So I got a PM from Synapse about buffing Tankers

Well...

How would a tanker EVER match the aggro holding capacity of a Mastermind? Have you ever seen a buffed-up Mastermind driving his pets in a crowd? It's mind boggling. The AOE addition to buffs just made this even worse.

Wow! You've certainly got something bunched up tightly.

First of all, I'm sorry YOU didn't recognize a light hearted joke. (HINT: there was a reason I did the emote at the end of my "statement".) I'm sorry if my attempt to lighten things here a touch didn't work for you. As you pointed out, it was a "one-liner". Please see definition of "one-liner" here. See, it says "joke" in the definition there...

Maybe next time I should use the words "HUMOR HERE" so it won't be lost amongst the angst.

Originally Posted by PapaSlade Rangle's right....this is fun.

fixed

Alone on a farm, sure. Without a higher aggro cap, those enemies would just be picking their noses. But given your stated opinion on farming (with which I rather agree), I don't think this is your actual concern.

On a team, those enemies are going to be shooting at someone, though. Might as well be the guy who's already far tougher than necessary for normal situations. So on a team, you're reduced from "unkillable" to "still unkillable", while making your team safer and doing something a Brute can't. And if you're fighting enemies where you don't want three spawns of aggro, well, nothing forces you to tab around the whole room as you throw your attacks and taunts.

Except, you know, your taunt aura. Like...Invincibility or RttC. So better shut that off too.
Just what you want to do when surrounded by a bunch of enemies.

Oh, wait... no, that would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.


I'm still 100% against them upping the aggro cap. It affecting Tanker survivability is just another reason it shouldn't happen.

And before anyone suggests I (or anyone) could use the increased danger the tanker would be in to justify a damage increase, I just have to say again I don't want a blanket Tanker damage increase.



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Do you frequently find yourself with more than 17 enemies in range of your taunt aura? Which, by the way, target caps at 10 anyway? In the situations where I would be able to use a larger aggro cap, many of the enemies are spread out.

You're absolutely right about this.

If it worked how a fight would REALLY work, your tank would be useless or dead in any given battle. We can discard how fights work in comic books and movies too, because those happen however the writer wants them to happen, which is almost always just as illogical as you think the game's AI is.

Let's look at how an Invuln/SS, the "classic" tank, would fare in a battle in which your opponents behaved like real people with working brains. You know, like in real life.

- No one is going to get within arms reach of someone who shrugs of multiple people shooting him with machine guns. Your AK-47 can't hurt him and you're going to PUNCH him?! Darwin Award waiting to happen right there.

- If your enemy has someone just as tough as you, they will assign that person to keep you occupied. The two of you will be locked in a fight neither will ever win, effectively removed from the equation.

- Sooner or later, someone will figure out that you're vulnerable to psionic attacks, and they will bring a telepath to shut your brain off, rendering you brain dead and no longer a threat to anyone ever again. And if you manage to survive, you'll find that there's a telepath with any group of people who even thinks you MIGHT show up.

- Anyone with a brain is going to ignore the guy yelling insults at them and avoid him for the aforementioned reason that it's idiotic to get within range of your arms. Instead, they're going to go after the guy who just vaporized 30 of their buddies.

- There is no way one group of guys is going to run up and attack you while another group standing 50 feet away is going to stand around with their thumbs up their butts. If there are 75 guys in that room, you'll be fighting 75 guys, not 17.

Comic books, movies, and video games are one thing. Real life is another thing entirely. In real life, Lex Luthor would have shot Superman with a kryptonite bullet a long time ago. He's so used to being invulnerable he wouldn't even try to avoid it. Pretty sure a kryptonite bullet in the brainpan would take Supes out.

Other tanks would face similar problems:

- How well would an Ice tank fare against a dozen guys with flamethrowers? Because that's what they'd bring with them.

- Fire tanks would find that a lot more people have access to liquid nitrogen than they ever thought possible.

- Shield tanks would find that their little piece of metal isn't much good against an air strike.

- SR tanks would discover that napalm is difficult to dodge. Filling an entire room with sticky, difficult to extinguish fire will ruin the day of even the most agile person.

- Stone tanks would be mired in so much movement hindering materials that they would be effectively neutralized in a combat situation. Then there is the sniper waiting to put a bullet in your head the second you shut Granite Armor off so you could move again.

- Electric tanks would have great fun being doused in liquid rubber.

- Willpower tanks would find that a lot of people have rocket launchers, and they've gotten very good at hitting the same target with them all at once.

You don't want the game to be more realistic. Tanks would be completely useless in real life because people aren't stupid enough to let them dictate how the fight is going to go. They can and will bring your weakness to the fight, it wouldn't be like a video game where you can just avoid the groups you don't do well against. They would seek you out and remove your ability to stop them in the future, probably with lethal results. A real life superhero's career would be very short and end very messily.

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.

That doesn't matter. Shutting it down cancels the mitigation you get from the guys that are in range.

