Arcanaville

I'm kinda partial to:

GB? What's a GB? Is that like a TB for older computers?

(Right now, I stand at about 2.86 TB of total capacity)

Way back in 1987 I made a bet with a bunch of friends that in my lifetime I would own a computer with a billion pixel screen, a trillion ops per second, and a quadrillion bytes of storage. At the time, that target was about three thousand times more pixels, a million times more ops, and a hundred million times more storage than my computer at the time.

At present, that target represents a computer with five hundred times the pixels, twenty times the processing power (not counting the GPU), and three hundred times the storage. Assuming we don't count the GPU in the calculation number, the trend is that I will hit the processing target in about six years and the storage target in about ten years. The display target is a little iffier: it might be thirty years, it might be only a decade (if things like wall and desk-displays become common in ten years). At this point, though, I'm willing to state I'm a lock to win that bet, unless I get hit by a bus in the near future.

If you want a strange answer:

Primary
1. Mud Pots
2. Mud Pots
3. Mud Pots
4. Earthquake
5. Earthquake
6. Burn
7. Burn
8. Burn
9. Burn

Secondary
1. Stygian Circle
2. Tactical Training: Maneuvers
3. Tactical Training: Maneuvers
4. Indominable Will
5. Tactical Training: Maneuvers
6. High Pain Tolerance
7. High Pain Tolerance
8. Eclipse
9. Eclipse

To be fair to Sam, that article doesn't really address what he's talking about (at least part of it) because it doesn't really address soloing. It addresses team roles, and how critical the trinity concept is to it. I think Sam is asking a different question: should we be forced to pick one of those three roles, and be locked into it not just on every team we're on, but even solo when we aren't even on a team.


And I would contend that somewhere between CoH and CoV this game broke the trinity as that article defines it. Think about CoV. Which one is the DPS class? Which one is the aggro class? Which one is the healing class? Its pretty clear that these roles have been heavily "smeared out" over the CoV archetypes. Both Brutes and Masterminds were specifically designed to handle some aspects of what is traditionally considered "tanking." There is no healing specialist (both Corruptors and Masterminds have significant access to healing, and neither focuses on it). DPS is remarkably similar across the archetypes (certainly, one can make arguments for which archetype generates the most damage, but in CoV those arguments revolve much more around powersets than archetypes).

In CoH, they cracked the holy trinity, but only by accident. They wanted Blasters to be the DPS class, Tankers to be the Tanking class, Defenders to be the Healers, Scrappers to be the soloing specialist, and Controllers to be a different kind of support class from Defenders. But they massively screwed up and ended up first giving everyone so much ability to enhance their damage that most classes had the same offensive ability as most DPS classes in other MMOs, and second giving everyone enough survivability that only Blasters were really under as much threat as the trinity ordinarily proscribes. At some point, they realized that although they missed their design marks all over the place, they had inadvertently hit a different set of marks: everyone could comfortably solo, and liked it, and yet this *didn't* destroy teaming. We were never more collectively able to solo than in I2, and yet we were never more willing to team than in I2, at least as I observed the game. So solo ability didn't *automatically* mean teaming was damaged (there were, of course, specific issues with teaming which were addressed with various degrees of success).

In CoV, however, these design decisions were deliberate, and much more thorough. I don't think the CoV team gets enough credit for that. While I think they made lots of mistakes, one thing they did do was make a set of archetypes that all could solo reasonably well, none of which was locked into a trinity role, and yet all of which had some nominal role on teams (their biggest miss was, of course, Stalkers). There are still people claiming that's impossible, or implying its so difficult no one has done a good job of it yet. I think CoV is actually a very good example of doing that pretty well. Not perfectly, but it suggests what is possible in future designs.

You can make the entire MMO into an extension of the costume creator: make anything with any powers and any abilities, at any time. However, it ceases to be a game as the game developers define it. The game developers want to make a game, not a non-gaming sandbox, so the answer to why the game doesn't go this route is simply that its not what the developers want to make. This may sound completely arbitrary, and it is, but its no different of a decision than the one they made when they decided to make a superhero game and not a fantasy-based one. Neither decision is one that is up for a vote or subject to reversal.

