Blaster Farming

[PsycheAdrenaline]

any suggestions on keeping enemies from running have a big problem with this on my Fire blaster no mass immob ive tried not using rain and still have the problem though slightly less also melee hybrid and control, 

 

the immob proc and the immob on interface still does nothing please help

[Shred Monkey]

Hit them harder! 

 

I guess you could try the taunt power from the presence pool... also, I remember seeing a taunt proc in one of the hybrid attacks... I have never used it, so I can't say if it even functions.  My first suggestion is actually probably the best answer.

[tidge]

5 hours ago, PsycheAdrenaline said:

any suggestions on keeping enemies from running have a big problem with this on my Fire blaster no mass immob ive tried not using rain and still have the problem though slightly less also melee hybrid and control, 

 

the immob proc and the immob on interface still does nothing please help

 

I think the Epic Fire Pool has Bonfire... not sure how it is in the Epic Pool, but as a Dominator primary you can always have one up and slot it with the Overwhelming Force KB-KD proc. For your purposes (as a Blaster) the Force Feedback +Recharge proc may be the only other slot worth investing in.

 

The Presence Pool's Provoke isn't good at keeping mobs from running if they want to run. A better power from the presence pool is the PBAoE Invoke Panic, but you will have to be very Blapper to get the most out of it. The recharge timer is one the order of other AoE holds. I *like* the Presence pool on some AT but not on Blasters.

 

[Banana Man]

Outside of using lore pets or in-map npc allies with pets to draw agro (/plant, /illusion), you're not really going to be able to stop things from running. Slotting hot feet for slow does help. When solo-farming on blasters, you want to be moving group to group, two shotting all of the lts and minions with your aoes. The bosses from the group will follow you, once you have bosses from three or four groups following you, jump to your next group and drop bonfire, and kill all the bosses while they're getting KBed. Then repeat. Ice/fire is the best farming blaster, but really anything with fire secondary can do it.

[reib]

Bring snow storm from ice mastery pool slotted for maximum slow, put on the boss in the middle of the group. That's wath i do and working very well.

[Banana Man]

What kind of fire blaster are you using to farm?

[PsycheAdrenaline]

i am running fire/Atomic but also have a Psy/Dark and Watter/Mental

[Rathulfr]

Why are you farming with a blaster in the first place?  That seems to me to be far less efficient than a brutes/tankers, which have built-in taunt to keep the mobs from running (as much).  And I'm not even mentioning the 75% max resistance (oh crap, I just did, didn't I? oh well).  Is it really "farming" if you can't hold aggro and cap resistance?  Not criticism, just questions.  You do you: it just seems unappealing to me.

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by Rathulfr

[Frostweaver]

well, blaster farming is more of a novelty than anything else.

No, it's not as fast as brute, and every once in a while you faceplant.

But the thing is, if you can do it, you can pretty much handle any content in the game. Why is that? because in an s/l farm you won't have your incarnates or special stuff up all the time... you have to be ready to keep going, and survive, even if you popped off all your inspirations and your two or three defensive abilities are on cooldown... and a 4/8 or even a 3/8 can kill you right quick unless you are built magnificently and ready for ANYTHING even with your special defenses down.

So I don't begrudge blaster farmers their bragging rights, they have earned them far more than 'spines fire brute #13386 with well-proven farming build #2'

Edited April 21, 2020 by Frostweaver

[Frostweaver]

The incarnate melee hybrid defense has a built-in taunt. but most blasters cap defense, and the resistance version does NOT have it. Basically it was clearly the dev's decision to not encourage blaster farmers.

If your resistances can handle the farm, then definitely get the defense hybrid. It's one of the reasons that my blaster uses temporary invulnerability instead of scorpion shield, and runs at 40% defense instead of 45+.

Edited April 21, 2020 by Frostweaver

[McGarnackle]

10 hours ago, Rathulfr said:

Why are you farming with a blaster in the first place?  That seems to me to be far less efficient than a brutes/tankers, which have built-in taunt to keep the mobs from running (as much).  And I'm not even mentioning the 75% max resistance (oh crap, I just did, didn't I? oh well).  Is it really "farming" if you can't hold aggro and cap resistance?  Not criticism, just questions.  You do you: it just seems unappealing to me.

 

There are scrapper farm builds that work great as well. Also, if you're good at positioning, a dark/em/soul does really well as you don't need to worry about taunting anything when it's all immobilised in place. And the 75% resistance cap is not an issue paired with many of the blaster secondary +regen powers combined with sofcapped defense

Edited April 22, 2020 by McGarnackle

[Banana Man]

A single ice/fire blaster can farm faster than a single brute, so I don't know that I'd call it a novelty.

