Eox's Fletcher feedback.

(yenku) #21

I do play mostly Fletcher, Nader and Sawbonez.

IMHO, I’d increase the cooldown to 10 sec for each sticky bomb, keep 3 of them and reduce the damage when not a direct hit.
Fletcher should be rewarding for who is able to do direct hits with his sticky bombs.

About the loadouts, I’m used to lock on, and due to the amount of minimum damage, it’s even more important, to me of course, I mean, if I slightly miss I’m still doing a good amount of damage, however.

I would touch just these two things…
as @Eox and @Szakalot just said -.-

(Eox) #22

I’m not sure about what you mean about increasing draw speed.

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;c-216182”]

Unfortunately there is no real way to punish spam without nerfing his versatility, and as you said before I was mostly playing Fletcher correctly anyhow.[/quote]

There’s one. Apply the changes in the OP.

I am positive about that : if you apply what I suggested, spammers will be much less of a threat, even with 3 stickies. It doesn’t mean that you will beat them 100% of the time of course : there’s too much factors to take into account (and if you’re engaging Fletcher in a tight indoor area spam or not if you die you deserve it). But at least evading the first sticky bomb, even partially, should give you a pretty big advantage if the Fletcher doesn’t switch and keep hurling Sticky Bombs at you.

[quote=“sweetColumn;c-216194”]
but another problem is fletcher still able to play like assault or even better than before if you decrease the sticky count and increase the damage.
they key in here is cooldown. while you can drop proxy mine, it cant be thrown far enough over a cover. While fletcher can deny cover by throwing over it or airburst at longer range.

i think cooldown nerf slightly higher than proxy (12-11 sec) but still retain the same 3 stickies and less damage on maximum range would reduce constant spam.

im also not sure how to justify fletcher sticky shotgun combo.
proxy is Close range specialist, bush is kind of in the middle, fletcher is weird. He can do in any range as long as the player is good enough. Ive seen fletch players that are able to do stick at very long range against snipers.

lastly, the loadout.
both proxy and fletcher got smg secondary paired with m.pistol.
i think, rather than nerfing the m.pistol SD could have nerfed the cooldown because sparks got hit very hard by the nerf for the machinepistol.[/quote]

Wow wow wow. Careful about the wording. Are you suggesting Stickies to have 11-12 seconds Cooldown or are you suggesting a bigger cooldown than a proximity mine (20 seconds per mine if my memory is clear) ?

About the maximum range, if that Fletcher got a stuck stickybomb on that sniper, I’d first congratulate the Fletcher on the very good throw (long range stickies look easy, but they aren’t), and blame the Sniper for his tunnel vision. Being able to toss the sticky bomb afar is not an issue to me. Getting the direct hit past mid range is hard : sticky bombs aren’t hitscan. They’re projectiles. This means that by the time you throw one, it’ll take some time to reach its destination. Considering that, you should have more time to evade it. Good players will probably attempt to pre-detonate though, reducting a bit the time you have to evade, but at a long range it’s easy to pre-detonate too early or too late, so I think there’s a skill indexing factor here. Throwing stickies far also requires the Fletcher to earn some inertia before throwing : you can use that to predict what the Fletcher will attempt to do.

Fletcher is supposed to be weaker at long range and giving falloff to the Sticky Bombs (is it what you are suggesting though ?) makes sense. But I think there’s more interesting changes to pull out first.

(GatoCommodore) #23

I’m not sure about what you mean about increasing draw speed.

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;c-216182”]

Unfortunately there is no real way to punish spam without nerfing his versatility, and as you said before I was mostly playing Fletcher correctly anyhow.[/quote]

There’s one. Apply the changes in the OP.

I am positive about that : if you apply what I suggested, spammers will be much less of a threat, even with 3 stickies. It doesn’t mean that you will beat them 100% of the time of course : there’s too much factors to take into account (and if you’re engaging Fletcher in a tight indoor area spam or not if you die you deserve it). But at least evading the first sticky bomb, even partially, should give you a pretty big advantage if the Fletcher doesn’t switch and keep hurling Sticky Bombs at you.

i thought proxy mine is 10 sec cooldown because it never felt like 20 sec to me. always available on demand.

maybe thats why fletcher stickies felt like endless because the cooldown dont feel that long.
12-15 sec is middle ground tho, if sd were to make fletcher 20 sec cooldown it would make fletcher not very useable.

what i read in gamepedia wiki the stickies cooldown is 8 sec.
too fast imo

(Eox) #24

I’m not sure about what you mean about increasing draw speed.

