Arcanaville

Sith Warrior, maybe, but I don't really find the Jedi mature into "epic" classes. They are the Peacebringers to the Sith's Warshades.

Neither *ever* reach the ridiculous levels of power we do here, or come even close. A Katana/Invuln scrapper is probably, relative to content, three times stronger than even the tankerish force-based classes. You scrapper-lock in that game, and given how health recovery works you're going to be calling the drones in no time.

No can do. Corruptors don't get FF as far as I know.

If your problem is that you don't ever really want to be in melee, I think that will be difficult with a human form PB. If your problem is that you *die* in melee too much, the PB will be much more resilient than your blasters.

Even I've said this in the past, but that was in the context of talking about full mez protection. We all have damage, that doesn't mean its pointless for the critters to have health.

Melee gets mez protection: mez just doesn't affect them, at all. If we gave blasters mez resistance then the *duration* of mez would decrease but they'd still be affected by it. That wouldn't make mez pointless. In fact, it would cut directly to the heart of one particular problem with mez. In order for mez to have *any* chance at affecting a melee archetype - and they are supposed to be *theoretically* threatened by mez - it has to stack. To stack, it has to last long enough to have a chance to stack. But that duration is not just acting to give mez a chance to affect melee, its also just plain killing squishies. There's no other rational explanation for 30 second stun grenades except a) they are long duration to have a chance at stacking on melee if they allow themselves to get pounded by them or b) the devs are sadistic bastards.

Another thing about mez protection is that there's no specific reason why blasters would have to obtain protection against *all* mez. In fact, only two mezzes are problematic: stuns and holds. Both prevent the blaster from taking reactive action, like using inspirations (except break frees). I don't care if blasters are vulnerable to sleep: sleep will only incapacitate until the blaster is hit again, and that train is never late. Terrorize is more problematic, but at least its a problem most things are in a similar boat to: most melee don't have terrorize protection either.

But when you can be held or stunned for a longer period of time than it takes to roll a new alt, that's a problem. And I do think there is something to the notion that long-duration mezzes are long duration at least in part to have a chance to stack, which means giving blasters mez resistance acts less to escape mez, and more to bring it back to reasonable levels of duration in the first place: levels of duration that would have been more likely if the devs didn't have to consider stacking and building mez against melee.

If its not your argument, stop saying it, and there's no problem.

Technically, if you aren't in melee often on a human PB, you're probably heavily gimping your offense. The main difference between going WS and PB is that with a WS, you're diving into the crowd from the start, while with the PB you're either softening them up from range and then jumping in, or letting them come to you while you finish them off with melee. But you're going to be in melee as a Peacebringer: an all-ranged human PB is not, in my opinion, practical.

I don't believe in deliberately going out of the way to make a "special" inherent. Frankly, I think every time you give something an inherent that is an admission you screwed up and didn't do it right the first time. And really, the devs just make it up to silence the people who think everything is supposed to have an inherent. The stalker inherent is "assassination." I rest my case.

Having said that, I'm not sure what I would do to distinguish the archetype, in terms of special effects or special additional effects to powers and attacks. If I had the time and resources, I would want to make up something really interesting. But with less time, I would probably take the VEAT route, and fiddle with the archetype's base numbers to give them some offensive edge. Perhaps non-zero base recharge, or non-zero base endurance discount, or both.

You realize that asking for a taunt aura to have its taunt pulses increased to 8 seconds and claiming anyone can "peel" the aggro off of a tanker without a strong taunt aura is contradictory. Gauntlet taunts for longer than that.


So, you're asking for the aggro limit to increase from 17 to 50?

The real problem is that blasters are, as I keep saying, hung up on the generally unspoken archetype requirement that they should be vulnerable. That's why you can't give them shields, that's why you can't give them mez protection, that's why you can't give them almost any passive defensive ability above a certain strength, except as epic selections.

Then you can't give them too much mez, because that steps on controllers. You can't give them too much offense because then they'd kill too fast. That leaves mechanical offensive tricks and soft control, and you can't make knockup the blaster inherent effect.

Even you're showing a hint of that intrinsic prejudice. Blaster mez protection options could leave them with less magnitude, or no magnitude and high resistance, it could break out of mez but not prevent mez, but even with all those potential short comings there's something that just doesn't seem right to you if blasters don't need to burn power picks for it while there exists a scrapper out there that has to burn two. Because blaster mez protection isn't just required to be lesser protection than the melee archetypes, it must be lesser in every possible way or there's something wrong. There's no other reason to believe blaster mez protection must be more difficult to achieve than domination, even though domination does more than provide mez protection: it provides full endurance refresh and a strong boost to dominator mez.

In fact, here's one way to describe domination: it returns you to full endurance, it grants you mez protection, and it allows you to mez bosses with one hit. Total focus was reduced to mag 3 because giving blasters a single mag 4 stun was considered wrong. Dominators get to have *all* their mez be mag 6, *and* have both ranged and melee attacks, *and* their melee attacks even have a higher modifier than blasters, *and* they get to have mez protection. Why? Because they do not need to be vulnerable. Its actually just that simple.

