Steampunkette

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.

I don't know about Controllers... But Control Radial is -amazing- for Dominators! My Dark/Savage/Soul dom opens fights with a fear affect, then moves in to use other powers. With a nice long-lasting fear you can suddenly stack fears every time you land any hit. And if the target is also stunned, it stacks Fear AND Stun (Or at least it seems to). The more controls on a target the more chance they'll get shut down. And the additional damage is swank, too. I've only done that on Justin, though. The Dominator will be using it in another 6 levels on Live! 😄

Try this on for size, @oldskool! Definitely going for Spectral and Intuition. Maybe I should do Assault? Judgement will probably be Void Radial for theme and the 50% damage debuff. I'm never sure what to do with Destiny but I feel like Ageless could be good, here? She's going to be End-Heavy, after all, and more recharge means more Blackstars.

As someone who loves Savage Assault on her Dominator: You should never be exhausted. Pop your stacks at 3 or 4, guys. That's how it's meant to be played. The ring is misleading because it's a warning rather than a queue to use that power.

Mostly I run duos and small teams, really. Very rarely do I solo or hop on 8 man steamrollers. Thank you for this helpful advice!

So I should Rebuild into a Recharge Build? With Darkstar's ridiculous -ToHit it really seems like a great idea... The only question I have left is: Target cap? With 10 targets hit by Blackstar, that still leaves almost half a spawn of enemies who aren't debuffed by 35%. How do I offset those enemies and their high chance to hit me? Is that just where Darkest Night comes in?

I recognize that Dark/Dark doesn't Synergize as well as, say, Dark/Ninja. But for theming of this character I wanted to try it. So she's not going to be perfect. I didn't even get halfway to Softcap though Darkest Night will put her up 12% against those who don't resist ToHit. She'll be open to Defense Cascades dropping her to nothing, her Energy Damage Resistance is a suck... But she's got capped Smash/Lethal damage and near cap on Psionic meaning she'd be fairly great against Carnies, I think. Which would make her my ONLY good Carnies-fighting character! She's also got some decent resistances to Dark, Fire, and Cold meaning she should be solid against Circle of Thorns and Banished Pantheon in Dark Astoria. Tsoo, too. ... I just realized that it's mostly magic groups that use Fire/Cold/Negative/Smashing while Tech Groups do Lethal/Energy/Toxic... Huh. Do you all think this build is a viably strong one or am I overestimating the value of the spread I have, here, and need to get back to the drawing board?

Oh! I see. Well! Assault Sets are a combination of melee, ranged, and AoE attacks. Usually 2, 3, and 2 or 3, 2, and 2. Each powerset also gets a "Build Up" power and a power that is meant to express the powerseet type's general theme. Like Dark Assault getting Lifedrain, Psychic getting a control, or Cold enjoying a PBAOE slow aura. Manipulation sets are built around a few melee attacks and both area soft control and single target hard control to keep the Blaster safe.

Do you know how many Green Lanterns, Captains Marvel, and so forth there are? Hell, there were even 4 or 5 Supermen running around for a while, there. Plus all the Robins and Batmen. There's plenty of tropes in both directions and Legacy heroes to muck it up even further. I love the little jabs you put in, here. Little defensive spines. Very cute. I'd prefer a better system, Biostem. I'll take what we've got 'cause there's no alternative, obviously. But I hope, someday, things change. It sucks being the only Cyclone on my server and having to "cheat", regardless.

By be more creative you of course mean compromise. If you can't get what you want get something that you don't hate. Maybe given enough time you'll actually learned to like the thing that you didn't hate. It's a bad system. it's a bad enough system that as soon as Cryptic got the chance to make a system allowed multiple people to have the same name they made it! I really wish people would stop lauding and defending systems that even the people who created didn't carry forward because they were bad systems. Don't get me wrong I get "creative" with names more often than not. I've gotten used to it. That doesn't mean it's a good thing. If even Cryptic, the people who made the game in the first freaking place, will not stand by unique names why the hell should we? For now we don't have a choice. Maybe forever. But the amount of Stockholm syndrome people seem to have with this particular thing is just frightening.

