Johnny_Butane

I think for Tanker Energy Mastery that Power Build Up would be amazing, but they will get something really lame like Repulsion Field.

I think for Blaster Flame Mastery that Heat Exaustion would be interesting to see, but they will likely get Bonfire.



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Tankers only have endurance problems because they expend the same endurnace per attack as everyone, but the damage they deal per attack is less.

Improving Tanker damage would improve their endurnace efficiency. That's a fact.

There are a number of people in both this and Starsman's thread who've indicated they think improving Tanker offensive capabilities would improve their stacking for teams.

Starsman was advocating an almost imperceptable increase in damage tied to a slightly unwieldly mechanic. I pointed out the flaws in his proposal, especially from a conceptual standpoint, which was his stated purpose for said proposal. I offered him both encourangement to further develop the idea and suggestions on directions he could go with it.

You're correct, many people turn out to troll me. You included, on occasion.


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Tell that to an early level Rad Defender who's debuff toggles drop because they ran out of end or to a MM who can't summon his pets back in time.

You define "fail" as a faceplant. I define it as a mission taking an inordinate ammount of time or effort to complete. As I said before, that could be becuase of a faceplant or it could be because the AT kills things slowly, I don't care the reason.

Your opinion is that one is worse than the other. Good for you. That's not my opinion.

Then I would suggest you not play Blasters if you don't find them enjoyable or go to the Blaster forums and try to convince Castle to revisit them.


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Incorrect.

-I have suggested near Scrapper-level hits but only for breif periods. Such suggstions only raised Tanker average damage slightly and put it nowhere near a Scrapper's average damage output with or without Criticals.

-I have suggested near-Scrapper damage(sans Criticals), but only against Boss cons and up. I have also suggested this, but with addional restrictions on when it can be used.

I have never said Tanker damage output should be highter than a Scrapper's as a suggestion or solution for Tankers today.


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I don't think the subject of the picture is level to begin with.

I wont deny Tankers benefit offensively from IOs. I simply think other ATs benefit more from the mitigation.

Recharge and Endurance I count as being neutral. They improve powers in both areas.

I've always felt damage procs are better suited to ATs with faster attacks due to their fairly low chance to proc. That's not the majority of Tanker sets. Also I'd like to remind you that while purple sets may have better chances to fire, you can only have one instance of that set in your build

Accuracy, as you say, is situational. Accuracy bonuses wont improve an Inv/SS's performace for example.

I didn't. I used it as a reminder that what Spitting and I were talking about then, what you are talking about now, was largely opinion based.

See, opinion.
For me, it's not. On a Blaster I can pop three medium purple inspirations and death takes a holiday. On a Tanker, popping three red inspirations wont allow me to demolish a hazard sized spawn of Cimerorans in seconds like a Blaster can.

It's not full protection, no, but you can't deny it improves Blaster survivability and perfromance significantly. If you wish to argue it isn't significant, tell it to Castle.


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Thanks for posting.

I would thumbsdown an idea like this because the only effect it would have is increase a Tanker's personal survivability, and that's something that simply doesn't need to happen.

Gauntlet taunts any enemy you attack. Any any you'd be attacking that got Terrorized is already aggroed onto you and thus not attacking a teammate. The fear effect would be largely pointless to the rest of the team.

I would also object for conceptual reasons. It doesn't make sense to me for any enemy to be intimidated by a Tanker's mediocre offense/damage and not the Brute who just one-shotted his buddy or the Blaster who just flash-fried his Lieutenant. I have the same criticism of the current Gauntlet mechanic.


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Likely I did not. I spend the majority in my time in these threads arguing that these threads deserve to exist and deserve for the devs to pay attention to them. Without that, all the suggestions in the world don't make a lick of difference.

Also, I don't see how my opinion on your suggestion matters. In fact it's likely better I don't become associated with your idea.

Here are my thoughts on your idea:

-I don't think Tankers need better damage against minions and LTs. A blanket, constant damage boost, as in this case, would be viewed by the devs and most players as unbalanced. I believe that Tankers being more damaging than they are now against only Bosses and up is more acceptable and there's plenty of conceptual rationale to support it.

