It's not that scrappers NEED stealth, just that tankers shouldn't be doing it nearly as much, if at all, because tankers are presumably TRYING to draw attention to themselves and away from the squishies. I mean, basically everyone had and used stealth effects in CoX to some extent anyway, but you didn't want your tanker to go stealthy in the middle of a fight, because it's against the intended purpose of having him or her there in the first place. They're supposed to draw attention to themselves, so they want to be seen.

I personally see one point of disambiguation between tankers and scrappers being the idea that tankers are trying to pull the crowd toward themselves and then batch-process a mob all at once, whereas if scrappers could do that, hold the aggro and not get killed, well, they'd be tankers then, and we wouldn't need two different classes, would we?

Thus the scrapper should be more focused on taking down the single toughest badguy in the mob (e.g. the boss) and therefore get mostly single target attacks that allow him to successfully do that, but make it more work for him to take out a bunch of minions because he has to attack them one at a time, for the most part. Again, I'm not saying "No AoE for scrappers" nor am I saying "No single target attacks for tankers" just that tankers should lean more toward melee AoE and scrappers should lean more toward single-target melee, as far as what they're doing most of the time, what their BEST attacks are like. This gives them them their own character and makes them more distinct.

To me, the ideal mob for the tanker to take out quickly, with the fewest powers clicked, and with the least amount of danger should be the "all minions" mob, like the throngs of Crey Riot cops that hung around in parts of Brickstown near the train station. Conversely the easiest fight for the scrapper should be a single boss standing there by himself or even a two-boss mob like the dueling Circle of Thorns wizards that used to inhabit parts of Peregrine Island. They both win those fights if built well enough, but the tanker maybe doesn't beat the 2-bosser as fast, because he doesn't deal as much damage to a single target with his attacks as a scrapper would, so it takes him a longer time to beat them, assuming he doesn't run out of endurance or something. The scrapper doesn't die to the horde of minions, assuming his defense or regen or whatever is good enough, but he has to punch each one of them individually, one after the other until he's defeated them all (in series) instead of AoEing them all at the same time (in parallel), like the tanker does, and this is less efficient for him and costs him more endo.

The tanker doesn't drop all the minions with one AoE, he uses several on them over time and eventually drops them all at about the same time, the scrapper drops one at a time, fairly easily, but takes some time doing it before he's finished. The tanker should be resorting to using melee AoE attacks even when he IS fighting a single target, because they're his best attacks in general, and because he has them slotted well because they're his standard attack chain.

I think there's a desire on the part of players for their toon to be good at everything. If you're a scrapper, you're only satisfied if your scrapper is resistant/defensive/self-healy enough to basically do a tanker's job. Otherwise you feel like "This toon sucks, he keeps getting defeated." Well, as a scrapper I feel you should have to run away and heal up sometimes, and the "whole mob alpha strike" should usually drop you. People playing tankers on the other hand should be able to assume they're invincible (barring catastrophic bad luck and or totally deficient power build) but most would like their damage output to be good enough so that the fights don't take forever, in other words, as good as a scrapper's. People playing tankers want more damage, because people playing ANY class want that class to be good at everything.

That's basic human nature, nobody likes having weaknesses or deficiencies. But in order to make different classes in a game PLAY differently, you have to give different ones different strengths and weaknesses, and therefore you have to give them weaknesses. Nobody should be able to solo an Archvillain and his entire mob at the end of a Task Force, except in the case of people with PERFECT power selection, slotting, set bonuses, etc. And even then, that should work ok for THAT AV, but not for the majority of other ones. I think a single toon SHOULD be able to solo an Archvillain or giant monster, but should have to respec his toon JUST for that, and should have to know the AV's stats and attacks, etc. It should be a real challenge at the build level to be able to do that, even assuming you have the money to get the gear (and the necessary respec to slot in that gear) to allow you to do it, if you don't screw it up in the execution of the fight itself.

I agree that stealth is not just for during combat, and I have no problem with the tanker using it to bypass a room, or whatever. That said,a lot of Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers in good old CoX just ran/jumped right by them, agging stuff in their wake, and laughing all the way, because they were practically unmezzable. So that's an option too.

But the use of stealth IN COMBAT, which is certainly a possible thing, would, one can argue, benefit every, because if they can't see you, they can't hit you. But the tanker;s job is not to hide and let the mobs attack the blaster behind him. So for tankers, in combat, stealth is undesirable. Now for the scrapper (or stalker for that matter) stealth is a valuable tool because with it you don't take as much damage form the lieutenants and minions while you're slicing and dicing the boss, presumably.

That the idea I was playing with there anyway. Your mileage will undoubtedly vary on a case by case basis from one class/toon/build/player/mob to another.

As for the AoE play style versus the single target play style, anyone who can drop an entire mob in one or two well-placed AoEs should probably be a Blaster. Since you generally want the tanker to hold the attention of the boss and the lts and the minions all at the same time, it makes sense that he's have attacks that would damage all of them at the same time, doesn't it? The idea is that the scrapper, being a non-tanker, is not as durable, and as such he should be trying to avoid all that alpha strike aggro, thus he want's to deal with badguys one at a time (or a very few at a time anyway) to limit the aggro he draws to the point that his less-effective-than-a-tanker damage mitigation powers can handle it. That's my take on trying to craft a play style the makes one class different from the other, anyway. I have no idea what they're actually going to do.

