what AT's are in need of any help?

I don't know if you're asking me specifically what I think of such an idea, but as to the idea in general, you need to re-read what I said. Tankers are NOT the "leader AT", nor should they be. The leader of the team, regardless of the AT, is the leader. Period. Some Tanker players already have it in their head to boss everyone around and need to be the center of attention and hold ALL the aggro. They even flip out if a Brute takes any, which is why you've got these people asking for aggro cap buffs and higher threat.

And Tankers on their own will be easily hitting the cap with Hybrid Assault if it comes out as is. On teams or leagues, it just takes a single Kin to get them there. Lack of damage buffs isn't what's holding Tankers back damage-wise, it's their low damage cap.


If they were to introduce something like that, they would likely make it so it didn't stack from multiple Tankers, defeating the purpose of it making multiple Tankers more useful. The devs are cautious of stacking buffs because they get pretty OP.


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So you'd nerf one of the most popular ATs in the game rather than see Tankers be improved?
Nice.


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No, I said "if you want" and proceeded to point out that if New Dawn wanted Tankers to be the 'leader AT', that leaders tend to be the big guns for their teams and not mediocre fighters only used for decoys.


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This, with Scrappers moved up to 80% (and Stalkers left at 75).

Person A: I want a cheese sandwich.
Person B: I want a pizza.

Both are made with dough and cheese, but they're not the same and a person wanting one does not necessarily mean they'd want the other.


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No, I'd like to balance brutes better, considering I've seen no evidence that tankers are in need of improvement.

Pushing them into damage dealer roles would also not help anyone - got way too many ATs that share that role already, using your same argument. The HP cap was raised on Stalkers because of powersets added to the AT after the AT was designed, that couldn't properly use powers designed to increase personal HP caps.

True, I admit this - I just didn't want anyone thinking that the whole of MMs were great.

Sigh... this is a tough one for me.

I think the brute cap is essentially due to having the tanker role while on redside mostly, before Going Rogue and before side switching became trivial.

I think tanker damage caps can be raised, but their default damage should not - not their base mods anyway. I could see buffing individual powers, such as ice melee.

Scrappers are fine, really, that 5% is going to do very little.

Right on Jay...I can tell when a player is virgin to redside when they complain about a Brute's performance...back in the day on Redside that's all we had! God knows Stalkers would die if you even looked at them the wrong way at the time hehe.

For most people playing this game, Scrapper and Brute survivability aren't infinite. Tanker survivability itself is finite. For the vast majority of the people playing the game, tanker damage mitigation is not redundant. Its therefore not a given that improving tanker overall ability to acquire and survive aggro would not be considered a positive move by the majority of the players playing tankers.

In terms of popularity, its entirely possible that more people would rather be the one being protected than the one doing the protecting, but that's a problem that Defenders share. In fact, both the archetype statistics from 2008 and the seven year anniversary statistics showed that Tankers were more popular than Defenders. And more interestingly, there appears to have been a shift from 2008 to 2011 where for much of their career Tankers are apparently now more popular than Controllers, Controllers only overtaking them at or near level 50 (even more dramatically, they appear to overtake Blasters as well, coming second only to Scrappers).

It would be interesting to see what the archetype creation statistics are post Freedom, when you can now make anything on either side. You would think that Brutes would be more popular than they are, but that is almost certainly due to the lower popularity of playing on the red side with anything. Still, its noteworthy that Masterminds scored so high from 1-49: its possible that's because Masterminds present such a unique gameplay option relative to the five hero side archetypes that its the strongest reason to venture into the red side. That suggests that unique gameplay options as judged by the playerbase is possibly as compelling if not possibly more compelling reason to play an archetype than raw performance is, although performance must count for something.

This^^^^ Most definitely. It just makes me mad that I can not really get much use out of my first lvl 50 villian simply because the ninjas die so fast. What good is having this awsome damage if you almost never get to use it due to paper thin defense and wacky AI issues. Essentially what was done to Jack Frost on the recent update needs to be done to Ninjas to make them alot better.

I have to question what the anniversary numbers are counting. Are those the number of those ATs rolled/logged since launch, in the last year before the graphic was made, etc?

It doesn't say from what I can see, and if it's the totals since launch, that's not going to show us any useful information or trends.

And I agree, the numbers since the morality system and side switching came into effect would be very interesting. There's another infographic I recall seeing not long ago (perhaps around Freedom's launch). IIRC, it did have some stats about the morality system and side swapping, namely, what the most popular ATs for switching sides were, etc.


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The devs have stated that MM's had the tanker role on redside such as there was one, the players just did not realize this and assumed it was brutes. But the devs really wanted there to be no tanker role.

Perhaps not, but in combination with the 2008 numbers a trend does begin to suggest itself, at least on the hero side. There's a significant gap in popularity between the "offensive" archetypes of Blasters and Scrappers, and the "support" types of Defenders, Tankers, and Controllers. And interesting, alone among the three "support" types Controllers seem to gain ground over time - i.e. they become increasingly more popular with increasing level. That's highly suggestive to me that what might cause that is the fact that Controllers slowly cease to be support-focused types and become more offensive, at least in terms of playstyle if not in terms of raw numbers. When players realize that Controllers can go both ways, particularly by level 50, they become "stickier" - people play them more often, and that boosts their population numbers.

They may also steal attention from Defenders, which may explain why Tankers are more popular than Defenders: Defenders face more competition for attention. The numbers could be interpreted as saying the players perceive the overlap between Controllers and Defenders as being more serious than the overlap between Tankers and Scrappers. There's no way yet to compare Tankers to Brutes, because we don't have numbers from a period of time when they could be created without barriers between them.

Its also noteworthy that the seven year numbers correlate strongly to the trends expressed in the 2008 numbers. The numbers showed Controllers on the rise and Blasters steeply falling and that is a match for the 2011 numbers. If the 2011 numbers were totals from launch, it would suggests the trends seen in 2008 were more or less similar to the overall trend from launch. The only thing the 2008 numbers do not predict in the 2011 numbers is the switch between Brutes and Masterminds, which were fairly close to begin with.

As an anecdote, something that came to mind when thinking about the 2008 numbers versus the 2011 numbers: the leveling curve change. I find myself more likely to roll some ATs(and sets) now that I know are 'late bloomers' because the path to 50 isn't as long as it once was. Obviously, I'm not a Blaster person, but I have a few high level Blasters now that would never have gotten as far in the old days.


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I always laughed at that one lol. Maybe if you stick with Bots or Thugs back then.

Yes I remember, and I remember them changing brutes to what I was referencing.

I did write a really long reply elaborating but then the internet ate it up. You basically took my words, misread the meaning here and went on one. You did because I agree with most of what you said. So therefore what you've assumed I meant, I didn't. There is no American mind here. I am British. There is more than one way to interpret a post and you've taken one way that I find literal and extremist and ran with it.

This game isn't Marvel. I just have to add on top of that fact that I don't see a problem with Tankers.

1. Controllers do get OMG more damage when they get epic pools with AoE damage that gets containment. AoE immobilize, fiery rain, and fireball is incredibly different from what controllers have at lower levels.

2. And controllers do function as defenders on teams. Unless you have AoE at low levels damage your damage output does not really matter much. So a defender's damage over a controller just is not very important on teams. Whereas a controller's controls are very useful and noticeable. Defender buff/debuff numbers are invisible, so you don't really see that a defender's thermal shield is better than a controller's.