Game Balance & The Endgame

[summers]

5 minutes ago, YIP said:

I have a very different perspective than many here:

 

The primary reason I play this game is that there is lots of content that is accessible for my 4 year old and I to duo, and occasionally trio with his 5 year old cousin. We would never have played the grindy game that was issues 6-10 or so on live servers.  I rely heavily on incan destiny and prestige tp powers to move the kids around zones and difficult-to-navigate maps, and in order to make toons playable for the kids I have to cut out any powers with a crash or location targeting. 

 

I know a dozen other players or so that play extensively with their young children, so I am not alone in this.  While I could not care less about titan weapons or AT modifiers or any of that technical stuff, I would like for my son and I to be able to play the existing content with our current toons without needing to research powers and respec them.  I don't want to have to create custom easy AE arcs so that the kids  don't get "beated up" on minimum difficulty.

 

I don't expect the devs to bend over backwards to accommodate people in my situation, but they should recognize that there is a sizable portion of the server that is completely uninterested in any additional challenges, grindiness, or barriers to accessing content.

While I and a lot of other people desire greater difficulty at the 50+ incarnate level, I wouldn't want to see it come at the expense of anyone that wants to steamroll this content. I think that's an inherent and crucial part of the fun of the game.

 

Having said that, there are difficulty sliders and there should remain a difficulty where you can run through them like a hot knife through butter.

 

The higher difficulty should scale more intelligently and be actually difficult rather than a cakewalk at +4. That's really all I want. A fair but difficult level of gameplay where powers like holds, stuns, -recharge or -tohit debuffs are actually relevant. 

[Wavicle]

1 hour ago, ABlueThingy said:

Well, that's not really true.  Because at the time there was no way to "earn" that power at all.  Not for a long time.  The purple patch CRUSHED people.  Tanks used to regularly fight groups of mobs at +8.  That was why the steep drop off was added for anything higher then +4.  Because some players were so powerful it was functionally impossible to challenge them under the existing rules.

 

They nerfed AoEs to stop all the blasters farming, not just the wolf farms.  I remember the wails when it became untenable to Hydra farm because they added ranged attacks to everything. Wolves got Hurl, Monkeys got psi blasts, Hydra got spit, all hellion/skull/troll/etc thugs were given at least one pistol attack , etc.  I forget if they were all ADDED or they just boosted the range.  Wasn't there a -acc added to fly for the same reason?  But all that was done because Blasters could easily fly up and out-range foes and just farm XP all the live long day.

 

ED dropped in issue 6(along with CoV) and IOs didn't come out until Issue 9.  Frankly the backlash against ED would have been minimal if IOs launched with ED

Yes, it is really true. They put in the Purple Patch and ED so they would have room to give us more power later. This was explicitly so.

[Wavicle]

1 hour ago, YIP said:

in order to make toons playable for the kids I have to cut out any powers with a crash or location targeting. 

small side note, you may be aware of this, but using "powexec_location target" or "powexec_location self" you can now bind or macro location targeted powers to be located at your target or yourself instead.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Wavicle

[ABlueThingy]

1 minute ago, Wavicle said:

Yes, it is really true. They put in the Purple Patch and ED so they would have room to give us more power later. This was explicitly so.

 I'll agree on ED, it was vaguely intended to allow room for expansion later.  Only took them 3 more issues to figure out what...

 

I don't believe that the Purple Patch was done for a later expansion though?  Mostly because it never came.   It was a flat nerf to player power and their ability to team (functionally) and was stated as such at the time. (The teaming thing just seemed like an accident imo)  There have been many, many nerfs in this game where the stated goal was to reign in players to a specific level of power.  Especially pre-Issue 9.  For some reason the Devs thought players should/could be challenged at +0/1.  Which is just silly to imagine these days.

 

But I will concede the point, I can't know what they were intending and my memory could be fuzzy and a lot of the original dev choices were... interesting.  And I don't really want to argue on this because I believe we should do this NOW.  No mater what the original intent.

 

 

 

[summers]

20 minutes ago, ABlueThingy said:

For some reason the Devs thought players should/could be challenged at +0/1.  Which is just silly to imagine these days.

