oedipus_tex

Another subject I haven't talked much about is mezz and how it impacts flanking in most games. The usual rule is an incapacitated mob does not count against multi-opponent penalties. That's probably the rule I'd want to use here. The benefit of this rule is that allows weaker mezzes in the player's arsenal to still be effective. We have a bunch of these in City of Heroes. For example, Thunderclap in the Storm Summoning set. It's only Mag 2, so most players skip it. If, however, a group had 16 enemies, 10 of them minions, Thunderclap would significantly reduce the Multi Opp penalty of all teammates. The existence of the "mezz rule" is why I didn't want to post any actual numbers in the original post. There'd need to be some thought to how many uncontrolled enemies a player was expected to handle at a time. With the goal being 'team content' it's something you'd want to think about carefully. Some people will no doubt say "well why not just nuke those minions" which is a fair point, but we haven't said anything about how much HP minions in this sort of content would have. Ideally it would be enough to survive an insta-gib.

By the way, we haven't talked about it yet, but a Multi Opponent Stat also provides a way to make those T9 armor powers much more useful other than just having them throw more Defense and Resistance on the character. The T9 could allow them to shift the Start Line for number of enemies before penalty begins and/or reduce the debuff experienced per extra enemy.

I just wish one of the two Dominator ATOs was designed for a damage power instead of a Control power. Neither set adds damage to powers. I usually end up slotting the better of the 2 and ignoring the other or just slotting the proc. Most Control sets have only 2 or 3 powers where the ATO makes sense. You don't want to slot it in the T1, T2, or T3 because those need to do damage. You can't slot it in most Assault powers, and if you could, still wouldn't want to, because again you need damage. So you're left with few options.

The reason I proposed a Multi Opponent Combat stat (or possibly 2) is that just giving a few enemies in the stack +ToHit penalizes all player archetypes equally. It also adds penalties to lightly/un armored characters, which is something we want to avoid. Part of the current conundrum is the gulf in how armored a highly IOed character is versus one who is not. Mechanics designed to threaten highly IOed characters tend to flatten unIOed characters unless the mechanic takes into account relative amounts of defense. Someone in the thread mentioned Rularuu as an enemy faction that threatens IOed characters. This is true, but the elements of Rularuu that make them so dangerous make them even more so for characters with no or limited armor. At least when you have some base defense, you have a chance to dodge most -Defense attacks, making you survivable until someone rolls 20 on 1d20. If you have low defense to start though the -Defense is almost guaranteed to hit, and once locked in, you can't use Purples to recover because your defense is somewhere in the negatives.

The reason I recommended a tertiary app with Power Boost is that Power Boost contains a multiplier for -ToHit that makes Dark Blast uber. Here are the non-Power Boosted and Power Boosted values for Dark Blast against +0 and (in paren) +4 enemies: Dark Blast, Gloom, Moonbeam, Tentacles, Night Fall, Torrent, Life Drain -9.38 (-4.50) -18.59 (-8.9) Blackstar: -62.5 (-30) -124.0 (-59.52) Power Boost almost lets you ignore the level difference between +0 and +4 enemies in terms of your debuffs. Power Boost is so effective in -ToHit powers because ToHit (along with Defense) takes Schedule B enhancements. These enhancements only increase +ToHit modestly. But Power Boost close to doubles them. As you can see from the values, Power Boosted Blackstar will bottom out the Defense of all enemies even in incarnate trials. Slotting-ToHit in the power doesn't bring it nearly as close. A downside for you is Power Boost won't increase the effectiveness of your shields. It will multiply the endurance you get from Heat Loss though, multiply how much Life Drain heals you, and just generally make life easier. I would definitely pass on S/L defense armor for that. -ToHit isn't exactly the same as +Defense, because it can miss. But Power Boost + Dark Blast pairs soooo well that I'd be loathe to give it up.

Poison Trap lasts for 260 seconds before it "unsummons."

