Questioning the MMO Trinity?

To me, the Tanker should flex from defense to offense more as a fight progresses. The easiest way to do this in the CoH system is to have an inherent aura power for tanks that increases damage done based on how few enemies are within a short range. For example, if each stack of an inherent buff added 5% damage, and use the formula:

n = 20 / e

...where n is the number of stacks and e is the number of enemies within 40 feet (if there are any in range), you would wind up with a 120% damage buff when there's just one enemy in range and a 10% damage buff when there's 10 enemies in range.

This may encourage players to try and separate mobs more, but I think that the threat vs. damage consideration would make tanking more interesting at best and more damaging against the last few opponents standing at worst. The ultimate goal, of course, is to make the tank feel more powerful as a hitter while preserving his protection/threat role. It does borrow from Fury to an extent, but I think it's sufficiently unique in that it would "reset" after every fight and keep the tank at fairly mediocre damage until the "damage dealers" knock off the minions and other distractions. It would definitely make the tank feel like a force while soloing, so that if teams aren't available, he wouldn't feel terrible about running some arcs. Just an idea, of course, dependent on the will of the developers to see it as a problem.

Butane, mang... You're doing yourself a horrible credibility disservice leaning so hard on Mids numbers.

Just now got done verifying both in-game with Real Numbers, and City of Data, that Scrapper's base damage with Smite is 82.58 and the Tanker base is 58.73... exactly the same figures that Kali gave.

I'm more willing to trust her numbers at this point, having two sources of credible verification of it. Unless you want to tell me that the in-game measurement is off?

I personally like the idea of a damage bonus against tougher foes.

As JB said, Minions don't matter, all ATs can easily take care of minions, however a scrapper would still kill more minions, quicker, than a tank could.

A tank having scrapper level damage against an AV, minus the ability to crit or without fury, would still be outpaced by a scrapper or brute but it would go a long way to giving tanks a bit more oomph and make a second tank be viable as a damage dealer on TF teams (where it really matters).

why are people pretending Johnny is worth taking seriously?

This thread is very disorienting.

While Johnny may be a bit overzealous, he does have a point, bringing a second tank is often not worthwhile, they bring aggro holding (which a single tank is generally sufficient for) and nothing much else, others ATs can do more damage, can provide buffs/debuffs, better controls beyond getting every to simply hit them and nobody else

One additional AT besides at tank adds more to the team, more DPS, more mobs are locked down for longer, more buffs/debuffs make the team tougher/kill faster, all a second tank can do is provide damage that isn't on par with any of the damage dealing ATs and fight for aggro with the main tank.

What's a Tank?

What's a Healer?

Define damage dealer.

The stances idea comes from WoW.

Warriors have 3 Stances, Battle stance (a balance of offensive and defensive abilties), Defensive Stance (defenses increase at the cost of attack strength) and Beserker Stance (attack strength increases, defenses decrease). There are other bonuses too

Warriors can also spec for Protection (they're like CoH Tankers, they don't hit hard but they can take a ton of punishment), Arms (Built around using two handed weapons, they hit very slowly but very hard) and Fury (more akin to the Brute than a Tanker, focusing on fast hitting quickly but sacrifice protection for greater DPS).

If, with gauntlet, you could switch between offensive and defensive stances, both with their inherent pros and cons (defensive stance is the way tankers are now, offensive stance sacrifices defenses for a higher damage modifier).

Defensive stance = used when in a team, tanking big groups or hard hitting targets like AVs, especially when the Tanker is the main tank.

Offensive stance = used when solo (when the huge damage reductions aren't really needed) or for when there is already one tank on the team.

Now the problem with this is a balancing act needs to be enabled. Too much DPS increase and too much defenses sacrificed and Tankers basically become scrappers without the ability to crit, stepping on Scrappers toes. Too little and nobody would see the point in switching to offensive stance and it doesn't help the Tank any.

I think the main problem with Tankers is that, unlike other MMOs, the normally glass cannon Melee DPS AT (Rogues in WoW being the best example, can be squished almost as easily as Ranged DPS but deal silly high damage due to the risk they take even being in melee) isn't really that much of a glass cannon.

It's a shame they didn't go with their original idea for Tankers, slow hitting but hitting incredibly hard when they did, meaning they hit harder than Scrappers but they also hit a lot slower, keeping the DPS in favor of Scrappers.

Lots of classes have stances in WoW, it's just that only warriors call them stances. Death Knights have presences (frost = tanking, blood = dps, unholy = pvp, in general terms), and druids have shapeshifting (bear = tank, cat = fight, moonkin = moonfire spam, tree = healz0r). Kheldians in CoH have stances (nova = shoot, dwarf = tank, human = versatility and damage).

WoW doesn't have a single melee dps class. Rogues do melee dps, yes, but so do death knights, paladins, druids, and warriors. When they're specced for dps, they're significantly less effective at tanking, even in full tank gear, but they're still more durable than rogues. The comparison of scrappers to rogues bothers me, because scrappers are not rogues and do not fill the same kind of role. The closest AT to rogues in CoH is the stalker, and even it uses stealth and surprise attacks differently, and had to be brought closer to scrappers to be effective on teams.

