FB/TA/FM Build could use some help please! Cinder Shot!

[GanjaGamer501]

@Nemu You were very knowledgeable and would very much appreciate so further details. 

[Nemu]

 

10 minutes ago, GanjaGamer501 said:

further details. 

Welcome to the game!

 

I'll provide a detailed write up in a bit. Stay tuned!

[Nemu]

Ok, I'm going to cover few basics about blasters. Some of which you might already know, some of it might give you new insights.

 

1. Blasters are squishy out of the box. They have the following weaknesses: no defense, no mez protection, no resistance to debuffs.
2. They make up for this by doing a lot more damage out of the box, most, but not all blasters have a lot more AoE alpha strike fire power than other ATs
3. They are not necessarily a pure ranged AT, rather they are a pure damage AT. However, the combo that you picked with Tactical Arrows favor pure ranged play. Other secondaries have melee attacks that hit hard.
4. The trick is to balance offense with survival. Survival can be accomplished a few different ways, none of which are exclusive with each other:

•      Kill things before they kill you. This above all is the blaster mantra. Dead things don't fight back, and you don't get XP for just surviving.
•      Using inspirations proactively. As a blaster you should prioritize stocking your inspiration tray with breakfrees and lucks and their variants. You can convert 3 of the same inspirations into another. You should take a moment during your downtime to do so.
•      Leveraging your mitigation toolkit. Blasters have access to a small arsenal of mitigation tools in the form of holds/stuns/knockdowns, either from the primary or secondary or even pools. Some of these are worth taking to give you momentary respite from problem mobs. You are not trying to be a controller though, you only need to disable them long enough to either retreat or kill them. So don't over invest in slotting those powers for holds/stuns/etc.. especially if they do damage, remember the mantra.
•      Learning game mechanics and taking advantage of them. There are a few ways you can influence mob AI to buy you time. If you are getting shot at out in the open hide behind something and break line of sight. This stops the attacks and forces mobs to chase you, which gives you time to pop inspirations. If you alpha strike a group and enough mobs die from the volley, this will trigger fear in other mobs sometimes and make them run, which also buys you time. Movement is a pretty critical skill that is taken for granted. A lot of blasters die because they don't move when they should.
•      Learning problem mobs in a group that you need to take out first. This comes with experience. Typically you want to target debuffers, things that mez, healers/buffers in a group first, when those don't exist then it should be whatever is the highest threat, typically bosses. Sometimes you can do that with your AoE alpha volley, some times you need to focus a bit more with your single target attacks.
•      Making a build with IO sets that shores up your defense. This will have the biggest immediate impact to your performance, but learning/mastering the other bullet points will make you a much better player.

General game tips you might find useful:

1. The current build meta is focused on defense. 45% defense is the softcap for regular content, that means mobs without buffs will have a 5% chance of hitting you. Since blasters have high damage out of the box, many blaster builds choose to build this way and still retain respectable offense.
2. Defense is broken in to two categories - positional and defense against damage types.

• Positional defense has 3 types - Melee, Range, and AoE
• Defense against damage types have a much more diverse roster - Smashing/Lethal is the most common type of damage type, Energy damage is very prevalent as well, then there's fire/cold/negative energy/psi and toxic damage.
• Very very few builds can softcap all these defenses, your play style will determine which defense you prioritize.
• If you haven't already and you own a windows PC. You can use mids reborn to review and plan out your builds. Go download mids reborn here: https://midsreborn.com/
• In game you can monitor up to 10 attributes via the power - combat attributes selection. The typical ones I monitor are some combination of defenses, some resists, regeneration, recovery, recharge, and damage. These numbers will tell you how many inspirations you need to softcap defense and whether you are being debuffed or not.
• Speaking of debuffs, blasters have no debuff resistance so while softcapping is nice, it can and will get stripped when you face overwhelming odds. Remember the blaster mantra.

