Too many tankmages.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-08-10 21:26 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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Well if you can't solo something, you can always team up with someone to beat it. I also had a couple toons that couldn't solo the Alpha slot arc, but in a duo with someone else, it was cake.|
Originally Posted by Tenzhi
Only one of my level 50 characters was able to do those "regular" missions. The rest of them couldn't beat that guy who creates duplicates of himself.
I don't really have a main. I just have characters and I play them (or make new ones) as my mood dictates. On the one character who had an Alpha slot open, at the time I didn't see a way to craft an Alpha that didn't require shards so I converted to iXP towards other slots. On the others it all had to be converted to open the Alpha slot. After which I no longer wanted to do those trials because getting into them was often a time-consuming process and playing them was not very fun to begin with. |
As far as the trials, I'm not sure what the problem is. To me they're just another mission where you kill stuff, like any other mission in the game. And getting into a trial is very easy. Simply go to pocket D, and you'll most likely be able to find a trial within 5-10 mins. That's where everybody goes to organize them.
It was a lot harder to craft your Alpha before the trials, since you had to do a bunch of regular TF's. Now it's much easier. On average, a trial goes several times faster than just about any TF.
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The only things that's somewhat questionable is what I bolded...|
Originally Posted by m3lon
Congratulations guys, we've beat the game! We've done everything from making Blasters than can tank AV's, to making Tankers that can slaughter masses. Empaths are soloing AVs and Scrappers are getting healing badges. We've finally reached the point where anything can do everything.
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The rest leaves me to ask, have you even been playing?
ANYONE can get the healing badges, saying otherwise is
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All of this is very arguable, especially in a genre that is based around stat-based over skill-based gameplay to start with. Regardless, either you look at "anyone should be able to win" as a design goal for the vast majority of studios or you assume these game developers aren't competent at making games. I would think the commercial success of MMORPGs in general and WoW in particular, console shooters in general and the Call of Duty franchise in particular, the Sims series, or even the much bigger casual games industry is proof enough that not only people like easy games, but most people like easy games.| While I don't debate that many of you may enjoy the challenges that such behavior creates, it's just not reasonable as a game designer to expect players to forgo content or powers (and exempting is a form of forgoing content) in order to create challenge. It would be no more reasonable to expect burnt out players to stab themselves in the hand before handling their mouse, simply because steamrolling would be more difficult as a result. No, one of the major challenges in game design is difficulty and if the game is easy enough to allow anyone to solo anything, that's a good sign that the game's difficulty needs to be re-examined |
If you purposefully pick a genre that is renowned for low difficulty, then proceed to study the game and minmax your character rather than simply play as is intended, then seclude yourself within a tight community of friends who play as good as you do, and end up complaining the game is too easy, it's hard to spare any sympathy. You couldn't possibly work harder to ruin your own experience except maybe by starting a first-person shooter and opening up the console to toggle godmode on, or something. For everyone else, the game can present an adequate level of challenge, and boosting enemy power levels using minmaxers as a baseline would ruin it for regular folks.
On another note, I find it ironic that this pops up now, even though the game has always been easy enough for someone determined to do any task with any AT except the Hamidon... Up until now, with itrials that are failable (and PUGs still fail trials occasionally) and very possibly not soloable (BAF and Keyes, that is). Up until the difficulty slider change, this game offered much less challenge than it does now unless one purposefully stabbed themselves in the hand by not using inspirations. Besides insps, I don't care how good anyone is at the game, soloing hard factions on +4/x8 on an IOed out character with incarnate powers is most of the time much harder than soloing the same hard factions on +2/x1 on a SO only character, which is what Invincible was.
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Interesting point. I was under the impression that overly easy games are a bad from a design standpoint because it tends to cause the replay value to suffer, but perhaps I'm wrong. It's hard to argue with your point that most people do indeed like easy games. I never thought of CoH as an easy game, but maybe this is where that "I'm a superhero, and it's endless fun being overpowered" viewpoint comes into play. hmm
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Originally Posted by Nihilii
not only people like easy games, but most people like easy games.
