Johnny_Butane

Your Dominator has my sympathy. Even if it's not something I want or care much about, if you were asking for Dom caps to be increased, I wouldn't disagree. I certainly wouldn't be arguing with you about it because, frankly, I'd feel like I was intentionally acting like a spiteful ****.


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*facepalm* That's only because the Tanker cap is so damn low.


Look, as I've said, I've put much time into my Brutes and my Tankers. The Brutes perform awesomely and have nothing but even more potential to improve offensively and defensively. My Tankers do not; they are stymied from growing offensively, have little need to improve defensively and thus have little future beyond being shelved indefinitely.

The Brutes will get tougher and tougher with every new IO set and Incarnate ability and some day not far off could very well reach and surpass the point my Tankers are at now and will likely do even better damage than they do now. My Tankers meanwhile will do about as much damage as they do now because that is all they ever will.

I don't think that's fair, and nothing you or anyone else says will convince me it is.


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60% may be near the cap, but there's still room for their Build Ups to matter at all. The Tanker will be smashed right into theirs 100% worth of damage buffs before that.

Then if it's pretty much irrelevant, as you claim, why NOT bring the Tanker's cap in line with Brutes?

I say it does matter. If you don't think it does, why oppose it? If you don't oppose it, why are you arguing with me?

I also take it you don't deny there's a double standard if you're making excuses for it. Well I don't think it's fair to Tankers. A double standard is pretty much unfair by definition.



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Of all the melee ATs, Tankers are the only one that a single Kin will even come close to letting them hit their cap. The other, non-melee ATs that have similar caps to Tankers, also bring significant force multipliers by themselves. Clearly, it would be extremely unbalancing if for example you put eight Kin Controllers together pushing over %1000 damage buffs collectively and could make use of it way more than they can already.

And again, I ask: if Brutes are allowed to have essentially the same potential survivability as Tankers, why are Tankers not allowed the same damage potential as a Brute? Why the double standard? Brutes can benefit greatly from being buffed both defensively and offensively. Tankers, not as much because defensively they usually don't need it, and offensively, they get hung up on their low cap.


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In the case of SS, if we consider Bruising a 20% damage buff to ST damage, about what a comparable SS Brute is outputting at 76% Fury for ST damage, 19% less for AoE, according to Mids. This assumes both are stacking Rage, of course. With the Brute having plenty of room to go higher with Inspirations, temp powers, Assault, what have you.

KM, not my area of expertise.



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Not to mention on teams/leagues (yeah I know BrandX said on their own) one Kin and a couple Leadership toggles is going to put most Tankers past the cap if they use Build Up or Rage. Shield takes even less.


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No, it isn't. But here's the problem. Video games are classified by their gameplay, not their content or setting. MMORPG is a video game genre. FPS, is a video game genre. Comic books, movies and TV shows are categorized by their content and setting; super hero, action, sci-fi.

When you set out to make a video game based around a specific genre of literature, in this case super heroes, the needs of the literary genre take precedence over the needs of the genre of video game you decide to implement it as. Sure, you pick a video game genre that meshes well, and some will better than others. Action platformer, 3rd person action RPG, of course. They've worked really well with super heroes before. Real time strategy...not so easy drop super heroes into that. But if you do attempt the great super hero RTS, you don't have the heroes mining crystals as your form of resource gathering. That's just not something that people think of when they think of superheroes. And if it's the best you could come up with, maybe you need to break from the classic RTS mold and do something completely different and not have resource gathering in the classic sense. An example would be Brutal Legend, with the merch booths and fans mechanic.

In CoH, in many ways they totally tried to force super heroes into the "MMORPG" genre, even when it wasn't appropriate, wasn't faithful to super heroes. As you say with your Colossus example, Colossus isn't a MMO 'tank'. He's a comic book tank/brick. So why in the seven hells did they give his powers, and the powers of other bricks, to the AT that wasn't about that at all? Why would they specifically word their official description to imply you were getting Colossus?

My assertion is that they completely intended to evoke comic tanks with Tankers. The lead designer even said so. So who's at fault that they don't deliver that? Not the players. They didn't assign them the power sets that created expectations. They didn't create misleading descriptions. It was the devs failure to properly tailor design to their chosen genre. The player isn't at fault when the devs have set them up with a bait and switch

And why can't Tankers line up better with their comic counterparts? Scrappers do. Stalkers do. Brutes do. Surely Tankers could. What would that take?

Well, I've said what I think. Bring their damage caps in line with Brutes, taking Bruising and their extra 10% max HP into consideration. Then at least they're capable of being as much of a heavy hitter. I'm pretty confident a damage boosting Destiny power will come along down the line, and until then, there's red inspirations and at least they'll get full benefit from team/league damage buffs.

But until they adjust the cap, any kind of cleaver damage buffing mechanic is pointless by throwing a single Kin into the mix. I don't honestly think we need one. I've got a backlog of +damage abilities now like Call to Justice, Aura of Mot and Boon of the Ancestor Spirits that aren't doing me any good.


