Differences in Powers?

Discussion in 'War Room (Powers, Artifacts, & Builds)' started by Cerulean Osprey, Jun 14, 2021.

  1. Cerulean Osprey Well-Known Player

    So I was looking over all the different power sets... It feels like, to me, and correct me if I'm wrong... but the mechanical differences between Tanks > differences between Healers > differences between Controllers.

    Do you agree? I'm trying to get a better appreciation for each power.

    Tanks - Seems like there's great variation in the gameplay mechanics?
    Fire Tanks focus on Self-Healing from Burning.
    Ice Tanks stack Defense and Shields.
    Earth Tanks transfer damage to their Pets.
    Rage Tanks defer Damage and Self-Heal.
    Atomic Tanks focus on building Quark-Gluon aura.

    Healers - Less variation, but still pronounced
    Nature Healers release Pheremones into the air. Heals are line of sight?
    Sorcery Healers heal based on AOE
    Electric Healers are similarly AOE, but has unique aura (Electrogenesis) and wave (Galvanize) to heal.
    Celestial Healers are battle healers.
    Water Healers center on High Tide power.

    Controllers - I see very few differences? Feels like just a difference in PI's?
    All controllers give POT, Instant Power Out, 3 Debuff Types, Pulls, Encasement
    Quantum: Teleport, Destabilize PI, Graviton PI
    Hard Light: Construct Combos, Daze PI, Panic PI
    Gadgets: Stealth, Electric PI, Burn PI, Frostbite PI, Dazed PI
    Mental: Invisibility, Dazed PI, Terrify PI
    Munitions: Combos, Burn PI, Stuns/Knockdowns
    • Like x 5
  2. TheLorax 15000 Post Club

    There's a little more to what you listed but yep you pretty much nailed it.
  3. Shalayah Committed Player

    When I’ve water healed I’ve never once used high tide. Lmao
  4. Cerulean Osprey Well-Known Player

    Aah... Anything you can think of, especially for Controller? To me, my lament was that different powers feel the same... just cosmetically different.

    Yeah, I just noticed that a lot of loadouts don't actually use it. What would you say is different about Water vs the other Healer sets? It looks very traditional.
  5. TheLorax 15000 Post Club

    All controllers are essentially the same and will setup their loadouts almost identically. The variety in playstyles mainly comes from choice in artifacts rather than the powerset itself.

    For healers I wanted to point out that Water's claim to fame is its shields and Water's AoE completely outclasses Sorcery. Sorcery's circle is smaller and doesn't stack. Sorcery is also the only healer that has a healing pet but it's mostly not a viable option. Celestial was an offensive healer, that changed with the revamp. Electric is mostly fast reactive burst heals. I think Nature is the most low maintenance of the healers.

    Earth actually has two playstyles: Brick or Aftershocks.
    • Like x 1
  6. DeitySupreme Steadfast Player

    A few things I’d like to point out.

    Fire is more focused on health rather than self heal. Yes it does self heal but the main focus is to have as much health as possible
    Earth has 2 different mechanics. Pet build which is what you described and also stoke skin which is defense build technically.
    Rage is more of a heal back than a self heal. Rages mechanic is to heal back a percentage of the damage taken which doesn’t take into account the users stats.
    Atomic is a power I’ve always personally seen as a Jack of all traits. It’s has self heals like fire. It has defense like ice. And it has damage mitigation similar to earth (not the same but similar).

    Nature is Heal over Time focused (HoT)
    Electric is burst heal focused
    Celestial to me feels more like a mix between electric and nature. It has HoTs (not as much as Nature) and some burst like electric. But combo based. Not really battle healer thou. You can turn any power regardless of role into a battle support.
    Water to me is the all around healer. It has strong AoE HoTs and shields to back up the heals. It can also be played as a burst healer if you wanted too.
    Sorcery IMO doesn’t really have a focus. It’s just an accumulation of abilities lol. It’s HoTs aren’t the best especially soul well. And it’s burst isn’t the best either. Water is well put together Jack of all traits and sorcery is the Jack of few traits. This doesn’t mean you can heal with sorcery. If I had to focus on one thing, personally I always go with the SC build using the arbiter for infinite power to take advantage of the orb.

