Gameplay style and "bad" powers

Something that's been going through my head recently is how a number of the more unique powers in the game tend to be labeled as trash. Now, some powers do need revising but I think it's actually a symptom of the game being so focused on kills as opposed to completing tasks. Let's take radial knockback powers. Keeping enemies off you theoretically keeps you safe but slows down kill speed, especially if you are melee. Killing enemies faster seems to almost always take precedent over surviving longer. I'd argue that this alone should be reason for more mission variety but I wonder if it would be in vain. Would more varied missions open the door for more variance in playstyle or would it simply draw the ire of players who want things the same as they've always been?

I don't think it's an aspect of mission design, I think it's symptomatic of the design of the combat system as a whole. The way the system is balanced you can relatively easily get a team (or even a single character) that can survive virtually indefinitely through use of passive forms of damage mitigation (i.e. defense, -to hit, resistance, regen etc.). Since passive damage mitigation is generally more reliable than active damage mitigation and it allows you to position enemies as you wish it makes for faster killing which in turn leads to a higher rate of rewards and thus it is what people choose to pursue.

This, combined with extremely high AoE damage (compared to other MMOs) encourages a playing style where you use passive mitigation to reduce incoming damage and fight the entire spawn at once as opposed to the style in other MMOs where you try to separate the enemies and engage them 1 or 2 at a time.

Take Detention Field for example. In CoX it's generally regarded as a rather poor power on teams since taking an enemy out of the fight means that either you have to wait around to kill them or you have them chasing you to the next spawn both of which effectively slow down your killing rate. No suppose the power existed in WoW it would be regarded as an extremely useful power for recovering from a bad pull.

Yeah, I think it would.

The "Stop 30 Fir Bolg" mission flips the value of a few powers on their head - suddenly Bonfire is incredibly useful.

Similarly Ajax in the Villainside I17 missions would probably have a rough time with Repulsion Field or Repel - you can't kill him but I bet you can knock him around indefinitely.

PFF would be incredibly handy for fighting Protean or the resulting fires you have to escape from.


I don't know if increasing the number of missions like this would be a good thing - I quite enjoy playing the game as a minion-mincing exercise most of the time. It sounds lame, but I found Champions involved too much thinking most of the time with its more varied mission objectives and goals. I spend all day doing clever stuff, and just want to switch off and indiscriminately arrest big groups when I'm playing.

But, it seems like there is a trend with the newer missions to provide more variety, which is fun, and none of that is going to stop me from doing some good old brain-dead radio missions when I want a more basic playstyle. So bring it on!

Yeah, the new missions are very cool, but maybe work a bit better solo than on a team?

I did the Villain side Dark Mirror arc on my own the other day, and broadcast to see if anyone wnated to help me take out a few Freaks, since thats what the next mission suggested. Aussie Monday night, no-one bit, and I was kind of glad when I entered the mission to find it was a single corridor with two spawns, followed by another long conversation with McD outside.

I did think at the time "I'm glad no-one joined me. I'd have felt like I mislead them."

Solo, its ncie to have all the extras. Often a team is enough entertainment on its own with little extra required from the game in terms of dialog or story.


Either way, I like where the devs are going with this. Having a mix of complex and simple is awesome.

I agree with a lot that you said. Powers are powerful only in the context of the challenges presented.

In the case of knockback specifically, knockback would be considerably more desireable if there were something to knock enemies into. In the past I'd suggested that if you blew an enemy into an obstacle, its suffers a stun that lasts as many base seconds as the distance it was prevented from traveling. The other suggestion was if you fall a long distance as the result of a knockback that you are considered to have engaged in an "uncontrolled fall" and take a percentage of your current HP in damage (so it would never kill you but wouldn't make a bad opening move, especially against enemies with high base HP.) A third thing that may be helpful would be for AVs to be changed from basically immune to knockback to vulnerable to 1 knockback every 30 seconds per-caster-per-power, so that if you have 4 powers that do knockback you can do it once per power, and have incentive to have more than just 1 power capable of doing it. These things would give knockback more purpose, IMO.

One other thing I've noted is that many of the more "unique" powers are less favorable because many of them them benefit less from set bonuses. From a set bonus perspective, powersets with more "mainstream" powers are able to slot more of the set because they need all of the "typical" ingredients. The Slow set, for example, assumes you need Recharge, Accuracy, Slow, Endurance Reduction, and Damage, but Snow Storm needs only two of these.

I think bringing up the Stop 30 Fir Bolg and the mission to protect the runes from the Red Caps points to how missions can allow variety. I've both won and lost the 30 Fir Bolg mission. My first time was on a fire/fire scrapper (no mitigation whatsoever ) teamed up with a tank. It took some effort but we managed to complete it using damage and some taunts. Yet, it can also be completed with a full control basis. Other teams had a member setting up a full Trip Mine minefield. While the end result is to kill stuff, it has a solid number of ways to achieve the end goal that are all viable. The reactor trial is another example of a situation where you obviously need damage but hard control options can be quite viable.

What I think would help is more Efficiency Expert type situations. Timed missions with concentrated goals to complete. Done right, you could have a damage option, a hard control option, and a stealth option.

When the game originally shipped, the idea that one character could beat 30, 40, 200 enemies at once was a great surprise to the designers- or at least to some of them. And the idea that one character could make seven characters unkillable was probably another surprise. So the "old design goals" were never necessarily something that worked in the actual game.

Pure survival missions would be interesting.

Theres' the fiery lab escape after fighting Protean, that would be cool to saunter through as a Fire Brute, for example

Retrieve the radioactive device from the toxic lake would be an option - if you imagine Paragon City Waterworks in Crey's Folly with a constant DoT. Being a tank is one option, flight is another..

Last night I did the Gaussian arc again, which has the mission with multiple ambushes that fails immediately if Lady Grey falls. That kind of sucks (unless youre an FF Defender) since the AI can lose the mission for you. I was playing my Stalker, so no luck there.

I'd love to see a similar setup where YOU have to get out past hordes of bad guys, not necessarily having to defeat them all. (Maybe even get to an EMP generator that deactivates all the robots when clicked, thus giving you a big XP boost for surviving or controlling them first?)

what i don't get is why the difference in powersets between hero and villian sides i found the villian powers more interesting and fun then heroes. if i could've picked dual blade/ninja set as a scrapper i would've had my first 50 hero instead i'm a stalker on villian side. but once again when you think about all of this when going rogue comes out you can just flip sides so i might just make afew villians and go hero lol.

Well, there's "bad", there's actual bad, and then there's Presence pool.

Some powers are fine, when in normal PuG teams doing normal content, i.e. no uber fire/kin farmer making everyone else irrelevant. Some powers take careful slotting and have a huge learning curve, but do have some sort of use if you're committed to it. And some powers might as well not be in the game.