I ask because, I mainly played scrappers and brutes, also mained a warshade, and a plant/fire dominator.
These characters had a tendancy to look at a room that was like, FILLED with council/malta and could just ANNIHILATE them, i'm wondering if by the endgame, we will be able to wade into a sea of baddies, smashing faces and sending them flying wave-by-wave with proper play.
Can we expect something like this? I was never a fan of only fighting three dudes at a time.
You get the mobs on the left, I'm herding the guys on the right into this corner.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
What about the REST of us? :<
[img]http://www94.homepage.villanova.edu/ebony.taylor/Homework%206/sharebear.gif[/img]
What kind of Share Bear are you SIR!? >:|
RangedDPS = prepare to Nuke them from orbit
Support = debuff the two groups or Buff our allies to make this even sweeter
Control = Lock these a$$holes down - we don't want any getting away
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
I believe there is at least one thread that brought up the matter of how AoE dominated in CoH and discussed some potential ideas for mitigating this phenomenon. Against a room full of bad guys AoE will always look and feel (and probably be, especially if they're minions) more powerful.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
You know, the One plus to farming with a Fire/Kin 'troller is no need to Herd 1st. :)
You target the minion (or Leut, dont target the Boss unless you're IO'ed) that's in the middle of the group, and you go to town, as everyone else on your team jumps in, Melee types follow you closely, you do Fulcrum Shift and not too long after that, foes group is down. Combine that with Ancillary's: Stone Mastery's: Fissure, And you ROCK, Literally! ;D
The only problem was trying to use Siphon Speed before the last foe goes down. :(
Let's not forget the wonderful thing that was a double raged+Fiery embraced foot stomp.
For me this is what make CoH great and 1 of the things i really waith to see on CoT, i even remember when the game star how a fire tank was able to herd a full map in to a corner, and then the full group star to do there things,
If im a scrapper, most of the times, i want to be able to face many foes, not maximun 3, dont expect to be able to run a freack farm +4+8 on my fire/wp herding 2 or 3 groups up from the star, but i want to know that ill be able to get there, once i get all my purples or any color you want for Cot.
please, Aoe, please not top 3 foes at a time, its no point on been a melle if it is like that
Well now, this is tricky because we also don't want this to be City of Scrappers or City of Tanks. I remember the days of Fire Tanks running rampant and herding all the mobs into a dumpster while laying down Burn and laughing. It was fun for those Tankers, not so much for the other players. So hopefully they set up some kind of cap to keeping this under some modem of control. We want to be powerful yes, but not so powerful that it's not fun for everybody.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
I spoke of this in another thread.
Basically the idea of mowing down waves of foes plays into our power fantasy. The hero fights a bunch of faceless foes until he reaches the main villain....for example Batman fighting dozens of henchmen until getting at the Joker. In the game we are Batman and unnamed foes (the minions luets and bosses of CoH) are the henchmen. Its actually a good thing to include this kind of thing in the game even if its a challenge to do with some powers...what isn't good is when it feels underwhelming and drawn out or worse yet a chore.
So yes by all means throw faceless foes at me I can chew through just please don't make it boring to do....and please please please do not create a situation where there is little doubt I will succeed but it will take me forever to do it.
-1-1-1-1-1-1
MWM Devs did mention farming was ok with them, but it might give diminishing rewards if done repeatedly.
This way, if you're just an adrenalin junky like me, you can still Feel Powerful but wont fill up your pockets much* faster doing it though. :)
At least that's what i took away from those discussions. ;)
while the original herding was fun initially it got boring pretty quick for me as most of the time I spent on teams just standing around waiting for the tanker to return with the map into the designated killzone. I was actually glad to see a cap put on the amount of baddies a tanker could hold as it added a level of jeopardy for the rest of the team in the larger fights/rooms with lotsa baddies.
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Making it so that the Tank can't just herd the whole map meant that the TEAM had to deal with each spawn of mobs, tactically and strategically. The Tank could still herd and pull a bit, but the Blaster had to control his fire and the Controller had to plan where to immobilize the group. Moreover, 'back then' we couldn't ramp up the difficulty of the enemy, so a whole map of mobs might murder the Tanker before he got ten feet, now.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Well, part of what made CoH fun was the slightly unbalanced nature of PvE. If you knew what you were doing, and could equip your build the right way, you would make an absolute monster that would stand out in pretty much any group.
