Can blasters reliebly solo?

[ninja surprise]

On 4/21/2025 at 10:09 PM, Naturallymorbid said:

With that im fairly used to but i feel im lacking in tools in certain situations particurally with tougher enemies, a blaster's main tool is their damage while other ATs have other tools, doms and trollers have thier CC, defenders and corrupters have buffs/debuffs, MM have thier minions.

 

what my issue was that it felt lacking, while you can knock out 90% of a mob with your alpha dealing with bosses or other hard to kill enemies can be a real issue, especially when i started going into melee range.

 

ill give you an example: my Arsenal/Savage dom is fairly squishy but even with +4 mobs, in the first 2 seconds of a fight the whole mob is already blinded, confused and under an ice patch, then followed by stun grande and tear gas - the versatility of CC feel more well rounded, while its way slower than blowing everything up, there is particularly no outgoing damage.

 

You're forgetting that most blaster sets have crowd control: knockback, fear, stun, knockdown, slow, confuse, immob, hold, endurance drain, etc.

 

Sure, a Fire/Fire/Fire blaster is pure damage, but Hot Feet does fear, Bonfire does KD/KB depending on slots, Rain of Fire does slow, -Fly, -Jump, Ring of Fire does immob, Char is a hold, etc. Plus, the inherent power means your first two Primary powers and first Secondary power can be used while you're mezzed so you can always attack even while held/stunned/etc.

 

So approaching a spawn I'll pop some build up or aim, throw a Bonfire and Fireball, trigger Rain of Fire, and a lot of mobs will be defeated or flopping and the rest will be running around in a panic. I have Hot Feet running and drop a Burn. Some mobs run up to melee range, then get scared and run away. I keep blasting like crazy at whatever's closest or most dangerous, while mobs run in for an attack and then run away to get out of the AoEs. Pop inspirations as they drop because that's what they're for, and have a ton of fun.

 

Blasters aren't just helpless damage dealers.

[The Witchfire]

OK, I'm going to necro this one since another thread had me briefly grumbling with my past experiences playing blasters.

 

First, let me say there's alot of good, but conditional advice on blasting in the thread.  I say conditional because most of it seems to assume the character is already at 50 and possibly also has been sugar daddy'ed into IO sets.

 

The game plays completely diferent when you're new and broke. Doubly so if you play at odd hours and can't make steady friends for teaming.  That was my situation the first year or so of playing Live.

 

I started playing blasters because, as Miyagi said "Best way avoid punch, no be there".

 

Side note; anybody else find it silly that a man who had been in the US for almost 50 years at that point spoke such broken English? 😄

 

Geting back on topic, the advice I got was always the same ; fly / hover and kite. I'd always get knocked out of the air though, or run out of space to backpedal in the instanced maps.

 

I think it took 3 years of soloing to get that first Blaster to 50, and the character never was able to farm up a single IO set.  The time was partialy because I racked up so much debt i'd set the character aside and let it burn off.

 

Instead of sounding like I'm just bitching, the general problem I found was that somewhere betwen 15 and 20, the mobs became too big and too damage resistant to take down before I'd get mobbed.

 

I got a bit better over the years, but I gotta say Blasters were probbaly my least favorite class. If anybody has tips for low / poor characters I'm all ears.

Edited Wednesday at 08:18 AM by The Witchfire
Speling corrections again

[Maelwys]

The addition of Blaster "sustains" (like Frigid Protection and Energize) and the removal of the Nuke crash in issue 24 drastically improved things compared to Live.

My Fire/Ice Blaster (who is built almost entirely for offense, not defense) now has roughly the same passive mitigation as my Regen Scrapper did on live.
~17.729 Absorb/Sec from Frigid Protection + ~27.733 HP/Sec average from their regular stats plus 2x Power Transfer and 1x Panacea Proc = ~45.462 HP/Sec. Plus ~30.7% S/L Resistance and ~7.5% Ranged Defense and other on-demand damage reduction powers like Ice Patch and Shiver.

Back on Live my old Regen Scrapper had no defense or resistance to speak of and ~55 HP/Sec (with their original SO build) and ~71 HP/Sec (with IOs in i19).

It's perfectly viable to build a soloing Blaster that only relies on their Sustain + Clarion Core Destiny for Mex Protection. And if you're not level 50 yet; some limited mez protection can be had by picking specific secondary powersets (like Martial Combat) or you can cheese it by putting the "Defiant Barrage" proc into one of your T1/T2 blast powers (so that you can use it whilst mezzed and give yourself protection to that mez).

