So, out of curiosity, I decided to see 'what would happen if I added a ranged attack, a melee attack, or a heal to an existing ranged dps, melee dps, tank, or healer'. Powers chosen for examination were Force Blast (full charge), Gauntlet Chainsaw, Psionic Healing (full charge), as I don't have those powers on any of the characters checked but it does work with my passives. I also tested the dps in hybrid role with no passive, to simulate what you'd get out of a hybrid with a defensive passive but otherwise statted for offense.
Ranged dps: FB 2,721, GC 782, psi heal 1,185. Effective hit points (HP*mitigation) 11,452
(Hybrid): FB 1,958, GC 651, psi heal 1,640
Melee dps: FB 1,816, GC 1,076, psi heal 1,185. Effective hit points 9,801 (more dodge/avoid, though)
(Hybrid): FB 1,654, GC 812, psi heal 1,631
Tank: FB 1,223, GC 664, psi heal 1,185. Effective hit points 47,310 (note: I play a high offense/low defense tank, relatively speaking)
Healer: FB 1,142, GC 474, psi heal 7,585. Effective hit points 13,819
Ratio of best to worst, ranged: 2.38 (crits would increase this ratio)
Ratio of best to worst, melee: 2.27 (crits would increase this ratio)
Ratio of best to worst, heals: 6.40 (!)
Ratio of best to worst, hp: 4.83
Do these ratios seem too high? What should the ratios be?
Does Champions Online excessively encourage specialization? 15 votes
Ratios should be somewhat lower.
Ratios should be a lot lower.
0
Comments
I wonder how the role choice affects CC magnitude/duration.
Otherwise, keeping ratios around 2:1 makes the choice of a specialty meaningful. One thing I've seen in several games I've played (including tabletop games) is when choices make a character marginally better at some things, but not really worse in others. In these cases, I felt as though my choices didn't matter much , and that made character builds less interesting.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Specialization is a good thing. If you lower the differentiation, everyone just becomes pretty much the same thing. We just end up with a bunch of tankmages who can do everything. OR we end up with a bunch of gimped toons who can do everything, but none of it well.
Also, with specialization, we end up with more interdependence, which is good. Even Superman needs Batman's help sometimes.
SIGNATURE:
Used to be coach on the forums. Still @coach in game.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
*shrug* I guess they could implement a DR on them, though I wouldn't make it as sharp as for dmg bonuses, and it would be a nerf to healers and CC'ers that encounters may have to be re-balanced around. There should be generally larger incentives to do anything other than dps, imo, as that's usually going to be the easiest and most popular route to take.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
SIGNATURE:
Used to be coach on the forums. Still @coach in game.
The overwhelming majority of content doesn't need specialization. However, the game tries to push specialization in characters, powers, and roles. It creates a weird disconnect between what devs are pushing on paper and the experience of playing the game.
If someone is geared up as a Cosmic tank, they are way overqualified for tanking anything else in the game. What does a dedicated healer do in most other content? Not a whole lot. Especially when you have that Cosmic geared tank anywhere else. How much healing do they really need? And what is going to be controlled in a party that can slaughter everything in seconds? Most bosses are still immune to a lot of controls, right?
The only roles that aren't unneeded or pointless in most of the game are DPS and hybrids. Being able to heal on the side without a build dedicated to it is a lot more enjoyable to play than "nobody needs my healing so... yeah". Same for control. Considering most content can be tanked by a beefy dps, having someone at Cosmic tank level is beyond unnecessary.
Then we also have a problem with so many things being character bound. We can all make alts, but what if you have that character you really love? And it was made to specialize in a small portion of the content? But isn't needed anywhere else? Another disconnect between what the devs try to push and how it feels to play the game.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
In contrast, games like WoW give healers a larger overall resource pool, but this pool refills much more slowly. Healers have a combination of weaker, but more energy-efficient heals they can spam endlessly (overall positive resource gain) mixed with more potent, but expensive heals (negative resource gain) that will dry them up if spammed for too long.
I know one argument in favor of high specialization gaps is that it "forces" you to depend on and team up with other people, but against high-hp targets, large numbers of targets, encounters with lots of damage, or encounters with mechanics that simply require more out of participants besides just beating the crap out of something until it stops moving, you're going to need other people anyway. Relaxing role gaps means players have more leeway in terms of who they can bring along for such content, and in a limited-population game like CO, that's an improvement on SOOO many levels.
I couldn't possibly agree more. I'm sorry to say this because I know a lot of folks have made it their way of life in CO, but this problem really started around the time of TA and the cosmic revamps. The extreme nature of this content and the requirements for clearing it has strongarmed a lot of players into hanging up their hybrids, less-optimal-but-themed/fun builds, and such in favor of more specialized, less-flexible characters with limited usefulness outside this specific content. Sure, there has been minmaxing going on long before this content, but it never really became a requirement until these things came out.
With these things changing the way more and more people make their characters, the older content begins to feel easier and outdated. In turn, this gets players wanting to see it brought up to the "modern" standards and...
...that's how a "build-whatever-the-hell-you-want" game gets converted into a trinity-or-die wow knockoff. Yay.
