The best improvement?
HELL NO WE DO NOT NEED THIS.
I think that about sums it up.
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I understand many people have a lot of enthusiasm for this sort of thing, but I'll just say as someone who has studied the problem a lot, and not all just hypothetically, what you're describing would be so complex to implement its unlikely you'd ever see it implemented during the lifetime of this game. Where the difficulty lies is in the "obviously it needs to be tested to be balanced" part. Put it this way: I believe I could quicker implement such a system if I threw away the powers spreadsheets and started completely from scratch than if I was forced to attempt it using the existing powersets, even if I was given the option to eliminate options I could prove were problematic. It would take so long to check and verify the suitability of the various powersets that making new powersets would probably be faster.|
Originally Posted by Kangstor
I had this idea since I heard the announcement for freedom but I didn't have time to put it thoughts and I got it mostly because of other super hero MMO that went free to play.
Those who are familiar with other MMO knows that MMO had a "choose what you like as powers when you get a power" mentality and when they went to free to play they put class types that restrictiong players choices. Subscribers had the access to freeform and classes. After I see CoH: Freedom I wonder what would happen if CoH made the reverse move. Giving archetypes to free players and letting subscribers to freeform. After thinking over it I come following conclusion how can it be done. Primary&Secondary Power Pool: This power pool has all the powers that archetypes gets but instead of giving a primary and secondary pool based on your arche types all pools will be opened to select as primary. Once a pool selected from remaining power pools a secondary can be selected. Example Primary pool: support; Secondary Pool: Defense. Third power pools, epic powers and ancillary power pools remain same. Epic Archetypes remain same since they presents a different structure. Innate ability: After primary and secondary choosen a player can choose an archetypes innate ability based on his primary power pool. Example a player who choosed primary melee and secondary support can choose from critical strike, fury or assasination. Combination of primary pool, secondary pool and Innate ability also sets your characters base attributes (hit point, defense, damage etc.) Currently this is all I think about. Obviously it needs to be tested to be balanced and such but I think it will provide interesting concept heroes to be born. What are you thinking about this? Can it be done? what are your suggestions to improve this idea? |
I think its possible to do something like this, but not like you describe, and I don't think the devs would want to expend resources on this sort of project.
Keep in mind that "balancing" in the sense of culling overpowered options is actually the least of our problems in attempting something like this. We have to make sure we don't damage or destroy critical elements of why City of Heroes has been successful for seven years. Replayability is an often underappreciated aspect of City of Heroes that is due to the very non-open powers system many advocate eliminating the restrictions on. The other game you're familiar with, in my opinion, suffers this very problem.
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Interesting...
Innate ability could (or would?) define the 'class'. In other words, if you choose brute fury then you get brute style attributes with of course whatever primary and secondary you choose.
Yeah this or wait for proliferation 3000.
Trying to think of something that would be overpowered in this case. Hmm, can't, too lazy. BTW my friend has a great idea about balancing stuff. I'll see if he wants to comment.
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Think about Stone Armor/Robotics, and more importantly *why* it might not be a kosher combination.
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Originally Posted by Necromatic
Trying to think of something that would be overpowered in this case.
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Well, he may not die ever, but with robotics in the secondary and with no support, he won't be winning any damage contests either.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Think about Stone Armor/Robotics, and more importantly *why* it might not be a kosher combination.
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How bout, lol, electric melee/kinetics with brute fury.
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Fire Blast with an armor. /shield would work for abuse purposes.
It would be a hilarious mess. Maybe it'll happen when the game is about to well and truly tank. I'd see it as far likelier to just give each AT access to every one of their potential primaries and secondaries all at once, though. You'd still pick powers at their appropriate levels but you'd have every set for your AT to pick from. Still a hilarious mess but at least there would be differences in playstyle between ATs.
I do wonder what the last hurrah would be.
