Arcanaville

In your perception perhaps. But I don't think that is *remotely* close to being the majority perception.

Actually, that costume works equally well as a saloon girl outfit, and saloon girls were not necessarily prostitutes. In fact, it may work better as a saloon girl costume because saloon girls were sometimes dancers and entertainers, and it actually looks more like a literal costume than normal clothes.

Actually, honestly no. And its not like they are easy to miss when they are around.

Touch the cap maybe: stay there relatively consistently? If its happening often elsewhere, Triumph must be under a perpetual damage debuff.

I'm not sure why most people haven't figured out how ridiculously broken time manipulation is yet, honestly. But soft-capping with time is more of a Defender thing than a Corruptor thing. Its possible, but not as easy on a Corruptor and I don't think you get there on an all SO build.

Its because this game separates offense and defense as virtually always a separate skill or ability. In reality, or comic book reality, it sometimes is and sometimes isn't. Its often the case the super strong people are also somewhat invulnerable, because otherwise they'd hurt their hands every time they punched something. But just because you're good with a gun, doesn't make you bulletproof: being good with a gun and buying a bulletproof vest are two different completely independent things.

This game doesn't really have a good way to represent that sometimes yes sometimes no linkage. It tries in rare circumstances like Parry/Divine Avalanche, but for the most part as a gaming convention learning or gaining the ability to use something offensively and defensively are different. And they come with gameplay restrictions. If you have a character that you want to have psionic blasts, you can do that. If you want a character with good psionic protection, you can take Willpower. Can't take both. That unfortunately runs into the same rule that prevents blasters from armoring up and becoming ranged scrappers.

I think at the beginning of time there was a germ of an idea to do something like that: have characters take core abilities and branch out from there. But that quickly devolved into the open system in Alpha, and then tossed aside in the archetype revamp in Beta, which is basically what we have now.

Pretty much by definition this game doesn't claim to be able to represent *everything* in comics: in fact quite a lot of comic book power platters are game-breakingly powerful or too synergistic to be balanceable, so they get tossed. We can do Wolverine because he's limited by range, which is important in an MMO. We can't do Superman, because he's won the superpower lottery. We can't really do Iron Man because even though he might have weaknesses Superman lacks, they aren't weaknesses easily represented in this game.


The reason you can get away with this in the Champions PnP game is because even if your weakness is lactose intolerance, a smart GM will make you pay full price for it. Its not just that a smart GM can scale content up to any player in terms of numbers to take advantage of your weaknesses, a smart GM can change the conditions of victory to neutralize your strengths as well. That's what comic book authors can do, that MMO game engines can't do. And honestly, most MMO players wouldn't accept either.

I've been thinking about Dark/Energy for a while now, just to pair power boost with Dark Blast. Power boost should boost the tohit debuffs, the hold, and the heal (and the knock). That should be interesting.

I know I wasn't silent. Remember when someone asked "how do you make an airborne mission for people that don't have flight" and I suggested a mission where you board an aircraft and stand on the wings to shoot down villains trying to bring it down? I had some pretty wacky ideas back then.

During one of the early betas, 18-19ish, there was a discussion about how to prevent controllers from being effectively neutralized in iTrials. My suggestion was to use special qualifiers on iTrial AVs such that if they were hit by a mezzing effect, the act of the mez effect being on the AV would partially neutralize it even if the AV wasn't mezzed.

That's actually not impossible. Suppose I were to make a critter with mag 1000 protection to hold. But then I give it a resistance power that buffs it 10% res(all) and set it to have a special Requires clause: if self>hold < -999 then effect. If someone lands a mag 3 hold on that AV, their hold mag will rise from -1000 to -997. They would still be completely unmezzed. However, that 10% res power would shut off. Hold magnitude on that AV would be higher than -999 (-997) and that effect would then stop.

