“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.