So I got a PM from Synapse about buffing Tankers

Thats great but I am talking about top end performance. This game now has an end game that has to be balanced just like the beginning game.

What about the VIPs who don't care about IOs or Incarnates? Or don't they count either?

My point being, the basic 1-50 game is available to every player, regardless of their account status.

You should NOT make changes that affect that basic game because of something that only occurs at level 50 that only some players even have access to.

Scrappers and brutes reaching survivability levels comparable to a tank, at level 50, with Incarnate powers, is a really crappy reason to make changes that affect the 1-49 game.

Just because they're playing free doesn't mean it's fair to force them to play an unbalanced game. Especially since a lot of them are still spending money, they just haven't subscribed in order to get the things you want to base these changes on.

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.

Simultaneously, the devs would have never gone to a F2P model if there wasn't some sort of profit in it. In that regard, upsetting your Premium players by "forcing" them to buy a $2 / month license in order to be able to play at a baseline is not a very clever business move. Moreover, it would be akin to a bait & switch - one could play for free, but now one would truly have to truly Pay to Win.

I don't foresee such a strategy gaining much traction, to say the very least. It would be far easier to keep the baseline balance of all ATs at the SO level to keep the status quo (and avoid a mountain of rebalance work across all ATs) and then keep offering IOs, AT-Os, and other incentives to make the game more fun / challenging while increasing revenue - without pissing off the Premium player base.

You have pretty flawed logic, why balance the game around early levels then since a character's lifespan is spent very shortly in the early levels.

The game has to be balanced at all levels.

How many levels are there above 50? Don't SOs go all the way to 50?

And aren't Incarnate powers there to help with, yah know, incarnate stuff?

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

No, I don't think it does.

At top ends of incarnate, I expect all AT performance to continue to move towards a common point. Balancing across ATs appears, to me at least, to be a moot point at 50+.

Keeping balance 1-50, however, absolutely a valid requirement.

here here!

Works to justify my stance. Go for it.



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Indeed. Especially since:

• A majority of toons never get past level 10
• Premium players can only play with SOs for free
• Store-bought IOs (or regular IOs) shouldn't be required to play at a baseline
• Incarnate content can only be played by VIPs
• Not every VIP player cares for or plays through Incarnate content

In short, the devs should cater to the greatest amount of the playerbase. People who play through Incarnate content (as well put together is it is intended to be) are not that majority.

The definition of "balance" changes radically in the end game. The definition of "balance" as it pertains to powerset or archetype performance from level 1 to level 49 is earns XP and other rewards at rate reasonably close to the average earning rate across all players for the set of circumstances being examined. That definition obviously becomes problematic at level 50.

There isn't an obvious way to quantitatively balance the archetypes in terms the players tend to see things, which is more of a "I feel like I'm just as good as everyone else in the areas I think are most important." You start getting into areas like "tankers have more mitigation but that doesn't matter: they have less damage and that does matter." At that point, you might as well manage the game design with a ouija board.

I agree with this, I've always thought better secondary effects would be the best way to give Tankers a unique flavour without increasing damage or defense.

A good example is Kinetic Melee- Tanker debuff numbers are a little higher than Scrappers. I think other sets like Dark Melee should work the same way.

Add some effects to powers- have Combustion cause knockdown, for example. Tankers could have a higher chance for secondary effects, or possibly higher magnitude.

These would just be small changes to help make Tanks play a little differently. Not a big buff, but I don't really think Tankers need one.

First off are you really still fighting this battle? I have good news for you, you won, tanks got a bruising to and a hit point increase. Secondly, I am not even trying to dissuade a review of tankers because I think many legacies of this game system need be reviewed for relevance to keep the intellectual property viable in a competitive MMO market.

Disclaimers aside I really take issue with the statement "There is absolutely NO reason to want to increase Tanker aggro caps." yet you complain about the uselessness of upgrades to the mitigation of tankers as unnecessary when brutes and scrappers do more damage 100% of the time, yet these other AT's are defensively insufficient much smaller percentage of the time. So essentially your complaint is that tankers are unable to leverage their increased survivability into a quantifiable advantage. You also state that the best solution to this is increase their damage. Let us suppose you are right. Tankers by increasing the aggro cap will allow them to gather more enemies to them. By being able to gather more enemies to themselves they will be able to maximize AOE effectiveness their by increasing overall damage to more enemies faster. Furthermore a tanker due to its superior mitigation ability will be able to survive a lot longer and therefore keep the AOE maximization in effect longer for themselves and their team. So therefore overall damage is increased due to efficiency of AOE attacks.

As far as your other points

Yes, one tanker can tank for a team of eight. This is a good thing. We agree.

Increasing the aggro cap for one tanker does not make additional tankers superfluous with proper tactics. I like to leapfrog with another tank. I grab a spawn's aggro and the other tank moves ahead to get the aggro of the next spawn and lead them back to group. Again maximizing AOE and reducing downtime between spawns.

You will never sign off on scrappers or brutes not feeling the heat of their own damage. K, good for you. That is an opinion. Since the purpose here is to improve tankers not nerf other AT's this statement is irrelevant.

I like this. I could see reducing the damage that tanker AoE's do by a slight amount, but greatly increasing their number of targets. So a tanker can hit 10 targets instead of 5, but has to hit a lot in order to make up for the reduced damage. That gives them a reason to take on large groups even solo.

This is a good idea. Let's work with the strength of the AT's instead of redesigning them to some whimsical ideal.

Different would be better than just numerically tweaked better.