Even I find myself doing it, which is why I *know* its the reason blasters are the problem child they are. Blasters are a sacrificial lamb to the gameplay concept of needing to be occasionally rescued, or bouncing back after being nearly defeated. That's why Defiance 1.0 was what it was: it was actually the mental image of blasters to the designers. Something that was beaten up, and with their last gasp vaporized everything in the room before falling over.


Here's something that I've thought about ever since dominators were buffed. A hypothetical archetype with dominator numbers, dominator assault sets as their primary, and scrapper defense as their secondary, would I think be a fairly popular archetype. It would be defensively weaker than scrappers because it would have less health, but it would have a mix of melee and ranged attacks, which would be an offensive advantage. It would be the perfect platform to build an Iron Man-like character, for example. But it wouldn't really be any stronger than a Dominator. By taking away the control set we've actually taken away some offense, so this hypothetical archetype would have lower theoretical offensive output than a dominator. It would have higher personal mitigation, but I don't think in most cases that scrapper mitigation is massively higher than dominator control mitigation. They have to be similar, or dominators wouldn't work. So this hypothetical archetype would be a ranged/melee/defense archetype that I can reasonably prove has equal to or less performance than actual dominators now, at least on average.

Anyone want to bet that this hypothetical archetype would *not* outperform Blasters, even if Blasters might have *some* small offensive edge (mostly in ranged AoE)?

Dominators > X > Blasters. QED: Dominators > Blasters. Not in all possible ways, but in terms of overall performance, that conclusion seems inevitable. But the thing that I've *really* thought about a lot is it begs the interesting question of why does there seem to be so little headroom to buff blasters, when there's clearly enough headroom for me to invent a whole new archetype above them and below dominators in performance.

Also, people do like playing blasters, because I think people are attracted to playing something that is all-out offense, and because at lower levels blasters tend to be a more "active" archetype offensively. I wonder, though, if the Assault/Defense archetype was created as an epic archetype or something, how many people playing blasters it would steal away. Perhaps that is the best way to address the gap with blasters; not by changing blasters but by making a new archetype that addresses those issues, leaving blasters to be a legacy archetype that retains that original vulnerability. After all, lots of people still like to play blasters, including me. Even if its broken, it might be too late to really totally overhaul it.

If your argument is the female costume is slutty or sexist and therefore shouldn't exist at all, then I'm compelled to state that the players that actually like it and don't think its particularly sexist should not feel the need to justify themselves or their preferences to anyone.

You have a right to not like them, and ask for alternatives. You do not have the right to denigrate the people who like what you don't like. That's a general rule, and not one specific to costume parts. For some reason, however, people often seem to think their moral compass is superior enough to exempt them from this rule when it comes to costumes.

It shouldn't really be called a gunslinger pack because the female costume set can't really be genuinely called a gunslinger costume. That's as far as one should go. Going farther and calling the other costume "sex worker" is, whether you intend it or not, an insult to the people who saw that costume as anything other than that, and thought that while it was not a gunslinger costume, it was a nice non-prostitute costume option besides. Its an unnecessary slam, when its not relevant to whether the devs genuinely delivered on their gunslinger pack to both (character) genders.

You're leaving no wiggle room here for the devs, so you shouldn't say things that demand people extend wiggle room to you to make a point. Sticking to the area there seems to be almost universal agreement upon, namely that the gunslinger pack clearly did not deliver a gunslinger option for female characters, sends a clearer message than arguing over whether the actual delivered option is sexist, for which there isn't overwhelming agreement.

Put it another way: I would have been just as disappointed if the female option was a fully clothed and covered western school teacher. The issue is not that the option is or is not sexy, but rather that it is not a gunslinger.

Not sure what I'm looking at here. But the total cycle time of an attack is its cast time plus its net recharge time (after recharge buffs). Cast time is not accelerated by recharge.

It comes down to expectations and intentions. A person making a movie generally has certain intentions: they want to tell a story, they want to visually evoke, etc. A person watching a movie generally has certain expectations: they want to be visually entertained, they want a certain movie-going experience. There's usually an implied agreement between the producer and consumer of entertainment that the intentions and expectations roughly align. When they don't, there's usually problems.

When we see a boom mic show up in a movie, we usually groan. We don't expect it, and we see it as a sign of bad production quality: the movie makers didn't care enough to edit it, so why should we care about watching it. When we see a stage play, we think nothing of seeing the staff move set pieces around: we can even marvel at their efficiency. We have a different expectation with stage plays than major motion pictures, and we judge accordingly.

Ultimately, we engage in entertainment media to be entertained. But we generally choose *which* media to serve certain desires or expectations on our part, and we presume the producers are correctly signalling their intent. We play games for the interactivity: we expect gameplay in an actual game. And if a game has little gameplay, but lots of QTEs, its fair for us to start to say "if they want to throw a movie at me when I wanted to play a game, then fine, I'll judge this as a movie not a game, starting with comparing the quality of the movie as a movie relative to all other movies I've seen." You start off in the hole because you basically violated the implied social contract to provide a game when you claimed to produce a game, and then you also get judged not based on how good your movie is compared to other games, but compared to other real movies. That's a tough bar to get over.


