So I got a PM from Synapse about buffing Tankers

You left out the one when Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are going through the list of potential candidates for the JLA (the revamp a couple of years ago after the final, final, FINAL, final Crisis...) where Batman refers to Hawkman as "a Tank".

"" doesn't represent "self obsessed cool, smug, git with some contempt to whom you are replying to" to me.

Since this is a written medium "vocal intent" isn't always easy to recognize.

Since I've never seen the show "Lie to Me" I don't have the same reference point you do.

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

While this would work, for the love of baby Jesus DO NOT turn KD into KB. In fact, converting all KB effects into KD with no possibility of increasing them beyond that point would be nice.

Stop reading the forums on your damn iPhone so you can actually follow the conversation.

Hopeling brings this up in Post #334 which is the entire reason behind the exchange you're responding to the end of.


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Then I should have waited for these to appear before posting.

What the frick are you replying to with this? Certainly not the quote you have in your post.

Just let it go and don't bother trying to figure it out. This is the kind of thing I have to deal with on a regular basis.



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Considering most squishies don't even have resistance to anything, typed or untyped is basically irrelevant to them.


Untyped damage allows a few things:

1) It allows the Tanker's larger base HP & larger HP cap to come into play vs. other ATs.
2) It allows the developers to treat most sets more fairly (sets without heals get penalized here, but then there is Rebirth as the effective counter)
3) It allows the developers to actually threaten Tankers, and some Brutes/Scrappers/WS/PB/Crabs in the first place.


You'll notice its generally used sparingly, and is often used as an area denial tactic and can be avoided. They want us to move when we play, probably due to player complaints of nothing but tank and spank.

We still have tank and spank, but now we also have some compelling reasons to move from time to time as well.

Its obvious to you what the intent was when the devs gave super strength to Tankers, but not when they gave them about half the damage of scrappers.

One rule the devs followed from the very beginning was, to the best extent possible, separating what things looked like and what they did. In fact, there was a time when what things did and what they looked like were implemented almost with *any* regard for each other. The super strength set is the devs concept of what tankers *look* like. The damage modifiers express what they think tankers *did*.

The problem that was hashed out years ago is one of normalization. The problem is that we can't just look at two comic book heroes' offense, and know only from that which one is the tanker or scrapper. And that's because in City of Heroes, that's dictated by both archetype *and* combat level. The combat level metaphor means a supposed defender could deal way more damage than a supposed blaster, if the defender had a far higher combat level.

Superman could hypothetically be a CoH Tanker to Wolverine's scrapper and still outdamage him: Superman could be level 100, or 1000, who knows?

Before City of Heroes came along, no one was saying Superman was a "Tanker" or even really *thinking* it. In gaming terms, Superman was a tank-mage. He could absorb tons of damage - without requiring support. He had massive offense. And he could hit you at range.

Most of the most powerful comic book characters were tank-mages. Even the Hulk was a tank-mage whose range was only trivially hampered by having to rip out the pavement and throw it at you. Above all, they were thought of as tank-mages because we couldn't imagine an MMO task they couldn't trivially solo. Neither Superman, nor Wonder Woman, nor the Hulk, nor the Silver Surfer, or Iron Man; none of them were missing anything of consequence that would require any support, at least not without writer's fiat.

Its worth noting that when this game launched, *nobody* was asking "why aren't comic book tankers properly represented." Nobody. Lots of people asked "why can't I make Superman?" but no one attempted to make the argument that we all knew what a comic book tanker was, and City of Heroes got it wrong. That's a relatively recent revisionist invention. If anyone was thinking it when we launched, they were in such small minority that the discussion never happened. And it would have been very quickly ridiculed. MMOs have evolved a lot since then, but that's sort of the point. The state of MMOs when this game launched was such that it was almost inconceivable to classify Superman as a "Tanker." Tank classes back then weren't just outdamaged by the other melee fighters, they barely *had* offense. Our Tankers had plenty enough damage to solo virtually all the content. Anyone familiar with other MMOs at the time thought that was insanely weird.


