“Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.” Sun Tzu

There was a big to-do in the Champions Online forums on launch day. The Cryptic team decided to push a sweeping patch that cut many players’ defenses by a significant amount, while at the same time increasing the damage done by the low level henchmen NPCs. Regardless if you were affected by the patch, or not, or whether you think it was a necessary change to a game that was too-easy, it was an abrupt and sweeping change to the balance of the game.

What’s the big deal about tweaking the defense? Because MMO combat isn’t about teamwork. It’s not about healing. It’s not about crowd control. It’s not about aggro. It’s not about the Holy Trinity. It’s not about skill. It’s not about build.

MMO combat is all about defense.

More accurately, MMO combat is about ALL of those things, but all those things are all about defense.

Ok, that was overly dramatic, but it is true. Taunts, heals, mezzes, stuns, roots and resists, pretty much all your MMO powers aside from attacks, are all about mitigating damage. I categorize defenses into two categories: passive mitigation (where you affect yourself to stop the enemies from hurting you) and active mitigation (where you do something to the enemy to stop them from doing damage to you).

Passive Defenses

• Dodge
• Resists
• Heals
• Buffs
• Blocking (if your game has active blocking)
• Line of Sight/corner pulls
• Movement powers
• Stealth

Active Mitigation

• Taunts
• Debuffs
• Stuns, mezzes and roots
• Knockback/down
• Offense/damage/debuffs

You may have noticed that I threw offense and damage in with the active mitigation. Dead enemies can’t shoot back and thus, the ability to kill your enemies quickly, before they can do you any real harm, is a good form of defense. Picture an encounter where you are facing 10 lower level NPCs who can each do you 10 points of damage per second. That’s 100 damage per second vs. your 300 hit points, which might be a problem, except you have an area effect opener attack that will kill 8 of your enemies. All of a sudden the fight goes from difficult to trivial, because you can mitigate 80% of the damage instantly.

Of course, offense is the way to ultimately win the fight. When we talk about mitigation, damage is the thing we are trying to mitigate… yet it is also a form of mitigation. The point is that the two concepts are coupled very tightly and in a way that might surprise you.

Every character (and team) has a slightly different set of mitigation tools available to him and those tools vary in effectiveness based on the situation, but also the game balance set by the designers. Every character also has the ability to win the combat by offense and this is also the one mitigation tool they all have as well.

Let’s take a game where defenses are too good — heals are very powerful, dodges and resists are too high. In this situation, offense makes a poor mitigation power, because you can’t kill anyone fast enough to nullify their damage. However, you still need offense to win a battle. In this case, you see characters and teams striving to get more offense, because they need it to push past the overpowered defenses of their opponents.

So, in a game where stealth is too effective a defense, you see people countering with more perception. In a game where opponents can dodge 95% of incoming attacks, people counter with accuracy bonuses, or debuffs. In games where heals and resists reign, you see people getting more and more damage to compensate. More defense means people compensate with more offense… makes sense.

Now, let’s take a game where defenses are too weak — heals don’t quite keep up with typical incoming damage, resists aren’t great, movement and stealth are designed such that you can’t escape a fight gone bad. In this case, you still need offense to win a battle, but you probably have enough of it without tweaking your build. However, because the other forms of mitigation are so poor, you find that damage has also become your best form of defense and thus, you need more of it.

In this game, you see alpha strikes and powerful AoEs rule the battlefield. No one can stand up to any concerted attempt to kill them, so the goal becomes do as much damage as fast as possible before the other guy. Strangely enough, less defense generally means people compensate with more offense.

Somewhere in that continuum is a sweet spot, where the relative power of offense vs. defense is matched such that sometimes it is better to have the heal, buff, or dodge, and other times it is better to kill your enemies with a massive alpha strike. That sweet spot is hard to find and some games never find it. Time will tell if the Champions Online devs are getting closer to that perfect balance, or not. Until then, I would definitely take a really, really big AoE.

Disclaimer: I originally posted this in the Champions Online forums, where it was quickly buried under gripe posts. I grabbed it, added a little and posted it here so that it would see the light of day. For those of you playing Champions Online and having trouble with the patch, I hope this post gives you some ideas and saves you grief.

