Too strong

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Gobbledegook said:

Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy looking, NERF HERDER!

 

[High_Beam]

On 7/12/2022 at 11:50 AM, Hyperstrike said:

When you can essentially fight (not necessarily BEAT) an enemy indefinitely.

Because REAL Tanks have no problem taking 3 WEEKS to sand off an opponent's hit points.

And flat out "can't kill one another" scenarios can be seen as a "moral victory" for the Tanker.

This is what I have come to appreciate with my limited experience playing tanks.  On live I was Blaster heavy followed by Controller and Defender.  I had a sum total of two (2) melee characters, a terrible scrapper and a crappy tank.  Both that way because of my poor building and my poor play.  I never really got a lot of what a tank was because I was just blowing stuff away and I always assumed they were too.  I never realized how low their damage output in comparison to others was.  When I came to HC I started to dip into tanking more in order to enjoy an aspect of the game I hadn't when it was live and becoming grindy (Blaster number 12 please) and I realized how slow their damage output was.

 

Initially I was like "screw this" and tried to be all damagy and the end result was I got my buttocks handed to me way to often because my armors were nowhere near up to snuff and my damage still blew dog.  I read around the forums and then decided to embrace the truth of tanking, we take a beating forever and take forever to beat someone down.  And as I accepted this I really liked the thematic element and then the feel of keeping those mobs on me so others may defeat them.  There is nothing wrong with being relegated (mostly) to a role.

 

Several posts in this thread speak to "if I just wanted to stand around I'd do X instead" and that's fine, good on you, you play how you play.  But @Hyperstrike's quote sums it up for me.  The moral victory of the damn-near draw of a fight is what makes playing a tank memorable to me.  It's not always about ripping through enemies, its about having scores of creeps piling on you as you slug it out, having taunted them stupid so that they ignore the the shooters that are wiping them out.  Stupid villains, when will they learn.  Nothing made me feel more super-powered than when I was on a SG team doing Freakshow missions set to +4/+8 and I was level 30 with no IOs or Set IOs yet and they were level 54 and I was tanking them and not dying.  They were so purple even Prince would have been jealous and I wasn't hitting crap but I was surviving and taunting so my team mates could do their thing, it was glorious.

 

Oh and just so we are clear on how slow my tank is, pink pom poms of death (but they do look Seksi on me).

Edited August 11, 2022 by High_Beam

[PLVRIZR]

Welcome to the wonderful (and satisfying) world of tanking, @High_Beam!  Come check out a "Tanker Tuesday" event. 😁

 

Tanker Tuesdays - Tanker - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com)

 

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, High_Beam said:

Oh and just so we are clear on how slow my tank is, pink pom poms of death (but they do look Seksi on me).

 

My shield/nrg tank has a 1hr30min solo no insps max diff ITF time and a 2min48sec average pylon time. That's on par with my claws/sr scrapper for pylons and vastly faster on the ITF because the tank doesn't have to waste any time surviving. "Slow" doesn't seem an appropriate description.

[Infinitum]

3 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

My shield/nrg tank has a 1hr30min solo no insps max diff ITF time and a 2min48sec average pylon time. That's on par with my claws/sr scrapper for pylons and vastly faster on the ITF because the tank doesn't have to waste any time surviving. "Slow" doesn't seem an appropriate description.

 

My EM/EA stalker took a pylon out in 57 seconds.  The EM/EA Scrapper in 1 min 28 seconds.

 

I can't remember my Fire/EM time but it seems familiar that it was in the 2 1/2 min range.

 

EM just synergizes well with taking out hard targets no matter what AT it is on.

 

I think it is more of an EM's AV smashing ability than a Tanker issue - yeah tankers use EM and survive better than any other AT, but EM vaporizes anything in its way if you can survive which is evident anytime you do a hard target test across every AT.

 

For instance my pylon testing with EM time ranking:

1. Stalker

2. Scrapper

3. Brute

4. Tanker

 

Which is how it should look.  Take the dmg set outside of EM compared to EM will not or ever yield the same result for a comparison.

