Concerned about Scrappers.

Someone doing more damage is probably less survivable though, and I consider that a big part of feeling powerful. My Energy Blaster has big booming attacks that do a ton of damage, but still feels much weaker than my Tank.

As an anecdote, I have several friends who were unable to complete Ramiel on their own with Tankers because they were unable to overcome his regen and kill his clones fast enough. Granted, AFAIK he's been scaled back a lot since then. But I still get numerous help requests from Tankers regarding Hero 1 in that same arc (usually from people employing a Lethal damage based set). That I admit is less of a clear cut case because there's a 50-50 chance there's also a survival issue in there as well, meaning it's a particularly harsh encounter for some regardless of AT.


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True, but I've helped Brutes and Scrappers with the same issues on the same missions, so that's not a Tanker problem, just a build/knowledge/competence problem.

And those powersets are available to Scrappers, and allow them to step right back ahead, exactly proportionally where their base HP put them relative to Stalkers.

Seriously, it just doesn't work like that.

To me, the definition of power is twofold.

Your ability to exert your will on your environment and your ability to resist the environment exerting itself on you.

It terms of super heroes, being tough enough to take whatever is thrown at you, and the ability to wreck their *****. But too much of one at the cost of too little of the other can be as bad as having neither. If you're a glass cannon dieing every spawn, I don't see how that can feel powerful. If you're a stone wall, slowly chipping away at an enemy, that doesn't feel powerful either.

That is why I think the majority of players stick to the middle and why ATs on the fringes are less popular and can't be designed by spreadsheet as easily as some people think.


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I'd be ok with that really, just make it stances and be done with it.

The funny thing is that i don't have any particular objection to a damage cap increase for Tankers, but after years of reading J_B's posts i simply cannot believe that's all he wants, or that getting that would satisfy him for more than a couple picoseconds. He would simply see it as proof that every half-baked demand he's made since forever should also be implemented as well.

However, that is not an area where i'm prepared to do the analysis myself regarding an increase in the Tanker damage cap, even though i would enjoy reading the results of any who did do the work. Still, outside of a few powerset combos when solo, and a decent number of team combos when not, it doesn't seem that a damage cap increase would have that much effect on regular Tanker play.

On the other hand J_B did then proceed to mention other game changes he would want to see to leverage the change, so it's already pretty much what i anticipated in terms of whether the increase would actually be satisfactory. "All i want is this and i'll be all good. Oh, and a few other things of course to make it more useful. And if you're already doing that..."

Well that's at least one thing you and Arcanaville agree on. ATs cannot be designed by spreadsheet alone. However, i think you two would diverge again at the part where Arcanaville would see that as a reason to employ a more comprehensive approach to the math and modeling of the game, and you would see it as a reason to take the original Dev approach of using whatever numbers seem vaguely right and praying it works out somehow.

Devastating can mean many flavors:

baneful, beaming, bitter, blooming, bright, brilliant, calamitous, cataclysmal, cataclysmic, catastrophic, consuming, consumptive, dazzling, deadly, demolishing, depredatory, desolating, destructive, disastrous, doomful, enthralling, fatal, fratricidal, glorious, glowing, incisive, killing, mordant, nihilistic, overpowering, penetrating, ravaging, raving, ravishing, ruinous, savage, spectacular, splendorous, stunning, subversive, vandalistic, virulent, vitriolic, wasteful, wasting, withering

physically or spiritually devastating; often used in combination; "a crushing blow"; "a crushing rejection"; "bone-crushing"

And 'dish out all sorts of damage' can easily include 'low' or 'less effective' since you're looking so deep into words and picking what meanings you like. Not saying the definition you're quoting is vague, just doesn't carry a specific meaning that would pinpoint the AT's theme as to mean 'only barely less than X and Q Archetype'.

And again, I'm always against revising anything based on 'that AT can do this so...' because it's simply homogenizing the game. It's just fewer variables actually making game's features unique and rolling everything into steamrolls and speed runs. Looking at edge cases isn't the point one should start at considering changes.

No. Flametrhowers were so big of a target due to their visibility and the intimidation factor of being engulfed in flames. Last time I checked, shooting something filled with a flammable liquid doesn't even make it explode. The "effective range" thing is a big problem since most machine guns at the time (WW2) could shoot a flamethrower wielder long before they ever became dangerous.

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

But the problem with ED wasn't ED, but the rather presentation of ED, which was all Jack. ED itself was, and still is, fine and how the game should have been designed from the start.

I get what you're saying, and this isn't the first time the conventions of an MMO have head-butted with the conventions of comic books in this game. Let's take a comic book character like Colossus of the X-Men. Super strong, and virtually indestructible. At first glance you might think he would be a Tanker in this game, but Tankers do not have the damage output to properly represent him, so a Brute would be better to represent how devastating he can be in a fight. But Brutes don't really have the degree of survivability to properly represent him either unless you do a high end build using IO's.

And that, I think, is where your argument starts losing steam. If I've understood correctly what you really want Tankers to be, then making them that would completely unbalance the game. If Tankers became these high powered combatants and still enjoyed the same survivability they have today, why would anyone in their right mind play any other melee AT? Then we'd have folks on these boards yelling for more Scrapper/Stalker/Brute improvements, which would then lead people to feel Tankers weren't as special any more, and the whole cycle would start up again.

