This will not be an issue at launch since the game will cap at 30 for a little while but I wanted to see what the masses thought about the top-tier Powers. T-9s are broken into (loosely) Defense/Resistance, Damage and Control/Support. This is not to say that the Control/Support T-9s won't do damage but that will not be their main focus.
CoH had some great T-9s and some not so great. Some of the Defense/Resist T-9s were tremendous then there was the one for Invul which was essentially 'crash and die like a dog'. The Damage ones were pretty spectacular while I always felt the Support/Control ones were pretty middle of the road.
Now this thread assumes that the top-tier (be it 9, 10 or whatever) will be similar to what we had before which is a pretty dramatic effect, likely with a total drain of End and a 3+ minute recharge time. While this can be fun and all I was hoping we could broaden our horizons a little bit.
Damage: Most of these should be pretty straight-forward...they hurt stuff. Depending on the literature they may do KB or not, KD or not, DoT or burst damage and may or may not include lesser debuffs to any standing enemies.
Defense/Resist: These buff the character with 1-3 minutes of relative unstoppability. The crashes tended to be all over the board from 'was that the crash?' to 'OMG I'm dying!'
Support/Control: A T-9 Control should be able to hit a BIG spawn and hold it for quite a while. Likewise the T-9 buff should make the target feel like a certain red-caped hero for a couple of minutes.
So...thoughts?
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Def/Res
Most people didnt take the T9's from CoH for the often severe crashes (-70% END, no recovery for x time, etc).
What may have helped this without doing a redesign (and has been mentioned both in here, the MWM forums and CoH forums) was to make those Clicks into Cloggles.
Example:
One With The Shield
+30% S/L Res
+15% E/NE/F/C/T Res
+374 HP
+30% Recovery
+Mag Protection (various)
Once it dropped (2 mins) you suffered a -60% End penalty. It didnt matter what you were doing ti just happened. This could mean you activated the power for a big fight, survived and moved onto the next mob and then your End falls.
As a Cloggle you can decide to stop the power at any point in that 2 min window. You would still suffer the same penalty (or maybe a reduced penalty?) but you can decide after that big fight to cancel the power, deal wit the End drop without any combat occuring and then get back into the next mob. The power still takes 6 mins to recharge no matter how soon you deactivate it (again it could be argued to have the recharge time based on how long it was active for but thats for a more detailed discussion).
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How about this as an idea for the cooldown (although it would be interesting to see), the cooldown *starts* WHEN you click the power to activate it (not at the end), so if you choose to drop it early, you wouldn't be able to activate it any sooner than someone who let it run until the time is expired.
So there would be no (timewise) penalty for stopping it early, compared to letting it run the full duration, but it gives you a bit more flexiblity. You could do a %age penalty for how long you had it running (so for a 2minute duration, if you let it run for a 1 minute, you had 50% of the penalty), but you couldnt start it up any sooner compared to someone who let it run for the full 2 minutes.
Of course, this is provisional, subject to balancing etc etc etc.
o.O A little early on the speculating aren't we?
We have no idea if there will be a tier 9. We have no idea how their power system will play out.
Now, if you just mean, what do we want in some uber button...whether it be OMG DAMAGE (Nova like) or OMG DEFENSE (God Mode) or OMG PETS (>_> Was never the same after the nerf to FIRE IMP LAVA WAVE)
The last part is what I believe the thread is aiming for (instead of actual "Here are numbers and stats". Sure, you might need to use numbers to get an idea across, but that is more of a example than anything else)
As said above, who says there will be a Tier 9?
Or an uber power-up?
Remember, we not fixing or fiddling with CoH mechanics. This is a new game with new mechanics that is in the spirit of CoH. If there is a power that can wipe out a crowd, who's to say it won't be your tier one power that is boosted somehow?
And who says it has to be balanced by an End crash?
Nothing I say here should be taken as insider knowledge because none of these specific issues has been decided yet (and even if decided, still untested, which means it could change again.)