Whatever Tankers might evolve into today, its important to remember their original intent because we don't change things out from a few thousand players to satisfy the complaints of a very few. Tankers make a valid trade to exist in an MMO world. They trade some offense to get lots of defense and aggro control tools. That's their gaming identity. We don't allow a few people to say they don't like that trade, so no one gets to have it. The people who don't like that option are simply not supposed to take that option. There are three other melee options, including the original baseline option of scrappers.

And what if you want to play Super Strength/Invulnerability but that option doesn't exist for Scrappers. You take the next best archetype option and go Brutes, or you take the next best powerset option and go Street Justice. Or you advocate for proliferation. Or for the devs to make a whole new archetype just for you. But you don't advocate taking options away from other players just to satisfy your own personal agenda.

I should say, a reasonable person shouldn't. You can do whatever you want; I'm simply going to continue to remind the devs what their design obligation here is. And its not to honor your sense of tankers or my sense of tankers or even their sense of tankers. Their first responsibility is to honor the sense of tankers of the existing players playing tankers. Only a genuine balance problem should override that.

Depends somewhat what you mean by "tanker". In terms of what a Tanker is in CoH, agreed. In terms of the big guy who can take hits and acts mostly physically (or is at least throught of mostly in physical terms). . . .

The comic book fandom term for Superman (and other characters of like property such as Thor, Wonder Woman, Ms. Marvel, etc.) is brick. And there was a distinction between them as and other characters such as Batman or Captain America. Even within settings such characters were noted to be apart from other characters, with consideration given when forming teams (particulay The Avengers, as they underwent and continue to undergo frequent lineup changes) that you needed/wanted a core of heavy hitters. In particular, the Avengers lineup from the 70s was known for its brickyness with Thor, Iron Man, Vision, and Wonderman as regular team members at the time.

While there are teams which lack bricks (think classic X-Men with Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, and Ice Man), the common pattern is for there to be at least one brick on the team.

Of course what suits a written narrative and what fits a game are two different things. Add too there are the limitations of imagination and the matter of legacy to deal with. Given a CoH version 2 the developers might not include the Tanker AT, in favor of the Brute, which I think comes closer to the concept of a comic book brick than the Tanker class does. But they did not have the Brute in the original AT lineup, introduced the Tanker, built a game about the original set of ATs, and that is where we are.

That quibble aside, I basically agree with how you outline things:

A brick isn't a CoH tank, though. Brick, as I've seen it used, refers to superhuman physical strength and durability. Tanks certainly CAN be bricks, but many combos like a Fire/Fire share little in common with the comic book definition of brick. And Hulk is clearly a brick, but also clearly a brute. So bricks and tanks are two different categories that only partially overlap.
This is because the story characters tend to be classified by their power types, while in-game we classify them by their group role (which may be poorly defined in the comic, if it exists at all). This is true for other common classifications as well, like speedster (MA/SR scrapper or Kinetics defender, to name just two possibilities), psychic (blaster/corr/defender/troller/dom/widow), and so on.

Something I clearly indicated in my choice of words. Indeed, my openning lines:

and

[quote] Brick, as I've seen it used, refers to superhuman physical strength and durability. Tanks certainly CAN be bricks, but many combos like a Fire/Fire share little in common with the comic book definition of brick.[/qutoe]

You expect a brick to be the heaviest hitter. The Hulk could punch you through a building. CoH Tankers are not the heaviest hitters so I would have a hard time qualifying them as comic book brickesque. They do have the durabilty bit down though.

The brute class is basically designed to emulate the Hulk, and as I noted in my post, I think the Brute AT more closely represents bricks in comic books than Tankers do--Brutes being highly durable and top notch physical damage.

Ms. Marvel, Wonderman, Thor, Superman, Wonder Woman, Rogue have plenty of powers they don't share in common and yet all are considered bricks. The are bricks due to two things--they shrug off damage that would stagger or kill others and can physically toss around big things, even if they have other powers up their sleeves.