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A million times this.
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Originally Posted by Tenzhi
Because everything I want for one character is usually not everything I want for a different character. Hence why they are different characters.
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City of Heroes is an easy game. It is a very casual friendly and casual focused game.|
Originally Posted by Little_Whorn
Interesting point. I was under the impression that overly easy games are a bad from a design standpoint because it tends to cause the replay value to suffer, but perhaps I'm wrong. It's hard to argue with your point that most people do indeed like easy games. I never thought of CoH as an easy game, but maybe this is where that "I'm a superhero, and it's endless fun being overpowered" viewpoint comes into play. hmm
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I can, and do, run every single one of my characters up to level 22, sometimes up to level 27, without enhancements. None. No TO, DO, SO, IO. Zilch. Nada. Prior to the invention system, I would commonly forget to refresh my SOs and so I was playing at least half the time as if I didn't have any enhancements all the way up to level 50. With the invention system, I kit myself out in level appropriate (meaning level 25, 30 or 45) generic IOs with a scattering of set IOs. I do this because they are literally slot and go.
Sometimes I get ambitious and invest into IO Sets for a specific character that I love playing. Sometimes I unlock the alpha slot and get a power to put into it. I'm slowly working my way into unlocking and equipping the higher incarnate slots on select characters.
I shouldn't be required to do so though in order to play an effective and enjoyable character.
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Adjusting the difficulty to account for the IO'd people, to account for the incarnates, is going to gut my ability to play the game. Give them content that requires a "you must have this amount of this kind of global bonuses from IO sets" or "you must have this many t4 incarnate abilities unlocked and slotted"? Sure. Sounds fun.
Adjust the rest of the game to essentially require those things? Pancake no. Not interested.
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Just comparing the effort needed to reach a given level not the effectiveness of that level|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Not exactly sure what you mean by that, but I should point out there was no soft cap in the same sense there is now in the pre-ED days.
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Higher levels of power have been much more democratized now than in the past: its easier to get what used to be very difficult to get before. But the absolute all-out maximum performance hasn't gone up all that much from the I2 or the pre-ED days in most cases. No amount of inventions and incarnate powers is going to return my Ill/Rad to her glory days pre I5. Nothing is going to really replace the old school perma-Elude (and stronger Aid self) of my I2 MA/SR. I'm not even likely to see my centriole-packing blaster build hitting everything from sniper range with 300% attacks ever again in a live build. My MA/SR is offensively stronger now against the aggro cap of +2s than my perma-elude build was. So its not all bad. But we haven't completely transcended the old days just yet. |
Many of the changes you are talking about really aren't about changes in the way enhancements and inventions work but are about overall nerfs to the way particular powers work. While your ill/rad isn't as powerful perma doms are much more powerful. The doms can take max advantage of invention system.
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http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=266564
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Originally Posted by Mr. DJ
The only things that's somewhat questionable is what I bolded...
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Mains (Freedom) @Auroxis
Auroxis - Emp/Rad/Power Defender Pylon Video Soloing an AV
Pelvic Thunder - SS/Elec/Mu Brute
Sorajin - Elec/Nin Stalker
Neuropain - Sonic/Mental/Elec Blaster
I embrace this game, the only thing they can do that would make me happier is get rid of the dang aggro cap, that way tanks can tank. But of course this comes from a tank perspective. I have played other classes though, and I honestly think there is exageration in this thread. The majority of pub runs on + 0 x 8 or + 0 x 1 because they like to speed run. I have been playing on and off since 08' and I have come to terms to the changes they made after ED, and now we have to realize that this game is old, and we have learned the mechanics of the game. We have it built into our learned behavior so the game seems easy, and we know how to play our characters beyond their limits.
