oedipus_tex

I wish Gale and Hurricane could be used to push Lightning Storm around but I have no idea if the game mechanics could handle it.

That's a valid observation. Also the fact secondary effects like -Recharge that hit the psuedo pet wouldn't affect the owner unless there is some 'transference' mechanic somewhere I dont know about. There are probably some other issues that arise with elevators, etc.

The way this is handled in most engines is the origin location for the pet is locked to the owner object. This is the way particle effect systems already work in CoX. It's the reason why when a Force Field character moves she doesn't leave her bubble behind. 'Creatures' may be their own special kind of object in the CoX system. Regardless, it either works or it does not work and the only way to know is try it, so if I ever get a server working I will try it and see. No sense crossing off ideas on theories about what may not work.

City of Heroes has a ragdoll engine that is quite good and pathing that is surprisingly intelligent. Locking a creature to another creature's location isn't an advanced technique. I'm pretty sure it was occasionally used in early Nintendo games. It's possible for various reasons the CoX engine doesn't support it directly, mainly having to do with how creatures/objects are created in 3d world engines, but I don't think that has anything to do with the age of engine itself. Now a possibly valid concern is what happens if the player-owner gets hit by knock back and whether its possible for the pet to continue to follow in that situation.

Without actually seeing it in action I have no idea. I have seen games where pets lock to the player's position and travel with them. Torchlight 2 is one example. In that game it is used to create powers where an orb or other kind of pet fires projectiles at enemies. Whether CoX can create pets with those characteristics I do not know. I haven't seen any in the game that I can think of, but that may not mean it's not possible. As far as how enemy AI would react, without actually seeing it, its hard to say. Enemies already deal with multiple Tankers and Brutes competing for aggro. They also deal with Mastermind pets and Illusion armies and other things with no negative impact I can see. A valid concern would be that secondary effects of powers that hit a pet don't transfer to the player. Obviously and that is why it wouldn't look like that.

Yes, they would. Whether this is an issue depends on how the mechanic works. I don't know if CoX has a mechanic that locks a pet directly to the character model. A team of 8 with no pets can theoretically aggro 8x16=128 enemies, more if some of those enemies summon their own pets. It's easily possible to end up fighting more than 16 enemies at a go. If you observe teams you'll notice they frequently exceed 16 targets at a time. Whether its actually worth implementing the effect is a good question. But it's possible.

RE: the target cap discussion, keep in mind you can fake a higher than 16 target aggro cap with pets or psuedo pets. There is also already a mechanic in place for sharing damage between a pet and an owner.

Normally I wouldn't either, although the specifics of these two sets are at odds with each other. /Kin Controllers normally rely on their AoE immobilize for damage. For Dark, it's a cone.

That was not the intent. I was referring to the use of Corruptor/Defender as a defense of two ATs that are fairly close in function. Defender/Corruptor have nearly the same issue as Tanker/Brute. I don't think you can address the Tanker/Brute situation by referring to Corruptor/Defender. I explained why in the previous posts.

No. Obviously we are not going to delete an entire AT on the Homecoming servers. I said that if I ran my own private server and had to decide what to do with those two ATs, one or the other would be cut until drastic changes could be made. It was not a suggestion on what to actually do. It was a statement that Corruptor and Defender share the same problem Tanker / Brute (and / Scrapper and to some extent / Stalker do) and that is why they do not form a baseline of how to address the issue. EDIT: Sorry for not completing the response in one go. It leans not on the perception, but the reality that a team with multiple Tankers has neither the damage advantages of other stacked combos nor the added utility. The other low damage ATs--Controller, Defender--are force multipliers that are deadly when stacked. That is why Tanker is a good candidate for some form of force multiplication.

I may not understand what these rankings represent. I surely don't see Electric Control as low tier (on a Dominator, maybe on a Controller). Is that because Conductive Aura only Dominates the first enemy in the chain? If so, we should remember it's a non-notify confuse that has a huge chance to trigger Contagious Confusion proc on an absurdly favorable cooldown schedule (60 seconds, exclamation point required!) If it could also Dominate you could throw all the other Dominator primaries in the trash. If anything I'd place Mind Control slightly below the rest, but only slightly (different story on a Controller, where Mind is very far behind). No pet and long recharge on the key powers. I'd definitely say Dark is stronger than Mind in most situations. But I can at least see how some people could feel differently.