And if you didn't notice, enemies who are aggro'ed tend to bring their friends along for the ride. So, if for example the aggro cap raised to allow for three full spawns of enemies, all it takes is a Lt. from each of those spawns to be one of the 10 enemies the aura hits to aggro the spawn onto you. Plus, who says it'll hit the same 10 guys each pulse?

And since you can't control what your aura hits, or what that Scrapper who chased an enemy into another spawn (despite the fact the team is dealing with two already) brings back with them, my point stands.


I can see training enemies onto Tankers do be the next big thing in griefing. Since their defensive sets have been balanced for the last long while with the 17 cap in mind, I'm in no hurry to see how the typical player fares. I'm confident the devs are too smart to touch the aggro cap, just like they're smart enough not to boost Tanker base damage 3X.


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A little while back, when the Justice League comic was starting up again (this was before the New 52 reboot), there was a scene with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman going through the list of people they could invite to join the new League. They got to Hawkman's picture, and one of them said something like "yeah, we could use a tank". Probably not the exact phrasing, and I don't have it on hand right now to look up, but they definitely referred to him as a tank, and saw that as something which the team needed. Even though they already had Superman, right there in the same room. So apparently comics do have something called tanks, and Hawkman is one, but Superman isn't.
The comment was never explained or expanded upon that I know of, so I couldn't tell you just what they think a tank actually is.

I know this is digging back a couple pages into the thread, but I just remembered it and thought it was funny.

Whilst this is off-topic, in different areas the emoticons mean different things because facial expressions mean different things

When you use this it can mean that you are being a self obsessed cool, smug, git with some contempt to whom you are replying to. If you watch Lie to me, the half smile can show contempt.

When you use this your saying something in jest.

I avoid half smiles, in my post history they're extremely rare.

Not one to herd nerfs, but then would it make sense to up the aggro cap on brutes and scrappers in order to negatively affect their survivability?

LOL!!!

Ok, I can see that.

Still kinda sucks as a tanker, but MM's have their own problems.

Eeerrrgh....

Well, as Claws' "at the edge" model shows clearly, Scrappers are already by far the weakest of the three main meleer's under discussion. (Stalkers are getting some buffs, but they'd almost certainly remain even more delicate than scrappers.)

Brutes..... I dunno. But raising a scrappers aggro cap is a pure death sentence at the edge of the envelope, I fear. A brute might just soak up the extra fury and keep right on going.

I know the scene.

In that context, a tank is someone who is tough and packs a big punch and is anything but subtle. Like a military tank.

The three of them, likely view Superman and themselves in terms of filling leadership positions first, before whatever role in combat they may take.


Regardless, consider this: From the game's launch until a year and a half later, Tankers were the only Archetype (and until just last year the only blue side AT) that had super strength and invulnerability. In light of that, I don't know how can anyone can say they weren't intended to represent the popular comic characters who posses those abilities. Scrappers meanwhile, were given sets like Claws and Regeneration; no one disputes who they were intended to evoke:






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It would, if Tankers still weren't keeping them for feeling much aggro in the first place, but it would go over with Scrapper and Brute players like an airship made of some kind of dense metal.

I suggested, semi facetiously, that Brutes and Scrappers should get Gauntlet that trumps Tanker Gauntlet and that Tankers would have to use Taunt to peel aggro of them.

Maybe it's time enemies got an IQ upgrade and went after the melee ATs that are the most actual threat to them, rather than one that can shrug off their attacks but hits like a foam bat.




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Yep. I wasn't saying that OUR tanks don't represent something from comics, just that what THEY mean when they say tank is apparently something different. I just thought it was a funny example, not to particularly prove any point.
If we're upgrading AI for verisimilitude, they should be ignoring all the melee and shooting Controllers first. If we're upgrading AI because screw those other melee types, they have nice things that I wish I had...?

That is essentially what their extra HP is.


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Its funny, but characters in comics usually don't try to classify themselves, unless the book is trying to be meta or post modern.

Flying Brick is the accepted term for discussing the typical flight/strong/resillliant character, but I don't recall every actually seeing that used in a comic by one character to refer to another.

Strong Guy from X-Factor, called himself that because in his words, every team needs a strong guy.

Amusingly, in JLA: Crisis on Two Earths, Owlman says to Batman something to the effect of "You should have sent your flying strongman. He may have had a chance of stopping me."

Defined terms are rarely used, except by the fans, but the point I was trying to make was that the fact Tankers were the AT with those abilities from the beginning, and the only way to even make those heroes until last year, they were obviously intended to reflect those kinds of characters, no matter what a spreadsheet says.


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...and I don't know about you, but it drives me nuts when they do. Especially if they classify themselves/each other into categories that don't make any sense in-character, like the example we're discussing. "Tank" is an MMO concept which, as you've pointed out earlier, doesn't even make much sense in a comic book world. It wouldn't have bothered me if they'd just said outright that Hawkman was good at drawing attention, and that can be an asset. But instead they chose a silly MMO term that the characters probably wouldn't use or even be aware of. I half-expected them to follow up with describing how adding the Flash would really raise the team's average APM, or how they would advise the candidates they deemed unqualified to l2p.