Some thoughts on mez and squishies

[DrPippy]

One of the aspects of CoH that I've never appreciated is the prevalence of mez-dealing enemies.  As a general, if you have mez protection rule, you can simply ignore this.  If you're playing one of the squishy classes, it's much harder to deal with: after you run out of Break Frees, you're pretty likely to be incapacitated for significant chunks of a fight (speaking of which, who thought that a 30-60 second duration for the KoA stun grenades was a good idea?!?).  While I know that there are ways of dealing with this, it's always struck me as a poor game-design decision (particularly the susceptibility to chain mez).  I think there are a few relatively simple options to mitigate the issue:

1. Bring back the old Discipline inspirations.  3 minutes of mez protection rather than 30 seconds makes using inspirations to deal with mezzes a lot more viable.
2. Make Break Free an inherent power with a significant endurance cost; reduce the duration of subsequent mez protection to 10 seconds.  Getting mezzed is still dangerous in that it drops your toggles and getting out of it would be hard on the blue bar, but it'd be a little easier to deal with, and maybe gives a little more flexibility with the inspiration loadout.
3. Increase the base mez protection to 4.0 for all classes.  Essentially this means that you'd have to get hit twice before you get mezzed.  I'm not sure if bosses have a chance to do a critical mez like controllers do; if so it would be an interesting twist as you could still get one-shot mezzed if a boss landed a critical mez.
4. Reduce mez durations across the board.  Most other games I've played will have status effects lasting between 1 and 5 seconds; the 10+ second controls seem to be pretty unique to CoH.  They're also a bad idea: it's simply not fun being a sitting duck for long periods of time.  The sheer prevalence of enemies with control abilities means that this might be too big a project to be worthwhile.  Even so, some of the really long effects (I'm looking at you, KoA stun grenade.  And maybe Malta's Operation Officer has one as well?) should be looked at.
5. Increase inherent mez resistance for all classes.  If everybody started off with, say, 100% mez resistance, status effects would last half as long.  This might be a quicker way to do #4, but it has the downside of diluting the effect of mez resistance granted by other sources (e.g. IO sets, etc.).

 

I haven't looked at the code, so I have no idea how feasible it would be to implement any of these.  My hunch is that #1 should be pretty doable, and that by itself would make a significant difference.  Ideally, I'd love to see some combination of 1 and 2: using discipline inspirations gives you a way to plan ahead for status effects, but if you don't do this (either because you ran out, or because planning ahead is lame), then #2 would give you a more expensive way to deal with status effects after the fact.  I'm less enthusiastic about 3-5, but they might bring up some interesting possibilities.

 

Thoughts?

[Frostbiter]

As a long time player of Blasters I'd hate to seem some of the uniqueness of CoH go away. Part of that uniqueness is that different enemy groups are really challenging to different AT's and sets. It's not that hard to keep a few Breakfree's in your tray to deal with these situations and you can emergency combine 3 of the same into a breakfree on the fly. Blasters can also get some mez protection from their ATO's and the first 2 powers in your Primary and the 1st from your Secondary can all be fired while under the affects of any type of mez. Blasters are a difficult class and playing one you quickly figure out which enemies can give you the hardest time if they don't go down first. That's all just my 2 cents of course, YMMV.

[Shred Monkey]

Break free inspirations also have a very low % drop chance.  I do not know the numbers, but on one of my blasters I have it set to ignore all but heal, defense, and break frees.  It's pretty common that my 20 inspirations fill up on heal and defense, and with 0 or 1 break free.

 

I think Mez resistance (not mez immunity) should be more available through pool powers and IO sets.

 

Also (stealing from other games) receiving damage could reduce the timer on anything currently affecting you while having lower hp % could increase resistance on incoming mezz effects.

