Starsman

[ QUOTE ]

I kind of agree with Lungorthar, but I'd leave Tankers at 75% and raise Scrappers to 85 or 90% base accuracy. Players hate missing more often than that.


[/ QUOTE ]

This is an idea i have been toying around but never mentioned: what if for every miss you get on single target attacks, you get a buff, this buff stacks with itself and if you miss 10 times in a row you can have it 10 times. Once you manage to hit, it will add an extra 40% damage to that hit. With something like this you may even drop further the accuracy and some people may like missing, so that they get to hit harder once they do. The buff may last only one hit, it runs out exactly after the one hit is delivered. Then you must acumulate rage again.

Another option would be to have a buildup like toggle, this toggle lowers your accuracy but increases your damage by very little, maybe 5%. Every time you miss it goes up another 5%. The effect of a miss can last up to 3 minutes within the buff.


[ QUOTE ]
Also, playing a 'tough Scrapper' or an 'evasive Tanker' should be an option

[/ QUOTE ]

I dont think i seen manyh comic book tanks that relly purely on evasion, truth is the definition of a tank itself on comics is a guy that will get hit and keep going.

I do think scrappers can get some mitigation and the same way for tanker with some evasion, but i'd keep tanker evasion buf under 40% max and 20% max for scrapper mitigation.


Note i know and realize that accuracy will not be used for balance, i posted this here more as a in-game view of how a comic book tanker and scrapper should had been. Right now that would mean too much to change.

I personaly would never change the animations lenghts on any of the tanker sets, they feel very good now, all we need are better numbers.

As for KO blow, i just got my tanker to 22 and decided to go to test and try out this power, it was amazing. I think i will be taking it. The refresh is somewhat slow but it is ok.

[ QUOTE ]
Scrappers should have had faster attacks, no single target damage attack should have been better (or equal to) a Tankers and they should have had a plethora of moderate and minor damage AOEs (mostly cones). They should be the kings of DPS (and minion killing, NOT Boss killing), where as Tankers should primarily be slow one shot wonders.

[/ QUOTE ]

If one thing destroys this game it is the AOE on too many places. I have fought groups with teammates that have no AOE and the game feels way more challinging but with fair dificulty, that way.

All i would have given all scrappers would had been at least one cone attack with a decent radius.



Now, that is your opinion, this is mine:

Tankers attacks should hit for high amounts of damage, but with long animations to make them somewhat slower. Slow attack should mean easy to evade, so they have lower accuracy.
Tankers defense should all be about mitigation, never evasion, but having a very high cap (like they do really).

Scrappers attacks should hit for little but be very fast, with quick animations and little above avarage accuracy.
Scrapper defense should all be based on evasion, never mitigation. They should have a moderate evasion cap, but extremely low mitigation cap.

The idea is that the scrapper can dodge most of a tankers attack, since he has high evasion and the tanker below good accuracy, but one or 2 hits from the tank may finish off the scrapper. This is the typical Wolverine vs Hulk fight, hulk will almost never hit Wolverine, but if he manages to he just needs a few hits to leave him unconcious.

Comparing, if no one ever missed, the tanker should do more damage per minute, but truth being the tanker will always have lower accuracy and miss much more, the scrapper would do more damage.

I'd give tankers hits a 70% or 68% accuracy, while scrappers would have an 80% or 82% accuracy.


As for blasters, i'd give them moderately fast attacks with moderate damage, their AOE would be very low damage, maybe between their weaker and second weaker attacks. Their accuracy would be as is, but their overal dps should be just a little above the scrappers, but with the added powers to ocationaly use high cost aoe that hit much at once (for low-moderate damage) and use one mega attack that makes them kind of charge energy and release it on a ultra nuke (single target) that forms a normal moderate aoe damage aroudn the target and drains 75 endurance. This is what you actualy normaly see on a comic book, if a blaster type decides to destroy a building they take a time to charge up and then end on their knees to catch a breath.

