slythetic

Think he means he wants his scrapper to have taunt aura.

Meaning:

Invulnerability
Willpower...kinda
Shield- Won't work here
Energy Aura
Bio- Maybe?

Something like that. Course it depends on personal taste.

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Agh I feel stupid. Then some more relevant questions for clarity, how married to app/pp is the op? Boosters available and willing to use? Really want Pulse rifle burst? etc. Have merits lieing around or leave out things like lotg/numina/miracle, etc.

Hmm I'm pretty sure this will work for most sets that have one. Look at whatever set you are interested in. Count single target attacks, generally this is the first two blasts. Then look for the next single target, high damage, non snipe. That's the tier 3 blast. Generally they have a shorter range. Some sets elec/ar don't have one.

Kind of depends on how you choose to rank. Fire/Plant/Illusion are certainly tops for damage but if you rank based on control the waters are murkier and fire definitely doesn't deserve to top the list. Earth/electric/dark can all leverage as much or more control than the sets mentioned they just do less damage.

Actually I don't count siren's song/shockwave because they seem to be tools for one thing that happen to have damage rather than tools to deliver damage, ie sleep and knockback. I left off the nuke because you said you did in a previous post and because its crash/cd.

Thanks for clarifying. I never hit consume on my fire tank or fire blaster as a damage tool nor think of it as part of their aoe damage package but maybe you do. Different outlooks.

Edit: I can't help but think that being that general makes the # of aoe kinda pointless though. I mean after all a sonic/energy blaster would have more aoe's than a ss/fire brute but it doesn't even remotely reflect their aoe capabilities

Rather than count them all out myself I thought I'd ask a quick question since you're earlier counts seemed inflated to me. Or if you prefer what you call an aoe attack I wouldn't. So how many aoe's does sonic have? How many does darkness mastery?

To my mind the answer is one and none. But I think you're doing any attack that has any aoe component so 3 and 3.

As far as damage buffs I'm really not getting the point. In a group the kin/assaults/etc make them less relevant. In a small group or single setting the buff isn't significant enough to be up every spawn and burst down an entire spawn before they can react much. To me burst damage doesn't have a whole lot of relevance in pve if it doesn't offer a defense advantage. At least in the sense of blasters.

I think you're missing my point, maybe my example was bad.

Summarized, sometimes a primary and secondary will have more powerful synergy when considering survivability.

So I asked about primary because sometimes primaries gell particularly well with some secondaries in terms of survivability. I used staff talking about willpower for the same reason I'd talk about stone or titan, the primary helps the secondary do its job better. Or on something like dark/sr, the primary compensates for some of the secondaries weakness.

I didn't mean, "willpower chars must play staff!" I meant, "maybe your primary will work a bit better with one or the other so you might want to consider how the two fit together when you choose between them."

This confused me a bit so I hopped on my elec/psi who does not have agility yet and cages is not slotted for end mod.

Even level spawn, field, aura, cages. Total time to zero endurance, about 8 seconds. I of course was taking no damage during this.

Not sure how much faster you want.

I'm not sure popularity proves much regardless. In terms of general mmo's I don't really think the statement that "less people play tanks" or "less people play healers" to be all that much of a concern as it's pretty much universally true and in all cases does not actually reflect poor balancing.

The problem is more a matter that tanks/blasters/defenders fit into the traditional mmo holy trinity fairly firmly. And coh isn't a trinity game. You can succeed on most levels without a tank and/or without support. So the tank isn't as needed. So the tradeoff isn't as needed. Ie most games if I were to pick up a tank toon I'd expect to have to lead a bit and that my damage wouldn't be great but I'd be fulfilling a vital support role for my group. It appeals to some people.

In coh the second half isn't as much there, tanking doesn't feel as useful to your group in coh compared to the dozen or so mmo's I've played. If tanks need a fix though making them brutes isn't it. Erasing further the boundaries between the melee's solve nothing.

Either adjust the content so a tank is more useful.

or Make the tank more tanky. More able to hold aggro, more able to take damage, less weak to debuffs, better able to control mob movement. Those sorts of things.

Or you could of course apply the nerf stick as well. Kneecap brutes and scrappers ability to taunt. Remove taunt auras, remove taunt in brute attacks, etc. Then attack survivability, seperate and lower defense caps, resist caps. Limit buff stacking etc. Or you could buff a tank and start designing content that would lay waste to brutes.

TLDR: Low popularity proves nothing about balance. Tanks and support are traditionally less played in any rpg or mmo you can think of.

Making a tank into a brute is imbalanced on the low end and just homogeneity in general.

The best thing they could do for tanks is make them more tankish and desirable/useful for terms in comparison to their brothers which means more like a tank not more like a brute. It's probably easier to vigorously beat the entire system with the nerf stick to do this though, so I wouldn't expect drastic changes.