I miss that the most about CoH. Because it's something other MMOs do their best to prevent. you don't feel special in other MMOs, when simple mooks are a threat for your top level guy there is something wrong. Look at games like SWTOR, you hit the level cap and mooks just scale right up with you, to the point your elite character feels underpowered. In COH, the only thing that could threaten those game busting builds were even more HAX supervillions. But it was against those HAX supervillians that your team needed the busted design characters. because without them you probably weren't going to be able to pass certain RAIDS.
And it wasn't just fire tankers, or fire/kin trollers, or plant/kin trollers, or illusion/rad trollers that could dominate in COH. What made COH fun was finding new and fun combinations that could dominate just as thoroughly. I remember a certain Dark/Dark tanker who pretty much was invinciple in pve or pvp. I had a number of very powerful builds that dominated endgame content, but that dark/dark was something else. It was so wild i tried to duplicate it. I could not. It turns out that person had found the right combo of skills and enhancements to make a truely unholy monster, and i simply couldn't repeat the build. When i saw that, i knew i would never build another "accepted" min/max build and find my own hero to play.
I did... with a Will/DB tanker. Why DB? because DB had a lot of AoE, and accepted the RIGHT type of enhancements to turn a willpower tanker into a tanking god. it rolled just 2 of the DP sword combos, i didn't chose them for max DPS but for the number of skills and the enhancements they allowed. The end result was a WP tanker that was at the cap for health regeneration with just 2 enemies around him, had a defense stat of 60% vs everything, and 90% res vs slash/bash/psi (i think it was 40% vs everything else). The truely wild thing about him was debuff was the only way he was dying... ever. He could tank multiple SVs alone and without support (i don't recall what the max I tried was, but i do recall a few battles with 4 supervillians agro'ed on him and the team wiped... he simply tanked it till they all caught up, not his fault for poor agro control, the team's fault for getting sloppy), he could tank Giant Monsters alone and without support.
very crazy, and overpowered build, and it was with two ability classes no one paired (at-least i never saw another will tanker tanker close to that powerful, heck if there was another defensive tanker build played less then dark it was will)... it was also a very fun build with easy agro control, as all those AOE combos held agro nicely. i barely ever used taunt (well most good tankers didn't have to anyway); could that WP tanker kill those SV or GM alone? no way. That was what the team was for. But i think everyone enjoyed having my tanker on their team, and it was fun to play a character who litterally felt like a superhero.
this was an important thing about COH that i don't want to see go away.
I loved my Plant/Kin troller. I really loved my Ill/Rad troller, i know my rad/rad defender was probably the 2nd most sought after teammate after my tanker; and why it wasn't a world breaking /solo build, it was a cool build with a cool power combo that debuffed anything and everything, and thanks to proper enhancing wasn't all that bad for ranged damage either. I think what i'm ultimately getting at is if you make a superhero game it's important the characters feel like superheros.
they don't have to be demigods, but it should be possible to be a "step" above the ordinary. So that when you leave a team one or two of your teammates really stand out in your mind and you think "cool". those are cool moments in an MMO.
Tank/taunt/herd is a primary reason I am waiting for an MMO to abandon the taunt power.
You have no taunt, you have no tank. You have no tank, suddently controllers (of which a tank is one, let's be honest, they are not a real melee) and defenders become much more important.
Get rid of the tired tank/heal/dps model.
By the way, taunt is at the core of AI failure. As with islands in the Pacific, you would just sail around a tank in actual scenarios, as a tough but largely wimpy dps is nothing to counter, strategically.
If games had anything remotely better than "attack highest on what hits me" list, again taunt would not work.
Stop it, games. Just stop it. Stop with this basic biatch strategy as core game design.
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The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
TERA did this. So did Elder Scrolls Online.
The general consensus of the community in those games is that not having a Taunt Power to focus attention onto the aggro magnet was a Design Level Mistake. Why? Because it makes the "job" of being an aggro magnet harder to accomplish, since maintaining aggro becomes something flimsy and fragile, rather than solid and reliable. Net result? Teamwork and coordination rises in importance to a level that precludes "friendly" pick up group play with people you've never met before. Group dynamics become insular and elitist, rather than welcoming and open. Oops.
The grass isn't always greener over the septic tank, you know.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
+1.
