Blaster Set besides Ice?

[Daihok]

Just wondering if there are any Blasters sets that are on par with Ice? I mean everyone is Ice. So just trying to find something maybe on par with ice to be little different.

[MJB]

all of this is for blasters only, corrs/defenders/sentinels have some caveats here

 

with that said; yes there are many alternatives to ice, that may even better given certain contexts, ice is just really easy to get a lot of damage out of and is generally highly rated in all contexts.

you cant really go wrong with ice, but for other sets:

 

psi: arguably better than ice for large team environments, has fantastic burst damage, especially once the snipe changes go live, but your basic combo is will dom -> snipe -> tk blast (or strangler if you are /plant i suppose). because of the projectile travels times, all 3 attacks will hit at roughly the same time making it seem like 1 attack. you can imagine 2 or 3 psi blasters doing this at the same time would be rather scary burst damage, however the sustained damage isnt that high. once the the 3 hit combo is used, you are mostly waiting around for it to come back up

 

rad: might be top damage dealer with the snipe changes, not sure yet, but even now its definitely viable and does decent damage, its just outshone by ice atm a little bit. another thing to note is the animations dont feel as "smooth" as ice imo, but that may come down to preference

 

dark: king of 1v1's imo, you get a lot of utility between life drain and -tohit on every attack. you also get a nice hold that you can proc out. unfortunately on the current patch the snipe is rather useless, however i think its going to be amazing once the beta patch comes out, which will give a nice damage boost. the gist of the set is you trade some damage for some utility

 

fire: is a little weird, in large teams it lacks a lot of damage imo, but in small teams (think 2v2, 3v3 sort of thing) the extra damage you get from the DOTs adds up to quite a bit of offensive pressure, unfortunately the set is really hard to proc though, so you really want a hold from somewhere. strangler from /plant would be the best option, but if you have another secondary you can get char from fire mastery, or spirit shark jaws from leviathan and they kinda-sorta work. personally i run char and can do a pseudo snipe burst with char -> blaze -> blazing bolt for some burst, but its not as effective as psi

 

beam: kind of similar to fire but more up front damage/not as reliant on DOTs. probably better in smaller teams because the damage takes some time to ramp up due to needing to lead with disintegrate (no burst, but good damage tbh, it just all comes as DOTs) before you hit really hard with your other powers. it has a neat trick in that the snipe damage is REALLY delayed, so you can snipe -> lancer shot to have both hit at roughly the same time, and they both hit really hard which gives some viability to joining in on large team spikes. another thing to note is that piercing beam is bugged atm and does less damage than it should, if that ever gets fixed then it gives you a third high power attack (though with one hell of an animation time) that also does -res, which would be pretty nice i think

 

dual pistols: honestly i dont know a lot about this set, but someone is gonna get mad at me if i dont include it. the set does a tonne of damage tbh, but has a major drawback in the animation times are really long, so you spend half the time planted on the ground being an easy target

 

 

 

now ive said in a few places "good for 1v1" or "large teams" or w/e, but really all the sets listed are viable for everything atm, its just some are a little more optimised for one thing or the other. also there may be some other sets that are good and just not come to my mind as i write this... idk

 

 

tl;dr there are more options than ice ffs

 

 

[barrier]

Good summary, MJB.

 

I'll add a bit of info to that: dark/* is pretty good. Having played a ton of Ice/Temp, switching over to a Dark/Plant was night and day. Moonbeam is a great finisher and you often find yourself hitting the to-hit requirement to go instant by just clustering with your team on a spike (not that that matters when you're cycling aim and toxins) or when you get overgrowth at the start of a match. Strangler -> Abyssal Gaze -> Life Drain -> Moonbeam is a ton of proc damage, if you've built it for 8v8's (no heal slotting on Life Drain), and depending on your positioning, you can even start with Moonbeam if you know your going to be in range when you start the Strangler-led chain (and aren't going to be out of aim/bu by the end of the chain).

 

I think Ice leans a lot on plant on the current meta. BFR is a nice way to get yourself killed (I respec'd out of it on my Ice/Temp), and because you lean on plant so much, it means that the performance delta between blast sets has a lot of room for skill / picking what could be considered a subpar blast set and making it your own (as long as you have two or three things that can be 4+2 proc'd).

[Daihok]

Awesome thanks guys!, Would these sets also apply for say corrupters and sentinels? Also on corrputers Im gonna asume prolly Poison/Cold/Rad prolly make the best secondaries correct? Im just trying to get a breakdown of things. Like looking at Blaster secondaries it seems really hard to choose anything other then /Plant. I mean tactical arrow and devices look ok but im not sure. Ill be honest never pvped much back on Live but I love to pvp. So me and a friend trying to get a breakdown of things more or less. So any tips and stuff are more then welcomed. We are really trying to kinda stay away from the FOTM Ice/Plant right now.

[MJB]

you cant really go wrong with /plant, however /ta is also really strong (imo better than plant in a lot of situations) purely because of gymnastics, though grounding people with net arrow/glue arrow is endless fun. /em also gets a shoutout, its usable but not quite as good as /plant and /ta imo. /devices is getting changed on the beta patch and might be a lot more viable because of it, not sure (it does have a niche atm in that you can get perma insta-snipe thanks to targeting drone, but thats also changing on beta). i dont know about other sets

 

corrs and sentinels work a bit differently, so no the above advice doesnt quite work for them, for example the corruptor version of psi doesnt get psychic focus (aim), which is a somewhat big deal, however all corruptors get dominate from psi mastery, which helps your damage a lot regardless of primary. having said that damn near every corruptor ive seen is running ice...

 

similarly the dark mastery hold for sentinels does massive amounts of damage, which makes your primary somewhat less important, i run a psi sentinel to some success but psi for sentinels works very differently to blasters (you dont get a snipe with a travel time, so no 3 power burst). lots of people are running ice sentinels... surprise surprise. theres been some rumours of beam sentinels doing rather well, their survivability allows them to build up disintegrate stacks pretty well, and its one of the few (only?) sentinels primaries with a snipe, which is nice. other primaries i dont know a whole lot about

[Daihok]

I think Sentinel has really peaked my interest, what would be some good secondarys for sentinel? Im wondering about Ninjitsu maybe?