 

A Minion is no match for a Hero or Villain of the same level. A single Hero or Villain should be able to defeat multiple Minions simultaneously.

 

Lieutenants are much stronger than Minions, and often have greater powers or weapons. A Hero or Villain should be able to defeat a Lieutenant and maybe a Minion.

 

Bosses are powerful foes. A Boss on his own is oftentime a fair match for a single Hero or Villain.

 

How things have changed!

[Wavicle]

22 minutes ago, ABlueThingy said:

 I'll agree on ED, it was vaguely intended to allow room for expansion later.  Only took them 3 more issues to figure out what...

 

I don't believe that the Purple Patch was done for a later expansion though?  Mostly because it never came.   It was a flat nerf to player power and their ability to team (functionally) and was stated as such at the time. (The teaming thing just seemed like an accident imo)  There have been many, many nerfs in this game where the stated goal was to reign in players to a specific level of power.  Especially pre-Issue 9.  For some reason the Devs thought players should/could be challenged at +0/1.  Which is just silly to imagine these days.

 

But I will concede the point, I can't know what they were intending and my memory could be fuzzy and a lot of the original dev choices were... interesting.  And I don't really want to argue on this because I believe we should do this NOW.  No mater what the original intent.

 

 

 

The purple patch was put in so simply the EXISTING level of power was appropriate. ED was put in so FUTURE power would be appropriate.

[golstat2003]

2 hours ago, ABlueThingy said:

 

Quite.  I agree with them there.  I don't know how possible it even is to rebalance the game around IOs. Or at least to do it before the sun explodes.

 

That said I'm not against arguments saying that future high end content should be balanced around it. 

 

They were working on a post-50 advancement system to let us continue to gain power and basically needed ED to kneecap us first.  If you're already at the damage cap and Acc cap and Def cap and Rech cap... what is +3.5 Melee Def or 7% rech from an IO going to be worth to you?

 

I remember it changed a lot, one of the iterations was a skills based system for sciencey research, detectiveing, etc.  It eventually mutated into IOs/Crafting...

 

...I would love a detective system...

 

 

You can reverse that argument.  The game has always swung around with harder or easier content added.  Nerfs and buffs to the base game.  Isn't it selfish to tell that from now on the game can ONLY get easier, when in the past it changed all the time? That this here and now is the new base difficulty and it can't be made harder from here on out.  I think some people could see that as very selfish as well.

 

...Now see, like, I typed all that but I don't want to end on it.  Because I don't actually want to see the observable base difficulty to really raise that much.  I agree that this game has, for most any kind of team and a lot of solo players, for the majority of the life of this game, been easy.  Not always, not in every mission or against every villain group, not for every AT and powerset at all times.  But it was fun and exciting most of the time, I think.

 

But for the sake of discussion...

 

if it was easy to steamroll in the past, and now we are objectively more powerful in all measurable ways... I don't think nerfs to the most powerful, over-preforming, sets would actually make people unable to steamroll.  You'd have to butcher a set to make a character weaker then the pre-IO days.

 

If the game was always easy and you could steam roll things durring the SO era and now in the IO/Incarnate era people are even stronger... as long as you don't remove more power then people gained since the SO era people will still be able to steamroll and be powerful.  Right?  X+10 -5 is still X+5.  As long as X alone was enough then X+5 should still be enough.

 

That makes sense, right? 

 

 

 

To be clear I'm not against nerfs (or targetted buffs) as long as as any 8 players can still steam roll the game. Things like more debuffs for mobs, more bosses in missions and many of the interesting things suggested over the years,  though should only appear in the higher level difficulty that teams CHOOSE to undertake

[golstat2003]

2 hours ago, YIP said:

I have a very different perspective than many here:

 

The primary reason I play this game is that there is lots of content that is accessible for my 4 year old and I to duo, and occasionally trio with his 5 year old cousin. We would never have played the grindy game that was issues 6-10 or so on live servers.  I rely heavily on incan destiny and prestige tp powers to move the kids around zones and difficult-to-navigate maps, and in order to make toons playable for the kids I have to cut out any powers with a crash or location targeting. 