Consider stacking such effects on a target. You could have mez strip resistance off a target bit by bit in theory. You could also, with a little more trickery, cause holds to turn off one attack but not another. There's lots of things you can do if you want to put time into playing that sort of game with the game's mechanics.

The purple triangles were explicitly designed so that a single controller would be essentially unable to hold an AV, but multiple controllers could. It was a concession to making AVs vulnerable to mez, but not trivially easy to lock down, and balanced around being teamed content. Two or three controllers can break the triangles (mag 50). One or two dominators can under domination. One mind control dominator can perma-confuse most AVs.

Actually, you expect the brick to be the hardest puncher.** Subtle but important difference, because there's nothing really in the notion of a brick that says the Iron Man can't deal ten times more damage with energy blasts than any brick can physically generate with their fists in theory.

And even that is a bit relative. The notion of "combat level" is pretty hazy in comic books, but there is still the sense of there being, for lack of a better way of putting it, "weight classes." We expect a brick of a particular weight class to be the hardest puncher in that weight class, but we aren't surprised when something comes along that punches far harder but isn't a brick, its just of a vastly superior class. Cosmically powered, say.

This is much more well defined in MMOs than comic books, but the concept isn't completely novel to comic books.


I think the important point, though, is not that tankers are not bricks, or bricks are not tankers, but more that the concept of a brick is more closely related to a powerset combination rather than a class. A brick is not any archetype as City of Heroes defines archetypes. Its a very special case of a powerset combination that actually crosses archetypes. SS/Invuln brutes and tankers are both bricks, even though they have different offense and defense. They encapsulate the core concept of being a brick: strong, and resistant to physical damage.


** Actually, maybe not even that. Would you consider Cannonball to be basically a flying brick while he's in motion? He's not really a puncher, he's *literally* a brick thrown at someone.

We already discussed VEATs in this thread: they have conceptual issues in this context which is why I referred to entanglements.

Corruptors and Dominators aren't "defensively strong" although they can have a lot of offensive mitigation: also already discussed. If you want ranged survivability in general its hard to beat mind control dominators. But that's not really aligned with what the OP seems to be talking about.


What is "typical blaster survival levels?" When I'm playing blasters, I'm generally aiming for "not being dead." But more importantly, the OP originally mentioned a problem with staying alive, so surviving at "typical blaster levels" doesn't sound like what the OP is looking for.


Because actual blasters don't tend to have a lot of mitigation: for most of them taking one shot instead of two is meaningful.

Lots of things have sleeps. Controllers have sleeps. Dominators have sleeps. We all solve this problem you're presenting as intractable just fine.

Dark Miasma in general offers a lot of survivability, but you have to know how to use it. Also, while you can get a gigaton of survivability out of /Dark, it takes a lot of time to use all those tools. I'm not sure its really a good ranged blaster analog: its a borderline controller with fire blasts.

Lots of online discussions have perspective. Its just that most of them have this perspective:

And we do: one of them is called "endurance."

And other games go farther: they have gear damage.


That's actually not true. Control effects are explicitly designed to stack, and critters are designed with the expectation of stacking. That's why most controller mez is mag 3, but bosses require mag 4. Bosses are specifically engineered to require a stacked mez to affect them.

And while control effects are binary in the sense that each individual effect is either off or on, its the variety of the effects themselves that give us *any* non-binary attributes in the first place. Holds prevent movement and action and suppresses toggles until they expire. Sleeps prevent movement and action and suppresses toggles until they expire, but damage breaks them. Fear prevents movement and action but doesn't suppress toggles until it expires, but damage can temporarily break it.

The problem with a mez meter is, what if I want to give something a sleep but not a hold. In your system, stacked sleep eventually becomes a hold, so I can't allow that sleep to stack. But what if I need the sleep to stack to affect stronger foes?

Moreover, a meter is linear. Notice a mez can do several orthogonal things. It can detoggle or not. It can stop action, stop movement, or both. And it can be broken never (by expiration only), temporarily by damage, or permanently by damage.

