Ineffable_Bob

I feel the need to comment on this, but how do you troll a troll guide?

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Ballista is a Toggle Dropping *******!

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Yeah, he is. He was designed to be as close to a Player Hero as we could make him. How do you guys like the Toggle Drop on him? Is it too nasty or does it add a nice challenge?

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Personally, I don't like TD, period. I understand why it's necessary in PvP (although I maintain it needs to be toned down a bit), but putting it in PvE is just annoying.

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Agreed. If I wanted to get mezzed or knocked down, I'd play my blaster. When I play a toon with status protection, I want it to actually protect me.

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The contact to start is located (?? a little help, toward SE corner).

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It's the #1 starburst symbol on the map.

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(*What the heck are crumpets anyway?)

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Just stay away from the figgins.

Anyone put together something similar to this for the CoV Strike Forces yet?

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When you dont have "pocket defenders" and all that there's no chance your scrapper can do what a tank does defense-wise. Wanna bet? Bring your scrapper and I'll bring my tanker to the test server and we'll see who takes damage better.

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You're right, but still missing the point. If your non-Granite tank doesn't have 'pocket defenders', you can't stand up to large-group spawns. So since you need a 'pocket defender' in a team, why not just get a scrapper, who also needs the 'pocket defender' but also does more damage?

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If we put together a team and just vary the tanks and other ATs for a given set of missions without worrying about the tank's or other AT's roles (in other words, assemble the team and just let it happen) the optimum balance for the team should be achieved. That data point is what I think we're looking for.

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You're going to need a lot more than one weekend, then. There's millions of possible combinations of 6 characters, when you consider different powersets, different power choices, even different pool power picks. And that's not even considering playstyle - two sets of players with the exact same character builds might approach things in a completely different way.

Now, I understand that we don't need to test them all. But say we find 50 different team compositions that are better without a tank. So what? There's millions of other team combinations that didn't get tested and might possibly be good with that tank. That same team might even be better with the tank if the other characters on the team are played differently. And even getting 50 would take much longer than a single weekend.

I don't mind testing, but we need some better criteria than just 'we'll do what feels right on the team'. If that's the only criteria we can come up with, all we're testing is our own playstyles.

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The single-target Taunt is not supposed to work in PvP. If it is, it will be fixed in the next build.

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It certainly was working, I got that Taunted message a lot in Siren's Call this weekend. And my (scrapper) taunt didn't seem to affect them at all.

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The question is one fundamentally of team dynamics, and the optimal performance of such dynamics. Assuming that a team dynamic is one that needs a meatshield/scranker is to already bias the test towards having a melee AT. It will illuminate Tanks vs scrapper slightly, but not much else.
We have to get past our I1-I4 preconceptions, and test the TEAM dynamics, with regards to what tankers bring, rather than just how we perform the old roles. Half the contention is the roles have changed.

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While I understand what you're saying, I think we're looking at too broad a test here. If we can't define the roles we want to test, we end up with an open-ended number of tests, and no one has time for dozens or even hundreds of testing missions.

We're going to need definition of what roles need to be tested, if we're going to do any tests at all. This, I believe, was Tom's original question. Having read through the thread, my take on this is as follows:
<ul type="square">[*]Meatshield. You're the guy that attracts the attention of all the mobs and tries to hold it. My previous post pretty well covers this one. [*]Scranker. We'll need some definition of what we mean on this. My take on it is that you are the first one into most mob groups, but rather than taunting anything you just attack the most dangerous mobs, expecting that your team can handle any aggro from the rest.[*]Selective Meatshield. This is the role Statesman described. Taunt what you know you can handle, to free the team to handle the rest of the mobs. You're still probably the first one into most fights, you'll probably end up with more aggro than the scranker, and chances are your build will be more defensive than the scranker so your damage is less.[/list]Are there other roles to test? Is there anything else a tank can do?