 

General play style tips and showcase. It's perfectly fine to hover blast so don't feel compelled to joust as I demonstrated in the videos in the following link

 

Please read my commentary in the first post about range defense. I have maintained for a long time that range defense is the most important defensive attribute to build for on a blaster focused on survival. It's certainly the case for your build since tactical arrow leans heavily into the pure range play style, but it's just as important for blasters that punch face.

 

I'll give build commentary in a bit.

[Nemu]

Ok your build. I need to know how much influence you have to work with. Builds aren't cheap, and even the cheapest build can run into into double digit millions of inf. Which is why I would prioritize learning the game and adopting a playstyle while you make that money to outfit a build suited for you, and then upgrade.

 

As to how to make influence there are a few ways, you can run content like task forces and story arcs for reward merits and turn those merits in for crafting supplies such as enhancement converters and sell them on the auction house for a quick profit. Just doing content as a level 50 will also net you a few million inf per play session if doing group content. On large teams there'll usually be two types of players, those that can carry the team and those that tag along. And it's perfectly ok to tag along. There are many detailed guides on making influence in the market section of the forums and I'm not going to give any more advice here since I'm not an expert (though I do well enough to out fit every one of my characters with top end builds that work for me).

 

General philosophies with making builds:

 

1 - define your goals

2 - identify synergies in your power pairing/pools that contribute to your goals

3 - identify and triage gaps that you need to address (to the best of your ability, some gaps aren't addressed and that is ok too)

4 - put plan to action via mids

 

Rather than providing you a build right away take a look at this for general build principals and a very loose outline of the build making process:
 

 

What you will see from that thread is that like most other games there's little value in spreading out your focus when you build when it comes to set bonuses. There are at most 2 core attributes you really want to build on, and the rest are "nice to haves." Most builds I see on the forums lack focus. The link above gives you an example of how to bring focus to a build. You don't need to memorize all the sets and their bonuses, what's important is that you understand the "why."

 

For part 3 I'll chime in on your actual build.

[GanjaGamer501]

1. Goals=     Team player: master of dropping DA' BOMB on mobs, True Shooter style Blaster (like the name implies} I want to Blast Stuff! Soloing AV's is NOT my goal but being able to maybe die once or twice before melting them solo would be ok. Less Sheilds because friends should be sharing theirs and MORE POWER (Tim the Tool Man Taylor's grunt). 

 

2. Identifying synergies=    I really like the Oil Slick and fire rain combo along with the Net arrow and ice arrows (for trapping in said fire rings); bone fire is a must (with knockdown enhancement) to also help (control mobs) {I know I'm not a controller, but I know I'm a glass cannon safety from a distance is important}.   Fb BB and Fire Ball are my main attacks, and I wouldn't trade any of them for anything.

 Infernos damage is amazing, but it puts me directly into combat something a true ranged induvial should avoid.

 As for Leadership and the other power pools I don't really know what synergizes with MY build, so I was reading what they said they did and tried to pick the best. I figured better aim and defense were a must, so I took Leadership, and my toon has wings ofc I'm taking fly/hover. 

 

3. Identifying gaps=   Endo was my major gap at first but after spending a little influ I made it so that wasn't a problem. But since then, I've only be criticized about my build, and I never really saw anything wrong w/ it. Even now I'm wandering does making up for Defense take away from that issue of Endo I already solved. 

 

4 Mids plan= Oh boy where to begin.......so if you are struggling to get everything mids is a BAD SUGGESTION. It's like only knowing English, but reading building instructions written in Chinese and spoken in French. I can slot and do everything in there but it doesn't really show me anything if I don't have 100 Kazillion Infu. I know what a fully loaded Toon CAN be but I'm a broke hoe with not a lot of extra spending cash. 

 

Below is as far as I made it before looking up prices and just about crying.

[Nemu]

Mids can be daunting at first, there's a lot to unpack with the tool. But it is the most popular way to share builds so it's a good tool to have. Familiarity with it come over time but for now it's a good way to see how other people are building. The key when reviewing builds is looking at the set bonuses slotted in each power and understanding WHY they are used and how they contribute to the end goal. It's easy to spot the goal with focused builds because you will see repetition in the types of bonuses accrued.

