Sarrate

Personally, I disagree with slotting RttC for taunt; it improves a character's "hands off" threat generation, but it doesn't raise the threat generation ceiling. Having (and using) Taunt will completely swamp/override taunt enhancement in RttC.

The threat formula uses the longest taunt remaining, so a 40-80s Taunt will always win over a 1.25-2.4s RttC. If a player is serious about tanking/threat, then they'll be using Taunt.

Yes, the damage debuff will stack from multiple sources. Keep in mind that the higher tier powers tend to have longer durations than the lower tier ones. I think Quick Strike's lasts 4s and Concentrated Strike is 8s.

[edit: I haven't done any math, on this, but I don't think QS would help your survivability noticeably over the killing/stunning power of CS. With enough recharge you'll keep the debuff up anyways.]

Honestly, it's a subjective point. What is "sufficient"? Never getting burst down? Lady luck will catch up with you eventually. Getting burst down infrequently enough for you to care? Is that once a week? Once a day? Etc.

Sorry, I can't be more helpful - my characters tend to either have more layered mitigation (Invuln, WP) or resistance heavy (Elec, Fire).

By the way, if it helps, my quest for threat knowledge started in the I6/I7 days where I was constantly ripping aggro from Tankers (who didn't liberally use Taunt) with my DM/Invuln Scrapper (who didn't have Confront). If Scrappers can cause threat issues, then Brutes are worse... and they get Taunt instead of Confront.


I haven't played EA on a Brute, my experience comes from playing it as a Stalker before the buffs. Having said that, I'm personally not a fan of predominately defense based sets for tanking. The reason is twofold:

1) Defense is cheap and much easier to acquire (inspirations, IOs, buffs, etc). So having a lot of it lets you hit the soft cap faster, but after that you're a bit stuck.
2) It's susceptible to burst damage. I really dislike not being able to judge if I'm in trouble or not. I could be at 60% hp and get hit by a couple hard hits at once and fold.

I don't want to be a downer or to push you away from a character you enjoy, but I also can't bring myself to be dishonest with my concerns. (I have an Ice Tanker and this is what got me to stop playing her many Issues ago.)


On a different note, I've seen you mention Power Siphon as a defensive tool many times now; it's actually a purely offensive one. Kinetic Melee attacks debuff damage all the time, not just when PS is active. All PS allows is for them to generate stacking +dmg buffs on you.

The same logic can be attributed to a lot (most?) ATs. Scrappers deal more damage, so they should generate more threat. Come to think of it, Blasters deal more damage, too; clearly their threat generation should be even higher. Defenders/Controllers/Corruptors all have potent buffs/debuffs, it would be prudent to eliminate them first. Etc. The tanking role in MMOs is usually very artificial - it makes no logical sense for the AI to go after the toughest player character.

Imagine that you're the Tanker and you see the Brute taking too much damage and being at risk of dying. With equal builds (ie: no Taunt vs no Taunt, Taunt vs Taunt) a Tanker cannot match the Brutes theat generation. So, their original role - to keep other players safe - becomes impossible. Okay, I conceede that a Tanker with Taunt can out threat a Brute without Taunt (which would likely be the case for a 'dps Brute'), but it takes a considerable amount of time to catch up to their threat lead, which may be too late.

That's only part of it. I'm also looking further ahead. Before GR/IOs/etc, it didn't seem like much of an issue to me. Tankers never had to compete for the same role with them, and buffs/debuffs were less prolific, so it was harder for Brutes to realize their potential. Now, however, it's much easier for Brutes to impede on the Tankers' role. The amount of +def/+res available from IOs, Incarnate abilities (Cardiac Alpha for more +res, Destiny), the increase of team sizes, single target buffs being made AoEs, etc. I can only see this problem getting worse as time goes on, not better. Tankers are already getting super saturated with mitigation, where Brutes can keep growing until the difference becomes a wash. At that point, the only thing Tankers will offer over Brutes is Bruising (which doesn't even stack).

I'm not trying to be dramatic here, that is honestly where I see current trends leading.

If by "SO much stuff", you mean "the entire game", then yes.

I think it's pretty easy to see how it happened. They didn't design a balanced game because they didn't understand what players would do with their system. They didn't expect players to slot multiple SOs of the same type into a single power, let alone stacking buffs/debuffs. The more time went on, the more players got used to how things worked and the more work would be required to rebalance the game. I don't remember if you were around for GDN/ED, but they would be nothing compared to a change to stacking buffs/debuffs.


Also: hindsight is always 20/20.

Erm, if most players would never notice, then it didn't change anything.

Having said that, I think you're wrong. Let me give you a very simple example.

4 lucks (now) = 45% defense
4 lucks (dr) = 30% defense (12.5 + 12.5*0.8 + 12.5*0.4 + 12.5*0.2)

That's a damage intake increase of 4x. I suspect a squishy using inspirations to fight a tough EB would notice that.

