SpittingTrashcan

Actually, the revolutionary idea that the devs have been stumbling toward for quite a while now is the idea that all content can be end game content. Starting with the original SK/Exemp system, continuing with Ouroboros and AE, coming to nearly full fruition with Super SK, and with the last barrier being dissolved by Going Rogue, the beauty of CoH is that gaining levels only opens doors, never closes them. Trying to point to a specific "endgame" for CoH would not only be pointless but meaningless.

It's true that CoH content also bears a great deal of self-similarity across all levels, but then that's true of any MMO that doesn't have the budget or staff to create a lot of new code and art resources. At least CoH squeezes everything it can out of the resources it does have.

I'm honestly not sure what Kruunch's idea of an end game is. I can't really be bothered to care, either, given that he seems to see any innovation as the enemy of success...

So, in other words: people should be able to do whatever they want to do, but the best rewards should be reserved for things that are difficult to the most people, and variety is one way to measure that breadth of difficulty?

I can get behind that.

Good analysis.

I had the same insight a while ago regarding variety producing challenge. My conclusion was that perhaps AE rewards should be reduced overall, with increased rewards for playing missions selected at random rather than ones specifically chosen by the player. This didn't go down too well, for obvious reasons. I think an algorithmic scaling of variety of challenge to reward would be, if not unexploitable, at least less so.

Of course, the cynical TL;DR is NERF AE AND FARM MISSIONS LOL, but I think you're onto something more interesting.

If soloing AVs is the new measure for doing well enough not to be dissatisfied with the state of one's AT, then quite a few ATs are in miserable condition.

It's an odd thought, but Defenders would be a lot handier if they came in pairs. In fact, two half-Defenders would do as well or better together than one whole-Defender does alone. After all, consider the Mastermind, and the amazing all-VEAT teams when they were first made available...

On a personal note, if it comes down to a choice between optimizing a Scrapper up to Tank survivability, or just rolling a Scrapper and a Tank, I just roll a Scrapper and a Tank - because I like rolling alts.

I was under the impression that I was already encouraging the categorization of control as a form of mitigation when comparing controller and defender performance, and in fact I believe this to be the case. I should have been more clear, I suppose.

I do think your observation that when Defenders outdamage Controllers they tend to do so via AoE is interesting. It's another way that the difference in performance solo and on teams increases for Defenders and decreases for Controllers as the two ATs go up in level.

I'm not looking at defender population as a practical problem, though. I think someone has already said it better, but I'll stumble toward it anyway: is extreme support specialist, at the expense of other attributes, a role that many people will ever want to play? If the answer is what I think it might be, then it's quite possible that the Defender AT needs no changes because it is already well suited to a niche that is naturally small.

I really was going to walk away from this thread, but.

The bit where the existence of Ouroboros is used as proof of an implicit blessing of PLing and farming, as if there were no possible other use or rationale for the flashback feature in a game where it's long been extremely rare for anyone to play all the arcs through on a single character?

Priceless. And a perfect example of molding evidence to fit the theory. Which is... I'm grasping for a word here... ah.

Disingenuous.

At some point it'd be interesting to do an exhaustive analysis of how all possible Defender and Controller primary/secondary combos compare. I would but math is hard.

I honestly don't know whether Controllers or Defenders solo faster, on average. I do think it's possible that as they mature, the difference in performance between solo and teamed grows smaller for Controllers and larger for Defenders. Many other ATs become more self-sufficient as they mature, and while Defenders do as well, the widening gap between solo and teamed performance might lead to the perception of bad soloability (regardless of whether this is actual or not).

If you feel good about your current performance, then you don't need to improve it.

"More vulnerable to foolish exploitation attempts than Defiance 1.0" does not strike me as a good thing to aim for.

Thanks, that's a good analysis. The only reason I brought it up was because of J_B's mention of "some kind of scaling damage that increases with enemy rank". -Regen has that effect, more or less. I agree that it doesn't solve any of what I see as the chief Tanker issues, though. And FWIW I still think Tankers are okay as is, for many of the same reasons you do. I'm growing to like the idea that an AT having niche appeal is not a strike against it.

