Hi all,

Juste read a few posts on the first page.

I'm MD lvl5 and proficiency lvl 4, on a Caldari logi suit.

MASS DRIVER ROCKs in this build !!! But I personnaly think that there is a too high penalty on shield damages. The answer to the Mass Driver is FLUX NADE !!!

And the most important : you barely can't play it by yourself, you need to play with a squad. It's not a lonewolf weapon.

Good training ;) !!!

the ar is not op

only the tac ar is op...

the reg ar is fine right now the tac ar got a damage raise and hmgs did to much damage really fast anyways and they still do lots of damage.

what u pl really should have been complaining about its damage mods..

they make every gun seem over powered..

if u got obliterated really fast and u have decent shields and armor u likely got killed by some1 with 20 stacked damage mods.

ar never really needed damage mods as its effective enough as is.
of course im using free miltia fits and im pwning but that's just cause I actually have skill...

if u want to complain about op weps blame damage mods they make weps op...

And then there's the ammo, when a weapon takes ~4 rounds to kill and holds ~18 rounds it's useful life is very limited and supply dependent. The ammo limit was a great balancing aspect prior to the nerf, now it's more like insult to injury.

And we haven't even talked about trying to fight an opponent who has any elevation advantage.

I would like to hear CCP explain what battlefield role they see the Mass Driver filling and how this nerf properly supports that role while still keeping the weapon viable.... because quite frankly I don't see that it does either.

0.02 ISK
Cross

Because hes a fraud..

HIs MD skills are Garbage..

Thank you. Finally something constructive. I've found that I do 10x better using the Freedom rather than the EX0. If you had read into my posts, you'd see that I've been saying this the whole time. Perhaps all of you should try builds with it rather than the EX0. I'm starting to think the Freedom has higher stats than it states. I promise it makes a drastic difference.

I'll reiterate this basic point again as I have done in various threads regarding all sorts of weapons and game mechanics.

Balance needs to be derived from the average not the outliers. What this means in a general context is that if you are in the top 20% then you are not an appropriate case for balance assessments. Nefing things so the they "take skill" (i.e. are significantly more difficult to use) for those with the top gun game is bad game design. It's net effect is to take those few who are already excelling and give them an even greater advantage. This creates more pub stomps, red lines, and blow outs. Meaning that ultimately this creates a more boring play experience and diminishes the over all player population.

Not all weapons function the same, nor should they. Weapons, like any of the other gear, or indeed many of the skills in Dust ideally should fill a role and be evaluated with regards to the success in that role. At bear minimum evaluations need to be more complex than is "X weapon good/bad" and they certainly need more context then anecdotal debates between various players about their KDR in a smattering of matches (matches which often aren't even put in any sort of context).

Balance is about game health, not personal preference, a specific play style or a singular feature/role.

Consider this a request to for all concerned to provide detailed, sober feedback within explicit context, and hopefully to do so with a focus on the macro level of the game rather than simply on their own personal reactions.

0.02 ISK
Cross

I don't understand what you all are saying regarding them making the MD a slayer weapon. How can a reduction of all relevant stats make it more effective at killing people?

It's doubtful that there was any rationale behind these changes aside from "Well, as long as we're tweaking values, let's adjust these too." This is just a thoughtless nerf. If it was some sort of holistic balance attempt, then the smoke trail wouldn't be following the old trajectory path.

Okay I give in/don't care anymore. Give us the old MDs back. I killed with them then, and I kill with them now. If it makes the rest of my fellow MD users happy, then let's have it back the way it was. I just got tired of being called a noob tuber, people saying that I used a noob tube, or that the weapon took no skill to use because of the insane splash damage. But whatever, like I said, I don't care anymore.

What 'ability to slay' stats got worse not better. It's not like direct damage was buffed and AoE got nerfed. MD took only nerf and no buff in any aspect. Please, clarify what you mean when you say that now it has turned from support to slayer weapon. All I see is that the 'slaying' is the same or worse (read, direct damage) and support got severely nerfed (read, AOE/Splash). Or maybe I did not understand what you meant.

Wait what? Rounds flying straighter does not make it easier to get kills.. quite the opposite on flat ground with no dropoff its hard as hell to hit their feet.. (picture yourself in an open flat field)..and the range nerf makes that a very low % shot... as well as when hitting the wall beside them.. no blast radius means the wall eats it.. and enemy walks away..

