Johnny_Butane

Going to have to disagree based on my experience. There, my flying super strong guy came dangerously close to soloing their giant robot with just the gear they had at launch. Had I stuck around...?

Find me a non-Incarnate Inv/SS Tanker on SO's that can drop Kronos without temp powers and the like.

And yes, beating up giant robots is part of my metric for determining how 'super' something is. Why wouldn't it be?




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I didn't say "heaviest hitter" then, did I?

And yet I can get behind that.

I can see why. The rules and mechanics don't suit the superhero genre very well. Most people playing are resigned to that fact or don't care about comics or superheroes anyways, they just want a casual MMO with a flexible costume editor.

Well, he failed on delivering the illusion and on delivering the reality. So we get rodeo clowns.


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You know, I'd love a Bulldog head. And a Bulldog pet.
Where can I sign for that?


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You're trying to ad hominem and deflect with semantics. Nice try but not nice enough. My point stands. There are 'Trinity ATs' in the game. Tankers Blasters and Defenders are those exemplified.

Again, you're wrong. They were intended to hide and backstab.

In fact, I'd wager to say the exact intent of Stalkers was to compliment and contrast the slow building back loaded damage of Brutes with front-loaded burst damage.

That doesn't work so well on most teams, and adding Scrappers to the mix didn't help, so the developers are expanding on the Stalker's repertoire, not pushing them further down a path of extremely front loaded damage that wasn't working. They're improving their damage after the initial strike and improving their chances at scrapping out the fight instead of relying on more Stalkery hit and run tactics (which waste a lot of time and often don't work so well).

Some Stalkers sets/combos run into that problem, but not all of them, fair to say?

Well in that case the same can be said about Tankers' damage caps.
They don't get maximum use from Rage, Against All Odds, Kinetics, Leadership and others in a buff rich environment. But, you won't be conceding that point, will you?


You said, and I quote:

"Tankers were never, once designed with the intent of being heavy hitters in this game."

The old quote you refer to proves your assertion wrong. No matter if it's no longer applicable to the present design or if it didn't get past the design phase; it was the intent of the lead developer at that point in time and it was designed. And you said 'never'. You're wrong.


Screwing someone over doesn't have to be about malicious intent. The weather can screw over your picnic plans, and there's no true anthropomorphization of the clouds and wind behind the meaning of the phrase.



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Oh my Zod. We are in agreement on something.



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As is theirs.

As opposed to ATs that are more hybrid and can better serve in multiple roles? Like heck there are. Tankers, Blaster and Defenders. There's your tank, glass cannon DPS and 'healer' there. They have their jobs and are generally very poor at doing anything else.

Sorry, you're wrong. There's nothing 'Stalkery' about more max HP. And Stalkers never got Criticals before i12. That's making them more 'Scrappery'. And and the building/falling of the new stacks is actually very 'Brutey' when you think about it.

So yes, they are strengthening them towards the middle, allowing them to do more when not in Hidden (like the other melee ATs), more non-front loaded damage and to survive better. In short, to better 'scrap it up'. If they were making them more "niche-y" as you say, they wouldn't be touching their HP but would instead be buffing Assassin Strike to do more damage the longer the were Hidden or something like that.

I have a quote from the lead dev at the time that says otherwise.

I happen to think their situations have a lot in common. They both suffer from over specialization and they both get screwed over by their more popular, more flexible counterparts.

A proper CoH2 is probably not going to happen at this point. Positron gave the not-so-subtle hint that '(CoH) Freedom is the future'. I believe you should take that literally.
CoH is probably past the point where investing in a (good) sequel would be profitable. The "CCG Grab Bags" they announced at the Pummit do not bode well to me as an indicator of how much actual revenue the Market is bringing in for them. Also the Doom numbers were way down, at a second all time low IIRC, as of the last quarter(?). Is CoH going away anytime too soon? Likely not. But it's still not hot enough for the men in suits to throw money at a sequel.