 

It's much more work than farming on a brute, or a tank (tanks are probably better than brutes now), but you can reach similar or slightly greater levels of efficiency. When farming with two people, ie one blaster + one tank or one brute, it starts to get considerably faster than running two brutes. Spines/fire scrappers could POTENTIALLY be better than anything, but it'd be a matter of how much saturation you can maintain on it.

 

Fire isn't a bad primary for farming, probably top 4 for farming blasters. Atomic though is pretty lackluster, so you won't be out-clearing any min/maxed optimal brute builds on that. It can still work, it just won't be super fast. 

 

Incarnate wise for a farming blaster, I would use 

-Musculature (for proc rate and increased judgement damage, and having to pop fewer reds) 

-Ageless for recharge that won't mess up proc rate, and recovery

-Degen interface (75% chance for -hp side)

-Ionic judgement (max aoe version)

-banished pantheon lore pet with the invincible pet to pull more aggro

-Double-hit assault hybrid

[Krazie Ivan]

17 minutes ago, Banana Man said:

A single ice/fire blaster can farm faster than a single brute

i'd love to see video of this. mind recording, uploading, & posting a link to an asteroid run?

21 minutes ago, Banana Man said:

When farming with two people, ie one blaster + one tank or one brute, it starts to get considerably faster than running two brutes.

tried with, or ever seen a Fire/Kin Corr Duo?

[Banana Man]

Posting videos is against the CoC so I can't give you a video. I can show you in game sometime. I'm probably easiest to reach via discord. I'm @S on the PvP discord and @CR banana man on the main homecoming discord.

 

Kin is basically non-existent in asteroid farm runs. Most of what it offers is fulcrum shift, and you can damage cap for the entire run using t1 insps. I feel like the best buff/debuff secondaries would be things with aoe -res debuffs that are ticking patches, so they can hit more than 16 things (sleet, freezing rain, etc).

Edited April 22, 2020 by Banana Man

[WitchofDread]

What would pair well with dark blast for farming?

[Camel]

13 hours ago, WitchofDread said:

What would pair well with dark blast for farming?

/Fire would still be best as it has the most AoE. Even with its non-synergy with Dark Blast being more cone focused.

Edited April 22, 2020 by Camel

[Frostweaver]

Posting LIVE videos is against the CoC. Look again.

No Twitch feeds, in other words.

[Frostweaver]

I find DP set for fire to be exceptionally good for farming, as it has a lot of radius aoe, more proc potential, and it's nuke is faster and has a nice +def effect.

As far as secondary, time works well but I haven't tested it with others.

[Banana Man]

"Whilst Homecoming is still undergoing efforts to become a legitimate operation, live broadcasts or uploads of gameplay footage are not permitted."

 

21 hours ago, WitchofDread said:

What would pair well with dark blast for farming?

Fire is far and away the best for any primary when farming (and usually in general). For farming purposes, the best primary with a secondary that isn't fire probably would get out-farmed by literally any primary paired with fire. 

 

Tldr: For farming:

best primary/not fire < worst primary/fire

 

Dark isn't great for farming, but its doable with /fire. The only powers you'd probably use from dark for a farm build are umbral torrent and blackstar.

[Frostweaver]

Banana, no offense, but you truly have no idea what you are talking about. I have farmed with 12 blasters  and while fire is inarguably the highest damage, it offers NOTHING ELSE. When you are farming 4/8, you need more than pure damage... a LOT more.

Now, if you are farming 1/8 or 2/8 and you are NOT farming comicon (like that cave map where NOTHING moves) then sure, fire is fairly fast. but on 125 or 133, or even on the doctor farm, you better NOT go higher than 2/8 with fire, and frankly, it has a ton more cooldown in between spawns than water or dp, which both, despite being lower damage, dramatically outperform it specifically in the farming context. Heck, even AR outperforms it in 'non patrol' farming maps.

Yeah, Fire has higher damage than anything else, but three +4 bosses per spawn and 2-5 spawns attacking at the same time will smash you again and again. The ONLY possible way that fire can hold it's own under those circumstances is if you have absolutely insane mitigation in your secondary, like ice... and even then, you are slower at moving between spawns than most others, and you are not using your secondary to add to your dps, you are using it to survive.

Best in in regular content doesn't mean best in specialty content.

Edited April 23, 2020 by Frostweaver

[Krazie Ivan]

On 4/22/2020 at 12:34 AM, Banana Man said:

I can show you in game sometime.

which server?

[Banana Man]

I'd like to think I don't weigh in on subjects unless I have some sort of idea what I'm talking about.

 

I don't farm much anymore, because I don't have any reason to, and I have a pretty short attention span for it. When I did farm, I farmed using an ice/fire blaster on maps functionally identical to the popular "Comic-Con" map set at +4/x8 with bosses on.

 

I did full clears or near full clears in about 2 minutes and 30 seconds, closer to 3 minutes on the higher end. I can show anyone who wants in person. 

