Added Issue 18 Tanker ability: Bruising

I remember my friends made a video of it the last time I did that. I got all dressed up like little mac from Punchout! and kept using zone chat to shout "I...Am....BATMAN!" I'll see if they still have it.

For what it's worth, boxing IS slotted with kinetic combat, so it's actually not that bad an attack.

Nice. I was pretty stoked when I did 500 damage with KO Blow (or something like that) at about level 40 when I was teamed with a Kinetics Defender. That isn't too shabby!

A Shield Charging Scrapper with Build Up does(did?) that much to like 8 guys at once without a Kin.



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Tanker. Tanker! Tanker!

Tank! Er! One who tanks! Of course survivability is the selling point! Do you think I rolled up my Stone/NRG or my Invul/Ice to do jaw-dropping damage? Of course not, I rolled them so at 41+ I could walk up to AV's and drop kick them in the junk knowing full well they couldn't kill me without some major exertion.

Without purple inspirations, not very long, but certainly long enough.

I led an MoITF with my Dark Armor, softcapped, no DDR tank. I forgot to change my difficulty settings, and we did the first mission on +4. The team stuck together a bit closer than usual (even for an Mo), but my tank did fine and I only once had a cascade failure. Even then, I was still able to survive, but that's more on the merits of Dark Regeneration than anything.

Speak for yourself.

In comics, the "tank" characters are usually quite potent offensively. Nobody would call Colossus or the Thing poor offensively.

And then there's also tanks like this...



...that also pack a heckuva punch.



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You win this round, Mr. Butane.

Is it really a victory when nobody gains anything?



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ever tried to a loaded water tanker "up to speed"?
It would be like giving us the ability to oneshot a purple boss.......at the cost of a 10 second rooted animation.
Melee snipe....no thank you.

I don't know man, I think a "Colossal Headbutt" power would be a great replacement for Hurl in Super Strength. Costs 75 endurance, Single Target, has an 8 second charge up. Your brute/tanker gets into a runner-ready position, screams, bursts into that Super Strength glow, the ground begins shaking, and then you take off at top speed leaving a huge sideways crater behind you. The result is a literal melee snipe that'd probably do Nitro-Extreme(tm) damage and 1 shot anything EB and below.

:P

Shut up, I can dream.

Eh, many other ATs can do this as well. You should go look in the scrapper forums to see the crazy stuff some of them have done. And unlike tankers, many scrapper builds can kill the AV themselves pretty quickly. A dark/sd even solo'd LR (although it took a bit of luck).

I love my tank as much as the next guy, but he's simply not needed for current content. The game was designed around SOs and many IO'd out scrappers and brutes are reaching and exceeding tank survivability with SOs. So while the tank may exceed brutes and scrappers in sheer survivability it doesn't really matter as almost nothing in this game requires it. And the few things in this game that require it are usually beyond an IO'd tank's ability and thus the tank still requires support in the form of buff/debuff, mitigation which can also be applied to scrappers and brutes making them "good enough."

I think another problem is simply the nature of def in this game and the way IOs are skewed to those attributes. It's much easier for a scrapper or brute to build for increased def than it is for tanks to build for increased damage. Even squishy ATs can become insanely survivable now turning themselves into tankmages. I've got a fire/dark corr build that is softcapped to ranged attacks. Why do I need a tank? I'm debuffing the enemy like crazy, laying down massive amounts of damage, and I rarely get hit. And when I do, I have one of the best heals in the game. When all ATs can reach this level with some investment, where is there a place for an AT who's sole purpose is to survive and take strikes while sacrificing damage? I can make a scrapper or brute or corruptor insanely survivable as well and not sacrifice any damage.

I'm not saying that people won't play tanks, clearly they will. And I'm not ridiculing the AT, I love my tank. It is still cheaper and easier to give a tank ridiculous amounts of mitigation than any other AT. I'm just saying this love for tanks does not preclude me from objectively looking at the AT and examining it against other ATs in world where there are a plethora of options to increase survivability but few options to increase damage. It's far easier for other ATs to overcome their weaknesses than it is for a tank to overcome there's. I don't think a relatively small change like bruising is really going to make much of a difference. I do think the devs made a mistake by making +def so available when the softcap is 45%. It's too late to change that now and I seriously doubt the devs with make +dmg as common as +def so I really don't know what change would bring the AT in line.

