Author Topic: Teaming up?  (Read 14473 times)

A Cyclops named Steve

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Teaming up?
« on: December 15, 2012, 02:32:25 AM »
So I just started this evening so I'm still trying to figure everything out but is there a way to team up like CoH? I occasionally see the team up option pop up in certain areas(like in the jail break) but is that it as far as teams?
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dwturducken

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2012, 02:48:06 AM »
Yes and no. Yes, you can team. No, it's not like CoH. I haven't done it much, but I don't really see what it gains you, besides having another body on missions with you. In environment missions, it saves you and your teammates from "kill-stealing" each other, I guess.
I wouldn't use the word "replace," but there's no word for "take over for you and make everything better almost immediately," so we just say "replace."

A Cyclops named Steve

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2012, 02:58:06 AM »
Yes and no. Yes, you can team. No, it's not like CoH. I haven't done it much, but I don't really see what it gains you, besides having another body on missions with you. In environment missions, it saves you and your teammates from "kill-stealing" each other, I guess.

Hmmm well that sucks. That was one of the best parts of CoX being on full teams of 54x8 was about the best thing ever
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JaguarX

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #3 on: December 15, 2012, 03:05:15 AM »
Hmmm well that sucks. That was one of the best parts of CoX being on full teams of 54x8 was about the best thing ever
well by definition you still can team and turn up the diff, but full team in a CO is 5. Difference is that the bonuses for teaming is not that great but you still do if if that is what you are into. In fact there area few missions that give good end bonuses that a team of 5 is recommended, and then you have the nemesis confrontation which is fun as hell for a teaming incident (to me at least). You still can team in CO but it's not really a quick way to rush through levels over soloing like in COX.

dwturducken

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #4 on: December 15, 2012, 04:47:47 AM »
Right, what Jag said. I don't want to say, "Don't team! It's worthless!" Just don't expect that same benefits that teaming in our game conferred.
I wouldn't use the word "replace," but there's no word for "take over for you and make everything better almost immediately," so we just say "replace."

General Idiot

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #5 on: December 15, 2012, 04:03:49 PM »
You know what sucks though? There IS code in the game to scale mission mobs to team size. All the repeatable missions you'll be constantly spammed with by random civilians use it, and all the adventure pack and comic series missions use it. Most of the post-release content (Which is way less than you'd think) uses it too where applicable.

You know what sucks more? The scaling is horribly broken. It spawns what in CoH would be an 8 man mob for a 5 man team, and CO characters run at a generally lower power level than what CoH did. Meaning you WILL get consistently stomped flat every other spawn unless you really know what you're doing. Though that might have something to do with the holy trinity as well, champions has it though like almost everything else it's a little wonky. Healing does the same threat per point of health healed as damage does per point of health lost. And healers will put out more healing than anyone's damage usually, and even aoe taunt abilities have a 5 target cap.

Really, they could make the target cap 15 or 20 on most aoe powers and it'd fix so many problems with team content in champions.

faith.grins

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #6 on: December 16, 2012, 04:17:12 AM »
Though that might have something to do with the holy trinity as well, champions has it though like almost everything else it's a little wonky. Healing does the same threat per point of health healed as damage does per point of health lost. And healers will put out more healing than anyone's damage usually, and even aoe taunt abilities have a 5 target cap.

Really, they could make the target cap 15 or 20 on most aoe powers and it'd fix so many problems with team content in champions.
There are two problems I've found with tanking in CO.  The first is that holding aggro on more than one target at once is... hard.  I won't say impossible, but it takes some doing.  The second is that as a tank you are not tough enough to handle more than two players worth of mobs without external assistance, and the external assistance must be healing.  There are no defensive buffs which will keep you standing in the face of 15 dudes with AK-47s.  None.

Both problems can be remedied if you simply take a self-heal power of some sort, but I hate the idea that a tank needs a self-heal.  I can hold aggro against Legendary Villains no problem, but I have to spend half my time blocking just to keep my green bar above 10%.  I can hold aggro against 3 adds no problem, but more than that... I dunno.  I can do it, I know that, but I don't know that I can do it consistently enough to make my healer stop focusing on her own health bar.