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Fire Assault/Invuln with Defiance. Load the attacks with Kinetic Combats and Thunderstrikes and the Resist powers with Aegis. Add Combat Jumping, Weave and a Steadfast Unique. If you're not softcapped to all but Psi, you're damn close, plus good resistance and a self heal. And if AT modifiers are attached to Inherent, as suggested above, both your ranged and melee damage are insanely high. If Endurance is a problem, add Brute Energy Mastery for Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection (and another ranged attack AND another cone).|
Originally Posted by Amy_Amp
Fire Blast with an armor. /shield would work for abuse purposes.
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Not nearly as overpowered, but Dual Pistols/Super Reflexes would be damn fun.
@Roderick
The other side of the coin from Overpowered is that you run into players who don't understand the game enough, coming in as new VIPs who would go, ooooohh.
FF and Sonic together, that sounds good oooh and I'll add containment to that, double damage when I mez them, shouldnt be too hard. and then he gets frustrated at his massive lack of damage, granted, teams may love him, but still...
For every OMG Overpowered FoTM that would come out of this there would easily be twice as many completely useless combinations that experienced players may do for the challenge, but new players may do for the interesting effect, and be completely put off.
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Originally Posted by VoodooGirl
[*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*
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Really, you don't see how a hp capped tank with stupid regen, softcapped defence and capped resistances that can keep at least an aggro cap worth of mobs focused on him so the bots can do their thing might be unbalanced? These are bots we are talking about. Have you seen incindiary missles hit a bunched up spawn of 17 mobs? Think 17 burn patches going off at once mate. You wouldnt need to pull out any bot besides the assault bot.
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Originally Posted by Necromatic
Well, he may not die ever, but with robotics in the secondary and with no support, he won't be winning any damage contests either.
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Standard MMs are more than able to keep the aggro cap of targets on them, thanks to their buff debuff secondaries, bodyguard, provoke and/or APP AoE immobilizes. Having stone armor instead of buffs debuffs would just lower damage in most situations.
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That would be pretty weak IMO. Without any shields/mez protection you would die just as quick as a defender would, while having to be in melee. Then scrapper crits would also be better since being attacked is the easiest way to build fury, while crits are always at full strength and go over the damage cap.|
Originally Posted by Necromatic
How bout, lol, electric melee/kinetics with brute fury.
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Plus lightning rod has the pet damage cap.
On the OP I wouldn't mind it,but doubt it would happen
Dirges
Very hard to implement, hard to balance, and it has the potential of hurting the game more than benefiting it.
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Funny thing I just thought of for Fire/shield. You could nuke and not lose your mezz protection. Ar/shield for rolling nuke goodness.|
Originally Posted by Roderick
Fire Assault/Invuln with Defiance. Load the attacks with Kinetic Combats and Thunderstrikes and the Resist powers with Aegis. Add Combat Jumping, Weave and a Steadfast Unique. If you're not softcapped to all but Psi, you're damn close, plus good resistance and a self heal. And if AT modifiers are attached to Inherent, as suggested above, both your ranged and melee damage are insanely high. If Endurance is a problem, add Brute Energy Mastery for Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection (and another ranged attack AND another cone).
Not nearly as overpowered, but Dual Pistols/Super Reflexes would be damn fun. |
IIRC, CoH was built like this before it was released, but the devs changed it in part because tank mages were about the only thing rolled.
Freeform power choices only work when there's an involved, committed, thoughtful game master closely supervising character design and desigining the adventures to fit.
That's what the tabletop version of that other game used to rely on. Sure, some GMs weren't very good -- and those campaigns weren't very good either. But that game's rules system was explicitly predicated on a GM being present and participating.
That cannot be done in an MMO. It's just not economically feasible to hire one dedicated GM for every team playing on a given night.
Without that, the idea degenerates into munchkinism more or less immediately.
