Buff Controllers and Dominators by doubling the effect and endurance cost of melee AT defensive powers

[gabrilend]

Most teams today operate by diving into a pile of mobs, obliterating them with AoE (or ST attacks if they're facing a giant monster or archvillain/hero) and then zooming to the next. It's certainly an efficient way to slaughter all in your path, but it lacks variety.

 

I've noticed that most control characters seem to prioritize holds over immobilize, because there's little reason to deprive an enemy of movement. What, are they gonna run away? That's annoying at best. However I believe that immobilizes are incredibly useful, and I think that is desirable to emphasize the most interesting aspects of these control characters through balancing AT mechanics. They are, after all, one of City of X's most unique playstyles.

 

As far as I know, every enemy in the game has both a ranged and a melee attack. However, each attack has a separate cooldown - an enemy afar can only attack half as many times as an enemy up close. I believe that properly utilizing immobilize effects would significantly reduce the amount of damage taken by a character, and would bring increased value to the control archetypes.

 

Here is the proposed design change: double the endurance cost and double the effect of the toggled defensive powers on all melee archetypes. I believe this will encourage players to prioritize one or the other depending on the situation in a battle, and in addition I believe it will cause players to orient themselves around the immobilized enemies in a way that is not common in most teams. Most (all?) of these powers are split up into different damage types, and by thinking about which types the enemy is likely to use against them the melee character can switch between them in an optimal way. Should that be too much of a change for all archetypes, perhaps it would be a suitable change for Tankers specifically, since their powers are designed to be the most defensive.

 

Here is the desired effect: melee characters will think about their defensive toggle abilities more, and will adapt their usage to the enemies that are currently attacking them. In addition, control powers (specifically immobilize effects) will become more useful, as they limit the types of damage that enemies can inflict on players.

 

What do you think? Any ideas or alterations? Do you believe that the proposed change would produce the desired effect?

 

 

Edited April 25, 2024 by gabrilend
Re-organized a bit.

[PoptartsNinja]

Fun fact: That's how Statesman thought people would play the game, by picking one or two toggles and only running them as the circumstances warranted.

 

It didn't work then, it won't work now. Toggles aren't a major spender, they just increase the amount of time it takes to recover after a fight. The only thing this would bring back is needing to use the rest power after every fight, which would be as incredibly boring now as it was back at launch.

[Rudra]

No. If you want to make Controllers more relevant to the meta? More power to you. Gimping melee ATs to do so? No. Many power sets already struggle with END management. So I have to oppose this.

 

Edit: And I have to concur with @PoptartsNinja. I was not a fan of when melee ATs had to choose which of their armors they would use. Good example is my Dark/Dark Scrapper from back on Live. The very 1st character I made in the game. When fighting against enemies, I had to choose between my smash/lethal armor, my energy/negative energy armor, and my mez protection. Against spawns that included lethal damage attacks, smashing damage attacks, energy damage attacks, and mezzes all at the same time. So do I choose to be carved, bludgeoned, and roasted to death but immune to the mez, or do I resist the smashing and lethal damage but stand there like an idiot mezzed while they murder me, and so on. Not a fun time to play. I will never agree to go back to those days.

Edited April 25, 2024 by Rudra

[gabrilend]

30 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

Fun fact: That's how Statesman thought people would play the game, by picking one or two toggles and only running them as the circumstances warranted.

 

It didn't work then, it won't work now. Toggles aren't a major spender, they just increase the amount of time it takes to recover after a fight. The only thing this would bring back is needing to use the rest power after every fight, which would be as incredibly boring now as it was back at launch.

 

Wow, I'm honored to have had the same thought as him 🥰

 

Genuinely that made my night

 

EDIT: Maybe increasing the rate at which END recovers outside of fights? Idk probably a bad idea

 

30 minutes ago, Rudra said:

No. If you want to make Controllers more relevant to the meta? More power to you. Gimping melee ATs to do so? No. Many power sets already struggle with END management. So I have to oppose this.

