New Archetypes

[Rudra]

8 minutes ago, FDR's Think Tank said:

True you can taunt stunned enemies and still draw aggro from them, right?

I don't think you can, no. A stunned enemy, unless immobilized, can simply stagger around doing nothing. And as @biostem said, they can do so at extremely high speeds if the timing of the Stun and their movement command happen in the right sequence within the correct window of time. Faster than they even run normally, for instance. And I've never been able to Confront/Taunt them back.

[Chris24601]

For me, the only AT concept that seem like they’re actually “missing” vs. just “expressed with different priorities than you’d prefer” (ex. the defender support/blast and corruptor blast/support or tanker armor/melee and scrapper melee/armor) and wouldn’t require a LOT of powerset working would be the Melee/Support option.

 

Melee/Control is already fairly doable with the Dominator. It doesn’t get the full raft of powers thar a Melee set gets, but it gets a fair number in its assault set. Just don’t take one of the ranged powers and it’s there. This is a “already doable but with different primary/secondary priorities” AT.

 

By contrast, a Melee/Minions set has the opposite problem that the Minions set is where the MM’s ranged attacks are actually found. So you either need to swap those out with three melee attacks and give a different secondary (probably still support since MM minions actually need that support to really thrive) or you have to replace those three attacks with three support powers that are specific to each power set so the AT can get a full melee set.

 

The first is a fair amount of work and rejiggering just for a three power difference between it and a standard MM. I think some Pool sets with various weapons would be easier to implement for that concept than a whole new AT.

 

The second would probably see a lot of grumbling since you’d have to thematically match the support to each Minion set and that might not match the concept very well. Say Bots gets three picks derived from Force Field (to match the Defender bots), but many would probably prefer it be pulled from Traps or insert your preferred pool paring here… and you only get three so there’s probably some real holes in that support.

 

Again, a lot of work and probably a lot of people not happy with the paored limited support choices. It’s basically a No Win for the devs to even try.

 

Melee/Support (or Support/Melee depending on what the AT’s concept favors) though requires little actual redesign of the respective sets (both set categories run mostly independently of the other category in each AT that has melee or support) with the only tricky bits being coming up with an interesting AT mechanic and balancing the numbers appropriately.

It also is NOT something we really have elsewhere in the game (outside of custom AE mobs) because, to date, melee has exclusively been paired with armor sets (and sorta with control as part of Dom Assault set) and the risks of melee vs. being able to stay at range is a different playstyle.

 

That makes it far more plausible an activity for a small volunteer dev team to tackle and different enough to be worth tackling.

 

As to a potential AT gimmick; I would suggest something akin to the Brute’s Fury Bar (or Blaster’s boosts) but instead of boosting their damage as it grows with each hit, it boosts the strength of their buffs/debuffs, creating a playstyle where the AT must keep up its melee attacks to boost the power of its buffs/debuffs which again makes it play very different from the other support sets which are pretty “steady state” and operate virtually independently of the other power set in their AT.

 

That is the bar for me and making another AT… does it offer a new play experience compared to what is presently available (while remaining feasible to implement for the devs)? Melee+Support I feel has that potential that other options either don’t without a much more extensive inherent or could, but would require far more work to implement than is reasonable.

[megaericzero]

34 minutes ago, Chris24601 said:

As to a potential AT gimmick; I would suggest something akin to the Brute’s Fury Bar (or Blaster’s boosts) but instead of boosting their damage as it grows with each hit, it boosts the strength of their buffs/debuffs, creating a playstyle where the AT must keep up its melee attacks to boost the power of its buffs/debuffs which again makes it play very different from the other support sets which are pretty “steady state” and operate virtually independently of the other power set in their AT.

My concern with this is that you'd be incentivizing the character to generate aggro without management tools - DPS, armor, crowd control, range - and it's in melee-distance with no shields or mez protection. That can be a fast-track to having its face caved-in by a Freak tank or similar.

 

(At least, I'm assuming it doesn't have high damage. My bad if that's not the case.)

Edited October 3 by megaericzero

[Chris24601]

4 hours ago, megaericzero said:

My concern with this is that you'd be incentivizing the character to generate aggro without management tools - DPS, armor, crowd control, range - and it's in melee-distance with no shields or mez protection. That can be a fast-track to having its face caved-in by a Freak tank or similar.

 

(At least, I'm assuming it doesn't have high damage. My bad if that's not the case.)

That’s part of what would need to be balanced out… enough damage and hit points, and tweaking the buffs that can target themselves (or debuffs to enemy attacks) to provide sufficient mitigation relative to the attacks coming in to avoid face planting in whatever the dev’s define as reasonable content.

 

As a baseline I would expect base melee damage and hit points to be ahead of either the Defender or Corruptor ranged damage (depending on if Melee is primary or secondary) due to the increased risk in close combat relative to range.

 

That said, it’s also worth noting that without some type of mitigation (immobilize, stun, etc.) in their blast set, range is only a temporary advantage over being in melee and Defenders/Corruptors are perfectly capable of soloing, so it IS a solvable problem for some set of numbers that aren’t too much above those of the Defender and Corruptor.

Edited October 3 by Chris24601