Kruunch

No I wasn't talking about GFS.

Why can't you replace one of the two first powers? What difference does it make when a Brute can pick it (and for that matter, you could always reorder it for Brutes if it did)?

It'd be nice having a useful default secondary power for Tankers for a change

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i already have a sm/wp brute. not trying to duplicate that blueside. i think the smaller dmg numbers would make me pine for the brute too much

but brute is pretty squishy. can only hit 49% smash/lethal with tough. harder to get a decent amount of defense. withouth a sonic or thermal corruptor large spawns of lethal or smashing dmg that are immune to either the knockdown or stun of fault - or both - destroy the wp brute.

be glad you dont have to fight longbow. every pack has minions that do something on the order of -1000% regen from range for 30s.

i like wp though. pretty straightforward. easy on the end. i was considering super strength but without fury to fuel it i dont think i would be happy with any tanker that does smashing or lethal dmg primarily come late game. i'm not looking for a soloing powerhouse but i've been on ae farms with my controllers and defenders where the tankers couldnt kill a spawn of lt's on their own any faster t han my ff/rad defender in so's.

i had considered invuln too especially with the tasty tidbit that is gaussian chance for build up in invincibility. either set will be expensive to build for decent amount of typed defense i have no illusions about that. but i also cant ignore the fact that willpower on a tanker has really good defensive numbers, really high hitpoints as additional mitigation that are always on vs. a click power and a tier 9 that doesnt leave me open and vulnerable when it crashes if i lag and cant time the blue pills accordingly to keep the toggles going.

i also dont want to duplicate the stone melee end costs. i had to slot up over 4.20 eps before the endurance burned from 7 toggles and an attack chain with only 20% global recharge was sustainable, and even then for most eb's and av's i have to chug blue pills with some regularity. i may consider ss because outside of the rage and hasten crashes it's attack chain is pretty light on endurance - but fire is something i havent done since issue 4 and i'd like to explore it some. besides - sarrate doesnt seem to have mitigation issues as wp/fire

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That's strange ... my WP/Stone Tanker is hovering around 3.8 eps, has a global recharge of 40% (and Hasten on top of that) and doesn't dent his blue bar. Weird.

I favor Invuln over WP for end game stuff simply by that point even a moderately built Inv Tanker can take on stuff that a well built WP Tanker will sweat their support on.

Both can do any TF (as noted) but one is much easier to build then the other, in terms of pure tanking. WP is much easier to play and slot for however (imo).

P.S. - I don't find WP Tankers expensive to get up to STF levels comfortably. I think I spent 40 mil on mine and he doesn't really need much more of anything right now (at least that I've faced).

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Edit: If one of those scrappers was mine, I HAVE pulled off of you if I was ST'ing a mob and land a headsplitter crit. I just didn't have the heart to tell ya

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Yes one of those Scrappers is yours and I just didn't taunt because its fun to watch you go SPLAT.

And I take great joy in telling you

P.S. - You've never pulled agro off a Taunt (vs taunt aura / gauntlet) of mine. Although (and sorry to ding your man hood) I rarely have to Taunt off you, auras and gauntlet usually being enough.

Then again you also know how to play a Scrapper and aren't soloing 5 blocks away blathering about having agro.

Yeah although you'd have to work up to the STF with IO sets to do it comfortably (ITF is easy for a WP Tanker with T&W).

WP's only problem (as noted above) is -regen which I haven't seen a lot in the game and extremely large alphas and/or ranged alphas.

Having said all that, I can't say specifically if you wouldn't have more problems with the Fire secondary since that precludes all forms of mitigation. My WP Tanker has Stone Melee as a secondary which gives really good mitigation, which helps WP a lot imo.

Just to play Devil's Advocate:

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Since this:

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Show us which power you would replace in each Tanker secondary to add in the Blast.

Rules:

1) Can't be the first or second tier power
2) Can't replace Taunt
3) Can't be the tier 9 power

Go!


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wasn't taken up, I'm going to show where the problems are


'Easily' swapped out powersets:

Dark Melee: Replace Touch of Fear with Dark Blast (however, this removes a lot of utility and mitigation to the Tanker, meaning that it's a significant loss for a Dark Melee character)


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I think this might hurt at the lower levels for Tankers who rely on Touch of Fear, but I've never missed it so I wouldn't be opposed to swapping that but I could see where some would (especially coupled with Dark Armor).

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Energy Melee: Replace Stun with Energy Blast (again, removing a lot of mitigation from the set to get it)


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Because EM lacks for stuns

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Fire Melee: Replace Breath of Fire with Fire Blast (removes an AoE to get a single ranged attack)


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I would replace the single target Fire Sword attack with Flares personally (or a dumbed down Fire Blast). But I don't think FM needs a ranged since it technically has one.