Defender just got nerfed!!!

The launch day patch for Champions Online has hit many headstart beta players pretty hard and at least from the rumblings on the forums, a lot of folks are upset. I enjoyed the game during the open beta and the headstart, but I did remember thinking, “If I can defeat everything this easily and level this quickly, will this game have long term appeal?” Even so, logging in after the patch and playing some of my characters was pretty rough. The defenses upon which I relied now seemed like paper.

After a couple extended evenings of play, I have a few thoughts on the patch I would like to share. This is in no way intended to belittle those who are upset, or to suggest that everyone needs to scrap their concept build and switch to a min/maxed one. One of the things I like about CO is that you can have concept builds in the first place. These are just things to think about and possible suggestions that you might consider to have an easier time post-patch.

0. Take a deep breath — The patch is pretty ugly and sudden. Things probably went a little too far and I think we will see corrections in the future that will make people happier. This seems to be Cryptic’s MO. Ultimately, things will get better from here and once a few more patches come down the line, the game will be better overall.

1. Switch out Personal Force Field for Regeneration — I have a couple of characters that were PFF users and it seems to have been hit much harder than regeneration. There are several reasons for this, but I think the main one is that PFF repairs too slowly to be useful in extended fights. If a fight is over quickly, PFF wins, but you probably didn’t need it anyway; Regeneration is better for most fights now.

If you are building your character on a concept, then Regeneration is nice simply because it does not have any noticable graphics with it, thus the fact that you are hard to hurt could be explained with almost any effect, including “I have a force field… you just can’t see it.”

2. Don’t Ignore the Little Guy Anymore — I think a lot of the problem soloers are having have to do with the damage henchmen are doing. Most builds with any passive defense could stand in a small sea of henchmen with little fear. Doing that now is suicide in most cases; the damage the henchmen will do to you is significant. You need to mitigate this damge to survive the pull.

3. Big AoE Damage Helps — One way to do this is to kill as many henchmen in a group as quickly as you can. AoE damage is a great way to do this and so the mines in Power Armor and Munitions are good, as is the Gadget chainsaw and the Force explosion. Once you deal with the henchmen, and thus have reduced all that incoming damage, you can now deal with the tougher opponents.

AoE damage gets rid of the riff-raff quickly

4. Get a Crowd Control Power — Aside from PvP, I saw little need for crowd control pre-patch. Post-patch, you should consider picking up a CC power. Most sets have one, or you can dip into another pool if it makes sense. In a spawn of three, hold one and start working on the other two. If you can defeat one enemy before the hold ends, you have effectively reduced your incoming damage by a third… that’s great damage mitigation for a single power pick! If your set has holds that affect multiple enemies, even better.

5. Throw Stuff — Even for characters without Super Strength, throwing stuff is a great opener. It is a low endurance attack with potential knockdown and area of effect. For certain characters, throwing stuff really doesn’t make sense, “This is my scrawny telepath, Eat Mailbox Man”. If you can conceive of your character tossing a lamppost at enemies, try it.

6. Team More — Yeah, I know everyone wants to make the lone-wolf hero, but teaming is a great way to cover holes in your build without breaking your character concept (unless your concept is the “Shadowy, Anti-Social Avenger”). You don’t have AoE mines and don’t want them? Find a munitions guy and team up. Can’t be bothered with crowd control? Ask The Mesmerist if he wants to team.

7. Turn Off Hyperactive Ferret Mode — We were teaming the other night, getting our butts kicked when I realized, the game had changed, but we hadn’t changed our behavior. We were still charging into quest areas, scattering, and aggroing half the bad guys, heedless of danger. Slow down, just a little.

On a team, that means staying together and taking a brief rest between fights. It doesn’t mean a nap after every pull, just enough time to stop, make sure everyone is still here and no one has gotten dragged into another battle, and take the 10 seconds or so so that your “rest” healing kicks in. I think (though I am not 100% sure of this) that no one on your team gets their out of combat healing until the entire team is out of combat. Also, that few seconds allows Personal Force Field time to repair, and cuts time off of cooldowns for certain powers. All good stuff.

