Steampunkette

Torchlight 2 has that capability. City of Heroes almost certainly does not. There's about a decade between the two. You've gotta keep in mind that Cryptic didn't have the technical prowess to create an engine from scratch: They bought one. An -old- one. Old -when they bought it- old. Old before they started working on CoH which took, like, 3 years?

It should be noted: This would be one of the -MOST- Laborious power pools ever created, even without balancing time. Because all of these modifiers are power-external there would need to be separate entries into every power that these powers interact with that could be activated, or de-activated, based on which power is currently active. Any of the Knockback and Knockdown interacting powers, for example, would -need- to be mutually exclusive. Also, rather than making them always on toggles I largely chose to make them click powers or durational toggles. This could interact with Recharge powers, it could not. The impetus is to create a larger initial endurance cost for most of the powers, and to make sure these aren't "Always On Perfect Powers". This is a Power Pool meant to provide some options and variety, not utterly change the way the game is played. As to Animations? Just give it some general Flexing/Build Up/Headgrip type stuff and maybe a small aura that can be made minimum effects. Give 'em all 1.6 or 2.0 animation times, and let 'er rip.

Based on a few brief notes in the KB to KD Inherent Toggle thread, I threw this together to offer up some interesting solutions to common "Problems" in City of Heroes and one power mostly useful for -fun-. Tier 1) "Focused Power Use" (20% End Discount, Toggle .56 end/sec, 45 second Cooldown, Detoggles on CC) Tier 2) "Explosive Effort" (KD to KB, Click 30 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 3) "Restrained Impulses" (KB to KD, Click, 90 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 4) "Directed Force" (KB to KU, Toggle, 1 minute duration, 2 minute Cooldown) Tier 5) "Empathic Investment" (Sleep to Stun, Click, 30 second Duration, 5 minute Cooldown) Focused Power Use: By creating an Endurance Discount Toggle we grant a power that basically anyone can take advantage of. 20% end discount -might- be too high, but it would give lower level (Pre-Cardiac) characters a bit more sustain at the cost of a power and power pool selection. Definitely dip-worthy, the higher end cost is partially offset by it's function, but could result in overuse of endurance resulting in crashing the power. Explosive Effort: Mostly a funtime giggle power, it can cause knockdown powers to provide an increased survivability benefit by forcing enemies to get back up from across the room. Restrained Impulses: Something a fairly decent number of players might enjoy, if only because it would allow them to provide a temporary shift to their Knockback Powers. Might be best to pair it with a small (5-10%) damage debuff if only to offset the damage increase of things like Bonfire. Or we could make some powers unaffected by Restrained Impulses to avoid too much damage-shifting. Directed Force: KB and KU are largely interchangeable when it comes to overall survivability, but KU createsw a teaming AoE damage increase relative to the survivability. By making people invest in the power pool -before- they can unlock Directed Force I think we safely offset that increase. Empathic Investment: Let's face it, sleeps are almost useful in a team-based environment. But a Stun is -everyone's- best friend! By making it a capstone we increase the cost of the increased survivability of changing Sleep to Stun. I think that's a solid cost to effect ratio.

I'm interested, again, thank you Munkilord! What's the rest of the pool? GASP! What if we made it a "Metapower Manipulation" pool? Toggles and Clicks that allow you to change certain functions, some of them exclusive (So no one can use the KB to KD and the 100% KB chance increase toggles to keep enemies in fire pits forever) So 5 powers makes a pool. Let's see... what could we add... Tier 1) "Focused Power Use" (20% End Discount, Toggle .56 end/sec, 45 second Cooldown, Detoggles on CC) Tier 2) "Explosive Effort" (KD to KB, Click 30 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 3) "Restrained Impulses" (KB to KD, Click, 90 second duration, 3 minute Cooldown) Tier 4) "Directed Force" (KB to KU, Toggle, 1 minute duration, 2 minute Cooldown) Tier 5) "Empathic Investment" (Sleep to Stun, Click, 30 second Duration, 5 minute Cooldown) Yup... Making this it's own thread...

