sorry umbral, didn't mean to step on your toes, or your's leo, if i have. i went with what i saw was the core of both suggestions and applied what the devs have done when changes have been made to powers. as far as tankers having to spend more end to get the same effect as a scrapper, they should. scrappers give up some survivablility for more damage and tanks give up some damage for more survivability.
while i agree that something needs to be done, i don't think the dev's will do anything until they have a solid idea that will not break the tank in any way.
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Lol, I guess same can be said about my Stalkers | If a Tanker doesn't appeal to a team as it stands now, nothing you can do will make it appeal without making it horribly overpowered. |
I play them pretty aggressive too and know when to stop attacking to pinpoint a target to eliminate quickly (or before the combat occurs). And yet, apparently Stalkers don't warrant the team spot they take up on large teams and SFs. That's not me talking, that's all those min/maxers.
But when they say that stuff, I can at least follow up with "Well, at least Stalkers can do X, and Y and Z. Let's see a Brute or Scrapper do that!"
Can't really say that for Tankers. They aid a team, certainly, but when faced by the min/maxers, they got nothing to fall back on, it seems.
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| Reading comprehension fail. |
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I'm not sure if you ever run outside of IOs, but I do and all of my SO slotted melee characters can run out of endurance. I could mitigate that somewhat by slotting more end redux, but then I'd be losing out on extra damage, accuracy, or recharge. If you already slot heavily for end redux the, guess what, you wouldn't have to as much because you're getting some of that for free! ... Now I am laughably sure that you never run with anything but IO'd characters. Either that, or your never run with anything but a Granite Tank or a WP Tank on -1 diff. Time matters hugely for Tankers. Sure, they can take hits, but their survivability curve in SOs isn't high enough to allow them to survive infinitely. If it were, then they wouldn't have soloing issues because it's of laughable difficulty, even when they grab 17 targets. |
Maybe I'll get a demo rec of a mission. They aren't super fast missions but he rarely runs out of endurance and has no trouble surviving 2 spawns at a time. It's probably the combo of resists, +HP, defense and a heal.
He does have trouble with Freakshow. They heal and rez which makes me fight them longer and their -END attacks start to drain me. That's when I have to lean on Dark consumption and blue pills.
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Actually, the primary problem that most people have with Vigilance is that it only contributes something whenever you're playing poorly, that the benefit is unreliable, and that it encourages bad play in order to capitalize on it. Those are the reasons that Defiance was changed. No other inherent is so counter to the role of the AT that uses it. The other problem with Vigilance is that it does nothing solo. Sure, you can capitalize on it while on teams, but it does nothing unless there is someone else to feed it. That's the specific reason why I was separating the two portions of the inherent fix that I would apply. Tankers need different things at different times. |
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I really have to wonder when you'll stop pulling arbitrary reasons out of your *** and realize that you have no clue what you're talking about. You don't even get half of your information correct, and you artificially apply your own playstyle or specific experience within specific sets without accounting for the capabilities of those specific sets in a global manner. Increasing range or target caps in the manner you described is not the solution. It assumes that Tankers will never run up against single hard targets or that Tankers should be the AoE gods of the game no matter what conditions their under. It is inelegant, inefficient, and largely ineffective. Just stop. Please. |
I'd just like to say, for the record, that I have an IO'd out tank with Stamina, Physical Perfection, and Conserve Power who still runs out of endurance all the time. That may have something to do with Hasten and Rage, sure, but the fact remains that endurance is an issue.
Some say that there's a point when you've got so much endurance recovery that you can't run out of endurance. In my experience, that point either requires major buffage from teammates or your recharge rate is just way too low.
I'm just gonna throw my lot in with Umbral here. I pretty much agree with all his points... And as for Leo's point of increasing AoEs, something that I don't THINK was touched on (but I might have missed it in the wall of text at 4 AM)...