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
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both are support powers right? Than you can't take both of them. When I mean power pools I mean the ones that we choose our powers from. If i am not mistaken all primary/secondary power pools are Melee, ranged, support, defense, control, buff/debuff, assault and summon except epic archetypes. So you choose two different pools for your primary and secondary. |
Originally Posted by Mega_Jamie
FF and Sonic together, that sounds good oooh and I'll add containment to that, double damage when I mez them, shouldnt be too hard. and then he gets frustrated at his massive lack of damage, granted, teams may love him, but still...
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It will be even easier to do this with new character select screen since it asks what type you want to play now when someone choose one instead of pointing archetype it will give powers under that category than do same for secondary pool. At third option it will presents innate ability selection based on primary pool and show last calculation of hit points and damage (as low, medium, high etc) than move to body type.
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No. That was not why they changed it.|
Originally Posted by Amy_Amp
IIRC, CoH was built like this before it was released, but the devs changed it in part because tank mages were about the only thing rolled.
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They changed the system because it was impossible to balance around. A freeform power-system is quite simply bad MMO game design.
I think Sailboat nails the problem on the head quiet well. A freeform system works in an environment where certain caveats are met:
- The in-game situations can be randomized by a Game-Master
- The character must take penalties to their character to obtain certain feats or powers
Which is where we get back to the lack of flexibility on the part of a game. The game situations have to be presented to a wide range of players with a wide range of capabilities. The game itself is not flexible and cannot adapt itself to the strengths or weaknesses of the player themselves.
The Cryptic developers found out very, very, very early on that a Freeform power-system was simply bad game design, and they threw the idea out the window pretty quickly, before City of Heroes ever launched. Which is why we get shock-horror at the launch of Champions Online which revived the Free-form power system... and... as we witnessed in the sales market... it was still broken and the Cryptic developers could not balance the game properly. Eventually the Cryptic development team had to give in and go back to the Archetype system. Just to make a fair point of it, there are some very good reasons Champions Online bombed, why Atari dropped Cryptic like a hot potato, and why Cryptic is now owned by a Chinese company that specializes in low-budget Micro-transaction games.
This game, City of Heroes, does not need to repeat the catastrophic mistakes made by Atari and Cryptic Studios.
Devil's Advocate...
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If I read the OP correctly, your primary chooses which AT you'd 'technically' be and/or give you the choice of what inherent you can have.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Think about Stone Armor/Robotics, and more importantly *why* it might not be a kosher combination.
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A Stone Armor/ character would be automatically be categorized as a Tanker so /Robotics would use Tanker mods for pet damage. You can keep foes taunted to yourself up to cap, but pets bypass that cap and without support to keep your pets alive, they'd probably die eventually. The combo would be an aggro monster but probably not much else.
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Originally Posted by Roderick
Fire Assault/Invuln with Defiance. Load the attacks with Kinetic Combats and Thunderstrikes and the Resist powers with Aegis. Add Combat Jumping, Weave and a Steadfast Unique. If you're not softcapped to all but Psi, you're damn close, plus good resistance and a self heal. And if AT modifiers are attached to Inherent, as suggested above, both your ranged and melee damage are insanely high. If Endurance is a problem, add Brute Energy Mastery for Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection (and another ranged attack AND another cone).
Not nearly as overpowered, but Dual Pistols/Super Reflexes would be damn fun. |
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Originally Posted by SinisterDirge
Really, you don't see how a hp capped tank with stupid regen, softcapped defence and capped resistances that can keep at least an aggro cap worth of mobs focused on him so the bots can do their thing might be unbalanced? These are bots we are talking about. Have you seen incindiary missles hit a bunched up spawn of 17 mobs? Think 17 burn patches going off at once mate. You wouldnt need to pull out any bot besides the assault bot.
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Originally Posted by Sailboat
Freeform power choices only work when there's an involved, committed, thoughtful game master closely supervising character design and desigining the adventures to fit.