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;c-216182”]

Unfortunately there is no real way to punish spam without nerfing his versatility, and as you said before I was mostly playing Fletcher correctly anyhow.[/quote]

There’s one. Apply the changes in the OP.

I am positive about that : if you apply what I suggested, spammers will be much less of a threat, even with 3 stickies. It doesn’t mean that you will beat them 100% of the time of course : there’s too much factors to take into account (and if you’re engaging Fletcher in a tight indoor area spam or not if you die you deserve it). But at least evading the first sticky bomb, even partially, should give you a pretty big advantage if the Fletcher doesn’t switch and keep hurling Sticky Bombs at you.

i thought proxy mine is 10 sec cooldown because it never felt like 20 sec to me. always available on demand.

maybe thats why fletcher stickies felt like endless because the cooldown dont feel that long.
12-15 sec is middle ground tho, if sd were to make fletcher 20 sec cooldown it would make fletcher not very useable.

what i read in gamepedia wiki the stickies cooldown is 8 sec.
too fast imo[/quote]

Indeed; 8s is too fast.

20s is definitely way too big. 15s is really borderline. 12s is still a bit too big but it’s something to consider if spamming is still out of control after the changes described in the OP. I doubt it’ll be the case though.

(Herr_Hanz) #25

@Eox with draw speed i mean the speed at which fletcher can switch from his shotty to his stickys, like weapon draw speed. the thing that the quickdraw augment decreases by 30%.

increasing it for stickys will make fletcher a more easier target if he decides to switch for his shotty to his stickies. this will probaly affect his stickies RPM as well. maybe increase the speed that it takes to switch from stickies to detonator/shotty as well.

(watsyurdeal) #26

The thing is if you’re running into a fight head on stickies ready, you’re likely going to die even with Quick Switch, but if that’s your playstyle, then the Quick Switch augment is likely mandatory.

I don’t believe the switch times as they are should change, I think the real discussion should be centered around cooldown, number of stickies, and damage overall.

To point out a few things

  1. You should never need more than 2 stickies to kill a target, including Rhino. And even if you land just 1 sticky, a single shotgun blast should be more than capable of finishing someone off.
  2. The fact we have the whole 15 extra damage on stick, and 85 damage radius, means we can play with the numbers a bit and come up with some ideas on how to find the right balance of power here.
  3. The cooldown is too fast, I don’t think anyone here has disagreed with that so far, so if 8 seconds is too fast, what about 10, or 12?
  4. Should we add another layer to this, and have Sticky Bomb damage increase when they are stuck to a surface for a longer period of time? Therefore encouraging people to use them for traps.
(Eox) #27

[quote=“Herr_Hanz;c-216221”]@Eox with draw speed i mean the speed at which fletcher can switch from his shotty to his stickys, like weapon draw speed. the thing that the quickdraw augment decreases by 30%.

increasing it for stickys will make fletcher a more easier target if he decides to switch for his shotty to his stickies. this will probaly affect his stickies RPM as well. maybe increase the speed that it takes to switch from stickies to detonator/shotty as well.[/quote]

Isn’t that a constant in the game’s files ? It could be impossible to pull out due to code limitations.

(bgyoshi) #28

And yet, he has a blishlok. So you can play long range against snipers while using only stickies as your close range assault. Oh and blishlok to pick off the close range targets after a sticky bomb softens them.

To put them on par with mines, they would need a 12.33 sec cool down per bomb. To be fair, that sounds even better than 10 seconds, however:

What are we ultimately trying to achieve? Slower deployment of consecutively thrown stickies, or slower recharge of deployed stickies? Proxies CAN throw both mines one after the other, and then wait 40 total seconds to get both back. Should bombs be the same? That’s the spammy part of bombs. Here are some other solutions below:

Assuming stickies cannot be detonated mid-air:

  1. Throw all stickies at once (like now): Way higher cool down time per sticky (like 12 - 15s each) but more damage OR a higher effective radius when combined.
  2. Throw stickies one at a time (like fragger): Way lower cool down (like 5s each), but can only deploy one at a time. Maybe a damage buff for time spent armed on a surface, perhaps even making them close to as powerful as fragger nades or proxy mines if they’ve been armed for more than 10 seconds (arbitrary amount of time I made up).

Solution one makes sense in that stickies work the same way, but you’re waiting up to 45 seconds to throw all three together again, or up to 30 seconds to throw two at once. This will make the most effective offense use of stickies be a sticky/gun combo, but versatile enough to allow you to use multiple bombs at once when fighting 1v2 or 2v3. Assuming you use 2 bombs at once, you have to wait at up to 15 seconds to have two bombs at once again, but still have one in reserve. Alternatively, you can still lay bombs all over, defensively, and have one or two bombs recharged by the time you make it back to your team.

