Necraphim

I've done a lot of thinking and I think I've got the Blaster Roles nailed down:

PVE:

Making the TF take at least an extra hour to complete.

Killing piles of whites and yellows faster than tanks and scrappers can kill piles of whites and yellows. The tanks and scrappers are usually off killing purples and reds and are too busy to compete with your white/yellow domination!

Decoy to take pressure off the Defenders.

PVP:

Pretending to be Scrappers.

The noble and honorable pursuit of picking off the lame and wounded from 80m up stealthed, PS'd or Invisio'd.

Decoy to take pressure off the Defenders.

In Blapper mode, softening up the Inv/EM tank so a Scrapper can come in and kill it while you run away before you die.

Laughing at Defenders because you get moved off teams before them in order to balance teams vs. Tanks Scraps, and Controllers.

Anyone got any more Blaster Roles?

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I went away from the computer to check on some CoV stuff and *wham* I received 5 or so PM's asking "what is the Blaster's role?"

Answer - Ranged damage.

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Thanks for the definition. Very much appreciated. However, if our role is ranged damage, why so much melee in the secondaries? Currently, the only Blaster secondary I will play is Devices because of the sheer amount of melee in other sets.

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Now, the issue is more specifically - what does a Blaster do that a Scrapper can't already do?

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Currently nothing.

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Or, even worse, is a Scrapper inherently "stronger" than a Blaster.

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In the game's current form - yes. Having Blaster damage with incredible defense makes them stronger IMO.

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We want each Archetype to have a well defined role, and part of our Scrapper testing is aimed directly at this.

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I can tell you from experience that the Blaster's role of ranged damage is currently broken. There's nothing that we can do that another AT can't do safer than we can - that's just wrong.

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Secondly, I have no intention of removing melee attacks - it's just a "perception" by some Blasters that some of the Secondary Sets aren't as useful as Devices or Energy Manipulation. This is a rather frequent refrain in PM's (and the occasional forum post). This is something that we should also explore...we want all the Secondary sets to be fun.

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Personally, most of the fun is gone when I have to venture into melee range. For someone to even make good use of these melee powers, they have to take the Fighting pool. No player should have to use power pools to preform their ATs role.

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Law saved me the trouble of typing all this.

All the best PVP blaster builds look and play just like scraps right now.

SS/SJ, Havoc Punch, Bone Smasher, TF, Resists.

Maybe a little control thrown in on the ice primary and fire EPP and telsa cage to make squishy hunts even easier.

My blaster could handle purple rikti bosses with ease from 35+ but only because of 2 ranged holds, not very blasterish either. Pure ranged builds utterly fail in the arena. I just gave up trying to make one work.

Can't hold anyone without a toggle drop and that means brawl, havoc punch, fire whatever melee, bone smasher, and whatever in dev...dev is a little bit better since TP'ing people into a mine ambush is at least a much different game than
scraps play.

I will say that I am doing fine without the fighting pool, but only because I took energy EPP and have Force of Nature and Temp Inv...more scrap/melee type stuff. Weave of course is pointless.

Thanks for addressing this. I know they are weaker attacks for range in PVE, but that just gets back again to: range is weaker. I also know there is a stated goal to have a lot more emphasis on PVE than PVP in this game but I think this time we have the luxury of the two issues coinciding.

Too bad the PVE monsters don't fight PVP style....I have seen some awesome things with Counterstrike and Quake bots...let's program them smarter!!!

More satisfying by far to beat a smart AI opponent that uses the same rules as you than a cheating computer that has 40k HP and breaks rules such as Fake Nemesis can put up PFF from inside a Hold

Better AI will put your PVE and PVP game more in line with each other. Turn the AI on and off to taste with mission difficulty settings and viola, more fun in the game.

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I can't emotionally connect with a story if I can't connect the story with a legit place and a legit event. The random location and random map generation forces me to recall the map layout I've seen hundreds of times, across hundreds of stories. In effect, you're not allowing players to participate in a story

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You are a 100% correct. We need to find a way to communicate the story better to the players (not just the mission holder).

