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Francois Sanchez
Prima Gallicus
411
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Posted - 2015.05.02 12:32:00 -
[1] - Quote
Hey guys
I'm not used to this kind of deep global analysis but I guess there should be a start to everything so any constructive comment (so to improve this review) is welcome. I'm going to make some English mistakes so I already apologize for that and if there is something you don't understand don't hesitate to tell me.
So let's start
LAVs
This part is gonna be short as LAVs aren't designed to fight and I don't use them anyway. Even if I hate death taxis, I think an HP buff is needed as right now nearly any AV shot will blow up your car in one bullet/volley which is excessive. To me the pilot should have the possibility to either try to evade or to jump off his car. Getting killed without any warning like that is a bit too much. Maybe give them enough HP to barely survive to an ADV AV shot or give them a big resource buff so that they can fit some HP modules.
HAVs
Atm the moment HAVs are awfully balanced. Some builds are completely OP versus AV while there is a huge difference between shield and armour tanks.
In general, HAVs are too good when they turn on their hardeners while they're too easy to destroy without it (well, the shield tank is to easy to blow up). There is basically no variety in HAV fittings, it's 90% of the time 2 hardeners, one regen module, and HP modules for the remaining slots. So a slight HP buff (or slight buff to HP modules) accompagnied by a slight hardeners nerf would be welcome.
The second general note is about turrets performances. The large blaster is way too good at long range. The RoF reduction coupled with the increased damage per shot was a great idea for tanks fights, however now blasters can easily destroy infantry at over 120 meters (I wiped out 25 guys at 140m with a large blaster installation in an ambush OMS the other day). The RoF reduction caused the spread to be too small between shot, making the long range shhots super accurate.
Increase dispersion/spread and it should be fine.
And final general problem there is the bug with SHAVs that will be fixed soon.
Now let's talk more specifically about the imbalance between shield and armour.
Vehicles suffer from the same kind of imbalances than infantry :
- Continuous armour regen is better than shield regen (even more true for tanks)
- Much more HP for armour and better HP per resource invested ratio
- The "secondary" good modules (scanner, damage mods, fuel injectors etc) are high slots so accessible to the armour vehicles easily while asking for huge sacrifices for shield vehicles.
- More adapted fitting capacity for armour vehicles. Shield vehicles often dedicate their secondary slots to PG mods while armour vehicles fit plenty of useful things.
- Armour hardeners are simply better shield hardeners, moreover at equal performances armour hardeners are way better thx to the continuous regen.
Some of those problems are hard to solve without breaking other things, but armour hardeners nerf is needed and shouldn't cause any problem.
Shield recharge rate is beaten with a single basic armour repairer with max skills (130HP/sec for maddie vs 126 HP/s for gunnlogi). Add to that the shield delay and you have armour tanks ten times better at regen than shield tanks. You can at least double the recharge rate on shield vehicles in general while the regulators fix should have great effects.
The shield booster is useless against continuous fire (blasters for example) as the recharge is canceled by the damage taken. The HP recharge should be done whatever the damage taken. Moreover the heavy shield booster PG cost is ridiculous.
A final idea but I'm not sure it's good would be a very slight armour repairers nerf (something like 5%)
With all those changes we may already see some kind of balance even if I think it would still not be enough, but right now I don't have other ideas that wouldn't break other things.
A last point about tanks I would like to discuss is the tier progression. While I'm completely up for that kind of progress (same slot layout but better fitting capacity) there is a problem coming from the modules. To me it's normal to have proto tanks that powerful (even if the madrugar should be toned down, which I hope would be done with the few changes above), however STD tanks are way too good. The reason is pretty simple : many modules have the same performances at all tiers but simply recharge faster at higher level which means a STD is nearly as good as the proto tank but has to hide a bit longer. That's not right, especially when you see the cost difference.
Hardeners, afterbruners, fuel injectors, shield boosters are the ones that come in my mind, but I may forget some. Also when will we see ADV and PRO mobile CRUs?
Dropships in next post
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Francois Sanchez
Prima Gallicus
411
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Posted - 2015.05.02 12:50:00 -
[2] - Quote
Dropships
Already underpowered atm, dropships have moreover to suffer from the tank performances as more people are running around with AV weaponry.
