A tank just isn't a tank in this game

[PLVRIZR]

1 hour ago, ZacKing said:

Powers that don't do damage are still very valuable here.  

 

I single slot Taunt with the psi-damage Perfect Zinger enhancement...so it does (occasional) damage, as well 🙂

[lemming]

5 minutes ago, PLVRIZR said:

 

During the last TT and Sarah Moore TF, my "properly" built Inv/SS tanker (NUT) felt the same...😆

My SR didn't. 😄 darn eyeballs.

[ZemX]

2 minutes ago, lemming said:

Beta here too. It happened enough and not just vs Kins.   Maybe it was more prevalent on Justice. 

 

I am absolutely not saying it didn't happen.  It happened enough that empaths had a crowd of people treating them like gods, no doubt.  But there were as many people laughing at them in global chat channels whenever teams would go "looking for healer" or "need a tank" so there were at least both camps of people present from very early on.  If you chose to play an Empath, you didn't go hungry... not saying that.  But the reality too was that the core game mechanics that make stacking buffs/debuffs so powerful were there from the start.   Hell, ED was a result of that buff-stacking problem applied to enhancements.  The Live devs didn't realize how much power they'd given and many players didn't either right away.

[ZemX]

6 minutes ago, PLVRIZR said:

I single slot Taunt with the psi-damage Perfect Zinger enhancement...so it does (occasional) damage, as well 🙂

 

Adding injury to insult is NOT how the saying goes, man!

[Crysis]

3 hours ago, Krimson said:

Did the concept of a "Trinity" even exist when CoH was released? Should a game be beholden to a concept it predates? It's certainly not from D&D, whose three original classes were the Cleric, the Fighting Man, and the Magic User. 

In COH beta you could quite easily create tank mages which was quickly addressed.  I think originally it was an attempt to recreate a Champions character creation motif.

 

But even at launch, and now almost 20 years later, you’ve still got people who try to “force” their naked assertions about “the right way to play” onto the masses.

 

This is and always has been a sandbox game.  The Enhancement system extends that concept even further and in many ways has repeatedly broken the intent of the various AT’s thus all the adjustments to the game since.  I don’t dispute that the dev team, then and now, had some guidelines for “role based AT modifiers” as they clearly intended that some AT’s are better at X vs Y….but they almost always put an inherent weakness in the AT modifiers to balance that.

 

 …..except for Scrappers.  God and the Devs love Scrappers the most.

[PLVRIZR]

1 hour ago, lemming said:

My SR didn't. 😄 darn eyeballs.

 

Were you on TT, last week?

[PLVRIZR]

1 hour ago, lemming said:

Beta here too. It happened enough and not just vs Kins.   Maybe it was more prevalent on Justice.    And at some point, people seemed to have more experience with the different powersets and got more flexible.

 

Nowadays, most pugs seem to figure things out with what winds up joining though an occasional AT swap will happen.

 

Not sure what "Beta" was, but I was on the first retail distribution (remember when 40 was the top level and there were only four tank primaries?) and played almost entirely on Champion server.  After my very first toon...NRG/NRG Blaster...I just wanna fly, man!...I made one of my favorite toons of all time:  Kin/Dark Defender (Nosfera-too).  Kin absolutely ruled the day and I made 50 in a heartbeat boosting tanks on the Chimera ninja map...well before farms and such.

 

[Erratic1]

13 minutes ago, PLVRIZR said:

 

Not sure what "Beta" was....

 

 

Beta came before retail release. I had a Dark Defender then.

[Ukase]

59 minutes ago, Crysis said:

 …..except for Scrappers.  God and the Devs love Scrappers the most.

That's hilarious. Scrappers are trash, man. Low HP, random crits. Better off with a brute. Or a blaster. never a scrapper. They're weak. Feeble. And certainly not loved. Blasters get the most love here on HC. 

