Questioning the MMO Trinity?

When one has a favorite AT, it's natural to want to push the boundaries and want to make it more capable. But like it or not, ATs are all designed with inherent tradeoffs. To fundamentally alter tanks such that they did more damage, they'd have to have a commensurate reduction in survivability at which point they'd likely end up looking a lot like Brutes.

Why do foes in this game stand 10 feet away fighting back with guns that are obviously harming us little while we roast them alive? Why do enemies not immediately flee when they see us coming, then round up every comrade in their base and come at us with overwhelming force? Why don't they ever lock the doors to their bases?

Or to use an example from what is undeniably one of the classic games ever invented: is the King the most threatening piece on the board in a game of chess? Why does the entire game revolve around capturing that piece when it's trivially easy to prove that with the exception of pawns, every other piece is more of a threat?

In games you can't appeal to things "from a purely practical standpoint." Games choose a structure and build within that structure. This game chose ATs and it necessitates tradeoffs. Certainly if the devs ever do COH2 they can start with a clean slate and make a different framework; but they're still likely to build a framework would force you to make hard choices and not allow you to build a character that was excellent at everything.

It's true that in the right environment with lots of outside buffs a Brute can have Tanker mitigation and above-Scrapper damage. But that's hardly the norm. Scrappers put out a lot more damage than Brutes from a standstill. Without outside buffs it can be quite challenging for my Brutes to match the sustained damage output of my Scrappers. It's certainly doable, but it's hardly automatic. That's part of what makes playing Brutes so fun, IMO. Keeping that Fury bar up is like a minigame in itself. It's a brilliantly designed mechanic. And my Shields Brute required a gigantic investment in IOs to get close to (but not surpass) the survivability that a Shields Tank can get with a much more modest investment.

With Going Rogue coming, rather than buff Tank damage, the devs should just continue to proliferate powersets. That way for a given primary and secondary you can make the choice about whether they'd be a better personal fit in a Tank, Brute, Scrapper or Stalker (and if you squint a bit, Widows too).

EDIT: my first answer was "No" but to elaborate, if CO's free-form power selection is successful obviously it does prove the viability of the concept. If it's unsuccessful, it doesn't invalidate the concept. A common mistake is to assume that the failure of a product is due to a bad product concept but in reality it can be a bad implementation, or bad price point, or bad market timing, or poor marketing, etc.

Look at portable MP3 players. There were portable devices before the iPod. There was a la carte music purchasing before iTunes. But none of these were a commercial success before Apple got involved. Or to look at another Apple product, remember the Newton? Did its failure mean that handheld computing was a bad idea?

BTW, not to derail the conversation too much, but my own take on CO is this: they have correctly realized that in terms sheer dollars spent, the PC is now just a rounding error in electronic gaming. Consoles are where it's at. CO could get trounced by COH in the PC market and yet potentially succeed wildly due to console sales.

EDIT TWO: when I say "consoles are where it's at" I mean that's where the big consumer spending is, not that I'm a personal proponent of console gaming.

1. Against minions Brutes break even with Scrappers at 56% Fury (+112% dmg), and against bosses at ~63.3% Fury (+126% dmg).
   
   Math:
   1.125 * 1.05 * 1.95 = ~2.3 dmg (This is the slotted Scrapper damage mod against minions.)
   
   (~2.3 / 0.75) (This is the equivalent Brute mod required.)
   ((~2.3 / 0.75) - 1.95) (This is the required +dmg necessary to break even)
   ((~2.3 / 0.75) - 1.95) / 2 = ~0.56 Fury (Amount of Fury required, 1% Fury = +2% dmg)
   
   
2. Technically, Brutes do not have above Scrapper mitigation - they have about 12% more survivability from their higher hp, but not mitigation. They have the same def/res mods as a Scrapper. (Caveat: Fire and Elec hitting 90% res to Fire and Energy respectively and resistance T9s.) At any rate, there are others who would agree that Brutes have too many perks. (Personally, I think they should not have Tanker mitigation caps. That should be the domain of Tankers alone.)

