srmalloy

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So...

...you're pretty much forced to join Arachnos if you want an epic power pool, even if it doesn't make sense for your character.
...you're somehow locked into it even if you respec.
...all we get out of this in terms of facts is that you talk to an Arbiter to start.

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...and if you pick Burke as your first contact, Kalinda will tell you that you're "not one of hers" if you try to talk to her, implying that you're not considered one of the "Destined Ones", but apparently get shoehorned into Arachnos anyway...

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In the lobby of the watchtower in Grandville is a statue of each of Lord Recluse's lieutenants. At the base of this statue is a plaque that, when you click on, brings up a text box with tabs. The tabs are for the Archetype, and it goes into detail about the powers (including the hard numbers) that that Patron will give that Archetype. (Thus you can easily look at all the patron powers for your AT, and even those not for your AT).

You are given a mission to visit each of these plaques before you choose your patron.

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There was some talk about a set of 'epic pools' for players who chose not to ally themselves with a patron; has this gone by the wayside, or is there going to be a set of pools for the 'unaligned' villains?

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Did you know...

That the "Kill Skuls" badge is not misspelled, and is based on a joke here from the forums?

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That it was actually some yahoo in Perez Park who sat in a corner of the zone, inviting people to team, then sending them out with the instruction "Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.", which became a joke in the forums after someone described the situation?

Did you know...

That the 5th Column spawns in Brickstown used to be exclusively Vampyrs and Wolves?

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...after this PLing opportunity went away, people found a "glowie mission" that gave XP to every team member regardless of whether they were in the mission at the time or not? This led to Phase Shifters of any levels to be in high demand. I believe the XP was about 500/per glowie, regardless of level.

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It also worked if the team members weren't even in the same zone, and handed out level-adjusted XP, even if the team member was too low-level to get XP normally in the mission. This allowed level 1 heroes in AP to be part of high-level teams and get tens of thousands of XP in an hour or two, slamming them up through levels.

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Finder + Anathema Gladiator ( M ): This is the badge for 100 Lost Bosses. Rather easy, as mission will get half your bar. When you get higher in level, Nerva's docs are the best way to farm these guys.

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They also spawn in the dock area on the south side of Port Oakes east of the ferry to Mercy, where you can also find the occasional Damned (and where I've found one Bone Daddy), which you can cover while you make the loop around Port Oakes for Marcone Capos.

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Banisher : 200 BP Masks.... Ah, but there is no BP in CoV. Or is there? Well, the only known spot for masks is in Nerva, by the Longbow Base Island. You will find some longbows on the beach fighting various vilains (freaks, DEs, Riktis). Sometimes, you will see a Mask. I have killed a big total of 5 so far, woo-hoo-hoo! If i ever kill 200, i'll let you know.

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You can also find BP Masks at night in the southeastern section of the Potter's Field area of Sharkhead Isle. The spawn frequency appears to be a bit better than doing the loop around the buildings in the southeast corner of Talos Island, but again, taking a big team increases the spawns you get.

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heh so dmg/rng works in melee attacks and increases the range? i'll have to try that out . ..

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I don't believe it will work in normal melee attacks, since they have range=0, and 0 x anything is still 0.

It used to work in Shadow Maul, because it had a small range component (like 5 feet or something) on it, where even though range enhancers were not allowed, adding dmg/rng increased that component. I don't know if they have fixed that or not.

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Melee attacks do have a range, albeit a short one, in order to allow a small amount of 'slop' in placing your character in melee range; this was most egregiously noticeable before Whirlwind was fixed so that it didn't debuff range on melee attacks -- before this was fixed, in order for Tankers and Scrappers to attack Tsoo Sorcerors once they put up Whirlwind, you almost had to climb on top of them to be in range; you had to move in to be physically touching them before your melee attacks would be in range. Three Dmg/Rng HOs would boost the melee range out to double its value, which wouldn't get you outside of the effect area of a Whirlwind or other PBAoE power.

