Can We Get Rid of Aggro Cap?

[Vayek2]

Would it be possible to get rid of the aggro cap, and re-live the old glory days of taunting however much we can handle before being killed?

[Steampunkette]

We could!

 

But we shouldn't. And probably won't.

 

But hey! The Server Code is out there. Just load up your own version, modify the AI scripts, and enjoy the experience all over again!

[MunkiLord]

I get why it won't happen, but it would amuse me to no end. I'd absolutely be pushing every team I as on until we had the entire map or died trying.

[dmaker]

That would make for a fun churn. Just spam your aoe and sit in the middle of the maelstrom :)

 

Though I suppose that might be part of the reason why we won't see it. It encourages AFK farming.

 

[Vayek2]

sure, it would probably be abused by farming (but really, is farming so bad that we actually care what they abuse in farms but doesn't hurt the rest of the game?)

 

I just find that most game content is crazy easy now with set bonuses and incarnates. I thought a pretty easy way to bring back a fun challenge would be to just drop arbitrary aggro caps. I;m not entirely sure why the cap was created in the first place on live, but it seems like a fun idea to drop it now.

[Black Zot]

2 minutes ago, Vayek2 said:

sure, it would probably be abused by farming (but really, is farming so bad that we actually care what they abuse in farms but doesn't hurt the rest of the game?)

 

I just find that most game content is crazy easy now with set bonuses and incarnates. I thought a pretty easy way to bring back a fun challenge would be to just drop arbitrary aggro caps. I;m not entirely sure why the cap was created in the first place on live, but it seems like a fun idea to drop it now.

 

I think part of it was, it broke certain powersets clean in half.  Anything with massive mitigation (coughGranitecough) or bonuses for nearby targets could just pull the entire map and lay waste, which sucked for anyone who couldn't keep up or didn't have a badass graphics card.  It also ran directly counter to the vehement anti-farming stance the devteam had for most of the Live run.

[Vayek2]

are things still anti-farming? 

 

And aren't most people now playing with computers that are now 15 years more advanced than this game was designed to be played on?

[ShardWarrior]

I keep seeing the "go start your own server" type dismissive post being made in response to shout down suggestions of others on these forums.  If the best answer that you can provide is "don't like it, go place somewhere else" then perhaps you shouldn't be participating in a discussion.

 

28 minutes ago, Vayek2 said:

I just find that most game content is crazy easy now with set bonuses and incarnates.

Personally, I agree with this.  IMO the existing content is boringly far too easy now for teams filled with fully pimped out incarnates.  I don't know if removing the aggro cap will help with that, but it is an idea with merit.

[Steampunkette]

Just now, ShardWarrior said:

I keep seeing the "go start your own server" type dismissive post being made in response to shout down suggestions of others on these forums.  If the best answer that you can provide is "don't like it, go place somewhere else" then perhaps you shouldn't be participating in a discussion.

 

Personally, I agree with this.  IMO the existing content is boringly far too easy now for teams filled with fully pimped out incarnates.  I don't know if removing the aggro cap will help with that, but it is an idea with merit.

#1: City of Heroes existed for most of it's lifetime with the Aggro Cap. It's how most people who played the game existed in the game. To the point where most people don't realize that the aggro cap is hard-coded into the NPC AI and think it can somehow be altered on a character by character basis. Even though that was a hot bone of contention when the aggro cap was implemented.

 

#2: The Server Code is out there. I'm not saying "Create your own game and play it, hosting your own thousands of players at a time". I'm saying "If that's an experience you want, you can have it on your own machine, then come back after 'cause there's no way the Devs, here, are gonna do that"

 

#3: HILARIOUSLY people think this would increase challenge at -all-! As if a level 51 character with softcapped+ defenses, hardcapped resistances, enough regen and recharge to make the earliest scrappers drop their jaws because they six-slotted heal and have less is gonna be challenged by a larger than usual quantity of people who still can't hit them... Yeah. Ain't gonna happen.