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Invuls prior to the Invention System may disagree with that (hint, they have a bunch of powers that only take one form of enhancement).



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Well IMO, 'bitter hand to hand combatants' works for Tankers.



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This is flat out wrong. I'll produce the very quote in question. I have a keyboard macro set up for it.

He didn't say "Here's the solution we may try" or "the solution we could try. Even if it didn't make it past play testing, in order to test it at all they would have had to write the code for that. So yes, the mechanic the was later named Fury was thought of, designed and coded for Tankers.


If I'm correctly remembering the evolution of the Trapdoor encounter post live, first they made it so he couldn't be pulled from his room and out of range of his duplicates regen buffing. Then in a further patch, he was made immune to the lava. For a long time he was like that, and a lot of people seemed to be having problems and eventually he was updated yet again and they down scaled his duplicates and his regen a bit to where he is currently.



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To me, the definition of power is twofold.

Your ability to exert your will on your environment and your ability to resist the environment exerting itself on you.

It terms of super heroes, being tough enough to take whatever is thrown at you, and the ability to wreck their *****. But too much of one at the cost of too little of the other can be as bad as having neither. If you're a glass cannon dieing every spawn, I don't see how that can feel powerful. If you're a stone wall, slowly chipping away at an enemy, that doesn't feel powerful either.

That is why I think the majority of players stick to the middle and why ATs on the fringes are less popular and can't be designed by spreadsheet as easily as some people think.


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As an anecdote, I have several friends who were unable to complete Ramiel on their own with Tankers because they were unable to overcome his regen and kill his clones fast enough. Granted, AFAIK he's been scaled back a lot since then. But I still get numerous help requests from Tankers regarding Hero 1 in that same arc (usually from people employing a Lethal damage based set). That I admit is less of a clear cut case because there's a 50-50 chance there's also a survival issue in there as well, meaning it's a particularly harsh encounter for some regardless of AT.


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Well, you're the one calling him incompetent.



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OK, you may want to reword this because that would technically include AVs and GMs, and that's out for most Tankers.


When you're the worst, and trail behind your peers (the other melee ATs) by a good degree, I don't feel that is formidable, or "devastating". Nor do I when the same melee attacks do more damage on guys are technically aren't even melee combatants, like Dominators and Blasters. That's not formidable to me either. It's like being so bad at track, the guys on the Baseball team running bases can outpace you.



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Actually, I'd equate Lead Designer more to a Showrunner in television than a writer or director, just based on my experience. A lot of high level control and general direction on the whole operation, but not much on the details.

"Lead designer coordinates the work of other designers and is the main visionary of the game. Lead designer ensures team communication, makes large design decisions, and presents design outside of the team."

Not someone who proposes or comes up with numeric systems. At worst, he signed off on the wrong thing and trusted someone when he probably should have looked closer. But, it wouldn't have even crossed his desk without someone else creating it.


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Then you must be sitting in a cave. On Mars. With your head in a bucket. Tripping on space mushrooms.


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I've heard some say it was Geko, and some say it was Positron. Both from equally trustworthy sources. Either way, it wasn't Jack.



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The same Positron that instituted ED, that caused the game to take it's steepest population dip ever? Oh yes, that was Positron, not Jack. Jack couldn't spreadsheet his way out of a paper bag, something like ED was beyond him. Posi masterminded ED and GDN from all accounts, all Jack did was take the flak for it.


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Wrong. It was a mechanic the the lead designer of the game said Tankers were going to get.


How do you know what the intention of Tankers is, and that it doesn't include damage?

The official AT description suggests damage is an important part of the equation. It calls Tankers "devastating hand to hand combatants" who "dish out all sorts of damage". The same lead designer from above said of the mechanic that became Fury "This ability really gets to the core of a comic book Tanker. He's extremely powerful - but at the start of a fight, he holds himself back some. As the battle progresses, he lets loose."

Two official sources that are pretty clear the intent of Tankers was to reflect comic book Tankers and to, in part, have formidable offensive capabilities. If the lead designer of the game who was there when they created Tankers said it, what more proof do you need?



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Unless you're being facetious, I think he meant merging Stalkers with Scrappers, and Tankers with Brutes.


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Stalkers just got a buff that increased their HP cap and moved their survivability closer to that of Scrappers because some of their powersets hit the HP cap way too easily. They got better crits and damage outside of Hidden, again, like Scrappers. And pretty much everyone thinks they're great now.

Stalkers previously suffered for being too far out on the extreme end of the melee spectrum and being overspecialized for front loaded damage. Tankers, are at the opposite extreme end of that same spectrum and IMO, suffer from being overspecialized in aggro control and, on some of their powersets, hit the damage cap way too easily.
I can see parallels there.

In other words, it worked for Stalkers.


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Um, no. Flamethrowers were so big of a target because one bullet into the canister on their back and you take out them and anyone around them. And they were much more lethal when at effective range. Getting a bullet in the leg? Patch it up. Quite survivable. Flamethrower? Burning fuel sticks to you, keeps on burning to bone. Burns over the majority of your body in battlefield conditions, the medic can't just put some gauze on that.



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