SavageFist wrote:
While I understand CoH's reduction of the aggro limit to 17 for performance and mainly balance reasons, do you think we could tweak it a bit here? One of the main features of playing City of Heroes was taking on multiple bad guys to make you feel powerful. After playing other MMOs, I really appreciated the amount of foes I could fight in CoH. Instead of a hard limit on aggro and maybe AoEs(remember they limited those over time too), can we maybe scale the foes after a certain limit? i.e. When fighting anything over 15 foes, some arbitrary number of foes either take less damage, have more HP and/or inflict more damage. This would also be a nice indicator of how powerful you have become as you level and gain more stats, better enhancements, gear, etc. So maybe at some point you can more easily take on 20 foes and still survive, then later 25 and then finally hitting 30, where anything after that you better be on a team.
If that is not a good idea or too code intensive, please just look at getting as high a number as possible when playing end-game content.
One of the things our Systems Director has been working hard on is making players feel like superheroes and supervillains, and has focused on letting players fight as many mobs as they can attracts. Therefore, we've developed a rather interesting aggro system called Hate and we'll do a full spread on it soon. For now, I'll simplify it to answer your question. There is no limit to how many enemies you can attract, but more so how much hate your able to maintain. The Titan archetype is given a special archetype power set called Taunt, and it includes lots of ability that are able to stack hate. Hate is applied to a mob in such a way that there is temporary hate and permanent hate. If two tanks are fighting for hate they'll have to continue to stack hate on that mob. Most of their higher level abilities stack high amounts of hate and once they've reached a dominant amount of hate, it's nearly impossible for anyone to pull the target away.
Then there is Will which is a special value that allows some smarter and more thoughtful mobs to overcome hate, and continue to survey the battlefield and focus on the most crucial combatant on the field. There is a special temporary hate value called a Temporary Hate Delta, which can temporarily break a target's Will for a short amount of time, and those are very high-level attacks that have long cooldowns.