Not soon enou-

-gh...

Well, hot damn!

Ahah, I was thinking of higher end gameplay. There is another wrinkle with taunt effects - their durations scale up as you level. To make things more complicated, there are two different tables for how they scale.

For example, standard taunt effects (auras, gauntlet/g-lite) have a duration of 1.00 x Melee_InherentTaunt. At level 5, that would be 1.36 sec, but by the time you reach level 50, it would last 13.6 sec. That's a growth of 10x.

Taunt, however, has a duration of 20.0 x Melee_Taunt. This table scales from 1.09 to 2.05 - a growth of 1.88x.

Attacking alone would not be able to keep taunt duration up on the target, especially with the broken attack chains everyone has at those levels. Threat decay (which never has been explained to us) seems to be very unforgiving of this.

What I suspect was happening is the Tanker was running Mud Pots (Stone Armor's aggro aura, available at lvl6, but can be retained exemplaring down to lvl1) and that was what was responsible for your threat issues. Your EA brute gets Entropic Aura at lvl10, which should make a considerable difference, especially since it pulses faster and is auto-hit.

Are you talking about Death from Below (lowbie "Sewer Trial") or the Abandoned Sewer Trial (lvl38-40 "Sewer Trial")?

At any rate, could you provide any more detail about the situation? Which sets was the Tanker? Was he getting into spawns first? How long did spawns die? Etc. The threat explanation I gave you was very incomplete and watered down; so there could be factors at work that it doesn't explain.

Not sure when the last time you played WoW was, but threat has become less and less of an issue as time has gone on.

Glad I could help.
Yes, turning off Super Speed (and any buff with -threat level) will improve threat generation. A slightly more expanded threat formula (but still extremely dumbed down):

Threat = Damage * TauntDurationRemaining * ThreatLevel

ThreatLevel varies from AT to AT, but Brutes/Tankers start at 4, Scrapper 3, etc.

Yep, if you want to fill the 'tank' role, I consider Taunt mandatory, too.

Really, there are 4 different tiers of threat generation (also simplified)

1) Playing a character with no taunt effects.
2) Playing a character with taunt effects in the 13.5s range (Gauntlet, Gauntlet-lite, most aggro auras)
3) Playing a character with the Taunt power (~41s).
4) Playing a character with the Taunt power, slotted (~80s).

Someone with no taunt effects won't compete with someone who has them. Someone with just taunt effects won't compete with someone with a well slotted taunt. When two characters are on the same tier, then many times, the difference is damage output. (Debuffs also play a factor, which is why debuff ATs tend to draw a lot of attention to themselves.)

That and the fact Greater Fire Sword on Scrappers isn't as strong as on a Brute:

Scrapper Greater Fire Sword
Brute Greater Fire Sword
That is the only difference, no change to recharge/end cost/etc.

It's not bad damage output that was bad, it's just that taunt effects are very strong. A very simple (and not entirely correct) exmplanation is that taunts are debuffs that amplify threat by 1,000 times per second of the duration on the target. So if you hit a target with a 10s taunt, the AI sees 1 point of damage as 10,000 damage (1 dmg * 1,000 * 10s).

Another wrinkle is that simply appying a taunt effect is like a 1 dmg attack, so if you have an aura pulsing a 10s taunt every 1s, it'd be generating 10,000 'threat' per second.

So really, the only time someone with taunt effects will lose aggro is against someone else who is applying taunt effects. This is where Tankers are at a disadvantage - Brutes apply taunts effects of the same length as Tankers, but they deal more damage.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to talk you out of making a Brute, I was just making sure that you didn't get a false impression of how taunts worked in CoX. Taunt/threat is one aspect that is very poorly documented / understood by, dare I say, most people.

Just for clarification:

Gauntlet is an AoE taunt effect (5 targets max) added to single target attacks.
Brutes get "Gauntlet-lite" in the sense that their single target attacks still taunt, but only the target of that attack.

This means that Tankers have no benefit over Brutes with aggro auras (ie: the afk Tanker), AoE attacks (ie: Foot Stomp), or attacking a single target (ie: an AV). The only benefit a Tanker has is using a single target attack with multiple enemies in range.;


Ironically, Brutes can generate more threat than Tankers can. If a Tanker doesn't use Taunt (the power), then Brutes will out threat them.

Phase Shift and Hibernate share a "NoPhase" timer, so you'd only ever want one of the two.

Brutes that can hit the resistance cap:

Fiery Aura - fire
Electric Armor - energy; all but tox/psi with Power Surce
Invulnerability - all but psi with Unstoppable
Stone Armor - within 3% of s/l in Granite

Can you softcap them in SOs? No. Invuln can get quite a bit with saturated Invincibility. Now that I look at it, Stone Armor can get in the same ballpark (~30-35%), too.