Tanker Breath of Fire: 15', 30º cone
Blaster Breath of Fire: 40', 30º cone

Note that the nature of cone is to get biger by the distance. I am no expert on math so i cant get real numbers, but it does is obvious that a cone has more covered area the longer it goes. So, in the end the far end of the tanker breath covers very little area.

I can say that in practice i rarely affect 3 enemies with it unless they all are very cramped toghether and then again tney must be on a formation similar to this:


<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
x = affected
0 = unafected
% = me

00x
% xxx
000
</pre><hr />

Affecting the last one on the top usualy is very pure luck.

My avarage is of only 2 affected enemies with fire breath.

Practice is realy why i really dont like to say Breath of Fire for tankers is a AoE.

As for why the fire tanker does more damage than any other set, well the if you consider things on a way of balance, every time you knock back the enemy you are in a way mitigating damage, you are adding another effect that may help y ou. Stunn, KB, KD, Slow, you name it, they all end up doing something else. But fire attacks just do damge, their secondary effect is also damage. The fire melee goes all offensive.

This is a good excuse to make it stronger, but not a good excuse to make SS weaker than axe for the amount it is, since axe has even more KB than SS. I guess the developers tought the secondary effects of ice where huge enough to grant a extremely low damage potential (not that i agree with that).

Between the tnaker archetype, i wont deny it, fire melee is perfeclty fine. But ice and SS need a big hand, Mace maybe a small damage boost, it should be right there with Axe in my eyes.

[ QUOTE ]
Cones count as AOE as well (although granted in some cases their area is almost nothing).

[/ QUOTE ]

I find cones are diferent animals, specialy breath that has a very narrow radius, but it is ok, i tested all my powers. Here are the numbers so you can compare fire with SS:


Scorch
25.09 Fire
2.98 x 2 Fire (dot)
TOTAL: 31.05

Fire Sword
14.93 Lethal
24.5 Fire
2.98 x 2 Fire (dot)
TOTAL: 45.39

Combustion (AOE)
14.93 Fire
2.98 x 8 Fire (dot)
TOTAL: 38.77

Breath of Fire (Cone)
20.31 x 2 Fire (dot)
2.94 x 4 Fire (dot)
TOTAL: 52.38

Fire Sword Circle (AOE)
23.15 Lethal
23.15 Fire
2.98 x 4 Fire (dot)
TOTAL: 58.22


Just for completeness i tested my few damaging attacks on the Fiery Aura set, please dont use it to judge the fire melee set, remember fire melee can be combined with anything, I personaly theorize Fire/Axe will be way deadlier now with no KB.


Consume (AOE)
11.94 Fire

Blazing Aura (AOE)
6.57 Fire (every 2 seconds)

Burn (AOE)
I cant measure this one, Burn is a pet and for some reason i cant see how much damage it does on the chat log, never noticed this before (may be only on test server), but it is doing a roundedd 3 hits of damage for a lot of ticks (it repeats very fast and never misses). Will try more stuff on it later.


Best way to compare these may be if you become a 32 exemplar in test...

Ironicaly i just leveled and am on my way now to test server and try out both, fire circle sword and combust (the only 2 aoe attacks on fire). Will try them both unsloted and tell you the numbers i get then. (am lvl 32)

[ QUOTE ]
1. I hate Knockback. I've been booted from many groups because of interrupting targeting of blasters and controllers with KB.

[/ QUOTE ]

OK, i hate that excuse. The only people that are affeccted by knockback are (by just little really) melee types. A blaster or controer uses ranged attacks so there is NO reason for them to hate knockback, only way would be if they complain about enemies leaving the radius of an AOE, but AOEs are extremely overpowered, another subject entirely, but entirely a bad reason.

Hell, i remembered once i was on a team of blasters and me t he only tanker... we had an empaty healer that INSISTED i stayed close to the team so that she was able to heal me... can you explain how do i melee and tank if i do that? Same goes for this point of yours, the team is there to act as a team, not so that only AOE blasters do the damage.