You definitely do not need to build for the 45% S/L or Ranged defense softcap on a Blaster... although I've done both in my time.
 

 
I appreciate that not having enough funds to fully kit yourself out in IOs makes things trickier; but there are a few specific IOs that IMO give a Blaster a big benefit whilst levelling up (a Panacea proc in Health; Power Transfer procs in Stamina and your sustain, a Blessing of the Zephyr Knockback Protection global in a Travel power and a Stealth IO in Sprint would provide the biggest survivability benefits IMO... and a Gaussian Proc in either Aim or Build Up plus a few LoTG +Rechs help with offense!) and you definitely do not need to be a marketeer to afford them. Merely collecting a few Exploration Badges and running a few regular contact mission arcs for Merits (to swap for Boosters/Converters) and Prismatic Aethers will provide you with more than enough inf for them. Most of my new alts get transferred a little starter cash for START powers; but they're typically all "self-financing" by the time they hit level 7-10. It's their endgame builds that need at least half a billion (and even then, the new alt typically contributes at least half of it).
 

[Nemu]

2 hours ago, The Witchfire said:

I got a bit better over the years, but I gotta say Blasters were probbaly my least favorite class. If anybody has tips for low / poor characters I'm all ears.

 

My first 50 on homecoming is my Fire/Elec blaster. Like you I had no funds and I had to start out from scratch. I've noted in many blaster posts in the past that blaster success is a combination of understanding game mechanics:

 

-knowing when to move and where to move

-inspiration combination and usage

-prioritizing targets

-using distance and line of sight

-leveraging synergistic soft/hard controls in your toolkit

-living by the mantra "kill things before they kill me"

 

Regardless of builds or budget. If your idea of engagement with blasters is to hover and open with snipe and stay in one spot and blast you are doomed to fail. If your idea of nuking with pbaoes is to slow walk up to the mobs and endure them shooting at you as you plop down near the pack and stay animation locked for a few seconds before payload, you are going to fail as a blaster.

 

People that espouse the "hover blasters is the only way to play squishy blasters regardless of budget and build" playstyle are lazy or ignorant people still living in the past, that haven't taken the time to learn and master how to play blasters.

 

Builds contribute maybe 25% to your overall success, defensive builds gives you some cushion/tolerance for making some survival mistakes but they don't make you immortal.

 

Back to my Fire/Elec, when I leveled it I was using SO/DOs, which ever dropped for me. I also didn't avoid melee but actively sought out opportunities to use my punches because they are my highest damaging attacks, because dead things don't fight back. I used combat jumping and jousting to take me in and out of melee range quickly and I used build up/aim for burst damage to end the fight quickly. I never stop moving, engagements is a fluid mix of punches and blasts with me not being in one place for more than 1-2 seconds. This keeps mob AI constantly switching between chase mode and shoot mode and seldom melee mode, where they do the most damage. If you want a tutorial on jousting watch the videos I posted earlier in this thread.

 

There's also no shame in hiding behind obstacles. Using line of sight is fundamental to blaster success and what a lot of hover blasters don't get. Hovering in the air still makes you a sitting duck, but if you hide behind line of sight you control how mobs engage you. Use that time to pop lucks, buy yourself time for buildup/aim to recharge, etc...

 

During downtime I was actively converting my inspirations into lucks and breakfrees, it's difficult at first due to lack of inspiration slots but during the mid 20s you should be able to always convert 1-2 at any given time. I used them prior to engagements that I knew to be tricky. Monitor your range and S/L defense, for those tricky engagement pop lucks till those defense values reach mid-high 30s and unless you are running +4/8, you should be able to do some "watch this!" shenanigans.

 

One of the first IOs I got was the sudden acceleration knockback to knockdown procs. I put that in thunderstrike and force of thunder as I leveled up. So in addition to leveraging movement, inspiration usage, I also had some soft control tools to help me survive.

 

And I was doing all the things I did on my level 50 before I even completed my build. It just took more prep.

 

Target priority comes with experience. You play this game enough then you should know to burst Tsoo sorcerers ASAP, kill Sappers, interrupt sky raider engineers, etc...

 

Also on teams, do not run away from the team and isolate yourself. If you get in trouble kite the mob back to the team.

 

Summing it up, being agile and use lucks/breakfrees - blaster success. Staying in one place and not using inspirations - dead blaster. Most of the Hover blasting rhetoric I see in game and on the forums is from people that don't know or care to learn how to play blasters. 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Another approach to blaster building and playstyle is to pick whether you'd like to be mostly in melee, near melee, or far away. Then pick powers and slot for success when fighting where you're planning to fight. Then be consistent with your plans, only shifting where you fight if that is needed for survival reasons.  