That was just an example. CO doesn't allow specialization as you're describing it either, because the only way you can have more ranged powers than me is if you take excessively large numbers of them, and in CO you can't make use of all of them. In CO when I decide to take melee powers and a defensive passive, I haven't burned enough choices to be less effective than you are at Electric blasting. You'll just get there a few levels sooner. By your definition of specialization, there simply aren't enough choices to prevent someone from basically becoming a specialist in everything. And that perverts the entire concept of specialization.


Champions doesn't lock you into a "class" because Champions has no classes. But that's nothing special about the system, its a side-effect of the fact that there aren't enough options in Champions to prevent saturation.



You have specifically contradicted that statement earlier. You said that the question wasn't a question of what was "decent" but rather whether there was sizable difference in ability:

I contend that while Defenders are probably at or near the practical lower limit of satisfying the requirement of being able to solo at a reasonable rate, they meet that definition or would with very minimal changes to damage efficiency and therefore CoH itself is an example of a game that allows players to solo at a "decent rate." That's at least partially a matter of opinion, but that's a different discussion. They tend to be much lower in soloing ability than some other archetypes, but you're not consistently stating whether that is a problem.

If you want everyone to have some minimal amount of soloing ability, then I agree: I may disagree about what that value should be. But if you're saying there should be no significant difference between the soloing ability of the different classes, then that's something else entirely. Then my question becomes, why? What is it about choosing a class that makes it deserving of special consideration. If CoH started with just one class, and within the first five levels you had to pick a special power from a special power pool that altered your archetype modifiers to one of the established classes and was the mandatory prerequisite for the powers of that archetype, CoH would be an "archetype-less" system where the choice you're objecting to would no longer exist. Instead, you'd be arguing that the choice of *power* at level five, which modifies modifiers and is a prerequisite for other powers, is fundamentally wrong. Which means modifier modification and power prerequisite choices presented to the players have to be wrong. And again I ask: why? I get that you don't like the choice. Why must everyone else be forbidden from choosing it?


You have to pick one. Either everyone should have a minimum level of soloing ability, and then everyone gets to pick additional abilities beyond that, some of which may improve soloing ability more than others. In which case the debate is over what level of ability should the minimum be.

Or:

Everyone should have the same level of soloing ability, or be presented with the same options for improving solo ability. Furthermore, regardless of any choices made in the past, that statement should hold into the future. In that case, the question is over why this restriction on player choice is necessary or desirable.


I'm still not sure which one you believe, because you have made arguments for both, but they are mutually exclusive.

On the Intel side of the fence, you're looking at a processor between the Core i5 750 (2.67 Ghz) and the Core i7 975 (3.33 Ghz). I don't think you're giving up much by going below 3 Ghz on i7s or i5s: my i7-860 is probably going to run almost anything I throw at it for the next few years, and its a native 2.8 Ghz clock processor (but its a quad-core). More importantly, anything about 2.9 Ghz is starting to become a very pricey part.

On the AMD side, you're looking at something like a Phenom II, and there the range is wide enough that its not a bad recommendation to try to get a 3.0 Ghz processor or better: 3.0 would be about the middle of the pack for Phenom II, and the prices are not bad for processors at or a little higher than 3.0 Ghz (assuming you were gunning for a significantly above average processor and were willing to pay for it). In fact, I'd recommend Phenom II X4 955 or better if you were going AMD.


The Core i5-750 is a decent processor. Its going to tend to outperform almost any Core2, and the next jump up (to the i7-860) is a significant jump in price for only a small improvement in clock speed. I went 860 because it supports hyperthreading, and Nehelem (Core i5/Core i7) hyperthreading is a completely different animal than the old P4 hyperthreading (which hurt almost as much as it helped on many workloads). But as a gaming rig, my suspicion is you won't notice a big difference between i5-750 and i7-860.

To me, tools with the same net effect are the same tools, with cosmetic differences.


I think you're starting to play games with "different degrees." You keep saying you're ok with "different degrees" and then reversing and saying if two things have disparate capability (or opportunity) to solo, that's problematic. I'm becoming convinced that what you want is something that *looks* different, and can be claimed to be different, but isn't really different.


In my opinion, one of the things that is wrong with the CO system is that you *cannot* "specialize" in any sense of the word. The "thematic specialties" are really mostly convenient containers for the powers. The prereq thresholds become meaningless by the midgame for the most part. What you have in CO is really a big set of powers you can choose from, nearly at will, and no choice affects your future options much. Your electric blaster can never be better than my super strength fighter in using Gigabolt: no one can "specialize" in anything in the sense of being better than anyone at anything.

