General balance feedback from the week-end :
After spending a lot of time playing dirty bomb this week-end (and loving it), I’ve got several things in mind that could definitely help the game balance wise.
Keep in mind that I haven’t be doing any scrims, I’ve been playing a lot of pubs and I’ve also played a fair amount of games with a couple friends which allowed us to do some coordinated stuff. Enough to get ourselves an opinion about the way the meta is likely to evolve in a competitive environment. We would have loved to get some more experience with it before coming to conclusions but I figured we had some pretty solid feedback already. I tried to keep both pub play and competitive setting in mind while making this list.
But first of all, a short disclaimer since people will definitely respond by questioning my skill. Responding « you think it’s OP because you suck » is easy, and the sad thing is that it’s often true. Still, I believe I’m very decent at the game, I’d say I top the scoreboard most of the time during pub play, 1,5-2 K/D in the worst scenario and 4+ K/D when the team is flowing well.
But, I am in no way excellent, I struggle versus top tier players and I get bopped a lot by friends with a strong arena FPS background. I guess we all ran into amazing Vassili players who headshot a lot and go 27/2, well that’s not me.
- Class analysis :
I’ll start with the strong and end with the bad.
Aura
Her health station is kind of insane, the radius and regeneration are huge and it increases the TTK so much that it pretty much brakes the game at a higher level. Think about TF2’s Uber except that instead of promoting agression and movement it encourages static gameplay, chokepoints and AOE spam, but I’ll come to that later.
The thing about Aura is that she’s ridiculously as a duelist and a killing class, while being the best healer at the same time.
As a duelist she shines thanks to her station and rules close range engagements, its start-up time is fast enough for it to be dropped agressively right before contesting a corner, or even straight in the open if you need to. Dueling an Aura in close quarter you have two choices : Focus the station first which takes freaking forever to destroy and hope that she misses several shotgun shots, or try to out DPS the station which is pretty fucking hard if you don’t land a bunch of headshots (keep in mind she has insane ADAD speed).
I mentioned her as a duelist with pub play in mind, but she has even stronger teamplay oriented assets : on top of her station, she’s fast enough to insta rez people in close quarter situation.
I was lucky enough to draw an aura card with pump shotty, 30% health regen buff and 20% healing radius size : this shit was broken as hell. Couple the regen with a Fragger and you’ve got a guy with stupid tanking abilities and stupid killing power.
Finally, the pump shotty as Aura seemed a bit strong as it has a very tight spread and allows her to extend her effective range to 10+ meters. The shotties are very good in this game and I think a tight spread makes sense for someone like Proxy. But I’m not sure it currently works to have such killing power on a class that’s also the best healer.
How to balance her :
-Make it so damage interrupts the health regen, you only get healed if you didn’t get damaged during the last two seconds. It fixes the TTK and turns the tanking station into a proper healing station.
Fragger :
Fragger gets kind of stupid when he has heals and ammo, I’m not sure it’s such a wise idea to give the most HPs to the guy who also has among the best guns (I’ll specifically talk about the grenades later). So I understand he’s supposed to be slower but he really isn’t that much… His guns are great : the M16 is versatile, the BR-16 has crazy low recoil, it gets you headshots by stacks of three and the K21 is just crazy. Even though it’s a little hard to handle at range, it packs insane damage per magazine and the big bullet damage turns a single headshot into a death warrant. The COF turns big after 8 shots or so but its reset time is extremely quick. The last two weapons aren’t designed as CQC weapons but slow ROF can be negated by player skill. Fast ROFs in CQC are more frogiving to newbies but the issue disappears at higher level of play, when people land their hits. Even without taking skill into account, a CQC weakness is easily compensated by having almost twice the enemy’s HP (150 vs Proxy’s 90).
Alright, so coupled with having among the best gunplay, here come the nades : The ability to cook OHK canceable nades is kind of broken. Yes, it does take a little skill to learn the pop-grenade timing for several ranges but it’s only a matter of a few hours to get consistent with it and you’re rewarded with a 15 second cooldown single hit kill with no warning. Coupled with the health station, they are the only broken things in the game right now. The fact that they often seem to make people inrezzable is even worse. They play a big part of the game turning into a chokepoint AOE oriented spam fest at a higher level. If nades never instagibbed in any of the CS iteration it’s for a reason, think about what the CS meta would turn into with instagib grenades on a 15 second cooldown.
How to balance him :
-Reduce his HPs to 130,
-Reduce Grenade damage so it can’t instagib, make it 70 damage upclose to 35-40 damage in the outer ring of the AOE. Maybe increase the number of grenades carried at the same time as a counterpart.
-Remove the ability to cancel grenade throws, being able to cook a grenade and then just switch weapons is kind of dumb, there’s no risk in having a grenade ready at all times.
Vassili :
First of all, the heartbeat sensor is pretty dumb and it is just bad design, I guess that’s the third broken thing about the game but we chose not to use it so it never felt too bad.
This kind of crutch for situational awareness is terrible for competitive play, and I have no idea why you’d like to include any kind of ESP into your game. « But you can shoot the detector, L2P scrub », well no, the first ping is guaranteed and the ball is small enough to be thrown in weird places.
The second thing about this detector is that it can be terrifying in pub play, couple this tool with an excellent player and he’ll get OHKs as soon as people get out of cover, especially on unaware beginners. This is the kind of frustrating thing that creates terrible new player experience, and lowers player retention. Please consider revamping this ability.
When it comes to the killing potential, Vassili goes from decent at low level to insane when the player is amazing, I’m not unfortunately so I’ve only been on the receiving end of it. The OHK sniper discussion comes up every in every online shooter and it can be frustrating to be on the receiving end but honestly, Vassili really wouldn’t be viable at all if headshots didn’t kill in a single hit. And the movement is definitely fast enough to avoid getting hit.
How to balance him : Revamp the heartbeat scanner into an object scanner (ables your team to see ammo and health packs, health stations etc. through walls).
