Aett_Thorn

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Because people asked for it.

Some people don't like to outlevel content, like storyarcs or badge missions.

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This. Content is a large part of the game for people. When the Devs created a way to go past more and more content quicker, it was added so that people who didn't want to do that could limit themselves to not do so.

It gives no bonus, other than the extra content completed.

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As for the notion that people would be irritated to see a power replaced with a ranged power, I suppose that's true. You're not going to please everyone. I guess that means they better not do anything to the game ever again, because SOMEONE might potentially maybe be upset for a day or two. Perhaps the best way would be to add that tenth power.

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Massive hyperbole isn't going to help you any, just so you know.

Take a look at the changes the Devs did to Frozen Aura and MoG. Both of these powers were pretty much universally hated on the forums. Certainly, there were many more people in favor of changing them than keeping them as is. When changes came to these two powers, there were a decent amount of complaints about the powers being changed. Heck, we even got some posters to the Tanker forums who had never been here before saying that they used Frozen Aura well before.

And these were powers that were seen as bad. Now, take out a power that isn't seen as bad, and you're going to get some outcry here. So, I'm going to give you a challenge:

Show us which power you would replace in each Tanker secondary to add in the Blast.

Rules:

1) Can't be the first or second tier power
2) Can't replace Taunt
3) Can't be the tier 9 power

Go!

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That Tankers are "supposed" to be a melee class is arbitrary. There is nothing in controlling the aggro of the enemy that requires melee only.

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Yes, it's as arbitrary as having Defenders be ranged damage. It's as arbitrary as Controllers having controls and debuffs. It's as arbitrary as blasters not having debuffs as a secondary. So I'll ask you again:

Why should Tankers be given powers that let them change their roles, but not the other ATs? Why shouldn't Scrappers also all be given ranged attacks? Why should Debuff sets have a melee attack in them? Why shouldn't Blasters have an AoE debuff in them?

Giving Tankers a ranged attack is just as arbitrary as having only melee attacks. It's just an arbitrary way that makes you happy. Give us a real reason for why this should be done, but not the other changes I mention to the other ATs.

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Why not? Some sets have ranged attacks, so giving all the sets one would balance them out in that regard. Plus, it would fill a hole in the power sets that really doesn't need to be there.

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Except, if the sets that have the ranged attacks are balanced around having those ranged attacks, then you've just unbalanced all of the other sets.


Tankers are supposed to be a Melee AT. Having a couple of sets be able to go around that makes them an exception, not a rule to be followed just because you want them to.

Get Mid's Hero Builder, make a build, and let us critique it. Or, look around in the Tanker guides section.

All of them.

I'm always willing to see new sets. Check out Lady_Jade's power suggestion box to see if there's something like this. If not (or even if so), give us what you'd like to see out of the 9 powers in the set.

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Yup, but it's dang good.

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I love AOE Fears (strong mechanic in this game) but single target for a Tanker? Meh.

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It's also got a hefty -Acc attached to it, from what I recall. Great for helping with Bosses and up.

Invuln/SS is more clearly a 'stereotypical' Tanker combination. It's a great combo, don't get me wrong. But I think a lot of love for that combo comes from being the closest thing in-game to Superman or other characters from comic books (please don't let that summon J_B).


However, I have a Shield/War Mace, and love him. I have heard that Shield/SS is also a powerhouse. I don't think you could really go wrong with any of those three, though.

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You claim "X is easy," and when called to explain how you know that, you say it's easy because "you have an imagination."

Your imagination is not proof. You can't prove that your ideas are easy to implement, and there's evidence that they are, in fact, not.

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I never said "X is easy." I said there are things that could easily be done, and I stand by that. Doubtless there are things that would NOT be easy. None of us here are in possession of the information to say what would be easy and what would be difficult.

However, it's not a stretch to think that porting a power that's already in the game into another set would not be terribly difficult. There would be no need for new art, animations or what have you.

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Granted. The balance issues associated with that, however...


And no, I'm not just talking about damage scales. I am talking about the potentially HUGE survivability boost that this could give Tankers, and the ability of the Tanker to keep enemies at range with absolutely no return fire, at no cost to the AT.

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The fact that the game tells you that you can go to zero seems to be a decently big error.

