McNum

No, #1 is a mechanical issue, and Tankers are fine, but not great, mechanically. I'm talking about a gimmick or something similar that is uniquely the Tankers' and not something any other AT can do.

Maybe adding a symbol over the head of the enemies you've taunted would be enough, but something mundane, yet flavorful would be nice to get for Tankers, too.

It's a feel thing, not a mechanical thing. So, not #1.

Heh, yeah, I figured that in a thread about Offenders, a shoutout to the crazy people in the Repeat Offenders was in order. Even if I don't think I've teamed with you guys, at least not any more than on a pickup team with one or two of you, you make a wonderful example to follow when I'm feeling down about the power of any of my own Defenders.

So, yeah. Got a little sappy there, maybe. But I do appreciate that something like RO exists to basically run the game on its edges. A Brute tearing its way throw large spawns is kind of standard now. Doing the same with only Corruptors, Defenders and Controllers, though, now that's awesome. I kind of want to see how Trick plays, I had my doubts on my Trick Archer several times, but she's actually gotten pretty powerful.

The not-so-imagined scenario here is a Tanker on an 8-man team in a +2-3 Nemesis mission. He, for some reason, uses Taunt while standing among the squishies. The Nemesis troops all fire their grenades. Half the team is now dead. I've seen something like that happen a little too often. I mean, sure, the solution is "be more mindful of taunting", but sometimes the team just runs after you, even if they shouldn't.

The dirty solution is to have an +AoE defense aura on the Tanker by default, or as part of some power. Just like Stalkers get way over capped AoE Defense when Hidden, a Tanker could provide modest AoE Defense in the 5-10 feet around him. The example, again, is Superman taking a missile to the chest, leaving Batman behind him unharmed. In CoH, Batman would have been blasted. If a Tanker could radiate, I don't know... 15% AoE Defense to everyone else, it might work. It'd also solve the question of why you want more Tankers. Because 30% or 45% AoE defense is nicer than 15%.

It's a dirty hack, and one that could throw balance out of... balance, potentially. It'd need to be thoroughly tested in a beta, I'd say. Try out different powers, an inherent power, an offensive power, a defensive power. See if it fits anywhere. Also, try out the numbers, 15% might be too much or too little. Probably not too little. We don't want Tankers to steal the work of dedicated buffers, after all. Also, Shield Defense would end up being better at this due to Grant Cover, which basically does this, but to all Defense but Psi. But that Shield is better at defending allies? I'm okay with that, seems thematic enough.

Well, if we go both with the cap increase and something else, I think the something else should look at any weaknesses the Tanker has when tanking for a team. As far as I can think of, the big team killing weaknesses a Tanker can have is enemy AoE damage when close to a softer target. This can be mitigated by playing carefully, of course, just get away from the squishies and preferably turn the enemies around so cones go the other way. However, it's still a little too easy to accidentally get someone killed against AoE happy foes.

Mechanically, this is a nasty problem to solve. I mean, a reverse Bodyguard has merit, but it has the downside of making AoEs a lot more dangerous to a Tanker than a Brute, and we want Tankers to, in all situations, builds being similar, to survive significantly longer, and with more foes attacking them. That's the Tanker's schtick, after all. Now, something that reduces the radius of AoEs would be nice, but I am not sure the game can even do that. And, well, a change is much more likely to happen if it's not overly complicated.

So, yeah, it's tricky. I mean, the damage cap is for extreme cases of +Damage buffs, which is nice and all, but for Tankers to get their identity back, they kind of need something mundanely useful, too. Something that works with all powerset combinations and doesn't overpower the strong sets too much, yet gives the weaker sets a boost. Preferably something that boosts crowd control or team survivability, as most Tankers pretty much can take most of what the game throws at them. The trick is to extend the same to the rest of the team, simply by being a Tanker who knows his job well enough.