This is my opinion mind you. It's hard to determine if the devs/players truly find one more acceptable than the other.

-Assuming the case of a "switch," I can easily see some conflict arrise, namely threads saying "I'm sick of Tankers on my team who refuse to run in 'Defense Mode'" or simply people accusing Tankers of being in the wrong mode when they're not, two Tankers not being able to agree who should Scrank, etc.

These are not show stopping obstacles, however. There just needs to be a clear visual cue to show the Tanker and his team what mode he's operating in. Beyond that, it's a personal issue that would be no more hard to solve than a Storm Controller who abuses their knockback/repel or a Blaster who's slacking off. Tankers who refused to act in a team friendly manner would get the same treatment; a warning followed by a swift kick.

-I would recommend instead of a 50% damage buff that a bonus of 50% damage be used instead. The former would count towards a Tanker's damage cap while the latter wouldn't. In this case, I don't think it counting to a Tanker's cap would be fair, and should a Tanker hit his cap (which is easy on a team with a Kin or two), he wouldn't be recieving more damage running in that mode but he would have the taunting element still turned off regardless.


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I disagree on two fronts.

The first being that Blasters got attention to bring them a little more towards center and shore up their survivability. Defenders are likely next given that if Domm/Controller viability was a concern for the devs, then Defender vs Corr will likely be getting be getting looked at in time for GR. I'd say the devs are more than willing to rework the Trinity, with the exception of Tankers.

The second front being that it's easier for Blasters and Defenders to obtain more survivability (a weak area for both of them) than it is for Tankers to obtain more damage. There are simply more pool powers, IO sets, temp powers and inspirations that will improve defenses and damage mitigation (both direct and indirect) than there are the will increase a Tanker's damage. Most (all?) pool attacks are inferior to Tanker standard attacks for damage purposes. Hasten is really the only option, with Assault being laregly an endurance hogging waste for a tiny boost.

Tankers are in the unique position of having the most survivability of any AT, and that unique trait penalizes them further compared to the other two trinity members.

That does not mean the devs should not attempt to make them closer to comic Tankers or excuse them from ignoring the issue.

Says you. Considering what I said above, they got unquely screwed. I also consider soloing being slower because you have to slowly chip away at enemies to be just as bad as soloing being slow because you faceplanted.

Power can be defined as the ability to affect the world around you or conversely the ability to resist the world around affecting you.

Blasters and Defenders being powerless to stop themselves from faceplanting is the same as Tankers having impotent damage.

Defiance 2.0 improved Blasters' weak area (survivbility) both directly (the mez protection) and indirectly by strengthening the Blaster's existing strong point of damage, so enemies could be defeated faster before they dealt as much damage to the Blaster.

Gauntlet 2.0 can't really follow suit. Tankers weak area is damage. Unlike the case of the Blaster, giving Tankers more survivability will not increase their damage abilities or improve their soloing.


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The entry in question should be amended to say "not currently available."

Early on there was the intent to bring Incarnates to players. There were hints at it all throughout the CoV storyline. Like many things, crafting and power customization included, it fell to the wayside.

More recently however, they are being brought up again by the devs. Starting with issue 12 they began reintroducing the concept. The whole Origin of Power arc teased at them and the overreaching story point of the "power web" experiments of Doctor Brainstorm indicating that power proliferation power customization are parts of a much greater whole.

I would not be surprised if Incarnates became the next Epic character type.


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Enough to know Incarnate is an Origin, not an Archetype.

We went over that in this thread, but of course you read the rest of the thread already, didn't you?

From Paragonwiki:


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People have demonstrated repeatedly with many suggestions that there are things the devs could have done and CAN STILL DO to fix the problem.

The "concession" in question didn't have to be made and doesn't have to go unaddressed.

It is purely the devs' whim that holds Tankers back. Shafting Tankers and continuing to ignore the same damn complaints about them for four years wasn't done for the good of the game, that's for damn sure. Solutions exist. There are better alternatives. The devs have refused to pursue them, at least up until this point.