You could say this about other areas besides entertainment media. You could say the objective of going to a restaurant is "to eat" but its fair to say people tend to have a different set of expectations if they eat at a diner as opposed to a high end restaurant. We can expect hearty inexpensive comfort food at the diner, and be disappointed if we get expensive appetizers. Conversely, we can be disappointed if we get inexpensive comfort food at the high end restaurant, even if the food is otherwise completely delicious. Sometimes we want one thing, sometimes we want something else, and we have a right to have certain expectations based on what the producers of our content signal they intend.


You could order a hamburger and get a chicken sandwich instead. It could be a perfectly delicious chicken sandwich, and it could fill you up. In the grand scheme of things, you could say that's all that counts, but I think most people would still be upset they didn't get what they ordered.

Bill is still playing, but currently premium so no forums. Leveling Street Justice I believe, and having a ball apparently.

Like I said: this seems like either a marketing error, or yet another way Megan Fox is destroying the 21st century.

Actually, Ill/Rad is a strange bird. Its one of the best AV-killers out there, so a lot of people assume its got to be a high-damage offensive powerhouse that can solo anything easily. But actually, its not really. You give me one AV and I'll take it out: I can even easily solo Jack and Eochai simultaneously. But Ill/Rad is not an especially quick soloer. The PA even perma can't be cast into every single spawn exactly perfectly to take the alpha: the timing will never be right for that. And the PA isn't perma when you are leveling up when solo: you don't have enough recharge to do that generally. Your offense, even with the PA, is low by controller standards and you have a tendency to scatter things with the Phantasm. Your toggles have long set up time, and one of your big guns - lingering radiation - doesn't do much for you when trying to clear minions from a map.

Ill/Rad is so control and utility-heavy and offensively average, it does lend itself to being a good team support combo. Its swiss army knife-like set of powers (hold, confuse, stealth, fear, buff, debuff) works well to supplement whatever a team might have a need for, and you will always be handy to take out that one big baddie a team might have trouble with.

Solo, Ill/Rad suffers from the basic problem that if you give it one target to concentrate on, it will destroy that target, but if you give it lots of targets to deal with and it has to spread out its power, its primary strengths get neutralized.

Heck, even fully IOed I wouldn't call my Ill/Rad a particularly fast soloer. Its good at two things: focusing its firepower on a single target or two, and acting as multipurpose filler for teams.

That would be ... potentially problematic to implement. I can see all sorts of potentially ugly race conditions happening there.

If you didn't keep scattering your crayons and construction paper, I wouldn't have to shoo you with my spreadsheets.

I don't know if this is practical, and I know it creates other problems, but I wonder if at least *sometimes* the players should be allowed to see concept art before it gets implemented to offer early feedback to the concept of a costume set. Very specifically, when its not going to be a surprise, when its going to be offered in the store, and when its not explicitly tied to downstream content. What if one out of every three costume sets were developed that way, as an experiment. The whole closed beta process was itself an experiment, and mostly a successful one: offering players limited access to provide feedback before feature freeze allowed for faster and smoother development of certain kinds of content. Perhaps its time to try such an experiment for something much more purely art-driven. Just once or twice, to see if it will work at all.

Here's a crazy thought. Shouldn't the caps occasionally cap somebody?

And I wish you would stop saying this, since its totally made up. You act like there is this thing called "tankers" that CoH tankers stole the name for, but totally messed up. There aren't. Really, there are just melee fighters: things that focus on melee offense and have personal damage mitigation.

Tankers are things that focus on personal damage mitigation and control aggro. They are an MMO invention. To the extent that taunt doesn't really exist in comic book combat, Tankers don't.

If you don't like or believe in the aggro management mechanism, play Scrappers. Or play Brutes if you prefer and don't take taunt. Tankers are there to control aggro. They are a playstyle option for people who do believe in the aggro control system, which is most players that play tankers. What I sometimes wonder is whether most people fully realize that you're not on a mission to *fix* tankers, but actually on a mission to *steal* tankers from the players that play tankers, just so you can repurpose the archetype for your own pleasure.

We have *four* melee/defense archetypes in this game, when we have only two ranged/buff archetypes and only one of every other combination. Find the one that comes the closests your melee/defense preference. Don't tell the people that play the other options they don't deserve them.

True, but that's gameplay. Ranged fighters are rarely defenseless in comic books also. And buffing and debuffing is also something that rarely happens in comic books. Comic books are 99% ranged scrappers, melee bricks, and non-buffing controllers. In-combat ally support is unusual, non-soft-control debuffing is unusual, pet summoners are unusual. Furthermore, the way fights actually work AoE is supposed to be restrained by friendly fire.

In a real fight, your tanker shouldn't be drawing aggro. Your tanker should be standing there helpless while he's kited by everything that contains a brain.

Devs, if you're going to listen to anyone in this thread, ignore everyone else including me and just read this. I suspect this is the closest to the average person's viewpoint you're ever likely to get.