 

It wouldn't increase the challenge at all. You'd just be standing in a larger pile of enemies jumping over each other to try to find 6 square milimeters to stand in next to you while swinging or shooting fruitlessly at the armored god before them.

 

Why yes, Defense is a matter of relative damage reduction which is why it's value increases exponentially as you approach 45% and 100 people swinging on you are gonna hit a lot more often than 16, that's a great point! But taking 5 hits every X Seconds isn't going to be significantly different than taking 1 hit every X.Y seconds (Where Y is a value correlating to 1/4 of X)

 

You'll still have resistances, regen, and self-healing to offset the impact.

 

Meanwhile unless the target caps are also rescinded (And target caps are a balancing point between melee and ranged classes and also between Sentinels and everyone else) you're just gonna be standing there for however long it'd take to kill all those groups, normally. You'd just do it in one place instead of while walking between groups.

 

It's not significantly interesting. It's not engaging for all your teammates who have to wait while you herd up the entire map so they can shoot it when you bring it to the corner/dumpster/whatever. It's not going to make the Incarnate game "More Fun" in any meaningful way.

 

... also it would require us to get rid of the NPC Tether which is probably a hell of a lot harder than increasing the aggro cap from 16 to, say, 5,000. Otherwise the NPCs would just walk back to their spawnpoint.

 

So yeah... it'd be nifty to see a nice dumpster pull for old time's sake, but it'd be more reasonably to do that in a private server environment than try to make it a serious change to the way City plays.

[ShardWarrior]

14 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

#1: City of Heroes existed for most of it's lifetime with the Aggro Cap.

So?  The game existed for most of its lifetime without Incarnates too. 

 

All I suggested is that the idea has some merit.  It may help toward alleviating some of the boredom with non-challenging content, it may not.

Edited August 28, 2019 by ShardWarrior

[Rylas]

25 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

I keep seeing the "go start your own server" type dismissive post being made in response to shout down suggestions of others on these forums.  If the best answer that you can provide is "don't like it, go place somewhere else" then perhaps you shouldn't be participating in a discussion.

 

Personally, I agree with this.  IMO the existing content is boringly far too easy now for teams filled with fully pimped out incarnates.  I don't know if removing the aggro cap will help with that, but it is an idea with merit.

Part of the issue is that this topic has come up repeatedly already. OP could have at least done a search before making yet another thread on the subject. And had OP read through those threads, they would have seen all the extensive reasons against the suggestion (and the few, poorly reasoned ones for it). 

 

The problem is, even when there wasn't an aggro cap, things weren't harder. Whole maps would be cleared quickly by gathering them up. If the complaint is that OP doesn't find enough challenge, the suggestion wouldn't address the problem. 

 

If challenge is the desire (though, OP just made it sound like they wanted to relive the "Glory Days"), a better suggestion would be having higher difficulty settings. Wether that's being able to set it to +8, or spawning only bosses, or adding an AV to every mission (these are all on-the-fly ideas, mind you).

[Zolgar]

All removing the agro cap would do is make farmers even faster, and expand the gap between IO/Incarnated God builds and those that aren't.

 

It would not make the game harder, just allow those that could survive it to do things faster/easier.

 

There would be a slight increase in challenge for those who are not gods, in certain missions where large spawns are closer together, or where there are ambushes... But in a team environment this would help the weaker teams that went over normal agro cap, because the brutes and tanks could keep more of the agro off of the squishies.

[PaxArcana]

Please, no.

 

I don't want to go back to the days of standing by the door for half an hour, while the tank herds AN ENTIRE LARGE MAP worth of NPCs into a single mob, thanks.

[MetaVileTerror]

*provides PaxArcana with a reward medallion for the correct use of the word "mob" in the context of City of Heroes*

 

Yey.

[Zolgar]

4 minutes ago, MetaVileTerror said:

*provides PaxArcana with a reward medallion for the correct use of the word "mob" in the context of City of Heroes*

 

Yey.

