I played COX since its beta. What I enjoyed most about all the powers wasn't the DPS surge but 2nd stats that debuffed the target.
You had different Enhancement slots that could improve different stats to a power. Not just damage, but accuracy, speed, and debuff the target, a mob or single.
My favorite guy was a Claw Regen Scrapper. Sure claws were fast, but they were the only Scrapper good a Defense debuff, allowing me to bring the pain to bosses normally requiring a group to kill but dropping defense to 30% of his normal, allowing 70% of fast DPS to get in.
It did not work well in PVP, but I was more of a PVE player anyways.
WOW and most other MMO seem more about the DPS race and loot questing.
CoX wasnt just Best heal, Best DPS, Best tank. It was also filling a specalized role. Claws scrapper defense debuffing was not as great as Ranged defender radiation debuffing. It did have more damage because of the melee risk that went with it.
Working as a team, I filled a very specalized role: Dropping boss defense, and keeping it down, so other could really dish out the DPS.
Super strength Brawler specialized in stuns. A well timed stun could stop a boss from dropping his sig attack that would 1 shot the group.
Will we have the option specalize in our archetype as well?
Short answer: pretty sure.
Plans aren't final yet, apparently.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I can only hope/expect that the same player base that loved CoX will bring to CoT with us the same "to hell with the Holy Trinity" mentality that CoX had. We'll see if that happens. I believe the devs want it to happen.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
That all depends as to how the system works. Even the best laid plans can throw stuff out of the window.
And there is also the learning period of any new system, to see what needs to be done to cope with it. Sure, the "holy trinity" method might be a slower way to complete it. But if that is what works for some players, then so be it. Don't belittle people for playing that way.
Side note: I am saying "holy trinity" in terms of the setup, where someone is nominated to be the "tank" and the rest of the team support them/do their job. Depending on the "age" of the player, they might have a different point of view of "holy trinity". For example, Everquest players might well remember "Tank/Crowd Control/Healer" instead of the "WoW" version of "Tank/DPS/Heals".
But even with CoX, I saw enough players play Holy Trinity... they were not penalised for doing so either. They made it work for their style of game play.
Of course, you can just go barrelling in and hoping for the best at the start as you learn it... but that doesn't always work [1].
And breaking out of the "holy trinity" mode also depends as to *how powerful* other effects are. If CC is highly powerful along with buff's/debuffs going along the same route, then I can see the ability to "drop" an area (ie high damage output) because your debuffs are enough to compensate.
[1] See people who just ran off solo in a team and got overwhelmed due to the rest of their team being left behind.
To answer the OP, yes power sets are designed with [url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/645893]themes and thematic effects[/url]. It is actually something of a requirement to desinging out sets like this because of animation customization. If melee sets can both use weapon skins or hand to hand attacks, then set mechanics (the stuff the powers do) need to provide distinction between sets.
We also provide another way to specialize your character - at the [url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/625583] classification set up[/url] where you can choose your [url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/858157]Mastery[/url]
And yes, we do intend for every classification to have some capability to solo, for each classification to bring something to a team, and for a wide diversity of team functionality. If you want to play with the 'trinity' it should be possible, though since we don't have dedicating 'healer class' but instead Support with a form of Offense, it is more of an opportunity to break the mold and have teams like the old Repeat Offenders and such.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
The key to making that work is building a system that is designed to allow PCs to prevail even when outnumbered (potentially horribly). It was the "dogpile" mentality of City of Heroes, founded on the equivalency that 1 Hero equals 3 Minions as a baseline, which could then be expanded outwards into the mass combat "swamping" of our PCs that we all grew to know and love. Look into a large room and see 50 Foes? Dive in head first and it's a race to see who can drop the first Foe!
It was that "devil may care" mentality that City of Heroes fostered, in which the Foes pretty much always outnumbered us, but rarely outmatched us. The PCs were the "quality" fighters and the NPCs were the "quantity" fighters trying to swarm us. Note that outside of AV and GM battles, pretty much the only way for most NPC Factions to faceplant a PC was to swarm over the PC. There were a few notable exceptions, when a particular NPC Faction had an effect that a PC was vulnerable to (usually Mez, but not always), but with intelligent gameplay and alertness, even those obstacles could be overcome.
