ClawsandEffect

I agree.

That's why the Praetorian version of my main doesn't exist as a character, just as a footnote in my main's backstory.

Rick Davies being an old college buddy is plausible and doesn't Mary Sue that much. Being partially responsible for the creation of an enemy group does Mary Sue quite a bit.

I basically only put it in there as A) an explanation for why I use Clockwork costume pieces to represent his cyborg parts, and B) it justifies the use of the Clockwork Lore pets. If not for those 2 things I would never mention it.

Check your Reward Tokens, and place any you haven't yet.

Why do I say this?

Because if you have a high enough tier opened up......you can use the /auctionhouse command to access the market interface from ANYWHERE.

Quoting someone who posted in a graystar_blaster thread.

I'll have to remember to ignore anything you say about my builds then.

I mostly solo my scrappers, so Confront is 100% useless to me. Why would I need to taunt something if I'm the only person in the mission?

If I feel the need to taunt something, that's what second builds are for.

And for the record, in over 6 years of playing scrappers, I cannot recall a single time anyone has EVER complained that I didn't take Confront.

Take it and use it if you like, but don't give other people crap for not wanting to waste a slot on a power that is useless to them.

It's pretty straightforward actually.

Soft-capped Ranged defense, Hover, enough recharge to keep Lingering Rad up 75% of the time at least with Power Build Up, and enough end recovery to keep going non-stop.

I don't win every time, but I win often enough that I can legitimately say I solo GMs with that character.

If you really want to see the details, I can throw together a Mids' build when I get home. I had it saved, but the hard drive in the computer it was on took a dump on me.

I wasn't even advocating replacing Confront at all.

Just slightly altering the secondary effect that comes with the taunt.

My suggestion for an Accuracy debuff against targets that have accuracy bonuses wouldn't even be especially useful if your scrapper is soft-capped or has no defense at all. The sweet spot of usefulness would be for those scrappers that have medium defense, say in the 20-30% range. Currently, if you have 20% defense, an AV would have a 30% chance to hit you, instead of 20%. An accuracy debuff would let you actually benefit from a little more of your defense.

And you'd have to make the choice: Use Confront to debuff that accuracy bonus, or attack. Since, as mentioned, probably 90% of all scrappers skip Confront anyway, it would maybe give some of those people a reason to take it, and it wouldn't remove the core function of the power for those people who have and use it already. (since it would still be a taunt power)

You sure about that?

Were you there? In his office? On the day ED was envisioned?

It's not surprising that you're defending Jack this tenaciously...the two of you have a lot in common.

And saying he can't do the work himself is preposterous. You don't get to be Lead Designer of a video game company without knowing your way around the code. You just don't. That's like managing a Jiffy Lube while having no idea how to change a car's oil.

Ummmm, no.

Stalkers get Criticals too, and they do it better.

They get a 10% base chance to land a critical when not Hidden (scrappers get a 5% chance), and that chance gets increased for each teammate within 30 feet of them. The base chance goes up when the target's rank goes up.

Honestly, if Scrappers got the critical bonus for teammates being nearby, I'd be happy as hell with that. They wouldn't even need a buff to the base chance.

You don't REALLY believe that something like that would get done without the lead designer's approval, do you?

Posi did the actual work, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Jack was in on every aspect of it, giving the go ahead for every numerical change.

Blaming Positron for ED is like blaming the cameraman when a movie sucks instead of the writer and director who told him what to do.

Maybe proof that said designer can run a game without it failing miserably?

When Jack was in charge CoH was declining rapidly. It didn't start picking up again until Positron took over.

Jack then went on to create a game using his ideas....that went on to LOSE over $10 million in it's first year.

So yeah, citing Jack as a source of what Tankers should be isn't putting things in a very good light.

I've been telling him all of those things for literally years now.

He has ignored all of it, sweeping it all under the rug as though it is all irrelevant, when the truth is he knows damn well how much damage those FACTS do to his argument, so he ignores them in the hope that they'll go away.