There are. But stunning or holding a target isn't controversial. Knocback is. There's also be no DPS loss from movement on a given Hold or Stun effect, so if we changed up the power we'd need to balance for survival to damage. In this case I feel like it's edge enough to be a thing worth considering.

So I've got this itch to make a Psionic Fortunata. Came up with an awesome backstory for her and a name that fits it 'Clique'. I wanted to do a build with as few purples as possible and as much team buffing as I could cram into the build. A little bit of added damage, lots of recharge for Mind-Link, things like that. This build grants her teammates: 28% Defense (All Vectors and Types) 30% Damage (All Types) 24% ToHit (And a pile of Perception if I want those toggles up) If someone dies: 57.96% MORE DEFENSE 70% MORE DAMAGE 75% MORE TOHIT Her single target chain is hold/immob/kb. Her AoE is piss poor ('Cause Fortunata) but her Nuke throws 800+ damage (about 900 if someone dies within 2 minutes of it firing off and it goes off every 40 seconds...) Here's what she looks like (Spoilered for length) I could probably squeeze more performance out of her... but this is a character who will completely shut down a lot of different situations by providing her team with hellacious damage and defenses. Thoughts?

Simple suggestion: Remove the CHANCE to knockback in powersets that give a chance. Make it always knockback. Don't change the damage of those powersets, mind you. Or the Endurance Costs or the Recharge Time of those powers. Just make them -always- knockback instead of having a 30-80% chance, depending on the power. It'd be a slight survival increase for the powersets that do use KB, but thanks to group-gathering efficiency of teaming, it'll slow down the process slightly by reducing the amount of team-damage done in the extra half second of getting back into range. But it will also mean that the entire enemy spawn (or at least all targets hit) gets bounced across the room by an Energy Sweep, so at least the efficiency-lovers will have their groups still packed tight, just 5-10ft further down the hall, or against the wall in a tangle jumble of limbs. There. I fixed Knockback!

This isn't "assumed". This suggestion came up on the Live Forums more than a few times. I'm paraphrasing the Live Dev response to the idea. It was a massive technical hurdle that they even got the one slot in that they accepted the UI being broken forever after i12.

Basically impossible. GETTING the Arachnos Costume Slot was an amazing kludge that broke the game's UI in a bunch of new and insteresting ways! See, when the game was live, you normally could only get 4 additional costume slots at levels 20, 30, and 40 from the 3 tailors and the Halloween Salvage got you a 4th. Much later they added in an additional 5 you could purchase in the store. But when Arachnos Soldiers went live, you didn't 'Lose' your first slot to the Soldier/Widow Costume. It granted you an extra one but it didn't -show- that because the UI couldn't. So you'd do the 20, 30, and 40 missions and it would look like your character had room for no more costumes because of the 2 costumes you got at level 1. But you could still get a 6th costume slot unlocked turning in Halloween Salvage. You just couldn't see it or edit it, so whatever was in your first not-Arachnos costume slot was added to that one, and you could only swap to it using /cc 5 I -think- at this point you can get up to 11 costume slots. But I don't know if the CC command has a 10 argument. I -imagine- it does. But it'll still be locked away and uneditable if that's the case. They could not get an "This slot is Canon Arachnos" toggle in place to allow you to do multiple Arachnos outfits, so they broke things to give you the extra costume.

Pets, Pseudo or Otherwise, are entities in the world. You wouldn't be able to attach them to the PC. Generally speaking a pseudopet is spawned either on the location you're standing or with a ground targeted AoE. ... and it just occurred to me this would be ridiculous not only in implementation being at best semi-effective... but also comically bad. 😄 So for the sake of argument let's say it is a Pseudopet that is somehow stapled onto the Tanker's spine. Just straight up riveted in can't escape. You taunt. Your pet taunts in a PBAoE Pulse or whatever. Due to proximity, it's always going to be trying to steal your aggro every time it pulses. The NPC AI is going to have a field day trying to figure out who to hit when every tenth of a second there's a priority swap between the two of you if you're wearing a Taunt Toggle aside from the pet. Ultimately, I don't think it'd work. At best you'd be WoW Style "Totem Tanking" with maybe a damage-split between you and the pet if it could be rigged.

