Xaeon

that still wouldnt solve the supposed issue for tankers, just make brutes less rewarding for those willing to invest time to maximize them. Those 5 percentage points would make a big difference in how those characters would then play. The best suggestion I've seen is raising the agro cap and aoe radius if you are looking to make tanks more valuable. Nefing brutes to buff tanks isn't really helping tanks and is kinda like lowering the speed limit because one cars engine isnt running optimally. The aggro cap to my knowledge cannot be altered on a per AT basis. Which is why I dismiss it out of hand and instead focus on the expansioon of bruising for the double whammy of further increasing the Tanker AT's threat (enemies hate being debuffed) and letting multiple Tankers contribute something to the team by having their bruisings stack.

Is this a motherfuckin' jojo reference?

Yeah it's exceedingly difficult to actually finish any Port Oakes contacts these days because of how quickly you breeze past the zone's level range and move onto Cap Au Diable. Though I vaguely remember something about it being due for some new 7-20 story arcs a la the Skull/Regulators arc added to Blueside in I24.

I'll second this. Rad Armour is very, very good. As well as being a generic resistance set, it has an ally heal, two damage powers, three endurance boosting powers and a recharge reduction aura that would be good enough to without it. You can't go wrong with rad/rad. There's also a nifty build that has Meltdown and Rune of Protection that while neither is able to be perma'd; you can shave the recharge far enough that when one is on cooldown you just pop the other instead. And unlike older armour sets, Meltdown's "crash" is very forgiving and with all the endurance the set gives you; can probably be easily ignored or even not noticed at all in exchange for its effect not being as dramatic as Unstoppable or Power Surge. This build lets you cap out a number of resistances that normally only tankers and Kheldians could manage.

In a similar vein of adding to range and target caps, what about adding secondary effects to Gauntlet based on powerset? E.g., Ice Melee hands out slow/-rech effects, Dark Melee gives out acc debuffs, blade sets drop a def debuff, etc.? Or, if you don't want to tweak things set by set, give Gauntlet a pseudo-Confuse effect that causes a percentage of the target's damage to affect itself and its friends. Thematically, the target is so intent on hitting the tank that it will damage itself and its team to get to the tank. In the old "fix tanks" thread, a few of us discussed a bodyguard-like inherent. Having a tank on the team would reduce damage taken by (non-tank) teammates and redirect it to the tank. More tanks = more damage redirected = better survival for the squishies. I mean like, you could just merge bruising and gauntlet into the same power.

The problem is not at all with Brutes or Kheldians being too good, it's with Tankers not bringing enough to the table. Tankers have the harshest diminishing returns of any AT if you have more than one on a team and nerfing Kheldians and Brutes won't fix that. Two or more tankers does not really do anything for the team or league. But you are right in the fix being easy without distorting the flavour of the existing AT or nerfing other ATs. The stalker used to be in a very similar boat to the Tanker; people felt they were redundant, they struggled to find a meaningful place for them in most teams and some people suggested nerfing scrappers or deleting the stalkers entirely as a redundant and pointless AT. But the OG Paragon Studios devs instead knuckled down on the Stalker and made it more versatile until the Stalker was easily the equal of the scrapper, trading some trash mob clearing effectiveness to be its superior in AV slaying (ST scrappers can only keep up with a properly built stalker now if they use titan weapons which was never made with scrappers in mind). Tankers can get Stalkerized too without harming Brutes and Scrappers in any way.

That's not how MM's work as Tanks (if you play one that way). You are supposed to put your pets in defensive mode so they share your damage. The problem is that with the necessary buffs to pets to make them survive even the most trivial of late game AoEs they had to nerf MM's own pool so low that even with the defenses you can patch together, most MMs can't tank because they can't take the alpha and generally have no status protection. I'm not sure they meant for Brutes not to be tanks though, they gave them taunt, status protection, and not MMs. But CoV was supposed to take CoH innovations (from bending the holy trinity to outright breaking it). And they succeeded. Many people think they broke it dead in a bad way. I'm not editorializing on that here. But it is "different." I'm not defending Jack. I've roasted him plenty of times in plenty of posts. I'm just talking about the mechanics of what it looks like when MM's tank. Yeah but simply being survivable doesn't make you a tank. A tank is about managing aggro and taking hits for other players. Which only a handful of MMs do because you really have to go out of your way to dip into the hot garbage that is the presence pool to do it. Which is a waste of precious power and pool choices in 99% of cases and even then, Provoke is just laughably inferior to a true taunt power. Without these powers to aggro manage, if someone else so much as sneezes a tankermind is never going to be able to hold the enemy's attention as a Brute or Tanker or Kheld constantly drags the enemy's attacks away by just existing.