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What it sounds like to me is that you are setting up tests centered around a meatshield role. This is okay for a single datapoint, but misses that that role is exactly the one that has shrunk. Certainly there is the contention that scrappers can perform as meatsheilds just as well, but more important is that a meatshield with our meagre capabilities can be replaced with a buffer who can render the entire team into pseudo tanks, thus making the meatshield role moot.

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Well, I understand this, but it gets back to Tom's main point - what else is there besides the meatshield role? If we're going to play like Statesman did and just taunt a few mobs while the team does their thing on the rest, do we even need to run tests? We already know a scrapper can do that, especially an Invuln one; or a controller can lock down those mobs. I guess I don't understand how testing anything other than the meatshield role will be useful.

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However given that I think varying the team composition is an essential component for the test. At least with teams of varying support/control/damage levels are necessary to see how tanks behave in each situation. Of couse the more variation we need, the harder it will be to find enough people with enough toons to test everything.

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We may need two different tests. I wrote my post under the assumption that we were testing whether a tanker could be effectively replaced by other ATs. If we're also going to test how each tank contributes with different types of support, we should probably keep those tests separate.

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As I've said earlier, it would be a good idea to assemble a large test team willing to spend a weekend doing this with Herostats running.

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Good idea, Tom, I'd be happy to help. Although given all the various numbers we posted related to Issue 5 and ED, and the amount of change (zero) that came from that, I wonder how much anything we find will matter. Still, I'm a math nerd at heart, and collecting the data and analyzing it is kinda fun on its own.

I'm thought about this a little and came up with a straw man for a test format. Should be a good starting point. Ya'll pick this apart, I'll revise it, get a good solid plan down.

Mission Selection: I recommend two missions, L40-45, one with Freaks and one with Crey. Freaks are smash/lethal heavy, but also do pretty major energy damage and have a ridiculous number of sleep and stun effects. Also their self-rez makes for an interesting aggro-control challenge sometimes. Crey have a ton of cold and energy damage (depending on which Lts spawn), as well as smash/lethal, and Paragon Protectors really test the ability of a tanker if you get a couple unkillable ones in MoG-mode pounding on you. Note that I'm not suggesting Carnies - we know that all tanks have trouble with Psionics, testing that serves no purpose.

Specifically, the 'Rescue Vivian Van Dyne' Freak mission would be good for the Freak side. It has a ton of Freaks, being outdoor, and there's an AV we can test against without losing the mission. Just have to be careful not to rescue the hostage. For Crey, ideally we'd have someone of the right level that hasn't done Mark IV's SO store mission - just pick that one up. Or any mission in the Countess Crey arc would work fine, so long as we're careful not to complete it.

Team Selection: A full team of 8 is probably not feasible since people have time constraints, so I'm thinking 6. That forces the mobs to +1 level, always a concern for tanking, and if we set to Tenacious/Unyeilding difficulty there should be plenty of bosses. Ideally everyone would be within a level or two, probably in the 42-44 range. I suggest one Scrapper, two Blasters, one Defender, and one Controller. The powersets shouldn't matter a lot as long as we keep them consistent across tests, although it would be a good idea to avoid Invulnerability scrappers (since they tend to be the most tank-like scrappers and could skew the tanker's results) and to make sure the defender and controller aren't both the same set (since doubling up on any defender primary, with the possible exception of trick arrow, has the potential to massively reduce reliance on the team's own powers).