Solution two makes sense in that stickies now work more like mini grenades that are better when they’re traps. They aren’t nearly as strong as fragger nades, unless they’ve been pre-applied for awhile, but you can throw consecutive nades way faster than fragger can. Limiting them to one every 5 seconds pretty much erases all offense sticky spam, rewards defensive trap use, and STILL makes him stronger on offense than both of the other engineers.

Option three is to leave Fletcher’s combat options alone, entirely unchanged, give him more HP, and simply make him an assault class. He’s already slower than other engineers, but faster than assault. So instead of making him a high HP slow assault engineer, make him a low HP fast assault class. Maybe 140hp? 130hp? His nerf, so to speak, is losing engineer objective speed, and his buff is more HP to be the assault class he’s already as effective as.

(watsyurdeal) #29

I think ultimately we are trying to punish people who just throw out their stickies constantly, forcing them to instead rely more on their primary, and use their stickies carefully, as in 1 at a time and going for a direct stick whenever possible.

The problem is that people always have at least 3 stickies available at any given point in time, so it’s pretty much impossible to fight a Fletcher who’s without them. That and his weapons are kinda meh…debatable.

What I would like to see

  1. Stickies reduced to 2 from 3
  2. 10 second cooldown
  3. Direct Stick damage increased to 35
  4. AoE damage reduced to 75 max, 25 min
  5. Add an additional attribute, a secondary arm time, stickies that are stuck to a surface for longer than, let’s say two or three times the arm time, the stickies will then do 110 damage max, 36 damage min. This way you are encouraged to set traps, further increasing the skill ceiling in exchange for increasing the skill floor, you will no longer be able to kill people with just sticky spam, you have to have some actual skill when using them.

And before you give me grief, I see no reason a direct stick should not down a Sawbonez, or a Bush for that matter, especially when Proxy Mines can one hit ko Fragger. And those are proximity based and you can place them anywhere with ease.

Really the only problem is figuring out what to do with Bush at this point.

(yenku) #30

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;c-216232”]I think ultimately we are trying to punish people who just throw out their stickies constantly, forcing them to instead rely more on their primary, and use their stickies carefully, as in 1 at a time and going for a direct stick whenever possible.

What I would like to see

[spoiler]1. Stickies reduced to 2 from 3
2. 10 second cooldown
3. Direct Stick damage increased to 35
4. AoE damage reduced to 75 max, 25 min
5. Add an additional attribute, a secondary arm time, stickies that are stuck to a surface for longer than, let’s say two or three times the arm time, the stickies will then do 110 damage max, 36 damage min. This way you are encouraged to set traps, further increasing the skill ceiling in exchange for increasing the skill floor, you will no longer be able to kill people with just sticky spam, you have to have some actual skill when using them.
[/spoiler]
[/quote]

  1. Ok, I’d give 2 stickies a try. It’s Beta, isin’t it ?
  2. Could work
  3. Sounds rewarding
  4. More or less, these are the values
  5. Naah, keep it simple. I mean, would not add another layers before trying the other points you made.
(Eox) #31

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;c-216232”]I think ultimately we are trying to punish people who just throw out their stickies constantly, forcing them to instead rely more on their primary, and use their stickies carefully, as in 1 at a time and going for a direct stick whenever possible.

The problem is that people always have at least 3 stickies available at any given point in time, so it’s pretty much impossible to fight a Fletcher who’s without them. That and his weapons are kinda meh…debatable.

What I would like to see

  1. Stickies reduced to 2 from 3
  2. 10 second cooldown
  3. Direct Stick damage increased to 35
  4. AoE damage reduced to 75 max, 25 min
  5. Add an additional attribute, a secondary arm time, stickies that are stuck to a surface for longer than, let’s say two or three times the arm time, the stickies will then do 110 damage max, 36 damage min. This way you are encouraged to set traps, further increasing the skill ceiling in exchange for increasing the skill floor, you will no longer be able to kill people with just sticky spam, you have to have some actual skill when using them.

And before you give me grief, I see no reason a direct stick should not down a Sawbonez, or a Bush for that matter, especially when Proxy Mines can one hit ko Fragger. And those are proximity based and you can place them anywhere with ease.