I'd like to share something else I just dreamed up here too. It's possible to make the scrapper way more effective against a single, higher level and/or higher rank threat and the tanker more able to deal with large NUMBERS of badguys while taking on all comers and surviving.

Imagine if your attacks deal damage based not on how much damage output your power does, but rather as a percentage of the TARGET'S hit point total. So for comparison, let's say a standard attack I have does 100 points to damage to each target it hits (forget about resistances for the moment). That's a conventional attack, it hits, it does 100 damage to the target whether the target is a boss or a minion. Clearly, you'll be better against entire groups of minions if you're doing damge this way, especially AoE damage. Ok, now imagine that I have an attack that when it hits, it always takes away 20% of the target's maximum starting health. If the target only has 100 HP when it's fully healed, this power will do 20 points of damage every time it hits, but if the target has a 10,000 hit point maximum, you're doing 2000 damage in one shot. This amounts to MASSIVE damage in one hit against a boss or AV, but far less against a minion. Thus, if you're going to use this "percentage based attack" against a target, you want to save it for a boss or AV. Clearly this makes the guy who has it better against high quality targets in small numbers and worse against large numbers of lesser targets.

Of course the other option is to just give scrappers some kind of damage bonus that works better against bosses or something, like a "rage" factor that increases your damage based on how mad you are, and you get madder based on how often you take damage during the fight and how much damage, etc. Since bosses will likely be hitting you more often and/or for more damage, this would help more against them.

I feel like the Survivability<---------->Damage spectrum is definitely there, but I think that there's really only creative space for 2 types of characters in it. If you have four types the two on the left get lumped together and the two on the right get lumped together, or else the dividing line is more like "these three are more DPS, this one is more resistance" or whatever. In any event, the ones that can take are effectively tankers and the rest are different versions of the non-tanker with varying levels of damage output. Now, if you have exactly three types, the third type is presumably a "balanced" middle-of-the-road class that's intended to be a happy medium on both scores, right in the middle, and I think it generally ends up in one of two bad places:

1. It's a "jack of all trades, master of none" and is considered strictly worse than the tanker and scrapper, because it's not survivable enough to tank and not as damage-y as a scrapper, so why don't I just play a scrapper and get the extra damage? This "middle class" is literally just a less tough tanker or a less damage-y scrapper depending on how you want to look at it.

2. It's a "jack of all trades, master of BOTH" which makes it strictly BETTER than both the tanker and the scrapper, because it combines some "close enough for government work" facsimile of the tankers survivability and the scrapper's damage output, and thus gives you the best of both worlds.

To me, brutes and stalkers were just the villain analogs of tanks and scrappers and had an existence of their own only because they felt CoV as a separate entity needed them. Frankly the only really new-feeling class in CoV was the Mastermind in my opinion, as Dominators and Corruptors felt a lot like Blasters and Def/Cons to me. But anyway, from that point on the brutes and stalkers were a legacy that the game had to hold onto, which I felt were functionally equivalent to what the game already had in scrappers and tankers to a large extent, albeit with new "gimmicks" like Rage and uber stealth+placate,etc. Frankly, a lot of scrappers weren't THAT much less survivable than the least survivable tankers anyway. From one build to another it was a fuzzy grey continuum going from the tankiest to the scrappiest builds, and there was some class overlap. Admittedly, there weren't often a lot of tank builds that were as damage-y as even the worst scrappers, unless you want to count the fire tanks when they could herd and burn, but that was eliminated for good reason.

Functionally I think if they were trying to design four different melee classes from the beginning they'd realize that anything tough enough to tank is effectively a tanker in spirit if not in title and everything else might as well be a scrapper , or whatever class has the highest damage output of all the non-tankers.

As far as the AoE thing, hey it's just an idea, maybe I'm wrong. In fact, maybe the whole concept of trying to design a class to a particular play style is passe at this point. It's possible they're just going to make every class equally soloable and not worry about whether one particular type of specification plays very much the same as another. One could argue that the intricate details of the toon's build are what REALLY dictates it's play style in the first place and the resulting play style dictates what it's tole is going to be. As such these things often come about organically on their own anyway, if in fact they're ever going to be there at all. Lord knows there were people who made tankers in CoX who would play like "What, you want me to attack that WHOLE mob, are you crazy? I'll get slaughtered. No, I didn't take Taunt, that power sucks, and my resistance powers aren't fully slotted because it doesn't increase my DAMAGE." while there were scrappers who were like "I'LL tank the Archvillain, NO PROBLEM, I'm a REGEN Scrapper, I'M INVINCIBLE! INVINCI--OWW!!!"

I predict that the only real answers to these specific question about the masteries, etc will only come after play testing. This is the level on which stuff get's tweaked by playtesting.