CELESTA AUNGM
Kang Lo Directorate
Gallente Federation
155
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Posted - 2014.04.30 19:41:00 -
[1] - Quote
 Alex, I agree with your point of view heavily... BUT, at the same time, Crimson I share some of your pain, and I haven't gotten tired of reading this kind of complaint. Not YET, anyway.
Dust 514 is trying to keep advancing to the level that was (and still IS) intended: Ground capturing on a network-grid whose location is determined by an already established and stable base of PC players (Eve Online), on a "district" or sector sized map so large that vehicular support/transport is INDESPENSABLE.
 In that vast-map environment the HAV would be free to have jaw-breaking range and punch, but would be limited by it's slow speed when it comes to hunting sporadic dropsuit-ers. We saw that intended design in the 1.5 version of our HAVs.
In that vast-map environment the Dropship would likely become the platform for delivering an instant fight, reinforcing and distributing, and givng corp-commanders a high place to watch the fight from and assess. The sheer DISTANCE that a DS can cover in seconds would compensate for it's native vulnerability whenever it hovers around too long. We see this sometimes in PC matches, where some corps will give their right arm to recruit a good DS player to join them for their upcoming match.
Our troubles don't stem from these vehicles having been OP or broken in the past Patches, and needing to be tweaked around with...
The trouble is we've been operating in these SMALL maps for SO long, becoming fully familiar with the vehicles' performance curves, that we can no longer co-exist in the tight confines of thees maps long enough to get anything done. Tweaking the vehicles between Patch 1.7 and 1.8 has only made them worse (COULD ONLY make them worse). 
--The HAV gets ruined by Rail Installations, so the range of the Rail weapons was halved to try to ease the pain.
--We as infantry suffer frustration and suit losses from the HAVs and LAVs, where in the past the slower HAVs wisely travelled more frequently with infantry escort, making our encounters with vehicles a more "dropsuits defend the HAV" fight instead of a "surviving dropsuit RUN from the lone HAV" event.
I won't fault CCP for this, not design-wise anyway. I liked the behavior and limitatiions of the vehicles in 1.3 through 1.6. Needing development, but not unsound behavior.
It's the amount of TIME we've been trapped in small-maps and not released in large maps that are stable enough to make PC "the place we immediately jump on" when we play Dust. It's a kind of cabin fever. We're effectively no longer able to traverse maps of this tiny size without getting killed in "collision of the technologies" not killed by something being wrong with the technologies' design.
Again, it's not a suggestion that CCP's got "broken" design of anything specifically.
You weren't getting stomped so easily by the "six-wheeled Bop-Phaser Car" because it was wrongfully OP,... you were getting stomped so easily because the Bop-Phaser Car was rightfully designed to be used on the LARGER MAPS (the small map deprives you of all the advantages you could have over the darn Car).
The current solution they're trying is to start RECDUCING the strength/range of those big toys... the RIGHT solution is to save the original killing strengths/ranges of those toys in an archives somewhere, and get us the BIGGER maps as soon as possible before we "nerf" every piece of machinery we have just to stay alive. |