Really the only problem is figuring out what to do with Bush at this point.[/quote]

Sticky Bombs are no mines. You can toss Stickies all across a big room, sometime not even exposing yourself, and down a Sawbonez. Mines are countered by awareness, Sticky Bombs aren’t (unless they’re used as a trap). With such a change good players might become even more powerful than they are, and honestly we shouldn’t make good throws even more rewarding. They’re already crazy powerful enough. When a high skill ceiling character or weapon rewards good play too much, there’s an issue IMO.

Sure, some Proxies just lay a mine at your feet and blow it up. Cheap strategy, I suffered from it a couple of times and I raged on it too. But this will only work if you’re too close of the Proxy and can be rather easly countered just by staying away. With a sticky bomb, it’s a bit harder to stay away, and it’s actually designed to be used offensively, unlike the mine.

110 hp stickies would one shot Sawbonez, Vassili, Fletcher himself and Bushwhacker. That’s really nuts I think. Stuck stickies should still leave a chance to retreat to any character above 100 hp IMO.

(bgyoshi) #32

Which is very strange since neither of the other engineers have offensive passives.

I know a lot of people say turrets can be used offensively, but I don’t see it. I have no exact calculation but I could safely say I win 95% or more of fights against Bushwhackers that drop turrets. And I never have a situation where I’m being pushed back by a turret; when I’m on defense and I encounter the offense’s active turrets, it’s almost always because I’m pushing the offense back, and not because they’re pushing forward. Turrets are excellent at cementing the offense’s forward movement; creating a ‘checkpoint’, so to speak, so that the defense doesn’t push the offense back too far.

And Proxy mines are, as you said, easy to avoid when being used on offense by just keeping the Proxy at middle range and not getting too close. Mines are also a good way of keeping the defense from pushing the offense back too far, mainly by holding choke points and preventing captured side objective from being repaired.

Fletcher, on the other hand, can straight up top frag without ever using a gun, whether on offense or defense. Well… maybe not every time, but the point is, Fletcher’s “defense passive” acts more like fragger and nader, and less like bush and proxy.

So just make him assault. Or nerf the ability to be offensive with stickies and turn him into a real engineer. The thing we’ve been discussing, in essence, is how to make stickies way less offensively viable and more defensively attractive.

(Eox) #33

Which is very strange since neither of the other engineers have offensive passives.

I know a lot of people say turrets can be used offensively, but I don’t see it. I have no exact calculation but I could safely say I win 95% or more of fights against Bushwhackers that drop turrets. And I never have a situation where I’m being pushed back by a turret; when I’m on defense and I encounter the offense’s active turrets, it’s almost always because I’m pushing the offense back, and not because they’re pushing forward. Turrets are excellent at cementing the offense’s forward movement; creating a ‘checkpoint’, so to speak, so that the defense doesn’t push the offense back too far.

And Proxy mines are, as you said, easy to avoid when being used on offense by just keeping the Proxy at middle range and not getting too close. Mines are also a good way of keeping the defense from pushing the offense back too far, mainly by holding choke points and preventing captured side objective from being repaired.

Fletcher, on the other hand, can straight up top frag without ever using a gun, whether on offense or defense. Well… maybe not every time, but the point is, Fletcher’s “defense passive” acts more like fragger and nader, and less like bush and proxy.

So just make him assault. Or nerf the ability to be offensive with stickies and turn him into a real engineer.[/quote]

If he was limited to defense, Fletcher would just be a worse Proxy. Also, just because Proxy and Fletcher have rather defensive abilities does not mean that Fletcher should be defensive as well. I remind you that the merc role call advertised Fletcher as a versatile and agressive engineer.

Once again, easy fix : make stickies worse at dueling. Reduce minimum damage to make misses more punishing, reduce RPM of stickybombs overall.

(bgyoshi) #34

[quote=“Eox;c-216249”]If he was limited to defense, Fletcher would just be a worse Proxy. Also, just because Proxy and Fletcher have rather defensive abilities does not mean that Fletcher should be defensive as well. I remind you that the merc role call advertised Fletcher as a versatile and agressive engineer.

Once again, easy fix : make stickies worse at dueling. Reduce minimum damage to make misses more punishing, reduce RPM of stickybombs overall.[/quote]

Hence why I used the term ‘nerf’ and not ‘remove’

Aggressive =/= Offensive

Which is why the changes being discussed are all geared towards rewarding defensive stickies and punishing, but not hamstringing, offensive stickies. On offense, they should be a useful help to use every now and then, a secondary, not a primary. They are, without, question, a primary weapon, and I don’t think reducing the RPM by 1/3rd and increasing the cool down by 2s is necessarily enough.

