This is one thing I have questions about. Within CoX, the Blaster worked well because both primary and secondary had offense. Sure, maybe one or two secondary powersets had a sprinkle of defnsive powers.. (specifically ice? hibernate? or was that the tank? revive? or was that the tank? or the fire? (rise of phoenix being the name??) ). The blaster made up for not having ranged suppot as a secondary and having ranged offense as secondary by having the ability to take down the enemy before the enemy can hurt the blaster. The Corrupter introduced offensive primary and suppotrt as secondary. While i did not examine Valiance Online's specific class names (was not Debilitator?), and not each specific power set... I guess this is one thi g I look forward to examining more when the alpha arrives )


Edit: I just want to point out how awesome the Archery set is in Valiance Online. The animation I witnessed on the stream was good enough to please my lust for my old Archery/Devices Blaster. The animations in VO looked heavily improved over CoX and it really feels like a huge step forward with something that feels wxtremely comfortable.

i think the projector is a lot like blasters its got offence-offence option and yeah debilitator is like damage control or damage support/a corruptor(i played cors a lot more then blasters, has a great assult riffle kin cor and a rad dark some of my favs )
and manipulator is like control/support or ranged damage.
you should have a look at the powers page on the webiste here.

then factor in some of the power set groups like ranged seem to have dozens of potential power groups slated and more then 1/2 a dozen in already



theirs a few power set combos they dont have that id like to see one day a defense ranged for a ranged tank, id also really like to see a defense support and a defense control some time but id say they are focusing on balancing the more traditional power combos before they proliferate the tank class subset and the team only subsets.
although i hope they do in time i can see why they would hold off on it like vet classes so that everyone doesnt start out a tank/something

(but i really hope one day to be able to create a super heroic (team only)defence/support tank with heals that gains aggro by healing and has never killed anyone in its life )

Thanks for the reply i'm glad i'm not alone over here! I was worried that my amount of parenthesis made my statement confusing but apparently not . I'll take a look at the powers page on the website here, and i'm glad to know offense/support like a corrupter may be balanced after all.

I just want to point out that the Blaster secondary was support via multiple types of powers. Aside from revives and straight up buffs, you could do damage with most of the powers, but they had secondary effects for support. Most had crowd control effects, damage over time, or stat debuffs.
I get what you mean though.

Oh I guess I hadn't thought of it that way. I kind of liked the squishy aspect of Blasters. It just seems so weird to me to focus on offense as one trait and have support as another trait. I think I already said this above in my posts. It just seems kind of... backwards. Why would I want to buff my team with heals or shields or have slight debuffs as a secondary when I could have more rediculous damage dealing and be fully offensive. It just seems weird. Maybe it works and I don't know what I'm talking about thanks.

HotNerd wrote:
Well to be fair the secondaries were definitely the "offense is the best defense" kind of support. Most of the debuffs, IIRC, were for keeping things from getting close so you could continue to damage the hell out of them and did damage themselves while debuffing.
I know all of Ice's powers had a slow effect to them. One of my favs was an Icy Aura that slowed baddies if they got close.
I remember slotting for Slow once on my Ice/Ice and things barely moved. I ended up favoring damage though. What are Blasters for if not for killing everything quickly?!

Cobalt Chameleon wrote:
Thanks for reading and replying on topic! I appreciate the feedback!
Today I made an Archery/ice character and bugged my way to lvl 50 to test out the archery animations that i saw a deav stream on friday. I figured that out of all secondary powersets available for ranged support (and not /devices available), that ice would be the best to combine with archery due to the aoe -slow, -rech. I don't really want to buff my teammates if i play this build. It just ruins the tempo. However I do see myself applying the enemy debuffs because theyre target at the enemy and not my teammate. Clicking betweem teammates and enemy targets is disorienting unless i'm a controller immobilizing and holding enemies. I dont know why the though of offense to control confuses me with having secondary ranged support.

Anyways, if youre interested ... i couldnt get any of the secondary ice attacks to work, but I did record a short video of myself testing every archery attack in action. I think its the only working animation set in v0 of alpha?

I haven't got in to test yet because I'm waiting for the Mac client.
Thanks for sharing!! I'm liking the animations and sounds for Archery!

Well this thread was fun but I've now read the Archetypes thread more and have discovered the Projector! requiring a powerset of Ranged Offense primary with a required secondary of Melee Damage Control. All of my arguments are now nil! More variety aint bad if offense/offense and offense/support are both included!
valiance.shogn.net/forum/bulletins-news/225-archetypes#5096

In City of Heroes, my favorite thing really was the dark/dark defender. It was challenging to find teams who knew how to work with them, but once I did I think I turned a few people into fans. Using Recall Friend to stack the bodies of my downed team, then teleport foe to grab a victim to use the group rez on was probably the biggest eye opener for everyone on the Frostfire mission I first did it on. (Back when you rezzed in the Atlas Park hospital and had to run all the way back)

Some powersets take more strategy to be effective, but when you can make it work they can be epic. I'm hoping to see something similar here.