This happened ages and ages ago. A lot of people did not like AV level objects surrounded by boss mobs intruding on their content because they teamed with a kheldian and were very loud about it on the forums until the devs felt pressured to remove everything but quantum gunners and shuffle the Void Hunters and Shadow Cysts off into some arcs and task forces mostly focused around them.

Other games have tried to figure out how to weaken, if not remove, the Trinity model. Some add more categories. At least one I've seen tried to add "support" as a 4th member of the trinity (guess it wouldn't really be a trinity then, would it). Others have tried to figure out how to make a "bring the player not the class" thing, which is what this game already is. The rest of the industry is trying to invent THIS game, where play what you want, because 5-8 characters of any type or class, played by competent players, can do 99% of the content. But, every time someone tries, the biggest complaint is 'This game isn't just like WoW and its clones, so therefore it sucks'. But then, those that have all the features are decried ans 'just another WoW clone'. This game does not need to change to be more WoW-like, somebody needs to create a fantasy MMO version of this game. There are plenty of Trinity based, WoW clone games out there. If you want a holy Trinity based game, they're out there... hell they dominate. It's harder to find one that isn't to some extent, a WoW clone (stylistically). The settings (Azeroth, Telara, Arborea, Haranya and Nuia, Calpheon and Valencia, The Galaxy far far away...), genre (fantasy, sci-fi, heroic) and situations may change, but they are all the same basic game. The thing is, the original holy trinity was tank, healer and control. Everyone was expected to dps. Then devs got lazy and turned bosses into a big bag of hit points and phased out needing control because it was too hard to plan for. It was originally Tank, Support, Control. Support got watered down into healing because devs were scared of balancing buffs/debuffs and instead focused purely on healing and Control got dumpstered entirely while DPS became its own role and was stripped from Support and Tank. Now the Trinity itself is mostly dead and everyone is basically a DPS Tankermage in modern MMOs anyway.

You need to let go of your hateboner for Jack Emmert. No one even brought him up, there's no reason for you to start bashing him in this thread, too. His original concept of Mastermind Tanks (which was never even implemented into the game) was brought up and I'm pretty sick of the meme of MMs being primary tankers when they have precisely zero methods of in built aggro management so I just let loose.

Cysts were disabled entirely as a result of complaints by people who didn't like seeing them whenever they teamed with Kheldians. Void Hunters were to my knowledge; also disabled.

This is not true; the CoH Devs designed the Brute to fill the Tank/Scrapper rolls on Redside. Also before CoV came out; hells, pretty much right after CoH came out, the players found that they did not need a Tank. The CoH Devs had broken the Trinity, and most of us players were happy with that. This is CoH not some other MMO, and you Tank proponents need to quit arguing for the Trinity role that a Tank fills within a Trinity, because the Trinity is not going to happen in CoH. What I'm gathering from this thread is you all are trying to make the Tank into some type of Support/Melee. The problem I see is that you are trying to keep your heavy armor at the same time getting Support abilities through your inherent. I don't see that happening, but I could support the Tank being turned into a true Support/Melee. and then having a true roll in the group... Buffs/Debuffs & Heals on the front line. Otherwise the Tank is going to have the same issue it had when it stepped out of the CoH box. Brutes were not meant to be villain tanks. They shaped red to be more solo, and they did not want to mirror blue. If anything, the mm was the meatshield. The closest analogue a brute MIGHT have is a scrap. And before incarnates, scraps out damage brutes on a consistent basis. Jack Emmeret may have wanted MMs to be the Redside tanks but Jack Emmeret is a gibbering idiot who was wrong about literally everything in CoX. Forget his intentions for the game; he thought that three minions should be a hard challenge for a fully built level 50 player; who cares what he thought 14 years ago? By I18 the devs clearly thought that Brutes and Tankers were equivalent enough to have them share ancillary/patron power pools while Scrappers were thought to be closer to Stalkers and thus shared pools with them. Like can we finally retire this asinine meme of MMs being tanks? Because most MMs do not even try to tank or aggro manage for their teams while Brutes were given multiple tools to do just that. The initial concept of Masterminds was as tanks, but the initial concept did not pan out, nor did any of Jack's attempts to try and force it to pan out.