Now, a Dmg/Rng HO is useful for a small number of Tanker and Scrapper attacks that are melee cone effects, such as the Katana level-32 power Golden Dragonfly, which is a small cone area; three Dmg/Rng HOs would increase the cone area significantly, making it easier to hit multiple opponents.

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Are we talking about PvP here or did you just try and solo Requiem at level 10?

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Actually it doesn't matter. Barring the situation of tackling stuff that is way beyond your level, getting one-shotted by anything is equivalent to the game randomly deciding it is time for you to die. Even getting 95% swatted isn't fun, since usually that other 5% has already been queued by another critter before you know what happened. And not being afforded an opportunity at all to respond isn't challenging in the sense that an adventure game is fun to play, it is challenging in the sense that draws people to Roulette or slot-machines.

So it really doesn't matter if what one-swatted you was a stalker, AV, nasty boss, or even a lucky minion. It sucks regardless of how it happens. Relying on random insta-death (from the dieing player's perspective) isn't challenging, it is a design crutch. It might have been fun back in the SNES days but this isn't Super Mario.

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Well said.

PVP requires no skill now if all a person has to do is make sure their victim has no perception powers/defense and one shot them. This becomes even easier when your victim is preoccupied with another opponent.

I dont mind getting 2 shotted. 2 shotted means I have a reasonable chance to heal, escape, retailiate. And I dont wanna be forced to play a more hearty, boring AT just bc there is a few ATs out there than have this 1 shotting advantage. Thats why I refuse to play blasters/stalkers. Hitting the "I win button" is pathetic. It requires no thought.

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And so we see what PvP almost instantly descended into -- the ATs with the massive alpha strikes lining up to one-shot the ATs that are vulnerable to their alpha strikes, who in turn hide from the ATs that can survive their alpha strike and the subsequent damage long enough to beat them into the ground, and avoid the ATs that can keep them from getting in to deliver their alpha strike. Stratification based on HP and defenses.

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Just wanted to say that the AV at the end of Renault's SF is a 2-part guy. The first is a Coralax Priesnt named ::bleh:: can't remember. The 2nd, and most obscene thing I have ever faced is the Eye of Leviathan. It's impossible to beat, worse than Hamidon. Going to write a guid about the SF in general tomorrow I think. If anyone has beaten that damn Eye, PLEASE tell me how you did it.

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Did it this evening... Started the SF with four villains -- Inv/SS Brute (40 auto-malefactored), Merc/Dark MM (33, auto-malefactored), my Robot/Dark MM (33, auto-malefactored), and an Ice/Ice Corruptor (24, lackeyed to the Brute). A couple of missions in, the Corruptor had to leave, so we finished the SF as a team of 3. Having gotten shafted on this SF by Calystyx before, we went straight for him and pulled him back into the tunnel where we could lock him down; took two tries, but he crashed and took the damn coral sentinels with him. Taking the eye was just tedious; I tried throwing my robots at it (figuring I could always summon more) to see where its line of fire was. We finally wound up planted on the ledge at the back of the eye, with the Brute pounding on the eye, both MMs spamming heals to debuff the eye and keep the Brute healed, while our henchmen shot the Coralax away from us. I went down with the eye about 2000 HP, the other MM went down at around 1500, but I was right next to the Brute, so I could feed several damage and CaB inspirations to him, which kept him pounding long enough to pop the eye, completing the mission and the SF.

Because we were all malefactored down, we didn't get any SF bonus, and due to the SFs still being bugged, no badges, although I did get this coral cone attack temporary power that's good for three days. Whee.

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This reminds me of the dual wield vs two-hander debates in EQ, it aint the averages that will kill you, it's the streaks

As you also said though, getting a mix is the best approach. That's what made Regens so uber in the early days. It wasn't the base amount of regen that was whacked, it was the way the Def + Res pool powers acted to magnify the effect.

