Thunderforce

Mmm. I started this because I have the same problem; I know they're out there, but I can never remember which ones I've reported. So, start afresh - when you do see one, report it here.

NPC dialogue can be tricky, as you observe, being reported speech. Clearly the punctuation should always be correct, since people cannot speak punctuation - save for apostrophes indicating speech patterns. Conversely expressions like "gotta" are obviously simply what the NPC is saying.

However, a lot of the time an NPC says "P128912421749" or "'" or something like that. There are some grey areas - perhaps it's intended for Croatoa Tuatha to spout random gibberish - but we'll just have to use our judgement.

Let's have a pleasantly vague mission report, too, while I'm at it.

I can't usefully add CoH contact locations because all contacts for one origin have the same dialogue for arc missions and the like. Only contacts' "Hello, nice to meet you" dialogue is unique to them AFAIK.

Some dodgy NPC dialogue in Croatoa.

Am I really the only unashamed pedant here? Apparently.

Added capitalisation of "Telekinetic blast".

More badge typos, although I think I have all the low-hanging fruit. Sheesh - I'm sure I reported Phalanxer in issue 3, too...

I added the error in the text for the Medic badge; "... healing them for two hundred and 250,000 hit points."

Also added "Disconnecting in 1 seconds."

I wonder how things like the guides index work, then?

If it becomes an issue I'll put the list up on the Web and add a comment when I add additional typos.

Edit: given the possibility I will not be able to edit this post indefinitely, the list will appear at a typos webpage of my own.

Often I encounter typos in the game. While I generally /bug these, often I can't remember if I have /bugged them already. Furthermore it would be useful for people reporting typos to know if someone else has already reported them. Therefore I propose to edit the top-level post here to reflect all typos I encounter from this point forwards, and any other typos people mention in comments. If we are really lucky some enthusiast in QA will fix the whole lot at once. I'll attempt to determine some sort of ordering.

Please report detail. If a mission, what level range and origin (failing that, the contact name) and the mission title; if NPC dialogue, what type of NPC.

If you think this is all too pedantic for words, don't bother telling me.

We'll begin with;
General: Sentences of the form "You have defeated [foo]" lack full stops.
Mission: 15-19 Magic origin: Save Hacker from Tsoo. When the mission is complete the sentence "You have rescued the hacker and retieved the files" appear. This should read "retrieved", and is also missing a full stop.
Mission: 15-19 Magic origin: Take Artifact to [contact]. It is possible for the contact assigned for this story arc mission to be the contact for the arc itself. If you phone them up the resulting message implies they are not self-aware.
NPC Dialogue: NPC unknown, text approximate: "We are unwilling to conceed to your demands." This should read "concede". [In cases like this one exact text and speaker from another typo hunter will be appreciated.]

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I don't have any firsthand experience with tanks in Co*, but let me point out the role of tankers from other mmorpgs : Take aggro, get bashed, die for your team if it's needed.

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Mmm, but one of the interesting things about CoX is that ATs (ie, pseudo-D&D character classes) aren't such rigid straitjackets as the equivalent mechanics are in most MMO*.

(Don't get me wrong - it was a fine mechanic in D&D - it just should not have been cloned unthinkingly. Whoever called single-player computer games with pseudo-D&D mechanics and no roleplaying "RPGs" has a lot to answer for.)

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I mean, when you make a tanker you must think you'll be the one AT that will collect the most debt

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I certainly don't think that. For one thing, you're bound to solo sometimes and you're the AT that gets into trouble the slowest.

Even on teams, the times I've deliberately gone down as a tanker... sure, it happens, but it's nothing on the times I've gotten a bit over my head as a blaster, or discovered once again that enemies don't like being fire controlled (BP Spirits of Pain are my personal nemesis there), or Siphoned stuff out of a boss to save my teammates and had it take me out anyway, or just forgot that scrappers aren't actually immortal (er, maybe that last one is my fault).

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the one that will always have the most work

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Try being an empath on an 8-man PUG in the Hollows. :-)

Furthermore, we tested on crowds of fewer than 5 enemies. No doubt at all, really; pulse the Aura, MISS, my friend (who's watching closely) zaps the minion immediately, it makes a beeline for him and expresses annoyance.

After testing this with a friend I am fairly confident that it is correct that the taunt component of a damaging aura can miss along with the damage.

You're beyond my knowledge there. My energy blaster is en/en, generally restrains her enthusiasm for melee just long enough to let the tanker get stuck in first, and prefers punching people down into the floor with the Bone Smasher. :-)

Actually, while I'm at it - part of my raging altoholism is produced by a desire to see how the other half lives. So, blasters, what powersets are good for producing a blaster who actually does their thing at range?

