macskull

My goal when building (or playing) any character in this game is to contribute to defeating enemies while minimizing the chance I get defeated. Whether the enemies I’m interacting with are NPCs or other players doesn’t change that goal. I’m not trying to “humiliate” anyone - if I wanted to do that I could just do broadcast PvP. My point was not “just build better.” My point was that even factoring in player skill you’re going to have an easier time doing specialized tasks with a character that is specifically designed to handle those tasks. The biggest reason PvP builds are built and played differently here is not because of mechanics differences (though there is a learning curve associated with those) but because the character at the other end of your attacks is capable of doing things this game’s critters could only dream of.

True, but not exactly relevant.

All other things being equal, this is only rarely true. It is not at all uncommon for a Blaster to continuously have a 30% or higher damage bonus from Defiance simply from doing what they're already doing anyways. The Sentinel can only do this to one target periodically for 15 seconds at a time. It also doesn't stack with other Sentinels which makes it an okay niche for a single Sentinel on a team but it means any more than one is redundant.

The opportunity cost of taking up one of my four power pool picks means I likely won't ever take Experimentation on any of my PvE builds. Swapping the Speed pool out? Nope, not giving up Hasten, and Super Speed is just Speed of Sound but better in every possible way. Swapping the Leaping pool out? Nope, as someone who is capable of using the WASD and space keys this game's in-combat movement is unbearable without Combat Jumping, plus it's virtually free immobilize protection and slots for Kismet, KB protection, and Luck of the Gambler. Swapping the Leadership pool out? Probably not, and if I'm not taking Leadership it's because I'm taking Concealment. Swapping the Teleport pool out? Absolutely not. Sure, Experimentation gives me Jaunt, but Jaunt doesn't get me any closer to Fold Space and regular ol' Teleport is far and away the fastest travel power in the game for covering large distances quickly. Breaking it down further, most of the Experimentation powers have some pretty big flaws which make them an even harder sell. Experimental Injection has a three minute recharge for a pretty small single-target ally buff. Oh, and it's a melee range power. I guess you could use it to mule some heal or endmod sets, but you already have the inherent Fitness powers for that and you get those for free. Toxic Dart is fine, I suppose, for adding a ranged attack to a character if you really want it. It's just nothing to write home about. Oh, and if you're a Scrapper its chance to crit is always only 5% (it doesn't even get the base 10% crit chance against lieutenants and up that every other power gets and is unaffected by either of the Scrapper ATOs). Oh, and if you're a Stalker it'll only crit if you're hidden or a 20% chance if the target is held or slept. Speed of Sound is, as mentioned above, a strictly worse version of Super Speed. You do still get the higher max running speed, but you don't get the partial stealth or occasional extra jump boost and you don't get access to Speed Phase. Corrosive Vial is really the only saving grace this pool has, but it requires you to burn two power picks to get it. It's a good power, but the opportunity cost to get it makes it a hard sell. Adrenal Booster might be a good power if its recharge was half what it is now, or if its numbers were doubled. As it stands it's a mediocre self-buff/power boost that can never have any better than 50% uptime, and the modifier it uses to determine its strength on the various ATs mean it is less useful on the ATs that would actually want to take it.

Yes, that was the point. The problem is that they didn't want to create separate PvP-only copies of enhancements, so you're stuck in this unfortunate middle ground where you can easily create a character for PvP but that character is functionally useless in the environment you created it for unless you spend the time and/or inf to get the enhancements, either of which require you to PvE. Those were before my time and they were never really very popular. There's no such thing as open world PvP in this game. The closest thing to it is the four PvP zones, all of which require a player to intentionally enter and all of which provide multiple warnings to that player that they are indeed entering a PvP zone and can be attacked by other players. If a player does not wish to engage in PvP they can simply choose not to enter those zones. The only real problematic part about the PvP zones is they're the first place a player is exposed to PvP but they're also the most "anything goes" version of PvP the game has. Zone PvP is, and always has been, inherently unbalanced for solo players but once you start throwing teammates into the mix it becomes a whole different ballgame. Usually what you'd see happen would be one of two things: A player who has never PvP'd before enters a PvP zone and dies repeatedly, decides PvP sucks, and never goes back and tells all their friends how much PvP sucks. A player enters a PvP zone to do non-PvP things and then gets mad when another player attacks them even though they were warned multiple times that entering the zone meant they might be attacked by other players. The "restricted sort of direct consensual engagement among a limited number of players" is just... the arena, which has existed for even longer than the separate PvP zones. It's always been where the more competitive PvP has taken place in this game, because it's simply not possible to do a lot of the cheese you'd find people doing in the zones. Needing to design and build a character differently for PvP is no different than needing to design and build a character differently for any other specialized task in the game. I could build a petless Beasts/Empathy MM to run fire farms, but it would be pretty bad at it.