 

I know a dozen other players or so that play extensively with their young children, so I am not alone in this.  While I could not care less about titan weapons or AT modifiers or any of that technical stuff, I would like for my son and I to be able to play the existing content with our current toons without needing to research powers and respec them.  I don't want to have to create custom easy AE arcs so that the kids  don't get "beated up" on minimum difficulty.

 

I don't expect the devs to bend over backwards to accommodate people in my situation, but they should recognize that there is a sizable portion of the server that is completely uninterested in any additional challenges, grindiness, or barriers to accessing content.

This. This right here.

[golstat2003]

2 hours ago, Haijinx said:

Yeah.  That's where they fucked up. 

What's the alternative? We not having any new content for several years while they re-balance the game around IOs? Making Set IOs available in stores as opposed to the market? I don't think it's realistic for a dev team of this size. I'm sorry but that's just a fact some folks are going to have to accept at this point.

[ABlueThingy]

2 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

To be clear I'm not against nerfs (or targetted buffs) as long as as any 8 players can still steam roll the game. Things like more debuffs for mobs, more bosses in missions and many of the interesting things suggested over the years,  though should only appear in the higher level difficulty that teams CHOOSE to undertake

I'd also be cool with some options to make it even easier.  I knew a guy back during live that had to stop playing because he had something like a stroke and couldn't react very fast.  He would only play when using lots of slows or team with people who could.  Me and a friend used to a run Kin/ice and Dark/Ice def to give him enough of a delay that he could keep up comfortably.

 

Someone in my SG at the time pitched the idea of some kind of "Slow mode" in the difficulty options but I don't think it got much traction. Just drops a 50% -rech and 50% slow on all the mobs in mission.  Or something like that. 

[golstat2003]

With that said adding a setting of higher difficulty to remove minions and LTs probably (there's that word again lol) wouldn't be all that difficult. Or maybe even a mode of only AVs. (Call it nightmare mode).

[ABlueThingy]

1 minute ago, golstat2003 said:

With that said adding a setting of higher difficulty to remove minions and LTs probably (there's that word again lol) wouldn't be all that difficult. Or maybe even a mode of only AVs. (Call it nightmare mode).

Was it Doom that had a Nightmare mode where all the enemies would revive after 10 seconds? 

 

Ultimate speed run, all mobs have Revive with a 10 seconds cooldown. 

[Darkneblade]

4 minutes ago, ABlueThingy said:

Was it Doom that had a Nightmare mode where all the enemies would revive after 10 seconds? 

 

Ultimate speed run, all mobs have Revive with a 10 seconds cooldown. 

they will farm it lol if that mode got into CoH. Though I didn't see freakshow farms.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Darkneblade

[ABlueThingy]

1 minute ago, Darkneblade said:

they will farm it lol.

reverse debt protection. Revived guys give no XP. Also make it the revive from Willpower, a self vengence

[Haijinx]

7 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

What's the alternative? We not having any new content for several years while they re-balance the game around IOs? Making Set IOs available in stores as opposed to the market? I don't think it's realistic for a dev team of this size. I'm sorry but that's just a fact some folks are going to have to accept at this point.

Where is the groan button?

 

I am capable of doing the following things at the same time. 

 

Realizing that Power Inflation is out of hand, that the game set to +4x8 is simply too easy for a team of IO'd incarnates

Realizing at the current state IO'd characters and even worse IO'd incarnate characters live inside a very narrow band of the game's mechanical range.  

Realizing the developers aren't going to do anything substantive about it. 

Understanding that when the game is set at +0x1 teams of casuals should be able to have an easy game to play.  (Like the guy with his young child) 

 

You seem to think that if you give even an inch on this topic suddenly the developers are going to lock the doors and not come out until 2060 (a date you seem to like for hyperbole) 

 

I think that actually you are able to see the above points as well, but you don't want admit it.  

 

 

[Haijinx]

I'll add that It seems like the "AI" for this game is intentionally dumbed down for some reason.  

 

Which is a tragedy.  

[golstat2003]

7 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Where is the groan button?

 

I am capable of doing the following things at the same time. 