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Ice Melee: Replace Frozen Touch with Ice Blast (lose a lot of utility here, and likely less damage on a set that already suffers in the ST damage world)


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Agreed.

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'Harder' powersets:

War Mace: Replace Jawbreaker maybe? With what? What attack goes here? Is it a brand new attack? Does it cause redraw?


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Yes a brand new attack and yes causes redraw (or the equivelant animation of catching the thrown weapon). I think WM needs this more for thematic reasons (Thor's Hammer) then anything else but adding this would obviously be much more complicated then adding an existing power so I doubt this would see any traction. In lieu of that, you'd probably see one of the Freakshow animations I would think (flying disc or equivelant).

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Axe: Replace Gash with something? Same problems as War Mace.


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Same answer as WM too although more for consistancy sake then thematic reasons.

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Potentially crippling powersets:

Dual Blades: Same problems as War Mace and Axe, with the additional problem of what would this do to the combo system.

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No clue ... maybe the exception to the rule?

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Sarrate: regarding your earlier posts about Scrappers pulling agro off of their Tankers and maintaining that agro ... I've run with some of the most damaging built Scrappers and Blasters in the game (both in AT combos and specifically built toons) and I have *never once* had agro pulled off of me where I was actively looking to keep agro.

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Which is why I specified Invuln, Shield, and possibly WP Scrapper - all of them have taunt auras. Damage alone (unless there is some weird AI preference going on) isn't enough to override Taunt. Taunting off a taunt aura Scrapper or Brute is a completely different story.

I've seen a Spines/Invuln have aggro that took 1-2 taunts and AoEs to out threat. That is a very well slotted (5 Perfect Zinger) Taunt (~80s duration, ~5s recharge), I might add - strong enough to keep the attention of all four Patron AVs stuck to me like glue though a 30s Black Hole when combined with my AOEs. I've seen the exact same thing when duoing with a DM/Fire Brute in Cimerora. (I'd let him share part of the aggro to get his Fury up, then work to steal it back when he got into trouble. He wasn't Taunting, just using Blazing Aura.)

Taunt is not a 100% override; it's a threat multiplier Tankers have to weave in with attacks to maximize their threat generation.

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I'd be willing to bet that this is when Taunt and taunt like effects got changed in CoH from a control-like effect to a high threat meter type of effect as explained by Castle

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My guess is that it was always a threat multiplier, just that the internal docs were wrong from the beginning. Heck, old school Hamidon raids used to be griefed by the non-designated Tank Taunting with the hold team. Taunt + close range + dmg yields higher threat than Taunt alone from range - despite the fact the Tank had been Taunting him for the entire raid. (This was actually generating theories that Taunt had diminishing returns or something - it just wasn't working as it should have.)

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We must be playing different games then ... I run with two Shields Scrappers every night and I've never *ever* had a Taunt ignored in favor of their agro (and this is even on SK'd tank projects of mine that are doing piddly damage).

Conversely I have a really well built Spines/Fire Scrapper that only pulls agro if the Tanker forgets to Taunt (and more times then not, auras and punchvoke are enough to hold agro from me). As an AOE based Scrapper I also know to fight stuck to the Tanker's butt. I'd be willing to bet your examples are of Scrappers fighting at the fringes in which case, Castle's post applies.

As far as when the misdocumentation vs. misconception on the dev's part occurred .... shrug. It's only an educated guess. However I've never heard of Tankers remotely having agro issues before PvP was implemented. In fact, auras and punchvoke worked to such an extent that Taunt (or Provoke going back far enough) were considered to be a waste of a power by and large.

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So, if a player attacks Mob A and hits, would Gauntlet have to check Mob B to see if it hits? If yes, then Gauntlet is a bigger pile than I originally thought it was. :P

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That is what I believe is currently the case. Mind you, I might be wrong -- this is not exactly trivial to test, and I may have made a mistake in the testing setup (plus, it's been close to a year, I think, since I've last tested Gauntlet, which doesn't make my memory any more reliable).

(Solo testing setup: Turn off your aggro aura and go to a zone with critters that are sufficiently below you in level so that they don't aggro from proximity, but high enough so that they don't immediately run away after they miss the first time. Grab a spawn of 4+ critters, eliminate all but 4. Pull that spawn over to the vicinity of another spawn. Make sure that all four of the initial critters are closer to you than the other spawn. Use an attack with a high Gauntlet radius, but low enough so that it doesn't outright defeat the critter. See if the other spawn aggroed. If it didn't, then Gauntlet just missed. Since they are below you, expect to repeat this at least a couple dozen times to see the first miss. Then repeat it often enough to make sure it's reproducible. If you have a duo partner, then much simpler setups are possible, of course.)

