When the question of city of heroes vs champions online is asked I always go with CoH as a better game. There is one place however where CO was better, the ability to have a ranged tank. Now it would be as simple as adding some ranged powersets into the titan archetype but if it was given it's own archetype I could understand. Let's use my current Titan Iron Forge, she uses fire melee. I woud like to see her instead of using that to be able to use some fire blasts as an offensive set instead. Obviously there would have to be some balancing around this on which fire powers went into it bt I am thinking back to the blaster in CoH their secondary power pool of fire assault. Maybe a similar approach could be done here as taking a few ranged damage and a few ranged controll powers would be doable. A stun for example from smoke say. Nothing long lasting that could be chained but just an idea. Maybe others can think of better ways of implementing this.

It would be enough for me to be able to put one or two ranged attacks on a primarily melee character, some of my concepts require this (in fact almost all of my melee ones do)

ZeeHero wrote:
my stone tank in coh had fireball and fireblast through a tertiary powerset. was very useful

Well my thoughts here are something like Adeptus Astartes from 40k, guns and tankiness. Or maybe a recreation of Salamina who is my fire/regen tank in champions. Fire melee would not accurately remake this.

Ranged tank is a big no-no in MMORPG's, it's so difficult to balance and the most likely result is overpowered and all the other classes complain, or you have a class that's not great at anything, and the ranged tank complains.

There's a good reason why the mage is the glass cannon and not an iron cannon.

The only real way to "balance" ranged tank is if all enemies have good ranged attacks but that requires designing the entire game around the ranged tank.

Meridian wrote:
Giving all enemies ranged attacks isnt hard and isnt balancing the whole game around the ranged tank, its balancing the game to take into account ranged characters at all.

CO and ESO both have ranged tanks. FFXIV gives every tank class (and every melee class) at least one ranged ability.
Ranged tanking isnt a no no, its a necessity for the genre. I think we need to discard our outdated notions of what makes an "MMO"(most of which are grounded in the 90s) before we start any conversation about a game which won't be released till 2018 or 2019.

id really like to see some ranged tanks, particularly a healer tank that causes agro via healing then tanks like my celestial invulnerability blue lantern in CO

Meridian wrote: The same way you make a melee tank less damage than a melee DPS you so make a ranged tank less DPS than a ranged DPS. Also ranged damage typically had some form of light CC to make it harder for enemies to get to them. Also as a ranged tank you have options on tactical options doe the devs also. While a melee tank may be keeps better control over mob position and facing a ranged tank would have to think about it more. A ranged tank however may have better control over threat on a larger number of enemies due to being able to get better positioning for a cone attack. you have to give advantages to one and other advantages to the other. That is one of CO's problems they don't balance benefits vs detriments with their defensive abilities. Very aparent when my regen tank gets one-shotted through block with much better gear on the same cosmic my invuln or defiant tank can hold with mercenary gear. Poor PFF tanks have it the worst though as their only defence is having an essentially 25% bonus on raw health and no mitigation benefits at all. It comes down to balancing the power pools. Think of it this way. guy A has invulnerability and so does guy B Guy A gets an axe and gets really good at choppin, guy B decides to train with a couple of DEagles. Guy A and guy B each have a situation where 30 guys holding a building. They need to dislodge them and while both will probably get the job done guy A will not only more likely get it done faster and also may be a lot more intimidating as those 30 watch him cut through their friends and guy B will probably run out of ammo before having to go on and stands a much higher chance of not being able to finish. While he is invulnerable he might still be overpowered and tied up without an effective close range solution. Now take the same 2 guys and send them against someone they can't quite keep up with. neither one is gonna get hurt or killed but guy B is gonna be able to much more effectively neutralize the perp and guy A is probably gonna lose him. Both are "Tanky" but they do betrter in different situations. May be better to give the ranged tank longer cooldowns thus forcing them to take more attacks and losing say a self buff that the melee would have taken. I disagree with Zee on a LOT, she thinks we should eliminate the part of the playstyle where you can stay still while I think the game can accommodate both, CoH did. This would be a step on a compromise of some sort and would not be game breaking. There is not much I think CO did better than CoH but having a ranged tank is one of them.

Yeah the Mage tanks in ESO with ice staves and tons of health and damage shields say hi. Ranged tanking is a perfectly viable option in modern innovative MMOs.