It would make more sense to stop trying to balance sticky RPM and cool down to somewhere equal on offense and defense, and instead change how they work, entirely, to favor defense over offense, while leaving offense use viable. Even if you only gave him 1 sticky every 8 seconds, he would STILLLLL be far more aggressive than Bush or Proxy, so it makes sense to change their damage and arm/detonate requirements in a way that favors defense more heavily than offense.

(Szakalot) #35

all these walls and its really simple: Fletcher works, is just a bit too spammy.

20% reduction in spam is a good way to nerf without changing how the merc works.

Many of the ideas in this thread are completely unfeasible.

(bgyoshi) #36

[quote=“Szakalot;c-216254”]all these walls and its really simple: Fletcher works, is just a bit too spammy.

20% reduction in spam is a good way to nerf without changing how the merc works.

Many of the ideas in this thread are completely unfeasible.[/quote]

Present an idea for creating a 20% reduction in spam, then.

Unfortunately, reducing sticky spam completely changes how the merc works. So I’m really curious to see this idea.

(Szakalot) #37

[quote=“MidnightButterSweats;c-216255”][quote=“Szakalot;c-216254”]all these walls and its really simple: Fletcher works, is just a bit too spammy.

20% reduction in spam is a good way to nerf without changing how the merc works.

Many of the ideas in this thread are completely unfeasible.[/quote]

Present an idea for creating a 20% reduction in spam, then.

Unfortunately, reducing sticky spam completely changes how the merc works. So I’m really curious to see this idea.[/quote]

this was discussed before:

2s increase in cooldown is 20% fletcher spam decrease.

2s doesn’t sound like much, but its 2 sec longer for each sticky that fletcher will be able to throw during the map.

E.G. in 4 min at 8sec/sticky Fletcher will be able to maximally throw 30 stickies.

At 10sec/sticky it will be 24 stickies.

6 stickies spam reduction.

(bgyoshi) #38

[quote=“Szakalot;c-216256”][quote=“MidnightButterSweats;c-216255”][quote=“Szakalot;c-216254”]all these walls and its really simple: Fletcher works, is just a bit too spammy.

20% reduction in spam is a good way to nerf without changing how the merc works.

Many of the ideas in this thread are completely unfeasible.[/quote]

Present an idea for creating a 20% reduction in spam, then.

Unfortunately, reducing sticky spam completely changes how the merc works. So I’m really curious to see this idea.[/quote]

this was discussed before:

2s increase in cooldown is 20% fletcher spam decrease.

2s doesn’t sound like much, but its 2 sec longer for each sticky that fletcher will be able to throw during the map.

E.G. in 4 min at 8sec/sticky Fletcher will be able to maximally throw 30 stickies.

At 10sec/sticky it will be 24 stickies.

6 stickies spam reduction.[/quote]

I don’t see how this alone addresses the problem of 2 stickies being thrown in rapid succession during firefights, leaving 1 up for the next, essentially creating 10s between have 2 stickies ready to throw at any given game moment. Especially considering that @ 8s per sticky, fletchers already don’t run out of stickies to throw and sit stuck on a cool down.

Also, you’re falsely connecting cool down time with all of spam. Less stickies per 4 minutes does not a spam reduction make. The spammability of stickies is also attributed to their insanely fast detonation limit, speed, throw distance, and mid-air detonation.

(Szakalot) #39

meh,

‘insanely fast’ really?

Throwing two stickies ‘in rapid succession’ is not at all fast, unless you only detonate after the 2nd sticky, which is obviously not viable unless your first sticky got stuck on the enemy.

So basically, you throw sticky-detonate; throw sticky-detonate.

This is very slow.

Oh and its 20 seconds for two-sticky throws at the propposed cooldown nerf.

If Fletcher saves stickies for fights thats a fletcher that doesn’t use them for crowd control, to prevent peaking, to harass, etc. etc. etc.

As a die-hard fletcher I can tell you that sticky use is easily 50% suppression/spam and 50% direct combat. Longer cooldown will make Fletchers sacrifice one or the other. Hence - reduced spam.

You should have seen fletcher back when he had 4 sticky bombs, all dealing 100damage stuck or not, now THAT was spam

(JJMAJR) #40

I remember that the Scottish Resistance in TF2 had a longer arming time in exchange for more traps being available and more control over those traps.

It was essentially the least spammy Demoman weapon in the game because of that.

So why not take that formula and put it on Fletcher? He already has the more numerous trap advantage over the other engineers.