Our mezzes are a subset of all possible mezzes. Immobilize is movement stop, expiration only. Hold is detoggle, movement stop, action stop, expiration only. Sleep is detoggle, movement stop, action stop, damage break. Terrorize is movement stop, action stop, damage temporary break.

It might seem obvious that hold is a stronger sleep. But its not clear that immobilize is a weaker sleep: its stronger in terms of expiration. Sleep can be more easily broken than immobilize.

So how do you make a linear scale that encompasses all of this variety? You can't. So in exchange for simplifying the stacking, you eliminate mez options. Because it would be nonsensical to start with a permanent immobilize, but stacking it turned it into a sleep that can be broken. It would break before you could continue to stack up to a hold. And how do you deal with terrorize.

The fundamental difference between personal damage and mez effects is that I can think of lots of orthogonal effects for mez that can't be linearly ordered. I can't think of such for damage in our game. You could, particularly with a game that supported called shots. But our game doesn't have the mechanics to leverage the distinctions we'd be allowing. They'd be extra complexity for no benefit. The extra effects in our mez system *do* offer actual benefit.

Lets start the female customer respect train by not assuming all women have the same opinion on the gunslinger pack. Clearly they don't, just based on postings in this thread. And the fact a woman made them, and probably wasn't specifically thinking they were the spearpoint of a war against women at the time.

There's no question calling the pack a "gunslinger" pack was an error. There are *some* players that believe having a costume pack whatever it was called contain a male gunfighter outfit and a more frilly female outfit was also an error, but if it was an error, and not everyone agrees, that was an error in judgment, not a case of misogyny.

Not all women feel disrespected. Some men do. Lets try to keep some perspective.

That was you? Sorry about that, but you should have fired from longer range.

Its obvious to you what the intent was when the devs gave super strength to Tankers, but not when they gave them about half the damage of scrappers.

One rule the devs followed from the very beginning was, to the best extent possible, separating what things looked like and what they did. In fact, there was a time when what things did and what they looked like were implemented almost with *any* regard for each other. The super strength set is the devs concept of what tankers *look* like. The damage modifiers express what they think tankers *did*.

The problem that was hashed out years ago is one of normalization. The problem is that we can't just look at two comic book heroes' offense, and know only from that which one is the tanker or scrapper. And that's because in City of Heroes, that's dictated by both archetype *and* combat level. The combat level metaphor means a supposed defender could deal way more damage than a supposed blaster, if the defender had a far higher combat level.

Superman could hypothetically be a CoH Tanker to Wolverine's scrapper and still outdamage him: Superman could be level 100, or 1000, who knows?

Before City of Heroes came along, no one was saying Superman was a "Tanker" or even really *thinking* it. In gaming terms, Superman was a tank-mage. He could absorb tons of damage - without requiring support. He had massive offense. And he could hit you at range.

Most of the most powerful comic book characters were tank-mages. Even the Hulk was a tank-mage whose range was only trivially hampered by having to rip out the pavement and throw it at you. Above all, they were thought of as tank-mages because we couldn't imagine an MMO task they couldn't trivially solo. Neither Superman, nor Wonder Woman, nor the Hulk, nor the Silver Surfer, or Iron Man; none of them were missing anything of consequence that would require any support, at least not without writer's fiat.

Its worth noting that when this game launched, *nobody* was asking "why aren't comic book tankers properly represented." Nobody. Lots of people asked "why can't I make Superman?" but no one attempted to make the argument that we all knew what a comic book tanker was, and City of Heroes got it wrong. That's a relatively recent revisionist invention. If anyone was thinking it when we launched, they were in such small minority that the discussion never happened. And it would have been very quickly ridiculed. MMOs have evolved a lot since then, but that's sort of the point. The state of MMOs when this game launched was such that it was almost inconceivable to classify Superman as a "Tanker." Tank classes back then weren't just outdamaged by the other melee fighters, they barely *had* offense. Our Tankers had plenty enough damage to solo virtually all the content. Anyone familiar with other MMOs at the time thought that was insanely weird.