That might be a fair comment in this case if the devs had attempted to compromise. They didn't. They decided to force comic tanks to fit into the MMO mold and discard important and expected traits/characteristics just because they felt an AT was needed to be a dedicated tank at the expence of everything else.

That's not called making a compromise or a concession. That's allowing one ideal to fully supplant another and ignoring anyone who complained after their half-hearted attempt at a quick fix didn't fix the problem.


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I don't think it's a money issue at all. At least not directly.

I think it's a case that they simply don't care about the complaints.

The current intent is for Tankers to be medium-low damage decoys. Tankers are that, therefore, as far as Castle is concerned that translates to "working as intended".

For Positron, it's no skin off his nose if Tankers have concept issues or if Brutes take a huge chunk out of the Tanker population. As long as he isn't being inundated with complaints there aren't enough Tankers for the teams that need them or the forums aren't literally disintegrating in riots, I don't expect him to be moved.

Really, I can't think of an argument to convince either to address Tankers if they have no intent to ever do so. I don't think you can persuade someone into having respect for the source material if they just don't.

There's always the chance they change their minds on their own or defer to the people complanining even if they don't understand the complaints themselves.

There's also the chance of world peace in our lifetime. Neither is likely, but that shouldn't stop you or me from trying for it.


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...which is a very old suggestion for Tankers that Castle swiped and used for Shield Defense with Grant Defense. In other words, it's an unlikely suggestion now.


Proof?

Seriously, I can produce numerous instances of tanker-type super heroes in comics doing all kinds of damage. When I say that comic tanks do a lot of damage, there's not that many who doubt it because it's generally accepted.

But it's ludicrous to suggest that "squishy" super heroes frequently stand the shade of their tanker teammates for protection. That's not how comic book fights, or real dust ups for that matter, work. Occasionally a comic tank will make a show of blocking a blast for a teammate who didn't see it coming, but that is NOT what they spend the entire fight doing.

Please do not try to use comics to justify the illogical, oversimplified and outdated MMO model of combat or even suggest that is how comic battles go. You do not have one tough hero standing in the middle of a crowd of enemies, goading them to attack him while his teammates casually pick them off from a distance. That is an artificial construct of MMOs that has little or no bearing on actual comic fights. Any instance you could find in a super hero comic or animation that looks exactly like that would be the exception, not the rule.

I'm sorry if you think this is a harsh response, but Tankers do not need people trying to use comics as justifcation to forcibly marginalize them further into a support role as a decoy/punching bag with mediocre offense. That would not help them reflect their comic counterparts any better.


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Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. In me and in the devs. /sarcasm
As much as their current priorities lack any sympathy for Tankers, there's always the chance the devs can come around.

There's enough players on these forums and in the game who are of the opinion that Tankers need "something".

It's been my observation the majority of players will acknowledge Tankers don't measure up conceptually, but many of them have been convinced by a volcal few that the problem can't be fixed for balance reasons. That's utter bunk because almost every one of these kinds of threads generates suggestions and solutions a good number of people agree are worth following up and don't sound unbalancing. A smaller subset are just scared of change and have taken a "don't rock the boat" policy.

The only reason the discussion stalemates is because at this point the devs continue to ignore the issue and dismiss the complaints about Tanker concept, role and implementation. As long as there's enough Tankers to carry the teams that need them, there little motivation on the devs part. Progress wont be made until they have a change of heart and threads on the subject will continue, at least if I have anything to say about it.


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I agree with this. For that matter I don't think that there's enough enemy types especially vulnerable to S/L damage to warrant how widespread S/L resistance is among all enemies and potent it is.

This I do not agree with. There are plenty of non-S/L Tanker sets that don't live up to the ideal.

If anything, I'd suggest -res debuffs in Gauntlet for all Tanker melee sets before I targeted any specific damage types.

But I wont. Not for this.

Because higher resistance resists debuffs, that wouldn't have the intended effect. Enemies that had high S/L resistance would still be bears for S/L dealing tanks while a Fire/Fire Tanker would be utterly destroying anything that didn't have extremely high Fire resistance to begin with, which is fairly rare.