And as another poster just pointed out AGAIN.. how does an overall across the board nerf in any way change the role? or anything else that sounds nice? it is what it is..

Are you absolutely positive that you are hitting people in the head and chest and their body is causing the grenade to explode? Maybe I need to go back and do some test games, but last time I checked they were still going THROUGH the enemy.. either way.. theres no way im going to be using a MD that becomes necessary to get a head shot with..

To be perfectly honest, I'm a little baffled at what's happened with the Mass Driver. The reason for the splash and blast range nerf was that in playtests we found the MD to be so effective that at one point almost half the people in the office were using it in battles. Clearly, that's not been the case with Uprising and after getting the engineers to go elbow deep into the code it appears there may be a few reasons beyond dry numbers that are contributing to the MDs underwhelming performance.

One, there appears to be a de-sync between client and server so that (more often than it should) the server and client think the projectile exploded in different places. They're not far off, but enough so that shots you *think* are spot on are off the mark enough to do only minor splash damage. And two, I'm told splash occlusion is getting blocked by a single player character more than it should, contributing to the "randomness" of the damage dealt and the sometimes smudgy feeling of the weapon.

I'm hesitant to rebalance the weapon until we get these issues looked at (which is happening right now).

THANK GOD!!!!!! they looking into it.. But please I really must BEG you to re-balance it.. Give us the old ARC in trajectory,splash and 3d radius, and the range too.. The damage is the least of my concerns

and lol.. side note.."half the office using it" .. great minds think alike.. OO pz give char names!! I sooo wanna PWN u...

went back to see if things got better...

Umm no.. off the top of my head WOW the ar's are like 2 shotting me.. ffs.. Did heavys get a buff? they seem pretty damn powerful again.. maybe im totally off here.. even saw a couple snipers back on the BF (they saw me)

As far as MD goes.. I wanted to add this.. There seems to be a slight lag from trigger press to launch.. it just doesnt come out the barrel right.. sometimes looks ok.. mostly not.. so either very SLOW or Laggy.. not sure.. sometimes the grenades launches from where you were just standing if looks like...

Anyways.. real drag.. I guess since we dont have the #'s like the heavys (i have a heavy btw) we dont get the same consideration?

Is anyone else experiencing a glitch of where the smoke lands when you fire and where the explosion happening being two different places?

The truth of the matter is that MD should be both. When you want to play support - for example in PI when your corp relies on you and you need coordinated team play with specialization, I think AoE - regular or assault MD are excellent for crowd control. But when you are playing solo in a pub match and just want to hone your skills with MD, you should be able to use Breach MD for direct hits and slaying. It does not have to be either AoE crowd control or direct slaying.

Another point I want to make is that ppl tend to talk about Freedom MD mostly. And of all MD I think Freedom did come close to being OP. In general I against 'win buttons' in FPS. With Freedom you could both slay and crowd control - I think this kind of gameplay probably led CCP to nerf tho whole weapon class. I personally would be ok if they kept the regular MD nerfed but gave a buff to Breach and Assault to emphasize specialization. And if you remember there has always been terrible imbalance between different types of MD - the regular was staple and both assault and Breach were its gimp cousins that no one wanted to touch. So maybe now would be good time to fix this.

Well I think everything is relative. To me it felt that Freedom MD was something like Duvolle AR - an unnecessarily powerful weapon. Sure you could argue the opposite 'if there are weapons like Duvolle in AR world, there is gotta be an MD that's as dominant in the MD world'. But that's just a matter of your view of the game mechanics in Dust in general and not pertinent to MD discussion we are having right now as far as I am concerned. In the ideal world I would like to see that all proto weapons are weaker. Again, it's a matter of opinion and belongs in a different thread.

Also I don't think I am arguing against your point at all. I say that different version of MD are for different things. I believe that the balance should be such that depending on your play style you should be able to as effectively use the regular MD for crowd control and Breach for slaying - the game is not suffering from having both, so long as they are not coming from a single weapon. As far as MD being gimped too much - I am glad CCP issued a statement that the game code for MD was broken accounting for its weakness in games. It seems to me CCP is promising that MD is actually balanced and that they will work first on fixing the code and second on adjusting stats if MD is still weak after the code is fixed. Maybe with the code fixed MD would regain its crown control ability - I know the stats argue against it but I am still hopeful.

