I much more enjoyed the rush of building my scrapper to not need many buffs.

+DEF Buffs were nice, as I didn't have much in the way of Defense Debuff Protection, but over all, it was just an added bonus to my already softcapped defenses.

+RCH/+REC (aka Speed Boost) I never needed since I built my main to cycle for the best DPS to begin with and to sustain it.

And for me, 3 minions and 1 Lt just isn't super.

I'm all for FLAT bonuses.

For instance in terms of resistance - You get resistance slots. With those slots you can choose from:

Physical Damage Resist
Temperature Damage Resist
Particle Damage Resist
Vital Damage Resist
Supernatural Damage Resist
Mez Resistance
Debuff Resistance
Knock Resistance

Players can stack any of the resistances on itself up to 3 times. So you may have a character who spends 3 points being nearly immune to ONE mechanic but you will be greatly susceptible to others. I'd say each player gets 5 points.

These defenses are not apart of the added defense Tanks would get.. but perhaps the MDPS role could use an additional slot because of their extreme vulnerability.

Brand X wrote:

One, get rid of typed defense. You either dodge the attack (positional defense) or resist it. No deflecting. Deflecting is still getting hit, just not as bad, which resistance covers.

Speaking as someone who was all about the [b]NO GET HITSU!![/b] from Issue 2 all the way till the end ... I have to say that I always hated Typed Damage Defenses. I'd be perfectly happy with a system that uses Positional Defenses and Typed Resistances ... but without the inverse of Typed Defenses and Positional Damage Resistances (say wha?). That way, Defense is all about "where" while Resistance is all about "what" ... resulting in a broad simplification of the two systems that makes them complimentary in a way where they don't (can't) step on each other's toes.

The reasoning was that the resistance to damage type is to keep the metagame interesting and encourage devs to keep the lore and Enemy NPCs varied in damage type (alot of times games focus too much on physical damage.

I do not like flat damage resistance (what has happened in Champions) where there are SOME damage type resistances but in the grand sceheme it's all about the +DefenseALL mechanic. +DefenseALL is boring to me.

I didn't put dodge in my list as I think it's something separate from resistance in my mind. Same with healing/regen. While they can mitigate damage, they are not the same mechanic.

How the game deals with Dodge and Healing is being debated heavily elsewhere I'm sure.

- -

But not to speak too much on one mechanic (like what happened in the "what is tab v twitch thread") I will simply say that FLAT bonuses are WAY better to manage than multiplicative bonuses. Things get out of control rather quickly (you could even say exponentially) when you use multiplicative modifiers. Also with flat bonuses you don't need to penalize players with softcaps because the cap is more or less defined for you.

Each mechanic's "flatness" should be easily defined in the character sheet so there is no ambiguity as to what your result is.

Brand X wrote:

I'd say the problem with CO is that enemies are less resistant to one type of damage, and more just equally resistant.
I think there's a few with a strong resistance to a few damage types, but over all, it (at least feels but I think it's how it's set up) is just Enemy has this much HP and this much resistance to all damage equally.
Maybe it's to stop people from going "I'm a fire blaster, so I only do missions with enemies who are really weak to fire damage".
CO also doesn't tend to have ways to make an INV character who is more resistant to Lethal/Blunt attacks, but weaker to Energy/Cold/Fire.

It didn't used to be this way. I miss those days.

The problem with their design however is they didn't take that into account when making enemies. So really it was ONLY the people doing psychic damage who got the shaft (which I did complain about) since it didn't work well against ghosts OR robots. Favoritism should not really exist but that doesn't mean we have to sacrifice uniqueness

I say build different innate resistance into EVERY character (NPC and Player) so that it still feels diverse. And while SOME enemy teams are made up of one type of damage (IFRIT doing fire damage for example) I hope there are many teams of enemies out there with as much variation as the teams of players (It's rare that I see a whole team of ice damage players).

I think I am agreeing with you here but do not fully understand what you're saying. When you say "enemies" do you main NPC enemies, Player enemies, or both?

Brand X wrote:

I meant NPC enemies. PC will always have varied resistances. Fire Armor's for instance will likely laugh at the fire blasters.

Thank you for the clarification. I don't know how their "powers" system will be structured so I don't know how a "Tank who uses Fire" will be structure d but I do indeed hope that those types of innate bonuses exist.

That being said.. just because my character uses electrical/particle damage doesn't mean she has an innate defense to being electrocuted.

Once the devs have defined the powers choice paradigm then I'll have more frame of reference to form a direct opinion. But overall I agree with your assertion.

chase wrote:

I was never a fan of hard caps. Softer ceilings-- a form of diminishing returns that's more transparent than and built in from the start works better for me.
Hard caps make for very basic min-maxing and reduce the effectiveness of certain team buff dynamics.
Soft caps lead to more judgement calls in your builds- is the reduced damage bonus worth the waste of another slot, or would you do better getting a larger bonus from another attribute. Do you specialize or generalize? Through balanced diminishing-return systems you can apply a balance that would allow both extremes to be equally viable, but have very different styles of play.

I share the OP's concern and did find that later in CoX's lifespan far too much of the content was becoming trivial. However, I would respond in much the same way as chase here: while hard caps have a place in terms of being a failsafe against breaking the system, I think generally speaking hitting hard caps means the system could be improved. That doesn't mean character capabilities have to be unlimited; you can certainly place upper bounds on things where needed, making it so that characters can get arbitrarily close to those bounds without ever reaching them.

