So, something I came across while trying to put together a build in Guild Wars 2 was that i couldn't make a high damage character with any sort of decent survivability, and I didn't want to make a survivable character because it'd turn the health sponge enemies into a slow any time I wanted to get somewhere in the world. And while I was doing that, the stray thought hit me "I never had to deal with this in City of Heroes". Strap in kiddies, because I'm about to ramble. This isn't a suggestion or anything like that; by all indications CoT is following the old CoH model anyways. It's just a matter of starting a discussion about why the power structure felt so good.
I've been giving that idea some thought and I think I know why - The powerset system in allowed everybody who made a character to do at least two things. In most games, you're restricted to only being able to do a single thing - say, damage, for instance, or healing - and virtually nothing else at all. With even the most basic character in City of Heroes, you had at least two things you could do because of how the Archetypes were designed: Brutes, tankers, and scrappers all had the ability to both dole out damage and to take hits, not in equal measure but at that all important point where they could do both. Blasters and Corrupters both had Ranged Damage and Crowd Control power sets. Masterminds had access to Pets and Support.
That last one is actually particularly special, and helps illustrate the way these powerset synergies could result in character play that doesn't exist anywhere else. In the vast majority of other games I've seen, a "petmaster" build is always going to have the pet require significant work from the player to manage, or be a near-useless tagalong for the main event that is your character's abilities (Looking at you, Final Fantasy XIV). In spite of this paradigm, the mastermind, because it was guaranteed to have support abilities, allowed the pets to be the dominant force, but to not have the defenses needed to stay alive in typical situations without help from a support character, letting them do all the work but still be engaging for the player.
This led into another trio of interesting design things, which I don't think any other game has really cottoned onto yet. The first is horizontal development for the dev team. What I mean by that is simple; in most games, say, Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft, classes have a list of powers. Because of this, any time a new power or ability is integrated into a class, it has to be weighed against all the other ones that the class has access to - no class in GW2 aside from Mesmer will ever have access to the "Alacrity" buff, because other classes have kits that are designed to not have it available. To do so would be to invite broken combinations that the game isn't designed for. This means that every class is limited in how many skills can be added to it, because overlap would eventually break things, especially since skill bloat would start up.
Conversely, by classifying powersets into discrete, well, [i]sets,[/i] you make it so that rather than modifying a grand set of 30 to 40 powers, you instead can simply add a new powerset any time you want to add a new set of abilities to an archetype. It won't modify characters who don't want their powers to change, and gives people the opportunity to try something new and interesting as time rolls on.
The second part is balance tweaking. By having discrete powersets, the devs always have control over interactions. Something in the powerset is overtuned? That can easily tell what, and what interaction is causing it, allowing them to rapidly fix the problem without compromising an entire archetype and checking the interactions of the new version of the ability/power versus literally everything that the class can do.
And, finally, it led to the ability for wildly different playstyles within the same archetype, to the point where you didn't actually need more than the initial set of archetypes. Take the Brute archetype for instance - if you wanted to be the ultimate attrition player, you were able to roll with electric Melee and Regeneration, making it so that targets were literally unable to hit you hard enough to offset your regeneration. Wanted to copy the Superman archetype? you could get away with it by using Super Strength with Invulnerability, letting you be seriously difficult to actually hurt. Katana/Super Reflexes and Street Justice/Grit were different in a humongous number of ways. Mixing and matching your two powerset types almost always resulted in something interesting and different to play.
Now, as is reasonable to assume, this gave players a considerably stronger base level of power than in most games. That's particularly interesting because those games like to nerf classes and abilities that are above a certain level, in a kind of "you must be shorter than this to ride" paradigm. Conversely, CoH instead allowed you to set your own difficulty levels in missions by setting a level shift of up to 4 levels in either direction, and affecting the size of encounter spawns - If you wanted to be a ridiculous powerhouse romping on squads of weaklings, that was entirely your bag! If you wanted to be constantly challenged by high-end enemies, that was also doable. And if you were just a ridiculous badass in and out of game, you could set both as high as they'd go and be constantly challenged by boss level mobs of enemies; I knew a few people who actually did that for fun.
[b]It's all about the power fantasy.[/b] In most games, you're this 'chosen one' or something along the lines of the greatest warrior the world has never known, but you don't actually feel like it; you're constantly struggling to fight elite enemies solo because there's no way to cover more than one thing without relying on other people. CoH never had that problem because it wasn't above letting players customize their own level of difficulty, and allowed them to feel powerful no matter how good they actually were at putting a build together, and it wasn't afraid of letting players [i]be[/i] powerful, which I feel like is something that so many other games struggle with.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
You bring up some interesting points, and it's very true. Your character was good at 2 things, and 2 characters with the same powers could balance those things differently but were always competent at both.