When solo, this means taking a few seconds before combat to assess the situation. How many opponents are there? Are there groups nearby I am going to aggro? Do I have an escape route if things go bad? Instead of Superjumping into the middle of a dangerous area, try starting on the edge and killing your way into your target. While adventuring in a tight spot, pay special attention to enemies that wander, or will respawn behind you.

8. Learn to Juggle — Many attack powers have useful secondary effects (holds, fears, knockbacks). Take Telepathy for example. The Ego Blast power applies a hold to its victim. This is great against a single opponent, but against three, you may find yourself taking more damage than you would like. One useful tactic is juggling, which means quickly tab-targeting between the enemies and hitting them so that your effect can be applied to all of them before you start your main attack. So, your attack sequence might look like this:

So easy even a child can do it

Target baddie #1
Long charged blast
Tab Target baddie #2
Short blast
Tab Target baddie #3
Short blast
Tab Target baddie #1
Start your regular attack sequence

Of course, this depends on the specific attack and your energy situation. In the case of Ego Blast, you can be charging the kill shot on Baddie #1 as he comes awake. You will still take damage, but a heck of a lot less than if you would have just charged and spammed attacks on Baddie #1 until he was dead.

9. Get a Heal — Just like holds, I never saw much need for a heal pre-patch. Post-patch, the game plays a little closer to a traditional MMO in that everyone needs access to healing. This could be a matter of teaming more, but if you are trying to make your character an island unto himself, you need a heal. There are heals in the Telepathy, Gadget, Martial Arts, Supernatural and Sorcery sets. Each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. Unless I was creating a team healer, I would be wary of maintained heals (that break on damage) and heals that scale with Presence (since you probably don’t have it). That still leaves lots of options for you to try and if none of those powers suit you, remember you can craft healing consumables as you level your crafting skill.

10. Consider an Escape Power — If all else fails, you may need to escape and leave the field to your enemies. Teleport is insanely good at this, as is tunneling, but is not very concept friendly. I have had a bit of success with superjump, swinging and to a lesser extent acrobatics, since all of them have a nice jump component that can be used to open the distance quickly. Flight is horrible at escaping, though I can occassionally escape by going straight up. I haven’t tried superspeed yet, so I cannot comment.

However, you don’t need one of the “class A” travel powers to escape combat. The Smoke Bomb power will drop aggro for several seconds and Evasive Maneuvers, if slotted with an advantage, will do so 50% of the time, on a 17 second cooldown. Also, if the worst happens, you can get away with a little bit of forethought… you did plan an escape route after all, didn’t you? One of the best tactics is to fight near a corner or doorway, using it to cover your escape until your travel power kicks into “non-combat” gear.

11. Watch the Runner — When teaming (or when multiple players are nearby) one NPC out of any group will say, “I am going for reinforcements” and head to the nearest other group and aggro them. This guy then brings his friends and suddenly, instead of fighting three enemies, you are facing six. Stop that guy! It is often tough to kill him before he gets to the next group, and if you chase him, you risk wandering into the aggro range of yet another spawn. If you have crowd control powers, a root, a snare, or a knockdown, this is the time to use it. Assign “runner duty” to the guy on your team best equipped to handle the runner and make sure he doesn’t get to that next spawn.

12. Get Under Control — A friend of mine who absolutely rules CoX is having quite a bit of trouble playing CO. We talked about it and even went as far as swapping accounts to look at each others’ builds and try them out. While I admit that his characters were more fragile than I would like, I found I had considerably less problems than he said he was having. I think one reason for this is that he is a “clicker”, meaning he uses his mouse to click powers instead of using the keyboard. Not a big deal, even in a fast game like CoH, but it seems to me that CO ramps up the speed even further and that extra second or two to get to the click heal, or to fire the AoE could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Consider working your keybinds to get all the important powers on the 1-5 keys, the alt 1-5 keys, as well as Q, E, R, X, and C. Move non-timely stuff to keys further from your driving hand. Or… and I have not tried this myself, invest in a 360-style controller and play the game that way. Everyone I have talked to that has tried it has indicated that “the game is made for it” and that they have had an easier time since switching from mouse and keyboard.