Ideal in my mind would be the following:
<ul type="square">[*]Gravity/Empathy controller. Gravity is a nice 'average' controller to test with - the set has excellent holds, including the Singularity, but lacks the soft controls like Ice Slick or Earthquake which are extrememly friendly to tankers. (Just look at how much a Fire/Ice tanker depends on Ice Patch, which isn't even as good as those controller versions.) The Empathy secondary won't be quite as effective as a similar defender, but the difference is negligible, especially once you get to 40+ and have plenty of slots.[*]Dark/Regen scrapper. Regen is a very common secondary still, even after all the nerfs (and there have been plenty), so it works well for a test team. The Dark primary is lacking in AoEs but the single target damage is excellent, which means that it is less likely the scrapper will be stealing a lot of aggro from the tanker.[*]Rad/Rad defender. The Radiation primary is a good jack-of-all-trades set, from healing to buffing to debuffing. Not quite the offensive punch of Kinetics, but Rad. Infection and Lingering Radiation give better defensive help. The secondary isn't all that important, really, but I see a lot of Rad/Rads so it's likely we'll find one.[*]Fire/Fire blaster. These guys are a true test of aggro-management skill for the tanker. AoEs everywhere. When we get to testing other ATs in place of tankers, we'll want to have someone with the massive AoE attacks that tend to cause aggro loss without a firm Taunt in place.[*]Energy/Energy blaster. Good single target damage, plus that annoying knockback that can also seriously test aggro management.[/list]Test Execution: Start by running both missions with the above team plus an Invuln tanker. This is the control test, to familiarize everyone with the mission. Using Invuln here makes sense, given that we know Invincibility is bugged and don't want real numbers anyway.

Next, run both missions 3 more times, once with each tanker primary that we want to test: Stone, Ice, and Fire. That should give us a fair baseline of how the team behaves with a tanker. Obviously the Stone test will be different than the other two, with Granite as an option.

Finally, run both missions 7 more times, once with the tank slot replaced by: any controller, any blaster, a Invuln scrapper, a non-Invuln scrapper, a FF/Sonic defender, and non-FF/Sonic defender, and a Kheldian (either type will do, I think). In each case we should try to avoid duplicating sets where possible. I listed Invuln scrappers separate because of their 'tankishness' with Invincibility, and FF/Sonics seperately because they boost the team's defenses directly, often nearly to tanker levels.

So that means we're running a total of 22 missions. If we spend about a half hour per mission, not an unreasonable time considering swapping toons, recording results, and the inevitable breaks that people will need, we're talking about 11 hours of testing. Split up over two weekend days, that becomes a more reasonable 5-6 hours each day.

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so our role by your own experience is to take the initial aggro, to tank 1/3 of the group long enough for the rest of the team to do it's job. So what is it you were doing that a buffed scrapper ... would not be able to do? Plus he would be adding signifigant damage to the team which you were not. Is this really your impression of tanking is? that someone even as knowledgable and skilled as you could only contribute handling 1/3 of the spawns?

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DarkPhoenix's post was tough to read, for me, so I edited it slightly. It very much describes my own reaction to Jack's post. What exactly in the experience you described would a scrapper not have been able to do just as well, simply by jumping into the mobs and hitting an AoE? With the buffs/heals/etc coming from the others on your team, a scrapper could survive that. He'll keep around 1/3 of the mobs busy, by dealing enough damage to them that he keeps aggro. The scrapper could even take Confront if he wants to be able to pull a mob or two off a squishy teammate. Where's the 'tanking' vs. 'scrapping'?

I haven't played my tanks a lot since ED, but in my limited experience in a team with my L31 Stone/Axe, my role has been to take the alpha strike, and then play scrapper. I can take an alpha strike, as long as the rest of the team immediately follows me in and takes some of the aggro off. I can push out the damage - not as well as a real scrapper, but with Axe my damage is respectable, and the knockdown helps too.

What I can't do any more is take all the aggro, all the time. And if we make a mistake and aggro a second group, I run like everyone else. Tanker's role? A poor man's Phantom Army, useful only for deflecting alpha strikes and doing mediocre damage.

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ED and I5 haven't created a ghost town out of City of Heroes.

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Yet. City of Villains caused (is still causing) a lot of people to stick around despite the changes - first for the beta after I5, and now for the live game after ED. Once the newness of CoV wears off, that's when you'll really see what effect ED and I5 had.

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I wanted to take a couple minutes to let you know that we aware of this issue. We want people to at least know where the PvP zones are and how to get to them. We don’t want players to feel forced into PvP combat. To address this issue we are going to take several steps. Players will be sent to liaisons that will be outside the PvP zones. They will explain that there is mission content available from a contact within the zone but will not, I repeat will not, force you to that contact. If the player wishes to go in the zone and find the contact they are free to do so. Just like a Task/Strike Force contact, PVP contacts don’t need to be introduced. As soon as a player clicks on them, they will offer mission content.