Don't even get me started on alerts.  (Mein Gott, if you are not in the Defensive Role, don't take Crippling Challenge!)
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Kaiser Tarantula

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #7 on: December 16, 2012, 02:34:10 PM »
There are two problems I've found with tanking in CO.  The first is that holding aggro on more than one target at once is... hard.  I won't say impossible, but it takes some doing.  The second is that as a tank you are not tough enough to handle more than two players worth of mobs without external assistance, and the external assistance must be healing.  There are no defensive buffs which will keep you standing in the face of 15 dudes with AK-47s.  None.
This is true of Defiance and Regeneration tanks.  They get nickel and dimed by henchman damage because they have no flat damage mitigation.

Invulnerability is a different story.  Sure, it provides less resistance than Defiance, but it also mitigates a flat amount of damage on top of it all.  If you've got 15 guys dealing 200 damage a hit, that's 3000 damage.  A defiance tank resisting 80% of that takes 600 damage.  An invulnerability tank resisting only 60% of that, but with a flat damage reduction of 150 damage, is only taking 300.

Of course, it works the other way around, too.  If there's just one guy, and he inflicts 3000 damage, the 80% defiance tank takes 600 damage.  The 60%/150 Invuln tank takes 1140.  Ouch.  As a result, Defiance tanks are better at dealing with single large enemies that kick out tons of daamage in large quantities, while Invuln tanks are better at dealing with crowds of weak enemies.

Regeneration tanks are trickier.  They have no damage resistance save what is provided by their gear, but they can potentially survive (via regeneration healing) anything that doesn't have massive spike damage.  A regeneration tank, therefore, wants to limit the number of attackers he's dealing with, and spread their attacks out so that they can't all spike him at once.  Make sure to block any attack that deals large spike damage, and just block often in general.  Your self-healing generates aggro against anything that considers you a potential target.

faith.grins

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #8 on: December 17, 2012, 02:23:39 AM »
This is true of Defiance and Regeneration tanks.  They get nickel and dimed by henchman damage because they have no flat damage mitigation.

Invulnerability is a different story.  Sure, it provides less resistance than Defiance, but it also mitigates a flat amount of damage on top of it all.  If you've got 15 guys dealing 200 damage a hit, that's 3000 damage.  A defiance tank resisting 80% of that takes 600 damage.  An invulnerability tank resisting only 60% of that, but with a flat damage reduction of 150 damage, is only taking 300.

Of course, it works the other way around, too.  If there's just one guy, and he inflicts 3000 damage, the 80% defiance tank takes 600 damage.  The 60%/150 Invuln tank takes 1140.  Ouch.  As a result, Defiance tanks are better at dealing with single large enemies that kick out tons of daamage in large quantities, while Invuln tanks are better at dealing with crowds of weak enemies.

Regeneration tanks are trickier.  They have no damage resistance save what is provided by their gear, but they can potentially survive (via regeneration healing) anything that doesn't have massive spike damage.  A regeneration tank, therefore, wants to limit the number of attackers he's dealing with, and spread their attacks out so that they can't all spike him at once.  Make sure to block any attack that deals large spike damage, and just block often in general.  Your self-healing generates aggro against anything that considers you a potential target.
Regen worked that way in City of Heroes, but it had a reputation for being a very strong defensive set because it was set to handle a high baseline level of damage.  It's also useful to be Regen in that every buff set benefits you greatly, whereas for, say, Dark Armor Scrappers, you don't get much use out of Sonic or Thermal Shields.  It's a large part of why Willpower, Stone Armor, and Invulnerability were considered so good and so popular:  they mixed defensive types.  Will and Stone give you some resists, some regen, and some defense.  Invuln gives you a bit of defense and a lot of resists.  That means they all scale well with any form of buffs or heals.  They've got a strong enough baseline to handle a fair number of enemies on their own, but if you toss Fortitude on top of 'em?  In some cases, that was about as good as popping your Tier 9, to be honest.

Haven't played with Invuln in CO, yet, didn't realize it specialized in group tanking.  I guess my next tank will roll that way, then.  I still greatly dislike that no CO Tanks have "complete" defenses:  there's always some sort of hole.  I dunno, I just perceive an injustice where some Archetypes are called Tanks, but their tools for tanking are inherently incomplete.  I guess it's also somewhat exacerbated by my attempts to tank for Alerts where other folks in damage roles have Taunts on their powers, and the team-up mechanic will often place a tank in a team with no hybrid or support characters.  (And that some hybrid characters don't actually have team buffs or heals... or least any that they use, although the PuG-maker can't be blamed for the latter.)