The problem is in my opinion, that Tankers are punished for their survivability with having 40% less damage than the comparable Scrapper while Scrappers and Brutes are allowed to have (or gain) enough survivability to survive hazard sized spawns, solo AVs or what have you. Well built, Scrappers and Brutes have enough survivability to solo almost whatever they could reasonably want(and some unreasonable things) while Tankers are punished with mediocre damage simply because they have the tools they need to tank for teams.


Because the problem of Tankers not playing like their comic counterparts exists now, just as it existed five years ago. Jack Emmert himself said: "Tankers don't play like comic tanks. This is a valid issue." The solution at that time, Fury, was never given to Tankers. The solution they went with, a modest damage multiplier increase, didn't really solve the problem of them playing like the heavy hitting big guys of comics. Even with said increase, as you admit, they deal "respectable" damage. That is a far cry from the "devastating hand to hand combatants" the AT description on the official CoH webside still pitches Tankers as.

And for that matter, "respectable damage" is hardly super in my opinion.

I'm not going to argue that Tankers can't deal damage. Generally, they deal low-medium or solid medium damage.

But that's not what comic styled tanks do. The proof is in developer quotes that Tankers were intended to represent these kinds of characters. There's a reason they were given powers like super strength and Scrappers were given swords. There is/was an expectation there for them to reasonably play like their comic cousins. The very tough guys are almost ALWAYS very powerful offensively. That is why they are called tanks to begin with. Like their militaty namesake, they're the toughest thing on the field and they have one heck of an offensive punch. CoH Tankers don't. Not compared to every other melee AT in the game and compared to the melee damage of a couple of the ranged ones.

Claws/Regen Scrappers are a very good analog for hairy Canadian mutants. I can name few if any comic heroes who's primary role is to act as a distraction. So why is it wrong for CoH Tankers to be closer to their comic analogs?

Starsman said in another thread:

I happen to agree with this idea. I think it provides a conceptual framework for a gameplay mechanic to allow Tankers to be heavy hitters AND stay balanced within the game with lower damage the majority of the time. I would be very interested in a mechanic added to Tankers based on this concept. At one point, the devs THEMSELVES latched onto this concept for Tankers. It was the conceptual reasoning behing Fury. As you can see, when they gave it to Brutes they changed the concept to one more fitting. While the Fury mechanic is not/was not suitable for Tankers, why shouldn't this concept still be?

Just tossing out a wild guess, is it's because you see Tankers as very good implementation of MMO tanks(aka decoys, which is what they are), rather than as a not so good interpretation of tough, non-brutish melee-oriented super heroes.

CoH's Tankers are great MMO tanks/decoys, and that in my opinion, becomes a problem when it supersedes them being great comic book tanks, as it has.


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I agree that had Brutes not been created, the Fury mechanic would've been perfect for Tankers. But they have been, and it'd be good to keep their particular flavor unique to them.

In a thread in the Suggestions forum I proposed a new mechanic that uses the concept of a "charge up" meter that has been used in fighting games for years. The idea is you could just click an attack and it would fire normally or you could hold down your mouse button or keyboard key for a couple of seconds so that a meter on screen would fully "charge up". At that point the attack would do significantly more damage, at the cost of the longer activation time and more End. I was surprised that the suggestion got no comments at all. But this would be a nice fit for Tankers. It'd allow you to switch to "heavy hitter" mode on demand (like the Superman example above), without penalizing you in normal fights by saddling you with a set comprised entirely of long recharge, high End cost attacks.

The mechanism could be available on all attacks in a powerset or only to select attacks. The charge meter would be immune to +Recharge buffs, so a few stacked Speed Boosts wouldn't turn a tank into the new farming FotM. The point is it would allow change on demand from a fast fluid medium damage attack chain to a series of slower but devastating attacks. It would have a different feel entirely from Fury, just as Fury's extra damage has a totally different feel from Scrapper crits.

I did not say that at all.

I said the original driving concept behind Fury when it was being designed for Tankers, that Tankers hold back for conscientious reasons, was a good concept and one core to comic tanks and could still be used to design a mechanic around.

I do not think the Fury mechanic is correct for Tankers then, or now.

That sounds very similar to the system they're using for a number of powers in CO.

