Behind the Mask: Pointing fingers and assigning blame

When I posted about teaming roles last week, I really wasn't expecting the feedback you guys gave me. Some of you insisted that the holy trinity was dead, others told me that healers can do just fine if they only have heals, and still others told me that tanks are useless. Some of you also commented that Archetypes make decent tanks or that spread stats are a bad thing. I wish I had time to make a detailed rebuttal to all the comments, but information comes first!

This week, we're going to talk about Champions Online's threat mechanics. Originally I was going to talk about tanks in general, but that is such a huge topic that we're just going to have to break it up into bite-sized chunks. I talked about threat mechanics a long time ago, but some things have changed.

This is particularly relevant because the two adventure packs are on sale right now, and if you're a free member, you really owe it to yourself to pick them up. They're that awesome, and you can explore the game's more interesting team content for a tiny fraction of the price. When you try them out, you'll have this guide to tell you about how big team engagements work and why your Inventor faceplants every fight.

You may even be able to stop it...

Threat in CO works like threat in many other MMORPGs. If you're the highest on an enemy's "hate list," he tends to attack you. Threat in Champions is different in that you fight huge groups of enemies in a typical team encounter, and the game's target cap is very low compared to City of Heroes'. This combination of factors makes it challenging for a tank to get and maintain threat on a large group of foes. This difficulty seems to be by design. The best option for many teams is to have several (approximately three) durable hybrid damage dealers -- one of whom is especially tanky -- to engage the enemy first and spread the hate around.

A dedicated tank is most effective on bosses, where threat is easier to build and manage, and where tanking makes a huge difference in your team's damage output (since DPS heroes won't have to block as much). However, there's a lot more to content than just bosses, and clearing spawns takes a lot of the overall play time of any group. A character that is good in 5% of encounters and anemic in the other 95% is not really very useful. A tank who can either help clear spawns effectively with strong AoE damage or who can gather and maintain decent AoE threat is much more valuable in a team.

Threat is generated in a number of ways: damage, healing, secondary effects, and taunting. The Presence stat affects threat by lowering it for most characters, but giving PRE to a Protector role tank increases her threat output. If you're in Protector exclusively for the extra hit points, keep in mind that having PRE might be a detriment to you.

If you set up a bomb in his face, he may perceive you as a danger

Damage is the most basic way to generate threat. It's the baseline threat generator -- virtually all characters deal respectable damage, because getting a decent attack and using it is trivial.

Because CO has a target cap of five (for most attacks), you generally only build threat on a small group of enemies at once. In group battle situations where there are lots of enemies, this generally means that AoE DPS heroes will not get too far over their heads if they stick with the team and don't run off.

In battles against Legendary or Cosmic bosses, threat becomes more of an issue. The strongest DPS builds can output thousands of damage per second. At around 2000 DPS or so, the best Brawler heroes become difficult to steal aggro from without a purpose-built tank with high PRE.

Fortunately for ranged heroes, threat is generated more slowly at greater distances. I mentioned that damage dealing heroes should be as far away as possible to avoid hitting other spawns and should maintain wide cones of fire, but threat is reduced at long distances too. You should stay as far away as you can while still maintaining optimum DPS.

As I said last week, this means that long-range heroes should be around 50 feet away and Brawlers should be in the enemy's face. Brawler heroes have it a little rougher and should expect to take some hits. It also means healers should be focused a lot on babysitting allied Brawlers.

If you're a Brawler who deals more than 2000 DPS, you may want to consider getting Palliate (with Absolve), Ego Placate, Evasive Maneuvers (with Sleight of Mind) or Smoke Grenade (with Escape Artist) to help dump threat off of you. If you're not sure whether you deal 2000 DPS, I recommend picking up one of these powers anyway. They help a lot.

Medical Nanites is such a stupid passive

I will probably devote an entire column to Medical Nanites at some point. It's terrible because it heals everyone in a huge radius around you and the only way to turn it off is to unslot it. Healer aggro is a big problem, and I've talked about it before, but there are ways to deal with it.

Healing generates much less threat, but it generates threat for every enemy attacking your party. If no one has attacked a particular enemy, you're in for a nasty surprise. In most cases, firing off a heal in a big group battle is a good way to faceplant because there will be a lot of enemies who have not been hit.