 

Realizing that Power Inflation is out of hand, that the game set to +4x8 is simply too easy for a team of IO'd incarnates

Realizing at the current state IO'd characters and even worse IO'd incarnate characters live inside a very narrow band of the game's mechanical range.  

Realizing the developers aren't going to do anything substantive about it. 

Understanding that when the game is set at +0x1 teams of casuals should be able to have an easy game to play.  (Like the guy with his young child) 

 

You seem to think that if you give even an inch on this topic suddenly the developers are going to lock the doors and not come out until 2060 (a date you seem to like for hyperbole) 

 

I think that actually you are able to see the above points as well, but you don't want admit it.  

 

 

Glad we finally agree on something. 🙂 

 

EDIT: To be clear it NOT at all a fuck up to say the game is maintaining it's balance point around SOs.

Edited September 29, 2020 by golstat2003

[golstat2003]

3 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

I'll add that It seems like the "AI" for this game is intentionally dumbed down for some reason.  

 

Which is a tragedy.  

Or more like it was never improved from where the game started back in the day. lack of manpower and greater priorities and all that jazz. 

[Wavicle]

9 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Where is the groan button?

 

I am capable of doing the following things at the same time. 

 

Realizing that Power Inflation is out of hand, that the game set to +4x8 is simply too easy for a team of IO'd incarnates

Realizing at the current state IO'd characters and even worse IO'd incarnate characters live inside a very narrow band of the game's mechanical range.  

Realizing the developers aren't going to do anything substantive about it. 

Understanding that when the game is set at +0x1 teams of casuals should be able to have an easy game to play.  (Like the guy with his young child) 

 

You seem to think that if you give even an inch on this topic suddenly the developers are going to lock the doors and not come out until 2060 (a date you seem to like for hyperbole) 

 

I think that actually you are able to see the above points as well, but you don't want admit it.  

 

 

All that's being said is that further difficulty should be restricted to Optional modes and future Incarnate content. What is the big problem?

[Haijinx]

1 minute ago, golstat2003 said:

Or more like it was never improved from where the game started back in the day. lack of manpower and greater priorities and all that jazz. 

No.  That's not it.  There are things the mobs do that make no sense really. 

 

For example a baddie will run away into other mobs.  You can see this really clearly with the Arch Villians during the Manticore task force.   But the approached groups do not aggro.    

 

Many have speculated it seems like they were intended to call for help.   "Cmon guys lets get em!"  

 

But it was dumbed out for some reason.  And its really a shame.  

[golstat2003]

1 minute ago, Haijinx said:

No.  That's not it.  There are things the mobs do that make no sense really. 

 

For example a baddie will run away into other mobs.  You can see this really clearly with the Arch Villians during the Manticore task force.   But the approached groups do not aggro.    

 

Many have speculated it seems like they were intended to call for help.   "Cmon guys lets get em!"  

 

But it was dumbed out for some reason.  And its really a shame.  

Interesting. I've never heard that they may have been supposed to call for help. Actually that might be a long standing bug that was never fixed. I do remember them running all over a map even if they were the last mob. So not sure.

[Wavicle]

Just now, Haijinx said:

No.  That's not it.  There are things the mobs do that make no sense really. 

 

For example a baddie will run away into other mobs.  You can see this really clearly with the Arch Villians during the Manticore task force.   But the approached groups do not aggro.    

 

Many have speculated it seems like they were intended to call for help.   "Cmon guys lets get em!"  

 

But it was dumbed out for some reason.  And its really a shame.  

I think it's just designed to get players to accidentally aggro if they follow or mistarget and to reward CC for keeping spawns collected. I don't think it was ever "dumbed down" from a previous version where the groups aggroed automatically. Though I admit the idea has some merit. Again, if the AI change isn't too hard, perhaps this could be part of an expanded difficulty setting.

[Haijinx]

Just now, Wavicle said:

All that's being said is that further difficulty should be restricted to Optional modes and future Incarnate content. What is the big problem?

I don't feel we are actually at the potential solutions stage of this situation. 

 

I don't think we ever actually will be.   We seem to be stuck in a sort of Status Quo is God holding pattern.  