Here's another way to look at it: The fewer melee ATs (or by extension the fewer ATs period) the fewer designed in weaknesses they have to have. In other words, both of those theoretical ATs can be better and more rounded because they don't have to worry as much about crowding anyone in between.



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I know it could. And has been. I'm purposefully throwing the same argument back in the face of the people who use it against me (though DrGemini isn't necessarily who that's directed at) so they can choke on it.

I agree. And still that's not enough for some people.

Good question. Here's another: Hybrid ATs already exist in the game and are very popular, arguably more so than their older, less flexible cousins. Do we really still need to keep the Trinity ATs as overspecialized as they are?

My answer to that is, look what they're doing for Stalkers; rounding them out insead of pushing them further to the fringe. That's the right approach.


You have no more justification to say that than I have to say that Tankers were designed to be heavy hitters. You may want them to the best at aggro, but they're apparently not currently and there's nothing that says they have to be better at it than Brutes any more than there is that says Tankers are supposed to be "extremely powerful" heavy hitters.

It's just your desires versus my desires. And guess what, no matter how many people feel either way, this is not a democracy. So I feel my reasons are just as valid to take my chances with, developer bias aside.

There's a good case to be made all four melee ATs should be looked at from the ground up. What should happen and what can and will happen are two very different things.

I've stated before that I think if we could go back to the beginning, there should really only be two melee ATs and I stated how they could be balanced so that they're both powerful combatants and are a little closer to how things are in comics.

One with great survivability and good aggro control, great ST damage but AoE revolving around low damage/soft crowd control.
The other with good survivability, good AoE damage, good ST damage, attacks that lower enemy damage resistance and low aggro control.

Solo, one is tougher, but has worse AoE damage. They end up breaking even for ST damage.
Teamed, the first improves the survivability of the second by tanking and the second improves the damage of the first by weakening enemy resistances.

That can't happen now, but it's closer to what I think things should have been.


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You are NOT competing with your melee teammates for aggro. They are meant to share it with you.

This is the entire problem with the mindset of people crying for more aggro/threat generation.

Scrappers and Brutes were given taunt powers in their secondary sets. Brutes effectiveness depends in part on them being attacked. Brutes have Poke-voke. Brutes are LISTED IN THE TANK CATEGORY at AT creation. Get the message?

They are fully intended to share part of the aggro. As Tanker, you are not the sole focus. The spot light is not on you. The other melee ATs were intended to shoulder some of the burden. How much ultimately doesn't matter as long as they can. If they can't, they will face plant and then you get to grab up whatever you want.

You shouldn't care if an enemy is not attacking the squishies because he's trained on you or because he's attacking the Brute next to you. If they are Taunting enemies onto themselves, that's their prerogative. Stop being a control freak.

If you must have the final say in everyone attacking you, roll a Brute if they're trumping Tankers.



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Then it's clear that Brutes were designed and intended to be the aggro kings. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it better, would they?


That sentence above is the same argument that people have been using against my assertion that Tankers were intended to do damage all thread long.

I'm not leveling that accusation at you personally, but I'm pointing out that the same un-logic is being used to deny Tankers were supposed to be heavy hitters, despite the fact the lead designer said so, website description says so and Statesman (the face of Tankers), is clearly modeled on the heavy hitters in comics.

"They aren't heavy hitting damage dealers now, so they were clearly never were supposed to be."

That's what the same few people keep saying.

Well, you say Tankers don't hold aggro the best now. Clearly they're not supposed to.




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So you want to force the AT further into that corner of the trinity?
That's hypocritical.


They already are. They have the best survivability of all the ATs, no matter how close the second place is, and they already pull and hold aggro better than anyone by far. Nobody wants the 'aggro crown'. Nobody takes the Presence pool for any reason other than the Fear powers. They already ARE the best person to do the job and nobody else even WANTS the job. The hours suck, the pay is poor and Scrappers and Brutes keep stealing your food out of the break room fridge.