The balance was also somewhat easier (I assume) because it only had to be balanced to a mob level. Fire, Radiation, Ice and all other 'ranged attacks' for a blaster were balanced against each other to the bar of 'it should take this long for a level x mob to die'. You didn't even need to take every power (and most didn't), so each move could also be set against each other. You could fully choose to do less damage and focus on a blaster's control powers, but your damage moves themselves weren't any less powerful.
Every other game likes to say 'Your class is good at X' and that's it, that one thing.
The only other example I can think of, where I can do 2 things, is currently from WoW. And it's a meme build only good for solo play. I play a Druid, who can choose from 4 specs. Guardian (tank), Feral (melee damage), Balance (ranged damage) and Restoration (healing). Gone are the days of a base class customized in talent trees, your class is your specialization. If you're a Guardian druid, you cat form has 0 damage abilities and you only know 1 offensive spell (moonfire). Your class is being the bear. However, as a talent choice, you can pick 1 other form to focus on. My Guardian Druid choose feral for this, which gives me the cat attacks but the damage is terrible. I however took a pvp talent (only available in the world if in War Mode and on PVP maps) called Master Shapeshifter that increases your bonus from the 1st talent, which for the cat form is +30% damage.
So I can be a good tank and also be below average damage, only in War Mode, or PVP battlegrounds. PVP battlegrounds are what I do most, but tanks are generally frowned upon, only good for running flags or defending objectives. There's generally no reason to actually attack a tank spec player so I get ignored a lot. This is when I use the Feral Affinity with Master Shapeshifter, if they ignore me I go cat form and deal enough damage to make them fight me. I even a good amount of 1 on 1 fights, if given time, because it takes a while. It's also nice in war mode out in the world, because I can go cat for single target and bear for groups, swapping as needed.
It's a meme though. It's of no use in dungeons (I don't even like WoW dungeons), master shapeshifter doesn't work in Island Expeditions, and I get yelled at for being Guardian because Feral would do more damage, and Tanks have 0 use in arenas (don't like those either).
Why don't I play feral instead? I don't care for damage, I don't like the feral maintenance buffs and I have 0 interest in maximizing damage. I love bear form, the bear play style and using feral affinity to be a bruiser. I value my defensive abilities in battlegrounds more than my ability to kill someone faster.
It's an anomaly in WoW, no other class can try and be good at two things. I don't know if it will even last, as Master Shapeshifter is getting a 5% nerf in the next patch despite how few people use it. Apparently Blizz thinks the power fantasy of a Druid is to only have 1 form, and if bear form, to just get punched in the face well.
(Sorry if that turned into a rant.)
That also ignores how no MMO has 'crowd control' as a role anymore, something I really miss.
Come on CoT! It'll let me be good at two things! It'll let one of those things be crowd control! It'll let me decide MY OWN power fantasy!
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. That dichotomy is probably the main reason I haven't enjoyed any other MMOs.
Also, that was brilliant.
Spurn all ye kindle.
For me, the hilarity was that I always billed Redlynne, my Martial Arts/Super Reflexes/Soul Mastery Scrapper, as being a "Pocket Tank" for a very long time until we reached Inventions and Issue 18 where we got Alignments. Once I'd taken Redlynne "around the horn" on the alignments wheel so as to pick up Soul Mastery in Grandville and then return to being a Hero (over the course of a month to get all the alignment badges), she ultimately wound up being this really weird combo of abilities that I called a Scranktroller, since that best described how she behaved in combat. She was a Scrapper, a Tanker and a Controller all rolled into one, which was kind of bizarro, but that's actually the way the character wound up getting built to play. She even had the Medicine and Leadership pools on top of everything else, making her a serious contender for being something of an "all rounder" character. I even needed to give her a Snipe power (Moonbeam) out of Soul Mastery in order to pick up a Hold (Soul Storm) to complement her Chance to Stun attacks from Martial Arts and Air Superiority out of the Flight pool, which was a guaranteed KnockUP(!), along with a PBAoE attack with a Chance to Knockdown (Dragon Tail). Oh and I had a single target Taunt too!