[Sovera]

4 hours ago, ZemX said:

 

I see a lot of Tank builds with Taunt dead last and I can only assume they are meant to be 50-only endgame builds.  Taunt is a HUGE help if you're actually playing the game while leveling instead of sitting at a door in a farm.  Not that you can't get by without it.  It's just very handy when you're standing in a group you have controlled and need to pull something else into it or off of someone else.  You don't have to go smack it yourself or worry about a ranged attack missing when another hit might flatten a squishy.

 

Just one more thing that goes away when nobody is "squishy" though.  That's the state of endgame CoH pretty much.  You don't need anything but damage and more damage.  Why anybody plays the high end game is beyond me.  I can only find "real" CoH myself on teams running max. difficult below level 45 and usually without everyone on the team being fully IOed yet.

 

As someone who always levels by playing and who had a major stint as a Tanker I can't say I felt the lack of Taunt. There were times, yes, where two spawns were close together and agro overflows, but I can count those on the fingers of one hand. More power for those who like and use Taunt though, but the number of times I see people jump into the middle of a group and then use it on the group is amazing though. Again, nothing really -wrong- about it. Just useless since they were already agroed. But again the game did not get worse because they did it.

 

The -range of Taunt is where I find Taunt more useful. So many annoying ranged mobs who will plink from afar with the biggest culprits the protean clockworks we get in Tinpex. but again, in a team it all melts. It's solo I would like having it.

 

Tbh I have the free power slot to take Taunt but was disgusted in realizing it did not work on Battle Maiden and that was that with my Taunt experiment.

[Sovera]

1 minute ago, Ukase said:

That's hilarious. Scrappers are trash, man. Low HP, random crits. Better off with a brute. Or a blaster. never a scrapper. They're weak. Feeble. And certainly not loved. Blasters get the most love here on HC. 

 

Not sure if serious.

[ZemX]

2 minutes ago, Sovera said:

The -range of Taunt is where I find Taunt more useful. So many annoying ranged mobs who will plink from afar with the biggest culprits the protean clockworks we get in Tinpex. but again, in a team it all melts. It's solo I would like having it.

 

Since I don't have a Fire Tanker, I don't play my Tankers on teams where "it all melts".  You hardly need a Tank on those teams, let alone one who took Taunt.

 

But yeah, I've seen that "hop in and taunt the pack of mobs you just landed in thing".  I don't mention it in game, because... unsolicited advice.  I use Taunt on the annoying ranged foes and whenever I want to grab something without leaving the main pack of enemies I have taunted with aura and AoEs.  I could do without it, but find it useful enough that I don't want to.  Like anything else in the build, I ask myself if there's a better one-slot wonder power I could replace it with and the answer is usually "no".

[Crysis]

20 minutes ago, Ukase said:

That's hilarious. Scrappers are trash, man. Low HP, random crits. Better off with a brute. Or a blaster. never a scrapper. They're weak. Feeble. And certainly not loved. Blasters get the most love here on HC. 

So buff Scrappers then?

 

I’m down for that!

[Crysis]

1 hour ago, PLVRIZR said:

 

Not sure what "Beta" was

 

Actually “Beta” period I would define as pre-release to Launch in April of 2004.  April 2004-June 2004 you could only top out at level 40.  40-50 didn’t happen until the first update “Through the Looking Glass.”

 

In earliest “alpha” release the power sets were mostly free-form, and they were more focused on origin (there were 7 power origins initially, later pared down to the 5 we have now).  It wasn’t until “beta” that they introduced the concept of Archetypes/AT’s and the division of powers.  
 

Fun fact….for Blasters initially the T9 wasn’t a Nuke, but rather BuildUp.

 

COH E3 overview from 2003, early Beta….

 

 

[Hyperstrike]

City of Heroes is City of Heroes.
CIty of Heroes is not WoW
City of Heroes is not Everquest
City of Heroes is not Guild Wars
City of Heroes is not EVE (THANK YOU GOD!)
City of Heroes is its own thing.  If you want to have fun, learn to play the game on its own terms.
Trying to force the game to conform to YOUR idea of "How it ought to be" is just going to leave you unsatisfied.

