BellaStrega

This is true!

I was never really gone. I posted too many times in one day, which caused a temporal anomaly to open and propel me into the next forum.

I used to farm the Storm Palace for arcane salvage on my DM/DA, but that was while I was getting her filled up with IOs, and I never took on more than two bosses...and of course, DA vs. psi damage, etc.

I haven't given the +4 bosses a try due to one hit taking like 80% of my hit points.

Well, the RCS challenge was three even-level mobs, but click panic buttons made those trivial.

What were the challenges equivalent to taking on the pylons or 3 +4 bosses at once?

That's because some tankers want to outdps scrappers, not because tanker damage is intolerably low.

Just be fair and acknowledge that when you say "well built" you mean loaded up with IOs.

Tanker Smite at 50, unslotted: 14.24 smashing + 44.49 negative = 58.73

Scrapper Smite at 50, unslotted: 20.02 smashing + 62.56 negative = 82.58

58.73 is 71% of 82.58.

If you three slot for damage... Let's say to 196% damage, that becomes:

115.11 to 161.86

Perhaps unsurprisingly, tanker damage remains 71% as compared to scrapper.

You suggested that scrappers should be made better against minions and tankers better buffed against bosses.

It depends on how far you want to improve them. If you gave tankers a 10% critical chance against bosses (for example), that probably wouldn't hurt anything beyond AT uniqueness.

That's not how the scrapper = minion / tanker = boss suggestion came across.

And I point out that the descriptor "medium damage" is misleading.

Yep. In issue 3, tankers were buffed from a .71 damage scale to a .8 damage scale.

My tankers clobber quite effectively.

That's why I said "all things being equal." A stone brute doesn't have the same survivability as a stone tanker (although it's arguable whether the difference is relevant). I also think that Granite is overpowered.

The Rikti War Zone Challenge was not around long before IOs. Issue 9 introduced IOs. Issue 10 introduce the RWZ. Issue 11 introduced purple sets.

Edit: Just clarifying timelines.

I've had this happen on other forums (in Firefox) in the past. What fixed it was deleting the associated cookies.

I had this happen earlier this morning, on a stationary target.

This looks like something that happened when they introduced gauntlet and the ability to hit fleeing targets with melee attacks. For some reason, you could chase a fleeing target all day and your attacks wouldn't do anything - they'd fire, but no hit or miss.

In this case, it seems to not be related to movement, but it reminds me of that.

Unless I accidentally slipped into an alternate universe since the CoV beta, they never nerfed tanker damage. They buffed scrapper damage in issue 5, after buffing tanker damage in issue 3.

I'm trying to understand this perspective where you're insisting that tankers can't do enough damage to stand in for a scrapper, though. I mean, I have played tankers, and my Ice/Stone specifically has never had trouble dealing enough damage alongside another tanker. I mean, sure, it's not equal to a scrapper, but at the same time, it's not exactly wimpy, you know?

As for expressing your opinion, you expressed your opinion that scrappers should be nerfed:

And if they balanced the game around characters with full IOs, then we'd all hate it. Believe me, scrappers wouldn't be the only AT to get the hammer.

I'm sorry, it is fair because scrappers get more damage in exchange for lower defenses. Tankers get more defenses and can withstand more mobs of all kinds pounding on them, and are less likely to be reduced to red health in a single shot. In addition, tankers are still doing ~3/4th the damage that scrappers do, which is still effective.

I already explained why your idea here is a poor one, and it's been a poor one for a long time. No AT needs "better at killing minions" as a niche. Some are better at it than others, due to AoE and overall damage levels, but fights against minions are largely trivial.

On the contrary, I don't trust you to accurately judge whether any idea is balanced because you come up with things like the above suggestion. It's not about establishing a balanced play environment, but making tankers the most powerful AT.

I never made that argument. I have never said that tankers have to be the way they are. I have said that tankers shouldn't have their damage output boosted, and I even explained why it's necessary for scrappers to be able to outdps tankers. I also pointed out that tanker damage is far from pathetic.

Dominator damage was too low for the control and utility they brought to a team. They got to be totally awesome whenever they had Domination up, and otherwise were rather mediocre. They don't have tanker-level defenses and had weaker primaries than controllers. This is not even comparable to what tankers are like right now.

I think the tanker AT can be improved and made more fun. I do not believe that "should be like Superman" is a reasonable expectation.

It's not a good suggestion because the fights that matter are against bosses, EBs, AVs, monsters, and GMs. Fights against minions are over in moments, so giving scrappers a bonus against them to balance tankers being better against the aforementioned categories would make scrappers pretty worthless on a team.

Also, other ATs are much better at minions than scrappers - blasters, for example, can take them down faster without needing to move into the minions in the first place.

But it's an age-old tanker forum tradition! "I'm not satisfied with tanker performance. NERF SCRAPPERS."

And what he really wants is a nerf to all other ATs, because hard capping scrapper defense and reducing the resist cap would require the same be done to everyone else, except perhaps brutes.

It's also a feature that more than one AT can fill a given role on any team.

Yeah, I agree with this.

I was going to respond to each of your points until I hit the paragraph where you claim that tankers level slowly because of hitting mobs with higher regen than your damage, and I couldn't keep going. I don't believe tankers have it this bad (or really, have it bad at all).

