Sorciere

[ QUOTE ]
I never really have an end issue with SR since I'm usually on a team with a tank, therefore my toggles are more than likely off.

[/ QUOTE ]

If you look at my earlier post, I was talking about the early levels, through the early teens, especially solo, and where tankers do not necessarily have reliable aggro management.

[ QUOTE ]
This late into CoH and with dual builds I would assume Stam isn't really needed, especially with IO's and End Redux's.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am talking primarily about (1) new players at (2) low levels here (per the topic of the thread), who may not even know about IOs and where endurance reductions are TO-sized.

[ QUOTE ]
Then again what game are you looking for?, last time I checked WoW had over 11 million players and everything from Warrior's to Priests have down time, via by lack of health or mana.

[/ QUOTE ]

You may be interested to learn that the lead class designer of WoW recently mentioned that he found the downtime for warriors to be a problem (most WoW classes have abilities to manage and reduce downtime, such as Spirit Tap for priests, and many classes do not have significant downtime at all if they play smart, such as hunters, death knights, or rogues). You may also be interested to learn, for example, that retribution paladin mana recovery in WotLK was specifically calibrated so that unless they used wasteful abilities or bit off more than they could chew, their mana recovery was meant to match their normal attack chains (and did).

[ QUOTE ]
I don't know what exactly you want , but every MMO I have played keeps the player down for some time, you can't just throw endless streams of powers without some downtime.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nor am I saying that you should. But using an attack chain consisting of two attacks at low levels while also running a toggle or two hardly constitutes an "endless stream of powers".

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Forced downtime is generally anathema for MMORPGs

[/ QUOTE ]

Seriously, did you just seriously used the word anathema?. Honestly Sorciere who are you trying to impress with a word commonly used in the 1500's. Was loathe not enough? or was "hate" too simple?.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am not sure what you're getting it, but it is common practice to use a variety of synonyms in writing in order to avoid repetition. As to "anathema", Google has 3.25 million hits for the word; it is not a very common word, but it's hardly extinct, either. If you wish, though, you can blame the fact that I am not a native speaker of English and sometimes employ unidiomatic expressions.

[ QUOTE ]
In any case, players who love the content will wait as long as possible. Hence why MMo's like Ultima are still around. Then again your basing your information on a website called Useit.com, I think that pretty much says it right there.

[/ QUOTE ]

Useit.com is the website of Jacob Nielsen, one of the pioneers of usability research. It is simply a commonly cited online resource. If you wish, I can probably find you peer-reviewed papers that cover the same topic.

[ QUOTE ]
Frustration might not be the best teacher, but it is a teacher. You try to learn to avoid that frustration.

[/ QUOTE ]

That is true, but it also depends on what options you have to avoid that frustration; none of the usual options make the game more challenging or complex; they simply hammer home the repetitive, grindy aspects. It's not that you are at risk of failing because of limited endurance recovery; it's generally simply that missions become more drawn-out. Some of the most endurance-efficient options (such as damage auras) actually REDUCE interactivity.

As I said above, you have very limited tactical options to counter that, and the options that you have have generally little to do with actually managing endurance as a resource (such as if your powers had significantly different endurance efficiency).

[ QUOTE ]
Possibly more agro ... taunt auras have a toHit check while Taunt does not (in PvE) and since global accuracies are fairly non-existent at the pre L20 game, misses quite often (as does Gauntlet).

[/ QUOTE ]

Most taunt auras are actually auto-hit. Chilling Embrace, Invincibility, Against all Odds, and Rise to the Challenge are all auto-hit, and so is the taunt portion of Mudpots. Only Dark Armor and Fiery Aura depend on auras that require a to-hit check, and unless you're going up against foes much higher than you, they will still hit regularly.

[ QUOTE ]
And I agree that taking Taunt too early will generally give the Tanker more agro then he/she can handle, depending on the situation of course.

[/ QUOTE ]

You can always choose to not use Taunt if you're getting too much aggro, even if you have taken it.

And, quite honestly, having all of the aggro is pretty survivable even on a low-level team if you adequate support. I've been both in the tanking and the support role at those levels, so I know that it's quite possible.

[ QUOTE ]
I never said it was good design, the fact that a very large portion of toons have stamina may or may not prove bad design. I said that doing something about endurance should affect all AT's at level 20, not just tankers. And if indeed it an issue with tankers alone, then it should affect tankers of all levels, not just below level 20.

[/ QUOTE ]

I may not have expressed myself clearly enough -- I was speaking more generally (I have always asserted in the past that endurance concerns are not tanker-specific and see no reason to deviate from that position). Note that my earlier specific example was actually referring to an /SR scrapper.

