Sorciere

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*blink*
That has to be a bug.

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It's quite possible that it is (it might be, for example, that Dual Blades and Dark Melee both got the scrapper Taunt scale instead of the tanker Taunt scale by accident).

It may also be that Castle wants to reduce taunt duration long term, but has left existing Taunt durations untouched (grandfathering them, so to speak).

I don't know which it is, of course -- I can only speculate. But right now, Dark Melee and Dual Blades Taunt do have a 25% shorter duration than other tanker Taunt powers.

But I am pretty sure that Invincibility and Against all Odds got higher 25% longer taunt duration than other aggro auras for a reason (I'd assume it is to compensate for the fact they don't do any damage).

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Do you actually play a Tanker? Try taking any of them, using only a taunt aura and not attacking and see how long you hold agro.

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I not only play tankers, I have done a lot of controlled tests of taunt mechanics with them. Specifically including the one case discussed in my previous post.

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Not to mention that the taunt mag, taunt duration and general area of effect are MUCH different from Taunt to taunt auras.

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The taunt magnitude of most tanker taunt auras (except RttC) is actually precisely the same as that of the various Taunt powers in tanker secondaries (mag 4). If you slot Invincibility or Against all Odds with three taunt duration SOs, then at level 50, the taunt duration will actually be longer than that of the unenhanced Taunt in Dark Melee and Dual Blades. The area of effect of Taunt is inconsequential for its strength, obviously.

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I sincerely can't see how you could possibly say that's a mischaracterization.

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Because I've actually performed controlled experiments regarding the mechanics of taunt effects and don't just make unsupported anecdotal claims like you tend to do.

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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)

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Aside from AVs, that's really a mischaracterization of taunt auras. You don't pull "easily away" from something that has a taunt effect on it, whether it comes from Taunt, auras, or Gauntlet. That 1000 * Taunt Duration multiplier is really, really hard to beat unless whoever is pulling aggro has a taunt multiplier of their own (usually scrappers or brutes with taunt auras). Even if you park a regular critter next to a Willpower tanker who doesn't do anything but let RttC tick (the weakest taunt aura in all of CoH), it is practically impossible to pull aggro with just damage.

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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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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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aunt Aura or no Taunt Aura, If the tanker is attacking and taunting (the power not the affect), it should be impossible the scrapper to pull aggro. Never mind that RttC is a fairly week taunt aura, Taunt the power + taunt the affect (via guantlet) from attacks + damage out put should keep the Tankers threat level way above the scrappers? Or is Aett talking about an AV the Tanker is not attacking?

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Aett was talking about a tanker who wasn't using Taunt (the power). Gauntlet and the taunt-effect from attacking, like aggro auras, has a -20% to-hit penalty vs. AVs. In other words, you can hit an AV with an attack and still not apply a taunt effect.

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This brings up another question. If a tanker is fighting 4 AVs (think STF), do the Guantlet taunts have a to hit check? In other words, does successfully hitting your target guarantee the gauntlet hit the other AVs (assuming they are in range)?

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No, it does not. It has to hit with a -20% penalty. As far as I know, even against normal critters there's a to-hit check for Gauntlet (though one that isn't penalized).

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I should point out that Lord Recluse has those exact same properties, although it's been demonstrated you can keep him taunted, but he is a lot squirrelier than most. (Granted the Tanker normally has 5-10 minutes of time to do nothing but Taunt.) Either that, or the MAG isn't working quite as Castle described to us.

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Devouring Earth Fungi also provide the same effects to all DE within range, with no observable adverse effects on tauntability.

I suspect that Banished Pantheon masks have their aggro-ignoring behavior mostly because of their AI (we recall that threat in CoX is an advisory mechanic, the AI can be told to pick its targets based on different criteria).

So, what is Taunt magnitude good for? I have an (unproven, purely conjectural) hypothesis here. Namely that Taunt magnitude either adds to or replaces the AT multiplier (in the latter case, only if it's equal or higher). I'm basing this conjecture mostly on the fact that Tanker, Scrapper, and Brute taunt auras have a magnitude that happens to coincide with the respective AT multipliers (except for RttC for tankers and brutes, which we know to be intentionally weak). This would have some interesting consequences, of course (such as there being a benefit to stacking Gauntlet or Taunt on top of an aggro aura).

Yes, we know that Castle actually said something different about how taunt magnitude works. But since taunt magnitude does not appear to quite work the way he describes it (or at least that there are other factors that come into play), I'm currently speculating as to what it actually does, and so I'm trying to construct alternate hypotheses that one could test.

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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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Taunt auras vs. AVs are generally a gamble, because they not only require a to-hit check, but a massively penalized to-hit check. Invincibility vs. a level 54 AV has a 19% chance to hit (39% base, -20% penalty) and a 8.1 second duration. If Invincibility was inactive at the same time (or had little duration left) where your RttC was actually hitting, then aggro could have easily switched.