Don't get me wrong, CoH has added loads of content, its what keeps me playing, but the vets in this game know everything about everything and the lead guilds set the main way to run the trials and task forces. People go on the forums and ask for builds and the experts build them their characters.
We can still have fun though, by pushing our limits even farther. Sure you can kill an AV, but can you kill Ghost Widow? at lvl 51? 52? 53? 54? lol I know it sounds ridiculous but I think some of us have just hit the point where we have beat the game, we number crunch to the .5%, we make new characters to pass the time, and wait for the next update.
I love what their doing with the Incarnate system, we may be able to destroy all the content except for the trials, but then we know what to focus on to become better and have a stronger challenge. We go on these trials and learn them and wait for the next set of trials and incarnate trees. Imagine what we will be able to do once we are full incarnates and doing content that requires a full team of full incarnates? that will be intense. but then of course we will get that down to routine and need more content. that is the way of mmos.
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I'm somewhat of a rhetorical person. |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That was somewhat of a rhetorical question. The point is that some people like yourself have one answer that involves differentiating alts in your mind, and other people, and probably far too many, have another answer that involves playing another game entirely.
There's absolutely no question in my mind that CO would have more players if it didn't jettison archetypes. That doesn't mean it was the wrong idea: there's a place for different games with different ideas, and the people who want what CO offers deserve to have an MMO just as much as the people who like archetypes in CoH do. But there's absolutely no question in my mind that the people who thought archetypes were arbitrary limitations that were unambiguously bad for the game were epically wrong. |
For my part, I quit CO because I found it too difficult overall. Which may speak to the 'people like easy games' discussion.
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Originally Posted by Supermax
As far as the trials, I'm not sure what the problem is. To me they're just another mission where you kill stuff, like any other mission in the game. And getting into a trial is very easy. Simply go to pocket D, and you'll most likely be able to find a trial within 5-10 mins. That's where everybody goes to organize them.
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| It was a lot harder to craft your Alpha before the trials, since you had to do a bunch of regular TF's. Now it's much easier. On average, a trial goes several times faster than just about any TF. |
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I have absolutely no question in my mind that CO would have more players if they had designed the game better. Of course, a poorly designed open game is worse than a well designed game with archetypes.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
There's absolutely no question in my mind that CO would have more players if it didn't jettison archetypes.
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If I am one of the first 6 people in a league, I expect the trial to start in no less than 45 minutes, more likely an hour. If I do not have at least an hour and a half to play uninterrupted, I don't even bother trying for a trial.
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Originally Posted by Supermax
As far as the trials, I'm not sure what the problem is. To me they're just another mission where you kill stuff, like any other mission in the game. And getting into a trial is very easy. Simply go to pocket D, and you'll most likely be able to find a trial within 5-10 mins. That's where everybody goes to organize them.
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The incarnate system is limiting in one way, but it isn't all bad: while there are many people who are unwilling to do the trials in any form, they are the minority. Conversely, for many players unwilling to farm or marketeer, the path to at least nominal amounts of incarnate power is far easier than the path to high level invention builds, and the moderate levels of incarnate power do not vastly outstrip the higher levels like the top tier invention builds do. It does act to distribute power in a different way than the invention system. Its an end game system, so it will be a minority participation system for a while, just as even leveling was. But it will likely act net to spread power out over a wider percentage of players, or at least those with level 50s.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Don't know how you are using democratized, but we have recently taken a large step back from that. The high end incarnate powers as a practical matter are only available to people willing to do trials. Seeing as incarnate items are all account bound this limits access to the current peak of power.
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| Many of the changes you are talking about really aren't about changes in the way enhancements and inventions work but are about overall nerfs to the way particular powers work. While your ill/rad isn't as powerful perma doms are much more powerful. The doms can take max advantage of invention system. |
Just a note: we talk about the +4s in the trials like they are at least a significant threat, even if strong teams can deal with them. Back in the I2 days PUGs used to farm +5s with relative ease. In some areas we are more powerful, but in other areas we haven't even scratched the surface of circa I2/I3 power.
