A game of "What if?" - How to get smarter enemies

We all know that buffs and debuffs are extremely powerful in this game. The only problem is, the enemies don't seem to notice. Clearly, smart enemies would attack the force field defender first, most notably because he has the least defense. Think about an ITF - we all know to hit the surgeons to make it easier to take out the Elite Bosses. The problem is, the way aggro is calculated, there's no way for the enemy to figure that out.

So here's my question: what if player targeted or PBAoE buffs also had a taunt component?

First, I realize it's way too radical of a change to ever get implemented. This is all rhetorical and pretendy fun time games.

Just think about it for a moment. What would it actually do? The empathy defender uses Heal Other on a player, which creates a gauntlet like taunt to five enemies within a radius of that player. PBAoE buffs, like Accelerate Metabolism or Mind Link taunt any enemy in radius of the heal. Toggle powers like Dispersion Bubble, even the one FFG produces, become slight taunt auras.

I think this would produce an effect of seemingly smarter enemies. Suddenly the real threats become easier to see. "Hey, I'm not going to kill anyone while that FFG is giving the team softcapped defenses." It may force us to play smarter, or make good tanks more valuable.

What do you think?

If you make the enemies TOO smart it would make tankers completely redundant.

I commonly wonder why entire groups of enemies will attack the guy they can't hurt while a squishier character blasts the crap out of them.

So, if you make them smarter, don't make them so smart they realize that beating on the tanker while the rest of the team kills them isn't a good idea.

The idea isn't "smart enough to ignore a tanker completely," but enough that buffs register as a threat.

It should make the tanker work for his aggro. Not make him worthless.

I used to play Anarchy Online before coming to CoH. In that game, the "Doctors" (the game's main healing class) pulled huge amounts of aggro just by healing; the bigger the heal, the more "threat" they generated. This forced the tank class to stay on top of his game spamming taunts and paying more attention while managing aggro. All mezzes in that game were single target, too.

I suspect such a system would channel us into the traditional mmorpg team model, making it harder to run with the take-whoever-wants-to-team approach and instead have teams refusing to start without a tank, a backup/off tank (both of whom must have taken and heavily slotted their taunt, maybe presence pool too), dedicated healers, etc.

That or there'd be an increase in people building the buff/debuff-heavy teams where it really doesn't matter who's got aggro.

I was actually surprised that this game wasn't set up that way at first, honestly.

I have mixed feelings about it overall. The ability to operate without pulling aggro is one of the few advantages the buff heavy sets currently have over the debuff ones (and the ability to solo certainly isn't close to comparable).

I'm pretty sure WoW tracks threat for healing, debuffs, and crowd control, but not buffs and other forms of support. However, the amount of 'threat' generated by healing is usually way way less than what a DPS class will generate through damage output.

I think adding a *tiny* amount of taunt to healing, buffs, and AoE support toggles like Force Field Generator would be great. Something like 10% of what a Scrapper/Tanker/Brute taunt or aura generates. This would mean that enemies taunted by those classes, or currently engaged by DPS would be fairly unlikely to go after the healer, but the occasional un-engaged enemy will.

Such a change would likely increase the importance of dedicated tanking classes to some degree, as well as increase the challenge level of playing a defender or other supporting class.

IMO, it's one of those things that would upset a significant chunk of the playerbase and not contribute enough fun to make up for it.

Besides, a good team has their support classes generating threat by blasting already. I have this concern that if you impose buff aggro, support classes will be discouraged to blast even more than they currently are(due to popular opinion that defender blasts suck), thus making them less enticing to play.

Are you just suggesting a change to how buffs are registered, Dechs? Because debuffs already do add to aggro (for the targets affected). Taunts, etc., do overwhelm that aggro, but that's as it should be, I would say.

I wonder how easy a system would be to add aggro to buffs, however. As far as I know, debuffs only work on the targets affected: I'm not sure how you could get enemies to notice people healing or buffing in another way. I suppose it could be a variation on that one power Ghoul lieutenants can cast on you, which ups your threat rating (or is it how much aggro you generate?).

Not sure if it's strictly needed, or that worthwhile, though. People seem to have more issues activating their buffs than debuffs, anyway. I know it's what keeps me from using most sets that require repeated buff activation. I'd rather see a little more ingenuity over how mobs are aggroed, or have patrols alert nearby mobs, etc.

And some of that is already being done: the new Going Rogue missions have a lot of ambushes triggered by you completing an objective of some sort.

Game is already way easy mainly due to what Dech's has mentioned. Enemy AI is very dumb. There's mention that this would ruin the ability to take 8 of any AT and just go for it, but I don't think that's the case. Besides, how good do you feel about yourself knowing that your 8 of any AT wipes the floor with a bunch of 'dumb' mobs? There's nothing self-fulfilling about that.

When it comes to challenge, enemy AI will always rank higher than mobs being buffed. Fighting enemies at +4 just means it'll take longer to defeat enemies but it will still be the same redundant battle formula.

What Dechs has proposed is what I've always wanted to see in this game, but I know this will never happen. Just at look at how much complaining has been generated from some of the new content (Trapdoor and Battle Maiden). If this game were too become more challenging the forums would just implode.

Well, to be fair, some Mobs have build in scripts to target squishier ATs (think manticore, he targets corruptors and MM first, then goes for the brutes, unless taunted) and healing can pull aggro (think old school hami raids, were empathy defenders died first after absorb paining the tankers) the thing is, they arent very high on the threat bar, and most scrapper/brute/tankers taunt auras will out taunt it pretty easily.

