CoyoteShaman

I'm having to agree whole-heartedly with the no votes here. This is an epic bad idea and the only reason I can fathom for even bringing it up is that you've made a ton of people so angry that they left your teams. Aside from the odd child or rude person, which will always exist in any society, I haven't seen a lot of teams suffer from what I would consider undue attrition. That even goes for pugs. One has to expect some people are in a pug for a single mission or so. If they're good players you friend them and look for them later to try to team with them again. If they're not you don't.

Frankly, and I try very hard to not say things like this, but what I'm getting out of this is that I would really like to not ever team with you. If you're seeing so much of this that you think the devs should hold a gun to players heads to keep them on your teams, it tells me you are not fun to team with.

Robin

While I don't really have an opinion of my own on if Gauntlet should be changed, as I don't play many tanks and I'm fairly certain the people who say I'm good at it are either just being kind or are not familiar with really good tanks, I do have an idea for how a change could work if it were decided it needed to be changed.

Except for certain circumstances/builds, all tanks I've ever seen go low on endurance some of the time during large fights with big foes. That's especially true when fighting sapping type foes such as carnies. It's been mentioned that an end boost or -end res would be nice, but the implementation has seemed a bit unwieldy. I would recommend the following if this were to be needed:

A combination of vigilance and fury: As the tanker attacks or is attacked, they fill a bar which indicates the level of their endurance discount (and/or -end/rec resistance). The max discount would never reach beyond a certain point (likely about %75 or so) but the max -end/rec res could probably go up to %100. Obviously I haven't given any thoughts to the game balance implications of this, since it's just off the top of my head, but as far as usefulness and implementation go I think this should be fairly good. The code would have to adapted from the brute inherent but it wouldn't have to be written from scratch and it would certainly be useful to all but the most tricked out of tanks, at least in heavy combat situations.

Robin

I think the difference in implementation is pretty major. Currently the math is very simple. You take the total of all the max hit points on the team and compare that to the total of all the current hit points on the team. The percentage difference is used to determine the endurance discount.

Doing a bar based on when anyone on your team gets hit would require a lot of checking and some pretty massive calculations. When the brute gets hit or hits, it's only relative to one character. What you're suggesting would require that the server tracks it for eight people and applies that tracking to however many defenders are on the team. On a full team of defenders that would cause roughly the same server load as having a team of 64 brutes, as far as the inherent goes. And that doesn't even include the healing part of it.

Further, that would aggravate instead of mitigate the problem of having it benefit different defenders to vastly different degrees. Healers would still heal the team and drop the bar more quickly than shielders, for instance.

I agree, however, that something needs to be done. There are a few threads on the defender AT forum that are trying to come up with some solutions. I'm fairly certain a real solution would require a change to the AT, not just the inherent.

Robin

It is. S/He's thinking of the base teleporter or some such.

I think the reason some people moan about things like this is that they're neophobes. Some people don't like change. They want the game to be the way it was and any substantive change will be met with distaste. They'd rather not have to learn the new culture the change will engender. They'd rather not have to struggle with finding new ways of handling the same situations.

Not everyone is like that, but when a change is so universally accepted or celebrated, the naysayers usually do fall into that group. That's especially true when the change will really be a "take it or leave it" change. You don't like it? Then don't use it. Some people think, however, that if they don't like it then it shouldn't be available for anyone. C'est la vie.

Robin.

I did a search and couldn't find anything on this so who knows. It's hard to describe for a search engine.

Right now when you trigger the base teleporter vet power, you go through the animation, flash out and then get the popup telling you to select where you want to go. While you're finding the right selection and clicking it, your character has reappeared and is just standing there looking stupid.

It would be much better cinematically if the selection screen came at the beginning of the animation. When you click on the tram doors you get the selection screen at the time of the click, not later on when the tram shows up and the doors open. The same sequence should be done for the base teleporter as well.

Robin

Count me in with two thumbs up on this idea.

/signed

Robin

Yes. You could have 7 level 1s on your team and all of them would auto-sk to 33.

Kat, that's not even relevant to some of us (me in particular). I haven't gotten a single email that I wanted, or sent one, in years. I'm sure others are in the same situation. Turning it off completely is all we wanted.

That being said, I agree with a lot of people that there should be more options for who to allow. Not for my sake 'cuz I'll just be leaving it off, but for the sake of many players. Some will want global friends, some will want SG, some will want server friends, some might want some combination thereof. Since the email system is global, it seems silly to not have the limitation selection be global as well. At least to me it does.

Robin.

PS: please don't take this as me saying your comment was a waste of time. I'm only saying that it's not actually a detail at all to some people. I was just pointing that out because it seems to have escaped some people.

One of these days people are going to start smacking me for sounding like a broken record, but I think the real problem is that the comparison is valid in the first place. One can quite validly compare defenders to controllers and defenders to blasters. If you look at either comparison based only the common sets the results are obvious: defenders are better than controllers and worse than blasters.

But when you take into account the whole of the ATs, the comparisons are just as valid and obvious, but now they become laughable. Blasters are actually damage dealers. Controllers are mitigators/mulitpliers: it's not their place to do direct damage so they're only mediocre at it, but when it comes to mitigation in any form they rock hard. Defenders are mitigators/multipliers/damage dealers: Both their primaries and secondaries are split between those three, with much more damage in the secondary and much less in the primary. So think about it: you can still compare defenders to blasters, but the defender is obviously inferior in damage. You can still compare defenders to controllers but taking into account the mitigation/multiplication of the controller primary the controllers win out in this field by quite some distance.

There is, in my opinion, no possible way to fix this by nudging numbers around or modifying the inherent. The only way to change it is to make it so they simply aren't comparable. That would mean changing the defender's secondary to something that would fundamentally alter their role in the team. At the same time, this could be used as an opportunity to give them the boost they need for soloing. Creating some melee offense/defense combo sets for their secondaries would do this quite well, and in my opinion is the only thing that would (this is because I haven't thought of anything else and no one else has pointed out any other options).

Do I think that's remotely likely? Of course not. It would take a huge amount of effort and resources for the devs to accomplish something like that. Do I think it's possible? Absolutely. They did something similar with the Dominator secondaries (ranged/melee as opposed to melee/defense) and all the powers already exist and are seen together in all four of the melee ATs (tanks/scraps/brutes/stalkers).

Unless/until someone else chimes in on this concept, however, I think this is going to be the last time I bring it up. I don't want to get smacked.

Robin

Maybe it's just my OS (Win7) but I no longer can hit the enter key to close the dialog box saying I screwed up my password, nor tab from that dialog back into the UN/PW text boxes. I'd *really* like to be able to use the enter key to close that dialog and get the cursor back in the UN textbox.

Please?

Robin

And also a major league /signed to the tabstop change (which is what the OP said, but in developerese).

Hey, at least I said something other than "Hi" or some goofy crack about taking a seat.

IIRC, someone somewhere said something about having some under-water zone or missions or some such. I'm wondering if the Oceanic Lounge is some kind of harbinger.

Robin