Perfect balance and perfect imbalance thinking...

You know what would suck? If they did replace heavies. You know how you fix that? Make them expensive as hell..

The thing that bothers me the most about this sort of thing is the fact that over time people make the assumption that everything needs to fit into this perfect balance framework, unfortunately that's not warfare, and I hope its not the mindset that we adopt for a game which I hope will play out more as an arms race then as a perfectionist selection game.

The way we should balance is not by balancing the power of tools, but via introduction of new tools. MTAC's outstanding at what they do better then heavies in every way, but how about this, much more difficult to shield against EM weapons, allow easier disability, make them more vulnerable to certain types of attacks. Allow player customization of structures so if a player wants they can make their structures inaccessible to MTAC's or perhaps make EVERYTHING accessible to vehicles and MTAC's to square the field, or just large enough for MTAC's but too small for vehicles.

Keep adding content, and de-bug the content and get rid of glitches. Be realistic about the power, and have developers who's job it is to think up creative sci-fi counters to the content other developers create. In time it will become a literal arms race, and potential creativity of design and play will go through the roof. It will feel like REAL war, where the enemy is always trying to outpace his opponent in tech, strategy, and equipment.

Make entire sections of gameplay dedicated to the covert to sneak around the front line gameplay. And same thing, teams of developers who's job is counter-co-version. Hey maybe I'm asking for too much, probably am, but I've always found the reality of warfare and TRUE strategic pushes on both the intellectual and physical stages of warfare to be most interesting. Was kind of hoping that was where this game was going.

Are MTAC's practical OP weapons if we really think about it? Hell yes. Should we pre-preemptively nerf them to prevent them from stepping on other roles toes? Hell no. Is there creative ways we could build in to counter them, and give some of that power back to other roles without artificially nerfing them? Absolutely... So should we give in to whiners without the creativity to make these alternative suggestions who'd rather go on a rampage with a nerf bat? Hell no.

The perfect imbalance, is an idea of how dust could be set up with things being balanced compared to one another based off other factor not necessarily use. This pared with having the Devs work on counters rather than buffs and nerfs would make dust one of the most unique and incredible games ever before.

When something becomes heavly used and is being used to swamp the mlgame with its OPness a nerf is called for. But rather than nerf the OP object CCP could make a counter to it and then the OP object could get a counter to that and so forth but the real strength of this is that counter to other OP things could cross counter something else and create a unique line up of weapons tools and devices and turn dust into a true arms race.

this is the orginal thread that inspired this