Some love at last
Since I first started playing City of Heroes I thought that the Blasters really needed some love. Why? Well, honestly their base special ability, defiance, sucked all possible ass. As you took more damage you would deal more damage. This sounded like a good idea on paper but it just never worked out. First of all in order to get it to do much of anything you had to be down to about 25% of your health. To have a serious effect you had to be knocking on death’s door. The problem is that blasters don’t have much in the realm of hitpoints so if you got there the next shot killed you. All in all it was something you’d be lucky to ever see do anything.
But all of that has changed! They scrapped the old system and replaced it with something more sensible: a damage bonus for using your attacks in quick succession, which honestly, you do anyway.
What’s more they made it so you can still use a couple of your abilities while you are mezzed, and that takes a bit of care of the other problem. Since blasters have no defense, little to no ability to mitigate damage, and zero mezz protection (that being held, put to sleep, and stunned for those who don’t play it) your biggest problem was standing around during fights holding your head. Now you can at least knock a few shots off.
Oh yeah. Plus the 12.5% overall ranged damage bonus. I think it is about time they realized that scrappers ended up doing a lot more damage overall since range doesn’t really exist in the game as much as you would like. It isn’t like a sniper rifle can shoot half a mile or anything.
So overall they’ve finally fixed something that has been bugging me as long as I’ve played and showed some love for those who have needed it for a LOOOOONG time.