 

Edit: And I have to concur with @PoptartsNinja. I was not a fan of when melee ATs had to choose which of their armors they would use. Good example is my Dark/Dark Scrapper from back on Live. The very 1st character I made in the game. When fighting against enemies, I had to choose between my smash/lethal armor, my energy/negative energy armor, and my mez protection. Against spawns that included lethal damage attacks, smashing damage attacks, energy damage attacks, and mezzes all at the same time. So do I choose to be carved, bludgeoned, and roasted to death but immune to the mez, or do I resist the smashing and lethal damage but stand there like an idiot mezzed while they murder me, and so on. Not a fun time to play. I will never agree to go back to those days.

 

Ah, well, perhaps it's a bad idea for the melee archetypes. But I'm curious, do you think it would have the intended effect for the control archetypes? After reading what you said I don't think I'm in favor of the proposed idea anymore. But I can't help but wonder if it would have worked.

Edited April 25, 2024 by gabrilend

[Rudra]

1 minute ago, gabrilend said:

But I'm curious, do you think it would have the intended effect for the control archetypes? After reading what you said I don't think I'm in favor of the proposed idea anymore. But I can't help but wonder if it would have worked.

No, it really wouldn't. While yes, mobs with both ranged attacks and melee attacks tend to be less dangerous if you can keep them at range, you are (or were) choosing to gimp melees, who have to close with those enemies and face their melee attacks anyway. So the only thing the OP would have done was put melee ATs at more risk for no gain.

[Shin Magmus]

Insanity.  This would just result in melees being more reliant on external buffs like Speed Boost/AM/Schmeletrical Schmircuit/Ageless Destiny, but they'd still run all their toggles.  I am not sure you understand how badly this wouldn't work, but it would make melees Tankier and thus be a series of massive buffs to them, rather than nerfs. 

Edited April 25, 2024 by Shin Magmus
Added more powers

[ScarySai]

The kitchen is on fire, stop cooking.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

1 hour ago, PoptartsNinja said:

Fun fact: That's how Statesman thought people would play the game, by picking one or two toggles and only running them as the circumstances warranted.

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

When fighting against enemies, I had to choose between my smash/lethal armor, my energy/negative energy armor, and my mez protection. Against spawns that included lethal damage attacks, smashing damage attacks, energy damage attacks, and mezzes all at the same time. So do I choose to be carved, bludgeoned, and roasted to death but immune to the mez, or do I resist the smashing and lethal damage but stand there like an idiot mezzed while they murder me, and so on. Not a fun time to play. I will never agree to go back to those days.

 

Odd that he would expect a playstyle, then deliberately design encounters counter to that expected playstyle.  Furthermore, if that was the intended playstyle, why not hard-limit toggles like auto-casts?

It would be nice to play a game where Statesman's ideas could actually work.  I love having a big toolbox and choosing the right tool to use for the right job.

[Purrfekshawn]

Doubling Endurance Cost won't force players switching off toggles, it will encourage most stalkers take Ageless Core Epiphany and maybe radial musculature to buff it. Most of stalkers take Ageless Core ayway and are bathed in the blue bar. When utilizing another strategy to force detoggle of Scrappers/Stalkers will require extra tags and thus a lot of work with side production of the bugs.

[Rudra]

38 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

 

Odd that he would expect a playstyle, then deliberately design encounters counter to that expected playstyle.  Furthermore, if that was the intended playstyle, why not hard-limit toggles like auto-casts?

It would be nice to play a game where Statesman's ideas could actually work.  I love having a big toolbox and choosing the right tool to use for the right job.

Because he actually thought dying until you figured out a strategy for that fight was fun. At least, that is what I was told.

[Luminara]

4 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Furthermore, if that was the intended playstyle, why not hard-limit toggles like auto-casts?