This would horribly shift the balance of the tanker sets as is. Super Strength has ONE AoE, Mace has THREE, and Dual Blades has three plus special effects. You'd need a total rebalancing of the sets, because AoE isn't something all tankers are generally equal at in the way that, say, all scrappers perform about the same number of melee attacks (a lot).
Now here's a silly idea for team bonus: Give Tankers a bonus to damage when targeting through a Tanker or Brute. No, I have no idea how this would work or make sense, I just know it would buff them when working together.
But yeah, if Tankers get a change to their inherent, it has to be a change that affects all their sets about equally with one sweep. Like a 25% increase in damage when targeting foes who aren't targeting them.
NPCs: A Single Method to Greatly Expand Bases
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The problem with this is that it ignores the function of time. This is one of the big issues that you have to tackle when balancing offense against defense. The longer a fight goes on, the more damage you end up getting thrown at you. Damage serves to shorten the period of time in which you are subjected to this incoming damage and thereby serves to increase your survivability.|
Originally Posted by Sharker_Quint
as far as tankers having to spend more end to get the same effect as a scrapper, they should. scrappers give up some survivablility for more damage and tanks give up some damage for more survivability.
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A Tanker, thanks to doing two-thirds of the damage that a Scrapper does, takes roughly 50% longer to finish a fight than a Scrapper will. This means that the Tanker will see roughly 50% more damage thrown at him and spend roughly 50% more endurance killing those targets. Now, thanks to hit points (Tankers have 40% more hit points) and self-buff scalars (Tankers get 33% more def/res from powers), Tankers take ~53% of the damage that a Scrapper does. Factoring this in, over the course of the same fight, a Tanker is going to take only 20% less damage than the Scrapper while spending 50% more endurance and taking up 50% more time.
Of course, this is assuming that the Scrapper has the survivability to survive the fight and the Tanker has the endurance to continue throwing out attacks without having to spend time recouping lost endurance to continue attacking, and, while it's possible to account for those variables by attaching values to everything, that's beyond the reach of a purely scalar analysis (which that was).
Now, if we apply some real numbers to this, we get a bit more complex. Let's assume that a minion equivalent, or ME, deals 15 DPS to a Scrapper at level 50 (this is factoring in Scrapper resistances). Apply a Tanker's superior resistance and defense scalars and a Tanker will take 10 DPS from a single ME. Now, similarly, it will take 2 seconds for a Scrapper to take out a single ME. Applying the Tanker's lower damage scalar, it will take 3 seconds to take out a single ME. Minions are worth 1 ME, Lieutenants are worth 2 ME, and Bosses are worth 4 ME, but I'm ignoring those for the sake of simplicity (higher rank enemies actually have a tendency to scale damage slower than the outright damage capabilities of the equivalent number of minions as well as reducing the negative impacts of overkill and increasing the impact of secondary effects by stacking them up more, I'm assuming these balance out the increased period of time in which they're dealing damage, but I know that isn't true: a boss is going to deal a good deal more damage over any specific interval of time than 4 minions because his damage doesn't drop as his hp drops).
Now, to complicate things (because that's just transferring the scalars into something that we can compare with what I'm about to do here), we have to factor in endurance consumption and recovery and damage recovery. Because Tankers and Scrappers use pretty much the same sets, endurance consumption is going to be same for each of them. I'm going to heuristically assign an endurance consumption, post end recovery, of 2 end/sec. Because regeneration is based off of hit points, which Tankers and Scrappers don't share a common value, I'm going to simply assume slotted Health and no +hp (which, without SOs, would simply act as a percent increase) so that Scrappers are recovering 10 hp/sec and Tankers are recovering 14 hp/sec.