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Random maps are even ok if they have even ONE unique feature that sets them apart. Interactivity helps a lot. I still remember the ice slide map of the fire/ice boss from the Outcasts..the first time I encountered ice. Of course I can't remember the story so maybe it didn't leave that much impression. I remember the clockwork king story though At those low clockwork king levels I was more emotionally involved since tactics like getting behind cover etc. actually mattered and I saw unique things for the first time (the first time I saw a prince break into gears after calling out the hero's name that owned the mission was awesome.)

Unfortunately most enemies now are a featureless blur of field mice under the lawnmowers of my characters. I blame this in part on the very homogenous AI.

I still don't know Hamidon's story after being on 15 raids. Too bad, I heard it was kind of cool. There is no incentive for me to go do those missions though, and if I was experiencing that story arc, I might miss a Hami raid and actually be *penalized* for seeing some story.

Just a big blob that drops treasure, and I'll bet I'm not the only one that thinks of him that way. Maybe it should talk or say something as it's being killed as a teaser at least...

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I play many controllers Type characters as well as defenders. Currently I'm playing a Dark/Psi defender that has some Fear powers. I've been doing Ok - Not Great but just Ok.

When I'm in a PvP match and someone has Spectral Terror - The Match is pretty much over before it Begins. The Spectral Terror are popped out quickly and it Chain Holds you better than I could ever wish to do as a Dark Defender. It's gotten so bad normally Ground Rules have to be made before the match even starts.

No Taunting and No Over Powered Spectral Terror.

My Illusionist/Bubbler is level 50 and I'm out of Respecs and I spec out of Spectral Terror because it really didn't do much against mobs. If you keep Spectral Terror in PvP in the way it is - Then I want a FREE RESPEC so I can also be Over Powered.

Take Care..

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I have found that I can beat any squishie complaining about Spectral Terror without using it and only using holds just about as easily.

I have found that good scrappers and tanks can beat spectral terror pretty easily using break frees. Even when they run out of break frees, it doesn't drop their toggles making it just an opener for me, not an I Win button.

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sounds to me like this could all be avoided by making hami even harder like needing 300 ppl to take him down then its impossible cause of the horrendous lag everyone would have :P

but seriously, i undertsand both sides of the argument. i know some very good peeps that play coh and cannot do hami raids so basicaly the people who make alot more money or who's parents pay for their comp and sub. have the advantage in pvp like most other mmos i have played.

Heh keep making hami harder and raise the max lvl to 60 that way ho's ppl already have would be outdated unless they chose to stay a lowbie :P

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That would actually make the problem a lot worse. People who already have 40+ HOs would continue to be in a seperate class, mainly by virtue of their joining the uber SG early. The only silver lining in the crap cloud of HO is that anyone can get one by shooting Hami before he is dropped. The less accessible they become at this point the more the gap widens between the have and have nots, a gap that really doesn't have much to do with skill.

The more HamiO's get out there the less of a problem it becomes but currently it still takes forever to slot out one hero let alone if you want to play more than one in the arena at 50.

Why give me 8 character slots if I can't realistically use them all to their fullest in my lifetime?

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I would like to point out that Quake, Battlefield:blah or starcraft have immense player bases and continue to be played for a long long time.


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Hehe I still log into AvP2 every once in a while and pwn a server or twelve =D.

Can you imagine logging into say, DAOC after a year or two of not playing and realizing there would be whole PVP and other parts of the game you would never even see just because you didn't keep up and do your farming like a good little MMO [censored]?

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Just curious, do you have a character between 45 and 50? If so, do you ever attend raids?

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Just curious, do you ever read before you post? *points up*

If you're not willing to make the same time investment in posting as other players, don't post here.

Where is it written in stone that MMO PVP can't be balanced? Man some people would be happy chewing the same type of cud everyday for the rest of their lives. That argument doesn't have any rational basis to support it and is another dead horse.

So take your Hami changes and apply them to one, or better yet several different 4-8 person TF where HOs become accessible to everyone. Tell me why this would be bad for a change rather than why Hami is so good.