*Gives MetaVileTerror a demerit for not knowing that 'mob' is short for 'mobile' and is an old gamer term for a single enemy*

 

Boo.

[MetaVileTerror]

Oh, I know it is, but City of Heroes transcends that utter nonsense.

[PaxArcana]

Both usages are correct.

Tanks used to herd mobs into a gigantic mob of mobs that kept trying (unsuccessfully, natch) to mob the tank.

 

Words are fun! 😄

[krj12]

Probably not going to see the agro cap removed, but the correct solution to the original issue was to impose an agro range - you get so far from the spawn point, the mobs break off pursuit.   Original problem would have been solved.

[Vayek2]

2 hours ago, Rylas said:

Part of the issue is that this topic has come up repeatedly already. OP could have at least done a search before making yet another thread on the subject. And had OP read through those threads, they would have seen all the extensive reasons against the suggestion (and the few, poorly reasoned ones for it). 

 

The problem is, even when there wasn't an aggro cap, things weren't harder. Whole maps would be cleared quickly by gathering them up. If the complaint is that OP doesn't find enough challenge, the suggestion wouldn't address the problem. 

 

If challenge is the desire (though, OP just made it sound like they wanted to relive the "Glory Days"), a better suggestion would be having higher difficulty settings. Wether that's being able to set it to +8, or spawning only bosses, or adding an AV to every mission (these are all on-the-fly ideas, mind you).

I had run a quick key word search for "aggro cap" and came up with nothing, but thanks for letting me know I need to dig deeper on that 🙂

The glory days would be awesome - after all, aren't we all here now out of a sense of nostalgia?

 

But yes, the key point I was talking about is to maybe give the existing content some new scope of challenge. I mean, yes, I do love feeling over powered and super hero/villian like. but like any game, I get bored when I can't make it harder.

 

I really like your idea of making a +8 option. I feel like that would do a great job of creating a more difficult challenge without really depending on the creation of new and complicated content.

[Rylas]

44 minutes ago, Vayek2 said:

I really like your idea of making a +8 option. I feel like that would do a great job of creating a more difficult challenge without really depending on the creation of new and complicated content.

It's certainly a better idea than removing the aggro cap since that becomes an all or nothing change. Imagine non-IO'd players trying to avoid too much aggro in dense spawn maps. Believe it or not, but there are plenty who don't bother with making super builds. At least difficulty setting changes keep it to player choice.

[MunkiLord]

3 hours ago, Rylas said:

Part of the issue is that this topic has come up repeatedly already. OP could have at least done a search before making yet another thread on the subject. And had OP read through those threads, they would have seen all the extensive reasons against the suggestion (and the few, poorly reasoned ones for it). 

 

The problem is, even when there wasn't an aggro cap, things weren't harder. Whole maps would be cleared quickly by gathering them up. If the complaint is that OP doesn't find enough challenge, the suggestion wouldn't address the problem. 

 

If challenge is the desire (though, OP just made it sound like they wanted to relive the "Glory Days"), a better suggestion would be having higher difficulty settings. Wether that's being able to set it to +8, or spawning only bosses, or adding an AV to every mission (these are all on-the-fly ideas, mind you).

I want this all boss spawn idea.

[MunkiLord]

How do we think it would work out of the aggro cap was lifted but the target cap remained? I think most of the times this comes up most people are assuming if we can aggro the entire map that we would be able to hit them all at once too. But what if we couldn't? Would that make it significantly harder if you could only hit 16 enemies but 200 could attack you? I'm still not for lifting the aggro cap, but this idea does make me curious.

[Redlynne]

You're welcome to launch your own server(s) where that is true ...

[Haijinx]

TBH I've been back since June.  I've never seen anyone yet take advantage of the current cap. 

 

Herding seems to be dead. 

 

 

[Megajoule]

8 hours ago, Haijinx said:

TBH I've been back since June.  I've never seen anyone yet take advantage of the current cap. 

 

Herding seems to be dead. 

 

 

Good.