Right now 1 good swarm is already too much for an ADS and basically denies the access to a large zone of the battlefield. While the dropship shouldn't be able to fly around for a long time, it should at least have the chance to fire 2 or 3 times at the AV guy before running away. Right now you need at least two defensive modules (for example two hardeners) to fire once or twice before flying away, and if you fire a third time, you won't get away if the AV guy isn't killed. Outside a very few places, dropships have no way to hide or evade AV attacks meaning they need to get out of range or take the shots.
While the afterburner allows you to get out of range, that used module on a python means you'll never have a chance to fight the AV guy and ADS can't tank anything.
It is useless to say that 2 swarms will kill the dropship 99% of the time without letting it any chance of surviving.
Another problem, but I suppose that one can't be solved right now, is the visibility of the ground units. You have to get really close to just know there is a guy down there and you often have the bad surprise to see AV shots coming from nowhere because the guy isn't displayed on your screen yet. This problem is even more important when there are two guys, which means automatic death as the ADS is too weak/slow to survive that. Here there is simply nothing the pilot can do, he's not making any mistake, he doesn't take any risk, he's simply dead with no way to counter it.
This is why ADS should be much more survivable.
They should receive the tank treatment (extra slots, complete change of resources and tier progression). Right now you can't fit a python with 3 basic turrets and 3 basic shield modules (1 hardener, 1 booster and 1 heavy extender) without a PG upgrade EVEN WITH MAX SKILLS. That's simply unacceptable for something that expensive. It's the only ADV thing in the game you can't fill with STD stuff.
However if you fit only one turret, you can run nearly full complex if you put a PG upgrade, which isn't right either.
We should have SADS and ADS as there are HAVs and SHAVs. I made a post a while ago about that kind of modification, but apparently it didn't get noticed. Anyway there are things that aren't right in the proposition I made, but the global idea is there and I think it's worth looking at :
https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=196627
That's it for the moment. Congrats to those who had the courage to read through this huge block.
Rattati I'd really like to get your opinion about this, even if it's to say everything I said is crap or that you don't care atm
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Francois Sanchez
Prima Gallicus
412
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Posted - 2015.05.03 09:29:00 -
[3] - Quote
Thx for the feedback, I don't agree with every points of course but it's still interesting.
About the blaster range, my point wasn't about blaster installation being OP because I gunned down a bunch of scrubs, I just don't find legit to be able to kill infantry in less than 1 second with a large blaster while being at over 120m. Theoretically the blaster was supposed to be short range and it is not.
About the tank role, I think there should be one build good against infantry at short range but bad against vehicles (large blaster, but right now it's destroying vehicles easily and can shoot very far). Have the rail cannons gods against vehicles and crap against infantry (roughly the case) and missiles ok at both but beaten by the specialized version at both.
Buffing hardeners is really what I want to avoid, tanks are too good with them and too fragile without them. Tanks should be naturally tougher while being less in god mode with hardeners. That would be fairer while increasing the variety of builds.
And finally about the AV vs vehicles communities people really need to play on both sides, which I do. Vehicles users have to understand that being invincible against 1 AV guy is extremely frustrating for the other side as the AV can't do anything else and don't get any kind of reward. On the other hand AVers are asking way too much for automatic success when hunting vehicles.
P.S : @Breakin Stuff : yes, tankers are mostly cowards, which is sadly the case for 90% of the community. This is the main problem of this game as the guys wishing to fight are hardly penalized by that. Personally it's the worst community I've ever seen because of that. |
Francois Sanchez
Prima Gallicus
418
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Posted - 2015.05.03 21:46:00 -
[4] - Quote
Half tankers are redline/hills campers, in the other half you have most blaster tanks. Sure some of them are there to get into the thick of it, but a part of them are just there to get easy kills and flee in front of any kind of engagement that has more than 5% chance to be fatal.
That's where you see the difference between the scrubs and the true good tankers who will try to destroy the threat until it's clear they're gonna lose and so retreat smartly to come back a bit later to get ridd of the opposition once more.
So yeah, 50%+a part of 50% = majority of cowards, and sadly those guys are pretty noisy and have too much impact on tanks evolution (as the whiney AVers). So you alternate between tanks=easy mode and too powerful AV |
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