Willpower. Why an aggro penalty after inherent stamina?

A parting mechanical question. Oddly, very few of my old line characters ever respecced for inherent Stamina. It had been a part of every build for so long that I never felt the need for three more slotless powers. A handful of characters did it, if I could see a use for it. Most didn't.

At any rate: it seems to me that inherent Stamina has made Willpower much less strikingly attractive for Tankers than it used to be. You remember I was always a fan of the set and wrote several guides for it, including one evaluating the tanker secondaries through i19 as to how well they helped Willpower tankers hold aggro.

Inherent Stamina reduced the chief advantage of Willpower, I'm afraid. If you've been here a while you know my opinion of the endurance mechanic. It made 1-20 a slog and 20+ where the game began. Now that's happily been changed, and every character has access to an +recovery power before level 20.

So what is the continuing justification of making the taunt duration in Willpower so short? The set is not so overwhelmingly strong that I think it needs such a significant penalty now.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

I don't think inherent stamina has anything to do with it.

There were complaints about the lack of duration in the past but then people insisted there wasn't a problem.

Taunt duration can assist in herding, preventing them to be messed up.

People are fine with the lack of duration as they can gauntlet more and are perfectly fine if a Shield Scrapper does most the aggroing around them.

All in all, too late now.

I think that the Willpower taunt aura and other Tanker inconsistencies/issues were probably going to be tackled in the near future (that is before the decision to sun set the game was made…) as Rangle questions in his this thread.

Hopefully something will happen or another company will step up and keep the game running so we can find out. Otherwise I’m afraid we’ll never know (like why doesn’t Electric Armor get “Electrical Burn”?... j/k …. Well maybe a liitle ).

I'm with the others. There was no such justification. A lot of stuff in CoH, especially in some of the older sets (of which Willpower is sort of middling), is like it is because that's just how it was set up. Copy/paste from other powers while forgetting to change scales, typos, brain farts and just "I never gave it much thought" have all made their way into powers over the years, and some still have those stats, just because.

No one with formal knowledge of the set has ever said Willpower got a weaker taunt because it had QR.

In any case, even if that was the case, Inherent Fitness wouldn't "balance out" having QR. Willpower would still have significantly more recovery than sets with Stamina alone.

The whole thesis just seems terribly odd to me.

In a team environment for which high settings are more understandably safer given a decent team make up the low taunt aura could encourage the intentional way of play. Willpower has higher regen with controlled/debuffed mobs around it. Players who prefer some level of aoe effect efficiency might be encouraged to allow a Willpower to achieve consolidation or else get mullered. QR does allow for greater gauntlet rate but then so can slotting of any Tanker.

One problem with the weak taunt aura is that in large scrums I'm never really sure how tough I actually am. Was I surviving the aggro? or did I even have it? My impression is that WP was not nearly as tough as Inv without tough and weave; with both of them it became comparable but never really as strong.

In the end, I played my WP tankers on my home server less; the job of being main tank for master runs and the like fell to my Inv/DM tanker, who is the toughest character I ever built. Then again, almost all of my non-WP tankers take Energy Mastery for Physical Perfection and Conserve Power. My WP tankers usually get Earth Mastery, for big AoEs.

<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison

Will power is stronger than Invuln against certain damage types... well technically against most non-sl damage types. Invuln was in luck that almost all content in the game had mainly SL, but this isn’t always the case.

It is true that overall, Willpower does not feel as tough as Invuln without pool powers, but thanks to IOs these days most players have enough endurance to run tough, weave and combat jump on top of some great defense values.

As far as taunt-aura effectiveness goes, by not inflicting damage the aura already had issues. Most non-damage taunt auras are actually rather ineffective. Most your agro tends to be captured by your PBAoE attacks, not by the taunt auras.

Other than Ice tanks with Chilling Embrace, that makes up for no damage with an extremely fast pulsing debuff that hits with 5 different debuffs per tick, some (like the movement ones) with very high magnitudes, I never rely on a taunt aura alone to grab agro.

As a personal preference, too, I would put more emphasis in Gauntlet than in improving taunt auras. If up to me, all attacks would have a gauntlet radius of 20ft. Or at least, the T1 attack would (call it Mocking Blow for those familiar with other RPGs, a weak attack that serves mostly as a taunt and potentially debuff)

Invuln and Shield actually have stronger aggro auras than the damage ones, to help make up for this a bit. Ice doesn't get this bonus because it has two auras. And Willpower and SR got shafted.

I'm pretty sure that the weak taunt auras in Willpower and Super Reflexes are nothing more than a mistake, based on the numbers and how they are set up in the game's internal data. It looks like it's a case of accidentally using the wrong table for those two sets; because the Scale is the same as the other sets, but it uses Melee_Ones instead of Melee_InherentTaunt.

However I never succeeded in getting anyone to look at them and tell me for certain.

I've never heard that explanation before.