Spread the damage as much as you want. If an enemy has 8 magnitudes of health and you do 3 magnitudes of health with your AoE you're still gonna need to hit that one person 3 times to kill him. Hitting him twice, then some other dude twice, then him again, then the other dude, again, means it took you twice as long to take him down. Hitting him three times doesn't help, either, 'cause you've still got the other 16 of him to hit, too. You can spread it around, but if a total 5,000 damage is needed to kill 2 groups, spreading the 150 you're doing to multiple targets doesn't matter: You've still gotta put out 5,000 total.

1. The NPCs would attack the Pseudopet instead of the Tank. Or just continue to their second target if the first target cannot be targeted (Like a tanker going intangible, aggro is lost 'til they come back) 2. To what end? Being able to tank 2 groups at the same time doesn't actually -get- you anything, since you're still capped on targets for damaging powers. You grab 2 groups with one flailing helplessly at an immortal pseudopet instead of you, and the blasters take twice as long to kill the two groups as they would one because it's still two groups.

1. -I- am the one that brought up Problem sets, Rylas. Several posts ago. Again, you keep skimming posts or not really reading them. 2. I keep talking about the problems with the anti-KB pushback because it remains a point of contention. 3. I've never said anything about robbing players of choice. Strawman. Stop that. Final words from me: This idea is too much work for too little reward. Does not fix the central issue because lots of people won't bother with it. Will embolden "lrn2play" bullies to appeal to authority. Will lead to further threads to "Fix" knockback with emboldened authors 'cause "The Live Devs -and- the Homecoming Devs tried, so clearly it's a problem! They just need help getting it really fixed!" There are better ways to fail to fix this perceived problem which have less impact on the development team's limited resources. If we're going to faff about with it, at least we can get some new IO Sets out of it. I'm outie. Have fun!

... The amount of cognitive bias, here, is strong. You keep Strawmanning to try and make me look like I'm wishy-washy. You stop that! There's 6 sets where it's a "Problem". But there's other sets where there's 1 or 2 KB powers, which I've mentioned previously in this thread. To do an -entire- revamp for your toggle to actually function you'd need to change on the order of 70ish powers, total, spread out across 87 sets (89 if you wanna get fancy with it). And in the process you'd be neutering the functionality of powers like Force Bolt or TK Thrust whose sole goal is to get one dude away from the caster. Even if they only focused in on the 6 "Problem Sets" that's still a lot of powers they'd have to go in and manually add a Caveat Power Use line which applied the KB Debuff and the KD implementation. And each of those lines they'd have to do based on the quantity of KB in the power itself. And all of it so the people who dislike KB can circumvent the KD IO. And to do a KB to KU or KB to Repel or KD to KB or KU to KB toggle would take about the same amount of work. The Repel to KB toggle would be comparitively easy since there are, what? 6 Repel powers in the entire game? As to the "Less than you claim" thing: I've never claimed there were thousands. Even hundreds. Or dozens. Only that it is a problem and following through with your suggestion would make that problem worse through appeal to authority arguments... Which is what already happens thanks to the KB to KD IOs. AGAIN you Strawman. What you're asking for, here, is a disproportionate amount of work to result and a disproportionate negative response to result. I've tried to explain that as best I can. You'd be far better off asking for DPS Sets that have KD IOs as part of that set, perhaps even suggesting a few sets and bonuses.

KB to KD is already a choice people can make. KB to repel isn't. KB to KU isn't. KD to KB isn't. You're not increasing choice. You're increasing ways to make the same choice. Would you like to order the cheeseburger through the menu at the counter or the touchscreen at the table may seem like a choice, but you're still only able to get the cheeseburger. And setting it up that way makes it seem like ordering a Hamburger is the wrong idea. Much less the Chicken Sandwich. And, again, 6 powersets out of ... shit... you count 'em... https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Primary_Power_Sets https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Secondary_Power_Sets 87? That's not including how the Crab, Bane, and Wolf spider powersets kind of overlap kind of don't. You could probably argue 88 or 89 by including Widows. Is less prevalent than I feel you claim... it's likely more of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon applied to negative experience.