[ QUOTE ]
However, if you are going to play the game and see content past the first few levels then you have to watch your endurance. It defeats the purpose of an endurance bar to do otherwise.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is a non-sequitur, I'm afraid. It is perfectly possible to have an endurance bar (or a similar resource) simply to restrict behaviors that are out of the ordinary, such as making the DPS of a perma-hastened character unsustainable.

Acquiring attacks as you become them and use them is as normal as it comes; but without Stamina, you do not even have enough endurance recovery to sustain two attacks indefinitely. Toggles or a third attack pre-20 can have a rather dramatic effect.

[ QUOTE ]
If the player doesn't like it, they should move on to a game that has no endurance, mana, stamina, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

They can do that. However, I very much doubt that players leaving this game for another is a desirable outcome from the perspective of the developers.

Edit: One of the other underlying problems is of course that the endurance-effectiveness of most powers is pretty similar and follows a rigid formula. This deprives you of the tactics involved in using your powers smartly. Outside of prioritizing AEs over single target effects, there's little reason to prioritize, say, the individual Martial Arts attacks over each other.

What I am saying, to be clear, is that the current endurance model is an example of poor game design. Not with respect to just tankers, but with respect to the game as a whole. It does not fit the genre, it is poorly calibrated, and it is at its worst during the period when you want to sell players on the game.

Forced downtime is generally anathema for MMORPGs. It is not even specific to gaming -- HCI research has pretty clearly documented why forcing users to wait (say, because of a slow-loading website) leads to frustration and in a commercial context can easily lose you customers. That is why normally forced downtime is only introduced with good cause: Because it increases immersion (such as travel through the world), as a penalty for failure (recovering from a team wipe, for example), or something similar. During normal play, it is generally minimized, because it leads to user frustration and in the worst case to canceled subscriptions.

[ QUOTE ]
If you, I or anyone coming into the game doesn't realize that the blue bar and how much of it's left determines whether or not how I attack, then they have more to learn about mmo's or where failing in other mmo's to begin with.

[/ QUOTE ]

That you can learn to work around the issues does not make it good design. I haven't ever seen anybody put forward a good argument why being endurance-starved at low levels makes the game more interesting, reflects genre conventions properly (the opposite, if anything), or has some other positive property.

Absence of demonstrable harm is not the same as the presence of something good.

[ QUOTE ]
What level would you guys suggest getting Taunt?

[/ QUOTE ]

Personally, I tend to get it at level 10 or shortly thereafter. It is generally not as though I have the spare endurance to fuel another attack instead or the enhancement slots to slot another one properly. And since I tank on teams at all levels, I get considerably more benefit out of it than other powers.

What I'm saying is that Taunt is an issue of prioritization. Does Taunt stop you from getting more important powers? If so, delay it. If not, pick it up. It depends entirely on what your power priorities are and how you rank the usefulness of Taunt.

[ QUOTE ]
I find 22 is the point where a tank can reliably survive the aggro it brings.

[/ QUOTE ]

Huh? Your taunt aura will get you a lot more aggro at a time than the power Taunt (which you can elect not to use, too).

[ QUOTE ]
Its just that its hard to find comics about characters below level 20.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's probably because the D&D-ish level model isn't very faithful to the genre to begin with.

[ QUOTE ]
I know it drove me away from my first attempt at tanking.

[/ QUOTE ]

For me, it has actually been a major obstacle on various attempts to play a SR scrapper. On top of having to worry about endurance, you also have to worry about health (not because you don't survive, but because health regenerates much slower than endurance). It led to a stop-and-go mode of play that was very frustrating.

[ QUOTE ]
Even in the MA, I found the most draconian of missions just make more defenders/controllers desirable to keep the first tank alive.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, you could stack more defenders and controllers; alternatively, you could split aggro between two tankers and make each defender and controller up to twice as effective with regards to mitigation. That you can employ the first solution does not make the second unworkable or less effective.

[ QUOTE ]
In the end, we cant expect the dev to tweak content for specific ATs outside of special TFs.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am not talking about making specific ATs more useful; I am talking about content that requires more than the absolute minimum of defense, because when you have a game where only offense matters, than you're discarding an entire dimension of the game. That includes a whole bunch of defender and controller types, too. That has nothing to do with tankers specifically, but with making the game more than just mashing attack chains. It's like playing soccer with the net in front of your own goal rather than behind it.

[ QUOTE ]
I tested some stuff like this on the early MA, when a lot of stuff allowed for insane spawns. I had similar theory but in the end, my tankers had not the endurance to keep going compared to my scrapper, yet the scrapper had enough survivability to do more than my tanker before he faceplanted. My tanker also faceplanted attempting to tie but due to running out of endurance and, consequently, detoggling.