I agree S/L resistance in PvE needs to be looked at, but that's a whole other issue from Tankers and their conceptual failings.


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I saw him say that he thinks near Scrapper level damage against AVs would improve Tanker stackability, but I didn't see him disagree that such a bonus should extend to Bosses, EBs and GMs. I specificed Minions and LTs being exempt from it, but Pets and Underling cons would be as well.

Objects: If there's one thing Tankers SHOULD NOT be holding back on conceptually, it's Objects.

I happen to think if instead of Scrappers and Tankers at launch we had Stalkers and Tankers with full melee power proliferation, we might have avoided a lot of these concept problems.


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Take the rule further back to the point Tankers were actually designed and implemented.

At that point "tank" carried specific connotations to comic book fans. Tough, hard hitting heroes. The "team big man" as the official copy described. Devastating hand to hand combatants.

Changing what "tank" meant, especially when it contradicts the official description and especially when the lead designer agrees and later confirms it was intended to mean the comic ideal, is a violation of the Cottage Rule in my opinion.

Yes it may have held different connotations to fantasy MMO players, but this is a genre specific case. Comic books and super heroes are the genre. MMO is just a platform. Had this been a shipping MMO, one would expect "tankers" to be large ships that carry fluids, not slow, poorly armed battle cruisers used to distract pirates while other ships do the fighting.

The core of the "Cottage Rule" is about not violating people's expectations. If a power did this one day, they expect it to do the same thing another, not build a cottage. The "letter of the law" might be your phrasing, but the spirit is about people's expectations.

Comic fan's expect Tankers to have devastating punch. Classic MMO fans expect Tankers to be good decoys. The expectations of the former do not preclude the expectations of the latter; there's no reason they can't be both. However, as the game currently is, the ideal of the latter have almost completely supplanted the ideal of comic fans and I don't feel the devs have made enough effort to make a compromise.

I'm confident the devs could and can serve both with Tankers if they wanted to, if the devs decided give Tankers attention.


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Having consistantly the highest damage against everything all the time is not needed to do the comic Tanker concept justice.

I have never called for that, nor has anyone I've seen in this or other threads on the subject.

They do however, need some offensive prowess beyond the bland, mediocre, consistantly medium damage Tankers have now to do them justice.


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Actually, I'm more of a Marvel zombie. I will admit however that I think DC's animated offerings tend to be better with a few exceptions.

I would be quite happy if Tankers related to Colossus and the Thing. They're supposed to, but they do not. Those characters are more that just decoys. They are the heavy hitters of their teams and can compete for demolising the hard targets without Daredevil and Wolverine running rings around them in every situation.

I personally think he respected and understood comic book tropes better than Castle and likely better than Positron, even if he lacked the skills to communicate and execute them properly.

I have no doubt Positron has the skills, but I think he would simply rather Blasters be Rangers, Arachnos be orcs and Tankers be knights armed with broken swords, so weighed down with plate armor they can't attack properly.

I can't really respect any designer who claims to read Invincible, yet is content with Tankers as mediocre hitting decoys. At least Emmert made claims about attempting to fix the problem, and seems to have done a more faithful job in his second try. Positron hasn't from what I can see, and under his tenure Tankers have remained bland rodeo clowns, no matter how much Robert Kirkman he says he reads and is a fan of.



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Because the quote in question conveys that the intent of Tankers were to represent a specific archetype of hero from comics, rather than being one made up for the game as some people allege. That's a designed conceptual intent, not a balance issue that changed with the introduction of IOs, ED or what have you.

I bring it up because there's a good number of people who agree Tankers don't match up with their comic counterparts now any better than they did then, after the devs said they should. The game may have changed and improved a lot, but Tanker concept sadly has not and that's the point of referring to the quote in question.

I'm going to envoke Castle's own "Cottage Rule" in this case.

My interpretation of the rule is that if a power described to do X, supposed to do X, then one day it shouldn't suddenly build a little cottage.

Correct? It's a question of expectations.

Well in the case of Tankers we have an AT that's supposed to be like X. And X has been described by the devs in that quote as being like comic Tankers and according to the official description is supposed to be "a devastating hand to hand combatant".