[Bill Z Bubba]

23 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

Which is how it should look.  Take the dmg set outside of EM compared to EM will not or ever yield the same result for a comparison.

 

True statement. My nrg/bio/soul scrapper sits around 75 to 90 seconds on a pylon but she has zero chance of surviving a no insp max diff ITF unless I spend hours single pulling every spawn. Even then, I rather doubt she'd make it through the 2nd mission. Edit: Make that, she didn't survive the first spawn even through barrier and shadow meld.

 

But yes, I should hop on test and build up both scrap and brute nrg/shielders (as I already have with claws and SR) and run the same tests but based on builds I've looked at, and my history of testing with claws and sr, while pylon/AV times will follow the same order you stated, their inability to ignore incoming damage as tanks can will always slow them down considerably against everything else.

 

I will also admit the silliness of it all considering I have to use max diff no insp TFs for testing...

Edited August 11, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[Infinitum]

10 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

My nrg/bio/soul scrapper sits around 75 to 90 seconds on a pylon but she has zero chance of surviving a no insp max diff ITF unless I spend hours single pulling every spawn. Even then, I rather doubt she'd make it through the 2nd mission. Edit: Make that, she didn't survive the first spawn even through barrier and shadow meld.

 

It may be nitpicking but the scrapper shouldn't survive that level of incoming damage as well as a Tanker regardless of what kind of damage the tanker is able to output - because the tanker is still outputting less damage than the other 3 equivalent ATs but able to take on more incoming damage.

 

In regular content - I really haven't found anything that is threatening enough to give any EM based AT I have more than it can handle - but there again a fully kitted out build should operate that way.

 

So IMO should a Tanker outperform the rest on a max diff hard mode ITF?  Absolutely - because that is way way outside the norm of what content is - and also opens the door for this question - sure a Tanker can solo that, but how much faster would that run with a brute, scrapper or stalker attached with the tanker absorbing agro as it should?

 

That's the real question and test here.

 

I would say if the time isn't improved by a decent factor you may have a point, however if the time drastically improves - that is functioning as intended 

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Infinitum said:

It may be nitpicking but the scrapper shouldn't survive that level of incoming damage as well as a Tanker regardless of what kind of damage the tanker is able to output - because the tanker is still outputting less damage than the other 3 equivalent ATs but able to take on more incoming damage.

 

No, of course not, and as my edit shows, she can't survive it well at all much less stroll into the room with zero chance of defeat like the tank. Again, though, while Bio is awesome in many ways, the mitigation it provides is absolutely inferior to Shield's.

 

3 minutes ago, Infinitum said:

So IMO should a Tanker outperform the rest on a max diff hard mode ITF?  Absolutely - because that is way way outside the norm of what content is - and also opens the door for this question - sure a Tanker can solo that, but how much faster would that run with a brute, scrapper or stalker attached with the tanker absorbing agro as it should?

 

That's the real question and test here.

 

I would say if the time isn't improved by a decent factor you may have a point, however if the time drastically improves - that is functioning as intended 

 

But here's the real problem with these discussions. Teams make everything in this game meaningless in general. Balancing powersets and archetypes, especially the ATs that share powersets, based on how they perform with a team is an absolute non-starter for me. How they team is meaningless because when teamed, one aggro sponge and 7 corruptors will decimate everything, even the new higher diff mode TFs. How is that even remotely relevant to determining whether a tank's mitigation to damage output ratio is out of whack with its brute and scrapper cousins? (If anyone ever wonders why I so often ignore stalkers in these discussions, it's because of Hide. I place stalkers as far away from tank/brute/scrappers as I do sentinels.)

 

That's why my area of focus remains the mitigation/damage output ratio. From everything I've seen from others to everything I've tested myself, one thing remains clear: while the damage output of tanks remains at the bottom, (in most cases,) and their mitigation remains at the top, their damage output is too close considering how far ahead they are on mitigation, especially now on the AoE side.

