Fireheart wrote:

Brand X wrote:
I used to die lots in fighting games and pretty quickly. I found it just made me want to get better. *shrug*
Right, but this is not a 'fighting game', it's an MMORPG. So, rather than dying, I prefer to bring along my friend who has some buffs (or debuffs) and a Heal of some kind. Then we can both go to town on the baddies and have a blast, because Together we are tougher than them.
In fact, that's a core Problem with the whole Comic Book Genre. Almost all of the heroes in comics are solo. Those that are ostensibly 'teams' only actually team up against colossal enemies. Solo heroes have to supply all of the DPS themselves, so almost every one of them is DPS specced and not buff/debuff/support/heal specced. Because, you know, a support-hero is not as dynamic, flashy, and photogenic as a blood-mad scrapper.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Actually the Xmen fought as a team most of the time whenever they could. Storm was easily described as what a supporting super hero would be, she didn't heal her allies she blocked most opposing attacks on herself and her allies with her powers, note I said allies in there. Many other XMen were able to support each other while defend themselves simultaniously, and still had some means of offense. But they force multiplied each other when working as a team.

CoT is looking to be the spiritual successor to CoX. For me that means I expect an Empathy type power set regardless of whether it's in the genre or not, regardless of whether MMO players expect a healer AT or not, regardless or not if the set was or is perceived as a healing set in CoX. I expect it because since I started playing in Issue 3 Empaths have been around while endless debates on spamming HA and the necessity for Healorz have played out in chat and in the forums. Would I play CoT if there was no Empathy but it was otherwise a faithful to the spirit of CoX, undoubtedly. But it would be one bit of spirit I would see as not faithfully carried over, an entirely emotional response by someone who played a heck of a lot of Empaths. When the lights went out on CoX I had 9 active defender empaths and 1 controller empath across 3 servers, 5 of whom were level 50's.

As for Sailboats original post, well I am a longstanding member of Repeat Offenders and Green Machine. You can probably pretty much guess how important I think the big green numbers my Empaths could produce are when I look at the set as a whole. If tweaking how the heals work will help the game go for it, just don't relegate healing to a pool power.

Well I would hazard that's the starting number not some hard cap the game will never see exceeded correct?. While I would expect Empathy to exist I would not find it crushing to be delayed past release for whatever reason as long as it was on the way down the road. If CoT is the spiritual successor I'm sure I'll be hip deep in alts of all flavors while waiting for Empathy to appear. While I favored Empathy I also favored SR, Earth Control and Storm Summoning among my 100+ alts. My main above all was a Claws/SR scrapper (RAWR! :p) emotionally if you asked me to choose between my Claws/SR and [i]anything[/i] else, well [i]anything[/i] else can wait . I'll take whatever comes first, make alts like crazy and enjoy the anticipation of the rest.

PS Add Traps, Storm Summoning, and Kinetics ... plus whatever else we are both forgetting.

JayBezz wrote:

Abnormal Joe wrote:
PVP is an entirely different animal, with no relation to PVE mechanics. I would urge others to treat it as a totally different game since it is effectively.
-joe

Gonna agree with all of your post except this part. While I LOVE that Marvel Heroes has used given PvP its own mechanics and powers.. I do not think the "Seperate to be Equal" flag is universal. In a point and click movement, point to aim, limited Z access and limited movespeed game the idea of changing PvP from PvE is very appealing.
But what works in one game with one set of rules OFTEN does not work for other games. I bring to contention MOST games approach to crowd control in PvP is to say "KILL IT ALL". Which is to say "kill off that entire type of gameplay because players complain about anything outside of DPS, Mitigation and Heals". To this I must bite my thumb completely. Crowd Controllers should not be marginalized to crappier versions of their powers ever again in a MMO that has a controller class (as most modern games have figured out needs its own role/class).
Debuffing should come at a great cost because in the grand scheme it has the greatest gains. That cost should be built into the build parity and not be diminished for PvP. If I see one more game where confuses cost a ton to get/use and don't work in PvP I may scream.

While I do not know all games, obviously, I have yet to encounter a single one where the attempt to have both PvP and PvE in the same game did not diminish either. Well, maybe LotRO, not entirely sure about that one.
The problem is indeed in classes like mezzers, pet classes and other oddballs. It is not that players hate them but that they can not be made to work in a PvP environment.
Because mezzing is pretty much a binary state it is not particularly fun for either one of the players. If the mezz succeeds it is pretty much like fighting sappers without having a particular strength against them. They will drain you, chain stun you and whittle you to death by a thousand papercuts.. Not fun having to wait for 5 minutes, hoping for a chance to break free that never occurs. If on the other hand the mezz fails the mezzing character has the life expectency of a henchman in a blaster's alpha strike. Not all that fun for the mezzer either.
A pet controller works great in PvE because the mobs there are about as bright as an amoeba. They can be made to attack the pet over and over again. Another player will entirely ignore the pet and go straight for the controller.
Stalkers were a lot more fun in PvE than in PvP, because their gimmick was careful positioning, sneaking in and then pretty much one-hitting your enemy if you did everything right. Computer opponents don't mind if that happens to them. Players on the other hand tend to get a bit upset if they are killed without ever seeing their opponent until after the fact.
Paragon spent a -lot- of effort in trying to get those classes to work in a PvP environment, and they didn't really have the staff to spare on such a project, so the creativity of PvE expansions suffered. It was simply easier to come up with new combinations of powersets across the red-blue divide than to think of new ideas and upset the already tenuous balance of the PvP side.

