A rework for Arty's artillery

(HoopleDoople) #1

I’ve been overall enjoying Arty since I picked him up, but the mechanics of calling in artillery has been bugging me for a while. First and foremost, calling in artillery is extremely dangerous to perform. In most cases, you can’t call a strike on a location without dangerously exposing yourself to enemies at that very same location. Once you have the line of sight you need to hold your aim steady while you charge the laser, which makes it hard to dodge effectively without messing up your aim. And in the likely event that you get shot while charging your laser, your charging will be continually interrupted.

Even when you are safe to charge the laser it can be incredibly finnicky about what is and isn’t an acceptable target. Obviously artillery doesn’t work indoors (its lack of function in this case is a major issue in its own right), but it frequently will refuse to target areas that seem like they should be valid. In particular the EV causes problems - you can’t directly target it, only the ground around it.

My recommendation on how to fix most of these issues is to make charging the laser, marking the target, and calling in the strike separate functions. To make this work Arty would have his artillery split into a laser ability (Q) and a fire artillery ability (F). Launching an artillery strike would entail the following:

  1. Pull out your laser and it will automatically start charging. A full charge will be retained until either a target is marked or Arty switches to a weapon. The laser will not shine a green/red indicator of a (in)valid location until charged.
  2. Once your laser is charged, point it at your desired target and press M1. This location is now marked and your laser discharges. The enemies will NOT see a laser at this point.
  3. Arty will automatically put away his laser after marking a target and can now use his other weapons. The target will remain marked until a strike is called in or Arty marks another target.
  4. If Arty has a target marked he may at any time call in artillery to strike the target. The artillery would have its usual delay before striking, and it would show the laser from the sky indicator when triggered. Arty will have his standard 20 second cooldown on artillery and 2 max charges.

What will be really neat about these changes is that Arty would now be able prepare a target in advance. You could target a chokepoint behind the front lines and then when the EV reaches the chokepoint call in a strike from safety. Enemies would still have fair warning that a strike was coming, but they would have a much harder time preventing the strike from ever happening. If we really want to buff Arty we could even let him retain his marked target after using a strike. There is still other work needed to clean up what is and isn’t a valid target, but when the laser can be used outside of combat this becomes a lot less problematic.

(CCP115) #2

Those are some solid ideas, but here’s a better one:

Don’t play Arty. As an Arty main my whole DB career, I gotta say he is the worst merc, probably on par with Phantom and Proxy, if not worse.

These changes sound alright though, just a bit complicated.
Instead of placing a marker down and calling an Arty strike at a later point, I was thinking have the charge time increased back to 0.5 seconds, have the passive charge, and allow an instant calldown if the charge is over.

So if I know the EV is coming soon, I can pull out my marker, wait 0.5 seconds, and continue to wait. As soon as someone or something comes around the corner, I blast em with my strike.

Easy peasy.

(HoopleDoople) #3

Well I picked up Arty because I found him a lot more fun to use than the other available fire support mercs. I find long cooldowns on signature abilities to be annoying, so a mere 20 seconds for artillery was much appreciated. The lack of the M4 hurts his effectiveness, but I enjoy the BR-16 a lot more (hopefully the changes this patch didn’t gut it too badly). I knew going into my purchase that Arty wasn’t top tier. I’m way better as a combat class or medic (or better yet Phoenix to cover both roles) for serious play anyway.

Your idea isn’t at all unreasonable, but I’d still prefer Arty have the ability to call strikes on a prepared target. This frees up Arty to go where he needs to be without worrying so much about maintaining a constant line of sight on a critical location. Get some good communication with your teammates camping the objective/chokepoint and Arty is golden to roam free.