That is homogeneity on a massive scale, and its forced upon them by their implementation of an "open" powers system. Specifically, its what happens when decisions have no consequences.


You seem to be suggesting that a player that self-nerfs themselves is ok. The game shouldn't protect them from that sort of decision. But you are also implying that there are certain classes of decisions the game *should* protect the players from. For example, by the definition of "specialization" you're using above, the game should never allow someone to *ever* be able to pick any specialization that increases their solo combat effectiveness and conversely the game should never allow someone to ever be able to pick any specialization which impairs their ability to solo in any way.

Why? If I choose to be a Defender and that choice locks me into lower offensive ability, that's bad. If I choose not to take any attacks, that's fine. I have absolutely no idea why there should be a distinction, in terms of what a game will allow, between those two kinds of choices. If you consider it bad game design to give players the choice to play Defenders because that choice comes with lower offensive ability, why not also force the players to take a certain number of attacks that you deem necessary? What's the difference between those two options?

If you're consistently fluctuating between 90 and 100 endurance, I'd skip the third slot altogether and slot something else.

If I understand what you are saying, I'm not sure that's even laudable, much less possible, except in the general case where there aren't any ATs, and any player choices that permanently nullify other choices (in other words, no choices with consequences). "Soloing" is not a singular ability, and the only way to make sure that all consequential player choices generate the same potential for soloability is to make all consequential choices identical, or eliminate all consequential choices.

I don't consider that an advance in game design. If anything, the homogeneity it mandates is to me a step backward.

You're going to need a bigger boat.

I just said it proves its not inevitable, not that it isn't more common than desirable.

Without offensively-oriented secondaries, its probably right at the absolute lower limit of reasonable soloability, but I don't think its literally terrible. I think that's mostly a matter of opinion. Moreover, I don't think its a question of the devs "taking too much away" but rather choosing a soloing level that's lower than you prefer. In other words, *something* was going to have that baseline soloing speed, so the blame is more on the "3 minions rule" than it is on the "archetype trade-off" rule (for lack of a better way of describing those two design rules).

If you think Defenders should have stuck their hands in the offensive cookie jar more than the buff one, you can always play a heroic corruptor after GR releases. One game design principle I personally believe in is "something for everyone" not "everything for everyone." In trying to make things that some people will like, you may make things others will like less. This is intentional. Some people will like a class that takes more buff and less damage than a corruptor, and those people should have the choice to play a defender. Those that would rather choose the reverse have the choice to play a corruptor. So long as side-switching is allowed (post GR) there's no rule that says the devs should strive to make everyone love both defenders and corruptors, or to replace one with the other.

(Power set availability issues cloud the issue, but that's really a side issue).

I'm not directly familiar with Riolo (or maybe I just forgot him), but I am familiar with the research surrounding prisoner's dilema strategies, aka "tit for tat." It was a million years ago, but I believe I became aware of tit for tat around the same time I became interested in Core War (I probably first became aware of both around 1984 via articles in Scientific American).

The prisoner's dilema's contests are another line of research that suggests there is no inevitable specific evolutionarily derived biological imperative to be a jerk-wad.

Assault is +18.75% damage for Defenders. It costs 0.39 eps. If we cut the endurance cost with slotting its about 0.2 eps. For this to improve DPE, real attacks have to cost more than this, which is essentially saying that 195% (slotted attacks) have to cost more than 2.08 eps.

Defender secondaries are basically similar to Blaster primaries in terms of scale DPA, hovering around 1.0 dps in scale numbers; a full unslotted Defender chain is going to burn about 5.2 eps as a result (AoEs complicate matters somewhat). Someone that 1-slots for endurance will still have a 3.9 eps burn rate, plus or minus. So assuming you are attacking at least 55% of the time, Assault will help Defender DPE (if you spend too much time moving between spawns and don't toggle off Assault, it will burn endurance without buffing anything and ultimately reduce your endurance efficiency). This is solo: Assault has a much better return on investment in teams for obvious reasons.

That's actually not true for all archetypes. Blasters, for example, with similar offensive burn rates only get +10.5% damage from Assault. They must burn more than 3.7 eps for Assault to improve DPE, and with attacks 1-slotted for endurance they have to be attacking 95% of the time that Assault is up. That's extremely unlikely unless you toggle-manage Assault, and few people seem to do that.