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Originally Posted by rsclark
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Seeing as that other game now has archetypes and freeform characters, its much more likely the unfinished nature of the product that scuttled it. Everybody always acts like a freeform system has to converge to one optimal solution. This is not so at all.
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Originally Posted by rsclark
If I am one of the first 6 people in a league, I expect the trial to start in no less than 45 minutes, more likely an hour. If I do not have at least an hour and a half to play uninterrupted, I don't even bother trying for a trial.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The incarnate system is limiting in one way, but it isn't all bad: while there are many people who are unwilling to do the trials in any form, they are the minority. Conversely, for many players unwilling to farm or marketeer, the path to at least nominal amounts of incarnate power is far easier than the path to high level invention builds, and the moderate levels of incarnate power do not vastly outstrip the higher levels like the top tier invention builds do. It does act to distribute power in a different way than the invention system. Its an end game system, so it will be a minority participation system for a while, just as even leveling was. But it will likely act net to spread power out over a wider percentage of players, or at least those with level 50s.
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This is true, but I was responding to the statement that given the changes since ED, we're all vastly more powerful than we used to be. That's not generally true. The fact that its not generally true because of other counterbalancing changes doesn't change the point. In fact, it is the point. Just a note: we talk about the +4s in the trials like they are at least a significant threat, even if strong teams can deal with them. Back in the I2 days PUGs used to farm +5s with relative ease. In some areas we are more powerful, but in other areas we haven't even scratched the surface of circa I2/I3 power. |
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That is a contradiction. If the trials are "punishing" and only allowing people with very high end builds to succeed in them, you can't turn around and say we had "people" soloing the collection phases. That would be only the top tiny percentage of the top tiny percentage of players by your assertions. When I talk about teams blasting through +5s back in the day, I'm not talking about the top tiny percentage of all teams. I'm talking about any full team with a couple buffers over the mid 30s in level. If you were not there, you really don't know what it was like.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
For that to be so you would need the people willing to grind the trials, to be a much wider slice of the population than those willing to build high end invention builds. The trials by their nature are very punishing to people without high end builds. So it seems a stretch to take that as given.
... We had people soloing the collection phases and doors from day 1, and to some extent the new enemies are crafted to defeat many of the common things people do to improve their characters. |
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We had people with very high end builds that were able to handle them. The people who didn't spent their time in the hospital. No contradiction.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That is a contradiction. If the trials are "punishing" and only allowing people with very high end builds to succeed in them, you can't turn around and say we had "people" soloing the collection phases. That would be only the top tiny percentage of the top tiny percentage of players by your assertions. When I talk about teams blasting through +5s back in the day, I'm not talking about the top tiny percentage of all teams. I'm talking about any full team with a couple buffers over the mid 30s in level. If you were not there, you really don't know what it was like.
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That seems to contradict your earlier assertion that the current regime is more democratic. If you had most everyone at a level of power that was overpowered then you can hardly say we have greater access now.
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I never said *everyone* was more powerful back then, I said most teams were, because circumstances conspired to create both higher levels of force multiplication then than now, and because the average team was bound to have enough of the right thing to make them into high powered steamrollers. Today, the lows are far less low, and the highs generally slightly less high, making the overall level of power that everyone wields far more closer together than in the past.|
Originally Posted by Another_Fan
We had people with very high end builds that were able to handle them. The people who didn't spent their time in the hospital. No contradiction.
That seems to contradict your earlier assertion that the current regime is more democratic. If you had most everyone at a level of power that was overpowered then you can hardly say we have greater access now. |
If you played back then, you would have seen unbelievable swings and changes in power level. I saw it first hand by playing both Ill/Rad and MA/SR from basically release. MA/SR was one of the worst *anything* you could make at release, and then MA was buffed to "not ridiculously bad" in I1, and SR was buffed to "monster" in I2. Since then, MA/SR has never quite been as powerful. A similar story can be said about Ill/Rad. I remember when the first Fire/Kins really burst onto the scene: if Fire/Kin is borderline broken now, it was ludicrous back then.
