Help me choose a Blapper

[Mir2]

I’d like to try a toon outside my norm. Blapper it is. 
 

Base on minimal reading, I’m thinking Psi/mental or psi/atomic; but I know so little of blasters that I’m not really sure that would be best. 
 

Can anyone opine what a decent primary/secondary would be and, more importantly, WHY that combo works well?  
 

Influence is not an object, so feel free to be your opinion on a final maxed build. 

 

thanks

[Mir2]

Other notes;

 

This would generally be for teaming. 

I like “interesting” builds.  Illusion is unique, and that’s my main. Fire seems to be everywhere, so I pretty much do not play fire toons. 

[twozerofoxtrot]

Rad/En or Elec/En toasts baddies and pairs thematically. 

 

Primary has at least one PBAoE and thr secondary has strong ST melee on both.  Among other reasons to take those sets.

[OldManMercy]

I have a sonic/energy melee that's a blast to play. (Pun intended)

[biostem]

2 hours ago, Mir2 said:

Can anyone opine what a decent primary/secondary would be and, more importantly, WHY that combo works well?  

How about a classic John Woo/Matrix styled character, and go with dual pistols/martial combat?

[Spaghetti Betty]

I've recently been playing a Rad/Earth/Levi Blapper that decimates anything put in front of it. And it gets decimated just as quickly, too!

[Hjarki]

Psi isn't a particularly strong Blapper primary since it's single target controls are lacking, Psi Darts is probably the best Cone Blasters receive and the entire set is built around long range. Likewise, Atomic has relatively weak melee attacks so it's not ideal for Blapping.

 

In general, what I look for with a 'Blapper' is the ability to control/neutralize the target I'm melee'ing.

 

For example, consider Sonic/Ninja/Soul. You've got Screech with a Mag 3 Disorient and Oppressive Gloom to bring it above Mag 4 so most of your targets can't fight back. You've got Sting of the Wasp and Golden Dragonfly - both excellent attacks - and you can slot a purple proc into both (Golden Dragonfly's AF is trivial). While the Cone-centric nature of Sonic's AE is problematic, you can use AE Sleep to neutralize foes and pick apart the spawn one by one if your ultimate isn't available.

[Fire Chief]

Sonic/MA a kinda Black Canary char. sounds fun 🙂

[Nemu]

What you call blapper I call just normal blaster. Don't mistake the term with the notion that you can just stand still in melee range punching stuff. There are powersets that help you stay in melee range a little longer, but movement is still key.

 

Someone mentioned mezzes, they might work ok for even con - +2s, When you run at +4 mez duration drops off due to mob scaling, so they are less effective. Hard controls are rather lackluster in the blaster arsenal. And when I talk about controls I don't mean single target, because while you are neutralizing one mob there are 10 others shooting/punching back. I'm not dismissing the value of single target control, but if you look at the big picture you are rarely engaging just a single target, so you need to make sure their friends can't fight back either.

 

Most of the AoE control tools in the blaster arsenal are also slot traps. They typically do low to no damage, and they demand slots to be remotely spammable/effective, so now your slotting decisions are split between doing damage as you should be as a blaster vs pretending to be a really really really sub par controller. There are exceptions, and there are powers that do good damage that also have a control component, but usually the control component has a chance to happen, so they are not super reliable.

 

That said you don't NEED controls to play a blaster. You are an opportunist, and you can either create opportunities to get a hit or 2 in melee or you can leverage your teammates to create those opportunities. Movement is key. Learn to joust and never look back at the days that you thought blaster safety = hover. There are more layers than that.

 

 

I favor my fire/elec blaster above any other blaster combinations that I've tried and see other people play in game. I've also done dark/atomic where the two sets are at odds with each other because one wants to be at range firing cones and the other wants to be in melee for punches/pbaoes. The former has mitigation in the form of knockdowns which are much more reliable than other forms of hard control because it takes mobs the same amount of time to get back up regardless of level. The latter I just joust a lot.

 

Movement is key.

[tidge]

I like Water Blast/Atomic Manipulation for Blapping, paired with Combat Teleport.

 

The Primary leans heavy on the AoEs, the Secondary can pair a couple of single-target melee attacks (I use Negatron Slam and Positronic Fist) along with some PBAoE (Radioactive Cloud, Atom Smasher). I particularly like that the AoEs (and DoT) eliminate/thin out the large spawns, allowing for eventual focusing on the hardest targets.

[Hjarki]

2 hours ago, Nemu said:

Someone mentioned mezzes, they might work ok for even con - +2s, When you run at +4 mez duration drops off due to mob scaling, so they are less effective.

I mentioned two specific controls - Screech + Oppressive Gloom and Siren's Song.