Would the team be willing to consider making PBAoE toggles suppress instead of detoggle when the user is mezzed? At least one example currently exists in the game: Blaster Cauterizing Aura. The main powers I'm thinking about are: - Conductive Aura (Elec Control) - Arctic Air (Ice Control) - Choking Cloud (Radiation) - Entangling Aura (Nature) - Venomous Gas (Poison) There are examples of other PBAoEs out there (e.g. Hotfeet) but the group above all fall into the category of 'counting on this to stay alive.' There are strategies for getting mezz protection to keep them running, but it seems like it should take less work to make this sort of tactic work. Thanks for your consideration (and great job on the work done so far on other stuff--truly appreciated.)

I'd like to avoid comparisons between Corruptor <> Defender because that is another scenario where the two ATs mirror each other very closely and are only differentiated by a Damage <> Defense/utility scale. It's my general feeling that a player should rarely need to ask "Am I making a mistake rolling these powerssets on this AT?" With Corruptor <> Defender you've got a lot of that. I doubt there's a solution to Corruptor <> Defender this late in the game cycle. Truthfully if I opened my own server I'd cut the Corruptor AT entirely and move some of its abilities to the Defender until I could think of a way to make it distinctive, perhaps by switching it to Assault/Buff or Manipulation/Buff (there is no AT that gets Assault or Manip as its primary).

I have a habit of rolling B-list toons. I tend to stay away from the true cookie cutters but also try to stay away from the really frustrating/weak combos. Anyway, I have a concept for a Dark toon who is based on Paragon's last Blockbuster Video employee. The store gets hit by a meteor or something and he ends up absorbing all these horror movie abilities fromthe VHS types. The intent is to draw a dichotomy between the clean cut looking character design and the horrific powers (colored red-ish for blood tint). I've never seen a Dark/Kinetic character before and I'm pretty sure it's because the cones in Dark--particularly the immobilize--conflict with the PBAoE nature of Kinetics. But, I wanted to throw it out there anyway. Unusual combo that can work, or a disaster of frustration waiting to happen? I know Dark/Time or Dark/Dark are more natural pairings, but I am kind of tired of both at the moment, and I hate how /Dark ruins costumes.

Although this was the design intent in the pre-IO, pre-incarnate days, in practice Brutes are far more survivable than Scrappers due to much higher Resist caps, which are very achievable in the 2019 version of the game between all the various buffs flying around. But the larger issue for me is that all of these 4 ATs are crammed onto a single Defense <> Offense scale, with the only step away from that scale (kind of) being Stalkers and their Hide/Placate mechanic. What the solution should be, IMO, is to make comparison more like Defender <> Controller <> Dominator <> Mastermind. Which is best? Well they all offer wildly different things, so no direct comparison is possible. Stalker comes closest to this currently, but still has lots of room to develop in its own unique direction. (Sorry, multiple edits to clarify response.)

I think the problem with the melee ATs is that they have all traditionally been pushed along the same axis, with Damage on the left and Defense on the right. To fix this, I think the solution is to find a different axis. IMO: Tanker should be pushed in a Controller/Defender direction. These ATs, like the Tanker, are relatively low damage, and intended to team. However a team of Controllers or Defenders is still viable, because each member force-multiplies the whole squad. Tankers are the only AT in the game that does not follow this pattern, with the exception that the Leadership abilities do benefit from the Tanker's stronger armor stats. I think adding damage directly to the Tanker would be a mistake. The solution, I believe, is to give Tankers abilities that significantly boost team damage, so that when a bunch of Tankers get together you have a force to be reckoned with. I'll leave it to the number crunchers to eval whether this should take the form of -resist or +damage or both. Brute should stay where it is. To be honest I feel like this AT overperforms, but I'd rather not disturb a tomb and risk a curse. I am uncomfortable with nerfs at this stage of the game. Maybe they would have been appropriate when servers first opened, or if we ever get a 'rebalanced' server. The hard truth about this AT is it was only ever given its stats because it existed in isolation in City of Villains where it didn't have to be directly compared to either Tankers or Scrappers. If I could have designed this class from the ground up, I would have made their mezz protection semi-dependent on Rage, but we are 17 years too late for that now. Scrappers are intended to be generalists. The uncomforableness here is they have significantly lower defense than a Brute but similar (in most cases) damage. On the axis from Damage to Defense one would expect this to be the highest damage melee AT, but that's questionable in practice. I believe this AT is intended to encompass heroes associated with high mobility. A potential shift (alibeit maybe too extreme) would be to make all of their PBAoEs into teleports akin to Lighting Rod. It might also be feasible to extend the radius of their AoEs by 20-25%. Stalkers are a strange AT that is patterned after the Thief/Rogue/Assassin classes in other games. Unlike those Rogues, their actual concealment abilities aren't a huge factor in moment by moment play, nor do we have any lockpicking/disarming/subterfuge scenarios for them to excel at. They are also an 'assassin' class that doesn't particularly excel at taking out the main hard targets in the game, which strikes me as weird. I've long felt this class should have access to a unique power pool that just contains thief-like abilities. The ability to teleport instantly with no or nearly no animation, for example. And the ability to summon something in the vein of Phantom Army to distract enemies while you gain the upper hand. I feel this AT has a lot of potential for added fun just with the addition of a couple of powers in this vein.