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Except that having Defense values higher than 45% can be useful. Defense Debuffs and ToHit Buffs can make it so that 45% Defense won't floor the enemy's ToHit.

Since there's no in-game reason for having an AT Mod of lower than 1, why display that it can go to zero?

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So I get to where I want to changeup my Widow's claws and -POW- (queue the wimpy, groaning trombone slide)... You can't change the widow blades.

Can someone at the very least provide a valid reason for this?

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It's because they are trained to use those blades, if you're looking for an RP reason.

A game mechanic reason why? Because the Devs said so.


Also, you may want to look up what 'epic' means in terms of the Epic ATs. It means that they are tied in with the story of the game, and yes, the widows only use that one type of blade, so widow characters are forced to use them.

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Aett: In your particular example, since the overlap time is so short (5 seconds) could lag account for that discrepency?


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It could, but I wasn't getting any lag on my end. There may have been some server lag going on that was leading to values being smaller than they should have been (or bigger). I won't discount it, but the game was running pretty smoothly for me, with no other indication of lag going on.

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Also, with regards to threat, I've seen lower damaging toons steal agro from higher damaging ones simply because they were the last to cause the damage (seemingly) before the mob agro'd them.

What really puzzles me is when I see a Blaster steal agro from a Scrapper who is actively attacking the target AND has a taunt aura running.

This sort of leads me back to how Castle explained to me originally that there was no actual agro list in CoH.

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The first may be more due to Threat decay. Remember that without the TauntDurationRemaining * 1,000 value, Threat values for other ATs can be relatively low. If there is decay going on, it may be fast enough to see what you're seeing. Also remember that Debuffs can affect it. Basically, a character that deals 100 damage and has a debuff on the attack can cause twice the Threat that a similar attack without a debuff can.

So, a 50 damage attack with a debuff can cause as much threat as a 100 damage normal attack. It can also be a range factor. Then there's the AT Mod on top of that.



There are a lot of factors that we don't know about Threat. AI Mod and RangeMod are two of the big ones. That is why, when talking about theoretical Threat values, we usually assume that those two values are the same for both characters. In game, they may not be. It throws a lot of our theoretical values on the forums off. In fact, the only AI mod info that we know of is that there's no Mob out there that has a "kill the healer" AI mod on it (though the Devs could create one). The AI Mod in the Threat formula for a particular Mob could tell it to rate Controllers as a higher threat than Scrappers. We don't know.


Very, very rarely do the formulas that we use to determine relative Threat on the forums work out in game. The one case where we're usually right is in the case of Tankers with aggro auras or Taunt, since the TauntDurationRemaining * 1,000 value tends to be so high as to negate pretty much everything else in the formula.

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Well, we do know that Threat degrades. Otherwise, the person who first got it would never lose aggro, unless someone else got twice the Threat level. We can prove that another person can steal it without doing twice the threat value after a given amount of time.


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Ok I'm confused now ... do we need twice the threat to pull agro off another person or don't we? It seems that you're contradicting yourself here.

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Sorry, should have been clearer.

I meant that if we calculate a person's threat value from the formula, and know what it should be, I've seen people steal aggro after a certain amount of time even though their Threat isn't twice that of what the formula says the first Tanker's Treat should be. This is due to a slow decay of Threat. It still takes twice the threat to get there, it's just that this value becomes smaller over time.

Yup, but it's dang good.

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Yes, as far as we've been told, the value in that spot can never go below 1. It's a floor in the formula. The fact that the game tells you that you can go to zero seems to be a decently big error. If you could go to zero, then you could literally attack an enemy and never have him return fire.

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Not necessarily. Depending on how aggro is implemented, aggro could merely be the magnitude of the effect, but not the flag indicating the effect. So you could aggro a foe with zero aggro. In fact, if you walk near a foe and alert him to your presense, without firing a shot, you have in fact dealt no damage to him. (Of course, in this case he hesitates before he decides to fire, so the behavior is different than if you shoot him)

If this is what is said to be the behavior, then it's good to know.

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Sight aggro does appear to be different from actual Threat level, but it could be building off of AI Mods and Range Mods.