I bet the best answer you can give me is "I gots em and I don't want anyone else ta".

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<sarcasm>Why don't we just throw slotting out the window all-together? It isn't going to be fair to those people who couldn't/wouldn't attend raids. Also, it isn't fair to people who don't spend gobs and gobs of time on the forums gleening information on the best ways to slot their powers.

It isn't fair that some forum*Bleep* knows the ideal way to slot Cloak of Fear and I don't. I have a life and I don't have time to read the forums and find the best way to slot my powers. My opponent has an unfair advantage based on this. Remove all slotting in PvP!!
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Reading forums and testing builds are activities equally open to all players. Hami raids, either by your schedule or the makeup of your server or "who you know" or all three, are not. The time investment between reading a few forums is infintesimal versus going on 120 Hami raids per character (1 in 3 drops get you what you want toward your 40 HO by my estimates). You can also read and post to forums while doing many other things where a Hami raid does require a little bit of attention

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This argument makes about as much sense as the "remove Hami O's from PvP" argument. It has already been stated that when facing an opponent of a significant level difference that you will be auto-exemplared, thus reducing the benefits of Hami O's to SO level effectiveness. Yes, the owner of a cache of Hami's has an advantage, but not to the degree of a heavy-weight matchup.

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Another dead horse here, please read the prior thread before posting. First, people will want to compete at 50 with their 50.
Second, to educate you about one example, it has been repeatedly shown in this thread that high levels of accuracy will trump many defense based powersets altogether, even ones built around HOs themselves. Who knows what other ridiculous unbalances we might see when applied to health enhancement for instance, or end drain resists?? The owners of large numbers of HOs will in fact have the advantage of a heavyweight fighting a bantamweight. Perma 400% damage cap anyone? 300% base acc? Yeah sure, they won't matter. Refrains of "I can swing higher than you babies!" comes to mind.... Quoth States, "Hamidon enhancements are killer."

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There is honestly no way to make the PvP Arena a completely level playing field. How would you factor in game experience? I don't mean XP, I mean experience playing the game, and having strategic knowledge of the various powers and how best to utilize them in any given situation. Is this kind of advantage ok?

Good, Im glad we agree that this advantage is ok. Well surprise! That kind of knowledge is a result of a time investment, just as Hami O's are a result of time investment. The fact that Hami O's are a tangible object, and game knowledge isn't, does not make a case to remove Hami O's from PvP.

I honestly don't see the developers removing the Hami O advantage from the game. Hami O's are another carrot dangled in front of high level players to keep them playing the game. If you remove the incentive to do Hami raids, you remove one of the only reasons any level 50 character has to continue playing the game. (at least for those players who constantly seek advancement in their characters' lives)

Would being able to view an opponents Hami enhancement count satisfy most opponents of Hami O's in PvP?

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Again, it's a ridiculous time scale versus reasonable ones. Not to mention time spent practicing (participating in PVP fights or random build tests) is going to be a lot more entertaining than a Hami slideshow. People have no problem getting beaten by someone who spends their time practicing SKILLS. HamiO's are ITEMS. We hope to have the devs see the light on this one. MMO vets such as myself have seen them break the routine MMO mold many times before so we are holding out hope. I will be doing plenty with my 50s such as constant PVP or even helping others on random TFs, AV killing, badge hunting etc. in the current game. I will have that much more time to do it without required hami farming too.

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My best wishes for your wife's speedy recovery. I'm truly sorry to hear that.

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Hey, thanks kcirrot.

I just wanted to report since I just attended my first Hami raid I got two HOs out of the deal, One I can use on a controller character and one I can use on a damage dealer.

I want to play more than one PVP character so I'm still looking at a huge, or conservatively speaking, ridiculous, time investment there to get where I would like to be "ah the elusive carrot Eeeyaw :P".