Combine the two of these, and we can determine how fast a Tanker or Scrapper can defeat a group and whether that Tanker or Scrapper could survive the group and if they would run out of endurance while fighting the group. The balance comes in attempting to take out as many ME as you can without going over the twin thresholds of your survivability and your endurance. If either of those occurs, you're operating below optimum efficiency. For each ME scenario, I'm going to simply calculate how long it would take to defeat the total group (numME * killSpeed = time) and then use that time to determine how much endurance you would need to have at the beginning of the fight in order to finish it (time * 2) or die (if ((numME * ((killSpeed / 2) + (time / 2)) * minionDPS) < ((time * hpRegen) + baseHP)).
(In case you were wondering, the total damage in the "die" equation is calculated in that way to account for dead targets no longer dealing damage)
5 ME
Tanker Time: 15 second fight
die? no
amount of endurance needed to finish: 30
Scrapper Time: 10 second fight
die? no
amount of endurance needed to finish: 20
9 ME
Tanker Time: 27 second fight
die? no
amount of endurance needed to finish: 54
Scrapper Time: 18 second fight
die? no
amount of endurance needed to finish: 36
10 ME
Tanker Time: 30 second fight
die? no
amount of endurance needed to finish: 60
Scrapper Time: 20 second fight
die? yes
amount of endurance needed to finish: 40
12 ME
Tanker Time: 36 second fight
die? no
amount of endurance needed to finish: 72
Scrapper Time: 24 second fight
die? yes
amount of endurance needed to finish: 48
13 ME
Tanker Time: 42 second fight
die? yes
amount of endurance needed to finish: 84
Scrapper Time: 28 second fight
die? yes
amount of endurance needed to finish: 56
Optimal points:
Scrapper: 9 ME
Tanker: 12 ME
Now, compare the information for the Scrapper and for the Tanker. The optimal point for the Tanker requires you to have 72 endurance at the point of starting whereas the Scrapper requires only 36. While the Scrapper can only has to use rest about once every 3 groups, the Tanker would have to use rest after pretty much every group thanks to the endurance cost. The endurance cost issue isn't so much how costs for a single fight. It's more a question of downtime and how long you have to spend after each fight in order to have enough endurance to finish the next one. Because Tankers spend more endurance over a longer period of time in order to take out their enemies, they have to spend more time between each fight (or in each fight, which increases the risk of the fight by extending the period they're exposed to damage) recovering endurance in order to take out their enemies.
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That's pretty painfully specific, imo, and it removes a lot of the actual "play" from playing a character. A vast majority of the play comes from target choice. If the inherent power of an AT were designed to encourage it to have someone else pick the target for it, not many people will capitalize on it. Just look at how hard it is to get people to target through someone on a raid like Hami or the Mothership where you might actually want to target through someone.|
Originally Posted by CapnGeist
Now here's a silly idea for team bonus: Give Tankers a bonus to damage when targeting through a Tanker or Brute. No, I have no idea how this would work or make sense, I just know it would buff them when working together.
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I'm not even sure if that's possible, either, though, I guess it wouldn't be much more work than the idea I've got to check to see if it's targeting you. It would just be a matter of making sure that the AT of your target is a Tanker or a Brute rather than simply making sure that the target's target isn't you.
I DID say it was silly.
But yeah, my team play opinion is still "X% bonus damage to foes who aren't targeting you." Probably about 25%
NPCs: A Single Method to Greatly Expand Bases
Secondly, and I think this is the problem with only discussing a portion of what I'm suggesting, the inherent changes I'm suggesting (i.e. both of them together) would make solo play easier without making it better than the team play that it similarly encourages because you're not going to be made redundant by another tank or a shield scrapper on the team. If anything, if you want to deal damage, my changes encourage you to get onto teams because it increases the amount of damage you can deal. If you want to be an aggro magnet, it similarly encourages you to be on a team because you'll be of benefit to your team and another Tanker on your team isn't going to cut in on your functionality without providing you with something in return (i.e. more damage). If you just want to solo, it makes you life easier by allowing you to either lighten up the endurance slotting you've got or to allow yourself more time in a fight before you have to start worrying about each point of endurance.