Steampunkette

That's not -entirely- true, though... I mean sure, you can't decide "Which is best" between Dominator and Mastermind but that's because you're comparing Aubergine Stew to a delightfully challenging Brie. They do such different things that you really can't compare them. Meanwhile you can compare, say, A Corruptor and Defender. Or Defender and Dominator (So long as the Defender Primary Powerset you're comparing uses Damage Mitigation rather than Force Multiplication, in which case it's back to Stew and Cheese, they go great together but really can't be compared in any meaningful way) You are correct, however, in that the Resistance Caps are a thing in the Post-IO world. Heck, they're a thing in the SO world if you've got a Sonic Defender or Fire Corruptor hanging about. I was referring to the actual values their powers give them. A Scrapper or Brute is going to wind up with the same 22.5% resistance from a given power, modified by SOs. Though, really, Resistance matters about as much as Quantum Computing to Ducks as soon as you get into softcapping defense values which anyone can do. Honestly, the best possible solution to most game design issues would be to put in a few Defense Caps for every AT including Brute. Then Tankers would be able to earnestly be the -best- at survival... But I doubt anyone would be willing to go that far... If they were: Tanker Cap: 45% Brute Cap: 42% Stalker/Scrapper/Dominator/Instigator: 40% (Yeah I know Instigator isn't an AT but I can dream, dammit!) Everyone Else: 38% But you'd have to ensure there was an "Overage" level so Scrappers who have 50% total still benefit from it when it comes to defense debuff and cascade failure situations. THEN we could get rid of some of the ridiculous ToHit Bonuses of Incarnate Content that got inflated beyond reason 'cause IOs meant everyone and their sister had Softcap...

That's not a bad understanding of the differences in the ATs but there's one big thing: Scrappers and Brutes have the exact same defensive values. Brutes only have more HP. Meanwhile a Brute at maximum damage buff on an attack that deals 100 points of damage (Before AT modifiers) throws 656 damage with that attack (.75 base AT multiplier makes it 75 x 8.75). Meanwhile the Scrapper has a 1.125 scale instead of .75. So when they're capped out at 500% damage they're throwing 675 damage. Before Crits. (112.5 x 6) So Scrappers still -do- more damage. A lot more when Crits are included. It's just that a Brute's bigger health pool and inherent Damage Buff generating ability makes them more likely to get higher on the Damage Bonus Scale than the Scrapper will, all other things being equal. But 2 Fulcrum Shifts and a How's your Father and the Scrapper deals more damage than a brute with the same (Maxed out) buffs. That said, I generally prefer to play Stalkers and Brutes over Scrappers 'cause they just don't seem to offer me a lot. They're the standard AT that hits hard and gets hit well enough. Stalkers hit hard -and- get nifty stealth mechanics and such. Brutes hit hard -and- get to tank. I'm surprised there's no push to 'Fix Scrappers' like there is for Tankers, frankly...