 

[Snarky]

It is perfect the way it is. In my opinion. My evidence?  The squishies have developed a thousand work arounds (and yes they do work at getting around it) and are run by some of the best players in the game
 

Not to say the class i gravitate to ( Brutes) is not filled with great strategists and tacticians... just saying those who play the classes  with tons of game altering control and damage that drops heavies in no time seem to earn their stripes and get through it   Not saying they dont struggle sometimes. But if it was easy no one would run anything else. 

[iBot]

I too like the system as is.  There are plenty of ways to get around enemies with status powers.  First and foremost is bring a friend.  Teammates are supposed to be your "work around" for any of the game's content.  Sure the odd boss may still hold you but at least the rest of the team is still pounding on them while you are happily taking a nap.

 

Solo you just learn which mobs to solo, which to not bother, and once you have incarnate powers you can take status protection.  Changing the game to make it easier for classes without inherent protection would diminish the game in my opinion.

[Replacement]

I like the idea of #5, probably scaling with level.

 

I really think the mez stuff is pretty bad game design, but I'm also apprehensive about writing it off. It's mentally filed under "charming flaws" for me, as it's unique to CoH and a cornerstone that much of the rest of the game is "balanced" around.

 

If it were easy to implement (it's not), I would set up mez magnitudes to decay over time, with the decay speeding up with resistance. That would make more of a gradient to this kitschy mez system we have, and create some design space for certain ATs and armor sets to have varying degrees of different protection thresholds where they notice things. As opposed to simple holes.

Edited January 8, 2020 by Replacement

[Replacement]

Also, mez would be far less frustrating if offensive toggles suppressed instead of dropping.  A lot of those are on classes without mez protection and it's just meaninglessly frustrating

[DrPippy]

28 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:

As a long time player of Blasters I'd hate to seem some of the uniqueness of CoH go away. Part of that uniqueness is that different enemy groups are really challenging to different AT's and sets. It's not that hard to keep a few Breakfree's in your tray to deal with these situations and you can emergency combine 3 of the same into a breakfree on the fly. Blasters can also get some mez protection from their ATO's and the first 2 powers in your Primary and the 1st from your Secondary can all be fired while under the affects of any type of mez. Blasters are a difficult class and playing one you quickly figure out which enemies can give you the hardest time if they don't go down first. That's all just my 2 cents of course, YMMV.

 

You're absolutely right; it's really good to have different groups that are more or less challenging for different builds.  Part of the problem here is how prevalent mobs with status effects are.  If you have an occasional bad guy with an autohit attack, that's a fun and engaging challenge for defense-based builds.  If half of them have autohit attacks, that's completely different.

 

Also, blasters are unique in having attacks that can fire through mez.  (I guess masterminds are in a similar situation since their pets can keep attacking.)  If you're, say, a corruptor, though, a Hold is completely incapacitating.  This would be a fun way to keep you on your toes if it came up once in a while.  When it's almost every group in the majority of 40-50 content, it's just frustrating.  (At least for me, hence the post!  YMMV.)

[DrPippy]

17 minutes ago, Replacement said:

Also, mez would be far less frustrating if offensive toggles suppressed instead of dropping.  A lot of those are on classes without mez protection and it's just meaninglessly frustrating

Especially if your "offensive" toggle—let's say it's, oh, Hurricane, for example—is one of your most effective defensive powers.

[Mr. Vee]

1 hour ago, DrPippy said:

3. Increase the base mez protection to 4.0 for all classes.  Essentially this means that you'd have to get hit twice before you get mezzed.  I'm not sure if bosses have a chance to do a critical mez like controllers do; if so it would be an interesting twist as you could still get one-shot mezzed if a boss landed a critical mez.

4. Reduce mez durations across the board. 

You can do 3 for 8 hours at a time with p2w defensive amplifier for 20 million spacebucks and help with 4 for 1.5 hours at a time with base buffs for common salvage. Not the full solution you want but definitely helps.