I've alluded to it previously, but this can work to your favor. If you have Aura of Radiant Protection or a defensive passive, you can fire off heals on allies, then when the attacks start coming in, just raise the shields and start blocking. It's pretty tough for enemies to break through someone who is only taking 1/6th damage and heals thousands of HP with a single tap of Celestial Conduit or Conviction. If you're a tank with good single-target taunting, you can function pretty well as an AoE tank by distributing heals to friends mid-battle. This is yet another reason why getting PRE as a tank is a great idea -- you can increase both your healing and threat generation.

This mostly works best when someone else takes the enemy's initial "alpha strike," since you can heal that person and make his life a little easier by grabbing some excess threat. Healing aggro will not steal threat from a damage dealer, ever -- it is much less significant than damage threat. Don't try to taunt bosses by healing allies; it doesn't work.

If you're trying to avoid healer aggro, the best way to do that is to avoid incidental healing. Unslot Medical Nanites if you're an Inventor, and don't take it if you're not an Inventor. If you're a Seraphim healer or have other PBAoE heals (like Life Drain's Vampiric Sympathy advantage), stand away from allies who don't need healing. Also, using Protection Field or Mindful Reinforcement as buffer defense early in the fight is a good idea, although you will probably want to switch to heals if the going gets rough.

And lastly, block! If you fire off any heals, make sure you know the risks!

Miscellaneous ways you can get everyone's attention

Pets generate their own threat, which can be dangerous. If pets die, are resummoned, or are dismissed, all the threat the pets generated gets dumped on their controller. The Inventor has it particularly rough because his Munitions Bots deal out lots of AoE damage, more if they die, all of which gets dumped on the Inventor.

This can be a good thing, since pets can be used by tanks to hit more enemies at once. While it's not foolproof, having an arctic wolf or sigils to attract some attention while you also spam AoE taunts can help you grab the attention of groups of foes.

AoE debuffs also generate some threat even if they don't do damage. This is most notable for Illumination and Sigils of Ebon Weakness. Both can cause you to randomly die if you're a healer, although they can be used to simultaneously taunt and help the team if you're tanking or off-tanking.

Other support effects, like energy gain, don't generate threat unless they affect enemies.

Actually trying to get attention

There are only three actual "taunts" in the game: the Challenging Strikes advantage on many AoE powers, the Crippling Challenge advantage on many ST powers, and Defensive Combo's built-in threat. Defensive Combo can be loaded with Crippling Challenge as well, making it one of the best ST taunts in the game.

Challenging Strikes is the most common way for a tank to grab a foe's attention. It applies a debuff that reduces a foe's damage by 10% and generates threat over time. It does not stack. If you're planning on AoE tanking, you want to distribute this debuff to as many enemies as possible, as quickly as possible. I recommend using mobile cone maintains and fast-animating sphere AoE attacks to quickly spread CS.

If this debuff is allowed to run for more than a few seconds, it dramatically reduces the likelihood that a DPS will be able to pull threat from you before the target dies. This is a non-trivial benefit to your team.

Crippling Challenge (and Defensive Combo) is the other way to get an enemy's attention. CC forces an enemy to attack you for a small amount of time and generates a large chunk of threat in addition to applying a 10% damage debuff. The large chunk of threat can be reapplied repeatedly. This makes half-second maintain powers with CC very effective at taunting single enemies.

If you're looking to taunt a single enemy, you need to really abuse every mechanic you can -- tap Challenging Strikes to do the threat-over-time debuff and spam Crippling Challenge attacks to rapidly build threat. If you're given a second or three to build up some threat, it's pretty hard to actually pull off of that. Again, it is still very possible for Brawlers -- a half-second CC maintain can output maybe 1000 threat per second (Defensive Combo a little more), while CS can generate another 200 threat per second. If you're in melee, you have an advantage, but melee DPS generates far more threat than that. Obviously this makes PRE essential. Don't skimp.

That's all for threat mechanics, and wow that's a lot of stuff to digest. I'll see you all next week, when we'll talk about tanking techniques!

When he's not touring the streets of Millennium City or rolling mooks in Vibora Bay, Patrick Mackey goes Behind the Mask to bring you the nitty-gritty of the superhero world every Thursday. Whether it's expert analysis of Champions Online's game mechanics or his chronicled hatred of roleplaying vampires, Patrick holds nothing back.