They haven't gone away yet. And they won't, because the design of Tankers is set in stone, and no amount of caterwauling is going to change it. They will ALWAYS be the lowest damaging of the melee ATs, because they achieve greater survivability with virtually no effort.

The only way Tanker damage will see the kind of increase he is asking for is if the devs throw game balance out the window completely.

Did you READ my suggestion? Or did you stop at the part where I said "tweak Confront"?

Because if you HAD read it, you would have seen the part where I mention that it would still remain a taunt power, with the exact same magnitude and duration. The taunt effect of the power would remain 100% unchanged. I didn't mention replacing that with a Fear effect anywhere in my post.

It would just have the -range replaced with a different secondary effect. Not breaking the Cottage Rule, because it doesn't change the function of the power. And most scrapper players who don't frequent the forums would probably not even notice a difference in it.

Brutes need a LOT more help to even approach them than tanks do.

An Invuln tank will be at 90% resistance to S/L without trying, all by himself.

An Invuln Brute can only do so with Barrier. It is mathematically impossible for an Invuln brute to hit the S/L resistance cap by himself without it. And even then, he can only do so for a maximum of 30 seconds at a time. Or for 2 minutes with a crash.

If you don't believe me on the mathematical impossibility, fire up Mids' and check it for yourself. I 6 slotted Resist Physical Damage, Temp Invulnerabilty, and Tough with 5xBoosted Resistance enhancements, AND added t4 Cardiac. The Brute topped out at 78.4% resistance to S/L.

There is no way for the Brute to reach 90% to S/L without outside help or taking and using Barrier, or using Unstoppable. Those all have downsides that the Tanker is not subjected to. The Tanker can choose Ageless and have the recharge to run a better attack chain than the Brute, or can choose Rebirth and have even MORE survivability that is unavailable to the Brute, because he picked Barrier. So, a Brute can cap S/L damage for 30 seconds, or he can cap it for 2 minutes with a crash. And the earliest the Brute can do it is level 38, while the Tanker can be capped to S/L damage as early as level 22. It makes a difference.

It's the base values I'm concerned about rather than the caps. And for the record, I still think Brutes should have had their resistance cap reduced like originally planned. The devs didn't do it because of all the uproar from the Brute players. I considered it irrelevant, because only Fiery Aura and Electric Armor Brutes can reach the cap on anything without outside help anyway.

There's also the fact that, due to the lower base values, a Brute has to expend IO slotting just to almost reach where a Tanker is on SOs. The tank can slot for recharge and run a better attack chain than the Brute, while STILL being more survivable.

The point when I realized that buffing tanker damage by any great amount would be overpowered was when I went AFK for 15 minutes in a mission with 9 guys beating on my Willpower tank. I expected to come back to a dead tank, but not only was I still alive, my health bar hadn't even noticeably moved. And this was at level 17, slotted with level 20 generic IOs. If a tank can casually survive doing that, giving them more damage would be unbalancing.

Hmmmm, maybe there could be something here.

Tanks and Brutes have a 5 target Taunt, because they are set up to hold agro.

Stalkers have Placate, because they are set up to avoid agro.

Scrappers aren't really designed to do either of those things as a primary function, as evidenced by the fact that only a few of their secondaries have a taunt aura in them.

It's also true that Confront is the most universally skipped power out of all Scrapper primaries.

How about a tweak to how Confront works? In it's current form it is just a single-target version of the Taunt that Tankers and Brutes have.

I had an idea of how it could be adjusted without drastically affecting anything.

Here goes:

Make it more like an "Intimidation" power. The Scrapper has called out his target, making it clear that he is coming for that target specifically. This rattles the target, causing their attacks to be slightly less accurate and (maybe) slightly less damaging for a time.

And I mean Accuracy, not To Hit. Specifically, a debuff that counteracts Accuracy bonuses that NPCs get for being higher rank or higher level. The catch there would be that if the target does not have an accuracy bonus, the debuff does nothing, making it rather pointless to use on minions.