Rather than having a "singularity" of a Balance POINT, where there was only one successful formula that could work (1 tank, 1 h34l0r, 1 buff/debuff, 1 control, everyone else DPS) ... instead you had a broad Balance VOLUME in multiple dimensions giving ample "margin" for a variety of playstyles and combinations to work, including both Everyone The Same as well as Everyone Different. Having a spacious Balance VOLUME to work with is therefore key to recreating the experience that City of Heroes offered. That means that the average encounter needs to NOT be "over tuned" to the point where only a specific (and unique?) mix of Powers and capabilities is able to "pass the test" and complete the challenge. That means that "trash" mobs really need to be easy to trash and thrash, with the "danger" they present being a function of numbers and quantity of opposition, rather than as a function of quality and "power" of opposition.
Best example of this was the Knives of Artemis and their spamming of Caltrops. As a PC, you could NEVER achieve the kind of "Caltrop Murder" that the Knives of Artemis could dish out. Why? Because you were only 1 PC ... whereas the Knives of Artemis were ALL throwing out Caltrops, leading to a multiplication that simply wasn't possible for a single PC. I never heard of any Task Forces looking to bring Devices only PCs on board, with a stipulation that everyone had to have Caltrops in order to pull a "turnabout is fair play" on the NPCs, but even just thinking about it makes for a lot of fun, doesn't it? So the Knives of Artemis was an example of taking a Power ... Caltrops ... that was marginal in the hands of a PC, but became insanely powerful when stacked up to the rafters by a lot of NPCs throwing them out like party favors everywhere. It was an illustration of the fact that [b]Quantity has a Quality all of its own[/b].
And that sort of thing is only possible/reasonable when the Game Balance isn't (over) tuned down into a teeny tiny singularity point outside of which everything loses. And the only way achieve that is to aim for a Game Balance VOLUME, instead of a Game Balance POINT, where a wide variety of possibilities and combinations are not only viable but encouraged and acceptable. Doing that creates a dynamic equilibrium within the volume of the game's balance, with sufficient "margin" to accommodate plenty of potentially less than optimal choices. Once the "margins" are relaxed in that way, as a designer you free yourself from the need for Gear Checks and DPS Checks (and all the toxic competitiveness and mentality that spawns in response) and are able to deliver a gaming experience in which Players log in simply to have fun and feel ... super.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I very much hope...hope....HOPEEE that the Devs here stick with the mentality in CoH, I love large scale fights and the ability to fight crowds in the game, it made tanking / AoE powers / actual CROWD controlling skills all that much more enjoyable to use. The MMOs of today consider crowd controlling as keeping 1 target MAYBE 2 ... incapacitated in some form while the group fights another single target.. If games would break it up and instead have 3-5 varying difficulty targets per 1 target it makes everything for every character more fun and sometimes more challenging as to whom to prioritize first in that group. I hope we get our group fights back again..
Why waste a 'hope'? They've outright said that the idea is 'Similar to CoX, Only Better'. Instead of hoping, join us in cheering them on.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Yah , debuffing was my specialty; I loved the defender class and my favorite toon was a dark electric who to some degree tanked through accuracy debuffs and simply draining the power off mobs. In pvp she beat a lot of folks because they couldn't really hit her and I drained them of their power. The debuffs coupled with my limited damaged won most times,Until I ran up on a freakin' defense debuffing scrapper called Smofzilla. A bunch of strikes lowered my defense just enough to make me hitable and he did heavy damage. Our fights were a back and forth with me winning and sometimes he won. As far as the alternate build thing ,Coh did get the alternate build thing going ,but my experience was It was kinda costly and not as good as a main build because my main build had the rare purples.Oh yah damage isn't everything ;something I used to have to repeat to the errr.......DCUO folks all the time they bitched endlessly about the burn. I feel no archetype should be greater than any other just like you say having its own unique specialty. The roles in that err....game I mentioned leaves no flexibility in its classes, and there is always an endless need for power. Devs make sure a freaking troller does crowd control please and that no player is reliant on another player as his power source. I mean in Coh illusion trollers could siphon power from a mob and power the team. Sorry for the long windedness,but i miss Coh and there is no substitute so far,but some bad immitations.
Thank you for the feed back. I feel even more warm and fuzzy about Titans.