This game has multiple abstractions to make it a playable game, instead of trying to balance out how to deal with Superman and Batman on the same team if they do appropriate levels of damage when fighting mobs. It's not easy to set up a game to handle the non-combat side of things, and especially handle them in a way that's satisfactory to players - it's about confronting, fighting, and defeating your enemies (heroes or villains). In that environment, everyone has to be able to contribute, and that means if you have more defense, you do less damage. It also means stuff like origins are cosmetic - Natural heroes do the same damage as mutant and magical heroes, even though natural was initially defined as humans who get there with training - how do humans train themselves to be invulnerable and superstrong? How does my natural tanker train herself to wrap herself in ice and pull stone mallets out of the air? This game is full of conceptual weirdness, and I don't think this one thing, the threat mechanic, is really the spectre that you're making it out to be.

It also means that archetypes need things that they do better than others, or there's no point to having archetypes at all. The argument of whether games need archetypes is separate to the fact that this game has archetypes, and has to balance around that fact. So in this game, Batman gets to outdps Superman because Batman needs to be relevant in the situations the game represents.

I think you're splitting a lot of hairs I didn't even begin to imply. SWG was a fairly successful MMORPG prior to the NGE change. IIRC, this change was announced within a week to a month of ED, and is ultimately behind a significant number of subscribers leaving SWG. You can argue specifics all you want, and even argue over whether or not the game was objectively worse after the changes, but I think that's largely irrelevant. People liked the game before, and the game it was after was no longer the game they wanted, they quit. You can find ex-SWG players all over the place who are more than happy to explain this. My current WoW guild is full of them. Don't pretend this is a theoretical discussion about a theoretical game with theoretical changes. There's a real documented history.

It may be that it was the last straw for people after the combat rebalance and other changes, I wouldn't be surprised. But it was such a huge straw, and people who say they were happy with the game until then left.

I believe that several tests have made it debatable whether scrappers deal significantly more damage than brutes, unless Castle or another dev has made a point of posting datamined figures. BillZBubba has two threads in the scrapper forum about this, and more than a handful of players (who play scrappers and brutes) feel their damage is too close relative to brute survivability vs. scrapper survivability. I would think at this point that there's really not a strong consensus on how scrappers and brutes compare to each other.

Tankers hit fairly hard and their punches do respectable damage, with some exceptions. Ice and War Mace have received needed buffs. Tanker powersets hit hard enough that a noticeable number of forum posters have talked themselves into the notion that giving those powersets to scrappers would make scrappers overpowered. Tankers can dish out a ton of damage - the problem isn't that they're weak, because they're not weak. The problem is, apparently, that scrappers can do more damage than tankers.

I've played tankers, and in my experience, they're not as ineffectual as you paint them. Seriously, they're not that bad, and they haven't been that bad ever. Not even before issue 3 and the damage buff they received then. Back then, everyone overslotted their already overpowered defenses and underslotted their attacks, leaving them with the impression of weak attacks. ED finally made it ridiculous to six-slot defenses at the expense of slotting attacks, but somehow, the impression that tanker attacks are incredibly weak has stubbornly remained. Tankers don't need to have ways to boost their damage output. They're already respectable damage dealers - some secondaries more than others, yes, but Castle's apparently been working on bringing those into line. Looking over the patch notes since the last time I played, I just don't see how people are saying exactly the same things about tanker damage now that they were saying five years ago. It does not make sense. There's a reason that while tankers were complaining about how they ran themselves out of endurance trying to take out a handful of minions in issue 1, I was running around with Confessor's Inv/Fire tanker and watching him burn down hazard zone-sized spawns without needing any help I had to offer.

Brutes pay for their damage parity with scrappers by needing to maintain fury, which promotes a higher-risk level of play.

I think this is a false dichotomy, esp. in a game like CoH where you can build a team out of most (if not all) combinations of ATs and powersets and manage to deal with 99% of the situations you'll encounter in the game. I also do not believe that designing characters around the MMO trinity makes them incomplete characters, unless all characters are supposed to be equally proficient in all situations, which doesn't make any sense - even the comic books aren't written that way.

I mean, no one's obligated to be happy with the state of the tanker AT, and it's fair to be dissatisfied with the state of affairs where they're not the #1 damage AT (where Johnny Butane seems to be coming from) or don't simply have the hardest hitting attacks in the game (where Goldbrick seems to be coming from), but I think it's pretty easy to confuse what one wants with what's best for the game as a whole, and I think it's pretty hard to demonstrate that tankers are actually incapable of dealing damage.

I guess if this were WoW, where every character is designed to perform a particular role (and every class is designed to potentially fill 1-3 roles), I'd be more inclined to agree with you, at least WoW the way it was before the expansions. But right now in CoH, it seems to me that the MMO trinity is more of a polite suggestion.

Is it open to debate that SWG lost a significant portion of its userbase after changing the game?

I seem to recall the Banished Pantheon's references to gods being censored forever ago.

I think it's mostly justifiable there, because the wow playerbase is not only capable of making multiple **** jokes in 5 seconds, but they'll make compound words and portmanteaus out of it.

Wow's filter is actually much less aggressive than the one here.

a) AWESOME

b) I hope you never get reported for it because, you know.

I don't know what became of it, but back in 2004-2005, there was an SG on Champion composed entirely of Steves.

Amusing group.

I think your story is pretty funny, but I think people are a bit too invested in the whole "the most outspoken homophobes" thing, especially since it tends to make it sound like LGB people are directly responsible for causing homophobia.

Also: homophobic men are so stupid about women online. They think they have to insist we're all men just to keep themselves from accidentally flirting with a man pretending to be a woman and turn to same-sex loving forever.