Spud's covered most of it quite well, so I'll just add in a few observations of my own from playing an En/En blapper to 50.
You are squishy, you will get squished occasionally. But to make up for that you do a lot of damage.
I found the 4 biggest things I was looking for when picking sets for HEAT were recharge, recovery, accuracy and damage. in about that order. Your experiences may vary. The reasons for damage and accuracy should be fairly obvious. Recharge too, the better it is, the more you can attack and the more often Build up and Aim[0] will be available. I'm planning on slotting HEAT for recovery as well because I find she burns through a lot of endurance very quickly. That may just be my currently sucky build though. Also, Conserve Power and Power Boost are fairly useful, especially if you're making heavy use of your stun and knock-back.
As far as pool powers go, fighting won't give you great defences but you can stick a LotG +7.5 in Weave, which is the sole reason HEAT has that pool. Hasten is also not to be sneered at, even if you don't choose Super Speed as your travel power. I went with Super Jumping for the Mez protection. Depending on how many powers you take from your primary, you should have a lot of choices open[1].
I don't play HEAT using the nuke-stun pattern that Spud suggests, but it's a good strategy. This mostly happened because I started playing her before we could combine insps, and so ensuring I had enough blues on hand to keep fighting should Nova not wipe the spawn was irritatingly inconvenient.
As Spud said, cycling through targets to spread the stuns around is a good tactic, especially while you're waiting for Build Up and Aim to recharge. And his priorities for targeting are pretty much spot on. Take out their support in the initial strike, then move on to the minions. Dark Astoria taught me one valuable lesson: for an archetype that's as squishy as a blapper, massed fire from a hoard of minions is more dangerous than a single boss[2].
I probably don't play HEAT as well as I could, so she dies a fair bit. I've accepted this as a fair trade off for the amount of damage she puts out[3] and chose my ancillary power pool to get Rise of the Phoenix.
[0] Aim and Build Up, the two most wonderful powers in the game (for a blapper). The only reason a blapper should be using them only once in a fight is because the spawn was defeated before they recharged.
[1] I only took three, Power Bolts, Aim and Nova.
[2] Most of the time anyway.
[3] I'm apparently the opposite of Terrance, in that I don't mind dieing or running from a fight, but the piddly damage output of a tank makes me die a little inside whenever I play one.
You are squishy, you will get squished occasionally. But to make up for that you do a lot of damage.
I found the 4 biggest things I was looking for when picking sets for HEAT were recharge, recovery, accuracy and damage. in about that order. Your experiences may vary. The reasons for damage and accuracy should be fairly obvious. Recharge too, the better it is, the more you can attack and the more often Build up and Aim[0] will be available. I'm planning on slotting HEAT for recovery as well because I find she burns through a lot of endurance very quickly. That may just be my currently sucky build though. Also, Conserve Power and Power Boost are fairly useful, especially if you're making heavy use of your stun and knock-back.
As far as pool powers go, fighting won't give you great defences but you can stick a LotG +7.5 in Weave, which is the sole reason HEAT has that pool. Hasten is also not to be sneered at, even if you don't choose Super Speed as your travel power. I went with Super Jumping for the Mez protection. Depending on how many powers you take from your primary, you should have a lot of choices open[1].
I don't play HEAT using the nuke-stun pattern that Spud suggests, but it's a good strategy. This mostly happened because I started playing her before we could combine insps, and so ensuring I had enough blues on hand to keep fighting should Nova not wipe the spawn was irritatingly inconvenient.
As Spud said, cycling through targets to spread the stuns around is a good tactic, especially while you're waiting for Build Up and Aim to recharge. And his priorities for targeting are pretty much spot on. Take out their support in the initial strike, then move on to the minions. Dark Astoria taught me one valuable lesson: for an archetype that's as squishy as a blapper, massed fire from a hoard of minions is more dangerous than a single boss[2].
I probably don't play HEAT as well as I could, so she dies a fair bit. I've accepted this as a fair trade off for the amount of damage she puts out[3] and chose my ancillary power pool to get Rise of the Phoenix.
[0] Aim and Build Up, the two most wonderful powers in the game (for a blapper). The only reason a blapper should be using them only once in a fight is because the spawn was defeated before they recharged.
[1] I only took three, Power Bolts, Aim and Nova.
[2] Most of the time anyway.
[3] I'm apparently the opposite of Terrance, in that I don't mind dieing or running from a fight, but the piddly damage output of a tank makes me die a little inside whenever I play one.