Getting aggro and surviving is already dead easy. I find it ironic that for all the people accusing me of wanting an 'I Win' button over the years, I'm not the one asking to be more unkillable than Tankers already are (people already AFK in combat with them) and making aggro management even easier than Gauntlet and Taunt already make it.

If they're that terrible at staying alive and keeping attention on themselves, perhaps Tankers aren't the AT they're suited for.

The bottom line is I want the AT to have the opportunity to do something it doesn't do very well a little better and other people want the AT to do something it already does better than anyone else by far better still.

Why? Maybe they're control freaks who can't tolerate a Brute or Scrapper pulling any aggro (despite the fact they were designed to do so)?



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Stalkers are the opposite of Tankers, both at extremes of the damage-toughness spectrum (for melee).

So, if they're increasing Stalker survivability via Max HP cap and increasing their ST damage...

That would be comparable to improving the Tanker damage cap and increasing their survivability.

I don't care either way about the latter, only the former.


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You should stop to consider that maybe that is the problem.

That controlling aggro in and of itself isn't compelling enough for 99% of the players in the game and maybe isn't deep enough or is too artificial to build an AT around.
In other words: do most of the people playing CoH enjoy dragging Anti-Matter around with Taunt? I'm going to take a stab in the dark and says 'no'.

Newsflash: Tankers aren't the most popular AT in the game. That's common sense. They're an extremely specialized AT that does a job most people don't care about as long as someone is doing it. And that overspecialization is what alienates people from them.

Pushing them further and further in that direction isn't going to improve things for them. That is counter to logic. I said before, they aren't improving Stalkers by making them turn more invisible. The proposed changes are in fact, from what I see, pushing them a little bit back towards the middle without taking anything away:

They improving their damage out of Hide, (instead of making them Hide more for their damage).

They're giving them what I can only call the unholy child of Criticals and Fury.

They're upping their max HP (instead of making them more fragile).


They aren't making them "more Stalkery", they're making them more 'rounded' and stronger towards the middle while keeping their fringe capabilities intact (but without pushing them further to the fringe). That makes sense. That's a logical approach to increase their wide appeal and competitiveness while not taking anything away from players who liked 'Stalkery' gameplay.

So why shouldn't Tanker improvements take a similar approach?


If this assertion is wrong when I use it to justify improving Tanker damage, why is it correct when you use it to justify aggro changes?



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Probably not.

Fire Armor and Fire Melee do everything I'd want Radiation to do, minus the stupid flaming scimitars.

There are other armor sets that are just plain more interesting to me that I'd like to see worked on first.



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I feel I can be bold enough to say that any Tanker (with the exception of Stone Armor) will hit the cap when teamed with one decent Kin and one or more SoA.

Build Up for sure will ram them into it.

On a league, chances are very good both of those will be present.

And Kin the only buff set that would do it, but is the one that will do it the easiest. Plus there's anyone who brings Assault. Leadership pool is very popular nowadays.


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Just let it go and don't bother trying to figure it out. This is the kind of thing I have to deal with on a regular basis.



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Stop reading the forums on your damn iPhone so you can actually follow the conversation.

Hopeling brings this up in Post #334 which is the entire reason behind the exchange you're responding to the end of.


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Its funny, but characters in comics usually don't try to classify themselves, unless the book is trying to be meta or post modern.

Flying Brick is the accepted term for discussing the typical flight/strong/resillliant character, but I don't recall every actually seeing that used in a comic by one character to refer to another.

Strong Guy from X-Factor, called himself that because in his words, every team needs a strong guy.

Amusingly, in JLA: Crisis on Two Earths, Owlman says to Batman something to the effect of "You should have sent your flying strongman. He may have had a chance of stopping me."

Defined terms are rarely used, except by the fans, but the point I was trying to make was that the fact Tankers were the AT with those abilities from the beginning, and the only way to even make those heroes until last year, they were obviously intended to reflect those kinds of characters, no matter what a spreadsheet says.


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That is essentially what their extra HP is.


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