 

So offering up solutions to problems y'all don't actually believe in is kinda dumb. 

 

[Troo]

On 9/27/2020 at 3:31 PM, Troo said:

The game is easy player friendly to start with a lot to learn for new players (without blocking fun). It ebbs and flows a little while leveling.

 

Later in the game it does get too easy if someone is leveraging accolades, set bonuses, incarnates, p2w, empowerment buffs, temps, etc. Folks simply surpass current content.

 

However if someone is using maybe 2 of the listed it may not be 'too easy'. If they are only using 1 high level content is definitely not 'too easy'.

@Saikochoro Maybe I should use something other than 'easy'. Perhaps 'friendly' is a better fit. (see edit above.. thanks @Arcana 2015 for the reminder)

 

"Nobody can wall of text like Arcana. *Nobody*.
It's always worth reading though."

- Cailyn Alaynn

 

"Hold on to your eyeballs, history lesson soapbox Wall-o-text inbound." -Arcana September 17, 2015

Spoiler

 

https://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=9675.19480

 

Hold on to your eyeballs, history lesson soapbox Wall-o-text inbound.

If there's one thing I think most proponents of City of Heroes gameplay agreed on, its that City of Heroes offered freedom.  Not unlimited freedom, but exceptional freedom to play in any mode one wanted to.  The gameplay was friendly to soloers.  It was friendly to randomized teams.  And with the invention system, it even became friendly to min/maxers.  That freedom manifested most strongly in the belief that City of Heroes was unlike other comparable games in that it eschewed the notion of "trinity" play.  What's trinity play?  "Trinity" refers to the "holy trinity" of fantasy gaming: the tank, the healer, and the damage (DPS).  The idea is that every player (character) had a role to play on the team, and there were three roles: kill stuff, prevent stuff from attacking everybody else, keep stuff alive.  If you were good at one role you'd be bad at the other roles.  This ensured that everyone *had* a role.  Someone good at two or even three of these things would make everyone else superfluous or redundant.  The design focus was on the *player*, not the *character*.  Players were encouraged to make characters that would serve a purpose on teams; in other words characters were the tools that players used to play the game.

The problem with trinity play in a role playing game is, ironically, role playing.  If the players see their characters not as gameplay tools, like chess pieces, and more like entities that represent them in the game, like avatars, then it can be grating to have the game tell you what you have to make.  For some players, its comforting to know that you have a role that everyone else expects, and if you just do that and everyone else does theirs then things will work out.  For others, its stifling.  But its important to note that trinity play isn't intrinsically stupid, its intended to solve very real gameplay problems.  How do you make sure everyone feels (relatively) equally important to the team's success if *not* to assign them jobs to perform.  And that only works if everyone can't do all the jobs themselves singly.

City of Heroes is known for *not* being focused on trinity-style play.  But *why*?  Is it because the devs felt that trinity play was bad and wanted to try something else?  Actually no.  In fact, its well documented that the original devs believed in trinity play, and actually tried to enforce it in City of Heroes.   The reason why City of Heroes isn't focused on trinity play is because the original devs were absolutely horrible at designing for it.

See, trinity play requires two basic fundamental design rules to be in force.  First, it requires every class (archetype) to be good at one of the trinity roles (tank, damage, buff/heal).  And second, it requires every class to be bad at everything else.  If you're a tank with decent DPS, it doesn't matter if there are better DPS classes: you don't need them.  And when you don't need them, the damage soaking ability you possess to protect them can now be used just to protect yourself.  And with that, you might not need buff/healers anymore either, because there's nothing squishy around you.  The devs *tried* to do this, but failed in two spectacular ways.

First, they did *try* to make a trinity tank.  Tankers have very high damage mitigation and relatively low damage (original launch tankers had damage mods of about 0.6 - significantly lower than they possessed for most of the game at 0.8 ).  The were generally not good at buffing or healing.  However, even this floor of damage was pretty high compared to the damage necessary to kill stuff.  By allowing tankers to enhance their damage to as much as three times the base level, they allowed tankers to grow into damage levels significantly higher than even the DPS classes possessed initially.  True, DPS classes could also do this and be better, but the point of trinity design is not that something else is better, but that something else is *necessary*.  If you have *enough* damage, more damage isn't necessary.  It might be nice, but its not really essential.  Because of this, tankers could easily solo in terms of kill speed.  And when they soloed, because they had such high damage mitigation they didn't need healers or buffers.  It wasn't because they didn't need *healing*, it was because natural regeneration was high enough to substitute for healing.  More on that in a second.

