Daken Cydonia
Royal Uhlans
Amarr Empire
23
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Posted - 2012.09.16 14:59:00 -
[1] - Quote
I was late getting into tanks this build, and when I did go into it, I decided to try out armor tanking, as last build I went the shield route. Tanks were a bit OP before this nerf, but I had a feeling it was coming, the same thing was done to heavies two builds ago, and it still hasn't been properly fixed.
It seems like this is the way CCP always "fixes" things. They nerf the OP item, and boost it's counterpart. Other people have referred to it as a pendulum, which is fairly accurate, except that in the last few builds, I've yet to see the pendulum swing back, or really even find a proper center.
The heavy suits were as they were originally described by CCP, they were behemoths that really could go toe to toe with just about any vehicle, but that made them OP when it came to fighting other suits. So CCP took a fair amount of hit points from heavies, and slowed their turn rates slightly. If that was all of the nerf, it would have been pretty fair, the slowed tracking speed was fine, they could still track vehicles, the kicker came when CCP also nerfed the only Heavy Anti-Personnel weapon, the HMG. Reduced damage, greatly increased heat production, and decreased effective range, these made the Heavy suit only useful as a platform to fire a forge gun from. So people started using the forge gun a lot, not just for AV, but also for AP. More people whined, more nerfing occured.
This brings us to the current build, a little bit of oomph was given back to the HMG, but by and large, it's still not as effective as carrying an Assault Rifle. The forge guns were made to be effective as an AV weapon only against LAV's, they no longer had the range to hit a dropship, they no longer had a low enough charge time to high enough damage output to hurt anything other than a militia HAV.
Tanks roamed free, stomping on everything.
Which brings us to this week.
Tanks were easy mode, roaming free, rolling through enemy teams, laughing at most AV, only really needing to fear Railgun turrets and other tanks. If the driver had the skills and knowledge to properly build and fit a tank, it was all the more frightening. We really didn't need that much skill once we were in a good tank, you needed to be an effective player to earn the mountains of SP required to get into tanks, but once you had better than a militia one, and were smart about when you called it in, it really was easy mode, and would get you SP fast enough to build the supporting skills to make a decent, stock tank into a rolling death machine with 15,000 effective hit points.
A couple days ago we had this newest adjustment, it was not nearly so overkill as what happened to the Heavies, which tells me CCP learned from its past adjustments. At first it seemed to go to far, then I played a few rounds. I had to play smarter, I had to run away and repair more often, and pay more attention to my tank build. I realized that Blaster Turrets finally are the best AP turret there is, they didn't used to be, but the combination of tracking speed advantage, plus the cut to splash damage on railguns seems to finally have brought some much needed balance.
I would say that instead of the across the board increase to AV, I'd have suggested a rewind to something a lot closer to last builds Forge guns, just treat them like the swarm launcher, and reduce splash so much that they're no longer an effective AP weapon, but CCP went another route. I think they pushed it a little too far in the AV direction, BUT, it is MUCH more balanced than it was before this hotfix.
Anyways, that's my two cents. Tankers just have to play a bit smarter now. |