seebs

The only tanks I've got a taunt aura on so far are elec/ (very slight end drain) and dark/ (where I think it's just damage, no other effect). But yeah, that makes sense -- keeping things near the tank is probably good if the tank can take the punches.

I've got a slightly biased view, because I mostly play at low levels, where a lot of players are squishier than they will be later.

I'm more interested in the tactics question than in "validation".

The conclusion I've come to at this point is that both the tank and I were probably wrong. The tank was missing the point about scattering vs. gathering -- the scattering effect wasn't affecting herding, because everything was already herded. However, I was probably over-estimating the utility of the mitigation trops provide. It sounds like people tend to view trops more in terms of controlling movement of mobs than in terms of the mitigation produced by the fear. I was mostly thinking in terms of the mitigation effect, and disregarding the movement as irrelevant; I didn't figure anything would move far enough for it to make any difference. So I was looking at mitigation and maybe a bit of free damage; sounds like I should think more about the effect trops have on where things go, not just whether or not they're attacking.

CoH is the only game where I've seen people refer to spawns as "mobs". I am not sure why it happens here but not elsewhere. I'm guessing it's one of those things where, because you basically kill "a spawn" at a time, people heard the word used and couldn't tell which it referred to, and the obvious English meaning would have been to refer to the group rather than to the individual critters in it.

The latter.

I guess... I could totally accept someone saying that they prefer I don't do trops, and possibly even agree, depending. In this case, I think they were doing more good than harm. On the other hand, when I pointed out that they were a source of mitigation and were only going down AFTER the tank had fully acquired hate, I was told "not a request". Yeah, whatever. I will totally take orders from you when you're paying my $14.95 a month.

I tend to feel that, unless the team is dying as a result of someone's actions, it's pretty much up to them how to play. I once told a fire/dark corruptor I was duoing with that he should maybe use his heal sometimes. He was really enthusiastic when I told him dark miasma was an amazing set and he should start using it. (He had, pretty much, the powers you take if you make it to level 20 and always pick from your primary if you can or else your secondary.) But I just told him that I found most people did it, and it seemed useful. I didn't make a fuss about the next 15 minutes during which he didn't heal me. And hey, by the end of the mission, he even did once, I think because everything else was recharging.

More than one group means going over the aggro cap, which I'd see as a disadvantage, depending on the group.

I guess it's to some extent a tradeoff between speed and reliability, although sometimes the tank off by his lonesome with no support just dies, which is always a sign that it's about to be funny.

I never thought there was a cabal or anything, but I originally thought salvage prices made it impractical to IO characters (I mean even just commons and yellows) without a level 50 to fund it. Seriously! I thought this! It turns out I was laughably wrong.

Yeah, my experience on pugs is normally that the good groups are the groups where people occasionally die, because in XP/hour, even factoring in debt, you're utterly stomping what you get standing around waiting for the tank.

Also... It's FUN to be doing stuff that's a bit hard.

I had a team a while back that had one brute, and one dom, and everything else was blasters and scrappers. We were fast, but not durable. It was fun.

I have a bots/traps too. A friend of mine has a widow. We go steamrolling sometimes; widow turns on toggles, /follows, and we sit around chatting while I wander around the map looking for glowies. At +2/x4 or so. (We're only in the 30s.)

Oh, I was waiting until the group was down. I was putting up with the "don't attack until the tank says to" rule. I would never drop trops while someone was trying to grab a new group, unless I was dropping them under a blaster.

I seem to recall that seeker drones were new enough to me that I didn't quite have the recharge to have them ready every pull.

Level 26, I do have seeker drones, and used them "sometimes".

And yeah, I had to explain to them that traps/ plays from right under the tank, for the most part. I tried to put trops centered on "the most stuff" because that's how I usually use it. (I gained about 5 levels trick-or-treating, where trops-on-door was basically an IWIN button.)

One reason not to use trops is if you picked a set that doesn't have them, though I usually just reroll if that happens.

Okay, so, I've been on a lot of pugs. Usually, how it works is, if we have a tanker, brute, or scrapper (roughly in that order by preference), that toon charges into a new group, and everyone else follows, laying down AoEs and controls and the like. Ten or twenty seconds later, one blaster stays to finish off the last boss who's been triple-held and debuffed into a pile of soft goo, while the tanker runs on to the next group.

I was in a group last night that was... not like this. The tank would run to a location (say, a doorway), and say "Herding to here, stay clear". He'd then run out to a group, hit them, run back, hit them more, and then say "Come get some", and everyone would start attacking. Ten or twenty seconds later, we'd all sit there while he decided what to go after next and the scenario repeated. (There were a couple of other macros involved, like "jumping in, wait for mob to condense").

Now, since I was on a traps/ defender, I thought it was sort of neat having all my long-recharge powers available for every single pull, but I can't help but wonder what's up with this. Does this work? Does it produce better results in some way? Is there some kind of mechanic here I'm not aware of, that makes this desireable?

It felt a little like watching a WoW tank, who might want to get at least one hit on each of several things before other people attacked, but in CoH, other players aren't as ludicrously squishy -- you don't expect a blaster to get one-shotted by any attack from a typical creature you're fighting, for instance. So what, if anything, am I missing?

traps/sonic def.

Tank is elaborately "herding" groups -- runs in, picks them up, runs back around corner, fights for a couple of seconds, then tells us to attack. Whatever. So...

PGT
acid mortar
trops
AoE sonic
try to get a T1 blast off on the one remaining guy who's running away

I am informed: "Don't use caltrops."

WTF? Trops are a big part of the mitigation of traps/. (And yes, they need mitigation, the tank died at least once doing this stuff.) They explain that trops make it harder for the tank to "gather" the mobs.

... Huh? The tank's already gathered them. He's an actual Tanker, per se, so he's got Gauntlet. It would take substantial effort for people to get the mobs off him, all trops does is make them run very slowly away and use their crappy ranged attacks very rarely.

Or am I crazy? Am I totally misunderstanding traps?

I thought hero stats looked at log files -- at least, that was my understanding from the instructions to make sure chat logging was on and so on.

As to source, I'm obviously biased since I work on essentially nothing BUT open source. I am, however, a HUGE fan of the open source model. I wouldn't expect people to try to steal something like this -- but I would expect them to offer code contributions, patches, and the like.

I used to be pretty active in the third-party mod community for another game, which required by policy and by implementation that you get source for all mods. In five years I never once heard of someone trying to "steal" code. For the most part, the only people who can code enough to even try to lift the code would be respectful of it. There's also the point that you can publish code without releasing it as open source.

Anyway, I guess I don't entirely blame them for being concerned about it, but I don't think I'll run anything that needs admin privs, comes from a third party I have no business relationship with, and has no available source. It just seems like a bad precedent for me to set.

Assuming you have only single-target damage, and you are fighting alone, how much damage will you take fighting N minions?

Assume a spherical minion of uniform harm, dealing x damage in the time it takes you to kill it. Clearly, 2 minions will do 3x damage. More generally, if d(1) = x, d(2) = 3x, and so on, then d(N+1) = d(N)+(N+1)x, which is triangle numbers and thus proportional to N^2.

But there's regeneration (which is linear with N, thus irrelevant). And there's AoE.

So... Realistically, in CoH, if fighting a single minion would be expected to drain you of 5% of your health, how many minions can you fight? (And yes, I know this fails miserably for, say, blasters, who can start a fight by quickly killing at least some...)