There's a new game in town and she's looking good. There's a fresh freckled face, in the neighborhood. There's a new girl in town, with a brand new style. She was just passing through, but if things work out she's gonna stay awhile.
Former Online Community Manager & Forum Moderator
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I think a bunch of us will jump in right about now and assist you. How many Backup Singers do you need?!? ;D
refering to old Buffy Vampire Slayer scene: http://youtu.be/L8uH26GlWeo?t=45s at 1:06 ;)
I understand and I think it's great that you guys are thinking outside the box. However one thing that keeps coming up is the 'spiritual successor' theme of the project. We're just trying to spitball ideas within the framework CoH gave us to work with. If you guys have any ideas, and I don't mean 'this is what we're doing but it needs work' I mean 'sketched out on a pizza box lid but it LOOKS good' then it might be a good ides to let us know.
It's no good for us to make plans around the old system when the new system will be completely different.
It's no good for you to spend time and energy on an idea for a new system only to discover the majority of us think it sucks.
Please don't make the CoH mistake of developing things in the dark. A little communication can go a long way for both sides...
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Enforced Endurance Crash was pretty much the reason why I tended to avoid Tier 9 Powers on my builds like the plagues they were. I'd pick those powers up on my Controllers, Defenders and Masterminds, but avoid them on my Scrappers, Tankers, Stalkers and Kheldians if they involved an Endurance Crash of some sort, particularly on my Toggle heavy builds where retoggling after the Crash could sometimes take upwards of 10 seconds. It just wasn't worth the trouble.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I agree which is one reason I started this thread. Some of the T-9s had what were termed 'hard' crashes (like Invul) where you lost all End, most of your Ht and everything detoggled by default. This from one of the early Resistance sets that clearly needed work over time. Now take Willpower's T-9 crash which was mild by comparison. However WP's T-9 was set so that Rech buffs had no effect on it so it would not be available as often. This is typical design balance.
What I'm curious to see is how people felt about the various kinds of T-9s and how much they used and enjoyed them. As Zombie said earlier. we might not even HAVE T-9s in CoT and if few players enjoyed them then that's fine. But if many players did then they should at least be considered.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Well, I didn't have a problem with INV's Tier 9, in the sense that I knew what the devs had intended. It was the power you used when everything was going south, it gave you three minutes to stand your ground and let the team recover.
Majority of players just didn't care for that. Instead we preferred things along the lines of WP and Shields Tier 9.
Never cared for Regen's Tier 9, even at the end when it had the 15 seconds and no crash. 15 seconds was just to short imo.
If we're going "blue sky" for the "Tier 9 Omega" Powers ... I'm a little surprised that on one ever tried to do a "cumulative crash" sort of thing (which may take some explaining) for Powers that weren't Nukes.
The core idea is that a power like, say, Super Reflexes' Elude would be a Toggle, rather than a Click, and that it would "fill in the gap" between whatever the character's chance to be hit and 5% (ie. the Defense Cap). The margin between whatever the actual chance to hit (minus Elude) and 5% chance to hit would be added to an "account" that needs to be paid for [b]when Elude Toggles Off[/b]. Elude would have a maximum duration on the Toggle, so no matter what, the Toggle would expire eventually (5 minutes, tops?).
What essentially happens then is that Elude would push your character's chance to be hit to the cap, and hold it there (regardless of Purple Patch level differences and other buffs) ... but for every incoming attack that Elude needs to "fill the difference" this way, it builds up an "account" that the character gets "billed" for when Elude is toggled off. It would then be possible for design an "account billing cap" for Elude such that if you need to use it "too much" within a span of time you will have reached your Elude Limit and can no longer Elude (and the Power toggles off on its own). If you haven't used the "account limit" of Elude by the time it toggles off, the "bill" that your character has to "pay" will be less than if you'd run your "account" for Elude all the way up to the limit.
So let's say you're being attacked by some Foe NPC and they have a 7% chance to hit you because of {insert reason(s) here}. If you've got Elude running, that then gets dropped down to a 5% chance to be hit, but every time that Foe NPC attacks you, a "2% Defense bill" gets put on your Elude account tab. If the Foe NPC had a 10% chance to hit you, then you'd be adding a "5% Defense bill" each time they tried to hit you, because all that's being put on your Elude account tab is the difference over 5% chance to hit.