-shrug-  I don't feel very tough as a tank, and the game doesn't make the reasons for that clear.  That smacks of bad design.
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Thunder Glove

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #9 on: December 17, 2012, 03:35:02 PM »
« Last Edit: December 17, 2012, 09:33:04 PM by Thunder Glove »

Kistulot

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #10 on: December 17, 2012, 10:56:51 PM »
Is it just me or does anyone else really not remember any major super heroic confrontation where the only reason everyone survived was because someone was in the back healing everyone?

It doesn't feel like it fits thematically at all.
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JaguarX

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #11 on: December 17, 2012, 10:58:53 PM »
Is it just me or does anyone else really not remember any major super heroic confrontation where the only reason everyone survived was because someone was in the back healing everyone?

It doesn't feel like it fits thematically at all.

comic book, super hero story wise, movie, marvel/ DC and everything in between, I never heard of a confrontation like that before.

dwturducken

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #12 on: December 18, 2012, 12:16:56 AM »
You guys never played with our tank. His favorite tactic was to run into a large room, run around to each mob to get all of their attention, then bring them all back to us. As long as we kept him healed, buffed, and supplied with any purples that dropped, we could handle any large room, up to and including Frostfire

The heals became less important, though not unnecessary, once Freedom came out and Regen Brutes became available on blueside.
I wouldn't use the word "replace," but there's no word for "take over for you and make everything better almost immediately," so we just say "replace."

corvus1970

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #13 on: December 18, 2012, 12:26:18 AM »
You guys never played with our tank. His favorite tactic was to run into a large room, run around to each mob to get all of their attention, then bring them all back to us. As long as we kept him healed, buffed, and supplied with any purples that dropped, we could handle any large room, up to and including Frostfire

I played with many, many herding tanks. Heck, I teamed up with a dedicated herding tank just a few days before shutdown. She was really good at it too. I suspect her taunts were designed to call the parentage of her foes into question ;)
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dwturducken

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #14 on: December 18, 2012, 02:24:09 AM »
We may be talking about the same tank. :)
I wouldn't use the word "replace," but there's no word for "take over for you and make everything better almost immediately," so we just say "replace."

corvus1970

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #15 on: December 18, 2012, 02:25:46 AM »
Possibly. Let me see if I can find her name.

Ah yes, "Loretta Stern" :)
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dwturducken

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #16 on: December 18, 2012, 03:22:24 AM »
I don't recognize that name, but he liked female tanks/brutes.

Slightly related, is there even a LFT chat channel?
I wouldn't use the word "replace," but there's no word for "take over for you and make everything better almost immediately," so we just say "replace."

JaguarX

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #17 on: December 18, 2012, 03:56:45 AM »
I havent seen a LFT channel but many "lft" and or "team forming" messages on the COX channel and a few on the zone channels.

dwturducken

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #18 on: December 18, 2012, 04:55:10 PM »
I saw a couple of those last night, and someone could certainly create a dedicated channel. Since we're more used to teaming than the "home" community is, I guess I don't see much point.
I wouldn't use the word "replace," but there's no word for "take over for you and make everything better almost immediately," so we just say "replace."

Kaiser Tarantula

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Re: Teaming up?
« Reply #19 on: December 18, 2012, 09:22:17 PM »
Tanking vast amounts of damage in CO means stacking powers and advantages covering vastly different forms of defense to the point of nausea.

I recently ran with a tank who combined (based on observing his running buffs) Invulnerability, Energy Shield with the Laser Knight advantage, Reconstruction Circuits, Support Drones, Protection Field, Field Surge, Aggressor, Conviction, and Palliate.  He was damn-near unkillable, tanking Mega-Destroid Overseers in Resistance on Elite difficulty, two at a time.

Dude had a perpetual damage shield, soaked up fire from everybody and their mother, and whatever got through the shield and actually damaged his health could be easily healed back.  Heck, his support drones spent more time healing me and other party members than healing him.