The lag was horrible, well and truly horrible even judging by past EQ 1 raid terms, and my P4 3.2 Ghz/1 GB/Radeon 9800 Pro has been more than enough to handle every other situation in CoH including 8 person TFs with 100 enemies in the same three foot square. After my graphical lag (minimum settings) Then we get into the server side lag in which commands could only seemingly only be input once every five minutes. I'm still amazed this didn't flub the raid. I guess it took two hours but I'm a bad judge of subjective time. Maybe some Guardianers could corroborate.

Regarding some of the points made lately, I don't agree you need items to sustain an end game. PVP alone is a fine albeit highly volatile to the community sustainable end game. Items just muck it up by giving it the timesink/scale problems beaten to death pretty well before in this thread.

Economies, trading and crafting look good on paper, but in MMO practice I have never found them to be very fun (some people like to be day traders and crafters, but I've just never found them to be very exciting and it's definitely not superheroic. My apologies in advance to Accountingman and his sidekick Ledgerboy, their tireless efforts against the evil Red Ink have served Paragon well *salute*.

I have had much more camaraderie with SG members/friends and better socialization on a TV respec with 1/100th the lag than a Hami raid. I can go to PI or Atlas and socialize anytime I want also.

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Someone willing to put up with that level of farming should have an edge.

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Why is paying a monthly fee to torture yourself supposed to be an activity worth admiring. Why do unfun activities need to be rewarded in a GAME? Words like "put up with" & "farming" do not indicate fun to me. The only fun people get out of it beyond socialization with their raid group is stroking their ego later on when they get to "pwn n00bs".

To the lawyer, you are about the first pro-HO proponent I give any respect to in 60+ pages of lame "I gots em and you don't" arguments from kids living in mom's basement.

Tell me this though, how many of those 9 HOs can you actually use? How long do you estimate it will take you on your current play schedule to get the other 31 or so you probably want to slot? (I base that 40 number on power slots that people actually care about like primary, secondary, and pool.)

I am an engineer with a wife who is not in the best of health that I spend a lot of time taking care of and not only do I resent the TIME I have to spend to farm hami to compete in PVP but the QUALITY of the entertainment I'm paying for if I were to do so. I don't really see Hami as an open raid either since every Hami raid I have heard of has taken advance planning and scheduling of 20+ people. This is just not what entertainment should be and I say that from the perspective of someone who has done the mega raid thing over at least 10 more MUDs/MMOs than probably anyone reading this post. Raids I can enjoy in some games where there is actually enough varied raid+quest content to make it interesting and NO pvp (such as EQ2, where raids are not that hard to organize, mainly because you can succeed with a much wider variety of tactics than you can vs. Hami, not to mention they have raids for less people.) but in this game it is definitely dividing the playerbase into two seperate camps.

It is a dead horse but I will resurrect it here for the record:

Many, many players who were sick of item-centric MMOs made this their game, and a big part of choosing CoH was getting away from all that garbage. This is going to burn a lot of them.

Don't even kid yourself and think they are "lazy" or "cowards" or "noobs" or whatever label strokes your ego. They just choose not to participate in the same mindless MMO treadmill madness they've seen in 13421434365346 games before this. one. I almost want to start the "Disillusioned MMO Vets" supergroup (Slogan: "The DMV is Hell on Earth" ) and kill Hami everytime he spawns now but:

1. You'd all continue to miss the point.

2. More importantly, the MMO industry would continue to miss the point.

3. It's a boring raid.

4. Organizing people quickly turns into work instead of fun.

I really like the TF reward idea. HOs shouldn't be controlled by one or two groups per server that have far too much time on their hands for games. Would give us a reason to do more TFs. You could even have certain AV drop certain HO and give us some control over what we get to cut down on the random time sink of months of farming now that hami is a 9 hour spawn or whatever. 40 HOs * 9 hours is 15 24 hour days of 100 % of your time spent in solid hami killing and preparing. Now try a year or two when you factor in random drops, one raid a week, REAL LIFE, etc.

It is unrealistic BS in game goal design like this that causes people to leave MMOs in droves once realization sinks in of how underpowered they will be in the arena vs. hami equipped farmers.