Also, IF that was the requirement, you can USE knockback to actualy push strays into the radius instead of pushing them out of the radius. I have done this a few times with my axe tanker that almost always KBs, but if i was kicked out of a team because i got ONE target out of the radius, i would certainly set those to ignore list because they are just min/maxers i dont realy care to play with.

[ QUOTE ]
Depends the build. Fire/Fire Tankers can do 75% DPS of most Scrapper builds. They will also kill alot more at once then most Scrapper builds (barring Spines) because of the combined AOEs of that build.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wanted to note, i started playing super strenght tanker, then did a fire fire one, and now an axe one. I can compare the 3 first hand. The one that does most damage IS axe. Fire melee does soso damage (never compared much the numbers but it is not really that good), there are only 2 AoE, unless you count our endurance drain that is usable every 2 minutes and does 8 points of damage at lvl 32, or fire breath that is cone, not AoE.

The reason fire/fire is so hot is not because of fire melee, it is because of the Burn power that is part of Fire Aura. THAT power in my eyes is an issue. I guess taking away the auto hit nature would fix it, though, i know most burn tankers would cry like babies if that happened, but if it is for the good of the game i say do it! *and make the burn status buff last longer*

There is also another constant toggle AOE attack but it also is from the primary power set, and i like that one, not too much damage and it can miss. That one is nicely balanced.

Just wanted to make sure people know that fire melee is not that high on the damage list, it is the defensive set that give us this power.

Do you think it is posible to (in a future update maybe) randomize the multi-threaded parts of missions so that if you have 4 players with you on one tastk the mission automaticaly spices up to make these players think more strategicaly, but at the same time leave the base mission alone for the ones that decide to solo it?

I love the idea of cooperation and would like to see it on more missions even mid arcs, as long as it obviously does not forces others to do that same mission on a team if they rather solo.

AMEN, Stateswoman!

Altough i did played other MMORPGs i DID was sick of 2 roels:

The meatshield and the healers. Even so if you go to EQ warriors DO have a very very desent damage output.

As far as my comic book goes, this is what i'd expect from ATs

°Tanker - Hits hard but does so slow (slow animation not refresh), hardly gets tired, mitigates damge highly.

°Scrapper - Hits fast, gets tired after a long fight, mainly rellies on evasion, not mitigation.

°Controler &amp; Defender, these are rare in comic books, but always are in groups, they are presented perfectly on the game.

°Blaster - Can throw chains of decent attacks from very far and safe distance. Can also throw masive one damage but takes very long to powerup and usualy leaves them entirely drained (practicaly snipes, but shoud be more flashy and call everyones attention).

So as you can see the diference between the tanker and scrapper are mainly on the way they do damage and handle incoming damage. Also, the scrappers attacks should be more accurate than the tanker slow ones, since slow attack means it is easier to evade them, but if they connect they should be devastating to a single target.

Oh yes, rage, that one surely i agree with, it should be stripped of all negative effects, plainly make it a buildup but with diferent name.

See no reason for it to be the current way, or is rage buff MUCH MUCH higher than that of other tanker's build up?

Even if it was higher i'd rather they just made it the same as the other buildus all toghether except of in name.

Hmmmmmmmm,

Let me see if I manage to hit some middle ground here....


Concept wise SS is perfect.

Not being able to hurl while flying is just ok by me. As a fire tanker I cant use burn on the air ether, not all power sets should be 100% compatible, so it would be nice if you analyzed SS as a single entity without considering any other power set you may take along with it.

