SponkSponkSponk
The Southern Legion
Final Resolution.
819
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Posted - 2014.05.26 13:28:00 -
[1] - Quote
CCP Rattati wrote:As a few have responded, it's to encourage the use of other grenades than locus, as well as provide a reason to specialize.
Rattati, I disagree that this will do what you expect it to, and I'll try to show my reasoning.
First, you're attempting to encourage the use of other grenades than locus, but it's the tail wagging the dog, from a game design perspective.
Players use grenades to fill roles.
Flux grenades are for anti-equipment spam, as a prep move before an assault, and to take out shield tanked suits (heavies, mostly). Oh, and to drop the shields of tanks after you planted remotes.
AV grenades are for attempting to kill heavies in LAVs before they jump out and murder you, attempting to suppress dropships piloted by bads, and for fending off tanks for the 15 seconds it takes to regen the damage.
Flux grenades are for finishing off suits after you've winged them, or in enclosed spaces if you have friends to spam with you, or to cook against heavies, or basically any anti-infantry role because you can actually kill people with them (this is important for logi suits that don't have sidearms as finishers)
If you want locus grenades to be used more, then you need to discover why players prefer the other types and think about that, rather than blindly buff locus grenades until they're the optimal choice in so many situations that they break out of their role by pure OPness.
So, if fluxes get used more than you want, it's probably because they are useful in more roles, especially in an AV and anti-equipment role. Perhaps looking at it from a role-based perspective will make other changes obvious (e.g. maybe the AV grenade buff will reduce the reliance on fluxes, or maybe people would use locus grenades to take out equipment if they worked as well as fluxes)
Secondly, you're pushing the 'reason to specialise' bonus onto the grenades themselves rather than having a skill that's applicable to all grenade types.
Frankly, this goes against Dust's design philosophy, which is "defensive items get better in large steps as you go up tiers, offensive items go up in small steps". Compare the boost that any module gets as it goes from std to adv to pro, vs the tiny 5% and 10% boosts for weapons.
It's for a few good reasons; here's a few
1. It's a lot easier for a squad to apply multiple offensive weapons on a single enemy, but that enemy only has their own defensive modules to help them. Having defensive modules scale faster tries to ameliorate this 'n+1' effect, as does having diminishing returns for weapons
2. Psychologically, players do not like dying to expensive weapons that they see in their kill screen, but never get told about the prototype modules on their suit
So, you have to ask yourself from a game design perspective, what are you hoping to encourage here, and how does it fit into the game?
If you want people to specialise in the skill (which you'll note has prohibitive SP rank) then make each level of the skill do something awesome, like the Mass Driver skill does. I guarantee a lot of people will skill to V because it will be applicable for so, so many of their fits (unlike a small CPU bonus that doesn't affect much unless you're running core locus)
If you want people to run more prototype grenades, then you'll probably be pleased with the results, but I question whether it is the correct approach to take.
My suggestion would be to lower the damage gap between standard and pro grenades, rather than increase it, and look to other ways to balance them (blast radius is one thing, delay before detonation is another)
Thirdly, I haven't done the numbers but I suspect that AV grenades may still not be good enough, because of the nature of their usage.
AV grenades aren't thrown singly like other grenades; you use them much more rarely, but when you need them, you throw all of them at once as fast as you can. And more often than not, you find that two grenades isn't enough to kill anything.
So, in this regard, buffing grenade alpha may work, but it might be better to let players carry three of them instead, which improves the total amount of damage that they can output by a minimum 50%, hopefully high enough to actually kill stuff.
forthly, thanks for asking.
Dust/Eve transfers
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