13. Pets Do Help — The general opinion on the CO forums is that pets stink. I agree that there are tons of problems with pets. My Gadgeteer bots have a disturbing tendency to get stuck or lost and I have to unsummon/resummon them way too often. My wolves seem to be better at following me, but have the disturbing tendency to eat any crates, boxes and cars they find. Nonetheless, on characters where pets make sense, I have found them helpful. The bots do decent AoE damage, and the wolves do a good job of grabbing and holding aggro… to the point where they can almost tank a master or super villain. They will die during a tough fight, but not before my head-start in damage has already decided the outcome.

Anyway, I hope some of these tips will help ease your way through Millenium City. Good hunting heroes, and I hope I helped you avoid this fate…

Mmmmm... asphault flavored asphault

My new game of choice is Champions Online. I played in the open beta and the head start weekend and I am making a special trip to get my retail copy today to make sure I don’t miss a beat. It is a fun game and I am glad to be playing it. However, for as much fun as I am having in CO,  it almost joined that long list of games that have graced my hard drive and been quickly deleted. Nothing is worse than muddling through a long download, install and patch process, only to boot up a game for 10 minutes and realize that within the hour, this thing is hitting the Recycle Bin.

There are any number of reasons why a game is an instant candidate for deletion… of course the main one is that my gaming attention span is that of a hyperactive ferret… but let’s ignore that fact please. Actually, it isn’t that bad. I am usually quite forgiving of my MMOs. I can sift through a crappy UI. I am forgiving of bad graphics. I can even manage games that are horribly repetitive because frankly, all MMOs are horribly repetitive. I do want a game to offer me some hook — something new to the formula. Most games get insta-deleted because, after a night or so of play, I realize that it has nothing new to offer me. If I want to play the exact WoW formula, I have Runes of Magic, or WoW for that matter.

Champions Online DOES have a hook — a couple of them actually. It has great character customization, both in the look and the mechanics of your guy. It also has an action-oriented combat system that, while I am not entirely sure if it succeeds, is at least novel enough to keep my interest for now. I like it… so what was its Big Sin? What almost made me hit the Uninstall button 30 minutes into the game?

Instances

The first time I saw the “Choose Your Instance” screen when I zoned, I was done. It was Guild Wars all over again.  Guild Wars is a decent game,  with some good ideas and a pricing model that is hard to beat, but it is a “hub and instance” game. In these games, you are either in a hub where you interact with other players between adventures and form groups, or you are in an instance with your team, isolated from the rest of the universe. D&D Online is another example of a hub and instance game — you can chat in town, or run a dungeon.

I don’t like hub and instance games; they feel small to me. I like exploring and interacting with people. I like “hunting on the way” to missions and quest areas. I like teams that meet up and join together for the evening, not just as a convenience to complete a single mission. I find that when I am playing heavily instanced games I even miss things that are considered annoying. I miss being kill-stolen, and waiting in line to kill a specific guy to complete a quest. It sounds strange, but these little hassles remind me that I am playing with people. Overcoming these annoyances builds community.

So, I hate instancing and Champions Online is instanced, but I like Champions Online… In fact, I think CO could use MORE instancing. What the heck?

What Do Instances Do Well

1. Instances keep the servers happy — An instance is a copy of part of the world that is segmented, allowing only a (relatively) small number of players to interact. Many server architectures handle different instances on separate servers, keeping the number of connections to each server down. If a structure like this is used for the zones of the world, this can be a great boon to performance. Champions Online caps many of its zones to 100 players, spawning new instances when needed. I certainly don’t know for sure, but I am guessing this has to do with technical limitations of their architecture.

2. Instances allow quest designers more flexibility — DDO has some of the best dungeons I have ever seen. DDO dungeons have puzzles to solve and scripted events. They feel closer to a single-player game, or even to a tabletop rpg, than most other games. Instances allow this. Because the quest desginers know that no one else is in your copy of the dungeon, they can create a puzzle or scripted NPC behavior knowing that someone else is not going to come along and mess you up. Guild Wars had a progressing story where areas actually changed over time, based on where you were in the quest chain. You could not change an area in an open world game.