On Everlasting I created a character named Cyclone. I had to use an i for the L because somebody on that server is sitting on the name Cyclone with the intent to make a storm corruptor. She got the name from a friend who was sitting on it. I'm the only person who has actually played a character named Cyclone on the server but I will always have that ugly capital I in the middle of my name... Because the person who has it spelled correctly for an alt they haven't even created yet wants to use it for the character they originally wanted to make Stormsurge but that name was taken... Layered irony and frustration. I would love if names were not unique but I don't I think they'll be able to set that out

I roleplay while running missions. My superheroes interact with their teammates and friends, react to changes in the combat situation, and discuss the particulars of the enemy groups they are fighting or the story that they're contributing to. It requires one major change: do you have to use team chat instead of local or emote. I just put an asterisk on either side of an action to denote that it is an action instead of a statement. It's worked well for over a decade in different games.

I just use "/bind t powexec_name Mystic Flight" and "/bind LShift+LButton powexec_name Translocation" Then I hold left shift with my pinky and click where I want to go with Translocation in the world. Boom. I'm there. I take Mystic Flight off my bars and have Null the Gull hide the Translocate bar. I also use the second bind alone with Teleport. It's a whole lot faster than trying to click macro buttons!

I'm not certain I understand you, here. Do you mean we should design a new powerset type which combines things we like from different powersets or just talk about why we like the powersets that exist?

Would also work as a "Super-speed" powerset.

It's definitely something worth considering. But I'm not sure you COULD rebalance the AT at this point to remove Permadom. For what it's worth, the Live Devs did rebalance Domination in i15. They pulled the big Damage Bonus out of it and applied it to the AT's baseline damage scales, instead. But in the remaining 8 issues before shutdown they never again moved to change Dominators. They just kept adding new powersets and such. I feel like they either realized that changing Domination too drastically or removing it to replace it with a new mechanic was just too much change. That the resulting furor in the Dominator Community would make it not worthwhile.

Currently no one gets Assault as a Primary Powerset. One AT gets it as a Secondary to pair with Controls. That, alone, would make them feel a lot different. Instead of spamming attacks while your control timers are running down and then hitting more control effects and staring a hole in the Domination power on your hotbar for the Endurance and Control increase, you'd be playing a character who is more focused on where the enemies are and what they're doing. Not just standing in the center of a field of enemies coming to kill you, moving around and keeping track of where they're going so you can maintain aggro through ranged damage. Most of the game is the leveling experience. It's teaming and working together to beat up baddies (Unless your only goal is Efficiency in which case you grab a team of 8 and steamroll without a care as to who is playing what Archetype or Powerset until Knockback comes into play). Once you get to incarnate levels with this design as I've laid it out you'd -still- do good damage, your role in the team would just have to shift to Off-Tank or something similar. Min-maxers would probably still have a field day with it to tweak it's damage output to maximum and ensure it's defensive stats were completely capped to make it as durable as possible. It just wouldn't be able to main-tank the Avatar of Hamidon as well as a Tanker or Brute would thanks to a lower maximum HP and such. I got the idea for this Archetype literally -years- ago when I first played a Kinetic Melee Brute. I skipped Taunt and used Repulsing Torrent and Focused Burst to grab aggro at a distance. I'm playing a new one, these days, and I love her to -pieces-! But I'm still playing the same "Stand in one spot" game as soon as the aggro is secured. I'd rather move around. I'd rather use Savage Assault or Earth Assault. I'd rather mix and match powersets and create something cool and fun than only ever get this playstyle half-way through Kinetic Melee.

