal as well, but i personally find the st chain to be clunky, so I don't enjoy it, but you might.

 

I wouldn't vote for sonic blast myself unless you have pets to leverage, or teammates as the damage comes up a bit short vs other blast sets.

beam should work fine.

 

Keep in mind that when I say things like "comfortably" i mean that you have enough mitigation and enough output to drop more or less any GM that you encounter as well as all the adds it might pick up while it wanders. As such, being able to do it very quickly is my preferred approach. The longer a fight continues the more chances increase of a bad run that has you downing insp/temps to see the fight through. 

[Frostweaver]

I disagree about sonic as a GM/AV killer. It takes more than one cycle of your attack chain to drop one, and while it may not have the Raw DPS of fire, the second cycle, by default, is generally working off of -50% or more resist.

When you proc it up, though, that second cycle comes a LOT faster (like +100 recharge faster) and con potentially offer -hardcap resist, WITHOUT trying to stack the same -resist from the same power twice. Fire gets, at most, -15% resist

It will generally take dozens of cycles on a GM and at least 4 cycles on an AV... and every cycle AFTER the first, you are offering dramatically more damage than fire. (Not to mention if you DO have teammates, They REALLY love your -resist!)

And yes, fire gets quick snipe (and potentially -15% resist), and can really leverage it with the right secondary, which sonic doesn't get, but I still think that -res beats +20% dps over the LONG run.

[Frosticus]

2 hours ago, Frostweaver said:

I disagree about sonic as a GM/AV killer. It takes more than one cycle of your attack chain to drop one, and while it may not have the Raw DPS of fire, the second cycle, by default, is generally working off of -50% or more resist.

When you proc it up, though, that second cycle comes a LOT faster (like +100 recharge faster) and con potentially offer -hardcap resist, WITHOUT trying to stack the same -resist from the same power twice. Fire gets, at most, -15% resist

It will generally take dozens of cycles on a GM and at least 4 cycles on an AV... and every cycle AFTER the first, you are offering dramatically more damage than fire. (Not to mention if you DO have teammates, They REALLY love your -resist!)

And yes, fire gets quick snipe (and potentially -15% resist), and can really leverage it with the right secondary, which sonic doesn't get, but I still think that -res beats +20% dps over the LONG run.

There might be some miscommunication, but sonic doesn't work the way you are describing. 

You'd need a whole team of sonic blasters to reach the -res hardcap. 

[Frostweaver]

yes, I know, the minimum resistance is -300. But the effective floored resistance is 90%, and at anything more than -35% resistance, the debuffer is doing more damage than the 20% damage buff that fire gets, and at more than -45% resistance, the damage advantage of fast snipe +22% to-hit damage assuming a total recharge of 175% disappears. Sonic stacks -13% for each attack (not including reactive) for an average of 4 rotating attacks plus a nuke, which means that you will have, on average, -52% with spikes of -65%. Adding in gladiator and annihilation means spikes of up to -100%. Fire's spikes assuming similar slotting are -35%.

But, by all means nitpick my accidentally using the word 'hardcap' instead of 'soft floor'. I am sure that the intarweb points you win can net you MANY valuable prizes.
 

Edited October 19, 2019 by Frostweaver

[oedipus_tex]

I don't know much about AVs/GMs and their resistance. Isn't the limitation of Sonic that it's -Resist is resisted by any elemental Resistance the AV has? If so, if the AV has Smashing or Energy resist, you wouldn't get the full debuff, it would be partially resisted. But maybe most Avs don't have much typed resistance.

[Frosticus]

15 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

I don't know much about AVs/GMs and their resistance. Isn't the limitation of Sonic that it's -Resist is resisted by any elemental Resistance the AV has? If so, if the AV has Smashing or Energy resist, you wouldn't get the full debuff, it would be partially resisted. But maybe most Avs don't have much typed resistance.

