@Xenithos said:
I can’t spam the agree/like button more. This is the exact same reason Sparks is also outperforming. The people that pick her are abundantly good with her and have been for a while. Also, the changes to her medpacks to discourage selfish Sparks healing isn’t going to change squat. You want to stop selfish Sparks, then you make it so she has a third ability to heal herself back to full instantly/over time like other mercs, and make her packs useless for herself. That’s how you do it. You don’t keep nerfing the healing she gives herself. That only means it takes more packs to heal her to full. You instead put a limit on the healing she can give herself in a set time frame and separate it from the healing she gives other players.
I specifically said I wanted to only mention one reason why I think the patch is awful, but the Sparks change is another item that simply beggars explanation. I agree; the healthpack change does absolutely nothing to discourage selfish Sparks play. It can even be argued the healthpacks aren’t intended for other players regardless because Spark’s first and foremost priority is to generally to keep herself alive. Furthermore, in exchange for her all her amazing other capabilities, she’s supposed to have weak team healing capabilities. That’s the whole point of class balance. Every time you get better at one thing, you should get weaker at something else. A team isn’t supposed to be able to rely on a solo Sparks. This change still doesn’t make her a solo medic, but it does push her a little bit more in that direction as an instant, nearly 50 HP w/ Potent packs is pretty yummy, especially since, again, it is instant. That might even make Sparks better at pocketing a Fragger than Phoenix, making Phoenix even less viable.
As a note, I want to mention I disagree with @Eox on how Fragger is used. An effective Sparks requires a player of pretty high calibre. I’m not even talking about being a good Sparks, simply being an effective Sparks can already be very frustrating, so she is very likely only played by better players to start. I can agree with Spark’s telemetry data likely being skewed, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because balance decisions should be made based on how well good players play the game, not how everybody plays the game.
I don’t think the same applies for Fragger. First, Fragger has very noob friendly attributes ( high health, good weapons, etc. ), in addition to being the merc most similar to a standard CoD soldier. In fact, he’s not that much different from playing Skyhammer, and therefore a natural advancement. Sure, actually using frags requires a lot more finesse but he’s so straight foward that, at least in my opinion, he should be an attractive option for most players; therefore any resulting telemetry data will not be heavily skewed. Keep in mind Guardian is the biggest threat to Fragger’s playstyle and she’s out in the wild. I think rational people would at least wait to see how Guardian impacts the meta before introducing multiple nerfs targeting the mercs already most impacted by Guardian. I disagree with the notion multiple consecutive Fragger nerfs were made based off bad data or poorly interpreted data.