I think the idea has merit in itself, but that being said, I think that it is too much a departure from the current playstyle in CoX to gain enough popularity with the devs or most players to make it happen.



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My mistake.

I would guess that's the primary reason it probably won't happen. They don't want to seem like they're directly copying CO, even though it's a mechanic that's been used to death in fighting games for over a decade. In no way did CO invent it.

How is it any more a departure in playstyle than Dual Blades' combos are? That was a radical new mechanism unlike anything that was in the game before and it got incorporated just fine.

My understanding from the thread above was that you wanted to be able to do more damage on demand, to stop "holding back." I was looking for a new mechanism that wasn't a direct port of an existing one like Fury or Domination. The concept of a per-power charge-up meter is seems perfect to me (of course since it's my suggestion of course it'd seem perfect to me! ).

Still, given that it's a central part of CO's attack mechanics, debating its merits probably falls into the "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" category, which I think is a shame.

That's a valid point. I don't know enough about how the power system works to say how much work such a mechanic would take, but you would definately need some interface code and graphic work done to display a meter or some such to show how much you've charged a power. That means implementing the mechanic goes beyond just the bounds of Castle. The more people that have to be involved(and thus taken away from working on something else), the less likely a feature like this is to happen in my opinion.


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=P in the case of DB, its quite a bit more sophisticated then champions charge up mechanics, at least in feel and use. Tanks are fine as is. They are tanks, they tank. They cannot have high high damage because that would make them waaaay overpowered. This whole "Tanks dont really pose a threat" is literal non-sense. They can absorb a ton of damage, its safe to assume they are very powerful from a in-character perspective. However you have to accept that they need to have a drawback to be inline with the other ATs in usefulness.

That's true. Anything truly different can't be done purely via Castle's spreadsheets. But there's precedent. Before Dual Blades' combos there was Domination. That too had to have required new coding. So while this suggestion requires programming resources, it's not unprecedented. Short of cloning Domination (which I don't like because I think different AT's should have unique flavors) this is the only balanced mechanism I could think of that would satisfy that desire to say "I'm done holding back!"

That is your opinion, and one not agreed upon by a number of people who've posted in this thread.

By the outdated DnD style definition of being a decoy/meatshield is being "a tank."

The comic book definition is different. People have reasonable expectations of the AT based on the powers it gets and what comparable characters are like in comics, movies and cartoons, that are not, and never were, met.

Being that this is a comic book MMO about super heroes, it's not unreasonable AT ALL to expect Tankers to reasonably relate to their comic counterparts. The official description given on the CoH home page implies they should. It is many people's opinions they don't.

There's nothing in the comic definition that precludes them from being decent MMO tanks, but the inverse can't be said. Therefore the narrow, outdated MMO definition is what's holding them back.

Incorrect. People have made suggestions in this thread and others about mechanics that would allow Tankers to be closer to their comic counterparts, be heavy hitters, and still be balanced within the game.

Such a mechanic is well within the realm of the possible and plausable if the devs would stop dismissing the issue and work on one.

Roleplaying something that many people think should be, but isn't because the mechanics and gameplay constantly shove it in your face that it isn't, is non-sense to me. Expecially since we wouldn't have to pretend if the devs would address the issue.

Clearly pretending Tankers aren't medium damage decoys in the face of constant contradiction isn't enough for some people.


Look, people are seeking a reasonable solution to understanable concept issues. If you don't see those failings, fine. But nothing the devs would do would be intended to make Tankers any worse for people who think they're fine as is. The only thing anyone is asking is for the devs to deal with the issue, re-examine Tankers and attempt a solution. Their previous attempt four years ago didn't take or we wouldn't keep seeing threads and conversations like this.


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I was going to respond to each of your points until I hit the paragraph where you claim that tankers level slowly because of hitting mobs with higher regen than your damage, and I couldn't keep going. I don't believe tankers have it this bad (or really, have it bad at all).