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After making a spreadsheet to look at the relative balance of raw Regeneration, Defense, and Resistance, and how adding Defense and Resistance to Regeneration affected the survival of a Regen Scrapper, it became clear to me that the mechanics of defensive powers really needed a rework to make them comparable to each other.

Resistance is the base effect; if you have a Resistance of X%, then for every attack that hits you, you take (100-X)% of the damage.

Defense, instead of being a modifier to the attacker's chance to hit, should be a separate chance to avoid an attack; if you have a Defense of X%, then for every attack that hits you, you have an X% chance to dodge the attack and take no damage.

Regeneration, specifically Instant Healing, instead of being a 'heal fast' ability, makes each attack work similarly to Spectral Wounds; if you have an Instant Healing of X%, then for every attack that hits you, a short time (a second or two) later, you 'instantly' heal X% of the damage from that attack.

With these changes, the defensive abilities will, over time, average out to the same results -- X% of the defensive ability means that you average avoiding X% of the incoming damage. The increased healing rate of the other powers in the Regeneration secondary would need to be toned down, and probably something like making any increased healing from Integration not work while Instant Healing is active. Regeneration gets a bit of the short end of the stick by having to take all the damage before IH could regenerate it, so having an increased healing rate from other powers in the powerset -- but not to anywhere near the Integration rate while IH is running -- would balance it, although the numbers would have to be tweaked some.

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the reason for more influence in coh is that you get them for helping the civilains on the street. Cov does not have that perk.

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Are you sure? I could have swore that I saw myself getting infamy just by killing on the street... I could be wrong, but I could have swore that I saw it, even just last night in port oaks...

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With the newspaper/broker system to ensure a transfinite number of available missions, the devs were able to reduce the number of random street mobs in the Rogue Isles, so you don't have a cluster of 2-5 mobs every half-block the way you do in CoH, so going out and street sweeping isn't as attractive.

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I think you are all spoiled with being financed by your SG or alts in CoH. Prices are the same as is the drop rate and mission rewards.

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I haven't checked the prices in CoH recently, but I remember that Heal and Damage enhancements were the priciest in CoH; in CoV, Accuracy enhancements are more expensive than either Heal or Damage enhancements. Do a comparison; you'll likely find other differences.

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With Enhancement Diversification comes a benefit for ALL City of Heroes powers.

Every power, across the board, is getting a 13.33% reduction in its Endurance cost.

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And this provides a benefit to powers like Temperature Protection, Resist Elements, Resist Energies, Permafrost, Stone Skin, the entire Fitness pool, Resilience, Agile, Lucky, Dodge, Hibernate, and Body Armor how?

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I dont think this is being done on purpose, only that the game is really a big beta and should not have gone live until they worked out what this game was going to be.

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That isn't entirely fair. Even with a long beta-test schedule -- the kind of thing that most game developers can't afford before they start getting some return on the unrelenting outlay that is game development. Having characters artificially bumped in level to determine how the upper levels play isn't going to give you the same results that having hundreds of people level characters up to the high levels during play, so you're not going to get the same gameplay that you will after the game goes live. However, from the continued poking at the powers with each major update, repeated statements that powerset X was "right where they wanted it" followed by significant rework in the next major update, it's clear that they weren't doing or hadn't done the kind of prospective analysis that would have showed them that some of their design decisions were flawed.

For example, Regen took whacks every single major update, culminating with I5, where what had been the defining power of the powerset was changed from a toggle to a click with a rudely-large recovery time, apparently because it was 'too good'. With about an hour of work, I built an Excel spreadsheet (needs the Analysis toolpack installed in Excel to work) that took a stochastic look at the effectiveness of Defense-, Resistance-, and Regen- based characters, and the results of combining the different types of protection; it quickly becomes obvious that Regeneration can easily be the most poorly-performing secondary -- until you add the Defense from Weave and the Resistance from Tough -- Weave alone will make a Regen Scrapper outperform Defense- or Resistance-based protections, but both will make them much harder to take down. The devs' answer to the problem, as we've seen, was to massively carve back Regen's healing rate, with Instant Healing available only situationally. The reason for this was that it was 'never intended' that IH be used continuously, despite the fact that, for more than half of the time CoH had been live, IH was the only power in the Regeneration set that actually gave a Regen Scrapper a regeneration rate high enough to be useful in combat. I saw the '4 Heal / 2 End Redux' IH slotting recommendation to allow it to be kept up continuously appear on the forums within a month after CoH went live -- but a year and a half later, after several kicks to Regen, the last of which spread IH's regeneration boost out between Integration and Instant Healing, the devs come out of the blue with the claim that we should never have been keeping it running all the time.

