CharCharOdell
Shining Flame
Amarr Empire
255
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Posted - 2013.07.07 00:46:00 -
[1] - Quote
It bothers me how a lot of the newer players to Dust believe the answer to fix their lack of skill is to nerf what kills them the most. Now, I haven't been around here forever, as some of you from the closed beta have, but I have been around long enough to realize that asking CCP to nerf something will knock it into the ground. From Chromosome to Uprising, a lot of things got nerfed that didn't need to, and I'm sure we all know what they are, when in reality, only the Laser Rifle needed a nerf (because the way the weapon worked, by the time it cut through someone's shields, it would do ridiculous amounts of damage to armor) to its damage vs armor.
This build, the hot topics are free lavs, tanks, (the late) TARs, and cal logis.
(The late) TAR: Honestly, if used as CCP intended, the TAR was not OP. The problem was people cranking up the rate of fire with their mouse and using mods to compensate for the recoil.
Free LAVs: They are overpowered because they perform infinitely better than their cost should allow. The obvious solutions are bringing the mlt LAVs back to their Chromo stats or removing mlt lavs, completely. However, the latter has a lot of tankers and AV bothered because it really is free money for us, and god knows we need it.
CalLogis: I recently started using it as a combat logi suit to go with my massdriver and I love it, so I will be a little biased, but I don't think nerfing it is the answer. How about instead of nerfing it, we give the assault suits damage bonuses to race-specific weapons and the logi suits bonuses to different types of equipment. This way, nobody is sad because EVERYBODY GETS A BUFF.
Tanks: A topic near and dear to my heart. Honestly, the issue is the cost that using them has. One good tank will cost you around 1.4 mil. With average payouts being 250k, that means one tank has to survive 6 consecutive rounds to make a very marginal profit, which is very, very hard- I don't care how good you are. In Chromosome, this wasn't an issue because for around 8 million SP, you could have a pretty amazing Sagaris or Surya, and if the enemy happened to have amazing AV capabilities, you could switch to a good infantry suit and go from there. Was it a perfect system- no, but is was alright, and looking back on it, I shouldn't have been complaining. However, tanks are such a huge SP sink for marginally better HP and DPS, that it costs many millions of SP more to get the same tank you had in Chromosome, than in Uprising. This means that to have a survivable tank in most situations, you're going to be running around 13 mil SP just in one kind of tank and still not be where you really should, for having that much SP invested in one thing. Back to the ISK issue, a tanker in Chromosome would be able to invest a few mil SP into an infantry fit to compensate for any lost money in tanks because tanks weren't the SP sink they are now; so without the infantry part-time job, the majority (not all) of tankers are having trouble making ends meet- something even a less than average grunt has no trouble with. The solution, here is to either keep tanks the way they are and cut their cost by 50%, so that a good tank will cost 700k (vs 1.4mil), or bring them up to a point where they can easily survive battles against teams with 2 proto AV grunts working together (provided they don't play the hero). A third option is to bring in PROTO tanks, using the same scaling of tanks vs av as we have no, but with that, it'll take around 3 proto AV to kill a proto tank- that means tanks will have no real counter but other tanks in pubs, because only the best corporations run teams of mercs in pubs where 3 of them will have proto swarms. That raises the question of: are tanks overpowered, even if they cost 10 million? That is one of the hardest questions to answer concerning balance, and likely, it'll take years for CCP to find the same balance in Dust as they have in Eve. |