So. Personal story time. I play a Kheldian, Humanform, with no KD IOs and I spend most of my time blapping. That is I use Incandescent Strike, Radiant Strike, Gleaming Blast, Radiant Strike, Incandescent Strike as my main single-target attack chain. Yeah, I spend a tiny bit of time running over to the target after the Radiant Strike or Gleaming Blast knocks them back (Unless they're AVs in which case it doesn't matter) and then continue the chain until they're dead. Oh, also my AoE chain which is what I'm mostly doing to big groups is Solar Flare followed by Nova which wipes out all the minions (Because they're in the Nova's AoE even while flying through the air from the Solar Flare when I click the power) and leaves me with lieutenants running into melee. I just bounce back for a Proton Scatter and Luminous Detonation then go back to Single-Target chaining the boss 'till they get on me again. By the time the Boss is dead so are all the LTs and the minions died in the opening salvo. Could I do damage marginally more efficiently? Probably. But it's enough damage to get the job done and do it fast enough that I can PL my husband's characters from 1 to 22 in about 3 missions on Peregrine Island and 20 minutes. (I could probably do it faster if I did AE Farms but I just never enjoy those as much for some reason... Also we only go to 22 in PLs so we can enjoy leveling the character up and RPing after the character's defining powers are gathered and SOs are slotted) Could I make it easier for a PuG to fight alongside me? Maybe, but can run over to the left side of the room to fight a group at +4x8 solo while 2-3 other people do the same to a group on the right side of the room and the remaining 4-5 people do it to a third group. Honestly that's -far- more efficient with any group that finishes their spawn running over to help clean up the dredges of the other two spawns. Also: Triform PBs are a lie. You're not a triform you're a Dual-form that has to go to Human-shaped for RP sequences. Just slot the living heck out of your Dwarf and Nova forms, slot Inner Light however you like and make sure to grab Restore Essence because those are the only two "Humanform" powers that really matter. Everything else is needless because you'll either be Tanking or Blasting with no middle ground in Dwarf and Nova respectively. Your Humanform Powers are really just there for set-muling.

#1. The Stalinesque Rewrite of history thing was pretty clearly meant to be a joke... Also I removed the "Forum Gulag" from that joke 'cause I figured I was going too far, but apparently Poe's Law is alive and well! #2. You're not adding choice. You're just adding another way to remove knockback that costs less on a personal basis than the method to remove knockback that already exists. What that does is create -perception- of correctness, which is all a lot of people need to appeal to authority. "Well the devs made a way to remove knockback so you should remove knockback from your personal playstyle" Which is -exactly- what happened when the KD IO came out. #3. My "Extreme Hypotheticals" is literally happening in the KB to KD threads all over the boards where people who hate KB quit any team that includes people who don't have the KD IO in all their powers and kick anyone of the same ilk from teams they're in charge of. These aren't hypotheticals they're real examples of player behavior. And that's the subset of people who both hate KB -and- use the Forums to communicate. There's also lots of personal stories from people who use the forums and like KB about how they got kicked from teams or griped at or whatever. #4. Yes I'm glad we agree it would be tedious but it wouldn't be Copy-Paste. Each power has it's own knockback value with some being larger than others. You'd need to find the power's individual scaling gradient (if it has one because some powers have flat KB values and others have increasing KB values) and apply that specific scale to the "Remove KB" tag applied at the end of the power. #5. It still wouldn't fix the arguments on the forums. Magnitude determines distance. A Mag 100 KB will fling you across the map if you have no KB Protection Mags but a Mag 2 will just throw you a short distance.

The way the KB to KD IO functions is to explicitly replace the Knockback Value of any power it is specifically slotted into to .67 mags. It can do this because it's an internal power process (I.E. one that is tied to a specific power) To make the toggle work you'd be doing an external rather than internal power function. That means you'd need to go through every single power with Knockback in it and find the KB Mag for that power and create an "If KB2KD Toggle is Active Reduce KB by (Magnitude the power typically creates) and add KB Mag .67" value tied to it. Kind of like how every Scrapper Power has an "If Fiery Embrace is on this power deals Q more Fire Damage) tacked onto the end of it and any attempt to look at Scrapper Powers while customizing your kinetic/invuln Scrapper shows a fire effect on an invisible target being hit by your powers. That's the difference between an internal and an external power change. It would fix the "Problem" but it would only do so through an absolutely BONKERS amount of tedious work to the ultimate effect of "Save some people a few KB/KD slots" Because you'd STILL have the massive forum arguments unless the Devs turned it into an always on Autopower because some of us wouldn't use it and some people would complain, loudly, about it. And if they did turn it into an autopower? That'd just shift the complaints to the other side of things. "KB was Awesome why did you take it away!?" threads -everywhere-. The only real difference would be those who hate Knockback would have the implied agreement from the Devs that Knockback is WRONGBADFUN and the idea that they should be able to demand people turn their toggle on when they're on the same team as a RIGHTGOODFUN player. Which is what happened when the KB to KD IOs were added to the game in the first freaking place! I've had more than a few people on Everlasting ask why I don't slot KB to KD in every freaking power and any build I put into the build guides that isn't KB free tends to get at least one comment about sacrificing some survival or damage output to make things easier on the scrapper who can't be bothered to press the W key for half a second to move over to the badly mangled physics mess that was a warwolf peeking it's back-end out of a wall while it spasms for 8 seconds trying to right itself. Nothing is going to be good enough for certain players 'til all Knockback is removed from the game and a Stalinesque history-rewrite is implemented where the fact that KB ever existed is a taboo no one discusses.