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If AT Mod is a multiplier, and AT Mod is zero, then anything AT Mod is multiplied by will be zero. The formula does not contradict that. However, it is possible a min cap is placed on the AT Mod during the calculation, or the AT Mod is increased by one.

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Yes, as far as we've been told, the value in that spot can never go below 1. It's a floor in the formula. The fact that the game tells you that you can go to zero seems to be a decently big error. If you could go to zero, then you could literally attack an enemy and never have him return fire.

AT mod can never go below 1 in the Threat formula.

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Ps: Since tankers have effective ranged attacks now, should not blasters, defenders and controllers have the opportunity to have decent armor, defense, and status effect resistances too? it should also be true for red side... Giggles

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Sigh...okay, let's do this again.

Tanker ranged attacks have not changed much since issue 1. That's when the Ancillary Pools were released, giving Tankers the ability to do ranged damage and control, the thing that they were lacking.

At the same time, the 'squishy' ATs were given armors, in the same place that Tankers could grab ranged damage.

The term "soft cap" applies anywhere in game where you can go over that value, but that it stops offering meaningful advancement in that stat in most cases.

For Defense, the soft cap is indeed 45%. You can have over 45% Defense. However, the way the ToHit Formula works:

Final ToHit = {{Base ToHit + ToHit buffs - Defense - ToHit Debuffs} * (Accuracy + Accuracy Buffs - Accuracy Debuffs)}

where the {} mean places where the formula caps it at 95%, and floors it at 5%, means that anything above 45% Defense only really comes into use when the enemy has a ToHit Buff, or you have a Defense debuff on you, lowering your value.

Thus, against an even level minion, having 45% Defense will mean that he has a 5% chance to hit you, the lowest it can go. Having 50% Defense will STILL mean that he has a 5% chance to hit you.

Jade, the link to the Threat formula has been given here, which explains most of what we know about how Threat is generated.

If you are attacking, or applying debuffs or doing other non-damaging moves to an enemy, you will have a threat value. It can only be zero before a fight has begun (i.e., the enemy doesn't know you're even there), or if you stop fighting and run away, and allow aggro to degradate back to zero (when the enemy returns to it's starting point).

Other than that, aggro will never be at zero. The Threat formula has a lot of points where the value won't go below 1, so you'll always have at least a 1 value for Threat.

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Isn't "Asian" kind of vague and all-inclusive? I mean, technically, Asia houses cultures as far apart as Japan and Iraq, or India and Russia. When I see "oriental," that sort of old corny movie and ye olde anime are pretty much what I think of.

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The Orient comes from way back, when the Middle East was considered the Orient. It's a term that comes from the word East. Basically, it's more inclusive than the term Asian, as most people today, when they hear the word Asian, tend to associate that with people from China and Japan south. And while technically Asian does include countries like Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey, most people today don't associate those countries with the term Asian, even if it is correct.

I'm still not quite sure why the term Oriental is seen as offensive, I just know that it can be seen as such, especially when the term Asian is not. It is, however, an older word and tends to be highly racially skewed. I tend to view it along the same lines as calling an African American a Negro. It's an old, imprecise, and offensive word.


Edit -> Found this:

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Anyway, that usage of "Oriental" has survived a long time, and it still frequently carries all of the exotic/foreign/inscrutable/mysterious connotations. These connotations happen to coincide with many of the stereotypes held of Asian Americans. Furthermore, by definition, the word "Oriental" is Eurocentric, referring to things east of Europe. For these reasons, some Asian American activist types decided that "Oriental" was a Bad Word, and that "Asian" was more accurate, less Eurocentric, and less loaded with strange connotations. No big deal, right?

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Here

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As far as I know threat doesn't "degrade" ... it's a matter of scaling numbers.


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Well, we do know that Threat degrades. Otherwise, the person who first got it would never lose aggro, unless someone else got twice the Threat level. We can prove that another person can steal it without doing twice the threat value after a given amount of time.

However, we don't know any of the specifics on it, nor how fast the degradation occurs, nor if there is a set time before it starts to degrade, that I know of.


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However this doesn't stand up when you compare two Tankers together. Whenever I've seen to Tankers Taunt (the power) the same target, the first Taunt to land goes into effect and the second Taunt only applies after the first Taunt's duration wears off. I've seen this in occurances of me beating on what I Taunted and still not pulling agro from a nearby Tanker who Taunted first even while beating on another mob.