Give me an impossibly hard 8 person TF and I will lead a small tight group to blow it up on a regular basis and god forbid have some fun along the way instead of the much lauded "work" of farming hami. I won't setup a minimum 25 person popularity contest every day. I don't pay a monthly fee to do "work".

Hamidon has already been the site of the ugliest and most contested scenes in this game due to player greed over the single shiny slide on this MMO playground. I myself was bombarded with tells, petty threats of petitioning and had Hami and other monsters trained on me by TA, just for showing up to watch a raid.

Fix it devs, fix it fast before PVP makes it worse. Spend some time reading the SWG boards if you really want to know how bad fully item based PVP can get (the ground game).

Many people are expecting CoH to jump the shark on this one and take a big dive...dare to disappoint them.

I find it pretty entertaining that for every Hami farmer in here fighting for their sacred MMO given right to pwn with phat lewt it seems like their argument is cut down from like three different new forum posters every time .

Someone with time on their hands should count up the number of pro-Skill vs. pro-HO posts by unique players if they actually want to add something to the thread beyond spam. Would be interesting to see who the boards favor at least...

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This is in fact 100% correct. the most succesful MMORPGs always mitigate the work-for-it impact. Usually by dividing the game into multiple "divisions," warriors, socialites, crafters, leaders. Some take great amount of work some do not.

I do point out that all the strongest North American MMO are selling on brand name with the exception of CoH. Even CoH is selling on a brand of sorts... superheros.

Many of the games that pushed the work-for-it mentality spiked in there membership at first and have been steadly dwindling ever since.
The MMO that wants to be truely successful will need to break with the way things were done, since that obviously does not work well for long term retention, and innovate.

CoH is the smallest of the big boy MMOs (over 120k subcribers) if they want to stay that way they need to find their nitch. They gambled by their "nitch" a very light work-for-it attitude type game. If they decide to change they are making a very dangerous gamble. It is the Developers decision however I do point out that AC, AO, Eve and all the other true equals of CoH are failing for the exact same work-for-it attitude.


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This is a really good point and you can see evidence of this clearly if you have played EQ1, 2 and CoH like I have. EQ1 was all about elitism and time sinks, EQ2 is adding more and more solo content near weekly because that is what players demand. Just recently all the timers limiting reattempt tries to instanced zones were taken off most if not all instanced zones there...showing that they are willing to remove grind in favor of fun. EQ2 is of course a very item centric game "phat l3wt" and raid heavy still, but I kept my CoH accounts because that was where I came to get away from all that...not to mention pvp

Like if I really want to raid something for a challenge, I'll go do it in EQ2 where there are raids galore at many levels with engaging content and widely varying tactics around the raid also, not in CoH where there is one raid at level 50.

(Of course I will still pop ghosts, paladins, octopi and other rare monsters when I see em , but they don't qualify as raids)

One of the major selling points for me as an MMO veteran of City of Heroes was that there were no true items. This meant skills I actually care about mattered more than skills I didn't care about. Let's break these down.

Skills I like to develop and find as a fun activity in games:

Engineering (Character builds & design)
Reflexes (FPS style movement and fighting)
Ingenuity (Exploitation of game mechanics)

Skills I don't care about:

"Schmoozing" (Getting into all the Hami raids/plied with gifts because you have an attractive female character, or are the SO of a raid organizer. Or maybe you are friends with everyone and have no opinions that can't be easily discarded to match whoever you're with at the time as long as you get something out of them.)

"Having no life" (Being able to spend infinite time on an MMO to get the random drops you need because you are a kid or a loser, no job, no family, other people put food on your table and a roof over your head).

"Disposable income" You buy power on eBay.

I don't have a problem with a straight time spent = power gained formula on an MMO on a linear scale. CoH is very nice in that for levels 1-49 everyone can solo more or less equally (At the rate of their AT, natch)

For comparison time spent generally equals skill gained in any FPS as well. Look ma no XP system! ("Life" imitates RPG art anyone?).