If the Foe NPC with a 7% chance to hit attacks you 3 times while Elude is up, than then adds 3x 2% onto your Elude tab to be "paid" when Elude gets toggled off. How much Elude can "help" improve your Defense then has what amounts to a "credit limit" and the amount of "extra Defense" needed to reach the Defense Cap is what gets put on the Elude "credit card" to be paid for later. So if you only need Elude to give you a little bit of a boost, when the bill comes "due" you only have to "pay" a small amount because you only "used" a small amount of Defense increase from Elude. If however you needed a large boost to Defense, then the amount to be "paid back" when Elude expires would be much higher (and could potentially result in Endurance Crashing and Detoggling).
The basic idea then is to run a bookkeeping total of how much of a difference Elude is making and then only charging/billing for that amount of effort, instead of doing it as a fixed price, regardless of how much or how little of the "service" is used, with an automatic Crash as your "reward" for using the Power at all. In other words, what you got "out" of the Power determines what you have to put back into it once the Power expires. This would then create a mixture of incentives for using a Power like Elude in different ways in different situations, due to the "payback" funding mechanism.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I like the Cloggle idea...allowing you to stop the power and pay the crash penalty (however it is calculated). DDO has a rage mechanic for Barbarians (and a few other classes), that lasts for X time period, after which you are fatigued for 2 minutes or something. So you can toggle it up for the boss fight, or whenever...then drop it as soon as the fight is over and begin your cooldown period.
The periods in DDO are pretty short for its really not a huge deal, unlike CoX where those crashes pretty much take you out for several minutes.
I remember many times hitting the T9 by mistake...then having no real indicator of when it will actually wear off...just hoping it does not drop during the next fight cycle.
I never used my Fire/En Blaster's tier 9 while solo. In fact, the only time I really used it was during a Katie Hannon TF. I'd nuke, a kinetics on the team would hit transference, and I'd go on fighting a little bit longer. Fortunately, there were other team members to help take the aggro that I had acquired off of me before I ran out of Endurance again. Other than that, I really never used the nukes because I'd wind up unable to defend myself against the 1 foe that managed to survive the onslaught. Usually, a lucky Lt.
On my regular team, we never really used the damaging tier 9s because they weren't needed. Even on missions set for +4/x8. We either defeated the enemy group, or were defeated before the nuke would have gone off. I know that the Ice Tank would use his tier 9 on occasion. But, he wouldn't be pulling aggro when he did that.
As for what should be done to make them better? I'm not really sure. I do know that there would need to be some balancing done if they were going to be ZOMG powerful.
[url=http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power.php?id=Tanker_Defense.Ice_Armor.Hibernate]Hibernate[/url] in Ice Armor was one of the few "No Crash" Tier 9 Powers that could be used defensively.
[url=http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power.php?id=Tanker_Melee.Ice_Melee.Frozen_Aura]Frozen Aura[/url] wasn't a Nuke Power by any stretch of the imagination.
So in that respect, it only makes sense that the Ice Tank you teamed with would use their Tier 9 on occasion. I had an Ice/Ice/Arctic Tanker myself, so I *know* what you're talking about here.
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I25 was going to remove the crash from a lot of nukes. :(
Former Online Community Manager & Forum Moderator
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Just to cover this topic with a broad stroke of the brush, we're looking at multiple aspecs to "top tier" powers. Some may be show stoppers with appropriate risks, some may have variable levels of effect with variable amounts of assiciated risk, some may have something like the "cumulative" cost. It's all being represented currently in are first pass. We wanted to cover multiple approaches to meet the needs of the power and the set as a whole, part of that is feel of how the set should play out, part of that may be tied to mechanics surrounding a set, and part was to provide options for consideration in our initial tests. How things will end up is another matter entirely. All things subject to change and all that.