Whether nukes are effective would depend on what kind of enemies populate the trial. Packs of minions would be vulnerable to AoEs, but packs of bosses, elite bosses or even AVs tend to be more vulnerable to focused single target. There's no reason the composition of a trial would need to be similar to typical radio missions. You could even have some enemies who are very high HP, very low reward, where the goal was not to fight them but to use repel/knockback to avoid them.

Our first outting was a success! We did 2 Death from Belows followed by Positron 1. One team member dropped so we ended up doing the Task Force with 7 instead of 8. Also, we felt Posi 1 was too easy, so we turned up the diff by +1. 🙂 I took some videos from the Posi 1 action for your viewing pleasure. Thanks to all who came! Was a lot of fun.

No, I was talking about new content. I haven't said anything about existing content. I wouldn't change any of that.

The Tanker changes that are coming soon rearrange the order of certain powers with the goal of making leveling up less painful. What Controller powers (primary or secondary) would you rearrange if you could? A few stand out for me. Cold Domination This is really the reason I'm asking. :) I'd move Sleet to level 16 and either push other powers back, or just swap it with Forstwork. Currently Sleet doesn't appear until level 35. I've stopped playing Cold Dom as a set because it just takes too long to get to Sleet. The set is very dull IMO prior to that point. Gravity Swap Dimension Shift (currently 12) and Wormhole (currently 26) so that Gravity has an early AoE control power. Electric Swap Paralyzing Blast (currently 18) and Synaptic Overload (currently 26).

I have to admit I do not get excited about the possibility of more incarnate abilities. The one incarnate ability that I currently really enjoy is the Alpha slot. The Alpha slot adds a lot of complexity to build design and is very interesting. More importantly, the Alpha slot feels integrated strongly with the character. My least favorite incarnate ability is Judgment. To me Judgment feels like a temporary power. There's no strategic decision making, no integration with the rest of the character's abilities, its just a generic attack everyone gets. Rather than feel powerful, to me it makes the rest of my character feel weak. It's the like the relationship I have with the Nemesis Staff. "Here's this generic power that's tons better than your character's 'real' powers you agonized over." That's just how I feel. New abilities that was part of new content I would not object to of course.

Interesting conversations. It's good to hear from various perspectives. Not replying to anyone in particular, one thing I hope we can all agree on is that there should be no limitations on what new or "exotic" content might look like. There is a "main team game" out there that might loosely be said to consist of these elements: Radio missions Task Forces Trials Rikti Raids Zone Events Arcs (in particular the Maria Jenkins arc) Each of these types of team events is valid. In my opinion, the addition of new team events does not detract from the existing ones. I admit one thing that I find mildly frustrating is when players take the position that "My character is already designed to be ideal for the existing content; you can't create new content where that isn't the case." While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the feeling that a build is invalidated, I also hold the opinion that no matter how strong, how amazing, or how powerful our characters ever get, there is still stuff out there that can kill them. I just think that content creators need to remember that those top level enemies need to feel dangerous and powerful--gods, lords, and monsters, not street thugs.

Let's plan to meet in Atlas Park. We'll do a Death from Below (maybe 2) to get us started. Then for any who can stay do Positron 1, which will be the first real test of our abilities. I'm hoping to have close to 8 participants total. If we go over that, we'll split the teams or form a league.

Response to no one in particular. In the current system, if a player exceeds 16 enemies, any remaining enemies either do nothing or attack someone else. I think some of the predictions that a system like this would result in the death of tanking are far fetched. You can't tank more than 16 enemies currently. It would mean that a tank would have to be proactive about deciding when to aggro the next group, because enough enemies could possibly eventually be dangerous. As far as this resulting in nukes being the only solution, that depends a lot on the nature of the enemies. If there are a lot of minions, sure. If it's a swarm of bosses like are featured in the ITF or some of the trials, that's not as effective.