Okay, well, technically the character is an Alien but not a Nictus IC and throws beautiful galaxy colored energy blasts that dissipate into accretion disks but that's neither here nor there. I decided I wanted to make a largely control-based Warshade who stunlocks entire crowds before murdering them while being essentially immune to damage. This is what I came up with: http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1571&c=704&a=1408&f=HEX&dc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his is how her powers look. Cool, right? Anywho. I wanted to find out what Y'all think. I know I could do more damage with the Eye Beams than the Piddly Blast, I just like how it looks much more. Also she will have Fluffies. Just being near her means violent death for most NPCs.

Aggro is handled on the NPC AI side. The Live Deves put in the hard cap of aggro through NPCs throwing a global check pulse to find out how many people are currently attacking each of the Player Characters on their hit list. If Target A has 17 players it goes to Target B and if B has 17 players it goes to Target C and so on. There is no NPC AI Tag or Logic algorithm for "Is that a tanker in my Target A slot?" Trying to build such a check would be a MASSIVE clusterfrell and could result in lots of whacky AI behavior that even the Live Team didn't want to mess with.

Knock Toward is something that came up repeatedly on the CoH Forums. I'm Paraphrasing Castle's Response to the issue. And if it was a "Ton of effort" for the Live Team it's difficult. You're also right about the possibility of knock over or knock short. The Magnitude of any knock would be set beforehand, and result in some hilarious effects.

Cannot be done. Knock is a Vectored Affect. Knockback is vectored relative to the position of your character when the attack -hits- rather than when it's fired. But it only goes one way: Away. Knockup is a vectored function that pushes a character straight up and is a different mechanical effect within the engine's system. But knock-to would require either a new function (One that would take a -ton- of effort to create) or a sort of pseudo-pet kludge where an invisible NPC spawns in behind you and knocks you "Forward". But such directional spawning locations as "Behind" are tied to the NPC in question, not the PC. So if it specified "Behind" and the enemy was currently running away, it would just throw them further on their quest of getting away.

My husband made a Malta agent named November Black Eight. Well he tried. It was taken. Even the out there ones often get snagged.

Solo Tankers can already get through the game without much problem, similarly to Brutes but with less chance of dying. It's only really in end-game content that a Brute has all the Mitigation the Tanker does -AND- a huge damage increase over the Tanker.

How about giving Open World Enemies a global buff on kill to all Heroes/Villains within 40yrds. You beat an enemy in the open world, you get a 2% XP buff for 2 minutes. Stacking up to 25 times for a 50% extra XP bonus. Have it stack with the double XP bonus and suddenly you've got a nice enough incentive to beat up a couple large groups of enemies in the open world regardless of what other task you're doing. Heading into a mission? Beat up some enemies, first, for a short-term XP buff on top of your Double XP buff. Gonna whack a pile of Zombies or Rikti during an invasion? EVEN MOAR XP! It could work without being an overbearing level of improvement that way.

...

How about just increasing their damage buff cap to 500%? That way Brutes still get to be awesome at dealing damage, Tankers are great at survival, but at high end with a couple Fulcrum Shifts the Tanker kind of catches up a bit... But requires outside buffing 'cause they don't have a Fury Mechanic to start out on?