However, having said that, Assault isn't strong enough to significantly alter the *overall* endurance picture. If we are guestimating a Defender generating a relative 1.27 dps (0.65 * 1.95) and burning 3.9 eps overall and comparing to a blaster generating 2.19 dps and burning 3.9 eps overall, adding Assault to both would increase the Defender to 1.39 dps and 4.1 eps, and the Blaster to 2.31 dps and 4.1 eps. The DPE of the Defender increases from 58% of the Blaster to 60% of the Blaster.

If we compare to Tanker theoretical DPE instead, we have Defender theoretical DPE being 81% of Tanker without Assault, and 84.5% of Tanker with Assault (that's comparable to increasing the Defender ranged damage modifier from 0.65 to 0.675).

Rand said a lot of things, but I've always found her to be pedantically self-contradictory. She would have excelled at Internet discussion forums.


Specifically relevant to this discussion, Rand never, at least to my knowledge, dealt with the concept of defectors. Basically, Rand's philosophy only really works if everyone follows it, and yet Rand's own value system would suggest that under such a system, its in one's own self-interest to act outside the system.**

Another way of putting it is that Rand doesn't account for Nash. She assumes at all times that enlightened self-interest for a group will always converge on what would be optimal for the individual, and that by extension what is considered optimal for the individual can be extrapolated to what will be optimal for the group. Nash proves you can never take that for granted.



** Rand dismisses any notion of abstract altruism, yet suggests that its rational to obey codes of conduct that allow everyone else to follow the same Objectivist philosophy you do, for no other reason than that she declares it to be "rational." That's an example of pedantic self-contradiction. Why should I *care* if anyone else has the same survival opportunities that I do, under Rand? If you need to die for me to live, while I'm applying force to kill you I will be taking your ability to act rationally, but I have no self-interest at that moment in allowing you that option. Basically, Rand never fully explains why anyone who follows Rand should allow anyone else to follow Rand. It can't be out of the goodness of your heart, because Objectivists aren't supposed to believe there is goodness of heart. The presumption tends to be that if you don't allow others to follow Rand, they won't let you do so either, so its in your best interests to allow everyone to follow Rand and create an Objectivist society. But as I said, that doesn't account for defectors: Randian wolves preying rationally on Randian sheep.

I'm not an expert in DnD (and my knowledge of anything past 3rd edition is practically non-existent) but I don't think DnD ever really had a "Tanker" class in the way MMOs tend to implement it; especially as CoH implements it.

I mean, the "fighter" class (and all its variants) tended to be melee, and tended to be more hardy, but they seem to be more scrapperish than tankerish to me. The critical difference seems to be that in DnD, if the magic user runs up to the monster and hits it with his staff, the monster doesn't ignore him and attack the fighter, the monster turns to the left and eats the magic user's head. In DnD, the melee-fighter could take more damage, but they didn't have the near-perfect control of aggro that they do in CoH.

Perhaps my memory of DnD (its been a long, long time) or other PnP games is incomplete, but I never ran into a PnP game where there was the same capability of aggro control. In PnP games, it seemed the advantage of being the fighter was that you could jump right into the fight. If you were not the fighter, you were not relying on the fighter to lock aggro and make you free to act in any way you wanted: you were supposed to keep your head down or attack from a different zip code.

You get six friends who will never outlevel you, who are always logged in the same times you are, and who cannot quit your team no matter how many times you get them killed.

"Giving up" is not the right way to think about it. The right way to think about it is, using CoH as the example, everyone starts off with Defender damage and no range. Then Defenders got range and buffs. Scrappers got more damage and self-defense. Blasters got more damage and range. No one really "gave up" anything to get what they got, except from a relative perspective.

As to the thesis of the OP, I think that's a much more complex question than it is usually portrayed as. I'll just say this: if I were designing CoH from scratch today, I would not use the tank/blaster/defender archetype-role system. I'd basically create skill tree-like options that start from a core, then allow branch outs to various options: think VEATs, but more complex. But unlike VEATs, I would not lock players into a single branch. Rather than force players to make decisions about what they want their tradeoffs to be for all time, I would allow players to make situational tradeoffs intrinsic in their powers and abilities.