But almost from the start that AT started popping out very mediocre damage aggro-cottages that don't line up with many people's expectations of the AT based on many sources. That's in addition to the lead designer calling that a problem early on and saying it should be fixed.

So my question to Castle is this:

If the cottage rule is broken and remains broken for a long enough, does that grandfather the infraction agianst being fixed? Is it acceptable for it to keep spitting out cottages because then the cottage becomes the expectation? Despite many outside sources saying it's not about cottages and despite official descriptions?

Answering in the affirmative would seem very hypocritical to me.


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There just seems to be a lot of strange hitches in these new boards. The viewpost graphic is broken for me (I assume for others as well). That and some other things make me wary of the new setup. I'm backing up important posts and copying to clipboard whenever I hit the Submit Reply button for something more than a couple lines.


I think we've had a bit power creep lately, FWIW.

I suspect the devs think so too, thus Posi's comments about new, more challenging content being on the way as well as ways to make existing heroes more powerful. As it's been said before, how challenging this new content is to players who've taken advantage of these methods to become more powerful remains to be seen.

If one calls existing content not challenging to current characters and if the new content is extremely challenging to existing characters, but merely challenging to characters using whatever new thing they have (being new power enhancers, universtal enhancement slots, etc), then that could be their way simultantiously allowing controlled power creep.

It makes me wonder if the difference is going to be as extreme that they're going to create a generation of characters who trivialize older content to the point that AVs to them are like EBs to current players. That would make the new diffuculty settings in i16 make more sense to me.

No, but it takes one less good excuse away for not giving Tanker issues any attention (individual power sets withstanding).



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Do not trust the quote tags. Ever.

Firstly, Castle looking forward to the i11 beta puts this quote at quite some time ago, circa i10. July or August of 2007.

At that point, all ATs were still reeling from IOs in i9 only a couple months before. Castle's data was obviously from previous to that. The landscape of the game changed quite a bit in the time period. IOs definately affected statistics. It's not too much of a leap to suggest Tankers may not compare the same then as they do now.

I'm not dismissing your quote, but I am saying that's quite some time ago. Things have changed in the game massively. Things can easily have changed with Tankers.

And also, Castle says:

Since that time, Stalkers, MMs, HEATS, Domms and Blasters, who could be said were underperforming, got tweaks and attention.

Besides Corrs and Defenders, Tankers are really the only ATs left because that leaves Scrapper, Brutes and Controllers.

Now, I would suspect if Domms got tweaks for viability against Controllers as a result of GR, then likely Corrs and Defenders are up next. If after that point Tankers don't get some consideration, there's a chance I could go supernova. Either way you have something to look forward to.


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No, I'm not.

That depends on many factors including exactly how Tankers are tweaked if such a thing ever occurs.

They do? Where? Show me, please where a redname has said Tankers are performing above average. From what I can see, the devs have not really commented on any suggestions for Tankers, damage or otherwise. Castle stated he personally doesn't think Starsman's idea of Gauntlet is needed, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't acknowledge a good number of players do and will dismiss them indefinitely. There are cases in the recent past where Castle made changes that he didn't feel a strong need for to please players. And indeed for the most part those changes pleased them.
YMMV

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I can name at least four separate LGTF runs I was a part of where a second Tanker joined or was about the join and someone asked them if they had anything else to play, preferably damage for the AVs. At least one of those times they were asked if they had a Corr, Defender or Controller to bring.

I consider that stastically significant to my personal expereince because I have only run the LGTF nine or ten times.

On the ITF, the situation is slightly different for myself because I tend to run those in a fixed (or nearly fixed) team configuration that only usually includes heroes. Although I have one anecdote about an ITF featuring a Inv/SS Tanker and Stone/EM Tanker where the Stoner said something to the effect of "I was feeling kind of useless until now" refering to the infamous lag hill on the 3rd mission. I interpreted the remark to be more about his mobility and the fact that the enemies were coming to him at that point, rather than him having to meet them.


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A damage bonus is *not* the same as changing a damage multiplier. The latter would have unintended side effects.


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