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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.

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What Aett means is something like the following scenario:

Player A generates X threat.
Player B waits T seconds (for some reasonably high value of T).
Player B generates less than 2*X threat.
Player B gets aggro.

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

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Threat does in fact decay, that is easily demonstrable (in fact, you can generate situations where a critter's aggro will constantly flip between two players without either of the players doing anything). What nobody has been able to figure out is the formula for the decay, though.

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Isn't the fear in DM single target?

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Touch of Fear is single target, correct.

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Does anyone know what preemptive healing is?

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Preemptive healing (as opposed to reactive healing) is a WoW concept.

It refers to the idea that you start casting a healing spell BEFORE the tank has taken damage (and abort it if no damage has happened), on the assumption that the tank MIGHT take damage and a heal that has already started casting will get the tank healed faster than if you started after the damage happened. That's relatively important in WoW raids, because (1) burst damage can and will frequently kill a raid tank in the time it takes you to wind up a heal and (2) most heals are spammable without a cooldown on them and casts can be aborted if they haven't completed yet. (In fact, in some situations, such as where the tank takes more than half her health in damage each second, WoW raid healers will not even abort heals, because the cost in terms of mana is not worth the risk of a damage spike occuring just between the time you aborted it and the time the heal would have landed.)

Of course, the concept makes little to no sense in City of Heroes.

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I think your big picture is skewed. A scrapper's job is to kill. It's not a tank sent in to manage aggro. It's not a defender sent in to buff, debuff or heal. It's not a controller sent in to lock the spawns down.

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I think I have to disagree here a bit. Granted, this is how scrappers are generally played these days, but per the design of the game, scrappers are also the designated off-tanks of CoH (evidence: every scrapper primary has a single target taunt power, several scrapper secondaries have taunt auras [1]).

That said, whether for scrappers or tankers or brutes and regardless of what the actual role of a scrapper is, I've always been of the opinion that Grant Cover doesn't work well in the context of the overall combat mechanics. Fights in CoX are more often than not fought in some kind of tight formation: Players spread out to minimize the effect of area effects targeted at them; even melee tends to be highly mobile because most CoX critters don't cluster up naturally. A scrapper who is picking up a loose boss on the far fringe of a spawn (and thus is actually off-tanking) will in fact be very unlikely to be in the vicinity of another player.

[1] Obviously, this can be a problem of its own, e.g. when you have a Shields or Invincibility scrapper playing with a Willpower tanker and the scrapper would rather not have all the aggro when there's a perfectly good tanker nearby who is specialized in taking the damage, but can't override the stronger aggro aura of the scrapper. But that's kinda unrelated to Grant Cover.

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The whole character control argument is total bs. I've been playing a blaster with SS for a few weeks now, and when I get SBed, it brings me up to the speed cap of about 78mph.

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Blasters have different requirements than, say, tankers.

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Shout out to [name removed] on Guardian server who;

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I thought name-and-shame posts were against the forum rules?

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No, I don't think it would be "loaded" and just sitting there waiting to be used. That would be a waste of space. Zone events can occur there even if it is not loaded (I would assume, obviously I don't know for sure) because I would guess that the deciding factor of when or where a zone event takes place is nothing more than numbers in a database... numbers waiting to be called up when the zone is loaded. I could be totally wrong.

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You're dealing with two different cost factors here. One is the resource cost associated with keeping zone data in memory; the other one is the cost to build up and tear down zone data when players enter and leave the zone, respectively.

How that works out in any given case is anybody's guess and largely depends on the data involved. However, some educated guesses can be made:

(1) The zone layout information (position and extend of buildings and other objects, position of contacts, position of doors) must at any and all times exist, at least on disk, since it's created by humans, not a computer. This is separate from each instance of the zone (all of which can share the layout information).

Now, the zone layout information could be left on disk if the zone is not used; alternatively, the zone could be loaded into memory to minimize the cost of retrieving the data from disk (which is potentially a costly operation). As a third alternative, it could be kept in the memory of a central server and copied over the network. My best guess is that the information is kept in memory, simply because the build/tear-down cost is relatively high.

(2) Then there's the critters inside the zone. A lot will depend on how they are represented. If, for example, they are stored as objects inside an R-Tree or similar data structure, then the cost to build the data structure when somebody enters the zone is not any larger than populating it with new spawns when a player moves into a new area (I believe we already know that critters are despawned in idle areas of a zone). On the other hand, an empty R-Tree consumes pretty much no memory, and it may be simpler to have it initialized all the time. More importantly, there's really not much of a difference between "loaded" and "not loaded" in this case, and the question makes only limited sense.