Tough guy in melee with a touch of Defender is what I'd go for. Let the Tankers become force multipliers, even if it's just a tertiary concern. The Brute is all about itself, the Tanker should be able to empower the team, too. Like how when Superman, Thor, Captain America, or similar arrive on the scene, you know the bad guys are in trouble. It's a morale boost to Team Good, and a shock to Team Evil. And then we're back to square one again. How to do that?

Ah, so you already know the power of stacked buffs and debuffs. I'd imagine there isn't much that can stand against that team.

Same as the one on Test. So it's the Panther bug fix.

Yeah, I see why that one might take a while, actually. The Panther bug could make characters inaccessible. I'm sure there are worse categories of bugs, but I'd imagine this one is very high priority since it corrupts player characters. I'd imagine only emergency security fixes and issues that can take down the server are higher.

So I would not be surprised if this update is both a client patch for us, and a script of some kind run on the character database to do whatever magic is needed to make affected characters accessible again. So, four and a half hours seems pretty reasonable to me. When running scripts on the character database, you really, really want to make absolutely sure that you have a proper backup, that the script has enough time to run, and that it did what it needed to, and ONLY what it needed to.

If I'm right, then doing this is just four and a half hours is actually kind of impressive.

Pretty much this, yeah. Offender is an old term, and kind of obsoleted in most cases these days.

It basically means a Defender who does not neglect offense. Radiation and Kinetics are the classics for primaries that lend themselves well to it, but most primary sets aren't that busy that you can't send out some attacks as well.

The classic opposite is the Defender who has all 9 Empathy powers, the entire Leadership pool, and in some extreme cases, the Medicine pool to have another heal. And that one blast they had to take, but didn't want to "waste" any slots on. Healing Aura is, naturally, set to auto. And this isn't hyperbole, by the way, this was a classic Team Only Empath build back then.

If you want to see what Offenders can really do, you could contact the Repeat Offenders, they kind of live the dream here. Because one of the most powerful teams you can get in the game, is a team of Defenders who know how to run both primary powers and secondary powers properly. And that's RO in a nutshell.

I want an "/em flyposeRainboom"

Or you can just mix and match it. Make a macro that turns on Afterburner and changes to a costume with a rainbow trail aura.

Makes me kind of wonder what powersets you would give the main six ponies from the shows.

Yeah, I kind of see this set getting disallowed in quite a few powers, too. Like most placeable powers. Honestly, this thing needed a proper full beta pass before going Live.

Yeah, I think I'll go with this stance, too on that IO. Go ahead, abuse it. See what happens. Maybe nothing does, maybe it turns out that the IO is too powerful in some powers, maybe even to the point of breaking something. I kind of hope it does, really. Not quite sure what power it'd be that would get that awesome from this, although I have a kindling of an idea.

There is an issue with knockback, but this thread isn't the one to deal with that. There's way too much joy of getting break the game in this thread to have any kind of constructive debate on knockback here.

It's a Damage IO, Hurricane doesn't do damage. It's going to make Tornado... interesting, to say the least.

There's that word again "undesirable".

And yes, what I'm suggesting will take more time to get done, but it would be a lot better to get it right, rather than this attempt to sweep the problem under the rug. Plus, this IO has the potential to create several new problems on its own, as some of those "undesirable" powers could end up vastly more powerful then intended. So what do you do with outliers like that? Nerf the power or the IO? "Letting it be" is not an option as that makes this IO "required" for those powers, making a rather large disparity between the minimum and maximum potential of that power. Something we've seen over and over to be changed in this game.

Adding this IO to the game has the potential to become a lot more balancing work than just adding another IO. This is the kind of IO that gets powers nerfed. Or alternatively, gets made redundant by power buffs.

This IO will cause more problems than it solves.

Awww, look. It's Widowshy. I'll now read Ghost Widow's lines in Fluttershy's voice. That could either work really well, or completely rob Ghost Widow of any and all dignity she has left.

I think I'm leaning towards "works a bit too well, actually."