For what it's worth, if -regen were given to Tankers, I'd put it in Taunt, not Gauntlet, have a fairly generous duration, and not stack from same caster. That may be overloading Taunt a bit, though.

I note that these are excellent reasons why one would choose a defender over a controller as a teammate. They're clearly better team support, both by mechanics and by inclination. Unfortunately, the same design decisions that push Defenders firmly into the team support role also make them undesirable to actually play if team support isn't an end you are willing to sacrifice for.

I'm not saying that dedicated team support isn't a niche that some want to fill, and clearly Defenders fill that niche admirably. What I am saying is that low Defender population is a natural consequence of human nature and the design of Defenders. It's not that Defenders have a perception problem in the sense that they are misunderstood; it's that they are accurately perceived as the most altruistic AT. If low Defender population is actually a problem to be solved, and I'm not saying it necessarily is, then greater team support will make the problem worse rather than better.

Freddie Mercury, Mark Spitz, Ernest Shackleton, Ada Lovelace, and Simo Häyhä.

Wait, what was the question?

I hardly think the sweeping changes to all powersets' attributes in PvP zones warrants the claim that /Elec has "gotten weaker" - unless you only ever use your characters to farm in PvP zones...

I don't disagree with any of that (well, except for noting that the difference between 40% and 45% defense is actually rather large, though it also rarely matters in most play), but I'm also not sure how it relates to my point. If Earth/ is more than enough to make up the mitigation gap in FF/ versus /FF, then another, more damaging primary might be just sufficient.

It's also worth noting that until recently, leveraging the superior maximum damage potential of AoE required some extra work when solo, while Earth's pet supplies some pretty good ST DPS. It will be interesting to see how I16's team size increase option affects that - a tough, AoE-centric build such as FF/Dark might become a more attractive soloer for those who know what they're doing. That's more detail-oriented than this level of analysis supports, though.

One last little thought.

There actually exists an effect in game right now, that works out to being the same as increased DPS that scales upward with the rank of the target. It doesn't work out to a lot of damage in day to day work, but it absolutely ensures that you will eventually defeat your target as long as you don't die and don't run out of endurance.

That effect is -regen/-healing.

That may be your experience, but it's certainly not by design. If there is any disparity in the level of team support provided between controllers and defenders that can be attributed to AT-design-encouraged playstyle, it is that controllers are led to believe that their primary is worth using, so they spend time using it and not ther secondary; while defenders are led to believe (not entirely wrongly) that their secondary is useless, and so they focus on applying their primary.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:
- Kin/Son defender (superior damage and force multiplication) vs Fire/Kin controller
- FF/Dark defender (superior mitigation) vs Earth/FF controller
- Rad/Son defender (superior damage and mitigation) vs Fire/Rad controller

And here's a more refined version of the challenge:
For any defender support and blast set pairing, if that support set is available to controllers, then there exists a controller control set to match with that support set whose resulting performance is comparable in at least two of three categories and superior in the remaining.

That is, for any A/B defender, there's a C/A controller with more evenly distributed strengths.

Again, I would be keenly interested in being proven wrong.

I've been chewing on the question of the defender/controller disparity - whether it exists mechanically or just psychologically, what form it takes, etc. I have a theory.

First let me define some terms.
- Mitigation is any effect which reduces or compensates for incoming damage to the team. If it helps the team survive and it's not damage to enemies, it's mitigation.
- Damage is any effect which directly inflicts damage on enemies. If it creates an orange number, it's damage.
- Force multiplication is any effect which increases the rate of outgoing damage from the team. If it makes orange numbers bigger, or makes them come up faster, it's force multiplication.

Now, the theory:

A Defender can be built which exceeds any Controller in any two of mitigation, damage output, and force multiplication. However, that Defender will lag behind its nearest competing Controller in the remaining category.

In other words, no matter what's important to you, you can do it almost as well on a Controller and not have to make the sacrifices you would have to make to be better on a Defender.

I'm not at all sure this is true, though. I'd like to see if the forumgoers could provide some counterexamples.

To be perfectly clear, I am not trolling, I don't have hate for either AT, and I have no dog in this fight. I'm just trying to see if I've laid my finger on anything interesting.