Paragonsman

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It is that you never become porportionately more powerful than your enemies. When this is the case, you lose the sense that you're becoming more powerful as you level up.

That's the complaint. I don't care if I'm taking on Hellion grunts or Rikti grunts.

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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, Statesman, what you are proposing is essentially shifting the greatest rewards from fighting 150+ wimpy flunkies to fighting a few tough villains (effectively undoing the purple patch) and increasing the difficulty of missions.

Whether you want to dress those tough villains in white or purple is merely a matter of cosmetics assuming that you are keeping the current risk-to-reward ratio (minus the purple patch cap). Naturally, shifting the greatest reward toward a few tough villains means nerfing the reward for fighting 150+ wimpy flunkies, I think that's what many are complaining about.

I guess the bottom-line question is this: Are we going to gain experience as fast fighting a few tough villains under the new system as we do fighting 150+ wimpy flunkies right now? I mean, you obviously want to shift the greatest reward from fighting huge hordes to fighting a few. The question is, is the "greatest reward" going to be lessened in the process to slow new superheroes down.

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They really ARE the very same minions. They are just dressed up in different clothing and have a few different powers. You might see them as very very different. But, many of us see them as just the same minion.


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True - you could put it that way (which of course, pretty much nullifies the diversity in every other MMP, but I digress), but then one could equally say, "they're the same - just more of them!"

Also - think of the technical ramifications. Let's say that 10 minions equal a hero at level 40. That means that we'd need to stock 80 minions in a single room on a mission when there's 8 heroes. 80 minions. Every room. The performance issues boggle the mind.

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Well, Statesman, I see little benefit in insisting on dressing villains you are "balanced to fight in triplets" in white uniforms through all levels. If it makes the players feel more heroic to fight the same friggin villains their heroes are "balanced to fight in triplets" dressed in deeper and deeper purple as their heroes progress in level, I think you ought to just let them have what they want.



It's not like higher level characters can't read the level numbers and absolutely need their "con" to be color-coded. Now if you are really worried about color-coding "con" at higher levels, you can always do two level difference per color or maybe even add more colors (light red, dark red, light orange, dark orange, you get the idea).

So maybe your hero starts out "designed to fight" triplets of the same level, then end up "designed to fight" triplets of 58 when the heroes are 50. Mission difficulties will be adjusted according to what you are "designed to fight" at your level, of course. Yeah sure, at level 50 they can take on 200+ level 50 minions with ease (How's that for feeling heroic?), but the risk is so low that the reward is virtually non-existent. The color of the uniform is just for looks, the risk-vs.-reward is where the real beef is.

As long as the reward is the greatest fighting triplets, people will fight the triplets instead of 150+ +2s. Statesman, do you realize that what you are proposing is essentially undoing the purple patch, upping mission villain levels, and dressing the villains in brand spankin' new white uniforms?

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3) The underlying issue pointed out has been that, while scrappers could pick up powers to raise their defenses to tanker levels, there was no corresponding way for tankers to reach scrapper damage levels. Now, as usual, there were too many arguments at the extreme in any discussions on that, but the slot usage was not enough to balance things out (although it did make it closer than some extremists would admit to). Adding in a controlled, tanker only way to help redress the damage potential difference to target levels, at the same time as giving a much more comic-book feel, is an exceptional solution in concept - we just have to hope the implementation lives up to that.


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Outside of Invulnerability, I don't know of any scrappers that can actually, truly match tanker defenses, and Inv scrappers still have to delve into the power pools for their resistance (and IMO Inv in both archtypes is overpowered anyway). So I don't think it's really true that scrappers can get to tanker defenses. Rather, it's more that the game doesn't require more than scrapper defenses to get by in melee, so tankers say, hey, what makes us so special then? As they're upping the difficulty level, maybe that will change.

There's also the idea that resistance is perhaps too stable a defense to make tankers and scrappers who rely on resistance different. 90% resistance is always 90% resistance, so tankers that can exceed 90% just have waste, because outside of the rare resistance debuff, the excess is just thrown away. If the game scaled resistance somehow so that 90% base resistance doesn't always block 9/10 of damage against harder opponents, similar to debuffs scaling by opponent level, then having over 90% would be more useful, as insurance against resistance scaling.

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Nah. The gap between tanker secondaries and scrapper primaries being so much bigger than the gap between scrapper secondaries and tanker primaries is a problem regardless of whether or not high defense is needed. Regen being so much more popular than invul despite invul's raw ability to tank non-psionics much better, that can be solved by the need for high defense. The discrepancy in the primary-secondary gaps is another story.

In case you are even thinking about comparing scrapper SR to tanker Invul to "prove" that scrapper Invul is the only problem, try playing an ice tanker in the 40+ game some time...no sleep resistance, no psionic defense to evade sleep attacks...then come back and tell me how much SR sucks "even with the new Elude." DA doesn't stack yet? Well heck neither does ice/stone. Sorry, bud, but "Invul scrapper is the only problem" doesn't fly either. Raw ability to tank non-psionics isn't the only consideration. Each defense set comes with its own perks to balance the lesser raw non-psionic tanking ability, not the least of which is the ability to dodge AE sleep everybody else dreads. Granted some defense sets need help, but that's no argument against the generally narrow gap between scrapper secondaries and tanker primaries relative to the generally wide gap between tanker secondaries and scrapper primaries needing to be fixed per Statesman's ideas.

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To speak to those worried about us usurping the role of "boss killer" from the scrappers. Well, it has been said before, that no group should need any specific AT. That means that each AT should be able to in some way sub for 1 or more other ATs. Of course not as effectively, but none-the-less, we will be able to adequetly step into that role now, as can most blasters.

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Tankers can already fill that role more then well enuff. Tankers single target attacks do about as much as Scrappers do. The upside for Scrappers realy is the crits against bosses. But if the bonus from this change is larger then the 15% crit chance against a boss, then more then just boss killing will be a problem.

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Sorry, Znail, but I'm afraid your (and many other scrappers') specious claims on this will fall on deaf ears this time. There is no more need to propagate the above myth - The players' damage logs have repeatedly shown that scrapper primaries way out-damage tanker secondaries, and the devs no doubt have access to the same numbers through datamining. They cannot be fooled on this matter.



That said, the proposed changes have the potential to be either good or completely worthless. For all we know the magnitude and duration of the damage bonus may not even grant a 15% damage over time even under the most contrived optimum scenario, in addition to being almost totally unnoticeable in 99% of the fights.

The same goes for the inherent melee AE taunt since the "taunt metahold" in CoT is all-or-nothing. For all we know the new AE taunt could grant tankers the same half-a-second "metahold" in an AE vs. +5 villains that the current tanker attacks grant vs. each target hit.

It always sounds great when Statesman first lays it out, a.la. the knockback fix which at first was supposed to be global for tankers, and then the higher tanker attacks ended up not getting the knockback fix. The same goes for these changes. I wouldn't start celebrating just yet if you know what I mean.