What is the point of knockback?

I am rolling my first energy/energy blaster and its pretty fun. Im at lvl 11 with her now.

I then teamed up with a lvl 50 scrapper to help him and I start firing.
Immediately he says "No KB".

So I looked at my powers and they ALL caused knockback lol.
I couldnt help him more than throwing my apprentice charm and using sands of mu. I felt pretty useless.

So while the blaster is fun to play, I dont want to play her anymore because I dont want to hear "no KB" for the next 39 levels and people not wanting to team with me because of knockback

Just gotta learn to use it responsibly. KB can be the most effective form of mitigation just keep in mind to use nearby walls and corners, if you can control the KB enough to group all the enemies tightly up against a wall/corner you will be one of the biggest helps on your team hands down.

The point of knockback

(Also, because an enemy geting knocked through the air or getting stuck on a slope due to ragdoll physics can't shoot back at you)

Knockback can sometimes be difficult to control (an AoE KB power can easily scatter enemies around, making further AoEs less effective), but in general it's not nearly the problem that some people make it out to be. If someone is complaining that they have to press W in order to play the game, they're probably not worth teaming with.

Oh boy. Not this again.

It's quite simple. The large majority of people who complain about knockback either:

1) Have a massive problem with hitting a movement key. They're probably lazy. (And in before someone with a story about their brother with no arms who really does hate knockback because he can't hit movement keys.)

2) Are obsessed with maximizing their XP per second, which is quite frankly absurd.

If someone lacks the understanding that Energy Blasters can't control when their knockback occurs, and that it's a feature of all of their powers, and goes so far as to tell you to not use your freakin' primary...they're not worth teaming with.

The purpose of knockback is free, wild, and readily available mitigation. Mobs that are ragdolled can't fight back. It's like every blast has a hold component.

In my experience, as long as you make a clear and concerted effort to cut back on scattering mobs all over the map, or just play on PUG teams that just want to play the game, or in a group of nothing but ranged ATs...they won't mind.

Too words...Power Push. Take it Slot it and make those that complain about KB chase their food. Target said teamate and attack thru him. You'll enjoy every second of it.

And oh yeah, don't let the naysayers get you down. Most of them don't know what they are talking about, especially with Nrg blasters. Unless you are in the middle of a pack your KB won't knock things all over the place. as long as you use the powers on the front enemy then all enemies will go strait back and stay bunched.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Sure, the devs are supposed to listen to their customers, mister business 101 out there. And if I decide to start suggesting that the devs change the game from being about superheroes and supervillains to being about clowns that is my right as well, and technically Paragon Studios is supposed to pay attention to me. But I hope strongly that they assume a meth-head somehow managed to hack into my forum account and make paper airplanes out of my posts, because I hope they recognize stupid when they see it. I assume they will recognize futile just as accurately.

In addition to everything that's been said already, I have a few ways I use knockback.

1. Self defense. Yup, since I'm often at the controls of a defender or controller, I like to have something to get people out of my face.

2. Feeding the melee-ists. I'm usually running about the edges of a fight and using knockback to throw people back into it. Do I get a few miscues this way? Yes, but I think it's worth the trouble.

3. Defending others. Being able to scatter enemies that have crowded a teammate keeps everything working smoother. For example, my Emp/Archer has explosive arrow. My primary use for it is to break up crowds and knock targets flat. This usually lets a trapped ally get free.

4. knocking targets flat. As it's been said, a target that has been knocked back, down, up, or is flopping about on the floor (huzzah Ice Slick), is NOT SHOOTING BACK. That equals team win.

Keep using knockback. Feel free to love it.

the use of knockback is to go to Skyway and go up to the huge overpasses and run along knocking all the villains off onto the ground far below

One other point I don't believe was mentioned:

It looks frikken cool!!!

Sure you can feel powerful by popping a big orange number over the foe's head and deplete their green bar to 0, but then you can do the same and fling them half-way across the map!! Then you can slot for more KB and blast them the other half too!

Get Hover or the Jetpack from the vendor in the Shard. If you are over your oppenents, KB becomes knocking them straight down into the pavement and they don't travel far.

The point of knockback is to separate good players from bad. Good players will both use and know how to take advantage of a teammate's knockback. Bad players could mess up a team with unslotted brawl, so it doesn't matter what they're playing or who else is on the team.

Learn to use knockback effectively. Ignore the ones who complain right away.

See my Guides and Tutorials

My only complaint about KB comes as a player who plays 3 Kins. That is, I'm trying to heal you/an ally/myself, but before the heal goes off, someone changes their target to MINE, knocks my target away, and the heal gets wasted. Normally not too terrible, just annoying... worse case scenario is that the person who needed the heal gets hit more and dies. And that's happened a couple times, once even on a MoSTF run that subsiquently failed due to this.

However, most of the time this is mearly an annoyance orchestrated by a simply good player... that is, they see a target next to someone who's low on health, and they instantly try to help by tossing that enemy away... and good on them! However, a BETTER player will know there's a target-based heal aoe waiting to go off and trust me to do my job. And THEN they can get rid of the foe once they've outlived their usefulness.

It just takes a bit of forethought to use effectively. KB is a powerful weapon, one which gets misued a lot, which has led to people griping about it.

I have little sympathy for scrappers who complain it'll take them an extra 2 seconds to kill someone, though.

Going off the tangent of arguments over 2 second waits and all the other silly gripes.

The *only* use for KB outside of missions is to head to the rooftop behind Atlas AE on your Nrg/Nrg blaster, hit powerboost/build up/aim then slap one of the hellions on the roof with your strongest KB power - then shout "FORE" as he careens into wentworths, you get extra points if you can actually slap it through into the strage room in the back.

Hellion Golf - its the only way to play.

This is a superhero / supervillain game. Supervillains and superheroes throw eachother around in their epic battles. Anybody who doubts that can pick up a random comic book in the genre or watch some cartoons in the genre.

It the game didn't have knockback, it wouldn't fit into the genre. Thankfully, the devs get that and they have not homogenized the game into a sleep-inducing exercise in maximizing DPS.

To the OP: Take criticism of knockback as a sign that you're not using it as well as you can and a challenge to get better at using it (it isn't that difficult, really), but not as a sign to stop using it. If you run into one of those (in my experience) rare individuals who has an implacable hatred toward knockback, spare yourself the unpleasantness of being in their company and find a different teammate.