Let Tankers be Tankers: Remove the Agro Cap

Good point. While the big setpiece battles in the second two Lord of the Rings movies are fun to watch, part of me finds the closer, smaller combat you see in the first movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, more enjoyable.

Umm, I quit WoW a few months ago, and well, as a pretty well geared tank (prot warrior, full epic, T7 equivalent, before Ulduar dropped), you could herd up a fair number of mobs at a time, with the exception of elites and even then a good group could easily chain pull. Some of the best fun was breaking up the monotony of raiding by pulling WAY too many mobs onto the group. Sometimes we lived, sometimes we died, but god was it more fun than when everything went by the book.

Sorry I passed over the other quote on this. Anyway, if you read comics, who do the superheroes fight in small groups or one on one? It's not the minions. It's the bosses, it's the archvillains. Superheroes plow through craptons of minions at a time. When I think of Captain America, I think of him not only going toe to toe with most powerful, I think of him smashing legions of Nazi soldiers singlehandedly. This game, I think balances it relatively well.

A happy medium, instead of completely killing the aggro cap, would be to adjust how taunt effects work on mobs. The higher the mob level, the more resistant they are. You can still herd up large numbers of minions, but Lt's, bosses and AVs, not so much. Or a diminishing return on taunt as the level/rank of the mob increases. Minions have none, they are minions and supposed to gang up on the hero. Lts, bosses and AVs are smarter than that, you have to give them more of your attention. Gathering up 50 minions is a lot more "realistic" than gathering up 10 AVs.

Im not sure if it would be game breaking or not, but wouldent this make power leveling in boss farms in AE even quicker than it is now? Just gather a map, make sure you got heals incoming, set blasters to nuke nuke nuke, move to next map.

Im not saying that herding is a good/bad thing not being somone who actually does it, but this is what it sounds like it would be used for if the cap was taken off or raised.

Yeah, I think people tend to undrerrepresent WoW's power level, or label it as not heroic by default (in contrast to CoH). It has a different scale and different assumed power level, but I think in terms of its own genre, the characters in WoW are fairly powerful and compare well to their superheroic counterparts.

I don't think that aggro control and mitigation being easier actually makes for a superior tanking experience. Threat management in WoW is more active than it's ever been in CoH, and requires not just the tank to generate enough threat to hold aggro, but the dps to keep an eye on their own personal threat. The tank also has to ensure that he or she has threat on everything so nothing veers off to smite the healers.

At the same time, WoW's current design makes threat management much easier than it's ever been. All four tanks have access to aoe tanking tools, making it relatively trivial to pull groups and get them focused on you while your dps AoEs everything down. Threat management is primarily ensuring there are no stragglers and the rest is up to your dps to not pull anything away from you.

I think these kinds of comparisons are pretty bad, though - WoW and City of Heroes are two different genres, and the superhero genre tends to be much higher-powered. WoW and CoH comparative popularity have nothing to do with relative power levels - in fact, relative power levels are meaningless to most people. What's important is playing in a genre that people enjoy and having a fun experience while they play it. Most people who play WoW don't care that a tanker in CoH can round up 16 mobs and fight an archvillain too. They care whether their own tanks can withstand what they set out to tank.

I also think that CoH players tend to look at WoW's raid model: "40/25/10 players all attack one mob while in CoH up to 8 players take on limitless numbers of foes" and ignore the context of that model. That is, that one mob you're fighting (and it's not always one mob) is Arthas' second in command (Kel'thuzad), or a manifestation of an elder god (C'thun), or a cosmic entity sent to wipe the world clean (Algalon the Observer), and the bosses leading up to those fights aren't just mooks themselves, but fairly potent enemies in their own right. Nobody's getting excited over fighting just one mob, but each one of those mobs is individually more challenging than nearly anything you'd ever fight in City of Heroes. The new Hamidon might be an exception.

WoW's popularity comes from a few factors. One major factor is that it was part of an already successful IP with five prior releases (three games, two expansions). Another was accessibility - even though WoW took a lot of Everquest's mechanics, Blizzard did so in a way that was actually fun for a lot of people. It still had tedious grinds (Timbermaw rep), but most of those tedious grinds were not required to take a character to 60 and raid. Further, with each expansion, they've been reducing and removing many of those grinds, opening more options for more classes, and rebalancing gameplay so that any tank can tank, any dps can dps, and any healer can heal. WoW at 60 had one viable class for raid tanking. WoW at 80 has four. A druid that specs balance or a paladin that specs retribution are not jokes.

In general, people enjoy playing WoW because it's a fun game and they prefer fantasy.