[/ QUOTE ]

I had been doing this for a long time using herding tactics solo; I didn't run out of endurance, though. The key here is to prioritize your area effects and damage auras over your single target attacks because of their much superior DPE when they hit, say, 5 or more targets at once (damage auras are even better).

If I want to, I can pretty much always run out of endurance. Heck, I can run out of endurance on a /Regen scrapper with Quick Recovery and Stamina and only one toggle if I want to. Unless you've done some heavy +recovery IO slotting, and aside from a few powersets (such as Ice Armor), the game generally forces you to cut back on your attacks (either by not taking all of them or not using all of them) if you don't want to run out of endurance eventually. Being able to run out of endurance is normal; the game gives you only about 2.5 EPS with Stamina, and it's not hard to burn more than that. And if that is the case, you need to prioritize those of your attacks that have maximum DPE.

[ QUOTE ]
1) Teams. In teams a second tanker just brings 64% the damage a scrapper or blaster would (stalkers and brutes and now Dominators can be considered to be in the same ballpark,) while bringing none of the utility a defender or controller would(corruptors and masterminds also can bring the utilities and worse: Masterminds are designed to tank.)

[/ QUOTE ]

In that respect, any solution that requires one of the tankers to assime the role of a damage dealer is a non-solution, as far as I'm concerned. I generally play tankers in order to (primarily) tank. A "solution" that requires me deal damage as a tank is no more a solution than one that required me to heal in order to contribute.

Secondly, as I've pointed out before, the lack of stackability is simply a matter of content being insufficiently difficult. When you DO sufficiently hard content (such as certain MA missions), then a second tanker does become very useful. When the problem is that tankers do not contribute on a metric that almost completely neglects survivability, the actual problem is that there is a reason that such a metric is commonly used, and that is what would have to be fixed.

[ QUOTE ]
2) Solo the tanker is the most endurance inefficient AT in the game. Defenders may in theory be close but other than force fields, all have a form of damage increase or resistance debuff that can increase their output enough. The order they get these tools may not be the most optimal, though, but they all get them.

[/ QUOTE ]

I will wait for what the adjustable teamsize difficulty slider in I16 does to tanker soloing myself. Endurance efficiency is greatly affected by area effects (an AE hitting more mobs means better DPE), and tankers both have solid AE capability and the means to survive using them solo effectively.

[ QUOTE ]
How bout increase the damage cap on tanks to 400%? (or 500-750% but im trying to be reasonable.....)

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, the damage cap on tanks IS currently 400% (depending on how you calculate it, of course).

In any event, don't count on any caps being raised. If you were to ask me, I'd actually suggest lowering the magnitude of certain caps.

[ QUOTE ]
then can you explain why invul is ok to buff to s/l cap with tough and fire is not?

cause im STILL trying to figure out how you justify that one

[/ QUOTE ]

Fiery Aura is a scranker set, so to speak. It trades some mitigation for additional offensive capabilities.

[ QUOTE ]
Fixed.

[/ QUOTE ]

"Whoosh"?

[ QUOTE ]
Also note, nowhere did I say in the original post Tankers are rolled to do damage, but that they are rolled in big part (when not by MMO players) by people that have an inspiration in Superman, Colosus, The Thing, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Have you considered that for women Superman, Colossus, and The Thing may not be the role models you make them out to be?

Not that I'm really sure what they have to do with your proposal, to be honest.

I'm afraid I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the proposal. It seems to be a somewhat complicated way (using a mini combo effect) for giving tankers a single target 20% damage bonus.

I also find the game-world justification somewhat problematic. Taunt is already a somewhat artificially-feeling power as is; I'm not sure I want to exacerbate that by making it more artificial and on top of that see it being used more frequently for reasons that do not relate to its primary purpose.

[ QUOTE ]
Yes. it also means that for people who enjoy trying things for the lore or for the fun of seeing new things, that theyre FORCED to grind the living hell out of an instance or three they might not enjoy just to get the carrots needed to see the new shiny.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. Just to be clear, I'm not exactly fond of the whole process myself (my husband and I decided after Gurtogg Bloodboil that we really could do better things with our time than following the WoW raid grind). I'm simply saying that it's a logical way for an MMORPG company to extend progress at the maximum level.

It's also why I rather like the fact that City of Heroes doesn't follow that model and why I think that people who want more endgame content similar to WoW may want to be careful what they wish for, lest they get it.