Since AVs get a 50% accuracy buff, the lowest their final To-Hit will ever get is 7.5% as opposed to the 5% of most other critters. If Intimidation* gave a 50% debuff to that accuracy, it would reduce the AV's Accuracy bonus to 25%, effectively lowering their To-Hit floor to 6.25% instead of 7.5%.

Interestingly enough, this effect would be more valuable the lower your defense is. If you're already softcapped, the AV's accuracy bonus is applied to 5%. If you have no defense at all, it is applied to 50%. Normally, an AV attacking a Scrapper with 0% defense will hit 75% of the time. Using Intimidation on that AV will reduce the final To Hit from 75% to 62.5% instead (if that debuff was 50%)

It would still function as a Taunt, because it would be dumb to ignore a guy who just said he's coming for YOU, but the Accuracy debuff would replace the -range debuff found in Tanker and Brute Taunt (and Confront as well). And since it woudl still function as a Taunt, any Scrapper who took it and slotted it with a taunt set will not have to change their build.

50% might be (and probably is) too strong, I just used that to illustrate what I'm talking about.

It would be something that no other AT has, that relates to the "traditional" role of the Scrapper (attacking single hard targets). And if done correctly it won't really affect performance in a really noticeable way (because reducing To Hit from 7.5% to 6.25% isn't a huge improvement, and it probably would not be that strong anyway).

The other catch is, time spent using this ability is time that could be spent attacking instead, leaving the Scrapper with the choice of whether he wants to reduce his enemy's accuracy against him or attack. Most Scrapper players I know would choose to attack again, and STILL skip this power, so it probably would not end up being game-breaking at all.

The other idea I had is give Scrappers the ability to apply a minor regen debuff when they land 2 Critical Hits on the same target within a given time span. Make the time span long enough and the debuff small enough that it will only really come into play against something that survives more than a few hits from the Scrapper in the first place.

I dunno, that's just my idea. Don't think it's really necessary, but it would be kind of cool for the Scrapper Taunt to work slightly differently from Tanker and Brute Taunt, to reflect their slightly different role (not really meant to take agro for a team). And 99% of Scrappers will probably still skip it anyway

*I don't have a name in mind for it, so I went with Intimidation.

Because they started working on Beast Mastery before Staff Fighting.

How do I know this?

The 4 legged rig appeared as early as the Halloween Event. They obviously developed the 4 legged rig before then, and they would not have gone to that effort if there were not a powerset in the works that makes use of it. The devs would not do the work of creating an entirely new skeleton if it was only going to be used for a couple vanity pets and a buyable travel power.

Staff Fighting was announced because someone stumbled across the demo files for the animations and leaked them. Seems they didn't see the point of denying it when it was known the animations were already in the game. Had that not happened, I'm guessing Staff Fighting would not have been announced as early as it was.

When what they want is unreasonable and unbalancing, and their case is presented as though the devs OWE it to them? And when that person also acts as though anyone who disagrees with him hates the AT he wants things for?

Absolutely.

I don't hate Tankers, Johnny. I have 4 of them I'm actively playing right now ranging from level 11 to level 40. The level 40 Tanker would be 50 by now if it were not for the fact that I rerolled him when a new powerset became available.

My problem with what you keep asking for is that it's a selfish request, and that you always play the martyr when anyone disagrees, no matter how logical their disagreement is. Your request doesn't help ALL Tankers, just YOUR tankers and ones in similar situations that can consistently stay at the damage cap. The vast majority of Tankers in the game are not going to be sitting at the damage cap anywhere near frequently enough for your request to really benefit them much at all.

But, since I'm not entirely unreasonable, I would fully support an increase to the Tanker damage scalar up to .85. The math I did earlier in the thread supports it as being a reasonable buff.

That would help all tanks in all situations, not just those that can consistently hit the damage cap at level 50. And it would not be out of line since .844 would be exactly 75% of the Scrapper damage scalar. I figure it would even out since neither criticals or Bruising are factored into what the damage scalar actually is.

Since Scrappers get 75% of Tanker base values on defense and resistance, Tankers getting 75% of the scrapper damage scalar would be perfectly fair in my opinion.