View from Atlas Park: More Posse V Posse Goodness

A View from Atlas Park: More Posse V Posse Goodness

Okay, I’ll start off by clearing some names. The players of GhostofPowerleveler and Ars Moriendi both sent me emails to indicate that the team had been pvping in Siren’s Call for a while and had gotten bored of things when they left the zone. GhostofPowerleveler made an admission that Ars Moriendi denied (I’m assuming these people wrote independently) regarding Lesson 6 of last week’s column: GhostofPowerleveler indicated that the increasing number of heroes in the zone was a factor in leaving; Ars Moriendi said this wasn’t the case. Regardless, neither wanted to be seen as bullies or gankers.

Which, I’m happy to say, they weren’t. If they’d stopped to rub my already horizontal character’s head into the ground with a “u suxx00r n3wb!!!!11!!”, I’d not be so kind about it, but they weren’t being unnecessarily unfair in what they did. It wasn’t that much fun, sure, to have to make repeated hospital runs, but that is the nature of the PvP zones.

So, hopefully that clears things up. Other heroes should feel free to stomp these villains down in PvP, but just be nice about it.

So… I went to Bloody Bay as a point of comparison and had a “I’m going to tear my monitor off my desk and throw it through the window” PvP experience. It started with me trying to control a pick-up team of eight who wanted to different things – fight villains, collect the meteor, explore – and among whose number there was at least two players under the age of ten. Lesson 8: you don’t have time to be nice when controlling a team in a PvP zone, so either they do what you say or you kick them from the team. Things ended after I’d solo’d the Shiva Strike mission to within sight of the goal, only to be PK’d. For the amount of time I’d put in, I could have screamed.

What got to me the most where the Stalkers hitting me and just how annoying it got. I’d stop to tell the team what to do – ASSASSIN STRIKE! I’d open my map to pick the next waypoint – – ASSASSIN STRIKE! I stopped to take a sip of water – ASSASSIN STRIKE! This made things not a lot of fun.

It also indicated to me that the CoV Archetypes seem a bit better suited to PvP than the CoH ATs. With the exception of Masterminds (because they are tend to attract a lot of incoming fire and are very squishie) the CoV AT’s seem to have been created with PvP in mind. Their inherent powers generally increase the amount of damage they do, which is the key to PvP. CoH ATs, on the other hand, are more balanced towards PvE (player versus environment) which doesn’t help that much for PvP. CoH Inherent Powers seem to fall behind CoV Inherent Powers in terms of effectiveness and utility – Defenders especially are getting shafted, while Blasters could do with a little love.

So, here’s my will-likely-never-happen suggestion towards fixing up the CoH Inherent Powers so that things work better for PvP. Scrappers should get Defiance while Blasters get Critical Hit. This reflects Scrappers fighting with more desperation as the battle turns against them while Blasters’ ability to hit key areas of their enemies with precision attacks makes a bit more sense to the AT. Defenders should lose Vigilance and get [insert snappy power name here because I can’t think of one right now] that boosts their effective combat level as they approach zero health. This new Inherent Power is equally useful in solo and group situations, lets Defenders still fill their prefered role of being healers, crowd controllers or damage dealers and helps pull this AT from its near second-class citizen status that I perceive it to currently have. (Sorry to those who think this is unfair, but I’ve seen a lot of players who look at Defenders who aren’t dedicated healers as last-ditch group filler, not valued teammates.)

Some severe testing would be needed to ensure that this new Inherent Ability doesn’t make Defenders unkillable, and that the effective combat level boost doesn’t alter hitpoints, just the effectiveness of powers, but I think it is a pretty good idea; at the least, it’s better than Vigilance is currently.

While I’m dreaming, I’d also like a time machine for Christmas.

– UnSub [email protected] 28 November 2005