That's what the tabletop version of that other game used to rely on. Sure, some GMs weren't very good -- and those campaigns weren't very good either. But that game's rules system was explicitly predicated on a GM being present and participating. That cannot be done in an MMO. It's just not economically feasible to hire one dedicated GM for every team playing on a given night. Without that, the idea degenerates into munchkinism more or less immediately. |
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You read correctly though I aim to provide at least two selections (At most three) for each power pool. For defense power pool primary; I would probably put gauntlet and fury (fury fills as you are attacked too after all) as options while for melee primary critical strike, fury and assassination. Secondaries get weaker base numbers compared to primary pool so example of stone/robotics won't be that overpowered since bots won't have that much damage output and a robot/stone won't have enough taunt to keep bots alive to be overpowered.
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Originally Posted by Leo_G
If I read the OP correctly, your primary chooses which AT you'd 'technically' be and/or give you the choice of what inherent you can have.
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that sounds a lot better than what they intend to use that server for
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Originally Posted by Leo_G
Devil's Advocate...
If I read the OP correctly, your primary chooses which AT you'd 'technically' be and/or give you the choice of what inherent you can have. A Stone Armor/ character would be automatically be categorized as a Tanker so /Robotics would use Tanker mods for pet damage. You can keep foes taunted to yourself up to cap, but pets bypass that cap and without support to keep your pets alive, they'd probably die eventually. The combo would be an aggro monster but probably not much else. It wasn't indicated, but if I were guessing, choosing an assault set as a primary would mean the character gets Domination as its inherent. A /Fire Tanker would probably do just as good considering the mods for pets. I think it'd be a fun little game if the devs made a VIP server, very small load, maybe only 300 at a time. Everything is periodically wiped every other week, and the rules are lax. A few GMs would just josh around, doing what actual GMs do, maybe they'd give a dozen or so vets privlages to help police things. Players could make outrageous combos, the GMs could do random BS like waves of gian monsters, open PvP...just craziness. |
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I see you've never played a /Stone Brute then. |
Originally Posted by Kangstor
Secondaries get weaker base numbers compared to primary pool so example of stone/robotics won't be that overpowered since bots won't have that much damage output and a robot/stone won't have enough taunt to keep bots alive to be overpowered.
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Stone Armor, even as a secondary, is still so ridiculously survivable that it would be a cakewalk to tank things for your bots. As long as you didn't set your difficulty so high that you routinely exceeded the agro cap your bots would likely never die and just keep pumping out damage.
Maybe freeform power selection could work if they had coded it into the game from the beginning, but shoehorning it into the game NOW would pretty much break the entire game -OR- it would mean that we would see nothing new for at least a couple years while the entire dev team worked on trying to balance a completely unbalanceable system.
This suggestion has been shot down many times already. And it has been shot down for a good reason. Allowing freeform power selection in this game is a horrible idea.
Look at the possibility of Shield Defense/Fire Manipulation. On the Shield side you'd get: The damage boost and taunt of Against All Odds, Shield Charge, Tanker defense numbers since it's the primary (able to softcap almost without IOs at all). A passive HP boost. On the Manipulation side you'd get: 2 damage auras, Fire Sword Circle, Combustion, Burn, Build Up, Fire Sword. Even with tanker damage numbers, that would be stupidly overpowered. I mean, 2 damage auras being buffed by AAO? FOUR PBAoE attacks? You'd have the ultimate overpowered farmer there.
And if you went with Pyre Mastery or Mu Mastery, you'd get even more AoE.
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Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately. |
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Most can't, but that's really besides the point. I asked people to think about *why* that powerset combination would be broken, because its critical to understanding how this game is constructed. Bodyguard was put in to give masterminds, with low health and no personal defenses, more survivability. Giving any tanker bodyguard, much less a tanker that can come close to capping resistances on everything, obviously breaks the design of bodyguard.|
Originally Posted by Nihilii
Standard MMs are more than able to keep the aggro cap of targets on them, thanks to their buff debuff secondaries, bodyguard, provoke and/or APP AoE immobilizes. Having stone armor instead of buffs debuffs would just lower damage in most situations.