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Yes this is the case. Gauntlet checks "toHit" with each mob in its area of effect.

See post above for reasoning and changes behind Gauntlet.

If I remember correctly, the original Gauntlet worked exactly like Taunt and when PvP was released made Tankers totally overpowered because anytime you hit something everyone (enemies) in the vacinity would be locked on to you for XXX duration.

This was when the general rules for Taunt and taunt like effects were changed for PvP and Gauntlet got side swiped in the process. The reasoning was that Gauntlet should work *in general* when the Tanker was continually pounding away in the midst of a bunch of enemies and in this sense their reasoning panned out.

**EDIT* I'd be willing to bet that this is when Taunt and taunt like effects got changed in CoH from a control-like effect to a high threat meter type of effect as explained by Castle. Chances are one of the devs at the time (Geko?) threw in a hot fix to adjust taunt effects so that players had a high native resistance to them (the first time players needed to be able to resist taunt effects) and this fix changed the mechanic by which taunt effects previously worked. Shortly afterwards, people started noticing taunt effects behaving a little differently under extreme circumstances, and thus Castle's post (who may not have been aware of the hot fix which very likely wasn't documented). Just a hunch but I believe the timing is right.

Gauntlet is a great addition to a Tanker's agro management as are taunt auras but neither can be relied upon reasonably as the sole means of managing agro. In combination, these effects sincerely mitigate the need for the ability Taunt, which is still useful for helping team mates at range.

Sarrate: regarding your earlier posts about Scrappers pulling agro off of their Tankers and maintaining that agro ... I've run with some of the most damaging built Scrappers and Blasters in the game (both in AT combos and specifically built toons) and I have *never once* had agro pulled off of me where I was actively looking to keep agro.

In my estimation, most Tankers who do get agro pulled are usually guilty of relying on taunt auras (which can be easily pulled away from) and punchvoke (which is unreliable at best) and/or having mistimed a Taunt (i.e. forgot to cycle it into their chain).

Also regarding Banished Pantheon (masks): I have yet to see a mask that didn't immediately turn to me when I Taunted it. As I said, I've seen the duration become much lower then normal, but I've never had a mask ignore a Taunt. Having said that, I haven't actually done comparison tests, but I think I'd remember if something ignored a Taunt.

As I've said before, the only time I've seen my Taunt ignored is when another Tanker has landed his/her Taunt first.

Now this may not be the case or the formula for 100% of the mobs in the game and my own subjective reasoning/observations certainly can be faulty but over the course of 5 years (off and on) and through 14 different Tankers I have yet to see Taunt not physically work as I've stipulated.

According to Castle (in the link you provided the last time we discussed this) Castle gave an example condition of where Taunt (the power) could be overidden. The condition (if memory serves) was something like a Blaster doing his/her whole chain ending with their large nuke, while the Tanker tried to Taunt at range (outside of the radius of the Tanker's taunt aura and Gauntlet effects).

The only other time I've seen Taunt work haphazardly is when fighting Giant Monsters and I usually attributed that to being in a large scrum where another Tanker may be Taunting as well (but I've never actually run tests to prove one way or the other).

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playing around with willpower and invuln in mids, i noticed that willpower can get 70% smash/lethal resists.

ignoring the taunt aura discrepency, can willpower tank the ITF?

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Sigh. Yes I tanked the ITF at L44 SK'd up on my WP Tanker.

Taunt aura doesn't mean squat.

Just play the damned toon and stop worrying about what you can on Mids.

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anyone have any suggestions?

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Build it yourself and don't listen overly much to other people's opinions on the subject.

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Bingo!

What a complete waste of time.

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Will additional accuracy enhancement affect this?

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I suspect that they would (though I'm not certain -- for all I know it may be that the penalty is applied after min(to-hit-chance, .95) is calculated, not before). However, the easiest and most reliable solution is still to simply use Taunt vs. AVs.

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I don't believe the Gauntlet effect is enhanceable. I have a crazy amount of +acc and global accuracy and I see Gauntlet not work quite a bit.

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Yup, but it's dang good.

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I love AOE Fears (strong mechanic in this game) but single target for a Tanker? Meh.

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Well, we do know that Threat degrades. Otherwise, the person who first got it would never lose aggro, unless someone else got twice the Threat level. We can prove that another person can steal it without doing twice the threat value after a given amount of time.


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Ok I'm confused now ... do we need twice the threat to pull agro off another person or don't we? It seems that you're contradicting yourself here.