They had more success with their trinity DPS class, blasters.  Blasters really are bad at mitigation and bad at buffing and pretty good at damage.  But the devs made a second mistake.  If tanker damage was good enough, blaster damage was awesome.  Blasters were the literal incarnation of the overpowered mage in game design discussions: blasters could kill so fast neither mitigation nor buff/healing mattered much, at least initially.  Eventually without powerful slotting blasters felt the sting of lacking mitigation and healing - in fact data mining analysis by the devs shows that Blasters performed their trinity role beyond expectations: they were always as a class the most burdened with dying in missions, and most reliant on good teams to keep them functioning correctly.  Ironically, long past the point where the devs abandoned trinity thinking blasters were still hampered by the legacy of this design, all the way up to Issue 24 which was the first *serious* attempt to break them from their trinity past.

And then they pretty much dropped the ball.  Literally by design (this is also well-documented), Scrappers were designed to break the trinity design because Scrappers were originally intended to be good soloers.  Remember in trinity design there's no such thing as a good soloer, because trinity design mandates that everyone is good at one thing and bad at everything else.  A good soloer is a trinity breaker (there are heavy-trinity games that contain good soloers as exceptions, but its still the case they are just that: exceptions).  Scrappers had a good balance between damage and mitigation.  They only lacked buff/heal.  And they didn't need buff/heal because of a design error I mentioned above: in City of Heroes if you had enough mitigation you didn't need healing, because everyone had a good source of self-healing: Regeneration.  City of Heroes implements always on health recovery.  In effect, CoH regeneration is a continuous, always on, never suppressed, works in combat, Heal-Over-Time (HoT).  And its strong: by default base regen recovers full health in 4 minutes.  That's like a heal over time of 5% health every 12 seconds (actually, its exactly like that because that's how regeneration is implemented).  And on top of that City of Heroes offered a relatively easy to acquire power called Health that anyone could get that significantly boosted regeneration: +25%, enhanceable.  It wasn't uncommon to have Scrappers and Tankers with fully slotted Health running around with the equivalent of a HoT of 5% every 7 seconds or so.  That's approaching the strength of many HoT buffs by actual buffers in other games.

That huge amount of "natural" health recovery meant even things that didn't possess true healing like most Scrappers and Tankers could avoid the need for them if their damage mitigation was high enough, simply because their high mitigation meant they didn't take as much damage that needed healing.  Not to mention actual Regeneration scrappers that had health recovery comparable to other MMOs raid monsters.

The devs screwed up with defenders in a different way.  Defenders couldn't necessarily do everything well (corner cases notwithstanding), but what they could often do was buff something else to do everything well.  Empathy defenders could buff almost anyone into basically a high performance Scrapper.  FF defenders could buff a player to have as much if not more mitigation than the average tanker.  If Scrappers were the trinity exception, Defenders were the trinity-busters.  At launch, defenders were seen as difficult to solo, but very quickly they were also seen as the ultimate force multipliers: if you have enough defenders, it doesn't matter what you are - including if you are a defender yourself.  You will be buffed into a trinity-bitch-slapping tank-mage (or if you were a heal/buffer yourself, a tank-mage-cleric).