If you were an Invuln in I1 - an invuln anything, scrapper or tanker - you were basically indestructible with both perma-unstoppable and double-stacking multityped invincibility. In I2, the thing to be was perma-Elude or Regen. But if you were Dark, you were screwed until the devs a) reduced the end costs of Dark Regen to "high" from "wtf?" and b) allowed your armors to stack. If you were a Fire controller you probably had up to a dozen imps flying around. If you were Illusion, you were golden after the tweaks to PA and terrorize. If you were any other controller, your offense was not really competitive and if you were a mind controller god help you before they changed the confuse rules, when you were basically kill-stealing your own team.
The *best* you could do was a lot better in the early days than now. But the worst you could do was also really, really bad back then. If you didn't play blasters before the first round of buffs minus broken smoke grenade, if you didn't play pre-stacking Dark Armor or pre-Elude SR, if you didn't play pre-Singularity Gravity or kill-stealing Mind, you simply don't know what the range in ability was in the "good ol' days."
There will always be standouts, then and now: people playing several standard deviations from the norm. But overall, if you look at scrappers, if you look at controllers, if you look at tankers, we're all much closer together than we have ever been, and we can all be much more powerful on average than we could be then. In that sense the overall trend has been to democratize power. Its also true that the difference between the moderate invention build and high end builds is not as dramatic as the difference between someone with a couple HOs and someone fully decked out in them. But its also true that nothing we can do today is extreme compared to what the strongest of the strong could do back then. We can sometimes equal the best we could do back then, and maybe arguably exceed what we could do back then in small ways, but we have yet to move the goal posts very far from where they were in those days.
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Skimming this thread made me realize something about my personal quest to survive +4/X8 fire cyborgs on a non-melee toon.
It is really the journey to tankmagery that is fun. Sure, in the end I can go into cyborgs and survive, heck thrive on my controller. But, I cannot tell you how much time and effort I put into him. How much fun it was to tweak builds on mids at home, at work, on my wife's computer...
All the time spent researching redtomax. And that's just time outside of the game! Accolade hunting, respeccing, farming, mishes, mishes and more mishes. All to perfect him. Is the game at fault for allowing his existence?
If it were truly impossible, if I found out in the end that it was a wasted journey, I think I might have given up on the game. I don't want homogenization. Just knowing that there is creative ways of achieving superpoweredness. Makes me hunger for the next project.
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I want the Archtypes to stand out more as well.
Maybe a revamp of the AT uniqueness may do the trick?
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This is one of the coolest posts from you that I have seen. Made me laugh.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I've been a strong opponent of homogenization for a long time (and its my main gripe with the incarnate power system) but now that I've seen what that kind of homogenization does in an actual superhero based MMO, I've gone from strong opponent to "Oh Hell No" religious zealot.
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Although, I have to admit that my take has been the opposite for the longest time.
The advent of the Incarnate system has proven (to me) beyond a shadow of a doubt that "homogenized" approaches or, like I like to refer to them; "GURPS", should be avoided on a system designed to encourage "repeatability".
The original design approach was pretty close to the path I would take.
Every AT should be able to take down enemies in a solo environment (mostly because of the genre we are talking about here) but each AT should approach this in different ways.
Where the original design "screwed up" was in the area of Buffs and Debuff. They were simply too powerful. No other MMO can boast such power from a buffing character except Healing. Which is why "healing" is such an important part of those other games.
Any future COH projects should consider going back to the root of the game and "revisit" how the original decisions created "imbalance" between ATs. But they should DEFINITELY stick to the same core IDEA of ATs.