Sarrate: That doesn't match my experience with agro. When getting into a "Taunt war" I've never seen the other Tanker able to pull agro off of me until my Taunt wore off (and assumeably his Taunt at that point went into effect) and vica versa. This includes the original taunting Tanker not directly attacking the mob that the other Tanker is.

Also, with regards to threat, I've seen lower damaging toons steal agro from higher damaging ones simply because they were the last to cause the damage (seemingly) before the mob agro'd them.

What really puzzles me is when I see a Blaster steal agro from a Scrapper who is actively attacking the target AND has a taunt aura running.

This sort of leads me back to how Castle explained to me originally that there was no actual agro list in CoH.

Aett: In your particular example, since the overlap time is so short (5 seconds) could lag account for that discrepency?

Isn't the fear in DM single target?

The damage threat multiplyer is extremely low when compared to Taunt's (the power) threat level. So much so that the only occurances I've heard of Taunt's effect being overridden is at range (when the Tanker wasn't actually pounding on what he/she was taunting *and* a very high dps toon was attacking the same mob (or another Tanker)).

As far as I know threat doesn't "degrade" ... it's a matter of scaling numbers.

However this doesn't stand up when you compare two Tankers together. Whenever I've seen to Tankers Taunt (the power) the same target, the first Taunt to land goes into effect and the second Taunt only applies after the first Taunt's duration wears off. I've seen this in occurances of me beating on what I Taunted and still not pulling agro from a nearby Tanker who Taunted first even while beating on another mob.

I understand the documentation/dev's input differs from what I've just said, however that's been my experience in-game.

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I'd prefer a build that would allow me to focus on AoE and mitigation. I'm not too concerned with having huge damage numbers.

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War Mace.

(has both excellent mitigation and has an excellent set of AOEs)

To a lesser extent, Battle Axe (the cones are significantly more narrow however).

Ice might also be a good option (has great mitigation ... not sure how good and/or plentiful the AOEs are).

Fire has good AOEs however no mitigation.

SS and Stone have only one (damaging) AOE each.

Dark Melee has decent mitigation (debuffs) but fairly limited AOEs (narrow cones or long recharges). However DM also has great utility (heal and end recovery).

Dual Blade: Don't know enough about it but Invince's toHit bonus coupled with Invulnerability having a decent amount of skippable powers makes it work well with DB (as you need to take most if not all of DB's powers to make it work correctly).

They all work well with Inv.

You would need to further qualify your question to get a better answer (i.e. what do you want? damage, mitigation, aoes, single target, fast chain, etc ...)

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You're being obtuse and overly nitpicky.

For all intents and purposes Taunt does mean you don't have to worry about agro. I have yet to have another toon pull agro from one of my Taunts and the only times I've heard of Taunt being overridden is when its done outside of the range of the Tankers AOE *and* a crazy burst DPS toon is on top of the mob.

In fact, it works so much like a control that for *years* Castle was reporting it as an unoverridable control.

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Really? Because my MA/WP scrapper was stealing aggro from an Invuln Tank against AVs in the STF just last night. Mostly due to damage. Granted, the Tanker was relying on his aggro aura. But just his Taunt value alone, on the aggro aura, should have been enough to hold the aggro. It wasn't. My damage was much higher, so I ended up stealing the aggro.


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Yet another prolific poster who doesn't actually read what he's posting to. Seriously?

We've been talking about the power "Taunt" , not taunt auras, which I believe I've already stipulated and commented on.

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This is what happens when you try to play the game from these forums instead of actually playing the game.


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Ahhh...the "your experience does not match mine, so you must not play the game" argument.

Listen, we don't agree on things, but I do play the game. Stop trying to dismiss arguments that you don't agree with. I have seen in-game, several times where Tanker aggro has been lost. Is it rare? Yes, it sure is. Is it possible to do? Yes, yes it is.


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Actually my comment about playing on these boards was directed at people who have posted so often that they truly have nothing more to offer constructively, but feel the need to find an excuse to post some more.

My posts tend to answer questions based on what you will *usually* (read as 90%+ of the time) encounter in the game, not the exceptions to the rule (although I do usually clarify that there are exceptions to the rule which I have done here).

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P.S. - Banished Pantheon Masks resistance shortens the duration of a taunt. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with magnitude unless you're just relying on a taunt *aura* or a side swipe by Gauntlet to maintain agro which is silly.

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Banished Pantheon, at least used to, have 4.0 Taunt Mag Protection, meaning that all of the 3-Mag Taunts would not be enough to deter them from attacking a squishy who got their attention first. You'd need to combine Taunt effects to get them off the squishy.