 

Oppressive Gloom works just fine even on +4 - the scaling doesn't decrease the duration below the activation time. Screech less so. Screech has a 5.96s duration, which is barely enough to cover +0 at the cyclic rate you'll be using it. So you're left with three options:

• Boost the Disorient duration via enhancements. This is problematic because Blaster's Wrath (full set) is the almost default slotting for the power due to its exceptional recharge and proc.
• Boost the Disorient duration via Incarnates. While Resilient doesn't work particularly well, Spiritual is actually a strong choice in many cases since it will often add more damage than Musculature (due to the recharge reduction).
• Deal with the fact that your coverage isn't 100%. Bear in mind we're not talking about building for 0% Defense/0% Resist on the premise that our status effects will render us immune to all harm. Even 80% coverage on a Disorient is still a significant reduction in damage.

Siren's Song has a duration more than sufficient to perma-Sleep a mob even at +4. However, Sleep isn't very useful in teams and covering an entire spawn with Siren's Song can be tricky. So it's mostly useful solo and as a conventional ranged AE rather than a Dominator-style City of Statues.

 

I agree that most AE controls are mostly pointless. I'd extend this to most AE anything in secondary. Blaster defenses simply don't get good enough to wander into a crowd and blast them all without killing any of them and survive. It's one thing to clear the room with Inferno and leave a few stray bosses - but conventional secondary AE is just going to get you killed in non-trivial content. Couple this with the fact that most secondary AE isn't really any better than what you have in primary for Blast sets, there's little reason to take it.

 

So, in my mind, Blapping is primarily about augmenting single target damage - replacing low damage ranged attacks with high damage melee ones in your rotation. However, the only time you're using those attacks is either when you've either controlled/eliminated all those minions or when you reach that final AV/GM.

 

In the former case, being able to go one-on-one with a Boss with little risk of harm is a significant advantage - and one that traditional SLER approaches don't really offer. In the latter case, there really isn't anything you can do but bring someone to tank the AV/GM or fight it entirely at range.

 

Additional Note: Oppressive Gloom is actually a pretty decent way to ensure you get the mano-on-mano fight I was discussing above since Stupefy is such a strong slotting. While ordinarily this is a massive pain due to the KB proc, the proc chance on a single target (the one you care about) is relatively low and the combination of Stun/KB tends to keep the riff-raff off your back. It still needs to be augmented with defenses/resists, but the total damage reduction is significant. However, Oppressive Gloom only really helps if you got a Stun you're working in conjunction with in primary/secondary.

 

Additional Note #2: You mentioned Fire/Electric. One of the reasons Electric is such a strong choice for Blapping is Shocking Grasp and its attendant Hold. While you're not going to get the guaranteed sort of stacking with Sonic/X/Soul, you're still minimizing the incoming damage with status effects.

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by Hjarki

[Mir2]

Thank you all for the feedback. 
 

I might be misusing “Blapper”. I intend to play this toon at BOTH range and melee. Preferably jumping back and forth with Combat Teleport (in case that changes any recommendations). 

[Nemu]

@HjarkiI don't think you are disagreeing with me too much on what I said. I will share my outlook on PbAoEs and what makes /Electric so strong.

 

I do use my pbaoes in the secondary regularly but not all of them are built the same and there are ones I favor and ones I think are doo-doo like atom smasher. The biggest factors are radius, secondary effect and cast time. Lotus drops for example has an 8 ft radius and a meh secondary effect, and it is the doo-dooist of the doo-doo pbaoes because it might as well be a low damage single target attack. Deafening wave is 15ft radius and you can cram hold damage procs galore in that power which makes it the most un-doo-dooist of PbAoEs. And then you have Thunderstrike that has a 10 ft radius, 3 second cast time, doesn't do all that much AoE damage which on paper makes it seem very doo-doo. But it has great secondary effects in AoE knockback (converted to KD) and stun which makes it in fact, not doo-doo and a staple in my /elec kit.

 

Since I'm Fire/Elec I don't get too much value out of shocking grasp as if I were Ice/Elec because I don't have a reliable way of stacking holds, and especially since I slotted Shocking Grasp as an Attack/proc monster I don't get a whole lot of hold duration when I do double stack holds via the Blistering cold proc in charged brawl on a boss. What has consistently allowed me to go toe to toe with multiple +4 bosses is my ability to rotate knockdowns via Thunderstrike and Force of Thunder, and both powers can also stun (not something I bank on). I've espoused chain knockdown when I came back to Homecoming and to date I think people are still underestimating how useful and how fun that is.

 

On my Fire/Elec I have multiple layers for survival - being mobile, kill stuff fast, softcap defenses, chain knockdowns/stun stacking, a hold, and even end drain (which I've used on LGTF against hami to slow down its blasts).

