City of Heroes

[Jester]

My brother plays a Fire/Energy blaster... sick, sick, sick.

Ice is the 2nd most underpowered set. Lightning is worse. Single targetting, with a special ability that only works well on bosses. Yippy skippy.

Still more powerful than any other archetype, though. :)

Jester

[WarLocke]

Ice is the 2nd most underpowered set.

Uh, what? Maybe if you're just considering damage. Maybe.

I played an Ice/Ice blaster to 18 during the beta, and she was a terror. All ice powers have a slow effect, and Ice is the only blaster powerset that gets two hold powers (on top of immobilizations).

[Jester]

Well, maybe it's competing with energy. But there's no way it's going to give either fire (blow entire mobs away with a single volley) or AW (blow entire mobs away with a single volley).

The slow ability is nice. But, as every class except blaster is finding out (apparently), doing cool things to enemies is just that- cool.

Killing them, however, is the objective, or at least what levels you up. And doing that quickly means tons 'o area effect damage.

Jester

[LiquidDamage]

In my experience with the Ice Blaster I've been grouping with, things are dead before the slow matters. Knockback (energy) at least keeps them from getting off their first attack, the slow only matters on their SECOND attack.

I was under the impression that Lightning did more damage than Ice, I heard it was upped in the beta to make up for the relatively useless secondary effect. Lightning also has a hold (who needs two holds as a blaster?), and a 1 second animation, 80' range AOE instead of a 3 second 40' cone (that you really need to be at a minimum of 20' away to hit a fair number of people).

Fire and Assault are obviously the most powerful.

I think that if Blasters as a whole had their damage lowered, at least their AoE damage at a minimum, then the slow on Ice would matter more. As it is, I'm sure the slow helps loads when solo from levels 1-11, some from 12-21, and then it pretty much is worthless after you kill anything you hit with it in 2 shots.

That's the problem, there is no reason to consider anything but damage on a blaster unless you are solo, or in a small group without any overpowered builds. If they didn't do so darn much damage in the first place, the secondary effects might be more useful.

On to other topics, when are you coming back to us, Warlocke? *nag*

[roguebanshee]

At least you didn't pick Devices (aka the "I Win" set).

My current Blaster alt is Energy/Energy with a focus on short range/melee attacks, able to dish out some serious pain but doesn't have the usual Blaster defense of taking no (little) melee damage.