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Conversely, giving Granite tankers a ton of ranged offense that Granite itself cannot debuff breaks Granite. If you want to say that giving a mastermind granite level survivability is a non-issue, you're talking about an area of game design and game balance far outside the realm of reasonable discussion.
There are other more obvious performance-stretching combinations, but this one seemed to me to best illustrate the design-breaking issues intrinsic with allowing free form powerset and inherent ability combinations.
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One problem with commenting on suggestions like this is that I know virtually *any* combination of decisions is going to lead to a broken system, but the precise *way* you make them changes how they are broken. For example, you say a /Robotics would use Tanker mods for pet damage. Why? Pets and other entities always use their own damage modifiers. Controllers and Dominators don't have different damage scale pets.|
Originally Posted by Leo_G
Devil's Advocate...
If I read the OP correctly, your primary chooses which AT you'd 'technically' be and/or give you the choice of what inherent you can have. A Stone Armor/ character would be automatically be categorized as a Tanker so /Robotics would use Tanker mods for pet damage. You can keep foes taunted to yourself up to cap, but pets bypass that cap and without support to keep your pets alive, they'd probably die eventually. The combo would be an aggro monster but probably not much else. |
Conversely, if you change the game radically to implement that kind of thing, what happens to FireBlast/Robotics blasters. Do they get a complement of bots that all shoot from range with blaster modifiers and Defiance buffs?
In such a game blasters, defenders, and corruptors basically disappear. There's almost no reason to make one of any of them. All three have a ranged attack set, which means all of them can pick it as primary and then take blaster mods. Blasters have the highest health. Blasters have the highest ranged damage modifier. The isn't a really good compelling reason to make a blapper that doesn't have a defensive powerset, and there's only a very weak reason to trade better buff modifiers for better damage *and* higher health. If the trade between corruptors and defenders is even, and it might not even be, then the trade to a super corruptor with blaster health and the blaster modifier and damage cap would be better. Scorge is great in certain special circumstances, like using Blizzard. But I suspect having almost twice the maximum ranged damage potential will be better, and some corruptors will have an easier time getting there than blasters.
The thing to realize is that each powerset was designed in a particular way to match up with the kinds of other powersets it could pair up with. When you allow anything to be a primary and anything to be a secondary and any two to combine, you're going to pair up things not just not intended to be combined, but things designed on the *premise* that they would never be combined. And then you're going to have game-breaking problems.
And remember that all of this has to work from 1-49 played by average players slotting normal enhancements. How it breaks or doesn't break at level 50 is the least important concern.
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I had this idea since I heard the announcement for freedom but I didn't have time to put it thoughts and I got it mostly because of other super hero MMO that went free to play.
Those who are familiar with other MMO knows that MMO had a "choose what you like as powers when you get a power" mentality and when they went to free to play they put class types that restrictiong players choices. Subscribers had the access to freeform and classes.
After I see CoH: Freedom I wonder what would happen if CoH made the reverse move. Giving archetypes to free players and letting subscribers to freeform. After thinking over it I come following conclusion how can it be done.
Primary&Secondary Power Pool: This power pool has all the powers that archetypes gets but instead of giving a primary and secondary pool based on your arche types all pools will be opened to select as primary. Once a pool selected from remaining power pools a secondary can be selected. Example Primary pool: support; Secondary Pool: Defense.
Third power pools, epic powers and ancillary power pools remain same.
Epic Archetypes remain same since they presents a different structure.
Innate ability: After primary and secondary choosen a player can choose an archetypes innate ability based on his primary power pool. Example a player who choosed primary melee and secondary support can choose from critical strike, fury or assasination.
Combination of primary pool, secondary pool and Innate ability also sets your characters base attributes (hit point, defense, damage etc.)
Currently this is all I think about. Obviously it needs to be tested to be balanced and such but I think it will provide interesting concept heroes to be born.
What are you thinking about this? Can it be done? what are your suggestions to improve this idea?