Now, I'll concede that just looking at single dimensions of a power can't tell you whether the power is balanced; the spreadsheet I created only looks at a comparison between Defense, Resistance and Regeneration (and combinations thereof) to see how the three protective categories compared against each other. But from the changes that have been appllied with the major updates, particularly Issue 5, it seems clear that the devs didn't have a good enough understanding of how the powersets would work in play over the full level range to be able to do a proper job of balancing the powers, particularly in PvP play, so when PvP was finally introduced, it quickly became clear that major changes had to be made to establish even a gross parity among the ATs. And that's the fundamental problem with I5 -- that it made so many sweeping changes all at once. Combined with the many pale "never intended" excuses for some of the power changes, it left an extremely bad taste in the mouths of many of the longtime players because of the changes to their playstyles -- in some cases, completely gutting their character design, or making the game no longer fun. I think, though, that if everybody who had been playing CoH prior to I5 had started playing after I5 went live, we wouldn't see the complaints and mudslinging; without a year and a half prior experience with how the various powers worked, we would have simply accepted that this was the way they worked, even if some of the powers seemed a little poorly-designed. It was playing for a year and a half, then having the title screen jacked up and a new game shoved underneath that's created the problem, and unfortunately for the easy acceptance of the changes, it's too easy to look at the changes and see them as having been driven by PvP, either in the arena or linked to CoV; whether that's right or wrong, it's people's perception of the issue that fuels the flames.

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As for changing the way defense works...eek. That's not really an option. There's simply too many things that would break...It's just not do-able.

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I agree that it would be a flag day, but moving defense out from being a modifier to a mob's attack percentage to being a separate 'roll' to avoid an attack, to my mind, makes for a more elegant mechanic that would be easier to balance against resistance... but you've probably got enough patches and special-case code slapped onto the existing algorithms that ripping it out and putting in a complete replacement would be more work than just slapping down another special-case exception for the next problem would be... but eventually, the accumulation of patches will exceed the effort it would have taken to replace it all, so it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis -- and the bean counters always win.

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Ok, on topic. Here's what I love about I-5:

When I do team, still a rarity as I hate waiting on people, no longer do I have to wait for the tank to herd.

I love that. Mob to mob action makes the game more fun. If tanks don't feel like this gives them enough time to grab the mob's agro, tough, work harder.

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Back before I5, when I would team with my Fire/Ice Tanker, the 'wait for herding' would consist of enough time to grab a spawn's attention, with a possible taunt to a second spawn if it was close enough that we could expect the firefight to spread to it before all of the first group went down (i.e., knockback). It wasn't worth trying to herd more than that, because the inevitable 'splash' of mobs once the zapgunners started shooting would spread targets out too far to keep control of them -- and because asking 3/4 of a team to stand around while I herded up a map was boring, both for me and for them.

Now, it looks as if I'm going to have to respec her into Hasten just to bring her offense back up to where soloing her isn't an exercise in tedium waiting for recharge...

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So...you're basing it on how many dots a server has? That's server performance, not population. If you want population, go in-game, hit team, find member, then search and look at the number at the bottom.