Tanks are more than simply mobile fat sacks of hit points.
They're combat controllers with multiple medium and soft controls.
"Follow the Tank" hasn't been a necessity in the game.  More or less since...EVER.
And it's gotten less so over time as various changes to the game and massive build research have meant that you can be godlike in ANYTHING with a bit of prep work.

So, if you're a Tank and your team leaves you behind, they're out being useful for something more than as witnesses to your bundle of awesome.
And if you're bumming because they aren't there, YOU are slowing the mission down.  Not them.

A Tank's "job" isn't to prevent teammates from endangering themselves.
Your job is to grab mobs and beat the crap out of them.

If others help, great.  But they aren't NECESSARY.

Please see my sig for the ultimate explanation of Tanks.

[Wavicle]

5 hours ago, Sovera said:

 

Not sure if serious.

It's definitely a joke. Whether or not it was intentional I'm not quite sure.

[Bill Z Bubba]

17 hours ago, Luminara said:

A sandwich just isn't a sandwich without the tangy zip of Miracle Whip.

 

Two bolters. AND a dreadnought for this heresy.

[arcane]

Conversations about roles are frustrating on this forum by default. Way too many people willfully see things in black and white when there should be shades of grey.
 

For instance, implying people want forced trinity play when they express that maybe the game could require more thought and teamwork than 8 DPS AT’s dropping everything dead at max difficulty but with zero difficulty. 

 

Or, for instance, implying people are fighting Council when they try to talk about lack of difficulty.

[PLVRIZR]

10 hours ago, Hyperstrike said:

City of Heroes is City of Heroes.
CIty of Heroes is not WoW
City of Heroes is not Everquest
City of Heroes is not Guild Wars
City of Heroes is not EVE (THANK YOU GOD!)
City of Heroes is its own thing.  If you want to have fun, learn to play the game on its own terms.
Trying to force the game to conform to YOUR idea of "How it ought to be" is just going to leave you unsatisfied.

Tanks are more than simply mobile fat sacks of hit points.
They're combat controllers with multiple medium and soft controls.
"Follow the Tank" hasn't been a necessity in the game.  More or less since...EVER.
And it's gotten less so over time as various changes to the game and massive build research have meant that you can be godlike in ANYTHING with a bit of prep work.

So, if you're a Tank and your team leaves you behind, they're out being useful for something more than as witnesses to your bundle of awesome.
And if you're bumming because they aren't there, YOU are slowing the mission down.  Not them.

A Tank's "job" isn't to prevent teammates from endangering themselves.
Your job is to grab mobs and beat the crap out of them.

If others help, great.  But they aren't NECESSARY.

Please see my sig for the ultimate explanation of Tanks.

 

Simply.  The.  Best.  You're the bomb.com, Hyper.  Couldn't have said it better.

[Maelwys]

42 minutes ago, arcane said:

Or, for instance, implying people are fighting Council when they try to talk about lack of difficulty.

Yeah. Surely everyone knows the real trouble will be Freakshow, Battle Maiden flunkies, or (Ouroboros help us) Praetorian demons.
(We're pretending AE doesn't exist right? Right...)

I loved tanking on my INV/SS tanker back in i6/i7.
That lovable taunting, raging, superjumping, footstomping brick that he was.

I sometimes wheeled him out in later issues for TFs because he could tank anything. Playing him was easy mode. He could cope with any combination of teammates (PUGs and random SG teams) because he could control aggro and weather all the incoming damage without needing any outside support - he could basically solo the mission by himself (and that was COH in a nutshell to me - your character being powerful enough to simply not care what other powersets/characters are on the team. When you don't need a "Holy Trinity" of MMO pairings, you can simply have fun experiencing the content and mucking about with your friends etc.)