The funny thing about you specifically calling out Defenders like this is Defenders were (and still are) considered one of the best dueling ATs in the game. A player's refusal to use the tools provided to them is not the fault of the game, it's the fault of the player. At the end of the day, 1v1 matches in City of Heroes have always been very rock/paper/scissors. That's hardly unique about this game - it's true in almost any game in any genre that has both varied classes and PvP. The difference is the game gives you some tools to maybe make your rock losing to someone else's paper maybe not as much of a foregone conclusion. Where this game's PvP always stood out was in the team format - a group of 8 players coordinating closely and working together to win in one of the fastest-paced environments MMO PvP had to offer.

Often. Not always. And this isn't one of those times.

To provide more context on this, the former dev in question is Castle, who was notoriously anti-PvP and routinely demonstrated he didn't really understand it. Him regretting the effort put into the PvP revamp makes sense though, since it basically caused the existing PvP population to evaporate overnight without bringing in new players to replace them. The really unfortunate thing here is that the I13 PvP changes were almost entirely the the work of an unnamed junior dev who ended up getting fired and blacklisted after the changes went over like a lead balloon, and the only reason they were actually implemented in the first place is because NCSoft went hard into the sunk cost fallacy. Re: instant level 50 PvP characters - good idea in theory. The requirement to PvE to get enhancements for those characters killed any chance that feature had at being widely used. Why would I make an instant level 50 character if I can't leave PvP zones or Pocket D even though I have to engage in the rest of the game to even build that character?

Mez is a binary thing so it's extremely difficult to balance around that. Under the pre-I13 rules Controllers and Dominators were top-tier dueling ATs but under the current rules they're absolutely awful. At least under the old rules inspiration management was its own skill, since you had to both bring the right mix of inspirations and make them last the entire 10 minutes of an arena duel, and if you were dueling against a Controller or Dominator you needed to come out of the gate pretty aggressively to get a kill or two otherwise you'd quickly burn through your breakfrees. These days you just bring 20 greens to most duels.

They can choose to stay at range, but some of the best attacks Sentinels have access to are the melee attacks in their epic pools. At any rate, when an AT is presented as a "ranged Scrapper" you'd expect that AT to have armor values identical or at least similar to a Scrapper. You can make any other ranged AT survivable enough through several avenues, none of which are conversely able to let a Sentinel get around their hard-coded limitations. I suppose you could argue the niche a Sentinel currently occupies is a training-wheels Blaster for people who are still learning the game or who lack the skill or desire to play a Blaster well, and even then that niche only applies while solo or possibly on smaller teams or during the early levels. At higher levels and on larger teams a Sentinel is just a strictly worse Blaster.

Agreed with the second part, but the first part is simply untrue. You can find gameplay demos from as far back as early alpha builds of the game where the Cryptic employee doing the demo talks about PvP. I'll often hear the follow-up argument that "PvP was added afterwards so the game wasn't built with it in mind" but by that logic the game wasn't built with badges, capes, respecs, the IO system, incarnates, inherent Fitness, additional pool powers, levels 41-50, Kheldians, VEATs, or side-switching in mind either, but those all exist. Agreed here as well, and there were routinely GM/dev-sponsored PvP events back during the retail days. There were a few early on in HC's run as well but my understanding is the team stopped providing support/sponsorship for them in the way of prizes so the PvP community reps really didn't have any official backing which meant any events relied entirely on player donations.

It’s not. What “distraction” abilities do Sentinels have? They have no taunt and no other abilities to manage aggro. Using the character creator number scales to justify anything is also not super helpful since those numbers are ultimately meaningless outside of very broad strokes (hell, look at the PB/WS numbers for a perfect example). Sentinels have worse armor values than a Scrapper, worse damage and target caps than a Blaster, and worse force multiplication abilities than Defenders and Corruptors, so where do they fit in in their current form?

Even when PvP was (almost) mechanically identical to PvE it didn’t have a huge following. People were always doing things like going into PvP with their SO’d flying Archery Blaster and expecting to be competitive, then complaining when they found out the game is very different when there’s someone capable of thinking and breathing fighting against them. The funny thing is it was the complaints from those types of people that got PvP overhauled which really just resulted in driving the existing PvPers away without bringing in new people (who were never going to actually PvP anyways). At the end of the day, this game has never been very difficult which tends to attract a certain type of player, very few of whom are interested in PvP. Hell, go into almost any PvP-related thread outside of the PvP section of the forums and you’ll find people who are outright hostile to even the idea of PvP even though this game’s PvP has always been entirely opt-in.

Just give Sentinels crits and call it a day. Apparently the reason they were supposed to be a “ranged Scrapper” is because their AoEs have melee AT target caps and smaller radii, neither of which are things that immediately come to mind when someone is talking about Scrappers.

Reading all these comments is just making me realize that no one in this thread really knows how PvP works.