Anachronism

I'm a tanker most of the time, but I've also got a Fire/Fire blaster, and I have to say the difference between the two is pretty insane. As a Tanker I'm always ignoring whatever 'damage' I'm taking, while attempting to kill the thing without the next ice age freezing me.

As my blaster it's usually a few quick shots filled with terrified, frenzied backpeddling and hovering. I keep wishing, as a blaster, I could have my Tanker's Unyielding Stance. I could use it more than he ever does.

But I don't think AoE's are the issue. As someone else said, it's the front-loaded nature of them. Meaning that I wait a few seconds and they're all charged, so I can go and drop a pile of fire on them and watch them burn as I fly away, and pick off the stragglers.

If I don't, and try to fire blast them each, I die! I can't stand up and engage anything! I'm always in favor of decreasing some critical flaws by giving up some massive advantages... because it seems more heroic to be average in all areas besides the ones I'm best at. But I have less damage-soaking power than the stuff I'm fighting, and they do an awful lot to me. Wouldn't drifting a bit closer to center be advantageous? Sure, we wouldn't kill things as fast, but we'd live twice as long. I'd rather feel a bit more durable than feel like a one-shot-wonder.

This goes for all other AT's. Scrappers are a good model of offense/defense for overall fun factor... if we used them as the base, and adjusted off that, I bet we'd have a lot more happy AT'ers. Would it make the game easy? Well, it's always easy to say "These enemies now have 3x as many HP's as before" if people are really that hard-up for challenges.

But I don't call getting one-shotted a challenge, I just call it cruel.

A lot of this comes from the fact that we don't have a lot of HPs at low level, nor do we have the slots or the SO's required to get the good defenses we need. Vaz puke is particularly painful, and for that reason I lived in Unyielding Stance against those dorks. Most of these problems seem to resolve themselves once we hit our unbalanced powers later on, but I'd still like to share the wealth a little and spread some of that survivability out among the largest percent of the 20 and under game (18 and under for Invul tanks)

Ahhh yes. Hibernate. I don't need to know what it does, I can already tell from a name like Hibernate that it's one hell of a combat power.

Cuz, you know that's what's scary about bears.

They hibernate.

Heheh, that is true, Ape. My apologies. We tankers are indeed a rare breed. I just wish they wouldn't moan about our longevity in battle. I would be more than happy to give them some defenses so long as they'd also like to give me some of their offenses. Hmmm...

I'll trade my level 5 ability, Unyielding Stance (which they could use, since they have ranged attacks) for Ball Lightning or Lightning Bolt, which are 2 and 3 level attacks. I'd trade it for Power Burst or Sniper Blast, which are 4 and 5 level attacks. Seems fair to me! I'd even trade it for Lightning field, which would fit my Invul/EM tank quite well and give me a PBAoE DoT aura. Hah!

Any takers?

Well, Statesman did say that the Provoke effect is coming along, and that they're working on the rage effect. I'd rather hear "We're working on it now" than "We'll work on it later."

And, a bit off topic, I hope that rage effect is mighty fine because Blasters are moaning their heads off about possible changes to AoE damage and their recent loss of Smoke Grenade. I have very little sympathy for a blaster who says he's not doing enough damage. Maybe we'll get some tanker converts if we actually start hurting something!

He means the extra provoke from our attacks. This'll let us build up the aggro just from wailing on guys to a degree that blaster AoEs won't pull them all off of us, which means that we can hold aggro best by attacking, with a bit of provoke or taunt thrown in as range.

I'm pretty sure he means an AoE aggro effect as well... though that could just be wishful thinking. His post was elsewhere.

SG got nerfed because it let you buff it all the way up to 100 percent Debuff, making sure that even an even con boss would have something like a -12 percent chance to hit you. I believe the streakbreaker code still allows them to hit you, but at a low level.

Now, the reason it was so broken was because it was a massive, massive advantage to the Blasters. Yeah, it sucks, they took it away. It'd be like taking away the ability to use Teleport to move around while in Unyielding Stance. That is -the best- tanker build right now because of that loophole.

I don't use it though! It's cheating and dirty. Just because I -can- do it doesn't mean I should. I don't blame you or anyone for using the Smoke Grenade, but it's not like you're a tanker. Blasters traded all their defense for the ability to utterly obliterate squads of men at once.