Plus, it keeps other players Striving to achieve that same Greatness. Keeps them interested in the game for allot longer. :)
Dolla Dolla Billzzz Yalll! ;D
I was particularly proud of my Willpower Tank (Superon),
[url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/72633#comment-72633][img]http://i.imgur.com/2bNSRQz.png[/img][/url]
just standing in the middle of a mob of +2 (or whatever it was) Rularuu when runing DR Quarterfield TF or or the others. He had 61% Defense across the Board, beside Psionic (at only 40%).
[img]https://faces.cohtitan.com/render/image/large/0/77242.jpg[/img]
And thats just before using any of Soul Mastery dark powers that further DeBuff the foes.
As I'm jumping into a Rularuu Mob, hit Darkest Night, and just sit there. ;D
Fun times. :<
But it [i]literally[/i] is! :)
I'd say CoX managed this pretty well. Consider that none of the new archetypes that released with CoV were true tanks in the way that Tankers were designed. It's also no secret that buffs and debuffs were far more effective than pure healing. In practice, a team could succeed with or without any given archetype.
If I had to name any MMO that broke the "holy trinity" mold well, it would be CoX. I hope that CoT lives up to this legacy.
I can understand frustration at the cheesy "wait here while I herd" strategy. I didn't like it either, but thankfully, few teams I joined ever employed it unless we were gravely outmatched. I personally wouldn't allow it if I could help it as I'd often be the one leading the charge. I liked to set an example of bringing the team to the action instead of bringing the action to the team, so to speak.
"You must be the change you wish to see in the [s]world[/s] game."
In regards to aggro itself, I want to play devil's advocate and argue that it's not completely flawed. Thematically, I think aggro represents a sort of intimidating presence. Every character who draws aggro has some quality---size, charisma, ferocity, [i]something[/i]---that makes them [i]appear[/i] to be the preeminent threat to their foes. In my opinion, taunting represents a tremendous show of these qualities that evokes an emotional or instinctive reaction in foes that may defy more rational reasoning.
Of course, this argument assumes a fundamental in-character relationship between mobs and player characters. At its core, I believe PvE to be heroes vs. villains, not player intellect vs. AI. The choreography between players and mobs should be partially theatrical while presenting enough challenge to the players.
The key for the game designers/developers is to find the right balance between the extremes of overly simplistic combat and overly punishing combat while maintaining the atmosphere of the genre. Too much reliance on aggro leads to the former while eliminating it leads to the latter.
That's my long-winded take on it, anyways.
[i]/em climbs down from soapbox...[/i]
^^^ +1111
If you are kicking a thug who stole from a granny, and then a giant monster throws a boulder at you, you tend to forget about the granny snatcher.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
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The taunt power is supposed to represent a forceful presence... be that an aura of power, massive irritation, hate inducement or whatever else. The end result is that the character makes himself/herself the target of the NPCs. The idea being they see the character as the one to focus on now despite whats happening around them.
There isn't anything wrong with it as it stands unless the game is designed in such a way that the power is a requirement (the holy trinity).
It is broken from the ground up. The problem you describe is a non-issue as it presumes monsters balanced for a taunt/tank world applied to a controller-only world.
That is how we always end up with most boss encounters of a giant bag of hit points to be slowly chewed down while tank taunt and high dps play their game of not trying to out-do the taunt.
Indeed, the whole "aggro" concept is based off this -- a simple-minded rule in probably well over 100 MMOs at the moment.
It is a tired concept.
I do not expect this game to try something new, as just repeating game design from Holy Writ with slightly prettier graphics is also standard.
But it is why I always look to a "wild" server with these kinds of things, so the mechanical, bread-and-butter masses can hang out on the carebear server and grind the same old gameplay since before half of you were knee high to a redcap.
Again, gameplay will evolve and adapt to new rules. Drop the taunt. Add a little AI and lower the damage of monsters to compensate. You no longer have the fraud of the tank and taunt to absorb it, and don't need it.
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The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
See, if you did stuff like much more damage for an attack from behind, scrappers could rescue blasters with quick, scrapperlock-like gameplay.
The simple AI addition to try to prevent being thus surrounded would be wonderous. Lucas Arts had a game engine with rudimentary AI, procedural environments, and destructible environments...several years before The Old Repuclic reskinned WoW. :(
Like a colony on Mars, robots to drive you, and autodocs, I fear such virtual worlds are decades further away than I had thought.
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The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
[quote=Plexius]Redlynne wrote:
The grass isn't always greener over the septic tank, you know.
But it literally is! :)
It is usually only when your tank leaks. ;)
(insert pithy comment here)