And then there's controllers.  I've saved the best for last, and I call them the best because even the devs recognized controllers as being the biggest threat to trinity play when the game first launched - they were actually the first archetype targeted for trinity-thinking nerfs.  Controllers are the good and the bad of City of Heroes design rolled into one.  Controllers possessed a megaton of hard mez originally.  A ridiculous amount, in fact.  Only players who played controllers from the start would necessarily know this, but originally Controllers did no damage in many of their mezzes, but they had a lot more mez potential in that their AoE mezzes had far lower recharge.  They could pretty much keep entire spawns of minions, Lts, and Bosses, permanently held for the entire duration of a fight.  Forever, in fact.  They could all but instantly paralyze Archvillains and turn them into punching bags, even better than punching bags because punching bags at least sway side to side a little.  They were more like bowling pins.  The good news for non-trinity play: here was a way to deal with aggro that was fundamentally different from the traditional tank.  The bad news for gameplay in general: it was a ridiculous way to diversify from trinity play because it made basically everything else moot.  You didn't need *anything* if you were fighting inert statues.  You didn't need healing or buffing or aggro control or mitigation or even loads of damage.  Sure, those things would help, in the sense that having a bowling ball that detonated on impact would help score strikes.  But it was wholly gratuitous and unnecessary.  Controllers didn't just break trinity play, they straight up broke the game entirely.

Sure, initially they had low damage, so it could be slow and frustrating to solo a controller.  I once spent fifteen minutes soloing a Jump bot because I ran out of endurance and the only way to keep him from killing me was to just keep Blinding him.  This turned him into a statue unable to attack me while I didn't have enough endurance to do more than nick him occasionally because I needed enough end to keep blinding him.  This was an end of mission boss, mind you.  And then tier 9 pets arrive and with that the missing piece in Controllers' trinity-nullifying grand slam package.  And the devs figured it out pretty quickly.  Controllers were targeted early and often for game balancing.  First they had their AoE hard mez toned down dramatically, increasing recharge all the way up to a base of two minutes.  The (explicitly stated by the devs) idea was that such mez was so powerful it should only be available maybe once a fight (spawn) or once every other fight even (at least for most players).  They didn't want to take it away, but they sort of had to.  And the only option available to them at the time was to make it less available.  They also added damage to non-damaging mez, added containment, and modified pet stacking.  All in all, in a funhouse mirror sort of way, the devs actually turned Controllers into Scrappers: a jack of all trades good at everything class that even included buff/heal.  Its no surprise that Controllers always top the list of most powerful archetype as a whole.

So we didn't get non-trinity play because the game is designed for it, and its not because of unlimited buff stacking or hard mez.  Its actually in spite of those things.  Its really because the devs were too good at making classes good at something, and horrible at making them bad at everything else, and ignoring their own rules in the worst possible design situations.  It wasn't until around Issue 7 that the thinking turned away from trinity design explicitly, and for reasons having nothing to do with Issue 7 itself.  It all has to do with what happened before: City of Villains.

The design team for City of Villains had a bit of a quandary.  They wanted CoV to be not too dissimilar from CoH, because they wanted the game play to be familiar, and also because they had to use the same game engine and wanted to reuse as much material from CoH as possible to reduce development costs.  So one very interesting decision they made was to say that since heroes were build on cooperation (i.e. trinity design), CoV villains would be the opposite of that: they would be designed to be self-sufficient, and work together by choice rather than design.  In effect, villains were all going to be Scrappers.  As a result, while CoH hero archetypes were at least *intended* to be good at one thing and bad at everything else, CoV villains were designed to be good at one thing and at least okay at one or more other things.  Stalkers had good offense and okay defense.  Masterminds had good aggro control and decent offense plus buff/heal.  Dominators had good aggro control (vis-a-vis actual control) and decent offense.  Corruptors had decent offense and buff/heal.  Brutes had good offense and good defense.  They were all designed to run counter to trinity play by design.

Once the devs saw how CoV villains worked, and also took note of the train wreck that was the pseudo-trinity landscape in CoH, they started to change their mindset to new design rules that focused not on trinity play but on cooperative self-sufficiency.  In other words, every class should be able to solo by being good enough at everything, and really good at something.  That way being good enough means they can always solo reasonably well and can always do something on any team, and their specialty means they would be desirable on teams beyond just marginally useful at least some time.  I'm not saying they succeeded at it consistently - stalkers and blasters in particular were troublesome here for different reasons - but its only then that the devs genuinely began to deliberately move away from the trinity mind set.  Until CoV, we were not trinity by coincidence and by error, not by design.  Basically, the bugs in archetype design became features.

