Let Tankers be Tankers: Remove the Agro Cap

An increase to the aggro cap would be nice but I don't agree with the elimination of the mechanic all together. Limited the # of critters seems reasonable and 30-35 would seem appropriate. Anything more and it just seems "off" if that makes sense.

In a perfect world, I would suggest the Aggro Cap be determined by the Team Size (and/or difficulty of the mission) rather then just a flat number. This would be present for all ATs and would be different per AT and not universal.

Tanks might start with an Aggro Cap of 10 while solo and could potentially increase the cap to 35 when teamed with 8. Brutes might start at 10 and cap out around 25, possibly less. Point is that any AT with Armor (primary or secondary) should have a higher cap than those without.

Squishier ATs, like defenders, would start with a cap around 8 and max out at 17.

Remember these numbers are all fictious and just my idea.

I don't care how unbalanced it was, herding wolf maps was quite fun and made a tank feel like a true super hero.

That and Perez Park herding with my 50. Start at one end and try to draw every mob in the street with you. Extra points if you slotted a KB power and sent them flying

Kruunch seems to be working on raising his own personal aggro cap.

I really was going to walk away from this thread, but.

The bit where the existence of Ouroboros is used as proof of an implicit blessing of PLing and farming, as if there were no possible other use or rationale for the flashback feature in a game where it's long been extremely rare for anyone to play all the arcs through on a single character?

Priceless. And a perfect example of molding evidence to fit the theory. Which is... I'm grasping for a word here... ah.

Disingenuous.

I actually agree with increasing or removing the aggro cap; not for the herding reasons people are talking about but simply because there are many situations where you have many more than 17 mobs in close proximity. As a tanker my job is to keep those mobs from squashing my squishier teammates; and if I'm at the cap... easy to do on a large team... and another group gets aggro'd then I'm completely helpless to do anything about it.

Like Kruunch I was around for the heyday of herding and I still have the original, untimed Drek mission on CMA. It was an incredible thrill to herd the entire main island of that map and stack them into one small area then unload with Seismic Smash and kill 200+ freaks with one shot. But you know, even if herding that many was still possible actually killing them would take forever in today's game.

You see, at that time Hami-O enhancements offered 50% enhancement and there was no ED so tankers could output roughly half again more damage. Additionally it was possible to stack hundreds of mobs into one location, literally inside each other's footprints so that a single target attack would hit them all. Now, with both of those things no longer possible you'd find that level of herding to be simply a parlor trick; and an inefficient one at that.

Kruunch isn't advocating a return to those days; I'm not advocating a return to those days. What bothers me about the aggro cap is the very thing I mentioned at the start of my post... that if you're tanking on a full team there are going to be situations where you're completely helpless to prevent an added spawn from wiping out the team. THAT is why I hate the aggro cap.

QR

I only managed to skim this thread, fair warning .

I remember the days of herding entire maps in a garbage container. Please, DO NOT remove the aggro cap. I think it's very telling that the only group I've come across even asking for it, are tankers...possibly because it was so incredibly boring for the rest of the team? Teams are much more fun, content is much more challenging, as is (compared to a no-aggro-limit environment). Not that consensus among us would influence the devs, but, thankfully, we do not have it anyway so, no real point in arguing it. Not likely to happen, sorry.

i never got bored.

City of Heroes broke 180k subscriptions at launch, had 194k in Q4 2005 (after City of Villains), and had 125k subscriptions last November. I don't know what current numbers are, although Positron said that there was a spike in active subscriptions after AE was released.

I think 50k is extreme lowballing. It also won't influence the devs, who likely have access to accurate numbers.

I always thought that a good idea for end game content was to add hazard zones that would only be available to level 45 - 50 characters to start. Set them up something like the Rikti War Zone where a beachhead of sorts has been established and the higher level characters would spend time completing story arcs, TFs or trials in order to secure more of the zone. As time went by the zone would switch from hazard to city by degrees and then finally the zone level would be reduced to whatever level ranges were originally intended by the developers.

Here's another thought, change the con system so that all mobs con to players like giant monsters. Regardless of a player's level a minion will always con as a minion, a lieutenant as a lieutenant, a boss as a boss and so on. This way if you make it to 50 without seeing all the content you can go back and grab an old contact and do their missions in any zone with using Ouroborous or losing powers in the process. Still allow players to increase their reputation but instead of it only upping mission difficulty it increases the difficulty of all mobs in the game for your character. You want to fight everything at +1, you got it! It's kind of the inverse of what they are doing with Super-Sidekicking.


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