Movement costs time, which adds up if you're moving a lot. A lot of perspective changes as you shift between places increases cognitive load and will increase errors in reading what's happening. Also, if you have a smooth and well constructed ranged attack chain then you may not increase damage much, if at all, if you sacrifice multiple ranged attacks to joust and pull off a single hard hitting melee attack. Basically, if you don't need to move around a lot, then it's very often better to not do that. 

On a similar note, there is value in hover blasting in one place, whether that place be in melee, near melee, or far away from melee. Cognitive load is reduced, which tends to make decision making better. Also, a fully ranged blaster who consistently maintains their range from a fight can see how a fight is evolving better than one in melee, better than one who is moving all over the battlefield. A fully ranged blaster can do a better job of picking out priority targets and figuring out where in a battle to apply their AOEs and mezzes to maximize their effect. They may give up some DPS by not making a lot of use of hard hitting melee attacks. But, in exchange they can switch targets quicker (on average) with ranged attacks than with melee attacks and they can put their DPS to better use through better target selection. 

Personally, I like building blasters to be in melee 90% of the time, or more. You get fulcrum shift as a matter of course, which usually greatly improves damage, without needing to stop attacking to move in and get it. You get any other AOE buffs aimed at the tank without thinking about it or spending time moving into and out of melee range. I sometimes joust when leveling. But, once endgame has arrived I'd much rather just stay in a consistent place in battles and focus on dishing out damage. If being in melee on the ground gets too dangerous then I'll usually hover just above the fight and stay in melee range that way; there is always a sweet spot above mobs in which you can melee those on the ground, but they can't use their melee attacks against you as you hover above them. If I don't have the ability to hover slightly above the fray on a blaster, and it's too dangerous to be in the thick of melee, then I'll shift to the edges of a melee scrum and fight there. I give up on having a better picture of how larger battles are unfolding by by consistently being in or near melee, though, so there is a tradeoff. I just happen to enjoy fighting in melee range more, so I stick with it. 

That said, I would agree with a lot of what Nemu is suggesting. For example, using line of sight is inarguably a good idea and it's a really effective way to reduce incoming damage. Also, when soloing, jousting can be a useful tool to confuse enemy AI, which will help to reduce incoming damage. That can be worthwhile even when the time lost to moving while jousting leads to any DPS increase being quite minimal. 

Edited Wednesday at 04:24 PM by EnjoyTheJourney

[Nemu]

I should clarify my stance on hover blasting. There's a difference between blasters that know what they are doing and choose to hover blast and those that endorse the idea that blasters are a pure ranged AT and one should skip any melee attacks in the secondary in favor of hover blasting. The latter wrongly believes that hover blasting is the most important aspect of blaster survival across all stages of a blaster's career. Most of the rhetoric I see on hoverblasting are rooted in the latter. It is the inspiration for the hundreds of hover blaster builds I see here on the forums. 

 

While I have a severe distaste for that rhetoric, I understand that my view on blasting endorses a very frantic playstyle compared to hover blasting. It's not everyone's cup of tea and some players simply don't have the mental or manual dexterity to play like that. I also fully concede that this game is easy enough that hover blasting and not using half your toolkit can still get the job done with a modicum of range defense so nowadays I don't fight that sentiment anymore. Still, mobs will still get in your face, you don't have the luxury of playing on open maps all the time. You need to learn blaster survival tactics regardless of your decision to adopt either playstyle. For example, instead of jousting you can still fly and pick opportune times to unload melee range attacks or just use lucks to make sure you don't get hit, but you need to understand those mechanics to be successful.

 

I agree on the virtues of staying in one place for certain content, hover blasting or not. This is much more evident on higher difficulty content where blasters need to stick with the group for buffs/support. That falls under the first point under my list of blaster success criteria - knowing when and where to move (and when to not move).

 

As for lost time during jousting and target priority, I solve that problem by landing right next to the target I want to punch/blast while I'm bouncing around the battlefield. This way I don't have to play whack a mole with the tab key. If I were less lazy I'd make a targeting bind for all the problem targets.

 

TL:DR Hover blast for the right reasons, don't be that guy that stays 30ft in the air all the time missing out on team buffs because "hovering keeps you safe"

[MoiMon]

my first character in OG CoH was a blaster Engergy and I tried to recreate that character as close as I remember it and I pretty much Soloed it being pure blaster you just need to keep an eye on large enemy groups and have an alernatyve power set that let you at leas scape or incapacitate other foes while you blast them, the trick is do not let them near you at any time or at least not in large numbers.