That being said, I wouldn't be opposed to Tankers being given something like what Defenders got: a damage buff that scales downward the more people they have on a team. This would help them solo more effectively (because goodness knows if you do wind up having to solo on a Tanker it can be mighty dull at times) but they wouldn't be stepping all over the toes of the other melee AT's on a team. I just think that a straight up damage boost all the time would be a bad idea for balance reasons.

The problem here with the individual is he will not accept the last paragraph as a reasonable compromising approach to getting an adjustment. It is his way or the highway and the devs (and some here)have already told him to hit the road with that ish.

This is flat out wrong. I'll produce the very quote in question. I have a keyboard macro set up for it.

He didn't say "Here's the solution we may try" or "the solution we could try. Even if it didn't make it past play testing, in order to test it at all they would have had to write the code for that. So yes, the mechanic the was later named Fury was thought of, designed and coded for Tankers.


If I'm correctly remembering the evolution of the Trapdoor encounter post live, first they made it so he couldn't be pulled from his room and out of range of his duplicates regen buffing. Then in a further patch, he was made immune to the lava. For a long time he was like that, and a lot of people seemed to be having problems and eventually he was updated yet again and they down scaled his duplicates and his regen a bit to where he is currently.



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Well IMO, 'bitter hand to hand combatants' works for Tankers.



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Invuls prior to the Invention System may disagree with that (hint, they have a bunch of powers that only take one form of enhancement).



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That's just it - I can never actually "feel" that. Let me give you an example with another game: World of Tanks. In this game, playing as an artillery cannon, I have a choice - shoot at the Heavy tanks and usually get either a bounce or just a couple of percent health off, or shoot at the Light tanks and kill them in one hit. You'd think the smarter solution would be to shoot at the heavies so they don't roll over your team, but the much more tempting one is to shoot at the light ones because they're easier to kill and make the whole thing feel a lot less hopeless. It's DEMORALISING to attack something and obviously not make much of an impression, so it makes a lot more sense to swap targets and shoot at something you CAN hurt. When put in this position, people will almost always pick the easy target over the hard one.

That's why I just don't buy the "mind games" aspect of it. Attacking the Tanker is clearly the wrong solution in any fight with a Tanker defending non-Tanker characters. Forcing the enemy into it, whether by mind control, mind games or some other method, just feels like it's making the enemy dumber for it. That's why I keep suggesting some way of making NOT attacking the Tanker a mistake for the enemies.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

No, it isn't. But here's the problem. Video games are classified by their gameplay, not their content or setting. MMORPG is a video game genre. FPS, is a video game genre. Comic books, movies and TV shows are categorized by their content and setting; super hero, action, sci-fi.

When you set out to make a video game based around a specific genre of literature, in this case super heroes, the needs of the literary genre take precedence over the needs of the genre of video game you decide to implement it as. Sure, you pick a video game genre that meshes well, and some will better than others. Action platformer, 3rd person action RPG, of course. They've worked really well with super heroes before. Real time strategy...not so easy drop super heroes into that. But if you do attempt the great super hero RTS, you don't have the heroes mining crystals as your form of resource gathering. That's just not something that people think of when they think of superheroes. And if it's the best you could come up with, maybe you need to break from the classic RTS mold and do something completely different and not have resource gathering in the classic sense. An example would be Brutal Legend, with the merch booths and fans mechanic.

In CoH, in many ways they totally tried to force super heroes into the "MMORPG" genre, even when it wasn't appropriate, wasn't faithful to super heroes. As you say with your Colossus example, Colossus isn't a MMO 'tank'. He's a comic book tank/brick. So why in the seven hells did they give his powers, and the powers of other bricks, to the AT that wasn't about that at all? Why would they specifically word their official description to imply you were getting Colossus?

My assertion is that they completely intended to evoke comic tanks with Tankers. The lead designer even said so. So who's at fault that they don't deliver that? Not the players. They didn't assign them the power sets that created expectations. They didn't create misleading descriptions. It was the devs failure to properly tailor design to their chosen genre. The player isn't at fault when the devs have set them up with a bait and switch

And why can't Tankers line up better with their comic counterparts? Scrappers do. Stalkers do. Brutes do. Surely Tankers could. What would that take?

Well, I've said what I think. Bring their damage caps in line with Brutes, taking Bruising and their extra 10% max HP into consideration. Then at least they're capable of being as much of a heavy hitter. I'm pretty confident a damage boosting Destiny power will come along down the line, and until then, there's red inspirations and at least they'll get full benefit from team/league damage buffs.

But until they adjust the cap, any kind of cleaver damage buffing mechanic is pointless by throwing a single Kin into the mix. I don't honestly think we need one. I've got a backlog of +damage abilities now like Call to Justice, Aura of Mot and Boon of the Ancestor Spirits that aren't doing me any good.


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ED bent Blasters over the table and did not nice things to them. If ED was/is necessary, the enhancement system is broken. Which it probably is.

ED is still a poorly documented mess. I was reading the Massively column recently where Elliot was trying hard to explain the system to folks. And he still managed to make a mistake. In what is probably the most casual MMORPG on the market, the enhancement system and ED in particular is a complicated mess.

/threadjack

Better.