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Okay, then, we'll do it by numbers. Last night, on Pinnacle, while I was playing, the population of Founder's Falls varied from six to eighteen while I was in that zone, the population of Croatoa varied from seven to twelve while I was in that zone, and the population of Talos Island varied from fourteen to twenty-five while I was in that zone. I was playing from about 1600 PDT to about 2100 PDT, taking two hours out on an alt to help school Hamidon again. An any-map search I did at about 1800 PDT returned a total of 624 unhidden heroes. I remember, prior to I5, regularly seeing in excess of 50 people each in TI and FF when I would be playing Sunday evenings.

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See, they did that once last January. Not even the minions, just the lieutenants and bosses.

Don't you remember the incredible outcry? The screaming was so loud that they rolled back the changes in two weeks.

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IIRC, the problem was that they boosted the boss HP and attack percentage without paying attention to the game mechanics they'd created. Because the damage that a mob does was dependent on their base HP, increasing the boss HP also increased the damage they did -- so the 'boss buff' not only made them significantly harder to take down, but made them hit significantly harder, too, doubling the effect of the change, which they hadn't actually intended. So, rather than rewrite the whole mob-damage computation, they rolled back the changes while they looked for other fixes.

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"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers


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Wow, do you actually have a copy of that book? Mine went where the woodbine twineth a long time ago....

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You can get copies, hard- or soft-bound ($98 hard, $88 soft) as print-to-order copies from microfilm of an original copy on non-acid paper; go to AbeBooks and put in the book title and author's last name, or use this link to go directly to the search results.

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If you can call replacing old imbalances with new ones corrections, then sure, I agree with you. Unfortunately the new problems are just as bad as the old ones. Tanks are now superfluous, for example. Suppression makes travel powers just as imbalanced as they were before, just in different ways, and without fixing the alleged problems it was supposed to fix.

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The changes in I5 remind me of a statement from a now-ancient computer text, which I have moved into my signature block:

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I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of this proposed change, but I think that it misses the primary problem with Defense-based sets (in PvP at least): the overpowering nature of toHit buffs. With a single click, an unslotted Aim, a moderately slotted Build Up, or a heavily slotted Focused Accuracy/Targeting Drone negates an entire Defense-based line, even fully 6-slotted.

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Understood; we're still working on this.

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It seems to me that having Defense work by directly subtracting from an attacker's chance to hit is an inherently unbalanced approach, and that the defensive mechanics could be regularized by breaking Defense out into its own segment of the attack process. Right now, as I understand it, the process works like this:

<ul type="square">[*]The attacker has a base chance to hit; this is modified by the level of the target and any accuracy modifiers from the power being used, inspirations, buffs, and debuffs.[*]If the target has any Defense from powers or inspirations, this directly reduces the attacker's chance to hit. The Defense value may be capped according to the target's AT; if the modified Defense exceeds the cap, the cap value is used instead of the modified Defense.[*]If the resultant chance to hit is lower than 5% or higher than 95%, it is capped to these values.[*]A random number is generated; if it is lower than the attacker's modified hit percentage, then they hit, and damage must be assessed; otherwise, attack resolution stops here.[*]The attacker has a base damage for the attack, modified by level, inspirations, buffs, and debuffs.[*]If the resultant damage exceeds the damage cap for the attack, the damage is capped to that value.[*]If the target has a Resistance to that attack type, the damage is reduced by the Resistance percentage. The Resistance value may be capped according to the target's AT; if the modified Resistance exceeds the cap, the cap value is used instead of the modified Resistance.[*]The remaining damage is applied to the target.[/list]
If the target's Defense is broken out separately, it would change the attack resolution to:

<ul type="square">[*]The attacker has a base chance to hit; this is modified by the level of the target and any accuracy modifiers from the power being used, inspirations, buffs, and debuffs.[*]If the resultant chance to hit is lower than 5% or higher than 95%, it is capped to these values.[*]A random number is generated; if it is lower than the attacker's modified hit percentage, then they hit, and damage must be assessed; otherwise, attack resolution stops here.[*]Determine the target's Defense from powers and inspirations; if this percentage is higher than the AT-specific cap, the cap value is used instead.[*]A random number is generated; if it is lower than the target's modified Defense, the attack misses, and attack resolution stops here; otherwise, continue.[*]The attacker has a base damage for the attack, modified by level, inspirations, buffs, and debuffs.[*]If the resultant damage exceeds the damage cap for the attack, the damage is capped to that value.[*]If the target has a Resistance to that attack type, the damage is reduced by the Resistance percentage. The Resistance value may be capped according to the target's AT; if the modified Resistance exceeds the cap, the cap value is used instead of the modified Resistance.[*]The remaining damage is applied to the target.[/list]
This would have to change the values for Defense powers, since the effect of a given percentage of Defense is to directly make that percentage of attacks miss, rather than decreasing the attacker's chance of making a successful attack. However, it has the advantage that a 75% Defense and a 75% Resistance are, over the long run, equivalent -- either will prevent 3/4 of the incoming potential damage from being taken by a hero, while still keeping the distinction that a Resistance-based hero has to be ground down over many hits, but a Defense-based hero can go down to one or two lucky shots. This long-term equivalence allows Defense and Resistance to be balanced against each other more easily. It also means that Accuracy increases don't wipe out the protection of a Defense-based hero; all Aim, Targeting Drone, and Accuracy inspirations do is make it more likely that the target's Defense will have to be invoked; the Defense value won't change, and will still provide the same percentage of protection.

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Thanks States. Issue 5 has not been the doomsday that many said it would be and for that I'm thankful.



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You have to be kidding. Paragon is now a ghost town. My friends list is permantly gray.

Sorry but my Tank still hates I5. The Devs had well over a year to make the tanks "work as intended" and these new changes just seem pulled out of their butts. A few inspirations are not going to cut it. Many of us still feel betrayed.

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My Regen Scrapper feels like he's out of range of his Mentor... all the time. After some testing, I still haven't figured out if there's a way to respec him that won't destroy the feel of the character; I'm afraid that I'm going to have to turn him into Clickmaster to be able to keep playing him at all, and that breaks the character concept I built him to. But every Regen Scrapper took Tough, Weave, perma-Dull Pain, and Reconstruction, so Instant Healing had to be nerfed into the ground, because after 18 months of play, you just then noticed that some people were slotting it so they could run it all the time?

It would be different on a team, but for my Fire/Rad Controller, it's just slower. Power Boost, Cinders, let the imps run in and go to town while I slap down EF and RI, back off somewhere quiet while I wait for Cinders to come up. EMP is too dangerous to use without incredibly careful scoping out of the area, because if there are two spawns in the AoE, you're not going to catch all of them, and the mobs in the other spawn that don't get locked down are going to come rip you a new one -- and three pets aren't enough to cover your rear.

I'm still trying to figure out how to rebuild my Fire Tankers; I think I'm just going to scrap the Fire/Energy Tanker -- with the additional Fear in Burn, the mobs don't hang around to get whaled on, and without Burn, what's the point of having a Fire primary? With my Ice Tanker, I think I can partially recover her by dropping her six-slotted nerfed Weave to take Hasten and six-slot it, getting the recharge on Burn back to something worth keeping. At that point, it might be worth dropping the whole Fighting pool; that would let me take Ice Sword back, and maybe take the Leadership pool, or just take Super Speed. Doesn't much matter, since taking Hasten in the first place breaks what I was trying to do with the character -- make it all the way to 50 without taking Hasten.

My Blasters? Except for my AR/En Blaster (for whom Full Auto has become much more of a crapshoot than it was, with four Dmg/Rng HOs expanding the cone area, but the maximum-target count remaining the same -- ignoring the recharge time nerf), I really haven't noticed much of a change; if I get into a situation where Defiance comes into play, I'm already pretty heavily boned, and the extra damage isn't going to help much. I did notice, with my 32 Elec/En Blaster on a mission in Croatoa tonight, that it had been a long, long time since I'd been able to do a mission and come out of it with a full rack of SOs.