Third point: I think giving reg MD and breach different tragectories would be a mistake. It would be very hard to adjust from switching back and forth. A faster traveling round for breach - yes definitely. I would also say go back to 4 round drup for Breach but increase ROF since in CQC you would want to hit high burst damage rather than sustain steady DPS for longer.

As a Heavy user who helped wage the numbers campaign to make CCP see the error of their ways:

I feel ya brother.

The players I affectionately refer to as "Massholes" were the bane of my heavy existence in the last build. Even as a nerfed HMG heavy at the start of uprising, it felt like Mass Drivers didn't have the teeth I used to remember them having.

From what I'm reading, MDs are something like a smaller Forge Gun now (you need perfect aim to get a brutal kill), when instead it should be the support area denial weapon others have referred to in this thread.

Hope they look into it for you guys.

On another note, I think that some of the problems with the rounds have been happening well before Uprising, and the blast radius nerf just exacerbated the effects. Especially when it has to do with a round not exploding where it's intended. I also talked about the rounds going through people back in Chromosome. It was my first post on these forums: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=507802#post507802.

Yeah, I've been noticing that. Don't quote me on this but I think that could be attributed to the scanning and scanning precision nerf.
Also, has anyone noticed that your rounds will occasionally not deplete your clip? I was doing some target practice today and started to realize that every once in a while there will be a "phantom round" that doesn't get counted. It still travels and detonates, but it doesn't count towards my ammunition. Pay more attention to how many shots you fire so I know I'm not crazy.

I haven't seen it recently, but when I experienced it it was a display issue - sortof.

You would use the round, but the client wouldn't think so, which means you can't reload. Once you fire a second time, you will see that you've consumed 2 rounds, and can now reload.

I've seen this on the MD many times, but it's a real ***** when you get it on the Breach Shotgun.

Ok I just heard they are rolling back all the MD' nerfs AND on top of that.. just as a show of gratitude for fighting so hard to keep DUST balanced for them.. ..... ....

THey are BUFFING the MD even beyond last patch.. AND are adding a whole new line OF MD"s that are all capable of 1 shot 1 kill .. after skilling into them ofc.. With HUGE splash damage.. omg .. THANK YOU SOO MUCH CCP!!1

its because people increas their shields so much that they will survive an entire clip most of the time. i got a HEADSHOT on a LOGISTICS with a freaking GRENADE LAUNCHER and he still had 352 armor. remove health increases or give sheild extenders a penalty. maybe reduced armor on complex extenders.

I haven't tried out the MD yet. It would be interesting to experience to shoot a MD and have it not arc like it used to. I'm glad they're taking a look at it if what everyone is saying is true.

If I was CCP I wouldnt respond to this garbage either. threats and tears=low priority. Try sounding like something besides a spoiled child, might work out better for you.

I'll add my two cents.

I'm a mediocre player. I can lead in a match where none of the really good (top 15-20% or so) players show up. I thought the old Mass Driver was slightly OP. Sometimes, rarely, the old MD made me feel godly, which was awesome. (I suspect that it was those rare long range direct damage headshots that would one-shot kill somebody that lead to the cries that, "MD are OP!")

All it needed to be balanced was maybe a tiny nerf to damage, particularly direct damage. But, CCP achieved this slight nerf by buffing shields. Once CCP buffed shields, nerfed nanohives, and added side sprinting, they didn't need to do anything at all to the MD directly to balance it. They could bring back the old MD exactly as it was, and the other changes to the game effectively nerfed the old MD into a more balanced state.

If they test the old MD stats in the current build environment (weaker nanohives, stronger shields, side sprinting) and still feel it needs a nerf, do something modest. Cut the old MD's direct damage by 2 or 3 %, and cut its old splash area by 5 or 10%, but not 50%. That's not even remotely balanced.

I'm using an alt with a tac AR most of the time now. I encourage other MD fans to do the same. Our (particularly the OP's) complaints are less likely to really convince CCP that something is wrong with the MD, compared to the stats they gather, and now show us at the end of the matches. When they see that tac ARs are now doing 100x the damage MDs are doing, they'll hopefully restore the MD to some of its former usefulness.

Prototype mass drivers

Oh yes quite a monster with a splash radius of 4 meters and 100 splash damage on the prototype and that's the high damage low radius one or you mean a monster with 78 splash damage with 5 meter radius, cause no other weapon can deal so much damage right. On top of that you have to compensate for travel time of the projectile. Also They are very week against shields.