And to top it all off, the whole point of the build was to achieve the power of [b][i]NO GET HITSU!![/i][/b] by stacking enough Defense to push chances of being hit to the "softcap" of 5%, allowing her to attack anything short of an Archvillain or a Giant Monster with nigh impunity. On Rikti Mothership Raids, I'd gather up 5 Rikti Magus Elite Bosses onto Redlynne and hold their attention on myself, waiting for the "cavalry" of the melee people to circle around and help me finish off the pile I'd gathered. The first time I did it, people on the raid were impressed. The second time I did it, they got even more impressed. I did it a third AND FOURTH time during a single raid and got a [i]reputation[/i] on Mothership Mondays on the Virtue server that lasted for ... a while ... ^_~
Like I said ... Scranktroller.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I took the single target taunt on my DB/WP/I seriously can't remember what Epic Power Set I took O.O Loved using it to tank the STF :) Soft Capped (Type) Defenses too with IOs in the mix :) Single Target, I won't lie, was lacking. I did take the PBAOE power, it looked so good, but I didn't have the slots, but used it anyways, because it was pretty :)
Built to solo AVs! Soloed Hero One (Whatever his I believe Rikti Name was) and Imperius! Those two were challenges! Took awhile on the Hero One to figure out. Made me feel all Spider-Man hero level doing that :) LOVED IT!
That said, I still preferred Stalker's Reconstruction over WP's Toggle Heal with enemies near though.
The most important aspect of it all, was it allowed me to create my concept. Regen/Super Reflex feeling character!
Sucked in PvP though. :p
I don't think you give GW2 a fair shake. It's not like CoH where you just build a character that can do multiple things, you have to PLAY it in the manner to do those multiple things as well. For instance, you can make a pretty sturdy guardian that focuses on defense stats with some offensive stats to bolster an offensive weapon and it'll perform mediocre... Until you use your virtues and traits to cap your crit chance and keep pushing out blinds everytime you kill a foe... Or a warrior who is built like glass and can pack a punch but keels over quickly... Until you grab some well timed full heals, heals-over-time, aoe block/stuns and tons of extra dodges to roll all over your foes.
I think the difference here is the goal of making defined class that fit in a lore vs creating a lore around a highly custom character. It's like comparing CoH to FFXIV. It's just not fair. Like, what if I start bringing in skill arguments here. Blade and Soul require certain knowledge and twitch reflexes to pull off amazing damage and with proper rotations and management of your class' defense mechanism, you can defeat targets normal players cannot even stand near whereas CoH is very static and the capability of the character is pre-determined in the build make up of their powers so it wouldn't matter how good of a player you are. See? It's a very partial argument...
Guild Wars 2 does have builds that fulfill multiple roles. Something that I've been playing in it since the game launched is a minion master necromancer, running around with a squad of undead constructs like I used to do with demons and robots in CoV. The build is very versatile, having powerful damage, extreme survivability, debuffing, buff removal, healing over time, burst heals, and an enormous HP pool.
I never said it was impossible to do that sort of thing in the game, and I have in fact been doing it from day 1, and furthermore, I never wanted to specifically bash other games in this regard. I made it a statement of where the idea for this thread came from, and while my implication was that "CoH did it better" (which, admitting my bias here, I do believe to be true), I don't believe that my statement was throwing unnecessary shade at the game. Are there ways to make it fun for me? Yes. I was just not finding those ways when the idea of how CoH worked occured to me.
As for a class fitting highly defined lore vs creating lore around a custom character, that doesn't excuse the other side of it - power scaling, and the feeling of being powerful. These games are designed to have fun, and part of that is the feeling of "winning", of being powerful, and going on grand adventures. In the case of Guild Wars 2, there's a big to-do about how your character is the best in the world, capable of fighting opponents well outside of their weight class, but the enemy designs are schizophrenic in that regard. Balthazar, a rogue god, was easier to fight than some Fractals of the Mists bosses, even when they have no right to be, purely on the conceit that it's meant to be a story boss rather than a group content boss. The raid bosses are the same way - there's no explanation for why Sabetha the Saboteur is so damn hard to kill, just that she is. At least CoH got away with explaining that as people having different power levels and power strengths, but GW2 just expects you to roll with the inconsistencies. Back during CoH, on the other hand, you were able to adjust the difficulty settings, which is damn important to me - you were able to increase or decrease enemy level and spawn rate, adjusting the power level to something you were comfortable with. That didn't work in group focused content, of course, but it was still really important to why the game was so good, especially since the game's lore conceits allowed for enemies in those group content pieces to be wildly out of proportion with your character's abilities and have it make sense.
And then you bring up the skill argument, but I'd argue that tab target combat systems take plenty of skill, just not in the same way. With an action combat system, your skill as a player comes down to how well you can use your active defenses (like dodging or other damage negation effects) while still getting in attacks between evasions. With tab targetting systems, there's almost always a greater emphasis on customizing your equipment, enhancements, or similar, and doing it smartly to accomplish a thing properly. Back during CoH's run, I encountered several Stone Tanks, of all things (the guys who could get 90% damage reduction in literally everything other than psionics) that didn't know what they were doing and nearly died in fights constantly. I encountered masterminds that didn't know how to keep their pets alive and let them die because they hadn't invested in any support abilities. And I also met Brutes and Scrappers that were capable of all but soloing raid content because they'd built their characters properly enough to do that at all - Redlynne's post is a great example of that. The skill based focus of a Tab target game is in the prep-work, rather than the combat itself.