Just my 2 cents
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This is a very good point.|
Originally Posted by Necromatic
Skimming this thread made me realize something about my personal quest to survive +4/X8 fire cyborgs on a non-melee toon.
It is really the journey to tankmagery that is fun. Sure, in the end I can go into cyborgs and survive, heck thrive on my controller. But, I cannot tell you how much time and effort I put into him. How much fun it was to tweak builds on mids at home, at work, on my wife's computer... All the time spent researching redtomax. And that's just time outside of the game! Accolade hunting, respeccing, farming, mishes, mishes and more mishes. All to perfect him. Is the game at fault for allowing his existence? If it were truly impossible, if I found out in the end that it was a wasted journey, I think I might have given up on the game. I don't want homogenization. Just knowing that there is creative ways of achieving superpoweredness. Makes me hunger for the next project. |
My Elec/Fire/Blaze scrapper is able to explode her way through 8-person maps with ease now, and is definitely a tank mage with survivability and good area and ranged damage.
And yet I'd rather play my Blaster, who is building up smashing/lethal defence slowly. The end results may be similar but each journey is very different.
Just thinking about this, I realised that having a power is in some ways more important than using it. I'm pretty sure I logged off once I'd got Fireball, for example, rather than racing off to do just once more mission and see how it felt. It felt like all the planning had paid off, and I could now wait.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Everybody always acts like a freeform system has to converge to one optimal solution. This is not so at all.
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In fairness, everyone acts that way because in over thirty years of video gaming, no one has been able to create a free form system that actually works.
To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, a balanced free-form system not only has to be balanced when the game first opens, but every single power added to the game over its lifetime has to be carefully crafted to avoid crippling the system. If you put all of your powers in one fish tank, the sharks eat the guppies.
It seems to me that the game is getting better as there's less of the 'we need X archtype with X power set or we aren't going to even start the Task Force'. There are now things to do at level 50, that take advantage of all those expensive sets we've been buying. There are new powers that layer on top of what we've already built while removing our reliance on other classes to be on their top game.
Saying 'the game is too easy' is simply saying you've been playing long enough to know better. Yet we still have lots of people passing over the Keyes Trial because it's 'too hard' despite the fact that it's actually quite simple by most MMO standards. What makes it hard? The other players in your trial not listening, not paying attention, or just plain not caring. It would help if anyone had ventrillo, but most of the CoH player base doesn't seem to have that little program. Or maybe it's a lack of vent servers. Either way, like everything that's come before it, eventually it will be simple and old-hat. The incarnate system will keep things fresh for perhaps another year. We'll see if CoH is out of gas when the Incarnate system is finished, but until then (and until SW:TOR) I plan to enjoy it.
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The BAF.
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Originally Posted by SpaceJew
Saying 'the game is too easy' is simply saying you've been playing long enough to know better. Yet we still have lots of people passing over the Keyes Trial because it's 'too hard' despite the fact that it's actually quite simple by most MMO standards. What makes it hard?
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The game where everyone is the same. It's been moving in that direction for the last couple years. Just look at the revamps and power changes made in that time and you'll see it plain as that zit on your nose.
Dominator Revamp - no more up and down ride that made them unique
Defender Revamp - more damage so they can solo instead of being team-oriented like they used to
Blaster Revamp - more HP, more damage and some mez protection so they don't need outside buffs anymore
Stalker Revamp - make them more 'scrappery' and less reliant on their unique stealth talents
Toss in the Invention System and Incarnate abilities and now no one has weaknesses, everyone has a nuke, and everyone has pets. Nobody needs anybody anymore!
Defenders - still team oriented, oh noes they can solo better now! and their damage buff disappears after...three teammates join the team?
Blaster - woo, I'm mez'd so I can still use my T1&2 Primary and T1 secondary! Still a glass cannon
Stalkers - needs teammates to be more "scrappery"
I know you can do better than 1 out of 4.