 

Anyway, I was talking about the fire secondary. Fire primary is like, maybe top 4?

 

Also, you don't need a primary or secondary to mitigate any damage. Surviving on fire farms is insanely easy if you're built for it. If you're only fighting one group at a time, you could probably afk for a few minutes and not die... don't do that, though, because fighting only one group at a time is a very slow way to farm. You want to be fighting as many things as you can so you're not wasting any damage from your AoEs, and you're minimizing you're time moving/not casting. Every now and again you'll get bad RNG and take a bunch of damage, but you'll usually out-regen the follow-up, and if you're especially worried, you'll be gaining insps at a rate that you can spare a green.

 

16 minutes ago, Krazie Ivan said:

which server?

 Indom 😄

Edited April 23, 2020 by Banana Man

[Frostweaver]

Well, to be fair, my favorite farmers right now are dp/time (built for general content/dark astoria) and archery/plants (built specifically for farming 4/8 s/l).

Primarily because on the DP/time, it can survive ANYTHING, and the archery/plants drops rain of arrows every 15 seconds for 900+ damage. In general, the BEST you can do is divide your nuke time by 4 without crippling your defense/resist/regen,  and while on DP that is about 22 seconds, on archery that is about 12 seconds.

On fire, the best you can get your nuke down to is about 45 seconds. The nuke does 1300 damage, but that's still not enough to kill bosses, you still have to toss in a fireball and most likely fire breath and explosion, just like archery. The difference is, while you kill a whole spawn every 38 seconds, archery does it in the same time and is ready to move in 15 seconds, with maybe an extra second or two polishing off the bosses.

Obviously, you could move from spawn to spawn collecting bosses instead, but more than 6 bosses is extremely dangerous for a blaster. Fire can do that fairly easily with a nuke +fireball and then move to the next spawn for breath+fireball and then to the third for nuke and then fireball, but you will be left with 6 or more partial-health bosses beating on you if you move at full speed.

DP can do the same thing as archery, but tends to take a lot more time for some of it's attacks. It will slightly edge out fire moving from spawn to spawn, but it makes up for that by throwing in easy damage procs and more mitigation... it is safer for a DP to have 6-9 bosses beating on it from spawn to spawn, and then use your judgement eventually to kill a spawn or two and the leftover bosses before moving on with a clean slate.

Dark is a lot safer from quick moving for the same reason as DP... all that -to-hit means more leftover bosses with safety.

Yes, you can go ahead and slot defenses to cap, but that cuts into your global recharge, or forces you to specialize in your defense/resist. Fire's nuke is point blank, which means you need to slot s/l or melee as well as range to cap, and so you have to look at 4 different mitigation factors... s/l or melee defense, s/l or range defense, s/l resistance, and healing/regen/absorption. Obviously, incarnates help, but again you have to decide on balance... do you want to improve your resistance or defense? do you want to use assault or melee? barrier? Barrier is awesome but you could speed up your farming with other alternatives.


The REAL trick is having a farmer that can do both regular content and farming... because no blaster can rip through a map in utter speed and safety like a spine/fire or rad/fire brute, It just seems better to have a farmer that can also brace dark astoria and the like... it slows down your farming speed slightly, But with (rare) faceplants you aren't going to be running a 3.25 comic con asteroid anyway.

Yes, fire is marvelous at doing a hybrid sl farm/general content with lower difficulty in order to get vet levels.... and if you are farming in a duo, it is literally second to none. But for higher-end solo farms there are faster and safer alternatives.  And if you are willing to cut back to 2/8 farms (generally the sweet spot for blaster farmers) there are MUCH faster alternatives because a 1300 point nuke that takes 40 seconds to recharge is serious overkill and seriously slow. Like hanging drywall with a 12 pound sledge.

[Frostweaver]

No offense intended, but I have to take the statement "I did full clears in 2 minutes 30 seconds on 4/8 functionally comic con maps' with a grain of salt as big as your head. I am making an indom stealth toon to watch and video and will happily admit I am wrong if you can show me, but I would be just as happy with a personal vid so you don't have to take the inspiration hit (and functional slowdown) of a second person in the map. personal videos, unlike live/twitch style videos, are perfectly within the COC guidelines.

If you don't want to do the video, please let me know where and when so you can prove me wrong and get a public admission.

[Banana Man]

I mean, plenty of people have seen me do it, and plenty have done it themselves (because it's not a crazy achievement, and anyone can do it), including the people who made the asteroid farm map in the first place. But sure, indom server, @banana man. Idk if I can do 2:30 regularly anymore, but I can still probably do around 3 minutes, which is a little faster than most top tank/brute speeds.

 

It's not about bragging or having a big head, it's about answering a player's question asking about blaster farming. 

Edited April 23, 2020 by Banana Man