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- Combat Mechanic -
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Yeah between that and the moon base the timing couldn't have been worse lol
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Hibernate takes the Tank out of the fight completely, for all intents and purposes. Many (not all) of the other tier 9 nukes did as well, in their fashion. Other tier 9s had some sort of balancing features included.
You are correct that Frozen Aura wasn't a high damage dealing nuke. It did, however, do a decent amount of damage for a PBAoE and take the foes out of the fight, unless, of course, they had sleep protection or someone was clumsy enough to "wake" them up. Not all Tier 9s were super damaging AoE nukes. Some of them were even single target ally buffs (not usable by caster), like Adrenalin Boost
Hissss! You *don't* throw in background singers when the star of a star vehicle is singing the theme song.
Here's your Linda Lavin meets super powered comics on Broadway (and if anyone says Spider-Man, they're being pushed off the mezzanine): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR3Hb-FiGqE
Former Online Community Manager & Forum Moderator
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If we are continuing this I think we need to define the difference (if any) between 'Top Tier' powers and 'Ultimate' powers.
Now they can be the one and the same, or they could be my T8 is my T8 and nothing more than that and I can then later get my ULTIMATE POWER which is separate. Im not asking which one we WILL have as im sure this is still on the Devs list (the list which itself is on another list which is on another list which is on another list...). Both ideas have their merits.
Example: Current idea is T8 as being the top tier for all Pri/Sec sets
This would be the YES I FINALLY GOT IT power as it took all the way to level X to get it (let alone slot for it - actually maybe we could have upon selecting your T8 power you get 2 slots by default instead of 1 as it is the T8 power??? - an idea for another topic). Now if this is the flavour we are going for then on a Defensive set it should be some kind of "You cant hurt me" power (makes sense right) and for a Damaging set some kind of "Ohhh thats GOT TO HURT!!" power (again makes sense).
But what if we offer (and this is not a new idea) TWO choices for the T8 only? So my Shield Def Stalwart can select "Turtle Up" and become nigh untouchable or "Kiss My Shield" and do a large attack (large for a Stalwart anyway).
On my Cosmic Ranger I can do "Vorpal Blast" and do stupid amounts of damage or "Cosmic Shell" and gain high Def/Res/Etc for a brief period.
Or some other third/fourth option (Support/Control/Pet/etc).
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
I wanna do this when my character is topped out. http://comiczombie.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/1308598-aston9bk_super.jpg
And this http://comiczombie.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/sq1jie.jpg
I don't care if it only goes off once ever 30 minutes with no way to reduce the recharge. I don't care if it drains all my End. If blasting is my thing then I want to be able to fire off a OMG! WOW! blast once in a while.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
How a Level Cap Master/Operator should feel: http://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080427092102/marveldatabase/images/e/eb/Dr_Doom_005.JPG
How a Level Cap Ranger should feel: http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/10/108735/2832096-DoomSorcery30IncredibleHulk606.jpg
How a Level Cap Enforcer should feel: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v614/Grey420/237928-34018-doctor-doom_super.jpg
How a Level Cap Stalwart should feel: http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/0/7666/781546-06excalibur_37_p21.jpg
How a Level cap Commander should feel: http://i388.photobucket.com/albums/oo326/OneDumbG0/Doom%20Stats/DoomSorcery14TriumphTorment1.jpg
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
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I think Lord Nightmare has a Dr Doom fetish :)
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
[IMG]http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4e5hy1rSr1rvbttyo1_1280.jpg[/IMG]
;D Favorite comic character
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
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The saddest part of that, is you'd think Spidey would've known that.
I'm just glad Doom and Deadpool have never fought. Oh the shenanigans.
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
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If Spidey was gonna screw it up, "Mr. Scott" would have been closer.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
To be fair to Spidey, if you were going to equate Dr. Doom to a Star Trek character then Mr. Spock is likely the one you'd go for.
'cause "Warp Factor 9, Khan" just sounds silly.
- - - - -
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Actually, IIRC Doom wasn't even piloting. He was riding with the Avengers.
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
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