Lothic wrote:

Comicsluvr wrote:
One of the issues that I had with CoX (and one of the things that partially broke the game) was that characters were eventually able to do things they were never designed to do.
...
This is why I think there needs to be hard caps on many abilities including Recharge, Defenses and Damage. I don't want the game to start off well and three years down the road everyone is scrambling for uber gear or the OP accolade.
I'm certainly not against the idea of the Devs of any MMO doing their best to make sure their game remains fun and balanced over the course of many years. But honestly saying something like this is far, far easier than actually accomplishing it.
It's not just CoH that suffered from the "power creep" syndrome - virtually any game (computer or PnP) that allows characters to grow from being less powerful to more powerful will have to tackle the issue. It's a classic Catch-22: The Devs are compelled to add ever more challenging content to the game to keep players interested, but every time they add more they're inevitably enabling characters to become ever more godlike to overcome the latest challenges. Frankly I think even the best games are always doomed to that kind of failure in the longest run.
The problem with establishing "hard caps" for everything in a game like CoT is that there's really no way the Devs can accurately predict what the best values for those hard caps will be for a game that might evolve for years. Sure they could plug in some numbers on Day One, but who's to say those numbers won't need to be tweaked a year or five from now? I'm far more in favor of chase's "soft cap" idea - they would be far more flexible and able to withstand unforeseen changes that'll happen in the future without the Devs having to come up with new arbitrary hard limits.

This is a definite issue as you said. I'll get hounded for saying it, but this is why I don't particularly care for the idea of levels per se with level 6 characters for instance vastly overshadowed by level 50's. I'd rather see characters get broader as they "level", but not distinctly more powerful for any given power, or at the very least have it limited to a change equaling no more than 30% from beginning level to end. You still have a character which is theoretically more "powerful" as they level, because they can do more things, but still only a few things at once. This helps alleviate the problem of escalating challenge in game, and actually allows more non-linear play as characters can get involved in most anything (which is actually more comic book like - a level 6 Iron Man wasn't prevented from an encounter with a 50th level Galactus for instance).

The problem is the majority of players absolutely adore the idea of level advancement and a feeling of looking down with a high level toon on another lower level one (says a lot about human nature eh), so game designer's cater to this because at least initially it draws players in as they naturally strive to improve. Then they hit level 50 and after two months complain because the game is "boring". So far the design decisions here sound like they are going down the same old path.... so inevitably the same old issues will arise.

There's a reason why the [url=http://www.amazon.com/Mutants-Masterminds-RPG-Steve-Kenson/dp/1932442529/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387578960&sr=1-3&keywords=mutants+and+masterminds]Mutants and Masterminds[/url] game system [i]starts characters at Level 10[/i] instead of starting them at Level 1 ... unlike every other AD&D based game system.

I would love for a MMO with a character development system like M&M but with better defined health system.

I always took it as building to what I wanted to be. The IO sets helped you to get there as Young Tutor so eloquently explained. And, IOs were another way to grow your character and that is important once you hit the level cap. Still many folks built their main characters with the ability to solo. So folks need to be able to wear the team or solo hat when appropriate. Case in point: as an incarnate I do remember unbalancing say a level 46 team, so I held back and only let loose to prevent team wipes; it didn't always work :( In other cases the rule was no incarnate AEs or you get kicked.

Redlynne wrote:

There's a reason why the Mutants and Masterminds game system starts characters at Level 10 instead of starting them at Level 1 ... unlike every other AD&D based game system.

I just want to point out that I'm currently in a Pathfinder game now and you can start the PCs at any level you want, it just takes a few minutes to level your newly-built character up to level whatever on paper. That said I still prefer the CoX PVE style of starting at level 1 for myself. I guess a lot of PVPers would prefer to just start as level 50 with all the gear they need to be competitive from the get-go, and for what it's worth, I'd be okay with allowing that, but in a PVP setting only. I mean, CoX had to sort of change the rules and gear for PVP anyway, because stuff that's fair and balanced in PVE when fighting critters just doesn't play the same in PVP. As such, I would rather see the PVP be done in such a way that you can, if you want to, go into "PVP-only" mode with your toon (kind fo like switching from one build to another) in which you'd be max level already and could have access to non-tradable, non-sellable, non-buyable versions of literally EVERY enhancement, as many copies of each as you want, etc. The only caveat would be that you can't do PVE content with the toon in that mode, just Arena-style PVP stuff. That way the PVPers wouldn't have to grind for gear at all, and all PVP would be inherently fair and more about teamwork, skill, strategy, etc than gear and time spent grinding for it. And PVE would still be PVE.

Young Tutor wrote:

One thing I *liked* about COX was how inventions let you create really "super" superheroes. If you wanted to sink massive amounts of INF into your main, you could. Would you be *that* much more effective than a hero with half the INF invested? Not really . . . with a few exceptions. +Def and +recharge were overpowered in certain builds, especially if you could get synergy with overlapping defenses or abuse really awesome powers. The flipside is that, outside of +def and +recharge, there really weren't that many attributes worth building towards.
Honestly, COX wasn't the type of game where a well-run team was "challenged" by much of anything, regardless of gear. It was an easy game. I liked that aspect of it. Unlike teaming in other "challenging" games, the best players in COX (in my experience) had a "bring whatever you like" attitude. Even though you could really have uber characters, few things were so hard as to make folks require that you be uber in order to join.
For me, that was the really cool part of COX. Building an uber character wasn't necessary, it was just fun. You didn't *have* to bring one, it was a labor of love. The game was balanced for SOs, IOs just made it easy. So you really felt like you were a total baddass when you turned up the difficulty.

I liked the "whatever build floats your boat, dude, you be you" attitude among my fellow gamers that CoH had. That said, there is room for SOME content to be "harder" than normal. In most cases I would want that to be the type of stuff you do just to get badges etc, like the "The REALLY Harnd Way" badge in CoH.