It is, but 13% -res will still boost damage by 13% regardless of the resistance of the target.

ie 100 damage becomes 113

vs 50% res 100 damage becomes 50*1.13 = 56.5

 

The debuff is of course impacted by level modifiers, but that doesn't come in to play vs GM's, but is noteworthy vs +con AV's/bosses.

[Frostweaver]

So is damage and to-hit.

[Frosticus]

17 hours ago, Frostweaver said:

yes, I know, the minimum resistance is -300. But the effective floored resistance is 90%, and at anything more than -35% resistance, the debuffer is doing more damage than the 20% damage buff that fire gets, and at more than -45% resistance, the damage advantage of fast snipe +22% to-hit damage assuming a total recharge of 175% disappears. Sonic stacks -13% for each attack (not including reactive) for an average of 4 rotating attacks plus a nuke, which means that you will have, on average, -52% with spikes of -65%. Adding in gladiator and annihilation means spikes of up to -100%. Fire's spikes assuming similar slotting are -35%.

But, by all means nitpick my accidentally using the word 'hardcap' instead of 'soft floor'. I am sure that the intarweb points you win can net you MANY valuable prizes.
 

I don't know what a soft floor is, or an effective floored resistance, but I can assure you that you can well exceed 90%-res and the damage keeps going up and up.

 

I will say that sonic is governed by animation times. The animations govern how much -res the st attacks can stack as the main attacks are all very short duration debuffs. 

 

howl+shockwave (w/ kd proc) is welcome on any team. Albeit very slow aoe output.

dreadful wail is fantastic, but has more like a 40% uptime on the debuff. Sentinels on the other hand can approach perma debuff from this attack.

 

Additionally, sonic needs considerably more than 50-65% -res (which really assumes no interruptions in your attacks) to keep up with fire and ice blast in an optmized build. The dpa of the key attacks in those sets are approx 2.5x or more than anything sonic has. It is a huge gap to close. One that most people will agree doesn't happen in spawn to spawn clearing, or even on a long duration static fight. 

 

My hope is that eventually screech gets ported over from sentinels and shout gets a second shaved off the cast. I still love my storm/son defender as it is a great example of self force multiplication synergy and a huge boon to any team. 

 

 

 

 

[Frosticus]

13 minutes ago, Frostweaver said:

So is damage and to-hit.

No it isn't. Not in the way the previous poster was asking about at least.

 

Your base tohit chance is lower against +cons. But 20% tohit buff still gives you 20% more tohit chance

Similarly, you damage is reduced against +cons. But buildup still increases that damage by 100% enhancement.

 

Sonics debuffs which are 13% vs even cons become 13*0.48 = 6.24% vs +4's.

 

The easiest way to think about it is that if it is a self buff then that isn't impacted by the level of the enemy you are facing. But if you are interacting with an enemy then it is subject to relative enemy level whether positive or negative. 

[Frostweaver]

actually I was thinking of enemy HP, which are in fact affected by +cons

[oedipus_tex]

What I was referring to is that an enemy with either Smashing or Energy resist would resist the debuff. For example, if a same-level enemy has 50% Smashing resistance, the debuff is actually 13% *0.5 = 7.5%. If that enemy is also +4 to you, its reduced more.

 

Someone may have already done the math and worked out that it doesn't matter. Was just curious whether many AVs and GMs have Resistance armors and whether that makes Sonic less attractive than it seems at a glance.

[Frostweaver]

As far as I can tell from extensive testing, AV's often have resistance of one sort or another (usually thematic) just like bosses and EB's, But GM's don't seem to have much, if any. However, they have a ton of HP and regen that more than makes up for it.

Oddly though, they DO seem to take MORE damage if they are a higher-level GM than you are. I think it has something to do with the way that full purple con GM's get exemplared. Of course, if you are lower level your attacks do lower damage, but I have noticed that Babbage actually takes less damage, per attack, from a level 40 compared to your 'damage per attack' rating then he does from someone exemplared down to do posi.