Guns for non-squishies?

I dunno, I mean I just threw these together for the most part and can see a few problems with them.

I mean for starters: Tank, brute, Stalker, and Scrapper ranged damage suck. Like, make master minds look like blasters suck. Ranged APPs and certain ranged powers they get skirt around this by the damage being linked to their melee damage modifier.

By making them Power Pools, they become readily available to EVERYONE and by the above comment I already made: who will end up befitting the most? None melee ATs, really.

The powers I picked out, as power pools, could result in doubled powers, which the devs hate with a passion. A DP blaster could have Pistols, pistols, dual wield, dual wield, and empty clips, empty clips.

Power order would need to be rearranged so that you can't just get some rather decent AoEs as soon as level 14, possibly. (I mean look at spring attack and the hoops you need to jump through that)

And if you make them into ancillary pools for Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers, and Tanks, you end up with the problem of only being able to have one EPP per-build and cannot select anything else to go with it.

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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Now that both Titan Weapons and Staff Fighting are giving Melee ATs sets with a larger range (I think 9 feet?) I think it's fair to revisit a Dual Pistols melee set. Sure, superheroes can fire pistols accurately from 80' away at moving targets with 95% accuracy, but in the real world, using pistols between point blank and 15 feet is common and deadliest (with point blank to 6 feet comprising 81% of the deadly encounters in that article), so there's nothing silly about the idea.

There is also nothing unbalancing about a Pistols set for Melee characters as long as they don't get more range than Titan Weapons, Staff Fighting, Spines, or Claws (unless, of course, you feel those sets are already broken).

That being said, the only reason I want such a set is to pair Dual Pistols with powers like SR, Regen, or Invulnerability. There are a lot of concepts to be explored there, and there's plenty of precedent in the superhero genre. If they gave us a Range/Defense AT that had lower damage and lower defense, that would fit the bill too, though I'd personally like to be up close and shoot the bad guys in the face.

I still want a DP/SR character. Or an Energy/Invul ranged character. Heck, Fire Blast/Fire Armour?

I really find the lack of those options to be a real pain at times.

And, please, lets not insult anyone's intelligence by knee-jerk screaming 'tank-mage'. EATs already have Ranged/Armour powers, and are not tank mages. The Devs do know how to balance stuff in this game.

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Yeah, VEATs are pretty hardcore. Like I said, the tradeoff is that you have to deal with the Arachnos motif, and that gets up a lot of peoples' noses. I think I've seen more people say that they'd play a Crab if only you didn't have to have the stupid backpack than I've seen actual VEATs.

I've actually run into this same problem when I was trying to create a custom class for a D&D setting. The class since got abandoned, but I kept a lot of the principles in mind.

See the thing about combat in this game, or in most RPG's for that matter, is that 80% of the damage in any given encounter is going to be focused in an area around the tank. It's an area I like to refer to as the "killball", the area in which most attacks in any given game are going to be focused. Generally, the squishier you are, the farther from the killball you want to be. That's the principle under which blasters operate. They can deal a ton of damage without having to directly expose themselves to the killbal around the tank. Scrappers, stalkers, and tanks need the protection because in order to deal damage, they need to fight inside of the killball.

Now once you start giving the melee classes ranged attacks, one of two things happen though. Either A: They run into melee and used the ranged attacks point blank, in which case why bother giving them ranged attacks in the first place. Or B: They hang back and use their ranged attacks at range, thus drawing fire, but weathering most of it due to their defenses and never entering into the killball. So is it possible to make a tough character that still heavily relies on ranged attacks at all?

I think it is, but I don't think it would work in this game, just because of how combat operates. What I think you would need to do is create a set of abilities that would still encourage players to stay near them, even though they are doing most of their fighting at arm's length. Now I'm not necessarily sure this sort of approach would lend itself to speedy ranged characters. I don't think it's possible to balance a character that's fast, tough, and able to fight at range, but you could make it work with big slow lugs. For example, in my D&D game, I tried to balance the character around the weapon they would be using, a minigun (yes, my D&D setting has technomagical miniguns. It also has Jet Dragons and Star-God mecha, pretty much a 12 year old's imagination on overdrive).