It's a frustrating thing, yeah. You either create a "See Saw" passive ability which increases melee damage when you make ranged attacks and ranged damage when you make melee attacks (Which has to be included power by power across every assault set since there's no "Melee Damage" or "Ranged Damage" function of the character) but that rewards cycling powers, not moving at range, and you're back to "Standing in melee, firing ranged attacks" You could add a Distance function to ranged attacks in the same way Savage Leap has, where longer range deals more damage, but that's liable to just make a weak blaster type who uses melee only when enemies get close... and still has to be coded on a power-by-power basis plus it makes the Real Numbers less visible. Part of why I went for purely tanking mechanics in this version of the Instigator. It doesn't declare you need to be X yards from your target or bounce between melee and range. Enemies -will- close. You'll get the chance to use melee, and then need to create separation for increased survivability. It puts half the movement onus on NPCs and lets the player do the other half.

And it isn't activated, yet. It's "Coming Soon" with no specific ETA.

So... Kind of. I wanna clarify that before WoW came along with it's "Holy Trinity" and kind of made that the standard there was, in fact, a four-role design setup with Control as a fourth Role for parties, sort of based in D&D Thinking with Cleric-Support, Wizard-Control, Fighter-Tank, Rogue-DPS mentality. CoH was built on -that- design mentality. In fact Everquest had a total of SIX roles, though some of those roles were handled by the same class. Tank, Healer, DPS, Crowd Control, Utility, and Puller. Bards were all about that CC and Utility, baby! Control is not a Support Role. Control is Absolute Mitigation where Support is Partial Mitigation. In Support you make people take less damage or restore HP to mitigate what is coming by a percentage. Control just -stops- damage. It's almost closer to Tanking than Support. I fully endorse and support the rest of your post (See what I did there?) If we stop making any AT 'til all those people are happy we won't ever make another AT. And no. I don't think it'll make a mess of Epic Proportions because the suggestion is a whole other kind of tank. One that -doesn't- have the same levels of amazing resistances and damage-buffing possibilities as the Brute. It'd be a different tank that is interesting but likely weaker, in end-game content, than the Tanker is. (Slightly better damage because their base is higher, but worse survivability, rather than better damage and equal survivability) Honestly, I wouldn't mind if the Sentinel had Assault Sets. I'd play the heck out of an Assault Sentinel... But it wouldn't be an Instigator. Even if you tossed a couple of Taunt effects on it's attack powers. It wouldn't have the survivability to be a viable Instigator style thing. If Assault Sets were proliferated, it would have to be as a straight DPS style port, not a Tank port.

I'm a roleplayer and the character is level 44 at this point. She's had about a month of consistent play of a few hours every day. Cyclone is just who she is, at this point. There's too many people around Paragon who know her by that name to make switching seem like an appropriate (And entirely random) decision.

... I feel like I've explained the feeling quite well throughout this thread, SRU. Repeatedly. A new playstyle in the form of an active and dynamic type of tanking archetype which cannot stand stock still in the middle of a group of enemies and take all of the hits forever. One which generates aggro not through passive means but active ones, and relies on movement and repositioning to most effectively survive and provide opportunities for their allies. One which benefits -particularly- well from teaming with Control and Soft-Control capable characters who can slow enemies down or immobilize them to reduce overall damage output (Leading to having some Support and Control powers in their Epic Power Pools) Mechanical considerations would be damage resistance caps being lower than Tanker or Brute, lower overall health than same (But more than a Scrapper), Strong enough defenses to effectively tank at lower levels, and both an absorb inherent (Allowing them to take Alphas) and an Aggro Generation inherent (allowing them to take Aggro)

It isn't. I put that into a spoiler. I'd like to ask that that information blurb be the last time we talk about the Tanker/Brute issue in this thread aside from vague references to the problem as regards the Instigator. This is not a "Tanking is Broken!" thread. This is an AT Suggestion.