For example, rage disorient can be taken care off with US or with unstoppable, some other tankers have similar powers that may help, maybe wet ice can help too, but fire armor lacks constant defense against these status and will have no workarounds. (Invulnerability tanker issues are a separate topic)


Ok, going back to my first line (not the hmmm one), concept wise SS is perfect. I love the feeling knock back gives. It takes away DPS? Then I think the solution should not be eliminating the perfect concept element that is knock back, but instead to add damage hit to the knock back. It obviously should be way smaller than the damage taken from fire dot, as he is keeping the enemy close while adding his effect, still getting constant damage.

I think I seen the KB damage idea a few times, and right now it starts to make a lot of sense... it should obviously not be applied to energy blasters, but it should be applied to tankers and scrappers. This damage do should be based on the distance of the knock back, so yes, a KD will do maybe just 0.1 damage (since Geko stated it is impossible for one attack to start in 0 and scale up from there) and add up the farther it goes, never going to insane numbers though. KB should never, in my eyes, do as much damage as a jab does now (regardless changes needed on jab).

Also, of course, there is the issue with agro; this is something that should be worked on the current state of powers, without making them too different.

I mentioned before an idea that is better than AoE, both concept wise and play wise: if you attack a higher than minion ranked enemy he will order all his subordinates to focus on you, at least until he himself looses your attention (he would even throw a line saying "Take this pestering Lungorhtar off me!"). In this I am considering that attacking the ranked enemy obviously generates enough agro to keep him on you. Agro of a hit should last longer than 2 hits, so that if I need to I can juggle 2 ranked at the same time so they call their subordinates to me, or should one hit miss, not loose agro immediately. Minions also should plainly rush to help the lieutenant no matter if he can throw the line or not, I say this because it will be silly for a disoriented boss to throw a "help here guys" line, but the minions still notice and run to aid him.

All higher than minion enemies should be immune to pool provokes or challenge, while only bosses and above should be immune to tanker specific taunt. These guys just have to be dealt with fist in the face.

As for overall damage I agree with all of Krunches points, note that the small damage added by the knock backs should be only to compensate the few seconds you where not able to hit the enemy, so we still need to fix the powers that do not do enough damage.

Following these rules, including the ones I state I agree with from Captain Crunch (sorry was not able to hold that one ), can do both, place the SS tanker where he should be AND keep the current flavor the build has. I still play my Inv SS tanker occasionally, but not that much, I love ALL the feelings from the attacks up to my level, but I don’t like the low damage output or being penalized for knock backs, but I do like them, even if they are of little usefulness. In my eyes, if you drastically change any powers feel you destroy the build for me. Play with taunt effects, damage output, and all that, but do not change the basic feeling of it.

I know many casual players that care little about DPS or boards will really enjoy if suddenly their enemies do not go flying out anymore with almost every haymaker or axe swing.

I have not played much with cone attacks other than fire breath, but i have noticed the cone radius to be rather small. I would not want handclap to have such a small radio, now if you tell me it will have some 160 degrees... that would do for me. Lower endurance cost is trully something needed for the power if recharge was lowered, not much otherwise since you cant use it that much to drain you.

I wont stop placing enfasis on the power needing damage, even if it was medium or low.

I must agree about handlcap NOT being changed. That power is fine in its current concept, what it DO needs ADDED is damage. That will give SS tankers a second AOE attack, giving this power some way to counter the fact that enemies went flying far away and cant be fought in melee range anymore.

A bit about handclap: you dont have to be surrounded to use it, idealy you jump and position so that all enemies are in front of you and even better, with a wall behind t hem (this highly posible i ndoors), then do the clap, enemies will go fly ing in ONE direction and be stuck not so far since they hit the wall. But damage really should be added to it.

I'm afraid this thread will start falling into flame wars now...

Please do not argue saying "your vision is wrong", just say what YOU think should be changed.

It IS a fact that SS is underpowered compared to the other tankers and as stated above it has nothing to do with the perseption of comic book tanker. That is an entire diferent topic.

The point here is to balance out SS between the other tanker secondaries.

If you think these are not the solutions to this underpowering, then just say what you would propose, if you think this powerset is balanced then i doubt you will feel hurt if you got a boost from the issues stated here.

