@Xenithos said:
However: Mercs that lack good counter play? and “good meaning you don’t have to switch to another merc and play rock paper scissors?” Could you clarify that again for me? I’m still not fully sure what you’re saying was a core issue.
To put it simply, I shouldn’t have to play Guardian to deal with Arty, or Hunter to deal with Turtle. There should be realistic counters that you can do at any time with any merc to deal with their abilities or strengths, whether it’d be rushing Fragger when he’s trying to cook his nade, cause you can hear a voice over that tells you he started cooking it. Or laying down suppressive fire against Vasilli which may not kill him, but it will force him to leave an area or position because he can’t hit anything due to aim punch. Or hell, even easier one, making the delay for proxy mines long enough that you can avoid them without taking too much damage, at least enough that would kill you instantly. Which we DID have until she got Lock On.These are just sort of common sense things to think about, a merc should be fun to play, but also fun to play against because they have a weakness or a certain way they do things that you can exploit.
I pretty much agree with what you’re saying, but I also think that a fair bit of the game already has decent enough counterplay, and most of those issues are solved by merc limits.
I personally have almost no problem with fragger, but I do think his spawn fragging choices by Splash Damage were poor ones. That’s the only time his ability isn’t really that telecast, otherwise I usually hear it, or have some inkling of him coming because he’s usually supported by a team and I dodge it. On a per merc basis, Having over the announcement sounds or warnings of incoming stuff like that would be amazing. Javelin’s ROCKET FIRING! or Fragger saying PINEAPPLES! like a madman would give the game more flavor AND fix that slight disparity. I think Proxy mines simply need a bigger hit damage radius, or to be slightly bigger. Once they become slightly more obvious and more shootable, dying to them becomes solely your fault, and not an issue of Lock-on.
Vassili’s heartbeat sensor can be destroyed, and without it he takes extra time to aim. I’ve only suffered against one Vassili in my entire 3 year time span of playing this game where he was simply unbeatable. And that was back when Terminal was defense sided so heavily that it was ridiculous. Personally, aim-punch on Vassilis sounds terrible to me. Hitting targets is hard enough in the game that DB is, and snipers have been nerfed so many times that it simply takes one or two people dedicated to teamcalling out the Vassili. In ranked games Vassilis are nearly useless, and in the few Pugs I’ve been in where he was allowed, a simple callout of even high level playing Vassilis currently degrades any of the power they might have. Their time to switch to secondaries after firing is just too much, and the weakening of MPs has driven them from being these godlike characters to run that had no weaknesses into being an incredibly high skill requiring merc to play. I honest to goodness do NOT want him touched even more unless it’s to lower his HP slightly. This is one of the few games where getting sniped doesn’t piss me off, where snipers are only instant kill on a headshot, and where playing against a good vassili or being a good vassili IS fun.
One single Arty is rarely that big of a problem, it’s when you have multiples that he’s disgusting.