It is when suddenly this ridiculous top tier appears on an MMO that normal people with lives just can't even break into without spending hundreds and hundreds of hours on the game or playing "friends with everyone" to schmooze items that turns me off. I like to be able to compete without having to sell my soul for it. This is why HOs and Hami raids, (albeit interesting and cool as something that gets lots of heroes fighting together in a "hard" battle), basically suck.

Every time I have seen hps increased or damage weakened in a game, I considered it the easy way out of a problem for the coders.

How about this for an idea? Instead of upping everything's hit points, up only the boss hitpoints. Then give the boss the ability to summon fresh reinforcements when outnumbered, like a whole group of them. That way, the AoErs still get to kill plenty of stuff, but fights are not trivialized and even a simple street fight could be crazy and a lot of fun (like the way 2 tsoo sorcs can keep a whole group alive when you're in your teens).

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I meant a sliding scale in the X minions = 1 Hero as levels increase, but nothing like the degree proposed elsewhere that had X=30 at level 50. That is just ridiculous, completely unnecessary and even counter to comic-book feel - such mass battles are very much the exception in comics. But going up to 6 or 8 "minion equivalents" at 50, while at the same time actually replacing minions with Lts, bosses and even monsters, gets the playing field back into the 1 vs 3 arena, without players feeling like they have lost too much.

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I like mass battles a lot but I recognize limits of video cards, etc. and would like to see more bosses, looies, and monsters and tougher ones in fights, but please give me a REASON to fight them. This game reminds me of nothing so much as Diablo II in the way it plays. Remember how much fun the end of level bosses were? You could get an entire level instantly for killing some of them, and usually unique drops, battles that got insane on hell mode with the maximum difficulty scale... sometimes even in the middle of the level if you had a unique monster appear with a random lightning shield power....

Rewards for fighting bosses/harder missions could take several forms without breaking the system:

Massive XP (Truly Massive: POW an entire level granted for an uber hard mission designed to kill heros until the ventilation in the building stops due to the ducts being full of dead Captain Atomics and SuperJanes)

Access to specialized and unique missions.
Seeing an enemy you can fight nowhere else.
Story/immersion.
Badges.

So what if massive XP reward caters to powergamers and they level really fast? People are going to eat up content at different rates anyway, and either reroll some new characters and do it all again in a different way or leave...some might even stick around for the community. Personally I'd just go to a chat room for community (If I actually cared about online communities that is...maybe if I needed TF style groups on a regular basis I might but that is a whole other can of worms).

Regarding story and immersion as a reward, I felt like my first set of clockwork missions was worth it when I ran into my first Clockwork Prince as the mission boss, which said my name and then broke into Gears when killed. Little complexities and surprises like that in games are worth seeing IMO. Of course by the time I did my 7th or 8th Synapse TF I was sick of them but by then the Clockwork King made that unique. More random surprises a la' scripted events in the middle of a mission would help too to make characters feel in the center of the story and hence more superheroic also. Even if a particular mission from forgettable generic contact V was non-scripted warehouse X full of generic villain groups V1 through V10 and reused 100 time polygon model with identical powers to street bosses Q, I would still be interested in slogging through it and entertained if I got through an entire level for it or halfway through a level or something to get to that shiny new power.

Far more interesting, rewarding, and superheroic feeling though to have maybe some +10 uber Boss that is sicced on your group at the beginning of the mission, who being unkillable, chases you through the entire thing while you look for bombs to disarm or something like some of the resident evil games. A real threat to deal with to make that XP grinding not a grind anymore. If my moving from group to group on the street is not really that different from moving from group to group inside a warehouse mission it's not going to matter.

Too many of these game discussions devolve into damage/risk/reward/this or that number or color con tweak. Where's the creativity people? I still want to know when I will be able to rescue a bus of schoolkids falling off a cliff and get XP for it!

P.S. For my part though, I appreciate feeling more powerful when I go up in level too. I suppose if a minion is a bristling with missiles flying robot from another dimension with a highly advanced neural network AI, he should act like it and not blindly follow me plodding along into a dumpster or down an alley. That might make me feel better about my superheroic ego when three of them kick my *** even though they are still called "Minions". He should also laugh about it "Foolish human, did you think your puny synapses could outwit the quantum attack algorithms of ZETA-1101?!"