What I'm saying is more of a theoretical exercise in maximising the amount of green generated by a given expenditure of blue - I don't think it's directly relevant to tanking, since once AoE enemy attacks become commonplace defenders won't often be healing you with PbAoE heals anyway.

I think the only thing really to get from it is that, when teamed with a Kineticist, all the melee types should stay close together. But that's not really remarkable.

... The other thing about Kinetics is that letting the occasional unaggroed minion leak towards the squishies isn't an altogether awful thing.

Incidentally, I think the assertion I made that it's best to have damage filtered through a tanker's defence or S/L resistance is not true without loss of generality.

Manifestly the effectiveness of (Pb)AoE heals scales with the number of damaged targets affected and as such, ideally, you might prefer a situation where people close to the AoE effect are taking modest amounts of damage and the tanker is taking the rest. This would be especially true with Kinetics/Transfusion, which can be easily dropped into a dangerous melee without endangering the defender, and with defender sets which have only AoE heals.

Of course in practice you can't fine-tune aggro like that and will prefer the tanker to taunt everything if possible, especially as in practice the other team members will manage to find themselves some aggro no matter what the tanker does.

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All my testing and experience so far suggests so.

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What _is_ your testing, so far?

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The difficulty in testing is that you want a situation where a significant number of enemies are present in melee range, but have a low chance of being hit,

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Easier than that. Group of greys in Atlas. Pulse the Blazing Aura once. Everyone hit by the damage component falls over. Your friend immediately does select-nearest-target and boinks them with Power Thrust or Force Bolt or some other minimal-damage attack (or the friend is much lower level). See if they go after the friend or not. Should work, no? Even without Taunt enhancers in the Aura, the duration will still be respectable on a -lots minion...

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Importantly - after the Taunt expires, all the additional aggro it generated vanishes completely. I was making the point that damaging auras definitely aren't better in holding aggro in a team situation, since they miss in ways that non-damaging auras do not,

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Up until here you haven't said anything too contentious, but is this, specifically, true?

Of course the damage component of Blazing Aura can miss, and the other damaging taunt auras either can or will be able to miss. But can the Taunt component miss? If not, Blazing Aura's marginally better than Invincibility; the enemy gets Taunted either way, and if by some chance no-one else has hit them when the Taunt wears off, they've still been damaged by the tanker.

Perhaps there is some obvious reason to know it works one way or the other which I am unaware of. However, if not, I ought to be able to carry out some testing.

Primary amongst them Dark and Rad, especially with nice teammates who will refrain from killing the anchors (although that's a bit of a lost cause with Darkest Night and a Tar Patch down).

Mind you, when I'm out fire controlling on a big team, I quite like a taunting tanker along; what generally happens is I lockdown a chunk of a massive spawn, the rest of the team plough into the guys who aren't locked down (which is fair enough, those guys present an immediate threat and are generally moving closer), the lockdown wears off, and every surviving mob tries to beat the snot out of the one person on the team who doesn't even have the two FF bubbles around them. With a tanker along I'm not so often hitting PFF in that situation.

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fire/fire is only build realy that can get away with no taunt.
with taunt in fire arura.

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Any primary has a taunt aura, it's not only Fire.

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My perception (having played both kinds) is that the damaging taunt auras are more effective because, well, mobs don't like taking damage. Not that I would care to do without Taunt on a fire tanker, but someone who thinks the only possible fire build is fire/fire may see it differently.

I think you'd have to agree that a powerset that works less well on tougher enemies is rather suboptimal.

[Incidentally, I think your signature is precisely about-face. The problem with Defence is the concept; "clone D&D mechanics". It was never, under any circumstances, going to work with that concept.]

And areavoke powers and taunt to get aggro, and higher resistances than scrappers (and trivially than blasters, controllers, and defenders) - not merely because, say, Invul powers do more on a tanker, but because they unlock their defensive set earlier than a scrapper and they are more free to concentrate on it both in power selection, slotting (the effect of which is small but non-zero with DOs) and in where their endurance is spent. Don't neglect these things just to give us the usual stuck-record.

Very simply; the base 30% S/L of Temporary Invulnerability doesn't seem like a lot if you're used to i3 silly tankers, but if you are an empath (I choose empaths here because they more directly turn blue into green than any other defender AT, especially in the early levels) would you rather the damage you are healing was filtered through it or not?