[wolfshadow31]

I did story arcs mainly solo to 50 with my ice/ice blaster, and the amount of times I needed to use a break free was probably less than 10 times.  I cant speak much for the other primaries etc, but I had freeze ray(ST hold) and then bitter freeze ray(same thing, only better) and once you learn which enemies have the holds or stuns, that's who you prioritise with like an immobilize, then move out of LOS, or hold, or put a slow or -to hit on them etc.  I didn't even take Clarion for my blaster...I just went for more dps.  I figure the best defence from getting mezzed...is kill the enemies before they can mez you. 😄 As was pointed out somewhere above, blasters and other squishy types have generally learned to work around their limitations, with relatively no issues. 

[Blackfeather]

I like the crowd control aspect a lot - it actually gives enemies a fighting chance of harming my squishies. 😉

Edited January 8, 2020 by Blackfeather

[Drazah Krad]

sorcery power pool has a "break free" power

 

jumping power power has a mez protection power

 

a few epic pools have mez protections

 

plenty of options to choose from honestly. My grav/storm controller rarely has problems with his high defense and mez protection.

 

might just be that you need to sacrifice some DPS for some mez resists.

[Apparition]

Between the P2W Defense Amplifier which gives you 4.0 status protection across the board, Break Free inspirations, and the Clarion Destiny power, I just don't see the issue.

[Luminara]

Unless some significant changes were made when the new servers were started, all "squishie" ATs already had a plethora of options related to being afflicted with status effects.  All of the control and buff/debuff primaries and secondaries have status effects, buffs and debuffs, which can be used to pre-emptively prevent mez.  Controllers, dominators and masterminds have pets which can soak up status effects, and some defender and blaster pets and pseudo-pets can, too.  Blasters can continue firing their tier 1 and 2 blasts while mezzed.

 

And that still doesn't include the buffs, debuffs or controls available in APPs, or IO set bonuses, or Incarnate stuff.

 

Oh, and extreme range with snipes, as well as other high damage attacks which can defeat mezzers before aggro.

 

And isn't there typically only one really threatening critter in each spawn?  One sapper, one mezzer, etc.  Target, destroy, clean up on Aisle 4.

[Shred Monkey]

I guess my only issue is that it is such a binary all or nothing type system.  If you're a melee toon, status effects are just ignored.  Before I started playing blasters, I did't even know what badguys used status effects after level 10-12.  That doesn't feel like good game design.  

 

But I can't say I feel strongly about this subject.  It's a non-issue for the most part, but if we're talking about it, I do think it could be better.  

[nihilii]

21 minutes ago, Apparition said:

Between the P2W Defense Amplifier which gives you 4.0 status protection across the board, Break Free inspirations, and the Clarion Destiny power, I just don't see the issue.

It's absolutely insane how gamechanging the defense amplifier can be, for squishie ATs.

 

I'd rather use it than Clarion in most cases. For starters it lets you stack another Destiny option, either Barrier/Rebirth for impressive survivability or Ageless to push out maximum damage. And then, it's available as soon as level 1 and doesn't force you into a long cast every 2 minutes.

 

Mag4 protection carries you through so much. I guess because we start at Mag2, which adds up to 6, which means 3 similar mez effects are required to overcome that. Right?

It can be heavy on your finances at level 50, but as price scales with level there's no reason not to snatch 8 hours of all 3 amplifiers on a new alt. Carries you through the early game, if nothing else.

[oedipus_tex]

I think we need a little of both. Make mezz not such an off/on switch for squishies, but also have some mezzes with some actual chance of affecting armored archetypes and squishies after they've built for mezz. There's currently very little in between, especially if you play a character with some kind of offensive toggle.

 

 

[Coyote]

40 minutes ago, Shred Monkey said:

I guess my only issue is that it is such a binary all or nothing type system.  If you're a melee toon, status effects are just ignored.  Before I started playing blasters, I did't even know what badguys used status effects after level 10-12.  That doesn't feel like good game design.  

