Behind the Mask: It's all about the DPS, baby

There is a lot of pressure on me right now to write a review for the May 4th melee patch, but I want to delay it because the developers are already tweaking things. So instead of hearing a rant about how sad I am that Psi Lash is nerfed, I will talk about the toughest, most challenging role in Champions Online -- the Avenger.

The Avenger is the "glass cannon" of CO. Avengers have fewer hit points than their Guardian counterparts, and far less than the tank-like Protectors. Avengers cannot use defensive passives, or even support passives to increase their survivability. The last straw is that Avengers cannot heal as rapidly as other characters.

These tradeoffs come at a massive benefit: the Avenger deals far more damage than other characters. What's even more awesome is that the Avenger's role bonus multiplies on the effects of other damage buffs, meaning that extra 20% damage never goes out of style.

This guide won't be covering just the Avenger, though. It'll also cover Avenger's new cousin, the Brawler, as well as all the other ways to play a DPS machine in lairs and team content.

In most MMORPGs, the damage dealer role is the easy role. It's often said that good tanks and healers make a team, and the damage dealers, by comparison, can't save the day if the party is facing a wipe. In most good pickup teams in most MMORPGs, the tank and healer are often "drafted" from the team leader's friends list, while the others can be any random person off the street. It's usually not a big deal if the DPS can't do his job that well. As long as the tank and healer are highly skilled, the damage dealers will eventually handle the threat.

CO's damage dealers are not in the same vein, or even in the same ballpark. While it is true that a good tank and a decent healer are generally the cornerstones of the team, the damage dealers can really break a team if their job is done poorly.

Outside the lair

In a solo setting, Avengers are often seen as the red-headed stepchildren compared to their more defensively-minded kin. Avengers are much harder to play. They are unable to use defensive passives to extend their longevity. Blocking is less profitable and heals are less effective. However, these crutches aren't that troublesome to an Avenger. He deals almost twice the damage of his defensively-minded brethren, and while little brother Brawler does benefit from a little more protection than he does, Avenger has the advantage of heavy long-ranged attacks, hopefully dispatching his foe before battle truly begins.

In PvE, an Avenger must play cautiously. Use holds and knockback to handle tougher villains, and use damage buffs judiciously to speed up kills. Even with cautious play, the average Avenger or Brawler dies a lot more than the average Guardian, Protector, or Sentinel. It's important for an offensively-minded player to remember that killing foes twice as fast is probably a good tradeoff for occasionally having to spend a minute or two traveling because you died every hour or so.

The real challenge starts now

Most lairs consist of a large number of challenges, including puzzles and bosses, but the majority of challenges involve fighting trash mobs. Even when it's needed to complete a puzzle, lairs often like to throw dozens of trash mobs to fight the party at the same time. Often, these trash mobs respawn, and killing them faster helps keep the number of mobs down to a managable level.

The real difficulty in playing a damage dealer in lairs is that most tanking characters can't effectively hold the attention of more than five or so mobs at a time. Even with AoE taunting abilities, the five target cap forces tanks to work very hard to hold threat from more than five foes. Although this used to be a non-problem by using Shockwave, its taunt was nerfed in the melee pass. Previously, Shockwave's taunt allowed tanks to accrue ridiculous amounts of threat to a large number of targets. Now, tanks have to work much harder to hold aggro from multiple targets instead of relying on a bugged taunt mechanic.

When the average Avenger carries wide-scale AoE damage, the chances of hitting a foe that the tank hasn't focused on is high. The typical lair groups can have over a dozen foes, and if a tank can hold five or six competently, the others will tend to stray aggro onto damage dealers or healers. If the damage dealers are Avengers, they will not last long against the tougher lair mobs. I've been through numerous lairs, and I constantly see the same kind of Gigabolt-spamming Avenger grab aggro from half a dozen mobs at once, get themselves killed, wipe the healer, and nearly wipe the whole team.

Controlling the fight

The first and most obvious thing that all Avengers need to do is to control themselves. PvE in Champions involves aggressive play, typically running quickly from spawn to spawn. Damage dealers need to cool that mindset down and focus on sticking with the team. This seems like simple, common sense advice, but lair groups always have at least one, if not more, lone wolves who run off and try to fight large spawns of tough enemies solo.

Even if you're committed to working as a team player (which should be a given), damage dealers can still cause their team a lot of grief. Be very careful of using AoE powers and make sure that you know roughly how big your AoEs are. It's really easy to catch an extra spawn of enemies by mis-aiming a cone or column. Whenever possible, aim so that no enemies are in front of you when you fire the cone, so there is no chance you will grab additional spawns. In close respawning map rooms such as those in Destroyer's Robot Factory, you may want to forego using AoE and stick to single-target damage until the tank has control of the fight.

Sticking to close area PBAoE or melee cone powers is another big way to save your team from extra mobs, which makes Avenger's little melee brother Brawler much easier to handle. In many ways, using Brawler and melee DPS rather than large area ranged damage helps a ton in lairs when it comes to getting extra trouble.

Managing knockback is doubly important for Avengers and Brawler. Often tank heroes rely on knockback or knockup as a means of damage mitigation, so layering on lots of knock powers may render foes immune to knockback. More importantly though, knocking enemies around makes them harder to keep in melee AoEs, and thus, generally harder to tank. Powers like Gigabolt can interact negatively with PBAoE taunting powers like Sparkstorm, causing massive knockback and making it hard to keep all the foes grouped. In all cases, it's important for a damage dealer to see what the tank is relying on, and adapt accordingly.

Tanks can't do it all

As much as many tank players would like to tell you otherwise, no matter how well your team works together, stray aggro will find its way to damage dealers or healers. Multiple tanks can offset this, but not completely ignore it. There are quite a few ways to help an Avenger or Brawler stick it out even when the heat is on, though.

The first and most obvious method is to build switch. By setting a build to one of the convenient build hotkeys, an Avenger can switch from a high performance damage dealer to a tough Guardian, complete with a complementary defensive passive (or even a support passive like Aura of Radiant Protection). If mobs turn up the heat on you, switch to your Guardian build and start blocking, or just keep fighting with your higher protection.

Even if you don't have a defensive passive to fall back on, switching to Guardian gives you more health and better self-healing. If you draw too much trouble, making the switch to Guardian role and blocking can let you last until your heals recharge, or until the team healer (if you have one) can heal you.

The best Avengers are masters of this. If done properly, an offensive hero can off-tank quite effectively, saving healers from drawing threat. When the tank can only apply Challenging Strikes to five foes at a time, healers can peel mobs off the tank as easily as any damage dealer, and if the damage dealers can stop this by pulling threat themselves and handling it, it leads to easier, smoother lair runs.

Playing an Avenger (or any damage dealer) isn't that tricky, but it requires a lot more attention and a different mindset compared to PvE. Tanks and healers have a much easier time moving from their roles in general PvE to lairs, but the average damage dealer (and really, the average player) has a large mindset shift to go through. Even though I'm more of the tank/healer type of player, I realize that it does take a lot more focus and attention to play an Avenger in CO.