[ QUOTE ]
Well, so are Mathematica notebooks, which is why I suggested it

[/ QUOTE ]

I didn't realize that (I knew that you could export Mathematica formulas to LaTeX, though). Is it reasonably useful outside of Mathematica or an obscure markup language? After all, Framemaker's MIF format is technically also text (like RTF), but far harder to generate by outside tools (bad memories here from having to write my MS thesis in Framemaker on a Sun4).

[ QUOTE ]
Version control is definitely, by definition, what you have on google docs. Something more robust is, of course, more robust and perhaps personally more desirable. Sometimes, though, we just have to go shopping in the mini-van instead of the ATV with transforming boat option and helicopter attachment.

[/ QUOTE ]

Google Docs lacks branching and merging in order to be considered to have something resembling modern version control. (This is not a complaint, since creating these features for, say, spreadsheets is very much a non-trivial exercise.)

[ QUOTE ]
Reptiles with navels?

[/ QUOTE ]

Since they already appear to have mammary glands, an umbilical cord isn't all that much sillier.

[ QUOTE ]
If this online version is anything like Google Docs, it will have version control. Google Docs does, and It's a feature I love. The ability to roll back to previous edit have saved many charts from being lost forever!

[/ QUOTE ]

What you're talking about is more having a history of changes (which is already pretty useful, but not quite what I mean). When I say "version control", I mean the full feature set that modern version control systems such as Mercurial, Subversion, Bazaar, or Git have, which is considerably more than just a revision history.

[ QUOTE ]
I am not sure I understand what the TeX features you talking about are, never dealt with that (at least not by that name so am lost)

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, these aren't related to TeX at all, just to the fact that TeX documents are straight text files.

"Progression raiding" is actually a fairly logical continuation of the leveling process. Instead of giving you increased power through new levels (and better stats and new powers that come with it), progression raiding increases your power through giving you better gear. The advantage is that gear improvements can be handed out in smaller increments than level improvements, so the process can be spread out longer.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Obviously, the lack of WYSIWYG with TeX-style typesetting software is a downside for most users

[/ QUOTE ]Have you ever tried Wolfram's Mathematica? It's not quite TeX, but it does do typesetting and equations. I know the CS chair at my university has used it to write a textbook, for example.

[/ QUOTE ]

The thing is that WYSIWYG is (for me) not a sufficiently high priority compared to my other needs.

First of all, WYSIWYG generally doesn't help me much. I do my proofreading and editing using printouts, not on-screen display, even when I use software with WYSIWYG capability. It's simply a more effective way of editing. WYSIWYG helps me with controlling the layout, but that's not a big concern for me.

Conversely, I have requirements that are not satisfied by proprietary document formats:

(1) Version control. Everything I write gets checked into a Mercurial repository, even if I work on something alone. But mostly I also collaborate with at least one other person, so a shared repository that we all have access to is generally our best choice. Word or OpenOffice.org versioning is not a suitable replacement for modern version control software.

(2) A non-trivial part of what I put in papers is programmatically generated, such as program output being turned into tables, pretty-printed pseudo-code, diagrams and graphs generated with GLE. Generating LaTeX programmatically is much easier than, say, RTF, and it also enables me to have a build process using SCons ensuring that whenever I or somebody else changes anything anywhere, I get up-to-date, correct PDF output.

There are a couple more features of TeX that I am rather fond of, too, but they are properties of the software and are not related to document formats.

If you want to tank on an Invulnerability tanker prior to level 18, you will need Taunt: You don't get your taunt aura until level 18, and Gauntlet won't cut it.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

A large part of the fun factor in PvE is being able to collaborate to handle things that the individual players couldn't handle alone.

[/ QUOTE ]

As much as I like the idea behind this statement, with infinite money source, and IO sets, characters have started to be able to handle anything alone.

[/ QUOTE ]

Which is a big reason why I rarely bother with IO sets, outside of alleviating QoL issues.

I suggest looking at Dana Massey's column at mmorpg.com "Make The Journey Fun". I don't quite agree with his proposed solution, but his analysis strikes me as pretty accurate.

Also of interest is the column by Sanya Weathers about quest design that he references:

[ QUOTE ]
"Part of leveling quickly means avoiding anything that might require time. Puzzles, word games, and riddles are only acceptable if the answers are already posted in spoilers on fan sites. The hardcore enjoy solving puzzles, but the hardcore aren’t keeping the servers running. The truly dedicated will alt-tab out to a spoiler site and continue playing, but everyone else will simply quit playing. One anonymous source told me that in a zone with a quest completion rate of around 70%, the sole puzzle quest will have a completion rate of 15%. And it wasn’t that high until the answers were on The Brasse and Allakhazam."

[/ QUOTE ]