It spawns a different pseudo-pet depending on the class (minion, lt, boss, AV) of enemy that it's used on. Since it's a pool power, they wanted it not to stack, much like Vengeance doesn't. But it would suck if a boss/AV level buff got overwritten by somebody else's minion level buff, as in replace stacking. It would also suck if you wasted the duration of the new buff because one was already active, as in ignore stacking. Thus: Suppress stacking.
This will sound a bit non-sequitor at first, but this is actually as good a jumping off point as any. I'm not explicitly replying to Codewalker, just using his statement as a launchpad. Hold on to your eyeballs, history lesson soapbox Wall-o-text inbound.
If there's one thing I think most proponents of City of Heroes gameplay agreed on, its that City of Heroes offered
freedom. Not unlimited freedom, but exceptional freedom to play in any mode one wanted to. The gameplay was friendly to soloers. It was friendly to randomized teams. And with the invention system, it even became friendly to min/maxers. That freedom manifested most strongly in the belief that City of Heroes was unlike other comparable games in that it eschewed the notion of "trinity" play. What's trinity play? "Trinity" refers to the "holy trinity" of fantasy gaming: the tank, the healer, and the damage (DPS). The idea is that every player (character) had a role to play on the team, and there were three roles: kill stuff, prevent stuff from attacking everybody else, keep stuff alive. If you were good at one role you'd be bad at the other roles. This ensured that everyone *had* a role. Someone good at two or even three of these things would make everyone else superfluous or redundant. The design focus was on the *player*, not the *character*. Players were encouraged to make characters that would serve a purpose on teams; in other words characters were the tools that players used to play the game.
The problem with trinity play in a role playing game is, ironically, role playing. If the players see their characters not as gameplay tools, like chess pieces, and more like
entities that represent them in the game, like avatars, then it can be grating to have the game
tell you what you have to make. For some players, its comforting to know that you have a role that everyone else expects, and if you just do that and everyone else does theirs then things will work out. For others, its stifling. But its important to note that trinity play isn't intrinsically stupid, its intended to solve very real gameplay problems. How do you make sure everyone feels (relatively) equally important to the team's success if *not* to assign them jobs to perform. And that only works if everyone can't do all the jobs themselves singly.
City of Heroes is known for *not* being focused on trinity-style play. But *why*? Is it because the devs felt that trinity play was bad and wanted to try something else? Actually no. In fact, its well documented that the original devs
believed in trinity play, and actually tried to enforce it in City of Heroes. The reason why City of Heroes isn't focused on trinity play is because
the original devs were absolutely horrible at designing for it.
See, trinity play requires two basic fundamental design rules to be in force. First, it requires every class (archetype) to be good at one of the trinity roles (tank, damage, buff/heal). And second, it requires every class to be
bad at everything else. If you're a tank with decent DPS, it doesn't matter if there are better DPS classes: you don't need them. And when you don't need them, the damage soaking ability you possess to protect them can now be used just to protect yourself. And with that, you might not need buff/healers anymore either, because there's nothing squishy around you. The devs *tried* to do this, but failed in two spectacular ways.
First, they did *try* to make a trinity tank. Tankers have very high damage mitigation and relatively low damage (original launch tankers had damage mods of about 0.6 - significantly lower than they possessed for most of the game at 0.8 ). The were generally not good at buffing or healing. However, even this floor of damage was pretty high compared to the damage necessary to kill stuff. By allowing tankers to enhance their damage to as much as three times the base level, they allowed tankers to grow into damage levels significantly higher than even the DPS classes possessed initially. True, DPS classes could also do this and be better, but the point of trinity design is not that something else is better, but that something else is *necessary*. If you have *enough* damage, more damage isn't necessary. It might be nice, but its not really essential. Because of this, tankers could easily solo in terms of kill speed. And when they soloed, because they had such high damage mitigation they didn't need healers or buffers. It wasn't because they didn't need *healing*, it was because
natural regeneration was high enough to substitute for healing. More on that in a second.
They had more success with their trinity DPS class, blasters. Blasters really are bad at mitigation and bad at buffing and pretty good at damage. But the devs made a second mistake. If tanker damage was good enough, blaster damage was awesome. Blasters were the literal incarnation of the overpowered mage in game design discussions: blasters could kill so fast neither mitigation nor buff/healing mattered much, at least initially.
Eventually without powerful slotting blasters felt the sting of lacking mitigation and healing - in fact data mining analysis by the devs shows that Blasters performed their trinity role beyond expectations: they were always as a class the most burdened with dying in missions, and most reliant on good teams to keep them functioning correctly. Ironically, long past the point where the devs abandoned trinity thinking blasters were still hampered by the legacy of this design, all the way up to Issue 24 which was the first *serious* attempt to break them from their trinity past.