Well said. It's nice to see someone who likes Tankers, but doesn't have rose colored glasses on.

Yes, it's not just IOs. Have a quick look at pool powers. Take a look at how many can increase survivability vs increasing damage. There's many of the former, and they're found in most of the pools, and few of the latter. There's arguably two decent powers in all of the pools to increase damage, Assault, and Hasten. Assault isn't all that worth it for the endurance it burns and Hasten only increases damage indirectly. There are a couple others, but they're very situational for increasing damage.

You'll find this with accolades and temp powers as well. Lots of options for more survivability, few for damage increases. Tankers are disadvantaged to the entire power system.

Does adding more +dmg options for all equally really help the situation? Not really IMO. Example: give a Scrapper more damage and he'll kill stuff even faster before he can even take damage. Survivability goes way up when all the enemies are dead.

The problem isn't really the power system, though. The problem is the design of the Tanker AT. If it is disavantaged by the realities of the system, the problem has to be fixed at the AT level if it's going to be fixed. Until then, the fact remains in a game where more survivability is easy to come by and more damage is relatively hard to get, the AT with the most survivability out of the box is always going to be at a disadvantage.


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Which is why my suggested changes are usually ways to make tankers better at aggro control and even more survivable. Since tankers are supposed to have superior survivability, let them stand out by a wider margin.

This alone is not enough. You need to make that survivability worth something. As it stands, even if they were made more survivable, it wouldn't matter because nothing threatens our characters enough.

Tankers don't need better aggro control. They already control aggro better than anyone else in the game. ONE can lock down the aggro of an entire team-sized spawn themselves. That's more than a lot of Controllers can say. More than that is simply not needed. The only legit reason to want more is to deal with ambushes or adds. But THAT is what a second Tanker or Brute or MM is for.

After that, the only reason to want increased aggro control is to make Tankers better for herding and farming. No thanks. Tankers are already abused this way too much. People treat these Tankers like Tractors: slowly but steadily moving back and forth across a farm.


Glad you figured that out yourself.

On teams, I've never found my survivability wanting if the team is supporting me the way I do them. There are already many options to give tankers a lot more survivability if they want it. More survivability wont make my Tankers more fun to solo, nor do I think it would help them better be "devastating hand to hand combatants" with "irresistible force" who "dish out all sorts of damage."

I've never had any problem with my Tankers being able to "proudly stand in the front lines of battle in order to protect their comrades". It's the other side of the AT's description coin I feel Tankers fail to live up to.


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I strongly disagree. Notice this time I said better, not more. I'm willing to concede that increasing the aggro cap is far from necessary. I would like, however, for tanker aggro control to be better.

As it stands, shield scrappers can steal aggro from tanks who are doing everything in their power to hold aggro. I'm willing to let outliers like that exist, but brutes should not have the same threat level or taunt magnitudes as tankers, in my opinion.

I don't know how you're really going to do that, the survivability part that is. What more can be done to drastically increase the survivability of tanks relative to other classes? If we are talking IOs then you really remove defense, as we're already at the cap, from the equation. Increase hit points? Increase resistance? My WP tank is already at 70% resistance to s/l at all times, and that's just Willpower. Should my WP be able to reach 90% without an external buff or SoW? 99%?

I guess my point is is that there's not so much wiggle room on the mitigation side of the equation without making a good IO'd out tank completely invincible. That is, unless you throw in some Godly content that just wipes the floor with any other AT, but that makes a tank necessary again when the idea is held that no class should be necessary. It also doesn't solve the fact that for 99% of the content in this game, tanks don't need more survivability, they need a better and faster way of eliminating the mobs.

I think JB is right, the current game mechanics are broken.

In a game like this where damage is better at mitigation than mitigation is at damage (and killing speed means something in terms of experience, reward, and endurance), once my toon is survivable enough, I should always preferentially choose more damage over more mitigation.