 

They did.  Toggles were mutually exclusive at launch.  But with multiple damage types in each spawn, an overabundance of status effects, graphical or audio cues being little more than animations or flashes of light which were impossible to see in the middle of combat, and an animation system which wasn't designed to support reactive gameplay, toggle mutual exclusivity wasn't viable without forced teaming and specific team compositions, which directly opposed Jack's fundamental vision of the game, so toggle mutual exclusivity was removed.

[Luminara]

6 hours ago, gabrilend said:

What do you think?

 

I think everyone will easily work around the increased endurance costs, since almost all endurance management problems are the result of under-slotted click powers, not toggles, and leverage the increased mitigation to blitz through content even faster and safer with less reliance on support and control archetypes.

 

I also think any idea rooted in the concept of taking things away from others for the sole purpose of enriching a few is repugnant.

[JasperStone]

6 hours ago, gabrilend said:

Wow, I'm honored to have had the same thought as him 🥰

He also gave us Enhancement Diversification ...

 

[CrusaderDroid]

Controllers and Dominators would be more relevant if enemies had less mez protection outright and more mez resistance so at least some CC would get through, coupled with either very big, interruptible attacks or damaging/debuffing auras or armor powers disabled by CC.

 

Currently, neither is true, so with any team that has any semblance of good damage, the only targets you can CC are the ones about to get wrecked by AoE damage flying around, and CC doesn't end the fight faster by itself. Kneecapping tanks is the worst way to address this - you need to change enemy design, not player design.

[ZamuelNow]

I was about to post similar.  While there's maybe some adjustments needed with IOs and Incarnate powers, it comes down to enemy design.  What's interesting is that it looks like devs are starting to play in this space.  The recent change to immobilization powers alters how knockback affects a target and the change to high level Council actually have a control weakness.

[PoptartsNinja]

Controllers/dominators would also be more relevent if it was possible to defeat enemies through stacking control magnitudes.

 

Like, eventually, if you freeze someone into an ice block long enough they'll still be frozen when the police come to collect them or you finish your bank robbery before they can possibly thaw out. Unfortunately, that only works if the CCs scale in a way the CCs in CoH don't. Which is to say: if stun or immobilize above a certain magnitude could turn into hold, and then hold above a certain magnitude turned into a perma-hold, defeating the mob. Or if sleep turned into confuse, and confuse above a certain magnitude turned the mob neutral because they're mind controlled (defeating them).

 

The game's not really designed or balanced around that, though.

 

 

There're some really good and fun CC powersets in CoH, but because DPS wasn't really a design consideration when the game was first developed (DPS didn't become a design consideration in MMOs until WoW, and CoH predates WoW) the game was designed around a Tank/Support/Mezzer trinity (with Scrappers being off-tanks and Blasters being off-mezzers). We're very lucky that we accidentally got DPS classes in the first place and, unfortunately, because Statesman viewed mezzing as the more powerful option he accidentally under-powered it.

 

That's partly why all the CoV ATs were DPS ATs. We got the Stalker, a melee-ranged Blaster. The Dominator, a control/DPS. The corruptor, a DPS/support. The Mastermind, a DPS/pet controller. And we got the Brute, a DPS/tank. Which is also why the Brute is so weird in modern CoH, because the Stalker has a built-in identity but the Brute?

 

In those early days of CoV, the Brute was a breath of fresh air (at least for me). It broke the OG CoH gameplay loop at the time by being an AT that encouraged you not to stop and rest after every spawn, but to throw yourself recklessly into the next battle because your fury was high. In early CoV, Brutes often had to pray your team had your back with holds/supports because if they didn’t you’d probably “brute lock” and die when you inevitably ran out of end and your toggles dropped. It was the fun melee AT, because if you didn’t want the brute lock style gameplay you’d play a different AT.

 

But over time, a lot of "Jack-isms" like:
- Forced travel time, with most missions forcing you to leave the zone you took the mission in.

- Contacts not giving you their cellphone until you’d completed half of their content.
- Founders Falls not being on the tram line.