3. Instances can scale — Instances allow the game designers to scale the difficulty of the missions they contain. If a solo player enters an instance, he can face 1 or 2 enemies. If 10 players enter, 20 enemies can spawn, or tougher enemies can appear. CoX has perfected this concept, allowing missions to scale based on team size and level composition — you can even set your difficulty level to make the missions harder or easier based on your preference. You just can’t do this in an open world.

4. Instances allow players to avoid griefing/inconvenience — Who here hasn’t been trained? I don’t mean trained as in “I am trained in 25 forms of martial arts and can chop boards to bits with my pinky finger” or “I trained my dog to hop on its hind legs while balancing a phone book on its nose.”  I mean, “We were sitting in the Crypt of Weeping Solace, waiting for Gigathrox the Mighty to spawn and these jerks trained 62 Flaming Orcs on us, killing us instantly.”  Kill stealing, camping, training… all problems in MMOs go away when you can hide with your friends in your own little pocket dimension.

Less malicious, but still annoying is the fact that open world quests often create spawns that are needed by many people at once. If your mission is to “Kill the Chief Orc” and there is one of him, and he spawns every hour, it is very likely that there are a half-dozen people waiting once you get there. In an instance, you have your very own orc to kill.

5. Instances help gather teams together — Champions Online copies a lot of the WoW/EQ quest structure. There are hubs where you gather all the quests and then you venture into the open world to various quest areas, complete a bunch of quests, then return to the hub to turn in. CoX has an instanced mission structure. You get a mission, head for the instance door, enter, complete the mission and then turn in. Sounds the same… but the first time I teamed in Champions Online, I realized it wasn’t the same.

See, the problem with copying the WoW quest structure is that people don’t team in WoW to quest. It’s too inconvenient. Invariably, people don’t have the same quests. If you share quests, then you find that people haven’t completed one of the prerequisites to get your quest. Other quests you have are unsharable… for some unknown reason. Once you get everyone together, and share all the quests you can share, the team sets out and then people scatter. Someone sees a quest pickup… for a quest they have that they couldn’t share… over there by those goblins. Once you are fighting the quest mobs, they are way too easy for a group to kill, so people tend to drift… and then see something shiny near that tower and … “oh I just died, I’ll be back”. Hopefully, as you kill monsters, the quest drops count for everyone, or else you have to kill even more creatures, which takes you longer than if you’d just gone it alone.

Champions Online has these problems, but then adds the fact that the guy who knows where to go can fly, so he goes vertical and you are left to putz through the zone with your superspeed or acrobatics… aggroing pretty much the entire contents of the zone to your destination. Of course, while you were doing this, the flying guy accidentally aggroed the big-bad you were there to fight and had to kill him while you were still too far away for the kill to count for you, meaning you have to wait for a respawn and kill him again, to which the flyer gives you a happy, “Good Luck” and takes off, having completed HIS quest.

Really, I am not bitter…

CoX’s instanced missions keep everyone focused. Someone gets a mission and then you all head for the mission door. There is no ambiguity as to where to go, or can you run off to kill Bob the Unclean who is just over that hill. You go to the door. Once everyone is in, you start. It is more linear and thus, easier to get everyone on the same page.

6. Instances can promote teamwork — In WoW, instances provide the hardest content. In CoX, instances scale to the number of people in your team. Difficulty tends to bring about teamwork. If you cannot face the evil boss alone, you have to bring friends and if the enemies are hard enough that even when you bring friends, you had better work together, all the better. In the open world, generally quests are easier because they cannot scale up, so if you team, you are bringing too much firepower. This generally means no one has a good reason to work together and thus teams never gel because their members are busy soloing on a team. I have seen many evenings in both WoW and CoX where a team would have a hard time the first few pulls, but then as they understood how everyone was going to work together, they improved. By the end of the night, we would be steamrolling the opposition.

Why Instances Still Stink

1. Instances make your game feel small — Hub and instance games feel small and often lack that feeling of exploration you get from open world games. If I am just going from hub to hub and dungeon to dungeon, I just don’t feel as though I am seeing that much. Even the most linear of open world games gives you the option to go places you aren’t supposed to go. You just never get that in DDO, or Guild Wars, and so even though they might have a similar amount of content as other MMOs, they still feel smaller.