The person who made the "UNGIMP PEACEBRINGERS" Thread -LINKED- that thread right above the post you're complaining about. Same person. And then specifically went on a little side-discussion ABOUT how Peacebringers in particular are gimped by the proposed issue. Are... are you just not reading things? And no. I'm not trying to extrapolate a vocal minority, friendo. You can just pick up that strawman right now. I've said that the arguments won't end 'cause there's people who actively quit teams when there's KB. And people who demand others stop KBing in ways they don't like right on these forums. I've also said that implementing a wide-area-web-grenade of 'Anti-KB Toggle" would further embolden people of that mindset to appeal to authority. I've never presented an "All KB Players will be Persecuted!" thing. As to the powersets: There's, like, 6 powersets where KB is a "Problem". Energy Blast, Energy Assault, Kinetic Melee, Peacebringer Blast, and Storm Summoning. Any other set that has knockback in it either has it in 1 or 2 powers that aren't exactly key or has one power where it's key but that knockback is very important for that set (Like Energy Manipulation's melee KB to keep people off the blaster, or Force Bolt from Force Field for the same purpose) If you don't like knockback or slotting for KD then just don't play those powersets. It's not some ubiquitous thing that every AT has in freaking ABUNDANCE that makes it unavoidable. "More Choice" is still misleading. You're not adding more choices. You're adding more ways to remove knockback from the game. It's the same choice as the KD IO with less cost. The Live Devs were like "Hmm. They're going to kill these mobs faster 'cause of less scatter, that should cost them a tiny amount. I know! Let's use one slot (which means maybe one set bonus and a minimal power modification cost) in exchange for the KB to KD" and you're saying "The cost is too high!" That's not more choice. That's the same choice at bargain bin prices. For us, anyhow. The Devs would be paying through the nose in mind-numbing tedium. More choice would be suggesting a Knock-Up toggle. Or a "KB To Repel" toggle. Or maybe IOs that do the same. Creating different effects to give people options to what they want it to do. How about instead of suggesting a Toggle, which I've already explained would be a massive pile of needless work which creates the perception of KB being WRONGBADFUN, you could suggest a few new IO sets for Melee, Ranged, and AoE Damage which have the KB to KD IO as the 6th IO in the set and give a variety of other set bonuses along the way. Then you could reasonably reduce the cost for yourself since you'd still need the IO that swaps the effect, but at least it'd still be part of a set you were interested in using and provide a Set Bonus? That'd also be a lot less work for the Devs.

The thread that was linked above my post was "Ungimp Peacebringers" by RedLynne. So yes. There are people who think KB "Gimps" Peacebringers. And yeah. Knockback creates a different playstyle than added DoTs. Similarly tohit debuffing creates a different slotting strategy than defense debuffing. Not every powerset is going to be perfect for every player. Or fit their playstyle. I, for one, vehemently dislike Dual Blade's 'Combo System' because I feel forced into a very narrow attack chain design wherein I -have- to take every power for every combo or else I feel like I'm doing it wrong. I also dislike Contamination's spread so Rad Melee is out for me. Fire Control's gone because of it's focus on damage instead of control. Etc. Etc. Etc. If you need a scalpel use a scalpel. I just think it's kind of weird to ask for a hammer to be sharpened into a scalpel so you can use it, instead. It's a hammer... it shouldn't even be -in- an Operating Room!

Oh. Also "Distracted" won't work. There's not character-function for "Aggroed on Me". All Aggro managed inside the NPC AI. It's a neat concept, but it's functionally impossible.