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Great! This should mitigate the problem of not knowing which zone has the PvP zone entrance, too.

Now if we can just get you guys to remove the mission that makes me run to David Wincott at level 5 every time, with no travel power I might add, then life would be good.

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I think it'd be pretty fun to have an AV or two you can use. Maybe make it so you have to have multiple members on your team to summon one. For example, it could cost 8000 points so you have to have 4 people. Then you could pit AVs against each other or have one AV against another groups forces.

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That's a sweet idea.

Excellent work! This is a great place to point those questions about the various TFs or trials.

Thanks Manticore. That eases the pain of failing to see even one single named hero all through the event last night a little bit. Not a lot, but a little.

13.33% is what, about the same as a -3 DO enhancement? I guess that's better than nothing. Barely.

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I find this disappointing, as some fruitful discussion may have resulted with the ability to get immediate feedback. I mean, I can understand not personally wanting to discuss issue 5, but doing your best to make sure no one else gets to either?

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I dunno. I suppose it could be because there was only limited time (I'm guessing) for that seminar thing, and a discussion about I5 would have resulted in the usual "I'm right, you're wrong" shouting match as seen on the forums (again, I'm guessing).
Better to leave it for when the devs return to the forums. Besides, I5 isn't something particularly huge when compared to the marketing and such surrounding the RPG and all that.
I could be wrong.

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You're not wrong, Kellis. In fact you nailed it right on the head. We had only an hour to discuss everything related to CoH moving into other formats. Issue 5 is a fine discussion topic - for some other time. I personally didn't discuss it at all with anyone from NCSoft. Someone else may have, which I have no problem with, if they did it outside the seminar that was meant for other things.

I spent the last couple of days at GenCon - highly recommended, by the way, if you're into any sort of non-computer games, and there's even some good stuff for the computer-based type. I spent most of my time walking around the dealer room and playing various games that have been out of print for so long that you can only find enough players when 25000+ gamers gather in one spot, but I did make a little time to talk to the folks at the NCSoft booth and hit a seminar with Jack, Shane, Zeb, and various other folks.

The seminar only had about 6 audience members, probably because it was poorly advertised - the only reason I knew where to find it was that I asked at the NCSoft booth. Worked out well for those of us attending though, since it ended up being more of an informal discussion than a formal presentation. I didn't take detailed notes or anything, so this is just what I remember from the discussion. Anyone else that was there, please correct any mistakes. This post lists who was there, although we actually had one more person, talking about the novels (sorry I can't remember the name).