    And trolls don’t have a specialty. You can pretty much switch powers and still play them the same. The only 2 that are technically different are munitions and HL since munition can use channeled abilities to debuff and HL can use combos. But overall they are the same.
  7. Tilz Loyal Player

    Ye tanks have all different mechanics, still you can play Fire and Earth a bit like a "fake" Ice-Tank focusing shields.

    Healingpowers are more or less different.
    Nature HoTs (haven't played it since Bug-Form Harvest was OP in DWFe)
    Electricity has reactive burst healing
    Water has shields, good bursts and a huge AoE-HoT (I hate it) + Water has the best healing SC in the game
    Celestial has bursty HoTs. Used to have the best SC (rip CG :( ).
    Sorcery has HoTs / Pets. I still would say run a burst focused loadout with Prio, Group, Offering, Shield, Pet, Arbiter. Having Scrap then makes Sorceryhealing just OP. Its insane how strong it is :D

    Trollpowers all have like one unique skill, but thats about it. Trolls are just re-skins of eachother :D
  8. Essential Exobyte Dedicated Player

    It was all more unique before stats revamp. Now all the powers are almost the same except for the power colors.

    Nature was my favorite until they threw it off a cliff. That's one power I rarely see now-a-days. Electric is awesome (imo) and still has some unique powers to use.
  9. DeitySupreme Steadfast Player

    Wait. More unique before the stats revamp? You want when most powers had the 1234 attack? Or what about when sorc and earth were pretty much limited to the same loadout? I’m yes you can prefer it before that’s fine. But unique?
    • Like x 1
  10. Essential Exobyte Dedicated Player

    Okay, you got me, somewhat. AM is a tiny bit of what I meant, a foot-note. What I was more referring to was the controllers having a pot power and cc powers, healers being able to cc ads like nature could and bug form, sorcery/earth had better pet damage, rage had awesome rage tank mechanics, tanks had 2 immunity powers, ice had more shields, stuff like that. More so that Rage tank was for the ads, Ice for single boss, Atomic/Earth for either, and fire...idk, nobody wanted them back then. Now it doesn't matter.

    There are lots of useless superpowers in the game that either need to be taken out or replaced with something that makes sense.
  11. Cerulean Osprey Well-Known Player

    Kind of a bummer to me that there’s minimal difference in Controlling between the different powers. Will look into how Artifacts change things, but hopefully they do some updates in the future.

    I was just thinking that Gadgets and Mental DO have Stealth/Invisibility. That’s kind of cool variation. Hardlight has its construct combos……… but makes Quantum and Munitions unique when it comes to trolling?
    • Like x 1
  12. Apollonia Dedicated Player

    The control roll was an afterthought. It was literally a role / change created in the last month or 2 before the game ended Beta and launched. The game originally intended players to recover their own energy. So this is why you see very little for the role from a design perspective.
  13. DeitySupreme Steadfast Player

    I didn’t know this. Wow learn something new. But yes I agree. There’s a reason most MMOs follow the holy trinity of roles. DPS/tank/healer. Most MMOs follow this proven format and give players the ability to regen power. However because of this there tends to be a pattern of some powers having less damage output in exchange for having group buffs and enemy debuffs.

    Basically what dcuo did was strip that from dps and strip the power regen from all roles and slap them on the troll. I mean it works for the most part. But that’s why they can’t really have much uniqueness when it comes to trolling.
  14. Tree Well-Known Player

    Love this "summary". I've always noticed the different survivability/de-aggro tactics with each Controller power. Other than that, there are hardly any game-changing differences between the Controllers, like ya'll have said. Hmm. Speaking of the ability to be the Controller, all 5 powers are solid!
  15. L T Devoted Player

    That's about right. Earth has an alternate mechanic where they can buff their defense. Atomic is more or less broken and has to focus on shields to get by in most instances. But the Dev team has really done a pretty good job of keeping the tanks different.