Most modern games do not even bother anymore. SW:TOR is a prime example of developers simply mirroriing the classes across their PvP divide, and doing away with anything remotely creative. Every class can DPS, A third can tank with marginal flavour differences between them and a third can heal (again with marginal flavour differences). There is a token amount of stealth (almost completely negated in PvP), a token amount of CC (almost completely negated in PvP) and in the end every class is DPS with a bit of a hobby to the side (of more DPS, tanking or healing). The game not coincidentally is also rather bland and boring. CoH, for all its flaws, certainly was anything but boring. Each of the original archetypes played out radically differently, and the 5 new ones added with CoV were even more creative. It was not until the power explosion that that game also got to be boring (when the question became if you could stuff the entire mission map or only half of it in that dumpster before burning it to death. I mean arrest). It is also why I stuck with defenders, scrappers and stalkers towards the end. Those classes were less affected by the power imbalance (that, and of course because I adored my dark/psy defender and her sister the claws/dark scrapper :))

Ralathar44 wrote:

Gauntlet wrote:
All of this sounds like PVP related. So long as it doesn't spill over into PVE thats fine with me. COH's biggest, most time-consuming problem came from attempting to "balance" PVP and killing PVE in the process. The basic appoach to "Nerf them, not me!" was to nerf EVERYTHING to the ground. "Nerfing" things was the cause of ED, Regen-Failure, and the obliteration of the Energy Melee set altogether. PVE; I don't want to have to wait around to get better to jump into the next fight. SWTOR has a rest power for EACH class and I LOVE that thing. Im not hiding in a corner hoping the badguys don't see me. Thats no fun at all. Do what you guys want with PVP just don't drag PVE down into the gutter with it.

Actually ED was extremely needed both to re-balance the game, which had suffered from severe power creep, and to make room for the inventions system. The inventions system became something very loved.
Examples of too much power and it's negative impacts on community: Never needed more than 1 tank or controller per team, fights became "stack in dumpster, nuke", build variety was poop, etc. ED hit, changes were made, IO's arrive, and suddenly you could build all types of ways, multiple tanks and contorllers on team were useful again, and combat became more challenging again.
Yes, I know there will always be some of you out there (fire tankers) who will miss grabbing an entire mission and soloing it yourself on max difficulty. But that was plainly not balanced and not challenging in teams.
*Healing*
City of Heros did healing pretty well. It was useful, it was good, but it was only one of many ways to keep people alive. We can't nerf recovery to the point people crawl super slowly through missions because it's not fun, but we can keep healing in check enough to where there are myriad options for support instead of just healing.
Support in COH included: buffs, debuffs, control, healing.

Regarding the last sentence, yes, it is true, CoH support included all of that. The fact that city of heroes support had buffs/debuffs and crowd control and the fact that those three were very good is the reason city of heroes was fun to me and it was also what separated City of heroes from almost every mmorpg out there. Most mmorpgs out there make it so you HAVE to have a healer and also make buffs/debuffs and crowd control very weak or, in their view, "balanced" when in reality they were so weak healing was the only thing that was viable for support, so you ended up with that mentality of every team needing a healer no matter how whiney, annoying, rude the player playing the healer was, the team had to put up with it(yes, I ran into situations like that in guild wars, it was always the person playing the most "needed" class in the team in any situation, to.).

Comicsluvr wrote:

oOStaticOo wrote:
Or just leave it alone as it was. Why mess with perfection?

If it was so perfect, why did the desire to bring healers along drop sharply after lvl 30 or so. Healers were too useful early on (because rocking the aura was easy) and next to useless end-game. A happy medium has to be struck somewhere.

That could well be because in the *earlier* levels of the game, Healing was far more beneficial to a lot of players who are missing out on certain things for their builds. It is a growing process that unfortunately, healing lost out with other sets when they could do more (and to more people) without necessarily waiting 60 seconds to buff the next person.

I agree with you BRAND X. My first 50 was a healer - love healers. Do not think that power should be messed with in any way shape or form!