On the other hand, if critters are stored in a large two- or three-dimensional grid structure, then it may make sense to allocate the grid beforehand, because initializing a large multi-dimensional array may be comparatively expensive relative to the memory savings (or was at least back when CoH was originally designed).

Zones could also have data associated with them that makes a complete tear down every time the zone is empty wasteful, though that is of course pure speculation (such as caching recently calculated critter pathing data). This cost could be mitigated, of course, by simply delaying it until a few minutes after the last player has left the zone.

(3) Most likely, zone instances such as "Atlas Park 2" or "Peregrine Island 5" do not exist until they are actually created. The same can be expected of mission instances.

(4) As a separate concern, being able to tear down zones completely when players have left facilitates loading them on a different machine next time (allowing for a modicum of load balancing).

Overall, there are a number of possible solutions, and since Cryptic back then probably chose the one that worked best for them, and their cost evaluation is not publicly known, we can only partly guess at how it's done.

I'd suggest looking at an Ice/TA or Earth/TA controller. Both of them get as close to turn-based play as is practically possible in CoX. Admittedly, that comes with the downside of not being the fastest leveler on earth until you get your pet.

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considering i been on this TF before as the only rad and he went down fast, its just the % thats bugged not his debuff res

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Well, that's exactly the point -- if he is bugged so that he is at 100% resistance (technically always possible for AVs, of course), then -resistance debuffs won't do a thing, unless they are unresistable (which Enervating Field isn't).

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You may keep your damned Speed Boost to yourself, please.

I'd rather know what's going to happen when I try to move. And if you must go zipping off ahead of the tanker, you do so at your own risk.



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Ahh the same old tired arguement after all these years... to the "I cant contol my character with SB!" crowd I offer this: Learn to Play.

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http://www.google.com/search?q=speed...cy%20tradeoffs

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If you overshoot your target- use /follow.

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As a tanker, you sometimes want to be at a specific position that is not next to the critter you are targeting.

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bring a rad

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If he is indeed at 100% resistance, resistance debuffs won't do a thing, since they are resisted by resistance -- i.e., fully in this case.

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What is the Magic Man arc?

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It is one of the arcs giving by Mercedes Sheldon in the Midnighter Club (level 20ish and requires you to have access to the club).

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You really don't know much of what I've actually suggested beyond "Johnny wants more damage," do you?

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Whatever buffs you think you can get away with, usually, often appropriating ideas and concepts proposed by other people. By all appearances, this is not because you find them more sensible, but because you expect more success from a piecemeal approach.

There's no coherent vision from a game design perspective behind your proposals, other than a consistent theme of getting tanker damage output buffed (covering 90% of your proposals), which is where people get that idea.

(QR)

There is a certain otherworldliness to how in this thread some people complain about the lack of damage tankers provide, while there is a thread about the LRSF in the general forum, where redside players wish for the durability of tankers and the strength of defender buffs/debuffs.

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The main thing that worries me is he doesn't have an affects resist toggle and I don't know how long it would be before I could get the active defense perma.

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Actually, Deflection and True Grit both grant resistance (the latter is not a toggle, of course, but it's not as though that's a bad thing). 15% resistance each unenhanced (23.4% enhanced), more when you enhance it. On top of that, True Grit also provides 10% extra health (about 20% enhanced). Combined, this is roughly the same as having 38.7% resistance against alphas (20% more health isn't exactly the same as having 20% more resists, but it allows you to take 20% more damage before you go down and also enhances regeneration by 20%). Combined with the fact that you're playing with an empath who can put Fortitude on you, you should be pretty good against alpha strikes. That's not even counting taking Tough yet.

As to Active Defense, a simple solution is to put four slots into it. That will waste a slot, but if you're primarily interested in teaming, that's not a killer. With four level 15 common IOs in it, that should make it permanent (barely, so -recharge debuffs can still leave you vulnerable for a few seconds). Once you get to level 17, you can put level 20 common IOs in and will be at the ED soft cap. Also, if you're always playing with an Empath, Clear Mind can pretty much fix any vulnerabilities.

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stone/
invul/ss

seem to be the cookie-cutter tanks, can anyone else suggest something outside of that (generally don't like SS for some reason for melee either) that will be able to take large party alphas out of the box (and hopefully not too late in the game either), or am I asking for too much?

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Well, Ice Melee and Stone Melee both are considered to provide pretty nice mitigation; Dark Melee is also interesting in that it provides a self heal. As to primaries, Ice Armor is also very popular among team tankers (the primary weakness is that sometimes the random number generator can really hate you). Some people also like Dark Armor because of the high resists and the control effects, especially when combined with a secondary that has synergy with them, but the lack of innate knockback protection is something that I personally don't like (IOs or Acrobatics can fix that for 90% of PvE, of course).

He has five missions outside his story arc, three of which are the hunt missions that you mentioned. So, if you still want to get him off your contact list, you should be done soon.