Nah. There is no fix for Tankers. They just were not designed for a game with Inventions and Incarnates. To fix them you'd have to break the Cottage Rule so badly they would be nearly unrecognizable. The best thing you can do for them is create separate sub-mechanics to try and offset the differences between them and brutes, but any kind of -real- change is going to have a profound effect on their effectiveness at all level ranges. If we're not going to create any Tank ATs 'til Tankers are 'Fixed' then we'll never make another tanking type Archetype. Honestly, that's a bad idea. Better to add some variety to the field so we can create new niches for the Tanker and Brute to fill and help set them apart. I sent SRU a PM about this, the crux of it is: Threat is a mechanical function of AI, not tied to the player character in any way. We can poke the NPC's threat meter to get higher on it, but the limits and monitoring of Threat exist exclusively on the AI. Thus they cannot currently be used to affect player Power Values without some kind of data-mirroring effect that doesn't currently exist. And any such data-mirroring would need to apply to every NPC in the area, and report on all threat levels and do it to every character... it would be a kludge and a mess.

I think we could safely drop their res cap to 75, at this point. As to how to herd from range: corners and brief surrounded situations. But the intent isn't to make them awesome tanks that stand in one spot. It's to make the combat more dynamic and mobile for those who want it. If you're looking for the most efficient tank you'd need to look at a Tanker or a Brute for pure XP/Second by holding the mobs still in your AoE spam. Though toss a couple doms on the team and it's the same thing outside of AV fights or iTrials.

Everything Sniktch said with a little caveat: You can be on more aggro sheets than the aggro cap allows. You can run through 3 full spawns of enemies with a taunt aura on, and even though only 17 can attack you, the rest are aware and angry. As soon as one who is actively fighting you drops, others will run over to replace him. So any attempt to Aggro-Check could be cheesed by exceeding the aggro cap through multiple groups being 'aggroed' but unable to attack because you're at the limit, -if- such a pulsing check could be performed. Though, y'know, a Fury like mechanic for more Max HP could be pretty great...

I feel like it IS the correct way to play. i24 added Bio Armor and Savage Melee. Both create some significant choices for you to make, and those choices aren't without a cost. You can play Bio Armor without Adaptation, or only ever use the Endurance version... But the Offensive Adaptation gives you a juice Damage Boost at a cost of defenses. And the Defensive Adaptation is the same in reverse. Savage melee makes you choose when to use "Finishers" or even -whether- to use them. That Savage Dominator I mentioned? I often sit at 5 stacks of Frenzy without touching any of my spenders because I like the Recharge boost and the Endurance Discount. They both play well into a Click-Power heavy character and help me get Domination back up, faster, to boot. That said... Sure. Hit me with some Life-Steal. I'll eat it up. (Pun intended!)

Firstly, I like Assault, not Manipulation, for this design. And there's some significant differences between the two and the resulting survivability of them. They're not interchangeable, even if both of them use powers lifted from other sets. And Manipulation would -never- work as a Primary. Especially not after the Homecoming Changes. Secondly, I like Assault because it combines Melee and Ranged attacks. That's it. There's a lot of superheroes that use their powers both up close and personal and also at a distance, but it's very hard to do that in City of Heroes unless you're a Dominator or Level 50. Characters like Captain Marvel or Deadpool who mix it up. It's not that I'm looking for "A Diverse Set". It's that I'm specifically looking for Assault powersets. A combination of Melee and Ranged attacks. I'm afraid it can't be done. Aggro isn't handled on the player's 'Sheet' essentially. Aggro exists as a function of an NPC. The game would have no way to check how many characters are aggroed on the Instigator at any given time. There's no "Real Number" for "Current number of people who want to hit me". You could do it in a manner similar to Defiance kinda? So that every attack you use grants X amount of Defense, Resistance, or Regeneration for a few seconds at a time, but I'm not sure it's a viable option.