<ul type="square">[*]City of Villains will release on October 31, Halloween, barring any major remaining bugs.[*]The first novel will be out in October as well. There are currently two other novels planned, to be released in 2006 (I believe April and August, but I could be remembering that wrong.) George Perez will be doing cover art for all three.[*]The initial CCG release will also be in October. (Sensing a theme here?) The first set is 300+ cards, with 33 pre-generated heroes plus the ability to create your own hero. The initial release is CoH-only (CoV will be sometime later).[*]The RPG base system book, plus some supporting material, will release in October. Again, CoH-only to start. I didn't get a good feel for exactly what all supporting books will be available, but I seem to remember some discussion of the Council.[*]The various games will tie together in terms of story, with the same heroes/villains/organizations/etc. In addition, you may be able to affect one game with what you do in the others. For example, there might be a CCG tournament where you could win the right to design your own online hero as a card for inclusion in a later CCG expansion. Or maybe participating in an RPG event could earn you a badge or special cape online. No solid plans for how all that will work yet, but it has definite potential.[*]It was very apparent to me that all these guys play the online game. That may sound like a no-brainer, and for guys like Jack it is, but for the RPG/CCG/novel folks, that's a big deal for people that like consistency across a genre (I include myself in that number). The fact that these guys could talk about their heroes that they play regularly tells me that they'll have a good understanding of the CoH experience, and I hope that translates well into the other formats.[*]Jack made a special point of saying that moving the CoH world into all these other formats (CCG, RPG, etc.) is to interest the gamer audience. The online CoH game is pretty easy to play, and very accessible to the non-gamer that is trying their first MMORPG. Some of that will carry over to the other formats, but for the most part they'll be focused on the audience that already games. For example, people that love CCGs and play CoH online will be a natural target for the CCG. I like this approach, being a RPG and CCG player myself. This sets a high bar for these new formats, since they're targeting the hard-core gamers that pick everything apart with a fine-toothed comb. I have no doubts about the RPG, I'm sure that will come through with flying colors. The CCG is a little iffier, but Dave W. has some good games under his belt (L5R, for example), so if it can be done I'm sure he'll make it happen.[*]The CCG will intially be all hero-vs-hero. Not ideal, IMHO, but it sounds like they are also thinking about adding more mission-based and story-based aspects in future expansions. And of course there will be villains at some point.[*]Outbreak will be used as the basis for the first adventure that is included in the RPG manual, which I thought was very cool. Everyone who has ever played CoH online can relate to that. The first release will have details on the Hellions, Skulls, Council, and Vazhilok - again, mirroring the early game that most gamers will already know something about. Well designed.[*]It sounds like the RPG will have an extremely detailed view of the CoH world. I'm very much looking forward to getting those books, just to read more of the backstory. As time goes on, we'll get more and more detail on all the heroes, villains, and organizations that show up in the online game.[*]Dave Williams likes Issue 5. That was the extent of our Issue 5 discussion. Another audience member started to talk about I5 a little, but I asked a question on a different topic right after that to avoid degeneration into the same stuff we all read here on the forums. I'll leave Issue 5 discussions from GenCon to other posters that may have talked about it with the NCSoft guys. I avoided the phrase "Issue 5" like the plague, myself.[*]The CoV initial tutorial is called Breakout, and it's a prison break scenario, out of the Ziggurat. (Since Jack said it in the seminar, I can say it without violating my NDA. )[*]At the NCSoft booth, they gave away many and varied things during trivia contests and raffles. I saw a few CoV beta invites and CoV pre-order boxes given away. Personally I answered a trivia question and got a copy of Guild Wars, which I might play a little to keep myself occupied while the CoV beta server is down.[*]They took a lot of sign-ups for the Auto Assault beta, also. I saw a little of the game, certainly looks interesting if you're into that genre. I'm not, personally, so I don't have a lot of detail on it.[/list]I'd like to publically thank Jack, Zeb, Shane, and all the other guys that took time to talk with us at the seminar and throughout the con. We love it when you take time to let us know what you're working on. Thanks!

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We're making some tweaks with Defiance in the upcoming patch.
It is not getting a major overhaul though. Just tweaking the defiance so it starts to kick in earlier. &lt;snip&gt;

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I stand by my earlier post. Defiance is a nice thematic ability but in no way addresses the concern of L30+ blasters. (L30 used because that's when mobs start to show a lot of status effects and ability to one- or two-shot blasters. Adjust that number up or down according to your experience.)

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Also remember that the Freakshow will work for anyone who provides sandwiches and a keg.

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I resemble that remark. Hell, sandwiches optional.

I don't get it.

We have umpteen-million posts on a large variety of issues in the Dev Response threads right now. The vast majority of them are asking the same questions - things like 'Please explain how you think Defiance is any good past L20', 'How is an Invuln tank supposed to survive without a dedicated defender following him around', 'How am I supposed to play my regen scrapper in a team when I have no defense, resistance, or ability to regen', etc. Why do they need to ask us for questions? There's a ton of them out there already, with no developer responses.

(Note that I'm not saying there aren't answers to such questions. Many of them may already have answers. But no one has seen red-name answers yet.)

I think a regular Q&amp;A is a great idea. I was a big fan of the Ask Statesman things done previously. But please, answer all the questions surrounding I5 before you go looking for more.