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Again the difference between playing the game on a regular basis and playing the game by numbers (and I know you've played the game plenty so I'm not dismissing your experience). Yes you are correct in that if you stood in the middle of Banished Pantheon and did absolutely nothing (just relying on your taunt aura), it would be very easy to pull agro from the Tanker. However this is the case with all mobs generally speaking the only difference being that with Banished Pantheon the slightest effects will pull agro versus doing your normal damage which will pull agro off any taunt aura if nothing else is done by the Tanker.

The essential noticeable difference (at least in my experience and to Sarrate's point) with Banished Pantheon masks is that the ability Taunt lasts shorter then normal. If I was going to quantify further (i.e. if this had been a thread about Banished Pantheon bosses) I would have also mentioned that agro is more slippier then usual when relying just on taunt auras + punchvoke.

To Sarrate's point, yet another area in the game that is documented vaguely or where actual experience opposes documentation. By her quoted Banished Pantheon description, I would read that as Taunt being fully resisted by Banished Pantheon which is obviously not the case when actually fighting them.

Additionally (and also to Sarrate's point) while the internal documentation might have read Taunt works as a control, the fact that it actually *does* work as a control for over 99% of the scenarios in the game, kind of reinforces my point.

To the OP's original question: I don't know if Taunt enhancements actually raise the Taunt magnitude of the taunt effect (again documentation in this game being somewhat vague and misleading at times) but I'd say for all intents and purposes, if it did, this would not be a reason for slotting the enhancement, but rather the effect you'd really be looking for is the duration that the enhancement adds to the taunt effect.

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The infos are just inconsistant and a tad misleading. Taunt enhancements add to the duration of your taunt. That's the main focus of enhancing "taunt". The mouseover shows you the salient bonuses with enhancements in place while the "detailed info" generally shows you base numbers adjusted for level.

The Taunt magnitude is almost meaningless as the power itself basically works like a control (you have to get into some extreme circumstaces where another toon is able to override your taunt).

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Taunt Magnitude does have a couple of places where it can come in handy to know about it. The one I know about most is the Banished Pantheon Masks, who have higher than average Taunt Mag Protection. A single Taunt may not get their attention.


Also, Taunt is not really like a control. It's a mathematical value in a long string of values for a total Threat determination. Just Taunting somebody does NOT mean that you will hold aggro, especially if somebody is able to put out a lot of damage quickly with a debuffing set.

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You're being obtuse and overly nitpicky.

For all intents and purposes Taunt does mean you don't have to worry about agro. I have yet to have another toon pull agro from one of my Taunts and the only times I've heard of Taunt being overridden is when its done outside of the range of the Tankers AOE *and* a crazy burst DPS toon is on top of the mob.

In fact, it works so much like a control that for *years* Castle was reporting it as an unoverridable control.

This is what happens when you try to play the game from these forums instead of actually playing the game.

P.S. - Banished Pantheon Masks resistance shortens the duration of a taunt. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with magnitude unless you're just relying on a taunt *aura* or a side swipe by Gauntlet to maintain agro which is silly.

Yeah I wasn't zoning, or playing with WWs. I was just standing still watching my power meter.

And no, its not something I'd report :P

The infos are just inconsistant and a tad misleading. Taunt enhancements add to the duration of your taunt. That's the main focus of enhancing "taunt". The mouseover shows you the salient bonuses with enhancements in place while the "detailed info" generally shows you base numbers adjusted for level.

The Taunt magnitude is almost meaningless as the power itself basically works like a control (you have to get into some extreme circumstaces where another toon is able to override your taunt).

Search is your friend.

Any tanking combo can hold agro and that has more to do with the person behind the toon then the strength of a particular AT combination.

Shields is a fun set and plays similarly to Ice except that it doesn't have Ice's go power. The trade off is that you do more damage and get a really cool extra attack.

I would say give Invuln/SS a try out. It's cliche, but it's cliche for a reason

As for secondaries, WM is a nice set with more options in the AOE department and great mitigation. DM is also a really nice set and compliments Shields really well. SS is my favorite set in a vacuum, mostly because I love the Rage mechanic over Build Up.

Not precisely accurate. EQ2 didn't fail in its own right as it was financially successful (second largest release and sustained subscription base according to Sony).

It did fail to overcome EQ's success but not for the first reason (all MMOs at that point were group based as most are today) and minorly for the second reason.

Server and network instability was a larger reason for its failure to keep a substantially higher percentage of its release crowd, as well as poorly designed crafting systems and to a lesser extent, content. There are also various other reasons but they get pretty granular and are more subject to interpretation.

People will upgrade their rigs for a great game generally speaking.