That sounds very cool and ambitious. I haven't seen inside the hood of City of Heroes power system yet, but I've done powers in other games. Would it be possible to accomplish this by awarding the appropriate powers as temp powers to the pet when the Dominator uses their Tier 5 special? Every Assault set has a power at tier 5 that is clickable without a target: Dark - Gather Shadows Earth - Power Up Electric - Build Up Energy - Power Up Fiery - Embrace of Fire Icy - Power Up Martial - Envenomed Blades Psi - Drain Psyche (this is the only problematic one) Radioactive - Fusion Savage - Spot Prey Thorny - Build Up If you put an AoE effect in that power that hits only pets of the right type you could possibly "convey" powers to the pet. In fact you might decide to make Dom pets awesome and let us convey effects to the other pets as well. Gremlins with Thorn attacks and Jack Frost hurling bees at people? Could be a way to set Dom pets apart from Controllers. Just a thought. 🙂

This depends on how you define "power." If I had to vote for the character most players consider "powerful" in the largest number of situations, I'd probably go with Plant Control/Psi Assault.

So for better or worse I have decided to try out a Thorny Assault Dominator for the first time for this adventure. Meet "Naughty Pine," a Christmas tree who assumed a life of adventure after he was placed on the curb at the end of holiday season.

I'm planning to make a video. 🙂 If we have more than 8 we will figure out a plan. Maybe league street sweeping? Haha.

Soft capped mitigation is nice, except that when your main contribution is defense and you exceed the soft cap you actually provide very little. That's the situation Force Field often finds itself in in late game content and why the set is much maligned on 8 man task forces. It's not totally useless. It's still decent for iTrials, although it relies heavily on Power Boost. Without Power Boost its shields are identical to Cold's shields with different secondary effects. The endurance drain and toxic resist in Force Field are nice but rarely critical. That's quite a step backward for a set that was once known for being able to take sets like Fire, Dark and Electric Armor and fortify their Defenses. Adding fuel to the fire, in terms of buffs provided, there is very little difference between Defender Force Field and other versions, despite a Defender's supposed better buff values. Defense is the only stat that is better for Defenders and the soft cap has a cruel effect on it. By mid-game due to the proliferation of Defense buffs, any Force Fielder or Cold character's shields are likely to bring the team to soft cap or close to it. It's true the shields aren't useless, but there are other sets that also provide Defense with much less tradeoff. I will admit I enjoy the big Force Field anti mezz bubble for chaos situations like some iTrials, and that Power Boosted Deflection +Insulation Shield are very effective for the Lambda Trial where players will be running off semi-solo for a portion of the trial. Absorb, though, is where it's at. Absorb will actually benefit the majority of armored characters because even characters at or past soft cap benefit, and if there is an Absorb cap (not sure to be honest altho I assume one exists) the only set that would be close to it would be Bio Armor.

Yeah. I went with flat values hoping it would add more clarity, but I may have made it more confusing. Ideally, it would be percent based, offset by your Multi Opponent Stat.

There's another detail I keep forgetting to highlight and kicking myself. Ideally the penalty only applies when you actually have the statistic. Like, if you have zero Defense, you don't lose more Defense. If you have an all Defense, no Resistance build, you don't lose even more Resistance. Working the math out of this is a bit of a challenge, but it basically means the penalty is actually a ratio to how much Defense and Resist you actually have. The less of it you have, the less percentage you lose. I presented the numbers as simply, -1, -2 etc, but in a finished model a multiplier works better. The main idea is that characters with no armor of a certain type are already sufficiently threatened by large numbers of enemies. We don't want to kill them even worse. This is an area where the current Defense Debuff mechanics can really get low Defense characters in trouble. Characters with low Defense get hit by a non-proportional debuff and lose the ability to dodge anything at all. The DDR and -Defense system is built mainly to get very high Defense characters with low DDR in trouble but sometimes forgets players with low/no Defense can also suffer the debuffs.