But, your use of the rogue vs. warrior comparison in WoW is problematic, because it's a limited comparison to what WoW was four years ago, when warriors were for all practical purposes the only tanks and rogues the only melee dps. Right now, four classes can tank, six classes can do melee dps, five classes can do ranged dps, and four classes can heal. Out of ten classes.

I would suggest that scrappers are more akin to what the enhancement shaman was intended to be in WoW at launch - off-tank, melee dps, and occasional tank. It was actually able to function this way in vanilla WoW, although very few players wanted to be around shamans who did anything but heal.

Current WoW, I'd compare scrappers to dps-specced warriors, paladins, and death knights, as well as to enhancement shamans. I'd continue to compare stalkers to rogues and cat druids, with crossover to enhancement shamans. I'd compare tankers to prot-specced warriors and paladins, tank-specced death knights, and bear-specced druids.

But scrappers are not and never have been rogues. I played a rogue at launch, and believe me, the difference was palpable.

Johnny, Dr Mechano suggested giving tankers scrapper-level damage against AVs.

I didn't go into the whole many different classes that can tank and DPS. I also went for the obvious example of Stances because...well as you said...Warriors call them Stances...

Mainly because out of those, I discounted Paladins and Druids because they are true hybrids. They can tank, DPS AND heal, they're not really like anything we have in City of Heroes (unless you count a Tanker or a Scrapper with the medicine pool and six slotted Aid Other to be effective healing).

Even in certain encounters other classes can tank (A mage to tank one of the Ogre bosses in Gronn's Lair since only they can spell steal his special shield which lets them survive. Aggro bouncing hunters for the nature damaging ogre boss in the same encounter using their +Nature resistance aspect buff or a Warlock to tank Illidan in Phase 2 due to being able to soak Shadow damage better than other classes are all examples of non-tanking classes being used for tanks)

That was the general jist of my post though. The classes that can tank do sacrifice their tanking toughness (and require a completely different set of gear) when they switch to DPS effectively but that leads to a problem in CoH...

I was thinking it'd work better if Scrappers were more glass cannon-y and Tankers had more damage, but Scrappers are the only group of players in this game who seem to be happy and we really shouldn't risk destroying that.

I dunno, maybe Tankers should get some kind of ghetto Fury effect or something.

This is the problem when a game blurs the typical MMO roles beyond recognition, the ones closest to those roles feel totally out of place.

Stances: combine tanks, scrappers, and brutes into one AT that can use any of the 3 styles.

That would be a better way to do it starting over, but a more cottage rule compatible system might be a stance that lets a tank trade defense for offense.

Alternatively, gauntlet could get an inherent chance to stun, giving tankers control, which would make them more capable of stacking with each other.

The problem, I think, does not originate with Tanker (or Tank) design.

It originates with the environment. A question to you all, but especially to Steampunkette, who may need to answer this question soon: in a world with no Tankers, how do you program the enemies?

Do they concentrate on healers as they should (if they exist) or all gank whoever does the most damage, or just attack randomly?

If all 'classes' have the same survivability (barring minor customization), and if that survivability is hightly significant, then players will define them only by their offense, and we end up with City of (Tank-)Blasters. If one 'class' has greater survivability than others, it becomes the default Tank. If that class has greater survivability AND offense than others, why play anything else (outside of RP)? Oh, and the occaisional debuffer.

Of course, you could go the other way and make all 'classes' made of tissue paper; that also solves the problem.

If everyone has comparable survivability and there is no aggro control, there is no way to keep enemies off of the blaster or healer equivalent.

Or you can just make everyone jacks of all trades, which then results in everyone playing the same character.

It's all about game balance and teaming trumping the comic book genre. Not in an effort to emulate MMOs per se, but just because at the time the game was created, THIS game was considered mold-breaking in that regard already...but they still had to answer those same questions.

If a game is going to truly break the 'trinity' mold, it has to be designed for that in the very basics of the aggro system and combat roles. Team Fortress 2 seems to be a game that comes closest to doing this...because it's Tankers are relatively squishy (compared to CoH) unless buffed, and because there are no AI enemies (in general, you may be able to play with bots).

Of course, if you really want to play a J_B style Tanker, I hear those are in Left4Dead

That and TF2 basically imposes the class structure on a completely different genre- it's only natural that it's mould breaking.

The whole 'make everyone Jacks' seems to be that CO is doing, for better or worse. I've heard that 'everyone is a Scrapper or Blaster', and as a result there's little reason to team up.

My thoughts:

Bringing 'comic book' Tankers to CoH: Give them a slider that allows them to increase melee damage at the cost of speed. Very few comic book tankers are known to be superhumanly fast, superhumanly strong and invulnerable, and those that are are 'signature characters'

Increasing Tanker stackability in CoH: Add to Gauntlet a melee-range aura that grants a Def buff to teammates that stacks with the similar auras of other Tankers. Next to the Tanker is supposed to be the safest place to stand per comics, not the most dangerous.