However what that tanker couldn't do is bypass the aggro cap, so as everyone's characters gradually became more and more powerful (e.g. level 50 incarnates with full invention builds etc) then there became less and less point to bringing a dedicated tank (or a dedicated anything) along. Because it's faster to steamroll through 4-5 mobs in the time it takes to herd 2 together (even with a minimal strategy of "Taunt the nearest mob, jump into another one. Then repeatedly Footstomp/KOBlow/CrossPunch/etc and get everyone to spam their AoEs"!).

You can still bring a tanker to a TF, but demanding everyone wait for you to tank is going to be an exercise in futility, and rightly so.
If you want the job of playing "protector" then fine. Go for the most dangerous enemies - Quantums, Sappers, Bosses, EBs, AVs, GMs. Sort your targeting binds out and be attentive. Don't worry about grabbing ALL the aggro; the Blaster can likely handle a few (dozen) minions... ...and if they can't? Then you can hand them a wakey and gently point out that they'll grab a little less attention if they let you leap in first. But always consider that they might be a veteran who wants to use Rise of the Phoenix or something, rather than a newbie who got in over their head - Faceplanting in this game isn't particularly problematic unless you're running a "Master of X" TF. So let the rest of the team bite off whatever they feel they can chew, and just have some fun with it all... 😅

 

Edited October 19, 2021 by Maelwys

[PLVRIZR]

2 hours ago, Maelwys said:

I loved tanking on my INV/SS tanker back in i6/i7.
That lovable taunting, raging, superjumping, footstomping brick that he was.

 

Wait, I *still* love tanking on my Inv/SS tank(s) and Inv/SJ and.....

[Sovera]

20 minutes ago, PLVRIZR said:

 

Wait, I *still* love tanking on my Inv/SS tank(s) and Inv/SJ and.....

 

You morbidly invulnerable (see wut I did there?? ;D) people need to take a whiff of danger instead of playing unkillable sets!

[oldskool]

13 hours ago, Hyperstrike said:

City of Heroes is not Everquest

 

I loved all of the rest of that comment, but this brought back some memories... haha

Back in the dark times, MMO gameplay like EQ had Enchanters (a class in that game for the youngsters that don't know) that would be the crowd control class.  However, they were necessary to stop too many enemies from swarming your group.  Then you'd have a puller, a role given to some brave or stupid SOB, who would "pull" enemies often one-by-one.  If they pulled too many, then the Enchanter may be able to lock down targets to buy you enough time... to run.  The tank would be there to catch the pulled target while the real heroes would do the damage.  

Then, CoH came about in 2003-2004.  It too had an enchanter style class (the Controller) but you could have the tank pull LOADs of enemies.  Early on teams dropped, but CoH was one of those games that had power fantasy built in as a concept.  Gone was this idea that tanks had to sponge damage from one singular entity while everyone else got to watch numbers.  Tanks in CoH could take on all comers.  The Controllers could even help lock down the overflow from what the tank took on.  

That is a simplification of gameplay, but by god I am glad that this wasn't like EQ.  There was stuff I loved about that game but the late game stuff was absolute garbage, in my opinion.  

[PLVRIZR]

1 minute ago, Sovera said:

 

You morbidly invulnerable (see wut I did there?? ;D) people need to take a whiff of danger instead of playing unkillable sets!

 

But, but, we're only unkillable until we're not...  I do, however, look forward to the new challenge settings to make things more difficult.  As my (internet-only) friend Cassie Knight (vet level 1,400+) always says... she wants to team with NUT, especially on the ITF, because he is, well, virtually unkillable 🙂

[arcane]

26 minutes ago, PLVRIZR said:

As my (internet-only) friend Cassie Knight (vet level 1,400+) always says... she wants to team with NUT, especially on the ITF, because he is, well, virtually unkillable 🙂

Pfft Cassie is like 2,100 now