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Ah - therein lies the issue. Personally, I see the level 40 minion in a whole class than a level 5 minion. They're from other dimensions. They're equipped to the teeth with experimental weaponry. They're giant robots bristling with missiles.

When you say "they're not different", it's straw man because I never said that the rank (i.e. minion) changes meaning over levels. To me, the difference is, and should be the level.

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Well, I'm not level 40 yet, but 28..ish Panthenon Storm Shamans feel a lot like 15+ Tsoo Sorcerors. Level 28ish Nacht feel a lot like level 15 Nacht (except for the occasional Warwolf or Vampyre which is cool) Level 15 Nacht feel a lot like Sky Raiders with less accuracy (except for the porters which give them some uniqueness).

It's by no means "not different" but maybe some in-battle catcalls (instead of just at the start) and more different AI would help differentiate fights. Especially if the catcalls told you what the AI was thinking..."Hear your Oberst my Nacht...you will surround the dumpster and you will wait for them to come out. You will not jump in."

Where are the really cool zooming jousting air battles? Sky Raiders just seem way too landbound and slow considering their name.

AI + territory can help differentiate fights. How about dark scary slimy tunnels soley full of Alienesque Boss ONLY mobs, with traps designed to split up the heroes so the creatures can quickly eat them. Many fights are in fairly open rooms, and the territory doesn't play into the fight TOO much besides Z-axis range and blocking LOS...

Things like Panthenon Totems are really great to break up monotony, but I could just go grind 20 more minions in the time it takes me to kill one of them so there isn't any incentive for me besides challenge.

What if Boss or other special mobs could drop random rewards "items" that were merely keys to unlock more interesting and special mission content for XP rewards and badges? Like a tiny Totem doll or something in this case...Nacht bathroom pass...whatever...

A form of item hunting that would not unbalance the game with lewt....

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Essentially, each hit (if successful) will give you a short term damage buff. Different powers would have different buffs; but if you could string enough hits together you can "peak" your damage.

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So, now Hasten will become as pervasive for Tankers as it is for Scrappers.

Well, I like the changes, but I still hate Hasten. (I don't hate it, I just hate 75% of all characters having it.)

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Yeah I am a tank without Hasten and I don't like how everyone and their dog has it either. I think I could tolerate it if I could color the effect blue instead of gold. My Ice/SS build sucked so much end Hasten was just out of the question for me anyway and conceptually I didn't like it for my Tank. (Not that I don't appreciate all the ubery goodness of it, I either have or am working toward perma-hasten on all my other builds) Variety is a good thing...wish there were more pools with something really good in the first tier power like that.

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As promised, I've been looking into the issues facing Tankers; I thought I'd explain the direction we're going. As we analyed it, Tankers have three very valid concerns (aside from the issues with specific power sets):

1. Without Provoke, they are not a real Tanker. Those people who enjoy the MMP role of "meat shield" have trouble holding aggro properly.
2. The Tanker's defense stats can be matched by a properly slotted Scrapper - but the Tanker can not approach the Scrapper in damage.
3. The Tanker doesn't "feel" like a comic book Tanker should. And frankly, this one really, really bothered me. Because our game is a comic book MMP.

So - here's the solution we're going to try internally. We went through a ton of possible solutions, and we weighed each one against how well they answered the three points above as well as how long it would take to get done.

1. Tankers will get a "provoke" like AOE effect on their melee attacks. The more a Tanker lands his blows, the more and more mobs he'll attract. The bonus here is that it's not exactly like Provoke (it's not ranged) - but it makes a lot of sense. Some huge monstrosity is bashing the heads of a villain group - they're going to get more and more concerned about taking him/her out....

2. As a Tanker lands more and more blows, he'll start doing more and more damage. The longer the fight, the more powerful the Tanker becomes. I can't say that the Tanker will do as much damage as a Scrapper - but it'll certainly be more than he does now. 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....I prefer this system to a power because this way it's inherent. It's simply the nature of the Archetype. And it also sets the Tanker apart from the Scrapper's criticals.