Actually, you expect the brick to be the hardest puncher.** Subtle but important difference, because there's nothing really in the notion of a brick that says the Iron Man can't deal ten times more damage with energy blasts than any brick can physically generate with their fists in theory.

And even that is a bit relative. The notion of "combat level" is pretty hazy in comic books, but there is still the sense of there being, for lack of a better way of putting it, "weight classes." We expect a brick of a particular weight class to be the hardest puncher in that weight class, but we aren't surprised when something comes along that punches far harder but isn't a brick, its just of a vastly superior class. Cosmically powered, say.

This is much more well defined in MMOs than comic books, but the concept isn't completely novel to comic books.


I think the important point, though, is not that tankers are not bricks, or bricks are not tankers, but more that the concept of a brick is more closely related to a powerset combination rather than a class. A brick is not any archetype as City of Heroes defines archetypes. Its a very special case of a powerset combination that actually crosses archetypes. SS/Invuln brutes and tankers are both bricks, even though they have different offense and defense. They encapsulate the core concept of being a brick: strong, and resistant to physical damage.


** Actually, maybe not even that. Would you consider Cannonball to be basically a flying brick while he's in motion? He's not really a puncher, he's *literally* a brick thrown at someone.

Some consider Iron Man a brick (do note I included him when I noted the bricks on the 1970s Avengers), though addmittedly he kinda sits along the boundary of the definition.

I think that represents somewhat of an evolution of the term. Brick originally only applied to the top tier of heroes--Thor, the Hulk, the Thing, and so on. Luke Cage? Well, in the right context he is a brick, just a brick in a setting where there exist a lot of people who could seriously hurt him if push came to shove.

No, the Brick isn't a CoH AT. I pointed to "lack of imagination" in my previous post, which isn't to say something bad about the initial game design, just nobody thought along the line of bringing in Bricks but more along the line of the division of labor already seen in MMOs to that point--someone who takes damange and controls aggro, someone who deals damage, someone who heals, someone who buffs/debuffs. And for all that it looks like I am criticizing the initial design, I do note that we got two different melee ATs as opposed to just one and that certainly fits the delineation between characters like Thor and characters like Daredevil to a better extent than trying to shove them all into one AT.


Cannonball is a brick who has a weakness--has to be using his power to not be easily beaten down. Works well in comic books (he's taken on Gladiator before after all) but might be problematic in a game.

No one is more eager on the boards to have a good scuffle over the role, value, and buff scenarios then Tank enthusiasts.
It is the only AT with it's own monthly event going on eight years. ;]
Long live Tanks.

Just because one, two , or a few writers at one time or another chose to make an analagy that a hard hitting tough guy is like a tank does not mean that CoH Tankers are suppossed to be like that.

That's a completely different discussion. I wonder if Cyclops is ever referred to as a Blaster in the comics? :P
I know that you're trying to change your tactics some JB, and say that you only want a damage cap increase because somehow, you've managed to create several tankers that hit the damage cap wall as you put it. But in reality, most of the secondary tanker sets can't do that. Outside of SS, its hard for most sets to have a +damage buff at all times. At best, most Tanker secondary sets get a form of self damage buff that they get to use some of the time by increasing the damage cap doesn't do much for the majority of the powersets Tankers use.

Nor does it do anything for the gameplay mechanics that Tankers were designed with, which is the area I believe should be looked it in order to change Tankers. Perhaps if that were changed, it might be done in a way that does increase damage whether directly or indirectly.

I feel I can be bold enough to say that any Tanker (with the exception of Stone Armor) will hit the cap when teamed with one decent Kin and one or more SoA.

Build Up for sure will ram them into it.

On a league, chances are very good both of those will be present.

And Kin the only buff set that would do it, but is the one that will do it the easiest. Plus there's anyone who brings Assault. Leadership pool is very popular nowadays.


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