All in all, I'm not impressed with I5. Taken together, I3, I4, and I5 have driven away my SG; I haven't seen the last of them on since before I5 went live, and most of them left months ago; even the ones that took advantage of the free-play period over Labor Day weekend didn't see anything that would bring them back. I intend to hang around a little longer, to see if things are going to get adjusted on the basis of datamining I5 on the live servers, but Statesman's vision of 'fun' doesn't match up with the fun I was having... and am not having any more. Maybe part of it is having pushed eight characters to 30 or higher, and three to 50 -- aside from seeing how the maps have been redecorated, the missions are the same, you're fighting the same opponents, and there's only so many times you can defeat the prototype Fake Nemesis suit before it becomes dull. There's only so much you can do without doing a major rebuild of the game world, I know, and I doubt that there's development budget for that. I think I'd be a lot happier about going through the same contacts over and over again if each contact with a story arc didn't give out the same arc each time -- make up a bunch of different story arcs for each contact, and which one you get from that contact gets picked randomly, so that the next character you play through that contact would get a different story arc.

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To some up what I think of the burn changes - terrible
For 1 power to be nerfed 3 times (fear added, damage lowered, recharge increased) makes it completly useless, The sole benefit to being a fire tank has been removed, with no benefit added to compensate for it.

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Just a nit here -- four times, not three. The increased fear factor, the damage reduction, the recharge time increase, and the AoE target-count limit.

In some experiments I did in Boomtown (where I could Taunt groups together readily and have them drop quickly) prior to I5 going live, my Fire/Ice tank could get between 20 and 23 mobs in the effect area of a Burn patch without taking advantage of the stacking bug; the variation is due to observation limits -- in that target-count range, the mobs start to jump in to get closer if you don't have a perfect ring of mobs around you, and it's hard to get yourself centered in the pack properly. The Council helps with that, though; Council minions seem to be more willing to run around to the other side of you to get closer (instead of jumping closer) much more than other groups' mobs do. So under ideal conditions, you could, without exploiting the stacking bug, get twice as many mobs in your Burn patch as the AoE target limit will let you affect now.

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Here's the part that is ridiculous: by the time the Tanker says "ready!", everything but bosses is already dead.

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Well, either you're fighting against -10 mobs or he's saying "ready" a while after using Burn. Burn doesn't kill even mobs that quickly much less +1 mobs. +2 mobs and up don't go down with 1 Burn patch. Actually, I assume you're talking about a Fire/Fire Tanker here. Ask him not to herd or find another team. You won't have to worry about this in I5 anyway with just the AoE restrictions alone.

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Or lieutenants and up. My Fire/Ice Tanker could more-or-less reliably defeat yellow minions with a single Burn patch and the damage from Blazing Aura, depending on the color of her enhancements, and assuming that the minions were in the Burn patch when she dropped it and had at least one tick of the Blazing Aura PBAoE damage against them when the Burn patch dropped, but any lieutenant or boss, or anything higher than +1, required "encouragement" to go down quickly; in situations where she had more than one lieutenant in the Burn patch, it was entertaining to see if there was a single definitive pattern to which of her attacks (Greater Ice Sword, Boxing, and Frozen Fists) needed to be used in which order against which targets to get them to fall at the same time.