I'm a level 27 Invul/EM tanker usually, and it takes me a combo of my three best attacks to kill a gray [VVV] con! If I could kill a blue in one hit I'd be happy. If I could kill a whole pack of blues, I'd be ecstatic. If you want MY level of offense, as well as my lack of range (NPC ranged attacks do a lot less damage than melee), then I'd say that you deserve all the defense in the world.

I don't think the AT's are balanced that great. I think Tankers need more O, less D. Their different powers sets, and their massive advantages should set them apart, not their critical, crippling weaknesses.

And I also think Invincibility needs work. It is broken. But if you want to touch it, you need to agree to give me mobile status resistance that doesn't kill me or something. If I am no longer going to be invincible, I need to at least be able to move without being put to sleep and killed.

Hey, I'm a usual face on the tanker boards, but I have a level 15 fire/fire blaster on justice, and I wanted to weigh in since I've been both super duper Invul tanker and fast little firespitter.

As a player who does both, I think that the massive offensive capability of Blasters is supposed to make up for their lack of any defensive capability to speak of, and that the best way to make a better character would be to even out these imbalances. My firebomber is coughing out fire and dropping fireballs pretty quickly, and I do lots and lots of damage, but the amount of punishment I can take is so little I NEED to be able to drop an even con in one volley if it slips away.

As a tanker, I see this as a huge issue. Not because "lolz blaster r weak" or anything, but because it makes Tankers into Meatshields for Blasters. Tankers want to be durable and feel important, taking a lot of hits, but to do that job best we need to

a) be rooted (half of us)
b) provoking all day (until you get invincibility--then just often)

And that's no fun for Tankers, and NO FUN for Blasters at all! Who wants to watch one Abomination slip past your friends and chase you through the level spitting goo for 50 of your precious HPs?

Since mobs are getting tougher, and therefore the percentage of their health we slice off per hit is shrinking (fireball does the same damage, but the guy has 2x hps so it basically does 1/2 the damage it did before!), we need defenses.

Not scrapper or tanker defenses, of course. But who wouldn't rather trade in some of their offense (namely a lot of secondary set powers) for some defense that lets them stay out of debt? As a Tanker, debt is a sign of a major screwup. As my Blaster, it's a sad fact of life I die about 2x times on a TF if I'm not being a kite and staying at max range.

CoH uses too many massive disabilities to define out characters. I think we'd all be happier if street gangs weren't our threat--but big bosses, and tough missions and TFs.

I think Statesman's position on Blasters is fine, but I think he's relying too much on the equation that:

Blaster + Tanker = Balanced Offense and Defense

It doesn't work that way. We should all be independant heroes who just take specializations. My blaster should be defined by the fact he likes to engage at long range, and builds all his powers that way. I wish we'd all start at the same stats--same HPs, same basic skills--and start working from there, and never really get as far from center as we do. It just ends up making us half of a superhero.

And for the reference, I as a tank do solo huge, huge packs of reds and purples and sometimes go grab a coke without worry. But I had to actually /invite a blaster mid-mission once because I couldn't do enough damage to beat a boss. He was no threat to me, I just didn't do enough damage. To the blaster, he'd be a threat and the risk would be staying alive.

We need to try to pull everyone a bit back towards 'the norm' so that we're a team of equals, not of extremes. Just my comments from a Blaster that doesn't want to have to kill everything in one shot, and therefore make my team feel stupid, just to keep from DYING whenever I see something.

Geez, nobody has complained to me about how much damage I can take. Usually it's what's keeping them alive! But as I said elsewhere, I think all the AT's are too extreme in their balance. Having a massive damage output like a blaster at the cost of taking more than a single hit is pretty rough. A scrapper can take a few hits, but not many. Tanks are the only things that can take any hits at all. Instead of making them into the guys who take on half the enemies while the other people deal with the other half, they've been turned into guys who NEED to pull ALL the aggro, or else you get people screaming and running around while they all focus on the one interloper. Darn you teleporting Sky Raiders!

Tankers need a boost, but they also need a break. If we Tanks really want to stop being meatshields, what we could really use is less of a need for us to be shielding the whole time. If that was the case, maybe we'd see tanks turning into more of a stun/knockback/knockdown melee controller thing, which does adequate damage but whose real factor is A) durability and B) knocking enemies around.

But as it stands we're NEEDED as defense for a lot of the game, then we're not needed for defense, and subsequently we're not needed at all. Defenders heal and protect. Controllers lock down. Blasters and scrappers damage. Once they don't need defense anymore, we're useless. We need a real job. Meatshields with no attack aren't even a Fighter class. It's a Fighter class with no sword!