 

I always viewed tanks exactly as @High_Beammentioned earlier: slow, plodding and immortal. Where scrappers were blenders that often took on more than they should and faceplanted for their trouble. That's just not the case anymore as the Trapdoor thread in the scrapper forum is showing. Tanks were fine as they were. If you soloed one, you could ramp up the difficulty far higher and earlier than brutes/scrappers could and that alone closed the leveling speed gap. Now they get the best of everything. Biggest AoEs, biggest targets caps, best mitigation, and single target damage close enough to brutes (when solo, of course,) just massive wrecking balls of doom with zero downside for their godliness.

[Infinitum]

6 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

That's why my area of focus remains the mitigation/damage output ratio. From everything I've seen from others to everything I've tested myself, one thing remains clear: while the damage output of tanks remains at the bottom, (in most cases,) and their mitigation remains at the top, their damage output is too close considering how far ahead they are on mitigation, especially now on the AoE side.

 

The issue with that is - it really isn't too close because none of this is balanced around what can solo hard mode content and what can't.

 

In normal content everything plays as it should - where if you are kitted out most content outside of the hard mode stuff will not bother you to any degree worth noting - furthermore no tanker is going to out damage a corruptor, blaster, scrapper, stalker, brute, a well built mastermind even, and probably more that I haven't mentioned here - and in most cases it's not close with what I have seen on here.

 

That is why my point of how much will the addition of X AT make in the time of any hard mode content is valid - because normal content - just about anything beats out the tanker damage wise still and can survive the threat on top of the better damage.

 

14 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

Tanks were fine as they were. If you soloed one, you could ramp up the difficulty far higher and earlier than brutes/scrappers could and that alone closed the leveling speed gap.

 

That is debatable, in fact before the tanker changes - aside from loyalty there wasn't much reason to take a Tanker over a brute because a brute can survive anything a Tanker could in normal content and dish out way more damage and still does dish out way more damage, even with AOEs even though they hit fewer targets - it is still more damage on the target caps they hit - which is increasingly valid the higher the enemy is.  For instance a Tanker AOE may not one shot a group of lieutenants, but a Brute's will.  I had one tanker and 5 Brute's prior to the tanker changes - even though I have always been a die hard tanker - there was just no logical reason to roll Tankers over Brute's then - aside from content like hard mode ITFs that aren't what is considered routine.

 

Secondly before the change and even now with normal content anything past level 30 is going to be able survive anything if the build is kitted out properly (with a few late blooming exceptions across all ATs) and still level faster than a tanker.

 

As it stands now I have all 4 melee ATs and for equivalent builds - the tanker doesn't stand out enough on damage to say "yeah this was overturned" but it does give me a legitimate reason to roll a tanker over a brute again - which was the goal.

[High_Beam]

3 hours ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

My shield/nrg tank has a 1hr30min solo no insps max diff ITF time and a 2min48sec average pylon time. That's on par with my claws/sr scrapper for pylons and vastly faster on the ITF because the tank doesn't have to waste any time surviving. "Slow" doesn't seem an appropriate description.

This and the other comments are fair enough, but I am not there, I am still learning and slow.  Soon I will have Total Focus and Energy Transfer and I know (have seen) the difference, but I have to be honest with what I am right now.

[Erratic1]

2 hours ago, Infinitum said:

That is why my point of how much will the addition of X AT make in the time of any hard mode content is valid - because normal content - just about anything beats out the tanker damage wise still and can survive the threat on top of the better damage.

 

There is another way of going about things. Build the Brute (all SOs), determine the limit of what he can face and still survive while solo and time how long it takes him to dispatch whatever scenario it is being presented. Then take the Tanker and compare how long it takes him to dispatch the same scenario. If inside the limit of Brute survivability the Tanker is clearing content faster then there is groundwork for questioning how reasonably the ATs are balanced.