Last Trader wrote:

I agree 'endgame' characters are supposed to be nigh-immortal killing machines. I think it more comes down to how the support sets are made. If they done properly then every set should have a some kind of debuff or utility powers which would be useful no matter what the make-up of the team. Allowing them to always help, be useful and part of said team. Instead of nerfing defense for characters, make the support more useful overall so then everyone is is in theory happy. There are many ways to approach this kind of situation without having to resort to nerf or changing things just for the sake of it.
Although it's hard to know for sure, as the game in just in the planning/design stages. This kind of discussion is important though, as it should be able to be addressed in the design stages before it can become a problem when a game goes live and then you'll get people complaining no matter what you do just in much higher numbers. Which would make it harder to then find proper criticism and critic rather than just people complaining and not being constructive.

My personal opinion to such a 'solo friendly' approach is 'boooooring'
The less strident explanation is that first of all if every class can do pretty much the same things then the whole design gets to be pretty bleh, and worse, you have really no point in having all those classes around to begin with. A game like EQ2 suffered a lot from this and was roundly (and rightly) critcised for it. You had a three healer classs, but thety all started out the same, shared a lot of abilities and played out much the same for a long time of your playing them. This directly and very negatively impacts replayability and the appeal of alts. Why bother with healer flavour 2 or tank flavour 3 when it is really only a matter of green or blue particle effects between them. SW:TOR suffers from the same problem. If you look past the graphics and to the numbers it is all much samey-samey, and along the empire-repubilic divide it is pretty much identical. They did their best to create engaging (or horrifying) story lines for each class but those missions are only a small portion of your experience in the game, and running through Taris with your third alt that plays and feels rather the same like your previous two is not the most enjoyable experience. A game like Vanguard (for all its technical flaws it was a very well designed game) did it a lot better. They had clearly defined pairs of roles for each class and took great effort to make each of them play entirely different. A sorcerer and a druid were both primary DPS roles, but their playstyles was entirely unalike, and the enchanter was different again.

Regarding the unstoppable killing machine, that really is a good way to kill off any fun in playing the game. It is fun, in a way, to be able to enter a mission, stuff the entire complement of enemies in a dumpster and burn it in one go, but that very quickly loses its appeal after a few times. We generally are entertained not by the predictable but by the unexpected. A movie you see for the first time is much more fun than the umpteenth rerun of it. Things you do every day bore you so much that you pretty much switch off your brain doing them. But something new happens and you suddenly are awake and alive again. With games it is no different. Going in a mission and knowing without a shadow of a doubt that you can defeat any one or all enemies you find with, solo or collectively, is called grinding for a reason. The word itself expresses how boring it is. And how much fun was it to find a group, enter the mission and being told 'wait here at the entrance, I only need you for the team size' by the fire tanker?

To keep the fun factor the game must get -more- challenging at higher levels, not less. But not in the traditional 'instead of 1000 hp your enemies now have 10 000 000 hitpoints for you to whittle away' but by missions and enemies that do unexpected things. Maybe even trying to exploit the weakness of your class and/or powerset (within reason of course). As you start out as an unknown wannabe hero you fight the likes of the Skulls and Hellions, who are little more than cheap and stupid thugs. But as you begin to gain fame the bigger fish in the world begin to take notice of you, and just as you, the hero, learn about your enemies, so should they do about you. There is a reason why sooo many Superman stories involve him losing his powers, or some of them, or at least are about him being threatened with such. Otherwise he is the unstoppable killing machine and there is no drama to the story. He can just fly in, shrug off guns, lasers and nuclear blasts, laser eye his way through any obstacle and arrest the villain, all in a few seconds. Unless there is a real chance for you to fail, there is no sense of accomplishment and the whole experience pales pretty soon (e.g. nobody feels a sense of accomplishment for communting to and from work. Unless weather or big technical difficulties make it almost impossible. And then you have a story you remember and are willing to share with your friends).

Most games are designed too much with inexperienced new players in mind, and drag out that phase as long as possible. And the 'end game' consists on doing the same two or three missions over and over again until the next expansion or update rolls along. But the reality of these games is that players are far more experienced, even with new game mechanics, than the developers expect and steam roll through the 'training wheels' missions. And a few months in they have played through the game at least twice and try to find ways to shorten the, by now and for them, boring stuff until they get to the good power. As in the case of CoH, when you reached level 32 (for most power sets) and got to the fun and versatile powers. It is not that those training phases should not exist(*), not that players should be rushed through them (as most games do these days), but that players should be able to bypass much of that stuf and that the meat of the game should be focussed on the 'matured' powersets. E.g. tons and tons of missions for the CoT equivalent of the levels 32-50, and the ability to somehow leech or transfer experience from other characters in your account (e.g. if you have high level tankers already your new tanker alt gains more experience the more of those you have. But they won't help you much with your new defender alt.)

(* one of the important reasons to have a wide range of starter zones and missions is to spread the load of launch weekend, when tens of thousands of players flood the same zones at the same time. Spreading the players out as much as possible means the servers don't crash under the load. In the long run this is a problematic approach as after the initial rush the game is saddled with a lot of seemingly empty zones. For games that regularly raise the level cap this gets even worse as more and more of the game becomes a virtual wasteland, scaring away the actual new players)