For example, you could erect a force field around the team to protect them from damage. But you'd have to take some small percentage of that damage, and the cost in maintaining it would be less energy to devote to offense (and by the way, in my world no click buffs: buffing someone costs you power continuously; energy devoted to those buffs couldn't be used to fight with). In effect, a "tank" would be someone that took the right abilities that allowed them to burn a lot of energy protecting allies from damage. But outside of teams, with those powers turned off, they basically cease to become tankers, and cease to have to live under that tradeoff.**

To put it simply, I would not make tankers. Only powers useful to tanking. Someone who loaded up on them at the expense of offense would be making a build choice to trade the opportunity for more offense for the opportunity for more team-oriented defense. But there'd be a lot of room to compromise between "all offense" and "all defense" and everyone would be responsible for their own chosen trade offs.


** Its the notion of actual meaningful tradeoffs that I think distinguishes my hypothetical system from the system implemented in Champions Online, which only has opportunity costs.

Its better to reduce the costs of attacks rather than buff endurance. Buffing endurance has collateral unintended side effects. In particular, it acts essentially to reduce the relative costs of all non-attack powers. I have no reason to believe the endurance costs of team buffs are too high. And specifically for defender primaries with damage-buffing powers, reducing the relative costs of using them could increase the offensive disparity between defender primaries (particularly solo), which is something else I wouldn't want to do.

For reference, I gave Statesman a specific example for a specific powerset, way, way back around I6ish after Archery came out. One of the Striga cargo ship missions was, on heroic, spawning dual Lt groups at even and +1. If you happened to be unlucky enough to draw a significant number of dual +1 LTs (due probably to the level round off issue) you could, with some secondaries, find yourself running out of endurance before being able to generate enough damage to defeat them both if you were a smash/lethal secondary and you didn't have stamina or an endurance recovery power. That *shouldn't* happen while solo at that level in a heroic mission within the core content.

That situation does not occur at the lowest difficulty level anymore, I don't think, so its no longer a valid example.

My own line of thinking currently does not rely on the existence of such an example. Rather, it relies on a more general principle that whether everything is soloable or not, the defender mod may imply a lower soloing rate than the devs intend. Its telling that of all the archetypes with modifiers lower than about 0.75-0.8, all of them except defenders have eventually had soloing performance improved *specifically* with damage enhancing buffs. Controllers got containment, Tankers got a modifier boost (Dominators were also boosted, but its not perfectly clear if the boost intended to improve solo performance or if that was a side effect of increasing the damage contribution of the archetype to teams). Corruptors have a 0.75 modifier but got Scourge out of the box.

It could just be a coincidence, but I don't think 0.75 is just an arbitrary cutoff number. The implication of a 0.75 modifier, in the absence of other damage improvements, is that the archetype is designed to solo 25% slower. I have reason to believe that 25%-30%% is close to the point where the devs would take action if they discovered that an archetype was datamined to be much slower than average, overall, and a lot of the changes they have made to damage and soloing seem to converge on this rule of thumb. However, I don't know enough about the devs' balancing methodology to state this with 100% certainty. I'm 90% sure this line of thought does point approximately to the truth, though.

In game design terms, DPA affects the short-term ability for something to generate damage. DPE affects something's kill speed. The game tools do allow the devs to adjust both independently, by adjusting damage modifiers which adjust both, and then the archetype endurance scaler which specifically affects DPE separate from DPA. However, the devs don't do that anymore, since the archetype endurance scaler is now set to be the same for all archetypes: 5.2 endurance per scale. My gut instinct is to believe the actual core intent is for all archetypes to have similar (but not necessarily identical) *absolute* DPE, but they are currently set to have identical *relative* DPE, which is a totally different thing, and at modifier values lower than about 0.75 it diverges from intent in a way that actually violates their soloing standards. But that's not something I can prove absolutely at the moment, because the devs' soloing standards are not publicly known with enough precision.

No, I don't agree with you that there is strong evidence to support the contention that the defender damage modifier needs to be increased. I only said I have strong evidence to support the notion that defender endurance consumption needs to be lowered.

And I actually hate it when people ask me to ignore what they say, and instead "realize" what their ultimate meaning is. In the absence of your illustration, you're just asking for more damage because you want to do more damage with a non-damage-focused archetype.

Honestly, I'm not even sure what your "idea" is. Originally, it sounded like your idea was "increase defender damage: they can't solo." Now it seems to be more "increase defender damage: low damage is frustrating." The problem is that the former is false, and the latter borders on nonsensical. If you find low damage frustrating, play a high damage archetype. That's what they are there for. Asking for more damage *only* because you don't like it, and not for any balance reason, is like me asking for my MA attacks to work at 80 feet, because lacking range is frustrating.