I don't find it confusing at all. Blizzard had a strong fanbase to begin with, and WoW was virtually guaranteed to be a pretty big success just on the basis of people who like their games in general. That it also eliminated a lot of the nuisance factor present in Everquest and other MMORPGs made it easier to attract players from other games. I do think people around here tend to sell other games short out of brand loyalty, though, and WoW's actually better than most are willing to credit.

But...my sword fighting taunts are only single target!!!

"You fight like a dairy farmer."
"How appropriate, you fight like a cow!"

Oh, and on topic: I honestly don't care what the aggro cap is. If we aren't chewing through minions so fast that my aggro is switching from target to target all the time anyway, something's wrong with the team.

A good example of maybe why your opinions about that game (and this) are in the minority.

You obviously didn't name Aerith, "Who wants a Kabob?"....

This only really applies to fighting AVs or similar single target threats. If you had an AV on each corner that mode of fighting would get boring as well.

The point of all this is diversity which is the real key to keeping game play entertaining. Just like I wouldn't herd a group of ten Malta Sappers, I loved pulling 100+ Freakshow back in the day. By the same token I love being able to solo AVs.

Everyone has their own tastes and play preferences. My contention is with those who seek to limit other people's options because of their own narrow minded view of what everyone else should be enjoying.

If you want to have an epic fight with three Hellions in an alley, knock yourself out.

Just don't say that my wanting to tank 100 mobs is silly and not heroic. You're not me.

FF VII has nostalgia going for it. It is one of, if not the, most important RPGs ever made. Simply because it brought a genre into the mainstream. RPGs were popular before FF VII, but they reached a whole new level because of that game. Every Final Fantasy since VII has had gameplay vastly superior to it.

In my mind FFVII was to RPGs what Quake was to FPS games.

Then it's a good thing that I didn't do that.

To recall, what I was responding to was your general claim that:

You were telling other people whether what they feel is and isn't super-heroic. I was explaining why this is a non-sequitur. I don't care what you do or don't find heroic. I was simply pointing out how your conclusion didn't follow from the premise, and how in particular it didn't match my personal preferences.

And that was based on *never* hearing people go "OH CRAP!" when I've pulled 3-7 mobs before.

But I have heard (in vent and in chat) all sorts of excited and crap-in-your-pants exclamations when I've rained down literally dozens of mobs on a group.

The first time I did it.

The thirtieth time I did it.

It might not be your cup of tea, but there are A LOT of people who appreciate and desire that kind of game play. This game used to offer that. It should again.

I would say thats based on how SHE feels, not on whoever cared but it's not my place to guess her position. I can talk about mine, though. In my eyes:

3-7 minnion/lts? nah, not heroic.
3-7 bosses? Depends on AT.
3-7 EBs? Now thats heroic.
3-7 AVs? Now THATS SUPER-Heroic
100 minnions/lts with occasional boss, not heroic, just bullying and farming. Nothing heroic about it in MY book.

But for each his own.

Edit to add: all this aside, the main reason to kill herding was NOT powergaming. Making the team feel useless in the face of a herding tank may had definitively helped, but the true reason behind it is the servers were not able to handle it. People that herded enough may remember occasionally causing zone crashes with their herds and this was in a time where the server handled less than it does now. The server just can't handle every tank going out there herding full maps and having them all active at once. Heck, it can barely handle the AE as it is.

I didn't say that it wouldn't be fun. My very narrowly tailored statement that you keep missing was that "more mobs" doesn't necessarily equal "more superheroic".

For what it's worth, and separate from what I wrote above, my personal preference would be for generally smaller spawns with individually more dangerous mobs. That's because I suspect that the reaction you are seeing is mostly that you're introducing an element of danger that normally isn't there, and is only tangentially related to the number of mobs; adding more mobs is not the only way to add an element of danger, though, and fighting army-sized crowds has the disadvantage of not being a good fit for the genre.

Yeah we all know about how you (and Sorciere) play the game though.

ZZZzzzzzzzz.

Then you're just cluttering up the thread with over thoughtful crap.


True but you already have the smaller, more dangerous mob scenario in the game currently (thinking Reichsmann and the multiple AVs, multi-pulling the end of the STF, etc ...).

You can also do Longbow missions in a full group ... even on Heroic they tend to present most groups with a fairly decent level of challenge (especially blue side).

However there is a seperate thrill from being surrounded by an "army" of mobs that can never be duplicated with a few uber buffed mobs. Most people who do my farm and pull multiple packs squeal (yes actually squeal) with delight ... and that pales in comparison to what we used to be able to do in this game.

Before you knock it ... you should really experience it. It's a rush.

For those that can actually handle it at any rate.

Good thing I was not expecting an intelligent argument.

Wow, it's a good thing you weren't calling out people just now for telling you how they like to play...

You get what you give sparky.