 

Just a quick tip on mids, one of the first things I open up when I look at a build is to click the view totals button:

 

This is pop up a window that shows you some core stats for the build. The first tab has all the defensive stats. A lot of ranged builds shoot for 45% defense to range defense.

 

Because you are just starting out, I hesitate to give you any complete builds and chose instead to focus my first two posts on blaster and game play overview. Like I said, understanding those will do far more for you than just tossing you a build.

 

But I did commit to giving you some build information in my third post so I'm going to tier these builds out based on budget, with the goal of getting you a bit more survival solo and addressing some of those challenges you described.

 

The goal is to make a build that has good endurance management and some range defense (shooting for around 30% so you can use one luck to achieve high avoidance) so you can have an easier time soloing, and so that teammate buffs can more easily put you into softcap.

 

First endurance. All blasters get a "sustain" power by level 20 from their secondary that basically gives them unlimited endurance, you just need to slot it. For Tactical Arrow that power is Eagle Eye. It gives twice the base endurance recovery than stamina, so slot that with endurance modification first and you may never have to slot stamina. While it does help with regeneration my take is that the regeneration bonus from slotting it is far less ROI than slotting it for endurance. If I had to prioritize between the two, endurance all day every day. Eagle eye is a toggle, so make sure you toggle on for it to work.

 

A basic skeleton of power picks for my core build looks like this:

 

I toggle on the useful combat toggles (excluding travel power like fly). At this point my defense is 7% and my endurance recovery minus endurance use from toggles at the bottom of the totals tab is about 1.5 end/s

 

First thing I will do is 3 slot eagle eye with 3 end mod SOs

 

You see end recovery jump to 3.71. Compare that to 3 slotting stamina:

Eagle eye is way better than stamina, as are all blaster sustains. If you can recover net 2 endurance/second, then you are in decent shape for endurance management.

 

Next I added end reducer to each toggle except combat jumping, look at the end cost in the powers window for combat jumping, it costs practically nothing. so I put a defense SO in there instead

 

Now your net endurance recovery is almost 3 end/sec.

 

Next we are going to work on defense, we will be using some budget sets, and I'll be focusing on attack sets since the blaster mantra is to kill before you get killed, so damage is important. I want to focus on the ones that are cheap and gives me the most bang for my buck. I know this by heart, so the first place I look to slot sets are in my targeted aoes - fireball, oil slick arrow and rain of fire, with the artillery set which gives me 4% total range defense at 6 slots.

 

My range defense went from 7% to almost 20% The next set I'll use is Thunderstrike which slots into your ranged single target attacks. It gives a total of 3.75% range defense

 

 

We hit 30% range defense! Its worth mentioning that there are 2 Unique resist set IOs that give you 3% defense to all, one is more expensive than the other. The cheaper one is the steadfast protection res/def unique IO and you can slot that in Fire Shield

 

 

You are at 33% range defense, which means a small luck will put you at softcap where enemies have a 5% chance to hit you. At this point the primary 2 goals are done. you can start filling out the rest of the slots with SOs if you are on a budget.

Blaster (Fire Blast - Tactical Arrow).mbd

 

I put a blessing of the zephyr -KB IO in fly so you have some protection against knockdown/knockback. I also slotted bonfire with the IOs you mentioned. The build still has 4 slots to spare. The budget will run you around 50-80 million inf (excluding SOs) depending on how patient you are with the auction house. While it sounds like a lot, you can earn a few million inf at 50 during a play session, and if you compliment that with other money making tactics like selling stuff on the auction house or converting reward merits to influence, you'll get there pretty quickly. FYI top end builds have a budget in the billions, so sub 100 million builds are VERY cheap in comparison.

 

Having said that, play style and learning the game will contribute far more to your success, and I can teach you. Reach out to me in game whenever you want to team up and I can show you a few things.