 

But I can't say I feel strongly about this subject.  It's a non-issue for the most part, but if we're talking about it, I do think it could be better.  

 

To be honest, my first character on CoH was Illusion/Rad. I actually had NO idea why players ever complained about Sappers, Sorcerers, CoT Demons, KoA, Ring Mistresses, etc. Then I played a melee character with status protection, and found that there are actually NASTY DEBUFFS in the game. Who knew?!? 😄

 

Squishies have to worry about mezzing, and have proactive actions that may prevent it. Melee characters may have to worry about debuffs, and often have fewer proactive actions. Given break-frees, Rune of Protection, and Clarion, I don't think that mezzing is really an issue, just a challenge.

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, Shred Monkey said:

I guess my only issue is that it is such a binary all or nothing type system.

 

Everything can be viewed as binary, from a certain perspective.  You either have enough health, or you don't.  Or endurance.  Or damage.  Defense is definitely binary, you're either avoiding hits, or being hit.

 

But I grasp your intent.  It would be more interesting, from a gameplay perspective, if status effects were more like scaled debuffs.  Slows scaling up to immobilizations, immobilizations scaling up to holds, as effects stacked, for instance.  The problems, though...  In players' hands, it would actually be detrimental to several ATs, as it would essentially change a primary form of immediate damage mitigation to delayed "if you live long enough" mitigation.  Controllers, as an entire AT, would become mega-defenders, which would make debuffing defenders and corruptors all but obsolete.  Dominators would have a significantly more difficult experience, as they're reliant on the immediacy of their controls.  And which soft control debuffs would stack to create which controls, and what do you do with the ones you can't crowbar together?

 

And if debuffs require two or applications to scale up to status effects, is there any purpose to NPCs using them at all?  They won't provide any actual threat or require player response.  A slow won't prevent a player from generating an enormous upper hand in a fight against NPCs.  Neither will an immobilization.  So the AI has to be reworked, and NPCs overhauled with more, and more dangerous, ranged attacks, because there has to be some kind of threat mechanic (and i don't mean aggro) to engage the players.

 

I'll even posit that the debuffs applied would have to be reworked, to include other debuffs, just to give them weight.  That stacking slow would have to have a massive -recharge attached, for example, or, again, it's simply not worth paying attention to.  The inevitable result would be piles of -ToHit, -defense, -recharge, whatever it took to make the stacking debuffs threatening enough to keep players from ignoring them completely... and players would be up in arms over that in short order.

 

The system we have, binary though it may be, is about as good as it can be made without being even more irritating, or less forgiving.  It's not the most creative solution Cryptic could have implemented, but it works, in the sense that it poses a sufficient challenge to players to keep them engaged, but can be countered in enough ways to prevent it from being instantly overwhelming.

[vibal]

I generally agree with the sentiment. Taking character control away from the player isn't a great or interesting mechanic, but in CoX there's only a few egregious uses of it. Most of the time if I got nailed it was my fault. Even in those cases it's generally when I'm playing at +x/x6 or more. Malta are pretty universally loathed, but sappers are minions. They're easy to pick off. They could maybe be a bit more recognizable since plucking the dude in black fatigues in an army of identical dudes can be a challenge. Nobody really complains about the basket of stun grenades that come behind the sap. It's almost exclusively the sappers that cause groans which is fairly understandable since it's one of the few mechanics that's almost impossible to build against (gotta love ELA for it though). An end-drain res/partial res in acrobatics could be potentially in-line ("Your focus on peak physical perfection has made you resistant to blah blah."). Probably still not worth a power pick but might make it more interesting.

 

Low/mid level CoT could probably be tuned a bit (fewer mages/demons - more hordelings), but late level are actually pretty fun. Longbow and arachnos could both use a bit of tuning. Longbow's penchant for -res and all the CC is a bit over the top. Arachnos' "all exotic damage, all the time" motto could be retuned a tick. Carnies are the only group that are a pretty hard "Nope." for me no matter the toon. -End, -recov, CC at the boss and LT level, -def. Pretty much any toon has something to dislike.

