Cross Atu
OSG Planetary Operations
Covert Intervention
2226
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Posted - 2014.06.03 17:45:00 -
[1] - Quote
Adipem Nothi wrote:Jaysyn Larrisen wrote:
Ok, just to be clear, you believe that REs are fine as they are?
For the most part, yes. Arguments could be made for a slight increase in time-to-arm to discourage use-as-grenade. Arguments could be made for faster toss and/or further toss to encourage use-as-AV. REs may need polish but they are not broken; other things are -- quite plainly -- broken. Time and resources are limited; would they not be best spent on first fixing broken things?
I agree with the above, but with a caveat.
REs can be considered workable from the perspective of a stand alone assessment (though I'd still make the case that both of your above arguments be adopted, or at least time to arm) but they rather clearly cannot be viewed at contextually balanced when compared to other in game assets at this point.
As I've said elsewhere they are currently
- more effective at AV than AV nades or Swarms(alpha may change this, but it may exacerbate it as well, we'll have to see).
- They're as, or more effective against infantry than Locus (as or more being situational)
- They're not in slot competition with Flux and so are given synergistic advantages.
- They possess synergies with Proxy giving them a further AV boost (and making them effectively 'dumbfire' assets within this context)
- Possess battle shaping assets in that you can establish ZoC which cost opposing forces extra time to clear (and thus loss of the initiative), an effect which persists after use because a team who knows there could be REs will spend extra time checking even if it turns out there aren't any at the moment.
- Can be used as a partial counter to equipment clearing by dropping hives, links etc on top of REs. This is also a 'fire and forget' use.
- They can be used in synergy with friendly vehicles via adhesion.
- They resupply from hives at a lower cluster rate than Nads (last I checked, could be outdated).
That's quite a bit of versatility, meaning that they overlap with the possible use of various other assets.
As such those other assets need to be more effective within their more specialized roles or they simply won't have a viable place on the field because the RE will be the better choice.
TL;DR
The RE may be generally fine with regards to it's current capabilities, but it is outperforming many other assets even within their own roles which has negative balance implications. Those assets should be buffed into a better state (as much as possible without making them OP) and then the REs scaled accordingly if any further touch ups are needed.
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