- No inherent stamina management, encouraging players to spend time using the Rest power instead of fighting.

- Balancing around the belief that one player should be equivalent to three even-con minions.

- The idea that defense classes would run at most one or two toggles at a time, picking and choosing their resistances as the situation warranted and not stacking them to their resist caps.
 

They got winnowed out of the game, or had their severity reduced... and now the "fight then rest after every spawn" playstyle is pretty well dead, and the Brute is no longer the reckless AT it once was because most every melee AT now plays like the Brute did back at CoV’s launch.

 

And I'd argue that that's not a bad thing but it is where the game's age (and the development pause caused by sunset) really shows, because tweaking controls to make them more valuable would require some hefty fundamental changes to the game's systems; and Mezzes (and the Mez ATs) would be much more difficult to modernize than the Brute would be. And I don't think modernizing Brutes would be easy by any means. I've got a lot of thoughts on rebalancing Brutes, but I'm not sure where I'd even start with Controllers that didn't include the words "so let's fundamentally change the way control powers work" 😁

 

Which isn't to say that Controllers and Dominators are bad, either. I think the two are very well balanced against each other. I've never once looked at a team comp and said "Man, it sure does suck that we have a controller/dominator, I sure wish we had something else instead." It's just that control powers in general are a safety net in a game where safety nets aren't really necessary. My favorite Brute back on live (pre IO sets) was a Stone Melee / Electric Armor (without Tough), who was very reliant on Fault (Stone Melee's safety net power) for damage mitigation because he barely pushed 50% smashing/lethal resistance. These days, Fault is pretty skippable because the same combo can trivially hit the hard resistance cap to six damage types

 

 

Actually, I can think of one thing that could make controllers/dominators more attractive without fundamental changes: a new, very rare enemy spawn def that contained say, 3x the normal number of mobs but could only appear on an actual team (i.e. not while soloing at X8, only if the team has 3+ or 4+ people). If say, 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 spawns was an "Overwhelming" spawn that a single Tanker couldn't fully agro manage, it would make controls (and off-tanks) more useful because the portions of the spawn that were uncontrolled would either need to be off-tanked or locked down with CC. At the same time, I could see players hating that and needing an extra difficulty option to turn Overwhelming spawns off the way AVs can be downgraded to EBs or bosses can be downgraded to LTs.

[golstat2003]

10 hours ago, gabrilend said:

 

Wow, I'm honored to have had the same thought as him 🥰

 

Genuinely that made my night

 

 

I think it's clear from the various responses that the comparison was NOT a compliment.

 

Jack had some weird ideas that were counter to each other for version 1.0 or pre-1.0 of this game.

 

A lof ot his ideas would have killed off this game if not for the sense of many others.

Thanksfully a lot of changes over the weeks, months and years after that version of the game led us to where we are today.

[ScarySai]

10 hours ago, gabrilend said:

Wow, I'm honored to have had the same thought as him 🥰

 

That is not a good thing.

[Greentea]

I always felt once the mobs get CC’d, they should get damage taken increased considering they’re defenseless.

 

For example, a Lost mob get mesmerized, a teammate use Haymaker for x2 damage or something like that due to CC’d. I’d imagine that will increase the value of controllers/dominators.

Edited April 25, 2024 by Greentea

[golstat2003]

Just now, Greentea said:

I always felt once the mobs get CC’d, they should get damaged more considering they’re defenseless.

 

For example, a Lost mob get mesmerized, a teammate use Haymaker for x2 damage or something like that due to CC’d. I’d imagine that will increase the value of controllers/dominators.

 

I kind of think that's the idea behind Containment for Controllers. Unfortunatly, I agree that it doesn't go far enough. The idea that if something is "mezzed" enough times it should count as death/being arrested (also stated earlier in the thread) is a brillant one.  . . and would be a huge undertaking for our small volunteer dev team, soooo probably not happening anytime soon. Maybe by 2034. lol

[Saiyajinzoningen]

Just now, Greentea said:

I always felt once the mobs get CC’d, they should get damaged more considering they’re defenseless.