2. Instances make your game feel empty — In Guild Wars, travelling (even town to town) meant heading into an instance. The hubs may have been populated, but travelling, you never saw anyone. DDO has “open world” zones, but since they are instanced, you and your friends are the only people there. Ultimately, these games feel busy only when you are in town. CoX has some action outside of their instances, but they long since adjusted rewards and risks such that no one “street sweeps” anymore. Heck, with the Mission Architect, no one even ventures outside anymore to even hop between mission instances. I am picturing a world where all the superheroes are pale and cannot bear the light of the sun.

3. Instances scale — Of course, I just said this was a good thing, and it is, but there are also pitfalls here as well. One possibility is that everything is either too easy, or too hard. Who judges what is the correct level of difficulty for an MMO? What should a solo character be able to fight? How can you possibly scale a mission for a team of all dps, or all tanks? What if the players are worse than average, or significantly better? Before CoX allowed players to choose the difficulty of their missions, it was pretty painful with some builds being able to fly through instances while others would get stuck, unable to clear missions without assistance.

4. Instances don’t foster community — Strangely enough, some inconvenience and crappy behavior is good for a game. When there is an issue, good people tend to rally together to deal with it. This can be as simple as getting a team invite from a stranger when you are both waiting for a coveted spawn, or as involved as starting a guild to hunt down notorious player-killers. Heavily instanced games don’t have strong communities because there is no need for them. DDO and Guild wars take this to a pretty extreme level in that not only can you spend the majority of your time alone in your private adventure instances, but the truly anti-social can bring along NPC henchmen and never team with another human being again!!

What does all of this mean? Well, for one thing, it means I still don’t like hub and instance games and for that reason, both Guild Wars and DDO have been off my play list for a while. Still, I look at a game like Champions Online and its troubles with open world questing and think that it could use more instanced quests. Champions Online has made me reconsider instancing as a tool. Like any tool, it has advantages and drawbacks. Used well, it can be a boon to a game. Used poorly, it makes your game feel like a single-player game, except with a rotten story and repetitive combat…

But those are problems for another article.

Today Turbine announced Siege of Mirkwood,  the second expansion for Lord of the Rings Online.  Looks like Turbine is following  the footsteps of Warhammer with there new “Skirmishes” feature, which sound like it’ll be PvP battlegrounds that you can join from a queue.

Siege of Mirkwood will expand the online world of Middle-earth where players will join forces to press further eastward into the dark, foreboding and treacherous forest of Mirkwood and take part in the epic conclusion to Volume II of The Lord of the Rings Online

NEW FEATURES:

• The Epic Conclusion to Volume II: Mines of Moria™ – Under the command of Celeborn and Galadriel, players will fight through vast armies of Orcs alongside the Elves of Lórien in a battle that will take them to Dol Guldur, the fortress of the Ringwraiths.  This update includes Book 9 and the Epilogue to the sweeping epic tale begun with the award-winning Mines of Moria expansion.

• Increased Level Cap — Players will be able advance their characters up to level 65, gaining access to new traits, virtues, skills and class quests.

• Answer the Call of War! – Jump into the heat of battle with the new Skirmishes feature.  Skirmishes offer endless action in repeatable, randomized instances where players can create and lead customizable soldiers into battle, training them to greater skill as they earn victories against the forces of shadow.  Answer the call of war wherever violence erupts with the new “World Join” function that lets players and their fellowships band together to fight in various locations throughout Middle-earth.

• Take up Arms! – Infiltrate the dark jails, deadly arenas and savage stables of Dol Guldur, the fortress of the Ringwraiths, and strike a blow against Sauron’s forces in new 3 and 6-player instances.  Call upon your fellows to adventure into the most deadly 12-player raid yet and face the ultimate challenge – the Nazgûl Lord!

• Major Gameplay Enhancements – Turbine continues to improve the award-winning experience of LOTRO with major improvements to the combat and Legendary Items systems.  Players will experience improved responsiveness when in the heat of battle.  Players will also be able to create and craft their own customized Second and Third Age Legendary Items from raw materials and grow their weapons’ power to level 60.  Achieve new Legacies, new titles, and a fourth Runic slot that will make Legendary Items even more unique and powerful.