And then they pretty much dropped the ball. Literally by design (this is also well-documented), Scrappers were designed to break the trinity design because Scrappers were originally intended to be
good soloers. Remember in trinity design there's no such thing as a good soloer, because trinity design mandates that everyone is good at one thing and bad at everything else. A good soloer is a trinity breaker (there are heavy-trinity games that contain good soloers as exceptions, but its still the case they are just that: exceptions). Scrappers had a good balance between damage and mitigation. They only lacked buff/heal. And they didn't need buff/heal because of a design error I mentioned above: in City of Heroes if you had enough mitigation you didn't need healing, because everyone had a good source of self-healing: Regeneration. City of Heroes implements
always on health recovery. In effect, CoH regeneration is a continuous, always on, never suppressed, works in combat, Heal-Over-Time (HoT). And its strong: by default base regen recovers full health in 4 minutes. That's like a heal over time of 5% health every 12 seconds (actually, its exactly like that because that's how regeneration is implemented). And on top of that City of Heroes offered a relatively easy to acquire power called Health that anyone could get that significantly boosted regeneration: +25%, enhanceable. It wasn't uncommon to have Scrappers and Tankers with fully slotted Health running around with the equivalent of a HoT of 5% every 7 seconds or so. That's approaching the strength of many HoT buffs by actual buffers in other games.
That huge amount of "natural" health recovery meant even things that didn't possess true healing like most Scrappers and Tankers could avoid the need for them if their damage mitigation was high enough, simply because their high mitigation meant they didn't take as much damage that needed healing. Not to mention actual Regeneration scrappers that had health recovery comparable to other MMOs
raid monsters.
The devs screwed up with defenders in a different way. Defenders couldn't necessarily do everything well (corner cases notwithstanding), but what they could often do was buff something else to do everything well. Empathy defenders could buff almost anyone into basically a high performance Scrapper. FF defenders could buff a player to have as much if not more mitigation than the average tanker. If Scrappers were the trinity exception, Defenders were the trinity-busters. At launch, defenders were seen as difficult to solo, but very quickly they were also seen as the ultimate force multipliers: if you have enough defenders, it doesn't matter what you are - including if you are a defender yourself. You will be buffed into a trinity-bitch-slapping tank-mage (or if you were a heal/buffer yourself, a tank-mage-cleric).
And then there's controllers. I've saved the best for last, and I call them the best because even the devs recognized controllers as being the biggest threat to trinity play when the game first launched - they were actually the first archetype targeted for trinity-thinking nerfs. Controllers are the good and the bad of City of Heroes design rolled into one. Controllers possessed a megaton of hard mez originally. A ridiculous amount, in fact. Only players who played controllers from the start would necessarily know this, but originally Controllers did no damage in many of their mezzes, but they had a lot more mez potential in that their AoE mezzes had far lower recharge. They could pretty much keep entire spawns of minions, Lts, and Bosses, permanently held for the entire duration of a fight. Forever, in fact. They could all but instantly paralyze Archvillains and turn them into punching bags, even better than punching bags because punching bags at least sway side to side a little. They were more like bowling pins. The good news for non-trinity play: here was a way to deal with aggro that was fundamentally different from the traditional tank. The bad news for gameplay in general: it was a ridiculous way to diversify from trinity play because it made basically everything else moot. You didn't need *anything* if you were fighting inert statues. You didn't need healing or buffing or aggro control or mitigation or even loads of damage. Sure, those things would help, in the sense that having a bowling ball that detonated on impact would help score strikes. But it was wholly gratuitous and unnecessary. Controllers didn't just break trinity play, they straight up broke the game entirely.
Sure, initially they had low damage, so it could be slow and frustrating to solo a controller. I once spent fifteen minutes soloing a Jump bot because I ran out of endurance and the only way to keep him from killing me was to just keep Blinding him. This turned him into a statue unable to attack me while I didn't have enough endurance to do more than nick him occasionally because I needed enough end to keep blinding him. This was an end of mission boss, mind you. And then tier 9 pets arrive and with that the missing piece in Controllers' trinity-nullifying grand slam package. And the devs figured it out pretty quickly. Controllers were targeted early and often for game balancing. First they had their AoE hard mez toned down dramatically, increasing recharge all the way up to a base of two minutes. The (explicitly stated by the devs) idea was that such mez was so powerful it should only be available maybe once a fight (spawn) or once every other fight even (at least for most players). They didn't want to take it away, but they sort of had to. And the only option available to them at the time was to make it less available. They also added damage to non-damaging mez, added containment, and modified pet stacking. All in all, in a funhouse mirror sort of way, the devs actually turned Controllers into Scrappers: a jack of all trades good at everything class that even included buff/heal. Its no surprise that Controllers always top the list of most powerful archetype as a whole.
So we didn't get non-trinity play because the game is designed for it, and its not because of unlimited buff stacking or hard mez. Its actually in spite of those things. Its really because the devs were too good at making classes good at something, and horrible at making them bad at everything else, and ignoring their own rules in the worst possible design situations. It wasn't until around Issue 7 that the thinking turned away from trinity design explicitly, and for reasons having nothing to do with Issue 7 itself. It all has to do with what happened before: City of Villains.