 

For example, a Lost mob get mesmerized, a teammate use Haymaker for x2 damage or something like that due to CC’d. I’d imagine that will increase the value of controllers/dominators.

this is what I've been saying/thinking for years

foes cant dodge, block or easily deflect attacks if held

iirc stalkers did crit dmg to held foes

this is no longer the case BUT

the code already exists, so its possible to implement it

but if it was everyone and not just stalkers holds would become debuffs

and mezzes would become relevant again.

 

 

[CrusaderDroid]

5 minutes ago, Greentea said:

I always felt once the mobs get CC’d, they should get increased damage taken considering they’re defenseless.

 

For example, a Lost mob get mesmerized, a teammate use Haymaker for x2 damage or something like that due to CC’d. I’d imagine that will increase the value of controllers/dominators.

It will, but in a very boring way that pushes things further towards "kill everything right now" - and possibly not even in a way that scales up well. If your team can clear out all the things you can mez without your mez, increased damage against mezzed targets isn't going to move the needle.

 

The fix has to be enemy-side, not player-side. Player tools are good, they're just in the wrong game system to flourish. Once you make it easier to inflict any mez at all, and combine it with reasons to mez (like, say, amped up Tanker auras that significantly slow down kill times or pose scaling damage threats that also get suppressed when mezzed), you'll start seeing control be more popular.

[Duckbutler]

36 minutes ago, PoptartsNinja said:

snip

- No inherent stamina management, encouraging players to spend time using the Rest power instead of fighting.

snip

 

God. And rest had a cooldown! My OG blaster would do a fight, rest, do another fight, then go AFK for 5-10 minutes because he was trashed and out of endurance. 

[PoptartsNinja]

22 minutes ago, Greentea said:

I always felt once the mobs get CC’d, they should get damage taken increased considering they’re defenseless.

 

For example, a Lost mob get mesmerized, a teammate use Haymaker for x2 damage or something like that due to CC’d. I’d imagine that will increase the value of controllers/dominators.

 

Honestly, if mobs had stronger damage resistance toggles that got suppressed by CC instead of just auto-resistances to certain damage types like they do now?

That would make control powers a lot more desireable without making them so absolutely vital that teams couldn't function without a controller/dominator. "AT makes team better" is preferable to "Team can't function without AT"

 

 

9 minutes ago, Duckbutler said:

 

God. And rest had a cooldown! My OG blaster would do a fight, rest, do another fight, then go AFK for 5-10 minutes because he was trashed and out of endurance. 

 

I forgot all about that! You just brought back so many traumatic memories.

 

26 minutes ago, golstat2003 said:

 

I think it's clear from the various responses that the comparison was NOT a compliment.

 

Jack had some weird ideas that were counter to each other for version 1.0 or pre-1.0 of this game.

 

A lof ot his ideas would have killed off this game if not for the sense of many others.

Thanksfully a lot of changes over the weeks, months and years after that version of the game led us to where we are today.

 

I also want to make it clear that, while I do think a lot of Jack's decisions would have been harmful if they were implemented; I have no issues at all with gabrilend's desire to see the game improved. As a result of this thread, I've become convinced that giving mobs suppressable resistance toggles is the right way to make CCs useful. Even if sleep only suppresses a toggle for 2-3 seconds, that still makes even a half-second sleep valuable.

Edited April 25, 2024 by PoptartsNinja

[UltraAlt]

11 hours ago, gabrilend said:

What do you think?

 

I think it should be left alone.

 

You seem to be posting from an end-game point of view, but you do not specify.

Just because a behavior happens in the end-game doesn't mean it happens during the playing of the actual game. There is a huge difference.

 

Everyone is not steamrolling at 1 or 2 attacks to destroy each mob.