Expanding bruising so the Tanker passes out debuffs to enemies like candy would be a cool and unique way to give them their own independent niche on teams. People swore stalkers were unfixable for years until they ended up being fixed. Also any suggestion that involves deleting people's characters is a complete non-starter that would likely lead to people leaving the game at best. To even entertain the idea of deleting people's tanker toons or forcibly converting them into Brutes is foolishness. I would absolutely quit the game if I logged in and saw that my tankers were deleted or turned into brutes. I don't care what I got as compensation.

A Titan Weapons, Rad Melee, or War Mace Tanker is going to out damage any defender you care to name lol.

tanks have always been my main, since I1. I've had at least 6 lvl 50s through the years. Never once have I felt weak. Maybe I'm just stupid though. I mean... Tankers have terrible, garbage damage output. This is not really up for debate. Defenders hit harder than Tankers do. So I dunno how you could not feel weak unless you don't care about damage at all. The only comic book character I can think of off the top of my head who fits the Tanker AT mechanics is Diamond Lil, from Alpha Flight back in like the '80s. She was completely invulnerable, but had only normal human strength. Any other "brick" or "tank" I can think of in the comics is also super strong. So I think the Tanker design was misguided from the start. Defender Damage Scaling: Damage Scale Melee: 0.550 Ranged: 0.650 Tanker Damage Scaling: Melee: 0.800 Ranged: 0.500 And of course, melee attacks usually get better better stats than ranged attacks as compensation for their lack of ability to attack from a safe distance.

RNGesus giveth, RNGesus taketh away.

I like most of what the SCORE team has done but there are a few decisions I don't really agree with and doing full powerset proliferation is one of them. While powerset proliferation is generally a good thing there are several places where the original developers make a decision not to give a set to a particular AT for good reasons and this is one of them. Empathy just isn't a great set for Masterminds. It's playable and decent enough on teams but at the end of day it's not really a great option. If you really want an MM Empath the best option is to stick with Pain Domination which was designed with MMs in mind. Their proliferation is so inconsistent though. Empathy for masterminds but no Energy Aura for tankers? Clearly a conspiracy is at work!

As someone whose main was an elec/elec scrapper back on live....pure resist sets are a pretty bad idea on scrappers not gonna lie. Better to go with pure defense than pure resist on a scrapper if you absolutely have to pick.

Bruh this meme is lower effort than my deep fried shitposts on homestuck discords.

Titan Weapons loves Endurance and Recharge. Radiation Armour gives lots of Endurance and Recharge. Titan Weapons loves Radiation Armour.

Broadsword is a set that's definitely seen better days; having fallen far from its height as the staple of Broadsword/Regeneration scrapper meme builds. Now a days though, it's old, its rather visually uninteresting, its stats are mediocre to bad across the board which is made worse by its damage type being the most frequently resisted in the entire game and even worse; it directly compares to two sets which are just strictly better than it in basically every scenario: Katana which is statistically identical save for having much faster flowing animations that result in far superior DPA whose only downside is that it cannot be paired with Shield Defense and War Mace which out damages Broadsword so hard its not even funny. Battle Axe at least is in a similarly mediocre boat but there's already been a good thread on fixing it. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can rebuild Broadsword to be stronger, faster, better, we have the technology. The question though is how? One of the most damning things about Broadsword is that its stats are identical to Katana but Katana gets much more usable animations that let you chain attacks far more quickly and thus the actual DPS of Katana completely outstrips Broadsword. Broadsword for its own part shares the majority of its animations with Battle Axe and War Mace, but War Mace massively outstrips BS' damage per attack, has built in CC, and has a better damage type. So obviously the answer can't be quite as simple as just speeding up Broadsword's animations lest it tread on Katana's toes, nor can we just tune up the damage numbers lest it start to verge into Battle Axe and War Mace's niche.

I really want all the various robot and power armour pieces NPCs get that we don't have, like the various crey helmets, Lord Nemesis' armour pieces, the dome head and arm cannons of Council/Column bots, Rikti power suit parts, Resistance/IDF power fists, Vandal's arm cannon, PPD hardsuit parts, and so on so forth. I also definitely, definitely want the tactical vest that Malta Ops and SWAT officers get. Its ommission is super glaring for natural themed characters.

That makes it very much not suitable for natural characters. Honestly just let it attach to nothing and basically be an alt animation for flying. We can suspend disbelief.

If you want more AoE, spring attack and mu mastery are probably your best bets. Tesla Cage and Ball Lightning are pretty strong AoE that you can't go wrong with.

The utility belt power pool was going to have free running for natural themed travel power goodness. As for grappling/web swinging, the only way to do it would be to do what CO does and basically make it an alternate animation for flying.