 

On the other hand I also picked Fire/Elec because it has a very fast, high DPA ST attack chain when you look at the cast times on blaze, blazing bolt, charged brawl and shocking grasp. Since Thunderstrike and Force of Thunder both take Force Feedback procs and I spam them regularly as part of my game plan they only feed my recharge rate. More Inferno=more fun. This combination gives me the best of all the worlds - AoE damage, ST damage, Range damage, face punching damage, tankmagery/mitigation, fun.

[Nemu]

47 minutes ago, Mir2 said:

I might be misusing “Blapper”

You are not, it's a real term that makes range blasting sound like the norm and using your melee attacks an outlier. I don't agree with that at all. Blasters use both their primary and secondary and those that skip their secondary are the outliers, Of all the other ATs can you think of any that promotes skipping half their powerset as the norm?

Edited August 9, 2023 by Nemu

[tidge]

3 hours ago, Nemu said:

... Of all the other ATs can you think of any that promotes skipping half their powerset as the norm?

 

No disagreement, but I feel like mentioning the Traps secondary for Masterminds has five skippable powers in Web Grenade, Triage Beacon, Seeker Drones, Trip Mine and Detonator. I'm not saying that they can't have their uses, it is more that I feel like I'd have to be playing a lot of very specific content to want to work any of those back into my build.

 

To emphasize the point by @Nemu: Blasters have a Melee Damage Scale of 1.0; there is no a priori reason to skip melee attacks on them if the primary goal is to do as much damage as possible with a Blaster.

[Nemu]

On 8/9/2023 at 1:34 AM, Mir2 said:

Other notes;

 

This would generally be for teaming. 

I like “interesting” builds.  Illusion is unique, and that’s my main. Fire seems to be everywhere, so I pretty much do not play fire toons. 

So first of all my comment about blappers is not a personal attack on you. I'm just trying to highlight the common philosophy around this AT and how it doesn't align with how every other AT is played.

 

I want to do my part to stop perpetuating this fallacy, and my goal is to help you be successful.

 

As for this comment about interesting builds for teaming, you can always try this jank.

 

 

You won't have the luxury of softcap defenses with this build but it gives you enough tools to do stuff in melee range. Knowing how to play blasters is key, movement is key.

 

As for your comment about using combat teleport - you can't joust with combat teleport. Your mind is in the right place: get in, get out. But where you are most vulnerable is getting locked in animation while you are in melee range trying to fire off that 2-3 second attack. What good is combat tp when you die to retaliation or get mezzed then die during animation before you can use it to get out? Learn how to joust, it is more useful in those combat situations than combat tp.

 

Secondly, combat tp consumes a pool slot. Typical builds will include hasten sometimes just because. Most go tough/weave, some take leadership for more defense/to-hit/Blind protection, teleport could be the last pool consumed. I'd recommend patching up as many holes as possible if you want to dip your toes in melee. Blasters are weak against mez, some like holds/sleep/disorient you are going to suck it up and burn a breakfree on. Immobilize is yet another mez, it's not as serious as the others because you can still attack, but an immobile blaster is a DEAD blaster. Combat jumping is an easy fix, it give you immob protection. In addition, that jump control gives you better mobility for jousting.

 

An immobile blaster is a DEAD blaster, I also recommend a healthy dose of slow resist. Ever get stuck in a caltrops patch or get slowed by psi attacks that neuter your recharge? Blasters depend on mobility and doing damage, if you can't do either you are going to die. Don't skimp on slow resist.

[tidge]

I find Combat Teleport to be really useful on Blappers: 

• teleport into make a melee attack, including those you have targeted but are otherwise blocked from range attacks
• teleporting "backwards" for a ranged cone attack
• getting "unstuck" from map geometries (and from slow/immobilize patches)
• It offers a short +10% ToHit after BAMFing

Some attacks do have long-ish animation times... but that's not a reason to avoid Combat Teleport. If the Blaster has put down some sort of (soft, or not) control patch like a slow or knockdown BAMFing around works just fine.

 

I generally agree that the Teleportation pool isn't a great one for mules, but the powers do offer places to put the Universal Travel global pieces, including the 20% Slow Resist. Personally, I don't like Teleportation for zone travel. Two pieces of Blessing of the Zephyr offers some positional ranged defense as a set bonus.

[Mir2]

Thanks again, everyone. 
 

For now, I’m going with DP/MA.  I’ll see if I like it at all. 

[kelika2]

ice/energy is the classic

 

[Herotu]

On 8/9/2023 at 9:07 AM, biostem said:

How about a classic John Woo/Matrix styled character, and go with dual pistols/martial combat?

I was going to suggest this combo.

I saw someone using it once, the teleport looked fun but I didn't level mine.