Now the minigun did a lot of damage, and had a built in knockback effect allowing them to keep foes pushed back, but the problem was this meant the other players never needed to expose themselves to danger. Yes, there was a "killball" forming around the tank, but they never needed to enter into it, because the enemies weren't in there. So the solution I tried was to grant buffs to players who stood around the tank, thus keeping them in the line of fire. You could easily conceptualize this as the "big guy" wading down a corridor, minigun blasting, soaking up shots, as everyone else leans out from behind him and takes potshots. But even then, the tank by himself was too powerful. Most enemies dealt their damage in melee, and since he had high defenses and the ability to keep foes in ranged, he never got hit. So I tried to rectify this by giving the tank lower defenses than usual, unless he had allies huddled around him.

That way, the killball was still centered on him, players were still encouraged to enter it, and ranged types could still hang back. Now like I said before, I don't think this would work in City of Heroes. Yeah, you could build a powerset around it, but it's such a radically different style of play that I don't really think it would have any place in the game, unless the entire game was rewritten around it.

I'm stealing that killball concept. Don't make me mug you for it.

A certain licensced MMORPG has been trying out ranged tanks. I have no idea how it works though.

The easiest way would probably be to give a guns (and Archery for that matter) APP. Scrapper and Tanker APP's are pretty much just a small ranged attack chain already. The only reason I can think of for them not having done so alrady would be redraw, actually.

I'm 100% supportive of the idea of DP scrappers, but I would also hope that they are somewhat "hybrid" in terms of animations to justify it and make it a more visually diverse set. More like gun-fu, rather than "dual pistols but with melee range".

I'm all for a ranged/defense powerset. People just assume without evidence that it'll be overpowered without really looking at how little safety range provides in this game. The idea that ranged characters have to be squishy sidekicks dependent on melees to babysit them is yet another of those great, stupid MMO/wargaming tropes that have found its way into CoH.

In the meantime, look into taking something like time manip or traps (only as long as you can stay under the FF generator) - they can be pretty tough once they get to midlevel or so.

I still believe there is merit in looking into Assault Powersets for other archetype, if people are so worried about defense/defense ATs becoming overpowered with ranged abilities then use the sole fact that Assault contains a MIXTURE of melee and ranged attacks for the win!

The melee attacks could be the one with the most mitigration via secondary effects whilst the ranged ones would be to a lesser extent. It means melee types can't be all-range right away and still go with their strengths. It also means that the ranged types now get to do their cool close-range attacks.

Even if you have to change the ratio of attacks so the melee types get four ranged attacks out of nine, and ranged get four melee attacks per nine. It could be a conceptual boost to many, many ATs.

Trouble is, is it feasible to grant other archetypes the Assault powerset in after so many years of being labeled 'melee' and 'range'?

I'm still hoping for a support/melee archtype one day more then anything. I always wanted to use Support moves like defenders and have like the assult powers of a dom. Sounds OP but the devs have shown us they know how to tweak the numbers.

With both sides no longer exclusive, I honestly think there is little excuse not to be looking at potential new ATs.

Note New ATs, though. Dual Pistols on a Scrapper is still a terribad idea, except as an Epic Pool. Pistols are for *shooting* people with. Yes, they are shorter ranged than other firearms, but they are still RANGED weapons. You do not scrap with them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Hey Sam, I have a Dual Pistols / Time manipulation corruptor who is pretty close to a scrapper. Soft-capped defense to all positions, and a huge -tohit debuff on anything within 25 feet make her a monster.

I conceptually wanted a pistol scrapper, and this is pretty close (or at least as close as we're going to get without a melee set).

Toss me a PM if you want my build so I don't clutter this thread.