PS - I always find it amusing that the same people who seem to be so against a system that revolves around specialized trinity characters are often the same people using WoW or other much more strictly trinity games as an example of how CO should do things. :3c
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
1) Just because a game "has trinity gameplay" doesn't mean that every example taken from that game has to involve "trinity gameplay"
2) CO keeps trying to be WoW, even though the trinity model works poorly in an open-ended customization game such as this, where the developers have less control over balancing each role to their exact specifications. CO should've never tried to become a trinity game in the first place.
The ratios don't cause these effects, they make the roles distinct and create a reason to pick one or the other, and in fact having all these bonuses separated out this way lowers the bar that they have to balance around so the ratios technically prevent these effects from getting even more extreme.
I say "what you consider problems" because not everybody considers a few bosses doing big damage a problem. A T-Rex should do big damage when it bites you with a mouth the size of a mini-van.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
People accepting to compromise their character in one way, to be able to excel in another way, should not feel punished for their choice, or be made to feel their compromise was meaningless. And people that want as little compromise as possible overall, shouldn't expect to compete with specialist. Why exactly should a non-tank be able to fill the role of a dedicated tank? Why should a hybrid be able to fill the role of a dedicated healer? That is not common practice on any MMO where such dedicated roles are available, and with good reason.
As for hybrid offhealer being useless, that is just not true at all. The most a dedicated healer has over a hybrid, is the build in +25% heal bonus in their role, the rest is mostly gear and power choices. If your hybrid healer is using dps gear and a dps toggle, sure it wont compete with a dedicated healer, but why should it? If you spend 100% if your time healing, a dedicated healer should always be the most optimal choice, by a significant margin. But as a good hybrid you could help with dps when incoming damage is low, and switch to healing when incoming damage is high, and jump in to share damage with the tanks when needed. That is all very much possible right now, the real "problem" is that only a handful people are even trying. Of course many of the hybrids that do join the endgame content aren't able to do any of that. Their damage is lower than the tank (even when the tank is blocking 50% of the time), their health and resistance is to low to take even one hit from a boss, and they have no heals they can use on other players. That is not something inherent to hybrids, but is more due to the choices of players.
All in all, CO is currently in the best place since it was released, in letting different builds contribute to fights. I would hate to see that messed up just because a few players feel they need to be able to compete with a specialist when using a generalist, when playing a specialized role. CO was designed from the ground up to be a trinity game. And it works quite well as one, as the newer endgame content clearly shows. The reason why it was considered a "hybrid focused game" for years, was due to content being so easy after "On Alert" that specializations were suboptimal.
The fact that devs have less control over what builds people use isn't restricted to trinity focused content, that is just the whole of the game. And that is actually more an argument for using a trinity model for endgame content than against it. Since for endgame content you do need some challenges that are tied to performance requirements, with a trinity setup you can include some weaker players/builds far more easily.
You're wrong. The problem started when ATs, largely trinity based, were added into the game during the F2P conversion. It used to be arguments over balance issues between ATs and FFs with content basically not being made at all that supported specialized classes.
Now, we see FFs being pushed into specialists. Except the majority of the game still doesn't support that and likely never will. Basically, it's the same problem CO always had but now the balance difference is in the content not the characters.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
If I wasn't clear, I'm referring to the huge gaps between effective tank hp and effective everyone-else hp. As big as the hp rift is in this game, it becomes difficult to throw out damage that a tank will care about without one-shotting squishier characters. The same could be said for tanks/healers dealing damage as well as non-healers trying to heal.
I haven't seen any examples of CO-style hybrids existing in other trinity-based games, at least those with any degree of balance. The closest I can think of are classes in WoW, like Druid, which can choose to specialize as a tank, healer, or either ranged or melee dps vs a warlock, who can only ever be ranged dps. In the beginning, there was a thing called the "hybrid tax" which dictated that the druid shouldn't be as good at dealing damage as the warlock. However, as the game evolved, the developers realized how stupid this was and got rid of it.
As for non-tanks filling the role of tanks, I see it happen all the time, and have even been in that spot myself a few times. Hence why I say that games with open-ended character building make poor trinity games.
I don't think anyone's calling for general characters being able to compete with specialized characters, at least I'm not. I just want the rift to be less severe. The penalties imposed on the hybrid role shouldn't be as severe as they are. The reaction people have to hybrid should be "oh, okay" rather than "oh god, not another one."
Whether or not it works well as a trinity game is debatable, but then again, CO isn't exactly a paragon of good design choices in the first place.
1:1 ratios isn't what I'm calling for, but I'll go along with you on this for the sake of argument. Let's say everybody gets the (to use your words) hp of a tank, healing of a healer, and damage of a melee dps. Suddenly, things become a lot easier to balance on the devs' end because they'll know roughly how much effective hp everybody has, they can tweak healing so that it's effective, but not stupidly high for dedicated healers like it is now, and they can more easily estimate how much dps will be coming in.
If the ratios weren't as extreme as they are now, things would still be easier to balance around, but also, people could feel special about excelling in their desired role.
Helpful Tools: Dictionary.com - Logical fallacies - Random generator - Word generator - Color tool - Extra Credits - List of common English language errors - New T6 Big booty tutorial