Debuffs also pull threat as well already, but its not very much.

If they did add a means for NPC to keep track of healing/buff/debuffs etc, then they need some form of threat 'meter' to keep track of whose pulling what threat, especially when certain mobs can 1 or 2 shot unprotected ATs (minotaurs cut my blaster in half, and a well placed hit on my earth/rad will flatten her in a second)

Well, the only other MMOish game I've played is Guild Wars. That handled it in a reasonably clever way, where healing/buffing didn't draw aggro per se, but the AI would target low hit point/low armor characters over high hp/armour ones.

Makes sense, really. Why beat on the huge burly dude in plate armour when there's a whole load of dudes in robes behind him with half the amount of health. I think that's a somewhat more elegant solution than adding aggro to buffs.

That said, it didn't really make combat more engaging/intelligent. If anything, it had the opposite effect. Games where you have to establish aggro and healing/buffing draws aggro tend to have much slower and less dynamic combat because you buff the tanker, tanker goes in, gets aggro, DPS move in, etc.

Nein danke. I prefer the fast paced and dynamic combat this game has. An interesting question though. I do quite like the way the new content is going, being much more engaging encounters.

Smart encounters = good

Tank 'n Spank encounters = baaaad

An interesting idea, but I think a lot of stuff would need to be rebalanced if something like this were put into effect. Not to mention that buff sets aren't really the most popular right now anyway, and this would just disincentivize playing them.

I would definately be ok with the change if they made it as an option prior to starting the mission, like during an Ice crystal mission.

Enemies constantly buffed....NO
Players constanly debuffed....NO
Heals, Buffs, Debuffs cause agro...YES

I'd pick it every time.

The only one that would be exempt would be Mind control, because the hidden factor is important. You couldnt confuse a Boss once and have him agro onto you.

Personally I hated the "smart" enemies in Guild Wars because they were TOO smart. They were very insistent on avoiding every single AoE attack, cutting down healers, and interrupting any interruptable power as soon as you try to use them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Instead of having every enemy be "smart", how about having a few smart enemies? Maybe 25% of the mobs have the "smart" AI and get aggro from healing/buffs/debuffs/ugly costumes. That way the current dynamic isn't completely lost but a new element of surprise is tossed in the ring. It might spice up fights a bit.

Keep in mind that many games have this mechanic mainly because they also have a "healing" or "support" role in which one character does not use any attacks at all. The reason buffs have to cause threat is that otherwise nothing would ever go after the "healers." I have never had that problem in this game. Although playing around with threat can make some powers more interesting; for example, if Healing Aura-style powers caused threat but Absorb Pain had none.

Speaking of Power Word: Shield, I cry every day that that is not how Force Fields were implemented here, at least as one of the buffs. That would have been a fantastic style power for Force Field to have gotten on a 90 second Recharge or so. Curse you, cottage rule.

What you are all forgetting in this thread is how tanking works in comic books.

The person wanting the aggro has to insult or in some way get the enemy offended by his presence, so that the enemy just doesn't care about the squishy guy nearby.

The solution here is to tie the taunt power, and a few other ones to your battle-cry, and then have lame ones generate less threat.


In a bit more seriousness, I would like to see something a bit more... dynamic. What I have in mind is this (yes, it's speculation and won't ever happen):

Threat can be generated by anything a player does, not by what they look like or their AT, though naturally, tankers would generate more or something. The reason here is that we fight enough enemies that _wouldn't_ care if you're wearing armor while i'm in cloth. I imagine zombies (for example) can't tell the difference. The enemies simply become focused on whatever upset them: a buff, a debuff, damage, someone shouting, whatever. The lower their health, the harder it is to get them to change targets, however, their blind anger doesn't lend them so well to actually hitting their intended target. Basically, if they fire at you, and the tanker gets between you and the attack, the tanker can take the hit. This would probably just be automatic for the most part, and would work on melee any time he's near you.

The result: More variable threat, and more dynamic tanking in a way that doesn't just revolve around numbers. The tank can tank by actively trying to move near attacking enemies to intercept them, and the enemies can target whoever they think is the threat, based on what they've done.


Yeah, never gonna happen.

It's my belief that every suggestion has a valid reason behind it. The suggestion itself may not be the best way to fix an issue, but an issue exists nonetheless.

The heart of the problem is that sometimes Tankers don't fit in a team, as their Taunt isn't needed. Bruising was added to address that problem somewhat, but while Tankers are more viable now, all bruising did was to make tankers a bigger damage contribution on steamroller teams, and didn't help make their tank role more important on said teams.

The fact is that Taunt is just a form of mitigation that does the same as any other form of mitigation, and doesn't bring anything special to the table besides a range debuff that helps clustering mobs a bit easier.

One way to go about making Tankers more viable on steamrolling teams is giving Taunt a bigger importance in mitigation, which is what I think Dech's suggestion is about.

The other way is to make Tankers more important to the damage aspect of a team, by building on the herder role of Tankers. Herding nowadays is a waste of time usually, and Tankers are just expected to take Alpha on steamrolling teams.

My suggestion to fix that is giving Tankers a buff to their Range Debuff capabilities. Taunt will make enemies go up close and personal more often than it does now.