As far as the game is concerned a map is a map is a map. Any instanced map is just another map instance to the server. Just like AP2, 3, and 5. You just don't have clearance to access that map unless you've got the mission flag that unlocks the door. The knocback mez-grant power is probably the easiest way to implement it, but it puts the choice of whether anyone's powers knockback their enemies into the hands of whoever purchases the power. Even on an instanced map that could mean one person being in control of 7 other people's powers. There's literally no good way to handle Knockback except to simply accept that it's a thing. If you don't like it in your powers, slot the KD IOs even though it'll cost you in other ways, and be ready for other people who are going to knockback. Some people are going to do it wisely. Others will do it foolishly. The only other alternative is to just remove all KB from the game. And that would be a -miserable- shame. KB creates one of the few senses of real 'Power' in a game that is otherwise just a few people swinging or throwing things at each other 'til someone drops.

That protection could be seen as griefing. Particularly if it's enough to reduce the KB to 0 and results in an Energy Blaster using a Nova in the middle of a spawn that doesn't budge and then kills said Blaster in the following 1.22 seconds. (That would never happen to a PB, their Damres is too stronk!)

Taking away a Brute's ability to AoE aggro is a bad idea. If you do that they're just a "Ramp Up Scrapper" for the most part. Aggro functions as a checklist inside the NPC AI. Any character generates aggro by attacking, debuffing the NPC in question, or healing themself or allies. In fact even existing in the vicinity of an NPC that is actively aggroed puts you on the list, but at a low level until something changes. Whoever is at the top of the list has the Aggro and the NPC will continue to attack that one person until they are unable to (such as the player breaks Line of Sight) or that person dies. In either case the NPC then moves down to the list to the person with the next highest aggro. This continues until the NPC or all PCs are dead and the aggro list is empty. Taunting immediately places you at the top of the aggro list, multiplying your current threat level on the target by 400%. So if you've got 200 points of damage on the target and taunt it gives you 800 points of damage for aggro purposes. You get the idea. All of that said, you're definitely right on the Facts that you listed about Brutes and Tankers. Personally I like the Unresistable 20% Resistance Reduction, or the 500% damage cap. Either option would make Tankers -much- more valuable on teams 'cause they could either increase the team's total throughput or have their throughput increased to a significant level by buffing. Either option increases the Tanker's value without significantly impacting their soloing ability or anything of that nature. That said, increasing throughput through an unresistable 20% debuff would only improve the value of a single tanker on the team (since Bruising doesn't stack). The 500% damage cap option, on the other hand, provides much more incentive to have multiple tankers.

Oh, not at all! It's more of a "Knockback doesn't 'Gimp' Peacebringers. PBs with knockback are actually quite effective, even in teaming situations. Here's an example of that bone hard truth."

It would probably make the powers animate awkwardly because there's only so many clock-cycles in a given power's activation... but it's possible. Maybe. So long as there's an absolute floor of 0 on Mez Protection. If there isn't an absolute floor on Mez Protection and you had a total -1 Mag Protection Debuff the result would be that you go flying backwards through the air until the debuff worked off... Then again, maybe that's part of -why- control powers were designed to be binaristic and there aren't any "Protection Debuffs" in the game. You have to admit it would be hilarious to give a Random Contaminated on Mercy Island a -100 Mag knock protection as you knock them back at level 50 (increasing the relative knock scale thanks to level scaling impacts of powers) and thus rocket the dude into orbit using one of the slanted fallen buildings, there. But that's if the engine is even capable of doing negative magnitudes of protection. Which I'm not certain it -can-. The Live Devs set it up to be a straight mag check on absolute values, after all. There may not be the ability to create a Protection Penalty in the system, with attempts resulting in logic errors.

Eh. *shrug* I think Corruptors are just fine how they are. Just need to make sure to take the Degenerative Incarnate to Scourge faster is all. The point of the thrust was: You can't compare Masterminds to Dominators 'cause they do things so differently. You can only compare ATs that do similar things.

Wouldn't work. It would need to reduce the target's KB Protection by 10 (or more) and hit with the KB -after- the other effects have landed. Otherwise you'd be hitting someone with Mag 10 KB Protection with a .67 knockback (having no effect) THEN reduce their KB protection by 10 (Having no effect unless another KB hits them in the moment)