 

[Errants]

On 8/8/2022 at 12:13 PM, Bill Z Bubba said:

I admit my nerfherding ways but I buffherd, too!

 

*gasp* Balance-herding!?

[Bill Z Bubba]

41 minutes ago, Errants said:

*gasp* Balance-herding!?

 

It's true. My heresy runs strong. I have two bolters mounted in my ceiling ready to drop down at any moment.

 

The subject of what we're balancing for was brought up in another thread and I know there's still no consensus and probably never will be but it'd be nice. If the game truly was balanced around SOs, then it's a completely unbalanced mess right now with IOs. And, yes, again, I'm in the camp that sees that imbalance, wish I never had, and knows I'd have more fun playing if I didn't.

 

I find claims of brutes dishing out WAY more damage than tanks misleading when I view it as barely more damage. The three Bills have pylon times of 2.75mins vs 4.5 mins vs 5 mins. Granted, part of that is because damage buffs are better for tanks than brutes when solo. Scrapper Bill pulls even farther ahead on AoE because he can cycle followup, spin, shockwave where the brute and tank have to do followup, focus, spin, shockwave but again, thanks to double stacked followup, the larger AoE size and the greater number of targets, the tank is barely behind the brute while maintaining a massive advantage over mitigation with all that extra health AND the MotT proc cranking his mitigation into orbit.

 

Then there's that whole proc business where tank procs aren't being punished for the increased AoE size of the attack.

 

Then there's the whole red herring of, yea, well, "that's ONLY at the very high end of performance cuz the game is balanced around SOs and at lower diff all three ATs survive just fine."

 

In the end, I'm left pondering a quote from @SomeGuy where they stated, "They wanted to make Brutes irrelevant. This isn't going to go back." Now, I won't agree that the devs wanted to do this, but I will agree that the end outcome is the same. Where do brutes really win? On fire farms in the AE and only when you have binds for combining insps to reds and you're built for capped fire resistance and defense. EDIT: Or if you're on a team with mates that buff exactly what your build is missing and a kin for fulcrum shift and heals to make up for the lower HP.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Bill Z Bubba

[Troo]

7 hours ago, High_Beam said:

embrace the truth of tanking

[Infinitum]

Just now, Troo said:

 

Wait. Should I have downvoted you?

[Infinitum]

35 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

It's true. My heresy runs strong. I have two bolters mounted in my ceiling ready to drop down at any moment.

 

The subject of what we're balancing for was brought up in another thread and I know there's still no consensus and probably never will be but it'd be nice. If the game truly was balanced around SOs, then it's a completely unbalanced mess right now with IOs. And, yes, again, I'm in the camp that sees that imbalance, wish I never had, and knows I'd have more fun playing if I didn't.

 

I find claims of brutes dishing out WAY more damage than tanks misleading when I view it as barely more damage. The three Bills have pylon times of 2.75mins vs 4.5 mins vs 5 mins. Granted, part of that is because damage buffs are better for tanks than brutes when solo. Scrapper Bill pulls even farther ahead on AoE because he can cycle followup, spin, shockwave where the brute and tank have to do followup, focus, spin, shockwave but again, thanks to double stacked followup, the larger AoE size and the greater number of targets, the tank is barely behind the brute while maintaining a massive advantage over mitigation with all that extra health AND the MotT proc cranking his mitigation into orbit.

 

Then there's that whole proc business where tank procs aren't being punished for the increased AoE size of the attack.

 

Then there's the whole red herring of, yea, well, "that's ONLY at the very high end of performance cuz the game is balanced around SOs and at lower diff all three ATs survive just fine."

 

In the end, I'm left pondering a quote from @SomeGuy where they stated, "They wanted to make Brutes irrelevant. This isn't going to go back." Now, I won't agree that the devs wanted to do this, but I will agree that the end outcome is the same. Where do brutes really win? On fire farms in the AE and only when you have binds for combining insps to reds and you're built for capped fire resistance and defense. EDIT: Or if you're on a team with mates that buff exactly what your build is missing and a kin for fulcrum shift and heals to make up for the lower HP.