 

 

 

[iBot]

I would counter the need to tune or adjust any of the groups by saying this is the beauty of the design for CoX.  It is possible for everything in the game to be countered however it is difficult if not impossible for one AT/powerset grouping to do it.  This is an MMO after all.  I contend that all those groups that present several challenges are there to give players a reason to find teammates.  That's not to say that a solo player cannot deal with those challenges.  It requires some creative use of the tools present.  However, a solid group of mixed ATs and roles handles anything the game has to offer easily.  It is something that a lot of games miss the mark on but I think was nailed in CoX.

[boggo2300]

I must be missing something, I 90% of the time play a blaster and I never think about Mezz protection, or how horrible mobs with mezz are, I honestly don't get the strong feelings about it, it's such a minor inconvenience, that happens so rarely, and hell nowadays you still have your t1 and t2 attacks as a blaster while mezz'd,  I agree 100% with what @iBotsays above, we don't need city of everyone playing the same toon which is what is going to happen if we keep giving everyone the same ability to deal with different situations

[DrPippy]

3 hours ago, Luminara said:

 It would be more interesting, from a gameplay perspective, if status effects were more like scaled debuffs.  Slows scaling up to immobilizations, immobilizations scaling up to holds, as effects stacked, for instance.  The problems, though...  In players' hands, it would actually be detrimental to several ATs, as it would essentially change a primary form of immediate damage mitigation to delayed "if you live long enough" mitigation.  Controllers, as an entire AT, would become mega-defenders, which would make debuffing defenders and corruptors all but obsolete.  Dominators would have a significantly more difficult experience, as they're reliant on the immediacy of their controls.  And which soft control debuffs would stack to create which controls, and what do you do with the ones you can't crowbar together?

 

And if debuffs require two or applications to scale up to status effects, is there any purpose to NPCs using them at all?  They won't provide any actual threat or require player response.  A slow won't prevent a player from generating an enormous upper hand in a fight against NPCs.  Neither will an immobilization.  So the AI has to be reworked, and NPCs overhauled with more, and more dangerous, ranged attacks, because there has to be some kind of threat mechanic (and i don't mean aggro) to engage the players.

 

I'll even posit that the debuffs applied would have to be reworked, to include other debuffs, just to give them weight.  That stacking slow would have to have a massive -recharge attached, for example, or, again, it's simply not worth paying attention to.  The inevitable result would be piles of -ToHit, -defense, -recharge, whatever it took to make the stacking debuffs threatening enough to keep players from ignoring them completely... and players would be up in arms over that in short order.

 

The system we have, binary though it may be, is about as good as it can be made without being even more irritating, or less forgiving.  It's not the most creative solution Cryptic could have implemented, but it works, in the sense that it poses a sufficient challenge to players to keep them engaged, but can be countered in enough ways to prevent it from being instantly overwhelming.

 

This is a really interesting idea; I was thinking this morning that it would be nice to see something like this if we were so fortunate as to get a CoX 2.  I think you raise some good points about potential pitfalls, but I also think that there are ways around them.  Just as a thought experiment, how do you think this would work?

 

Essentially, mez protection, rather than being the on/off switch that it currently is, would act to decrease the effectiveness of status effects.  At full effectiveness, you'd have something like this:

 

Hold = -100% recharge, -100% movement; Stun = -100% recharge, -80% movement; Immob = -100% movement.

 

But the total effectiveness would be scaled down by a factor MAG/PROTECTION.  For example, Char is a MAG 3 hold with a base duration of 10 seconds (I think). If I recall correctly, the protection that scrappers get from their protection power ends up being 10.  So if you hit a scrapper with Char, the hold would operate at an effectiveness of 3/10=30%.  Instead of being completely incapacitated, or completely shrugging everything off, he'd suffer a debuff of -30% recharge, -30% movement until the hold wore off.

