(To understand this post, you need to understand a) the recent changes for the Double Time augment, and b) what reload cancelling is, how to do it and how it helps. If you don’t understand those, please read the section underneath the long line for explanations, THEN read my complaints).
Now that Double Time has been updated, it is impossible for players who have Double Time in their loadouts to cancel their reloads by sprinting. This means that it takes considerably longer to reload your gun if you have the Double Time augment in your loadout (ranging from, slightly longer on guns like the BR-16, all the way to a drastically longer reload on guns like the Empire-9 or the Blishlok).
As well as this, before these changes, shotgun users that had Double Time were able to quickly cancel their one-by-one continuous rechambering animations of the shotguns with a quick sprint and immediately fire again, whereas now they cannot cancel the animation.
This means that, now, Double Time is a huge deficit for loadouts’ viability. Take Aura for example:
First off, Aura is not a very competitive medic (for reasons that I won’t go into now, as this post is already long enough), so she doesn’t need any reductions in viability (in fact, I’d argue she needs a buff to her healing abilities, but that’s another story). Basically, it’s important to recognise that, in most competitive games, people pick Sawbonez over her every time.
Now, Aura’s best loadout card was, without a doubt, her BL41 (which has a Blishlok, M9, Extra Supplies, Get Up, and Double Time). Given that this card contained A) her best primary, b) her best sidearm, C) is the ONLY card for Aura that can get Extra Supplies which is a hugely advantageous augment for a merc who needs to be constantly replacing her Health Station, D) has Get Up - another hugely helpful augment for all medics, and E) gave her Double Time which didn’t help that much, but could occasionally help out.
But this loadout is now hugely negatively impacted by these changes to Double Time now. The Blishlok has one of the longest reload animations of any SMG or Assault Rifle in Dirty Bomb, and so cancelling it early was incredibly important. However, if a BL41 user wants to cancel their reload NOW, they have to swap to their knife/sidearm/defibs and then swap back to their Blishlok, which takes a considerable amount of time when in a contest with another player. In essence, the BL41 card’s Double Time now has the opposite effect of having Drilled, and so Aura’s BEST loadout has been nerfed by these changes, despite the fact that Aura was already an unpopular merc for competitive players.
Aura is not the only merc affected by these changes (Proxy’s best card, KE12, has Double Time, as do 2/3 of Fragger’s BR-16 cards, as do 3 of Stokers already-lackluster cards (the three Double Time cards were never as good as the three that have Drilled), as do many of Sparks’ and Phantom’s less powerful cards, as does one of Fletcher’s best cards).
So, in CONCLUSION, the effects of these changes have been:
- Aura and Proxy’s best cards have been significantly nerfed in their combat effectiveness (and while Proxy’s viability is controversial, I don’t think anyone has been complaining that Aura is too strong, and yet she’s been directly nerfed).
- Sparks, Fragger, Stoker, Phantom and Fletcher’s loadouts have been ‘thinned’ in terms of viability (Sparks and Phantom especially are already known for having VERY few competitive loadouts, and now this has been exacerbated).
- And finally we are all having to relearn how to cancel reloads, for no apparently good reason.
MY SUGGESTION:
These changes should be reverted or altered. One method could be to simply put an option in ‘settings’ called “Double Time prevents sprint cancelling” and allow players to turn it on and off. Another method could be to simply allow us to cancel reloads by tapping the ‘fire’ button (LMB default).
However, if these changes are not going to be reverted, Aura will need a re-buff, as her best loadout card has been directly nerfed despite her already being a 2nd or 3rd pick medic (almost everyone prefers Sawbonez). Either her Double Time augment gets replaced with something else (or even has the Double Time augment being the 3rd augment, so that competitive players can just use the Iron card to avoid having the augment), or we need to see a buff to her Health Station (maybe reduce its cooldown, or decrease the time it takes for it to ‘arm’ and start healing, or increase the healing rate, or give the station itself more durability etc…).
DOUBLE TIME’S RECENT CHANGES EXPLAINED:
BEFORE it meant that, if you had “sprinting cancels reload” turned OFF in Settings, it allowed you (if you have Double Time on your loadout) to start your reload and during that animation you could start sprinting and it would allow your reload to complete its animation.
If you had “sprinting cancels reload” turned ON in Settings, you could start sprinting, THEN start the reload and you could then be reloading while sprinting, but at the same time if you started sprinting DURING the reload it would cancel that reload.
NOW (as of the recent patch), if you have “sprinting cancels reload” turned OFF in Settings, it makes no difference to before the patch. BUT…
If you have “sprinting cancels reload” turned ON in Settings, it doesn’t actually allow you to cancel the reload by sprinting any more, meaning that you have to either A) wait out for the reload to finish its animation (instead of cancelling the last bit of the animation as soon as the new magazine has been loaded in), or b) you can switch to your knife and back to your primary to cancel the reload.
RELOAD CANCELLING EXPLAINED:
Now, I’m just going to run over why reload cancelling is important in games like Dirty Bomb, for those of you who do not know what it does:
When you reload guns in Dirty Bomb, the actual magazine will load into your gun a little bit before the reload animation has finished playing out, meaning that the only thing that is stopping you from starting to shoot again is that animation itself because your gun is actually already reloaded. Now, if you start sprinting JUST after your gun is reloaded, it will cancel the final part of that animation and allow you to start shooting with a new magazine loaded in, often around half a second earlier than if you’d waited for the animation to finish naturally.