From my experience teaming, too, I can understand why the Tanker would want to hold off on calling 'Ready' until they've gotten their herd (whatever size) 3/4 dead -- what I usually experienced when my Fire/Ice Tanker was on a team would be that she'd grab aggro, wait for them to cluster around her, drop an Ice Patch to hold them there, call 'Ready' as she dropped her Burn patch... and then swear vilely and start running around trying to collect the mobs as virtually the entire group gets knocked out of both the Burn and Ice Patch areas -- assuming the rest of the team waited long enough for me to collect aggro first. Running after the boss the Blaster aggro'd because he couldn't wait to shoot, swearing as you watch Taunt recharging, having used it to finish getting the attention of the minions and lieutenants, hoping it will come up before the boss reaches the stupid Blaster, gets annoying the third or fourth time. And, yes, I know that symptoms like that mean I've had sucky teammates. You can't expect to get tactical wizards in pick-up teams, and most of my SG has given up on CoH already and moved on, most of them to Lineage II. On teams, I found that I got more mileage out of Burn and Ice Patch as area-denial powers than as attack powers; it was easier to lay an Ice Patch and an overlapping Burn patch in front of the group to make mobs stop and bunch up, giving the rest of the team time enough to lay down enough hurt to drop the incoming mobs. And while the change to Burn leaves it mostly useable for that purpose, it's become significantly lame for soloing; I'm looking at respeccing out Weave for Hasten to get the recharge rate for Burn back to something close to what it was.

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ive made a rant under the tank section of the board, so im going to go simple and lite here....
it seems wether purposefully or not, theyve changed the feel of the game from a super heroes (marvel dc) type of game, to a survival game.
too much has changed at once instead of little tweaks here and there.
was anyone complaining against the nature of tanks? or burn?

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Actually, I have seen a number of complaints, against both Invulnerability and Fire Tankers, mostly as a complaint against play style -- that as a hero on a team with one of those Tankers, they felt useless, because "the Tank told us to stay out of the way because he could handle it himself" or something similar, after which the Tanker would herd up and defeat the whole map. As I see it, that's a) a play style issue, and b) a mob AI issue.

As a play style, herding an entire map is mostly boring. After I got Taunt on my Fire/Ice Tanker, I took her into Perez Park and herded a street's worth of (grey) Hellions into a dumpster, just to establish that I understood the procedure for keeping aggro on a large mass of mobs. Since then, I've herded two or three spawns together in solo missions, just to get more usage out of the circle of Burn, using Greater Ice Sword, Boxing, and Frozen Fists to speed the lieutenants and occasional boss in the Burn patch on their way to defeat. Three spawns seems to be about the point where they all fit within the Burn patch without needing to try to get the mob-stacking bug to trigger, and it seems to be a good tradeoff between the time it takes to gather the groups into a reasonably-tight pack and defeat them all together, and defeating them one group at a time.

As a mob AI issue, it seems a little stupid on the face of it that any group of mobs would be willing to chase a Tanker around an entire map, particularly when a group is in an area for a purpose (i.e., guarding a hostage). Giving mobs a competing 'need' to stay near their spawn point that makes it harder to keep them following a Taunting hero the further they move from their spawn point would change missions so that a few close spawns could be herded together, but an entire floor/map would hemorrhage mobs rapidly as the Tanker tried to pull them around like a train.

This will likely get removed, since a red name hasn't posted, but if other people think it's worthwhile and quote it, it might hang around long enough to be noticed.

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The PL'ing guys are only playing fire tanks because they can herd and herding is one of the fastest ways to level. Fire tanks can only herd because the mobs stack and they have both the tools needed to exploit stacking - a taunt and an AE attack. The obvious solution is to stop the mobs from stacking. This has been suggested many times and the Devs have said that it just can't be done by changing the AI because of the bandwidth &amp; processor time required. Ok - I can accept that answer.

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Thinking about the mob stacking problem, it occurs to me that what causes stacking in the first place is a mob running up toward you, finding that it can't get as close to you as it 'wants' to be, so it tries to jump over the obstacle, thereby utilizing the vertical-collision bug to get closer by slipping into another mob. It seems to me that the check to see whether a mob can move closer to its intended target is already in the code, so adding one more check -- "is the obstacle another mob?" would have a relatively low overhead. If this check evaluates TRUE, then flip the mob in question from melee to ranged attack mode -- which makes it stand there and shoot, rather than trying to get closer to punch/slice/whatever. It won't solve all the stacking issues, but it should take care of a lot of them. And the change in mob behaviour will at least look more intelligent, with the mobs around the edge shooting in rather than trying to crowd in and beat on their target.

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