 

You have touched on a few things here that are issues that I believe if corrected would fix all the issues you see between tankers and Brute's.

 

1. Procs - shouldn't be in the conversation but are - but also are due for a change soon.  They do favor tankers - that is not a tanker issue but a proc issue 

 

2. The ATOs. The tanker ATO is stronger, but again not a Tanker issue so much as I honestly think the Brute ATOs served a purpose at one point but now are no longer as effective and need to be updated either with more dmg or more mitigation or both.

 

I believe those two changes would go a long way towards reconciliation of the Tanker/Brute dynamic that some perceive as a problem - and I would agree with those two areas.  As far as gameplay goes - I am not seeing any glaring issues that says either one are out of place.

[Troo]

1 hour ago, Erratic1 said:

If inside the limit of Brute survivability the Tanker is clearing content faster then there is groundwork for questioning how reasonably the ATs are balanced.

 

43 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

a quote from @SomeGuy where they stated, "They wanted to make Brutes irrelevant. This isn't going to go back." Now, I won't agree that the devs wanted to do this, but I will agree that the end outcome is the same.

 

Tanks are heroes. Brutes are villains. It really is that simple.

Tanks get love.

Brutes are niche-y and overlap a little with both Tanks and Scrappers. Which makes them great for wanting a good bit of everything without being 'the best'.

[Erratic1]

36 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

It's true. My heresy runs strong. I have two bolters mounted in my ceiling ready to drop down at any moment.

 

The subject of what we're balancing for was brought up in another thread and I know there's still no consensus and probably never will be but it'd be nice. If the game truly was balanced around SOs, then it's a completely unbalanced mess right now with IOs. And, yes, again, I'm in the camp that sees that imbalance, wish I never had, and knows I'd have more fun playing if I didn't.

 

I find claims of brutes dishing out WAY more damage than tanks misleading when I view it as barely more damage. The three Bills have pylon times of 2.75mins vs 4.5 mins vs 5 mins. Granted, part of that is because damage buffs are better for tanks than brutes when solo. Scrapper Bill pulls even farther ahead on AoE because he can cycle followup, spin, shockwave where the brute and tank have to do followup, focus, spin, shockwave but again, thanks to double stacked followup, the larger AoE size and the greater number of targets, the tank is barely behind the brute while maintaining a massive advantage over mitigation with all that extra health AND the MotT proc cranking his mitigation into orbit.

 

Then there's that whole proc business where tank procs aren't being punished for the increased AoE size of the attack.

 

Then there's the whole red herring of, yea, well, "that's ONLY at the very high end of performance cuz the game is balanced around SOs and at lower diff all three ATs survive just fine."

 

In the end, I'm left pondering a quote from @SomeGuy where they stated, "They wanted to make Brutes irrelevant. This isn't going to go back." Now, I won't agree that the devs wanted to do this, but I will agree that the end outcome is the same. Where do brutes really win? On fire farms in the AE and only when you have binds for combining insps to reds and you're built for capped fire resistance and defense. EDIT: Or if you're on a team with mates that buff exactly what your build is missing and a kin for fulcrum shift and heals to make up for the lower HP.

 

Outside procs (which I think procs are their own, broken mess that should not really bear on discussions of AT balance) I admit I am sometimes conflicted. Outside the realm of IOs and Incarnates, my tankers meaningfully do less damage. OTOH, the tankers survive so well and have such AoE capacity that the act of solo grinding on them for levels is notably faster because I can pack a mission with extra foes to wring xp out of. But balance is not predicated on the solo experience and in the group experience it doesn't matter what you play since ∀group g, (a_1,a_2,...a_n) where a_x ∊ {member of the set of ATs} and 1<n<8, ∃t, a tactic, where S(t), the evaluation of the success of tactic t, is true.