Whatever Tankers might evolve into today, its important to remember their original intent because we don't change things out from a few thousand players to satisfy the complaints of a very few. Tankers make a valid trade to exist in an MMO world. They trade some offense to get lots of defense and aggro control tools. That's their gaming identity. We don't allow a few people to say they don't like that trade, so no one gets to have it. The people who don't like that option are simply not supposed to take that option. There are three other melee options, including the original baseline option of scrappers.

And what if you want to play Super Strength/Invulnerability but that option doesn't exist for Scrappers. You take the next best archetype option and go Brutes, or you take the next best powerset option and go Street Justice. Or you advocate for proliferation. Or for the devs to make a whole new archetype just for you. But you don't advocate taking options away from other players just to satisfy your own personal agenda.

I should say, a reasonable person shouldn't. You can do whatever you want; I'm simply going to continue to remind the devs what their design obligation here is. And its not to honor your sense of tankers or my sense of tankers or even their sense of tankers. Their first responsibility is to honor the sense of tankers of the existing players playing tankers. Only a genuine balance problem should override that.

The flip side is that the amount of control you have is dictated by the maximum effect of the maximum stacking possible for the one effect that exists. When you design a set like Illusion control in City of Heroes, you can give it one single target hold, one long recharge AoE hold, a terrorize pet, and another pet with knockdowns. If the only mez that existed was holds, there's no way Illusion would get the Spectral Terror. Being able to provide multiple ways to mez a target that don't stack offers the same advantage as having multiple defensive systems that don't stack. You have more opportunity for variety, and less mandatory requirement to limit everyone one-dimensionally.

Non-binary mez effects don't mandate having only a single type of mez. There's lots of ways to do that with the mez system we have now.

Yeah, I kinda hinted at that problem a few million posts upstream. That was a bit of a surprise to me also.

True, its not a tank mage. But we were talking tangentially about revisiting blasters, since the OP was conceptually disappointed with the few ranged/defense combinations out there.

There is no such thing as a ranged-AoE heavy defensively strong combination without entanglements. If there were, we'd all be playing it. The farther you go in the direction of ranged offense, the more you're going to lose damage mitigation, outside of corner cases like going to a ranged mastermind like bots, which I don't think the OP's looking for.

If the OP is looking for ranged offense and survivability, Sonic has that. If you're looking to maximize offense, and still pick up some survivability, you can go something like Fire/Sonic corruptor. But I think if the OP could drive a Fire/Sonic corruptor with no primary mitigation, he wouldn't be asking for help.


On the specific subject of Sirens, when playing for real, and not for giggles, I use Sirens and AoEs all the time. If I could spam AoEs on large spawns constantly as a blaster and not get dead from the return fire, I'd write a book. Sirens is good for cutting the odds, even if you intend to use AoEs. The notion that blasters can literally vaporize everything in just a couple of AoEs is 99% hyperbole. Stuff is going to be still alive, or you'll have to kill time while BU and Aim are recharging. During those times, being able to take out an entire spawn of minions and LTs in one shot, and then hit a manageable subset of them with AoEs and single target attacks, is still tactically useful. Its comparable in difficulty to properly aiming knockback with an energy blaster.

Which would be the other alternative for an all-ranged squishy. If you can control it, the knockback in energy is a substantial survivability tool. What you need to make it work is a lot of speed, and enough endurance to be able to power attacks like energy torrent constantly, even if you're only attacking two things and would ordinarily pass on AoEs due to the inefficiency. Its all about getting as many bites at the knockback apple as possible, to keep the targets down.

In either case, the AoE objection to Sirens is mostly theoretical, especially during leveling, because Sonic's AoEs are not particularly good either way. Not using them constantly is not that big of a deal. Sonic is more of a single target attacker I've found.