The design team for City of Villains had a bit of a quandary. They wanted CoV to be not too dissimilar from CoH, because they wanted the game play to be familiar, and also because they had to use the same game engine and wanted to reuse as much material from CoH as possible to reduce development costs. So one very interesting decision they made was to say that since heroes were build on cooperation (i.e. trinity design), CoV villains would be the opposite of that: they would be designed to be self-sufficient, and work together by choice rather than design. In effect, villains were all going to be Scrappers. As a result, while CoH hero archetypes were at least *intended* to be good at one thing and bad at everything else, CoV villains were designed to be good at one thing and at least okay at one or more other things. Stalkers had good offense and okay defense. Masterminds had good aggro control and decent offense plus buff/heal. Dominators had good aggro control (vis-a-vis actual control) and decent offense. Corruptors had decent offense and buff/heal. Brutes had good offense and good defense. They were all designed to run counter to trinity play by design.
Once the devs saw how CoV villains worked, and also took note of the train wreck that was the pseudo-trinity landscape in CoH, they started to change their mindset to new design rules that focused not on trinity play but on cooperative self-sufficiency. In other words, every class should be able to solo by being
good enough at everything, and really good at something. That way being good enough means they can always solo reasonably well and can always do something on any team, and their specialty means they would be desirable on teams beyond just marginally useful at least some time. I'm not saying they succeeded at it consistently - stalkers and blasters in particular were troublesome here for different reasons - but its only then that the devs genuinely began to
deliberately move away from the trinity mind set. Until CoV, we were not trinity by coincidence and by error, not by design. Basically, the bugs in archetype design became features.
But it wasn't buff stacking that was the fortunate error, and it wasn't hard mez. In fact, abundant hard mez was almost the end of non-trinity play, because it caused the devs to try to reinforce trinity play on the game. We have what we have because they failed *again* to do trinity right. But its possible hard mez almost cost us trinity play. If they had "fixed" hard mez correctly, they might have been able to put the game back on a path to trinity play. And if they did that, its possible the opening wouldn't have been there for the CoV team to try a different way. Instead, the game fortunately "routed around" the problems of hard mez.
But the legacy of poor stacking rules haunted the game right up to the end. Blasters were denied decent mitigation all the way up to I24 because, and I'm speaking from direct experience working with the devs on this, in part the stacking rules made it difficult to hand the blasters something that was good enough to help them and not so good it was easy to abuse by stacking. Thus, blaster protection via power pools was a non-starter for the entire history of the game. Because CoH didn't have good ways of limiting stacking, if you wanted to give something a buff but deny it from being overstacked by other things that didn't need it the only real way to do that was to reengineer their actual powersets - something only they have access to. And that almost literally took an act of God. It wasn't until I24 that the devs had the green light to make the significant structural changes necessary to even attempt this, after years of small fiddling around that couldn't directly attack the problem. Namely, that of all the archetypes, Blasters were the only archetype across the entire game that as of I23 was still following Trinity design rules. Everything else from Defenders to Controllers to Tankers abandoned those rules long before.
None of this would be news to the devs, who were slowly trying to migrate from the shackles of the past. I24 saw changes to Blasters coming that were a direct attempt to break them from their trinity past. The incarnate system introduced new mechanics designed to allow the devs to hand powers to the players in a way that everyone would benefit strongly from them, without them becoming too strong in certain hands - judgment blasts being immune to damage buffs is a small example of that, the stack-limited hybrid buffs would be another. What Codewalker is mentioning above (Codewalker? did this start off as a reply to Codewalker? Oh yeah, I think I remember now) is just another example of the devs moving away from its trinity past and its mechanical shackles to provide more benefits to the majority of players. Where Blasters had to suffer for years without a good way to supplement mitigation through power pools, now the devs were thinking of ways to put
very strong powers in the pools in ways that would allow them to still be within the margins of what they wanted power pools to have. That flexibility doesn't encourage trinity play, it helped to continue to diversify away from it, something the design rules had been slowly evolving away from since 2005. But whereas originally it happened by accident, now the devs wanted to continue the evolutionary process on purpose. Overall, I think they were doing a good job there.
The final frontier, in some respects, was hard control. It would take new tech to make new kinds of mez, but I believe if the game still existed today we'd be there today. The devs wanted to innovate, and wanted to add more diversity to gameplay to continue the process we'd been on since 2005, where more options equals more ability to give more players more ways to do more things. There's no way that encourages trinity play. It continues to encourage the diverse gameplay we already had, and push it into areas where the trinity legacy still existed. The long shadow of trinity design even extended into the Incarnate trials, where one of the first complaints during testing was that Lambda and BAF heavily deemphasized controllers due to their hard controls being mooted for much of the time. That's Trinity, resurrected by unbounded hard control like Sauron empowered by the Ring of Power. Just like the One Ring, unbounded hard control doesn't equal Trinity gameplay, it appears on the surface to be its antidote like the One Ring tempts its wearers with the power to defeat Sauron. But in reality, it corrupts everything around it until eventually it empowers the thing you thought it would help you defeat.
I wonder how many people read the post through to the end, and how many just skipped to the end and went "wait, was this post a Lord of the Rings post? WTF happened here?"