Even ignoring all this, your complaint stems from a throwaway line I used as the intro to this thread to illustrate a point. Was it a bit of a put down for GW2? Yeah, I admit that. I'm biased. But it was never meant to be anything more than a throwaway, and was not a critique of the game as a whole.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
I have 80s in every AT in GW2. I've not found a single one that could Defend as well as a CoH Defender, or Resist as well as a Tanker. 'Build' doesn't seem to matter, except to make more DPS, so You survive because the Mobs don't. It seems to me like every 'successful' GW2 character is some twist on 'Scrapper' or 'Blaster'.
I'd say that character powers and AT balance is Not one of the 'features' of GW2. Nah, what GW2 does best is Infrastructure and the way that one can 'join' any open quest, without having to join a team. I've never seen a situation where 'one more PC' makes a big difference, regardless of their AT. Not like CoH.
No Tanker swoops in and scoops up all the Aggro, so that others can recover. No Controller locks down the enemy. No Defender drops a heal or shield to turn the tide of battle. Not in GW2. I don't get any 'Hero Saved the Day' experiences there. I'm pleased that my characters can all solo nearly any non-group-flagged content. But I never feel like _I_ made the difference - except when my Mesmer short-cuts some irritating JP.
So, I agree that CoH had the 'better' ATs and Powers. I had at least one of everything, except Stalker. CoH ATs/powers didn't 'need' the 'right build' to succeed. Any AT could make a big difference on a team. The 'right' enhancements could make a large difference in experience, allowing players to do Amazing things, but any player that knew his AT/Character well could contribute. 'One more teammate' could make a difference between a total Wipe and 'Easy'.
Player ability and knowledge did have an impact in CoH. 'AE Babies' did exist. An experienced player could pick up a brand new AT/Character and Rock!
Be Well!
Fireheart
Luckily I never said you did say that sort of thing. I merely said you're not giving other games a fair shake. And I think the reason you're not is because you're leaving out the prospect of formulating your means of gameplay to facilitate the different ways to play, i.e. you're being static with a variable for one game and not the other.
And to clarify, I'm not talking about what you prefer better or stating any preference as fact, just emphasizing your bias (which you admit to having).
Just so you won't assume I'm dismissing parts of your argument, I agree that difficulty has been a thorn in GW2, primarily because it aims more toward skill-plays than it does build-scale. Raids aside (as I never participated in any and stuck with open-PvE, dungeons, fractals and WvW), I found the difficulty in some of the environments to be easier due to the knowledge I gained through my time with the game. A difficulty slider could have breathed more life into some content, but without, I usually just played around with various build set-ups for the fun of it rather than optimized or maximized builds that a less skilled player likely couldn't use and "win" with.
GW2 has a tab targeting system...
GW2 isn't an action combat system. At best, it's a hybrid tab-target/action combat system.
And what you're speaking of is knowledge of the game. Skill is demonstrated moment by moment. At most, it's a semantics misunderstanding. I'd consider what you're talking about is mostly knowledge-based proficiency and what I was talking about was skill-based.
Well, if you don't want to be held to your words, just say so.
Now, I feel we've both stated our position adequately at this point, so i'm not going to go into it further, but this
Is just passive aggressive and rude.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
And you could fly or jump or tp or zoom over this stuff too. And (later on anyway) if you couldn't fly, you could craft a jetpack that, while slow, would let you toodle well overhead from sudden death purples.
Most games restrict variation for (fear of im)balance reasons. That's also why they limit effect stacking while CoH was fine to let multiple people ratchet it up.
Many MMs, for example, didn't take direct attack powers and hence had some free powers and slots that let them take the "unused 3" from Leadership pool. Glorious was the raid with multiple copies of all 3 affecting you.
Other games? No way, Jose.
Flight, self-rez, cheap boost consumables to make you an untouchable hero for 30 seconds, these are all "design flaws" in other games.
__________________
[IMG]http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/Gnurl/a72b7fba-8da2-4ac8-8e18-0f8453f7d3ee_zpscc5b27b5.jpg[/IMG]
The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
Reminds me of what my SG did when Demonology came out: 7 Masterminds, and one Night Widow (the support spec variant). We concluded that she added more to our overall DPS just standing there running all her support toggles on 42 pets than anything her offensive powers could offer.
We also may have crashed Port Oakes...
Native of Triumph - Victory - Protector - Gladden - Dwarrowdelf - Tribble
Broad spectrum geek and Shadowy Advisor
Yes, my [u][url=https://www.deviantart.com/revanantmorituri]art gallery[/url][/u] is almost entirely screen captures. Tough.
“Oh, yeah? You and what army?!”
*points*