    Nature stacks heals-over-time, and can refresh them. Electric is very burst-centric. Celestial healing is more of a mixed bag-- the combos make it very flexible. Sorcery used to be AOE-based, but not so much anymore since Soul Well was weakened. Pet Healing was buffed, but still isn't very satisfying. Water is really the swiss-army-knife of healing. Between High Tide and Rip Tide, you can play a variety of styles that can be effective. All healers have at least 1 line-of-sight heal now (that used to be Celestial's hallmark). They have a few moves in common, but in general, there's a bit of diversity there also.

    One of the cool things about Gadgets and Mental are their abilities to apply multiple PIs-- they can both apply all the original PIs except for poison and karma. But yeah it's been pointed out that the mechanics of trolling are completely unchanged across the power sets, which kinda sucks.

    However, one of the cool things about artifacts is that they *do* change the mechanics of trolling. The Comlink, the Claw, and to a lesser degree the Soul Cloak really change how trollers do what they do. Throw in the cog, tetra, and some other optional buffs and there are some options there.

    So... not so much variety due to power sets, but there is some variety now.
  16. Apollonia Dedicated Player

    Well, actually the game was designed outside of the role trinity and there was only defence and damage originally. Players were expected to regen their own health AND energy through combos/drops. At some point they got nervous and they were getting friction from execs who wanted it to be more formulaic and in line with WoW etc so they added in healing and adopted the trinity. Personally, I think this was a huge mistake. The fantasy trinity trope is not a good fit for this genre. Fans of superheroes don't play to heal or recharge energy. They could have stuck with damage and defence. Games like Marvel Heroes proved that the product could succeed without using that trinity. In fact, choosing to do that limited many of their character creation options since so many characters' powers revolve around invulnerability and durability and different forms of damage mitigation which are all taken off the table by tying "defence" to a specific powerset. If they were going to stick with a trinity though, it should have been damage, defence, crowd control (not battery).

    Here's a playlist with a variety of clips from early Alpha and Beta that shows a lot of the early functionality. Click here
    • Like x 1
  17. DeitySupreme Steadfast Player

    I can’t say that it hurt creativity or helped it since it is subjective. There are a lot of characters that are “invulnerable” but not as many as there are who are not. As for marvel heroes, isn’t that a different genre of games? Games like dcuo let you create a character, edit them, and play them outside of the well know characters of the given universe. If I remember correctly marvel heroes gives you options on who to play but they are set characters. But I’m probably wrong since I haven’t played that game. I PERSONALLY can’t think of any MMOs who don’t have the holy trinity.
  18. Apollonia Dedicated Player

    Both were superhero MMOs focused on action. That's all that's needed to make the comparison. The only difference between them was an open world vs isometric interaction with the game world. I offered the point about an MMO not using the role trinity as evidence that the playerbase doesn't insist on a role trinity and the game could have been just as successful (if not more) without it. We don't need to compare customization systems because it's not related to the comparison of gameplay we're discussing.

    As for the subjectivity of invulnerability options, the entire mechanic is tied to a powerset in this game, so objectively speaking, a player is required to use one of those damage mitigation options for their character and none of those offered options is particularly representative of the genre. Furthermore, a character with a different combat function (role) cannot choose a damage mitigation mechanic of another role. These are objective examples of how these design decisions limit the players' options and fail to capture an accurate representation of the genre.
  19. Cerulean Osprey Well-Known Player

    If the meta were to ever shift back to Controllers doing more CC to help the Tanks, it'd be cool to see which powers are better for CC.

    I was just thinking that it was cool that Quantum's Alcubierre Wave pulls enemies behind you in front of you.
    I used to always like using Gag Glove to push enemies back. :D