I also noted i dont like my knockbacks taken away, that is being talked about somewhere else, making knockback enhancements add damage is a very good idea, and i dont think it will take code at all, after all, enhancements are database entries, just like powers are.

BTW, I have yet to see anyone do their sugestions (on another thread of course) abot ice melee...


On a side topic, wont get too far from the topic, if tankers where made into comic book tankers, where they do heavy damage on slow hits (this should be long animations, not just long refresh, to avoid hasten abuse), i can see ice/axe/ss/mace/stone all being hard hiters, but i have never really seen a comic book fire tank...

Has anyone seen this? I just cant visualize a fire tank as a slow heavy hiter...

[ QUOTE ]

And to be frank, you don’t seem to want to play City of Heroes version of a Tanker. You seem more interested in playing an archetype that doesn’t exist that you want to call Tanker. So again, with the archetypes options in mind, why did you choose an existing archetype you didn’t want to play? Because you were hopeful that you could convince the developers to modify it for you?

[/ QUOTE ]

He CLEARELY wants to play a CoH version of a tanker. Else he would be asking for slow heavy hit attacks and he is not doing that. He wants the power set to be up to par with the other tanker secondary power sets.

Gravewalker, your post is the best post on this entire thread. Enough to stop this all, any more posting against THIS post of yours is just flaming from exlpointers. I'd give you 10 stars if i was able to!

[ QUOTE ]
IAW COH Rules of Conduct:

You will not exploit any bug in City of Heroes and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug ( bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits ) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of City of Heroes . Bugs should be promptly reported via 'Ask A Question' at http://support.cityofheroes.com.

It is my opinion to gain experience without risk is unnatural and is therefore a bug in the game mechanics and should be duly reported. I will accept from many that while the devs have not deemed it an exploit yet (operative word here) it is something that Ill simply report and included in the report a viable solution that experience should not be gained beyond a set distance from a defeated villain.

IAW COH policies and support section of their website:

Heroes can earn experience points in two different ways. They are:

By defeating as many villains possible. The more difficult the villain, the more XP your hero will earn. Your hero can earn XP defeating villains solo or in teams with other heroes.

By completing the assigned mission. Not only will the hero earn XP from defeating the villains in the mission, upon the completion of a mission, the hero will also be awarded additional XP for completing the mission. Missions can be attempted solo or in teams. XP earned from completing missions will be adjusted based on the level of the hero and the villain as well as number of team members.

So in order to gain experience you must defeat villians either solo (or on a team) or complete mission.

This is not a passive activity since the definition according to websters of a team or team work is:

Team /teem/ n. Two or more persons working together.
Teamwork /teemwerk/ n. Combined action, cooperation.

Simply being on a team does merit the reward. You must be be bringing some form of action to be considered part of the team, otherwise you are taking advantage of a "bug" within the game that grants you an unnatural benefit.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know you saw it while replying to me, seems you hurt realy bad.

Erratic, do you feel so insecure about your own opinions that you must send me a PM since i set you on ignore list?

Do you lack that much attention?

By powerleveling i mean not playing like crazy, but cheating around the SK rules to get more insane xp.

If you dont remember last big patch had a change made to SK so that it stoped giving xp to teamed low level members, forsing them to Sk if they wanted xp, numerous posts were done about new exploints now posible and not sure if it was Geko or another dev, but they mentioned they are working on further fix these problems.

I will try to dig the posts up.

[ QUOTE ]
No, people will recognize that your argument is poor and ignore it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, you are the one that have won a place on my board ignore list. I don’t really want to read more of your silly points.

The Dev team IS working to stop all exploits and power leveling cheats out there, the SK level range one being between them. The Devs obviously also think that is not right.

[ QUOTE ]
Does Knockdown not knockback

[/ QUOTE ]

I have handclap on my long time retired tanker, and it does knockback, not knockdown.