It's a bit dismal for Ice tankers at the moment but we are finally getting a Defence system that should improve matters - and, to be fair, the conceptual failing that gave us the defective psuedo-D&D mechanics is so deeply rooted in the MMO* industry that it was almost inevitable CoH would get it wrong.

I still say you can start Taunting and tanking any time, _provided_ you have a defender who can give special attention to you; an empath, a kineticist who can drop Transfusion by you, etc. The team's got to take those attacks anyway; if they are filtered past your defense and/or resistance, that's less total damage taken, albeit concentrated in one place, and it's taken on a longer health bar that heals quicker.

[That's why this doesn't work well with a defender who can't concentrate on you, like FF; yes, you drawing aggro means less damage overall, but an FF defender can't do anything extra for you once you're bubbled.]

My fire tanker was never not "nerfed"; she started after the AoE changes, the taunt cap, the defence changes - and she's never had SOs in a non-ED world. Took the areavoke as soon as possible (which is right away, for those who don't have fire tankers); switched targets in a fight and bounced around with Combat Jumping to get everyone good and annoyed with me, etc. Sure, I got planted every now and then, but everyone gets planted now and then on random Hollows PUGs...

Conversely before all these changes I had my Invul tanker - with DOs - knee deep in a mob of 30 red and purple Tsoo. They could not wear her down fast enough that Dull Pain couldn't keep her up. That's tanking as it was and frankly it was absurd.

Doubled tanker primaries are nothing on doubled defender primaries. Empathy + FF, anyone?

From Invulnerability I count Temporary Invulnerability, Unyielding, Invincibility as the vital three. No different to fire; S/L, mez and stuff, and areavoke [1]. What are the other two?

[Edit; and, err, Dull Pain or equivalent. Ahem. But what's the other one?]

I think it's a big mistake for Invul tankers to take RPD at level 1 - and at every other subsequent power selection choice up until the mid-twenties, you have a better power available. Even an attack can be a better defensive power than RPD's paltry value; if you defeat an enemy, that's 100% resistance against its damage.

I would taunt in the described situation, SOs, DOs, or unslotted powers. If I'm worried about my ability to take the damage, it's always going to be worse for the poor squishy - and worse for any healing we have around if the damage isn't filtering through whatever res/def I do have.

[1] *Please* resist the urge to tell me that Invincibility gives defence, etc...

I certainly don't want to be interpreted as saying it makes a _lot_ of difference. Obviously it doesn't; if it made as much difference as - say - the introduction of mouselook into FPSes, keyboard power activation would be universal.

[Substantively edited; missed a point]

I hate to oppose Bridger being the voice of reason, etc, but frankly there is a right and a wrong here, and the people who've read a little HCI research are right and the other people are wrong. Their opinions are not equally valid because they are not supported by empirical research.

For certain types of task a keyboard is the more efficient device and CoX power selection is such a task. Yes, generally, animation time means this is not a twitch game; nevertheless the less time you spend selecting powers the more time you can spend watching the team display, your own health and endurance, what's actually going on, etc.

Of course for some other types of task the mouse is the most efficient device - for example, pointing tasks of the type seen in first person shooters, which is why mouselook took over immediately there. Indeed, there are some "picking a villain out" situations in CoX where I reach for the mouse for the same reason.

Doulos; I'm sure you're effective. You've been playing a while, and - having an alt-sister in the Rangers - I know you understand the tactics of the game very well. I hope no-one is saying that a clicker can't be effective through a solid understanding of the tactics of the game; just that, by switching to a well-considered keyboard layout, you will save some time and as such improve your play.

It's fairly clear from HCI research that needless mouse operations are very slow compared to the keyboard. I know this is going to start the whole drama cycle again but meh, the facts are the facts. If you can compensate and keep up by clicking powers, good for you, but it's an inherently slower control method and you'd spend less time operating the controls if you used the keyboard - and be a better player, no matter how well you do at the moment.

This effect is masked to a degree in CoX by the default keyboard layout being clumsy; powers and movement are both on the left hand, power 0 is a long walk from WASD, and teammate selection is slow.

I use a set that overcomes these deficiencies - by no means the only possible such set. Movement on WASDQE, with Q and E handling left and right sidesteps (bit of a cycle of reincarnation here, this being the keyboard pattern for mouseless Doom); teammates on 1-8, insp on function keys. Powers go on the numberpad, which the right hand can cover very effectively, with Alt and Ctrl used for additional power trays. Nearest and cycle enemies on numpad + - /, for easy selection of the next victim. It's very quick and I don't ordinarily touch the mouse at all.