I'll even go so far as to bet that there have been players that have played melee archetypes, and then quit in frustration because they disliked not having range. But while that's unfortunate, there's nothing we should necessarily do about that. Some people can't be saved.


In any case, because this bears repeating: you can't just tell everyone to ignore your original justification for your suggestion. There is a distinct difference between "I can make a good case that defender damage modifiers are too low" and "I would like more damage, please." If you ask us all to ignore your example, your thread shifts from the former to the latter. And when it does, good luck with that.

I believe he is referring to "Threat" which is a character attribute related to how hate/aggro is computed. Most things have threat of 1.0. Scrappers have threat 3.0. Brutes and Tankers have threat 4.0.

However, I find it a bit contradictory to claim that most people don't know about the Brute 90% res cap, but then claim that the threat 4.0 is an indicator Brutes are aggro specialists. I dare anyone to prove a Brute *has* 4.0 threat without trusting the RN screens (I think even Stargazer would have extreme difficulty detecting that). The 90% res cap is easy for all but the most new players to spot: the floating red numbers keep going down. No one needed to be told in CoV beta that Brutes had a 90% resistance cap. I doubt *any* player in CoV beta both knew the Brute threat value *and* knew what it meant.


In CoV beta, the average perspective on Brutes evolved from "Brutes are Tankers, but they aren't very good at it" to "clearly Brutes are Scrappers, and its Masterminds that are the Tankers" which was closer to the actual dev intent. It was only post-launch, possibly in conjunction with the release of inventions and level 50 content, that the pendulum began to swing the other way to "Brutes are Tankers but you have to work a lot harder at it, which is ok because red side archetypes need less Tanking."

I think the "state of the art" in Brute/Mastermind** thinking, which is not typical, is "what with the Mastermind creating all that havoc, all my Brute needs to do is tank that one big baddie from wiping all the MMs pets and we're home free." Which is personally appealing to me because it *does* break the holy-trinity's hold on players, and shows the way to the future. YMMV.


** (Just an example: Brutes and Masterminds are not the only archetypes in the aggro equation. Dominators, in particular, are also designed to mitigate threat in a different obvious way)

I believe Castle acknowledged that recently (like, within the last year or so). I think Blasters were already at 5.2, and everyone else was set to 5.2.

It bugs me a little, because had I known at the time I would have called the devs on it. Its one of those things I think I should have paid much more attention to, like the Kheldian health balancing calculation error.

That was not the design intent.

CoV archetypes were never meant to be direct analogs of CoH ones. They were meant to be completely different things that did similar things in totally different ways.

Some people looked at the CoV archetypes and said "ah, Brutes are Tankers, Stalkers are weak scrappers, Dominators are controllers, Corruptors are Blaster/Defender hybrids, and Masterminds are something new." That was totally wrong.

Masterminds were intended to be the archetype designed to capture aggro in a totally different way than Tankers: with pets functioning as big bags of health. Brutes, on the other hand, were intended to be anti-scrappers: they were scrappers that did better on teams than solo, by being the most buffable archetype red side.**

Brutes only needed to have higher buff caps than anything else red side overall. They did not specifically need to have the same defensive buff caps as tankers. The fact that Brutes are often played as pseudo tankers rather than buffable scrappers is evidence that the "holy trinity" is as much imposed on players by developers as it is self-imposed on players by themselves. In fact, you could argue that by making Brute defensive caps identical to tankers the devs shot themselves in the foot by making it seem like Brutes were meant to *be* tankers. If they had resistance caps of, say, 80%-85% (higher than scrappers, lower than tankers, and around Kheldians) it might have been more obvious that Brutes were not meant to be plug and play alternatives to tankers.

Of course, now that they have those caps, its probably too late to change them. That's now how Brutes are defined. But it was not originally intended to be.



** Stalkers were the melee-based alpha strike archetype: basically melee blasters. Dominators were sort of anti-controllers: control and offense, rather than control and buff. Corruptors were the only obvious ones: anti-defenders. But CoV shuffled everything up, so this is an oversimplification. Pets went to masterminds, control went to dominators, and "controllers" were vaporized in the conversion. Melee offensive support went to dominators, and alpha strike went to stalkers, and blasters disappeared. Only corruptors and defenders were spared the shuffle.