I must say i DO like the power as it is, altough i'd welcome even 1 point of damage at lvl 50 (just for kicks) and a big endurance reduce.

Right now i use this power not while solo, i realize it would not be a solo power the time i took it. I knew (and it has worked for me) to get hordes off my team mates if provoke fails or if it still is not ready to reuse. With invinsibility i get enough accuracy bonus that i rarely miss any of the enemies arround me in such a situation and most of them end up disoriented for a long time.

I been planing to slot it for disorient duration if it do accepts that type of enhancements.

As for taunt duration y ou are right, the first time i took provke was after taking taunt on my first character. First i did it so i would use provoke on aweful situations (that was the idea) but the provoke animation was so slow on taunt that i rarely managed to get the agro to me the second i needed too. Heck it was long enough for me to loose the defender i was trying to taunt off at the hands of some hellion!

Following DS post, it gave me an idea...

If the Thing decided to clober some lowsy minion of Dr Doom for half an hour, Dr. Doom would not care at all and just ignore him. BUT if the Thing started clubering Dr Doom, not only he would turn arround to focus on this high cripling threat (since every hit the Thing does knocks him arround), but he would call all his minions to focus on him too.

How nice would it be if you at tacked a Liewtenant, that he yelled to his lower lvl rank friends (minions in this case) "ignore the others, focus on this pestering Krunch!!!"

With this you just have to actualy focus on keeping the big boss, or the next best thing, bussy untill he falls. After this the minions would be confused and they will start attacking rampantly, they do will be very subebtible to taunts and provokes. But lieutenants, bosses and AVs, should all be imune to provoke and taunt.

What if there are multiple enemies of the highest rank? (example 2 lieutenants)... HANDCLAP! Wirlwind axe! Fire Sword Circle... and so on! A longer duration on the taunt effect caused by normal hits will also help you to jugle between hitting 2 liewts or 3 in a row to keep them all bussy.


THAT sounds like a fun battle to me, anyway!


As for the controler being able to give others agro, i recall EverQuest had a similar thing for Shadow Knights, where the Shadow Knight would increase the amount of hate a creature had against any enemy of his choice with the use of his dark powers. Would be interesting to see something similar here for a few contrlers, not only mind ones, but not all of them ether, just those that fit. (Dark controler surely needs it).


note: Excuse my spelling, english not my first language and i have no spellshecker at hand right now.

Ok, of your sugestions i would not change taunt to an area effect.

To solve (try) the overal tanker agro problem i would increase the mag of every tanker secondary attack to the maximun mag for the high+ damage attacks and just slightly less for the other attacks. Over this i would give every attack an additional small radius AOE taunt effect of magnitude one lever lower than that of the target.

Attacks that already are aoe obviously would not do an additional aoe around each affected target, just the ones that got hit by the aoe will get the effect.

I note this should only be for all secondary set powers, note this because else chilling embrace and fire aura alone would grant infinite taunt.

The duration of this should not be mitigable, it should always last the same, but it will hit only if the attack hits.

Above this i would add an endurance cost to the real Provoke, this way other character types will have a harder time using a tanker intended power for free. (Side note that fears will be changed, i guess the same will come for this pools final power).

This will change most of the agro issues of the tanker, true he will be forced to be on melee range of enemies to get the agro he needs, for the exception of single targets with taunt, but that also gives more reason to bring a controler aboard (another topic but they too need insentive to be on a team these days).

In my eyes, the tanker should not be perfect at his job, he should have to struggle here and there, just like most ATs have to, that is why i am sugesting the ranged provoke be nerfed further with endurance cost ONCE we are given other means to hold agro.

A note i have not seen mentioned (or missed badly) in this thread is that the handclap sugestion of duration does not seems to note that this power consumes a lot of endurance. Even sloted, if you used it every 10 seconds for a fight you would run out of end very fast. Not sure how it is on test now, though.