It has been a long time since I've fiddled with this proc, too, but you're saying the internal cooldown was removed?

Hmm, looking at it in CoD, I do seem to remember "Lifetime in-game" being set to 10 rather than the current 0. Interesting.

I disagree. The 15' radius is a much bigger advantage than smashing vs cold damage. That extra 5' increases the area by 2.25 times (314 ft^2 vs 707 ft^2).

The fact Foot Stomp is in the same set as Rage just exasperates the issue.


City of Heroes has a power formula that is normally used to create powers. The more damage a power does, the higher the end cost / recharge time. Likewise with the radius (and angle for cones) for AoEs.

Frozen Aura follows the formula:
Dmg: 1.42 (63.35)
Rech: 20
End: 18.51
Radius: 10'

Foot Stomp does not (all the same stats, with a radius of 15'). If it were changed to adhere to the formula (radius being constant), it would need to either have its damage reduced to 1.1 scale (48.73) or have its rech/end increased to 26.59s / 24 end.


Note: I'm only stating facts, not any of my opinions regarding Foot Stomp.

This really depends upon your standard for holding aggro. I'm a bit of an aggro *****, so, in my opinion, Taunt is mandatory. I say this because all things being equal, a Tanker cannot out threat a Brute without Taunt. Period. *

Back before Castle and Ghost Widow went through the threat code, figured it out, and explained it on the forums**, I was playing an Invuln Scrapper and would frequently team with an Invuln/SS and Stone/Stone Tankers. I would inevitably rip aggro from them.

So if a Scrapper can do that (who have a threat modifier that is 75% of a Tanker), then a Brute would be generating even more threat.


* Mathematically, all things being equal, I don't see how a Tanker could hold agro over a Brute. By that, I mean identical attack chains, using Taunt at the same times, etc. Having said that, Taunting Brutes are rare.
** By the way, if you two are still around reading the forums, I cannot thank you enough for that information.

It's +3.75% and +0.75% for the first mob, then +0.75% for each additional mob. So:

1: 3.75 + (1 * 0.75) = 4.5
2: 3.75 + (2 * 0.75) = 5.25
3: 3.75 + (3 * 0.75) = 6
...
9: 3.75 + (9 * 0.75) = 10.5
10: 3.75 + (10 * 0.75) = 11.25

Just some food for thought: RttC may be pretty worthless by itself for threat generation, but I think that combined with other powers, it generates substantially more threat than it does on its own. In a sense, RttC is like unslotted Hover while slotted RttC in conjunction with other powers is slotted Hover: substantially better than you would believe it could be.

As for why I feel this way, I tried to explain it in this post.

Man, it's been ages since I've heard someone use that term.

Btw, when calculating DPA, if you simply divide the damage by the activation time (like you did in your post), you'll get numbers that are higher than reality. You need to factor in ArcanaTime. If you want a full description of what it is, you should read the thread first introducing it here.

[edit: Orange numbers are what I believe to be base damage (no crits, etc). Yellow numbers are what are getting factored into the average damage on mouse over.]

Yet MID's damage when just hovering over the power is:

Where is it getting those values?

Smashing (12.51) is pretty simple - it's just the normal PVE damage.

Fire(114.8 + 5x3) is a bit more complicated.

5x3 = 3 x6.26 * 0.8
Fire dot averaged out by 80%

114.8 = 43.79 + (56.31*0.05) + (56.31*0.10) + 62.56
This is normal fire damage, 5% and 10% averaged crits, and the (erroneous?) 62.56 fire damage at the bottom of the detailed window.


As much as I like the program, MIDs does have a history of getting APP damage incorrect for ATs that can 'crit' (Scrappers, Stalkers, and Controllers).

Pretty much all dynamically scaling toggle buffs have this effect (Invin, RttC, AAO, etc). These toggles have two attributes:

BuffA (does not stack, the "first target buff")
BuffB (stacks)

When it effects one enemy, you get both buffs. When you have two or more targets, it looks like this:

BuffA x10
BuffB x10

But since BuffA doesn't stack, that drops to:

BuffA x1
BuffB x10

Now here is the trick, the buffs last slightly longer than the activation (tick) period of the toggle. During this time, you'd get following:

BuffA x20 --> x1
BuffB x20

Thus why you sometimes get spikes in the benefit from the toggle. Why was it designed this way? If they made the buff last just as long as the tick period, it would be possible for the buff to momentarily fall off. It was deemed that the benefit of a brief double stack was better than a brief moment of no buff at all.

Adamastor has 25% res to negative energy and -25% resistance to energy. So an NE attack would need to have ~66.67% better DPA than an energy attack to deal better damage against him.