Lets straighten out some terminology. The forums send information to the browsers which are stored as a cookie. This is state information in the browser at the user's computer. That cookie has a number of fields, and I know they've been messing with them because certain things have changed over time. Two fields in that cookie correspond to the Remember Me checkbox which tells the browser to remember the user name and password of the user so the user shouldn't have to log in again, as in ever. Those fields are bbuserid and bbpassword. bbuserid contains the vbb user id number of the user, *not* the user's login name. That information is only meaningful to the forum software. bbpassword contains a hash of the user password and its used in place of the user's password so the browser doesn't store the user's password in a form that can be read.

These fields are set to expire in one year's time. All the other fields in the cookie are set to expire on session termination which is another way of saying "when you close the browser."


None of this has anything to do with vbb forum state tracking which happens on the server side. Its something server-side that is what's going kaboom, probably in session handling. Expire that every eight hours, every eight minutes, who cares. It exists in a session table in the forum database, and you should periodically expire that so it doesn't clutter up with a ton of sessions that might never resume - i.e. people logging in from different IP addresses or different computers just once. But, and I feel like I'm talking to myself here, expiring the session is not supposed to kill your client-side cookies. The boards are not "expiring" the client side cookies, the boards are sending cookie deletes to the client to purge the cookies. Including bbuserid and bbpassword, which is what is being stored to keep track of "Remember Me."

And this should never happen. Not every eight hours, not every eight years. Never.

I know they count as something, but I don't specifically remember the dev statement that they count as 1 dmg attacks in the aggro formula. And believe me: its theoretically possible to yank aggro from something that is just taunting if you dump enough damage into it. *I* yanked aggro once from a tanker taunting Hamidon. Whatever I did, even after I stopped attacking for a whole minute while phase shifted, as soon as I popped out Hamidon opened fire on me and me alone for a few more shots.

Aggro is strange, because there's weirdness in the AI that I think still hasn't seen the light of day yet. Back when I was testing taunt and aggro, I discovered that if you actually try the obvious experiment: have a tanker taunt the target and another character try to yank aggro away by hitting the target with as much damage as possible (without killing it) the target will often run away completely. I hypothesized at the time that what was happening was the AI wanted to attack the shooter, the aggro mechanics were "forcing" it to attack the taunter, and when the AI couldn't attack who it wanted to attack for a long enough period of time a timer went off and the AI assumed that it was somehow incapacitated or neutralized (because it couldn't attack who it wanted to attack) and that triggered a flee response.

I think I mentioned it the first time around, but give Sonic a try. And if you don't like the concept of screaming, there are alternate animations that make it look more hand-blasty.

Basically, you're playing Sonic to get to Siren's Song. Although I'm showing how it can make blapping somewhat safer than normal, it works equally well to make ranged blasting less hazardous. And Sonic does pretty good damage because of its stacking resistance debuffs.

Sonic blaster is good. Alternatively, you might like going Sonic corruptor and picking up a Corruptor secondary that is to your liking. I'm currently working on a Sonic/Time corruptor, and while its not indestructible, the soft control in that combo makes it very difficult to kill when playing any sort of standard content. If you stay away from Time's Juncture, you can pretty much stay at range the entire time. Alternatively, if you go Sonic/Sonic corruptor you can get personal resistance and mez protection with sonic dispersion, and stacking tough on dispersion will generate pretty good smash/lethal resistance. On top of the fact you'll be fighting sleep walkers half the time.

You can guarantee that by actually hitting the boss with an attack. If you don't, then even with unlimited aggro caps and taunt, aggro can still be stolen from you. Taunt amplifies the hate generated by damage. Taunt without damage doesn't do anything unless you happen to be the only thing around to attack.

In either event, increasing the aggro limit just to allow tankers to control two full spawns seems to be addressing a problem that doesn't demand attention. No other archetype is specifically designed to single-handedly handle an entire add-in spawn.