For a long time I was an opponent of powerset proliferation, not because I thought the sets shouldn't be converted from one archetype to the other but because the sets were just being transferred from one archetype to the other without regard for the fact different archetypes have different requirements. Before Brutes came along Tankers did have markedly different offensive sets from Scrappers in having far more soft control in general. That soft control was a form of extra mitigation over and above defensive numbers and it made them play substantially different. Brutes and powerset proliferation blurred that distinction somewhat in a counter-productive way.

PBAoE soft control should have been the primary forte of Tankers over Scrappers and even Brutes, but Brutes basically made that impossible to do directly. But given the mechanics of gauntlet, the devs should see an obvious way to do it indirectly.

I felt the same way. There was a reason the original Tanker powersets were as similar to Controller sets as they were to Scrapper.

Definitely agree with that, as well.

Well yes before proliferation the Scrapper sets ranged in brawl index from 2.778 to 6.333 at the max. The only exception was BS HS at 7.333.

Tanker sets BI were 4.5556-9.8889 with ET being 12.6666.

Now Scrappers are getting sets with BI's of 9+

Yes. Isn't that what a good Tanker does? Hang on for the long haul and keep going?

I haven't had much reward in doing so, also like a Tanker.

You mean Brutes and Scrappers fighting alongside me got a damage increase.

Then Incarnates came out and Scrappers and Brutes gained Barrier and Rebirth while my Tanker hits the brick wall of the damage cap without even needing Assault and now has little potential to improve or grow the way I want.

That's 'winning', Charlie Sheen style.

Tankers can only hit so many targets with AoE attacks regardless of how many are mad at them or not. There's two different caps in play there.

Furthermore, that gets into farming territory IMO, and I have an extremely negative view of that. Especially since, again IMO, Tankers are in the situation/balance point they are currently because over the years, some people have pushed them into a niche as a farming tool: Safe, reliable, slowly moving back and forth across a farm. No longer Tankers, but 'Tractors'. All at the expense of Tankers better reflecting their comic counterparts instead. I have have seen too many 'looking to make a farm tank' threads to be persuaded otherwise, so let's not bother debating it.

Not so. I believe that one Tanker being enough for a team's typical aggro needs is half of the reason they have redundancy issues. The other half is overspecialization in aggro control in the first place.

That is not typical operating procedure for the vast majority of teams. It works for you, obviously, but doing so without everyone on board is just going to cause group friction and it's not a play style you can hope people to adopt widespread.

'With proper tactics' is the key phrase. You can't balance an AT around said tactics when most people really haven't been using them since the game began.

It's quite relevant if a proposed change to Tankers has the side effect of buffing two other ATs that I don't think should be buffed. Why should I sign to that if I feel that way?



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I love your directness and your animated sig graphic.


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Ok, even I have to take out a calculator now, Encino man. Tanker sets had a similar range of damage way back when to scrapper sets. Most powers were between 0.8 DS and 2.5 DS; what we would have called 2.222 BI and 6.944 BI.

The only single target tanker attacks that did more damage than 6.333 BI (2.28 DS) were: Cleave (2.76), GFS (2.44 + DoT), Seismic Smash (3.56), KO Blow (after the upgrade - 3.56), Total Focus (3.56) and Energy Transfer (4.56). Not that many powers have had their damage substantially changed in Tanker secondaries, so a quick glance at City of Data will show the range of damage in the sets is and was similar. Jab is and always was 0.68 DS, for example (i.e. 1.8889 BI).

Are you STILL crying about that?

News flash: Very seldom does a scrapper or brute player that has half a clue what they're doing target the same thing as a tank. It's pointless.

Unless you expect me to believe that scrappers and brutes should be following you like lost puppies waiting for you to hit something first before they start attacking.

Since scrappers and brutes are very rarely targeting the same thing as you, exactly what benefit are they getting from your single target resistance debuff again?

I know exactly what the problem is. You're going to deny it, but it's written all over your posts. You think the game is only working right when the entire team depends on what YOU are doing, and waits with bated breath for your next move.

News flash #2: It really isn't all about YOU. I would wager a decent sum of money that you couldn't care less if other people's tanks benefited from any changes you got to happen. You'd be perfectly fine if Johnny Butane's tanks got buffed and no one else's.

It really is quite narcissistic. You prove that every time you completely ignore anything anyone says that refutes your "facts".

I think I'm about done listening to you whine about how unfair it is that you don't get to be the most indispensable part of every team you're on simply by virtue of playing a tank. You've been whining about the exact same thing for nearly 4 years now. You are by FAR the least reasonable person on these board when it comes to campaigning for a change that no one else thinks is necessary.

I guess we'll just have to accept that 90% of the other forum posters, the majority of the players in the game, and the devs are ALL wrong, because Johnny Butane can't possibly be anything less than absolutely right.

Right?

Not that my opinion of you has ever been a particular secret, just thought I'd make it crystal clear.

And you never did answer my question.

I'll repeat it one more time:

Since you keep insisting that the mitigation advantage tanks have is unnecessary, would you be willing to accept a reduction to it in return for more damage.

I'm betting you're going to tell me "No, tanks shouldn't have to give up anything to get more damage" because that's what you've told me every other time I've asked it.

Which leads to a follow up question:

If that mitigation advantage is so unnecessary, why are you unwilling to give it up?

I think it's because yo know damn well that it DOES make a difference, and you want to have your damage without giving up your mitigation.

That's called having your cake and eating it too. Usually seen in people with entitlement issues.

Have a nice day

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.