I understand the documentation/dev's input differs from what I've just said, however that's been my experience in-game.

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Well, I think this is more of a problem of needing twice the Threat to pull a target off of someone. Both Taunts should be applied to the target. However, the enemy is going to go with the first one until the second Tanker gets twice as much threat as the first one. That should be how it happens.

But like you've said, things tend to not work out perfectly in the game, and odd occurances do pop up.

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Aett: Threat decay is something I haven't tested. I am, however, shocked to hear you say that you could steal aggro off the Tanker at all - very surprising. Hmm... a couple things that could explain it:

* RttC has a debuff component, which makes RttC's threat multiplier a bit higher than usual. (I want to say it was something like TauntDuration * 1000 for debuffs, but I can't remember what value Castle gave for those, if any.)
* Being at range makes the taunt value lower than being in melee range.
* AI Preferences.
* Was the Tanker doing any damage from range? That would help significantly, even if it was just Vet powers like the Nem Staff.
* Keep in mind that your damage was being amplified by your taunt duration*1000, so duration alone wouldn't sway an AV.
* Note: A +4 would only resist it by 48% (Purple Patch). That'd make RttC stronger, but Taunt more so.



As I said, though, threat decay is something I really don't understand.

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I agree. This was kind of a W-T-F moment for me. As it stood, I didn't think that it would happen. It kind of surprised me each time it did. It never lasted for long (maybe a punch headed my way, but never more than that). So it was a very short thing that was going on.

As for your bullets:

* Debuffs usually have a value of 2, from conversations with Castle a while ago. They range from 1-2, but most of them have a value of 2 (Castle couldn't, at that time, remember any that were less than 2). So that may have come into play. But TauntDuration*1000 should have been far greater than just the debuff value.

* The range thing may have also come into play. Do we know if the enemy AI adjusts based on physical distance, or the max distance of the power? Just curious on that one.

* It was Ghost Widow, and know of know special AI mods on her that make her want to take out a Scrapper.

* No, the Tanker was not attacking. It was me in melee range, him at range just taunting, and everyone else back at range doing whatever damage they could.

* As for the last two, I would think that the Tanker's Taunt duration would have still been enough to hold aggro, since his TauntDurationRemaining *1000 value would have always been higher than mine. Since his should have been above 1000, and mine decently below that (maybe around 500 max), I should have had to do a buttload of damage to get aggro.

However, maybe it was the damage, plus range, plus debuff, that got me that high on the Threat list. If I was hovering right around twice the Tanker's minimum threat on her, there may have been periods where I went over that, and stole the aggro briefly.

It shocked me as well. Hence why I brought it up. Each time it happened (it happened maybe three times over the course of a long fight that we ended up not being able to complete) it made me wonder, since I didn't think that it should be happening.

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Ice might also be a good option (has great mitigation ... not sure how good and/or plentiful the AOEs are).

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Just a note here:

Ice is decent on AoEs. Frost if a good power early on. Does only cold damage, so can get around pesky S/L defense-using mobs, which is nice.

The only other AoE in the set, however, is the level 38 power, which still is a great power.

But if the OP is looking for an early-blooming AoE chain, Ice Melee might not be what he's looking for.

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I like it. It's something the AE is currently missing. In my experience it is difficult to make your custom critters neither too easy or too hard. This would give the ability to create custom critters more in line with the regular mobs in the rest of the game.

I disagree with the reduced XP though, they should give normal minion, LT, and Boss XP.

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Not to mention that this way, you wouldn't need to take up several precious, precious enemy slots in a group just to have one type of enemy with more than one power loadout.

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I agree. As long as it's a 'standard' set, it would take up less room than trying to make them in the enemy creator.

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I'd prefer a build that would allow me to focus on AoE and mitigation. I'm not too concerned with having huge damage numbers.

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Okay, if you want AoE and Mitigation, I'd say that any of the following could work well for you:

Ice Melee
Super Strength
Stone Melee
War Mace


Any of those should work. If you want more AoE, /Fire works well. If you want more mitigation, then /Dark or /Energy Melee could work.