I see where the miscommunication came in! We're good. 🙂 And I can agree that it would be more effort to balance than simply giving Sentinels access to Assault Sets. But wouldn't we have to change the Sentinel EPPs? The EPPs typically grant melee attacks right out of the Assault Sets, like Havoc Punch in Electric Assault and Mastery. But... I do have this? You can check out my thoughts, here. As to EPPs I think a split of Control/Support with maybe 1 Sustain power would make a great EPP for Instigators.

Personally I wouldn't want that. I feel like it creates too much of a gameplay divide in order to reinforce a narrative divide. I think most players would just take the "Train to 50" and then feel cheated or jilted at level 20+1 'cause their powers got shelved. Meanwhile a "Dedicated Street" hero who gets to 20+30 or whatever nomenclature we create is still going to have to get to level 50 in order to participate in any form of End-Game system or content (Unless the Devs split their 'End Game Design Time' across all the tree branches. It just makes more sense to me to decouple level from narrative and have different "Game Mechanicy" moments crop up than what we currently get. Probably P2W because they've already got the Opt-Out on Salvage drops and stuff on those.

What -is- a good reason to create a new Archetype if not to create a new playstyle? What exactly would be your reason to create a new AT? And no. Tank is not "Problematically Crowded". Tankers are just badly designed for End Game Content 'cause they were created for a game that didn't have end game content. The proposed Instigator would at -least- be able to do decent damage in Incarnate Content without stepping on the Brute's toes. There's 2 tank types in the game and at least 5 DPS types. 6 if you include Brutes. 3 support types if you don't include any of the EATs... Tank, Control, and Pets are the 3 combat roles that have the -least- options. As to "Sentinel with Provoke": It doesn't use Assault Sets. Period. It can't use Savage Assault or Earth Assault or Plant Assault. It's not a character archetype that weaves in and out of melee (even Blasters can get some of -that- going on unless they're /Archery or /Ninja or something). It's not a character archetype that tanks. Sentinel doesn't cover what I want from the Instigator at all, even with Provoke. I really hate the "Just play what we've already got that clearly doesn't do what you want!" mindset. It misses the entire point every time. Like a WoW player saying "Just play a Death Knight if you wanna be a Necromancer!" without any consideration of the narrative or role differences between the two. UGH.

After Vanden commented in a different thread about Sentinel level Defenses taking Alphas and holding aggro, I remembered that I'm not looking at building a pre-IO BRUTE, here. It's been a -long- time since I played a Scrapper to any level 'cause I just do Stalkers and Brutes, instead. The proposed Instigator would need a higher defensive baseline than Sentinels have. Closer to or slightly above Scrappers. But I stand by the idea of giving them a lower maximum Resistance Value. Either 75% or 85% and I stand by their health values. I still think the Sentinel Defensive Sets themselves would be entirely appropriate for their power selections. But the numbers would need to be tweaked up for the Instigator to take the Alpha and have decent survival while moving in and out of melee.

Not all teams are 8 players steamrolling everything in their path because lolnothingmatters. Sometimes it's 3-4 people and they can use slows and have it be useful. Sometimes it's just two people RPing while they fight crime in a videogame. And yeah. Incarnates and IOd out 50s is a whole other ball game. But if we're going to base all the Archetypes in the game on their level 50 versions then Dominators and Controllers are useless, Tankers need to be erased from the game, ANY Psychic or Lethal or Energy damage can die under the Fire/Toxic spam, and so forth.

I would say that calling them "Blasters" is reductionist and negative... You are, right, though, about the defense values. I hadn't considered the relative squishiness of scrappers when it comes to Alphas. Mostly because I play Brutes and Stalkers -instead- of Scrappers. I want to explicitly thank you for reminding me of this important fact! So they would need higher baseline values than the Sentinel gets, but still lower caps than Brutes/Tankers to keep them moving. Though while it is a Blapper's style to dance in and out of melee, they don't do it while -tanking- those NPCs. That's where the big difference actually is. The Instigator concept is a Tank, not a Damage Dealer.