But it wasn't buff stacking that was the fortunate error, and it wasn't hard mez.  In fact, abundant hard mez was almost the end of non-trinity play, because it caused the devs to try to reinforce trinity play on the game.  We have what we have because they failed *again* to do trinity right.  But its possible hard mez almost cost us trinity play.  If they had "fixed" hard mez correctly, they might have been able to put the game back on a path to trinity play.  And if they did that, its possible the opening wouldn't have been there for the CoV team to try a different way.  Instead, the game fortunately "routed around" the problems of hard mez.

But the legacy of poor stacking rules haunted the game right up to the end.  Blasters were denied decent mitigation all the way up to I24 because, and I'm speaking from direct experience working with the devs on this, in part the stacking rules made it difficult to hand the blasters something that was good enough to help them and not so good it was easy to abuse by stacking.  Thus, blaster protection via power pools was a non-starter for the entire history of the game.  Because CoH didn't have good ways of limiting stacking, if you wanted to give something a buff but deny it from being overstacked by other things that didn't need it the only real way to do that was to reengineer their actual powersets - something only they have access to.  And that almost literally took an act of God.  It wasn't until I24 that the devs had the green light to make the significant structural changes necessary to even attempt this, after years of small fiddling around that couldn't directly attack the problem.  Namely, that of all the archetypes, Blasters were the only archetype across the entire game that as of I23 was still following Trinity design rules.  Everything else from Defenders to Controllers to Tankers abandoned those rules long before.

None of this would be news to the devs, who were slowly trying to migrate from the shackles of the past.  I24 saw changes to Blasters coming that were a direct attempt to break them from their trinity past.  The incarnate system introduced new mechanics designed to allow the devs to hand powers to the players in a way that everyone would benefit strongly from them, without them becoming too strong in certain hands - judgment blasts being immune to damage buffs is a small example of that, the stack-limited hybrid buffs would be another.  What Codewalker is mentioning above (Codewalker?  did this start off as a reply to Codewalker?  Oh yeah, I think I remember now) is just another example of the devs moving away from its trinity past and its mechanical shackles to provide more benefits to the majority of players.  Where Blasters had to suffer for years without a good way to supplement mitigation through power pools, now the devs were thinking of ways to put very strong powers in the pools in ways that would allow them to still be within the margins of what they wanted power pools to have.  That flexibility doesn't encourage trinity play, it helped to continue to diversify away from it, something the design rules had been slowly evolving away from since 2005.  But whereas originally it happened by accident, now the devs wanted to continue the evolutionary process on purpose.  Overall, I think they were doing a good job there.

The final frontier, in some respects, was hard control.  It would take new tech to make new kinds of mez, but I believe if the game still existed today we'd be there today.  The devs wanted to innovate, and wanted to add more diversity to gameplay to continue the process we'd been on since 2005, where more options equals more ability to give more players more ways to do more things.  There's no way that encourages trinity play.  It continues to encourage the diverse gameplay we already had, and push it into areas where the trinity legacy still existed.  The long shadow of trinity design even extended into the Incarnate trials, where one of the first complaints during testing was that Lambda and BAF heavily deemphasized controllers due to their hard controls being mooted for much of the time.  That's Trinity, resurrected by unbounded hard control like Sauron empowered by the Ring of Power.  Just like the One Ring, unbounded hard control doesn't equal Trinity gameplay, it appears on the surface to be its antidote like the One Ring tempts its wearers with the power to defeat Sauron.  But in reality, it corrupts everything around it until eventually it empowers the thing you thought it would help you defeat.

I wonder how many people read the post through to the end, and how many just skipped to the end and went "wait, was this post a Lord of the Rings post?  WTF happened here?"

 

 

Edited September 29, 2020 by Troo

[Wavicle]

7 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

I don't feel we are actually at the potential solutions stage of this situation. 

 

I don't think we ever actually will be.   We seem to be stuck in a sort of Status Quo is God holding pattern.  

 

So offering up solutions to problems y'all don't actually believe in is kinda dumb. 

 

What are you expecting to happen? That this conversation is going to produce the solution, that the devs will then take that as offered and go implement it?