Prototype AR

Assault rifle prototype 78 direct damage and 700+ bullets per minute at 60+ meters for a total of 910 damage per second without including skills, small travel time on the projectile and almost no shield damage penalty is no monster of course. I hope you understand my sarcasm.

TL;DR

Mass Drivers where fine in chromosome.

Also, am I crazy or did CCP add an obnoxious muzzle flash to the Mass Driver?

Have to agree, this is some serious "I'm taking my ball and going home" whining here. Despite the initial nerf CCP has acknowledged the problem and are working on a fix. The only thing holding it up appears to be the testing and deployment policy. I don't know how PSN handles things but I remember reading that XBLive's policy only allowed a set number of deployments a year. I couldn't imagine PSN operating much differently.

Plus look how long the TAC nerf took, I think CCP may have learned their lesson and are finally moving ahead more cautiously as to not make things WORSE.

Half the people in the office?
Do you make all your decisions based on how people play in the office? Cause back then most ppl who actually played for playing not for testing or developing the game were NOT using MDs

Due to other annoying reasons I stopped playing several months ago
I start playing again and hay presto, Im much better with the AR then I was before
Cool lets use my earned skill points and go back to the MD
After I used my skill points on MD and started using it again I was thinking OK you guys have stuffed the MD somehow and made the AR better.
Way to go for variation, youve just decreased the ppl using MD from about 5% to about 1%.
NEWFLASH CCP the MD was never a popular weapon before and its even less popular now

This is another one of those illogical things, like hand held guns are more effective then vehicle or turret mounted guns. It's a bag @$$ gun mounted on a structure, a single round should kill or do serious damage

Pretty much the above.

The only way to counter an AR blob now is an AR blob.

Maybe it's the power of suggestion, but I think it does look better.

But why the lack of response? And why not just roll those tweaks out right now like they did with the TAR?

...

So does CCP plan to troll us all by unf-¦cking the thing in a ninja fix, or do they plan to troll us by not unf-¦cking it at all?

That would explain a lot.

Confetti Driver for FABULOUS crowd control

Perfect.

A motion to change all broken guns to confetti variants. Confetti Driver, confetti cannon, heavy confetti gun. Proximity Explosives will now be Glitter Bombs.

Yes everyone seems to be using them makes me wonder the relevance on md

thats because everyone is running around in caldari logistics suits so they dnt notice damage as much

lolol flux kill now? thats great! i need to start running them again!

"Huge learning curve".....it is every game's noob tube with rapid fire. "Jump"...."Shoot at feet"...."get kill". Yep.....lengthy learning curve indeed. How f*cking stupid do you think the devs are.

I may return to dust to test out the MD
I read from CCP they fixed the injector, but could mean anything from, xmas cake to hot air ballons

I'm not big on the exo or the freedom. even In chromosome I was using the high splash radius low damage variant and Am glad to say the I can once again flush people out of corners. CCP thanks for bringing that support aspect I was craving since it got nerfed. Now there is nowhere to Hide from us. No straglers can get left behind because they rounded a corner to get safe. Nowhere is safe now. THANK YOU CCP from the bottom of my explosion loving heart.

I felt it too I think the path got tweak for more horizontal range with the distance rebalance in uprising 1.2 if you notice it flies a bit straighter. I aim a bit lower than pre uprising 1.2. You will have to find that sweet spot again, I'm still tweaking my aim. I also try to always be on higher ground than the enemy. When I'm even with them I tend to overshoot just like you mentioned.

No offense intended, but if you are still having difficulties, maybe the problem is you. Lately I have been owning with the Mass Driver, it is very much improved.

Seriously, people are doing well enough that we are actually starting to see QQ threads about the Mass Driver again. When was the last time that happened? Right before the release of Uprising and the MD nerf.

I think the MD is in a sweet spot right now, pretty good but not overpowered enough to deserve a nerf.

My only remaining gripe is the trajectory, which makes it very difficult to fight against either level or slightly elevated opponents. I would prefer they reverted to the Chromosome trajectory, which had a much steeper arc and made it less likely that you would overshoot your targets, like you often do now.

I have noticed a dramatic difference in the mass driver - it does fly a lot straighter- I have also notice that splash damage on the wall seems to still be a miss - This is my subjective opinion but it has made a step forward as area denial- It is also very usable !