Let me use a possible example involving a Tanker (an archetype I envision having a high stat). For this example, let's say the Tanker class has a Start Line of 12. Some powers in this set raise to 16, because this is a set that is intentionally "extra good" at handling lots of enemies. This Tanker is in whatever this special mission is and aggros 24. With a Start Line of 16, the first 16 enemies fight at the same strength they always would have in the live game. The difference is what happens with the final 8 enemies. With his Start Line exceeded, the Tanker fights these at the following values (super made up numbers on the spot) 17) 46 18) 47 19) 48 20) 50 21) 52 22) 54 23) 56 24) 60 Let's say this Tanker has 50% Defense to the main attack form of this enemy. Against the enemy in positions, 1-20, the Tanker is soft capped. Against the enemy in position 21, the Tank is 1 point from soft cap. Against the enemy in position 22, the Tank is 2 points from soft cap. ... Against the enemy in position 24, the Tank is 10 points from soft cap. To determine what position any given enemy is at a time, the game just rolls 1d[number of positions]. This is easy to do because the game already keeps a list of aggroed enemies. Thus, when an attack comes in, the only real change is the attacker rolls to see what position he attacks from. * * * There's one more thing about this that I like about it for a team-heavy zone. It makes Tanking directly relevant to the mission. Pulling an enemy off a team member directly and immediately, rather than just implicitly, raises their survival. I've already said repeatedly why I wouldn't put this in the main game. But for a zone-specific mechanic I think it is at least worth talking about. If I ever get the developer copy of CoX working I'd like to experiment with it. It's been a few years since I modded a combat system and I'm itching to try it out.

Just so we're clear on the intentions, when you give all enemies in a stack the same +ToHit, you end up with them all still having the same Defense roll. This kind of like how in the iTrials the soft cap is raised to 59 for all enemies. If a character in an iTrial drops from 59 defense to 52, the double-damage-from-all-sources factor reappears. Under a Flanking system, the soft cap in a zone with a 45 soft cap looks more like: 1 45 2 46 3 47 4 48 5 50 6 52 6 54 8 57 9 60 And so on. The number on the left doesn't mean "1 enemy" by the way, it means number of enemies past the Start Line. The Start Line would be adjustable by archetype. It could be the 17th enemy, Or the 3rd. Or whatever number seems appropriate for the nature of the mission style you're creating. Importantly, only the enemy in that position fights with those advantages. Each enemy has a slightly different combat roll. This is intentional to smooth out the cap. Under such systems I've also sometimes seen where some single enemies are marked as multiple enemies to make them more interesting to fight. Giant Monsters in some games for example count for 2 or 4 or 10 flanks depending on their size. Figuring out how much defense you ultimately end up with in such a system isn't usually much harder than figuring out how powers affect enemies who are higher level than you. It mainly changes the language a bit. "Soft capped to all enemies up to the 17th enemy." In the current CoX system its not possible to fight more than 16 enemies at once, so I think the comments about limiting the ability to fight lots of enemies need some justification. You could use a system like this to severely punish players. Or you could use it to kill them less often but more fairly.

The changes to the Dominator Energy Assault set telegraph the direction Energy Melee may go, I hope. Energy Transfer isn't part of the Dom set, but I can see it getting the same treatment. Whirling Hands is now one of the higher damage Dom PBAoEs. ET just feels weak overall though. The wind up looks very silly and the "crunch" of the power is unsatisfying. Could it get the fast animation back when the set "powers up" using the dom mechanics but use the old slow animation at other times?

Either would work very well. Electric benefits from being able to very quickly close distance. Paired with Mu Mastery especially, it is a set that belongs at close range more than any other. Most players open with Synaptic Overload and make a move toward enemies when about 20-40% of the mob is confused. With Feral Charge, you can cover this distance instantly. Hitting Power Sink after Feral Charge floors the endurance of whatever you just closed distance on, so nothing has endurance to hit you if the Confusion chain hasn't yet reached them. With Power Sink and the right Alpha slot (lean toward something with endurance modification) even Elite Bosses will be out of endurance. This makes it possible to safely melee with them. Blood Craze is a heal, which is very much appreciated by any PBAoE character. If you play Electric I recommend turning on the setting where you can see all enemy's health bars, so you can see what is drained and by how much. I forget the name of the option. I turned it on with a slash command and forgot the name of the command. Plant is just a generally good set and pairs well with anything.