Knockback to Knockdown!

More like ... he hadn't used the power in at least six months. Even if he had Bomb slotted for KB, a confessed KB-lover would've noticed that the KB had been reduced by an order of magnitude.

That's the L2P argument, one of the oldest memes in MMOs and is usually trotted out to mock / belittle / berate people, not educate or convince them. Usually, it's not backed up by much of relevance.

A'right, look.

The elephant in the room here is that CoH is easy. So easy, in fact, that a FF defender who can block 90% damage for a full team of blasters is looked upon as a near object of gimply pity. We simply do not need mitigation at the cost of offensive performance very often (and, in fact, in cases where we do need that mitigation, the devs tend to use insta-gibs and mez / KB resistant mobs to negate pretty much everything FF brings). It's more important to keep mobs clumped for controls, debuffs, and damage.

The devs have embraced the AoE-fuelled zergfest fully -- they haven't attempted to reign it in since I5 / I6. In fact, with IOs and incarnate powers, I'd argue that they've ushered in new levels of zerginess (recharge times are WAY up, end recovery is up, survivability is WAY up, travel speeds are up, time to missions is down, etc.).

If this game had lower AoE caps, lower AoE damage, a consistent ST, tactical component from L1 up ... yeah, KB would be great. But that's not this game. It hasn't been this game for years.

The best argument for using KB? "I like it." That's it. In a game that emphasizes customization, that's all the justification you need.

The argument works the other way around too: if the game is so easy, if recharge is so down, costs so low, why do we *need* foes to constantly be clumped together?

But I think we're all at a point in this thread where we're just done and apparently, raising a post to defy your claims of the contrary is just for the joy of contrarian stances.

So have fun chatting with yourself, I guess.

So? It's still a great positioning tool. The Webster's people may have never said it, but I'll be damned if a dictionary isn't a great flyswatter.

This is a fair point, although to some extent I disagree. The elephant in the room for me is that knockback as it was implemented was not sufficient in many cases. The issue there was the assumption that the interuption of enemy powers was enough to justify the scatter, and the act of knocking back itself shouldn't impose further penalties on the enemy (in terms of time loss, -defense, damage, -resistance, or other penalties). I think it's still concievable to think of how knockback could work and be useful. After all, knockback is useful in some other games, for various reasons. One of the simplest ways would be if there was a much stronger connection between knockback distance and the time it took to stand up again.

Regardless, I think we have to be really careful of lumping all knockback powers into a single category. In my mind Bonfire has/had very little in common with Power Push or Gale.

A mob positioning tool would bring mobs back to the caster (be it player or pet).

It works in other games; why not here?