The most interesting game mechanic I can imagine right now, and one that might go a long way in balancing mitigation and damage, is to actually reduce mob resistance based on their blue bar. Thus, the longer the tank stands and is attacked, the more damage he/she does to the mob. This rewards high levels of mitigation with increased killing rates. The flip side to this is for scrappers. Reduce their mitigation but introduce a mechanic that says the less hp a mob has the less damage it does. Thus, you reward high killing speeds with increased mitigation. You'll have different playstyles (one would favor front loaded, the other back loaded damage) but would likely result in similar overall speed. It also makes sense thematically. If you hit and hurt a person, their attacks have less punch and do less damage. If the person attacks too often, they grow tired and are less able to defend themselves against your own attacks. I'm sure there are huge holes in this plan that would have to be addressed and I seriously doubt anything like this would happen at this point in CoH's lifecycle. And yes, front loaded damage is almost always advantageous, but the scrappers also have to bear the brunt of the alpha with less mitigation than they currently enjoy, thus increasing their risk in-kind.

And yes, the mechanic I described above is basically fury, but applied to the mobs and not the AT. I think the devs were probably thinking something similar when they created brutes, which are tanks "done right" in my opinion.

As it stands, I just think that too many ATs reach good enough survivability to take on pretty much any content in the game which makes the sacrifice in damage that tanks make a little unfair in my opinion. I think unless you change the actual game mechanics so that mitigation actually means as much as damage, the only real way to bring the melee ATs in line is to actually homogenize their mitigation/damage capabilities. You saw this with the change to fury as brute damage levels will be more consistently in line with scrappers, so I'm just waiting for the inevitable change to tankers (assuming one is coming, which is almost necessary imo). Fury is a game changing mechanic, bruising is not, so I don't think bruising is the last word.

We already win out on defense and resistance modifiers, and now even our hit point cap is higher, so I'm happy with those values.

My most commonly put forth suggestion is to allow tanker toggles to not suppress while mezzed. That would give tankers a unique survival advantage over the other ATs.

I still don't think this addresses any real issues. I'm looking for a way to give tanks purpose 100% of the time and not the 1% of the time when a tank actually gets mezzed. You're looking for ways to increase tank survivability when tank survivability is not a problem. I honestly won't care if you allow tanks to keep their toggles up while mezzed because the amount of time I spend mezzed is so miniscule that it's nearly completely irrelevant.

And your first statement leads me to believe you're missing my point. I'm not saying that tanks aren't the most survivable AT, I'm saying that tank survivability is going to waste and I can't see you adjusting it higher much further without just making tanks invincible.

IOs especially have given other ATs the tools to build incredibly survivable builds. Not more survivable than tanks, but survivable enough that they don't often have to worry about death and they are still able to do what their ATs were meant to do. I don't think tanks will go away, but I often ask myself the point of playing my wp/fire tank when my elec/wp scrapper can survive 99% of the situations the tank could and output nearly twice the damage doing so. I've never argued that my scrapper is as tough as the tank, I'm arguing that it doesn't matter. The survivability is close enough that any rational person who was looking at the numbers and the mobs, and whose goal was to kill the mobs as quickly and efficiently as possible, would choose the scrapper.

I play tanks because I love the concept of being a "tank." Taking damage that no one else can take and standing strong. I imagine that's what I am when I play. Objectively looking at the situation, outside the rare outlier, my scrapper can fulfill that role just as well with the ancillary benefit of giving me the feeling of being a mean SOB who can dish it as well as he takes it.

what I can recall without searching...

• Apply a single target attack's secondary effect to the AE of gauntlet
• Apply terrorize to the AE radius of gauntlet
• Give tankers an innate AoE defense buff to teammates (not to self), stackable.
• Innate/improved status effect resistance or protection(such as what Dechs mentioned)
• Innate debuff resistance (this one being needed 6 years ago)
• nerfing other AT's resistance or defense caps for relative performance gains

There are a lot of options for improving tankers that doesn't equate to "more hitpoints" or "more damage". It is rather sad that the most recent adjustments to tankers fall into those two categories, though.

You ask this as if it would be a contest.