I agree with this on Energy Blast mainly because Dual Pistols actually has this (altho it turns it completely on or off). Energy Blast is a mastery of energy explusion and I think some control over how far to knock things back would be a nice addition.

I'm not sure where the current benchmarks are for Dominators. I suspect the AT doesn't farm as well as Brutes, Fire/Kin Controllers, or Blasters, but that's merely a hunch. Fire/Psi Dominator was known to be a decent farmer back in the day but I'm not sure how it holds up on today's Fire farms. I dont think it was ever truly competitive with Fire/Kin Controller.

Putting Force Feedback in Tornado basically provides a 100% (edit: I read above that it's 90%, but anyway, its super reliable) chance to trigger the proc on yourself whenever you cast Tornado. That's the only time I've seen it fire. Since you will be casting Tornado every time it is up, it's well worth it.

Dominator was designed as a kind of 'blapper' class that was supposed to be able to use control powers to mezz enemies and then run in in relative safety and kill them. Their significant gap is ranged, radial AoE powers: unlike Blasters, the only place they receive ranged AoE radial blasts is in the tertiary pools, and they lack nukes. Instead they have only cones and PBAoEs (generally with 15ft range). The class has been adjusted a few times over the years. It was long considered a lopsided class during the early City of Villains days, extremely weak out of Domination mode and powerful when Domination was up. It only really coming into stride in later years when Domination was changed so that the Damage buff it provided was removed and the classes overall damage upped. The second big upward shift in power is when better radial blasts were added to the epic pools, when Villains got access to hero pools. It's a relatively balanced class these days, trading away the Blaster's overwhelming AoE damage potential for very strong controls (the best in the game) with some ability to provide AoE damage.

I think all of the Dominator primaries except for Ice Control are very strong. Each of them has significant advantages and disadvantages. Ice Control could use a look by the developers. It requires too much work to try to make the set withstand the pressure its supposed to (playing in melee) with lower payoff than for the other melee sets, or even for all of the sets taken together.

Electric is very strong on Dominators in general and I'd be surprised if this was an exception.

I would drop the panic button power for this, yes. The panic button isn't actually very good on a Dominator. You could just eat 2 oranges. Power Sink on the other hand is a massive endurance drain that is auto hit. It's true the radius could be bigger, but even with a 10ft radius its very useful. Especially good combined with Electric Control for ensuring whatever you got close enough to melee with has zero chance to fight back. With this power + the rest of Electric (particularly paired with an Alpha slot that adds Endurance Mod) flooring the endurance of Elite Bosses is easily achievable.

There is a very wind-like effect attached to many of the Ice powers, yes. Especially some of the armors. Also don't forget powers in Radiation, many of which only look like radiation just because of their color.

That is basically exactly what I picture. Another way to do it would be to make the Tanker versions of Build Up team-wide (perhaps not at full strength). I feel like Tankers already excel on the armor side of the game and its really the secondary that ought to factor more strongly into team composition, particularly the damage portion. Sets without Build Up would need some kind of mechanic.