[Erratic1]

6 minutes ago, Troo said:

Tanks are heroes. Brutes are villains. It really is that simple.

Tanks get love.

Brutes are niche-y and overlap a little with both Tanks and Scrappers. Which makes them great for wanting a good bit of everything without being 'the best'.

 

Brutes being villains may have been true at the launch of CoV, but that's long since stopped being the case. There are also villainous Tankers. 

 

But hey, I am more than willing to entertain the notion of giving Brutes their own niche. Maybe they could code it so that NPCs point and laugh?

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 minute ago, Erratic1 said:

But balance is not predicated on the solo experience

 

And that's precisely where I think most everyone has gone wrong including the OG devs. How a character solos from 1 to 50, in my mind, should be the ONLY metric BECAUSE:

 

3 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:

in the group experience it doesn't matter what you play

 

Except when it does. When the SG I ran with did a slew of all AT X ITF runs, corruptors came out on top with the fastest time and least number of faceplants but no one thinks a corruptor soloing from 1 to 50 is going to be faster than any of the melee crowd because they can't so it seems that XP/time leveling speed isn't relevant in balance discussions and I'd like to know why.

[Erratic1]

6 minutes ago, Bill Z Bubba said:

 

And that's precisely where I think most everyone has gone wrong including the OG devs. How a character solos from 1 to 50, in my mind, should be the ONLY metric BECAUSE:

 

If the solo experience is the fulcrum of balance, then certain ATs need some serious boosting and have needed it for a very long time. It would also deny the need for niche protection because when you are soloing you are filling all niches. Why did Brute damage potential get trimmed if solo was all that mattered?

 

[Gobbledigook]

My Bio/SS Tanker sits at around 2mins 15 seconds on the Pylon with a fairly aggressive proc build. Not a pylon only build. A pylon only build can be faster.

My SS/Bio Brute sits at around 1mins 45 seconds on the Pylon with a fairly aggressive proc build. Not a Pylon only build. A pylon only build can be faster.

MY EM/Bio Brute sits at under 1mins 30 seconds on the Pylon with a Fairly aggressive proc build.. Not pylon only build. A pylon only build can be faster.

Scrappers/Stalkers are sitting closer to the 1 minute mark on a Pylon with many different builds.

 

From my experience with my builds it seems fairly balanced to me. But it depends on how you build. 

 

If you can survive the ITF then you will complete as long as you put out some half decent damage. Tankers naturally do this. It does not make them OP, they are doing what they were designed to do...Survive. They have better damage now but that makes soloing etc a much better and less boring gameplay imo and doesn't really matter in teams.

Brutes can do it also with a decent build, just as fast and faster on the hard targets.

Scrappers/Stalkers certainly have the dps to finish it faster, but the survival is questionable, They are not tanks they are a dps though. If they could survive they would be much faster than a Tanker.

 

Throw in a team and the dps will pull further ahead and gain enough survival from team buffs.

 

A buffed ITF is not the best for a comparison as the Tanker has the best tools to deal with it, which means Surviving!

 

 

 

 

[Bill Z Bubba]

5 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:

If the solo experience is the fulcrum of balance, then certain ATs need some serious boosting and have needed it for a very long time. It would also deny the need for niche protection because when you are soloing you are filling all niches. Why did Brute damage potential get trimmed if solo was all that mattered?

 

I don't have an answer. I'm trying to find it. If we base balance on a teaming experience, what team do we datamine from? A brute and 7 corruptors or 8 kheldians?

[Bill Z Bubba]

5 minutes ago, Gobbledegook said:

A buffed ITF is not the best for a comparison as the Tanker has the best tools to deal with it, which means Surviving!

 

Again, if xp/time while soloing isn't relevant, what exactly is? If I run a tank from 1 to 50 solo faster than the same combo brute and scrapper because I can push the diff higher and sooner, why isn't that a balance issue?

[Bill Z Bubba]

I'm asking all these questions because without solid answers I have absolutely no way to provide useful information from testing.