This game has multiple abstractions to make it a playable game, instead of trying to balance out how to deal with Superman and Batman on the same team if they do appropriate levels of damage when fighting mobs. It's not easy to set up a game to handle the non-combat side of things, and especially handle them in a way that's satisfactory to players - it's about confronting, fighting, and defeating your enemies (heroes or villains). In that environment, everyone has to be able to contribute, and that means if you have more defense, you do less damage. It also means stuff like origins are cosmetic - Natural heroes do the same damage as mutant and magical heroes, even though natural was initially defined as humans who get there with training - how do humans train themselves to be invulnerable and superstrong? How does my natural tanker train herself to wrap herself in ice and pull stone mallets out of the air? This game is full of conceptual weirdness, and I don't think this one thing, the threat mechanic, is really the spectre that you're making it out to be.

It also means that archetypes need things that they do better than others, or there's no point to having archetypes at all. The argument of whether games need archetypes is separate to the fact that this game has archetypes, and has to balance around that fact. So in this game, Batman gets to outdps Superman because Batman needs to be relevant in the situations the game represents.

Yeah, I agree with this.

This game didn't do that. This game decided that Wolverine gets to outdo the Thing whether they're fighting 30' tall robots or droves of ninjas. They could have said "OK, Tankers are better fighting one large foe(like a Boss), and Scrappers are better at lots of little minions". They didn't. They said Scrappers get to be better at fighting everything, all the time and Tankers get to be decoys. How exactly is that fair?

What Samuel is pointing out is ONE abstraction that didn't have to be made so abstract. There have been NUMEROUS ideas and suggestions made about how to deal with Tanker concept issues. We could maintain game balance and solve these problems by next issue if the devs wanted to tackle it. It doesn't require throwing out ATs or the system. It requires some thought and the desire to do it on the devs' part. That's all.

The argument that Tankers have to be the way they are now because that is the only way that works doesn't hold water. If that was the case, NONE of the ATs would have been altered after they were launched. In recent game history we've seen striking changes to Blasters, MMs, Stalkers and most recently, Doms. In the last instance, Doms were changed for very qualatative reasons. Castle listed those reasons as:

-Eliminate Jeckyll and Hyde feeling.
-Improve "feel" of low level play.
-Increase Dominator vs. Controller viability.

While there is some argument already about Brute vs Tanker viability in the coming expansion, addressing the "Jeckyll and Hyde feeling" and the "feel of low level play" seem to me as just as valid reasons to alter Dom secondary damage as arguments about the "feel" of Tanker offense and improving the feeling that Tankers are heavy hitters are for changing theirs.

True, but being better at one thing may not be as beneficial or fun as being better at another.

When the things you're not so great at contradict what people's reasonable expectations are of the AT based on any number of outside examples, why shouldn't we attempt to rectify that? You can tell those people their expectations are invalid, OR you can try to make improvements.



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I could get behind that. Give tankers a damage bonus against Bosses/EBs/AVs/Monsters/GMs.

Scrappers kind of already have that with Critical Hit...

It's not a good suggestion because the fights that matter are against bosses, EBs, AVs, monsters, and GMs. Fights against minions are over in moments, so giving scrappers a bonus against them to balance tankers being better against the aforementioned categories would make scrappers pretty worthless on a team.

Also, other ATs are much better at minions than scrappers - blasters, for example, can take them down faster without needing to move into the minions in the first place.

I'm sorry, it is fair because scrappers get more damage in exchange for lower defenses. Tankers get more defenses and can withstand more mobs of all kinds pounding on them, and are less likely to be reduced to red health in a single shot. In addition, tankers are still doing ~3/4th the damage that scrappers do, which is still effective.

I already explained why your idea here is a poor one, and it's been a poor one for a long time. No AT needs "better at killing minions" as a niche. Some are better at it than others, due to AoE and overall damage levels, but fights against minions are largely trivial.

On the contrary, I don't trust you to accurately judge whether any idea is balanced because you come up with things like the above suggestion. It's not about establishing a balanced play environment, but making tankers the most powerful AT.

I never made that argument. I have never said that tankers have to be the way they are. I have said that tankers shouldn't have their damage output boosted, and I even explained why it's necessary for scrappers to be able to outdps tankers. I also pointed out that tanker damage is far from pathetic.