 

Now, if NPCS had a base protection of 2, 3, and 4 for minions, lieuts, and bosses (which I believe is the current system), a controller would still be able to one-shot mez a minion or a lieut, but would require two applications to incapacitate a boss.  However, instead of being completely unaffected by a single MAG 3 hold, the boss would suffer -75% debuffs to recharge and movement.  This would also open up a lot more options for AV fights.

 

This would probably require way too much rebalancing (and coding) to be anything but a pipe dream for CoH as it currently stands.  But if I were going to make my own superhero game, I'd try something like this.

[Luminara]

35 minutes ago, DrPippy said:

Essentially, mez protection, rather than being the on/off switch that it currently is, would act to decrease the effectiveness of status effects.  At full effectiveness, you'd have something like this:

 

Hold = -100% recharge, -100% movement; Stun = -100% recharge, -80% movement; Immob = -100% movement.

 

But the total effectiveness would be scaled down by a factor MAG/PROTECTION.  For example, Char is a MAG 3 hold with a base duration of 10 seconds (I think). If I recall correctly, the protection that scrappers get from their protection power ends up being 10.  So if you hit a scrapper with Char, the hold would operate at an effectiveness of 3/10=30%.  Instead of being completely incapacitated, or completely shrugging everything off, he'd suffer a debuff of -30% recharge, -30% movement until the hold wore off.

 

The magnitude factor could be thrown in the trash.  The framework for this approach already exists in Resistance.  Resistance debuffs are resisted by Resistance.  The same thing could be applied to all debuffs, then all status effects removed and replaced by corresponding debuffs which functioned in an appropriate manner.  Slows (-RunSpeed, -Recharge) would completely replace holds and scale up to the point of locking down the player character in the same manner, while simultaneously giving players the means of partially abating the effect via +RunSpeed and +Recharge slotting in their powers.  Magnitude would be obsolete in this system.

 

But, again, it creates new problems.  How, in a game where every player can achieve capped +Recharge, do you really make -Recharge powerful enough without also grossly penalizing those who don't take Hasten and/or build up significant +Recharge from IO set bonuses and Incarnate abilities?  How do you make existing status protection powers meaningful again, especially the ones which serve no other purpose, when they are less effective or broadly applicable than simply slotting enhancements, and avoid removing them entirely (which would necessitate multiple powers to be designed and implemented as replacements for the out-dated status protections)?

 

The NPC problems still remain, as well.  The current spawn model imposes limits to prevent players from being hit with, for example, three Rikti Mentalists at the same time.  If you use the same spawn model, you consequently have to give your mezzer enormous debuffs.  A mezzer with small debuffs isn't a threat, at all, because it's never going to survive long enough to stack the debuffs to mez level.  And a single, overwhelming debuff that hits mez level right away is no better than the current mez system.  The other option is to rework the spawn model and give everything debuffs, but that doesn't actually solve the problem for ranged ATs, it merely shifts the problem to ranged ATs with lower initial damage output.  It might work for blasters, but ATs with lower base damage scales and caps are unfairly penalized.  In effect, they're "squishier" than they were under the original system.

 

And going back to defenders, corruptors and dominators, what is their purpose in the game under the new debuff-mez system?  Do we, then, start redesigning defenders and corruptors to compensate for their reduced effectiveness as primary debuffers, given that controllers are the new debuff kings and queens?  Or do we simply reverse the roles, giving defenders and corruptors massive debuff values which automatically jump to mez level, and how do we reposition controllers so they remain unique and relevant?  How do we fix the problem of dominators having to survive long enough for their debuffs to flip to mez?  What does the new system entail for Kheldians, or masterminds?

 

It would be a very workable and flexible system, if we were creating the game from the ground up.  But as an adjustment of existing content, in the existing context of the game, it creates so many problems.  But, there's always hope.  System Shock 3 is in development, so a Co* 2 is always possible.