Of course, the thought in your minds must be....WHEN?...I'm afraid I don't know. First, we need some code for this. Then we've got to test it thoroughly. Finally, it'll go on the Test Server for awhile to gather data and impressions. This is going to take some time; but I thought you'd like to know at least where we're going, even though we don't know when we'll get there.

Feel free to comment!

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This totally rocks, I didn't mind doing the provoke thing, but I will definitely look forward to maybe getting rid of it and playing more like a comic Tank and the long drawn out battles against overwhelming odds =D.

My only concern is that I hope the aggro component of the attacks get a high degree of accuracy, up to even if you miss you still draw aggro. I use icicles along with SS punches now to also help gain aggro and I find against the higher level opponents (+3, +4) it is useless for that purpose because I miss too much and I still have to fall back on Provoke because the high acc of Provoke still lets me keep things off the head of my team. I have Icicles slotted with one SO acc, one SO end redux, and 4 SO damage. My SS attacks are all slotted with one SO acc also.

I will laugh soooo hard if a simple programming change makes it so a provoked/taunted PVP player can only target the taunter. Then I will laugh soo much harder as everyone begs Tanks to come with them on PVP raids.

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NO WE'RE MORE GIMPIER THEN YOU GODDA.....

Oh wait you're the one Ice Tanker playing this game.

My bad. You're gimper.


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Secondary Ice or Primary Ice?

Oft times I have been slowly punching/icicling enemies to death with my Ice/SS whilst thinking I should have gone Ice/Ice so I could be taking on more of them while they slip on ice patch and I frost breath more than one at a time to death with a cone AoE. Course I don't have foot stomp yet so bleh.

I would challenge you to a paraplegic duel to prove who is teh g;mpz0r but I have no hand with which to throw down the gauntlet I can't wear anyway.

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But its another vague promise with no timeline, no detail and little else. If its a tanker wide change it does nothing the address the hopeless internal imbalance, if its an SS only change it is unacceptably concept restricting.


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"vague promise..."

I think he's being as specific as he can be before all the details are ironed out. I for one have been pretty impressed with the amount of follow-through on promises here. If you really want to see an example of vague promises with little detail and no timeline, go check out SWG's developer/spokesperson Thunderheart. When there is a timeline given it is invariably broken there.

"tankerwide change..."
So what if it makes all Tanks more powerful at the same time? More powerful is more powerful even if the fire/* or inv/* tanks can still make me look like crap, I'll be happier personally and I'm playing one of the gimpiest tank combos if not THE gimpiest. I thought the bigger problem was useless post 30 anyway? Are not any positive changes good?

"...SS only change it is unacceptably concept restricting. "

I find this only to make sense if you're referring to the "more damage=hit harder" idea. Some non-Hulk concepts:

Superman, angered at the death of Krypton, his family and his life, really knocks the crap out of some bad dude who was taunting him with old family holos whilst beating on him...

Wonder Man, angered because he has a fatal illness, draws on this anger and really knocks the crap out of some bad dude who was threatening the children's hospital full of terminally ill kids whilst beating on him.

If it's not the taking damage=hit harder idea you were talking about there, then I find that comment confusing.

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Gang,
I'm holding off on touching Super Strength until we tackle a somewhat greater issue with Tankers - namely that they lack that "comic book feel." Specifically, you'd like to see Super Strength be something somewhat, well, "Hulk-ish." But currently, Super Strength is a poor cousin to Scrapper powers - which seems somewhat out of place. Don't worry - what we're looking at as a fix for ALL Tankers addresses this issue.

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*Keeps the faith in this awesome dev team*

*Starts wearing purple pants and playing CoH from a sandbox filled with authentic White Sands New Mexico sand.*

*Invites people to flame him a lot.*

I agree with pretty much all of Krunch's OP *especially* the build order changes!

One thing on rage ...is it true it only increases base damage not enhance slotted damage? Is this by design?