Dominator damage was too low for the control and utility they brought to a team. They got to be totally awesome whenever they had Domination up, and otherwise were rather mediocre. They don't have tanker-level defenses and had weaker primaries than controllers. This is not even comparable to what tankers are like right now.

I think the tanker AT can be improved and made more fun. I do not believe that "should be like Superman" is a reasonable expectation.

They could. I'd rather see it in the form of a special mechanic for Tankers.

One line of suggestions about Tankers has been about improving their damage against Bosses, EBs, etc and leaving their damage against Minions and LTs alone. That goes with the idea Tankers hold back on the little guys and let loose on the ones who can take it.

But I was speaking hypothetically.

As it has been said, Scrappers get Critical Hit that has slightly better chance of happening against bosses.

But Scrappers aren't just better at dealing damage against Bosses than Tankers, they're better at dealing damage against everything.

In the previous I was speaking as if we could go back in time to when the ATs where being designed and have both ATs with equal prowess, but in different areas of dealing and taking damage.

That can't happen now. Scrappers and Brutes are always going to come out ahead in damage. That doesn't mean Tankers could nearly match them for a short period, or against specific cons of enemies, but that's not the hypothetical situation I was describing.

I wouldn't pass up a single target damage bonus for Tankers that didn't effect Minions or LTs and scaled for Bosses and up. Such a thing fits with the concept of comic book Tankers and wouldn't be overpowering at all from what I can see.

But the point is moot until the devs decide to address Tanker issues.


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I disagree. Scrappers having lower defenses do not hamper them the way Tankers having lower damage hampers them. Scrapper do not have BAD defenses at all. Scrapper defenses are in fact optimal for soloing. On teams, they have outside support from buffs, debuffs and heals. You will find very few complaints on the Scrapper boards about them being to weak defensively. Many fewer than you will find of Tankers complaining about damage.

A well built Scrapper can survive just about anything he wants, hazard sized spawns, EBs, AVs, and thanks to their superior damage they'll defeat them in a shorter time than a Tanker.

That's not accurate. Tankers deal roughtly 65% of what a Scrapper does with the same power set. That's not counting Criticals

Smite does 114.5 three slotted for damage on a Tanker, 177.1 on a Scrapper.

I think you may be confusing me with someone else. I agree, Minion fights are trivial. I've specifically spoken AGAINST making Tankers better Minion/LT/AoE killers. I've always leaned to making Tankers better at hurting the big guys, the guys who can take it.

I fail to see how improving Tankers at damaging Bosses will destroy game balance.

In all of my suggestions, Scrappers still outdamage Tankers on the whole. Be it my Tanker Domination proposal, suggesting a damage bonus against bosses and up or whatever.

And I pointed out that consistant, medium, vanilla damage is far from their super hero roots and the ideal of the comic book tank.

I think it's very comparable. With have two ATs, both with defensive primaries and offensive secondaries. When one had "feel" problems, largely due to how it performed offensively, it got offensive tweaks. I'd say that's very relevant.

What about being like the Thing? His catchphrase was "It's clobberin' time!"
Not "It's aggro management with medium damage time!"


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That's because some tankers want to outdps scrappers, not because tanker damage is intolerably low.

Just be fair and acknowledge that when you say "well built" you mean loaded up with IOs.

Tanker Smite at 50, unslotted: 14.24 smashing + 44.49 negative = 58.73

Scrapper Smite at 50, unslotted: 20.02 smashing + 62.56 negative = 82.58

58.73 is 71% of 82.58.

If you three slot for damage... Let's say to 196% damage, that becomes:

115.11 to 161.86

Perhaps unsurprisingly, tanker damage remains 71% as compared to scrapper.

You suggested that scrappers should be made better against minions and tankers better buffed against bosses.

It depends on how far you want to improve them. If you gave tankers a 10% critical chance against bosses (for example), that probably wouldn't hurt anything beyond AT uniqueness.

That's not how the scrapper = minion / tanker = boss suggestion came across.

And I point out that the descriptor "medium damage" is misleading.

Yep. In issue 3, tankers were buffed from a .71 damage scale to a .8 damage scale.

My tankers clobber quite effectively.