What if....

I don't think a Tanker would even get bodyguard since bodyguard is the inherent of MM...if he had bodyguard, he'd stop being a Tanker with gauntlet and start being a MM with supremacy/bodyguard.

Although I can see a MM with stone armor on as brokeningly defensive, it'd probably be lacking the offensive punch of current MM...cripplingly so. I mean, are MMs not already brokenly powerful defensively and offensively? Take away their pets with an AoE and their ability to heal/buff them and you basically get a MM that's far more defensive at the crippling cost of needing to resummon defeated pets over and over.

Just going by what I hear on the forums all the time. I don't really play MMs much but I hear lots can solo the max difficulty, solo AVs, and all that jazz already but when it comes to incarnate stuff, all you heard was the gnashing of teeth, complaining that they can't keep their pets alive, that they can't contribute without them and so on...and it's not as if MMs get the greatest peronal buff mods either.

And how does Granite not debuff ranged? Because of the speed debuff? Aren't they already looking toward ways to lessen that little downfall when they decide to revisit SA, possibly changing granite all together?

Because a) self debuffs don't automatically translate to the pets and even if they did b) pets are immune from all recharge strength effects.

The -30% damage would be important, if it wasn't for the fact that mastermind pets have an intrinsically higher damage modifier than tankers do in the first place which neutralizes much of that difference. Comparing a Granite/Mastermind pet to the offense of a mastermind is missing the point: its turning a Granite tanker into a credible ranged offensive attacker.

A broken combination doesn't have to do everything better than everyone. That's gravy. It just has to do way more than ever intended. If I made an archetype with 95% of blaster ranged damage and 95% of tanker damage mitigation strength, the combination would be inferior in damage to a blaster and inferior in damage mitigation to a tanker and bat-**** crazy awesome.

Well I already know devs won't look at this thread or even if they did they won't take it consideration since probably they opted the the choice out a long time ago. Its just I missed old SWG (partly because of new SWTOR release coming close) and was getting this kind of things filling my head recently and just needed to get it out of my system. Responses were not bad either (neagitve or positive they had a certain maturity level. Well maybe except one)

Well, I don't think you fully grasp the complexity of the idea, but that shouldn't stop you from thinking about it. Everyone starts off ignorant, including me. Everything I know, or think I know about this subject is something I've learned, starting from back when I knew nothing. Its ok to ask questions as long as your goal is to strive for honest answers.

For all I know you're the person that invents the solution to the problems of making such a system that gets implemented in a live MMO. I just think its unlikely.

I should also point out that in spite of the fact that I say this is an incredibly difficult problem to resolve, and that most avenues to attack it have critical failures, I think after thinking about it for a *very* long time I could do it, albeit with a completely different way to structure powers in the game (and a lot of new mechanics). I don't think this is impossible in principle, I think its so hard its impossible to even know how hard without actually attempting to untangle all the knots in the problem.

Wel half of it comes to my mind while thinking how in-game base numbers shown. It says level 50 scrapper or level 50 brute while checking a power so I think if program checks depending on class than it can be switched to innate powers. Than I think a little more and said that same power in primary pool should be better than secondary pool (as well as I know this is already the case in example of tankers and scrappers) so maybe program already calculates these things and thats how they formed classes (at least CoV classes since they come later)

This would make it easier to power profiliate as weel instead of calculating all of numbers from a setthat you want to add another class you just switch a button and voila old set in another class.

Obviously these are my wishful thinking but I think it would be easier to find set-related problems this way and instead of keeping multiple copies of same power pools with different base numbers in database just keep one power pool in database and another database for primary pool adjustment, secondary pool adjustment, innate ability adjustment (or class adjustment for current system) but I guess it is not that easy since there are some differences in powers even in same set.

Powers have to be unique in the powers system, but in fact the first cut option to proliferating a power is simply to copy it to a powerset used by another archetype. Power effects are in fact calculated relative to the entity that uses them. Power Bolt, for example, is a "scale 1.0" damaging attack. Its pretty much scale 1.0 for everybody, but scale 1.0 damage is different for a blaster at level 50 (62.56) than a blaster at level 20 (31.94) than a defender at level 50 (36.15). You can even give it to critters, and that scale 1.0 attack will do different damage for a minion, an LT, a Boss, or an AV.

The problem comes in the fact that sometimes the devs don't *want* to give a different archetype the same power or powers. For example, you port a melee attack set to Stalkers, you have to make room for placate and assassin's strike. Conversely, look at the more recent example of proliferating Martial Arts to tankers. Storm Kick has an enhanced chance to crit, and Eagle's Claw boosts the chance to crit for Scrappers. But when you give the set to Tankers, the problem is that Tankers shouldn't crit at all, so you have to remove the crit. But then you've nerfed the damage of those powers and not given anything back, so the devs decided to add a self damage buff to EC and a self defense buff similar to Parry to Storm Kick specifically for Tankers.

This happens all the time, and actually it should probably happen more often than it does, because different archetypes need different things. And that sort of archetype customization tends to become problematic in a powerset free for all, which is why I wouldn't do it that way.