Let's talk squishy

(Press E) #1

So, squishy mercs. Low HP, high movement speed. Imo, they’re some of the most fun mercs to play. They keep the fast paced theme of DB at heart, and can provide a fun challenge when facing off against a tankier enemy. I see lots of complaints about Rhino or the Felix, but I haven’t seen anything on this.

Let’s look at aura as an example, as she’s someone I have a massive amount of hours on and understand the most, as well as someone I feel who’s been impacted the hardest:

Aura was a bit over the top in comp, but otherwise she was extremely easy to counter. Instead of potentially reworking her as I would have preferred, the devs opted for a significantly reduced health rate. And then nerfed that rate even more. Now I mean, sure, she was already easy to counter imo, but a nerf might have been deserved. But what isn’t is stacking the game with one-shots and non-stop assault mercs on top of her balance changes. Hell, even Castle doesn’t allow med stations in a lot of places where they should be allowed. Adding counters is just as much of a nerf as a direct nerf. Because of this, I’ve found it’s become a lot more difficult to do pretty much anything as aura besides healing.
Self-sustain in combat is no longer a completely viable strategy, which was one of the main draws of aura, and players aren’t punished nearly as much for being dumb and not shooting a med station before the aura. Not only am I struggling with that, but I’m also struggling against constant rockets, assault mercs and one-shot felix kills. And new players are struggling even more.

This isn’t just with aura either, it’s with all low health mercs.
Now, I get it. Playing a low health merc is supposed to be a tradeoff. Getting killed more often is fine, but I feel the devs might be going a bit crazy on it. DB is a game about versatility after all, it’s one of the main reason’s I’m here, but low health mercs seem to be getting less and less effective in anything other than their class’s job, while the tankier mercs seem to be doing the opposite. A firesupport who’s better as an assault, a medic who’s better as an assault, etc (and on top of that, they’re a lot faster than they should be for their HP. And why play a low HP fast merc when you can play a high HP fast merc?).
I’m not just posting this because one of my most played mercs was nerfed, I’m posting it because it feels almost like SD has been alienating lower health mercs in favour of more combat mercs, even though one of the draws of DB is supposed to be merc versatility and team support, not deathmatches. Most older players don’t mind toughing out the challenge, but I’ve been seeing more new players now than ever avoid squishy mercs, and it honestly has me concerned for the future of DB, especially now that we have weapon skins to draw in the CS:GO crowd.

This is just my take. What do you guys think about indirect nerfs to low health mercs? Are they excessive, deserved, should we add more fast mercs, or slow them all down?

(kopyright) #2

Kiratana should definitely be more squishy.

#3

Agree about the Aura changes being a tad bit too much. As for the rest, I personally don’t feel that adding heavies significantly changes the pace of DB. Yeah, I’ll confess that I generally prefer the tanky types in most games I play, but even a team full of Thunders and Fraggers still feels fast-paced to me compared to a lot of shooters I’ve played. I think the game is fine in that regard. But with that said, I think everything you’ve described should really just be chalked up to poor balancing and abilities that are becoming ridiculous. Proxy and Kira definitely don’t need to be any more viable. Aura was slightly overnerfed. Guardian is, uh, Guardian. Idk how I feel, to be honest. They’ve missed the mark on these past two merc releases and the game hasn’t felt the same since. I do like them, but at the same time I won’t pretend we wouldn’t be better off without them or completely different ones. I know a lot of people hate Turtle, but I think they hit a home run with his release. It didn’t disrupt the feel of the game at all.

Excuse the rant. In bed and about to pass out.

(ThunderZsolt) #4

I’ve thought you were talking about Squishy, the suicidal pig:

P.S.: I’ll post my thoughts on the topic when I have more time

(Press E) #5

@Wintergreen said:
Agree about the Aura changes being a tad bit too much. As for the rest, I personally don’t feel that adding heavies significantly changes the pace of DB. Yeah, I’ll confess that I generally prefer the tanky types in most games I play, but even a team full of Thunders and Fraggers still feels fast-paced to me compared to a lot of shooters I’ve played. I think the game is fine in that regard. But with that said, I think everything you’ve described should really just be chalked up to poor balancing and abilities that are becoming ridiculous. Proxy and Kira definitely don’t need to be any more viable. Aura was slightly overnerfed. Guardian is, uh, Guardian. Idk how I feel, to be honest. They’ve missed the mark on these past two merc releases and the game hasn’t felt the same since. I do like them, but at the same time I won’t pretend we wouldn’t be better off without them or completely different ones. I know a lot of people hate Turtle, but I think they hit a home run with his release. It didn’t disrupt the feel of the game at all.

Excuse the rant. In bed and about to pass out.

Yeah, it’s not tanky mercs changing the pace of the game that I’m worried about, so much as it is adding a bunch of assault mercs to a game that’s supposed to be objective based. I mean, we have all the assaults, all firesupports which are basically assaults anyways, a bunch of already assault-y mercs in the other classes (like sawbonez), and now we’re getting mercs than are more assault than whatever class they’re supposed to be. For instance, guardian barely being able to fill a medic role.
Assault is great and all, but I’d rather get more mercs like Trutle. With someone like them, you have to actually fill your role, otherwise you’ll usually barely get off the bottom of the scoreboard. Whereas someone like Skyhammer can topscore without even dropping ammo. People who actually help the team instead of more mindless deathmatch mercs.
We barely had enough squishy mercs as it is, now it just feels overwhelmed in this deathmatch trend SD is on.

You’re right though, I suppose SD hasn’t exactly hit the nail on the head with any of their other recent balance fixes, so maybe I shouldn’t expect much more with this. Still sucks though

(hurgya) #6

The problem with squishy mercs is, if you have a small monitor/low fps/bad connection, they are extremely hard to hit. I know, you’re not supposed to play this game on a potato laptop, but high ping is not really avoidable; the routing in EU is terrible, in busy times only the nearest server is playable.
This, of course doesn’t justify the excessive Aura nerfs.
Lastly, I don’t think that Jav in her current state makes light mercs weaker: since the rocket acceleration was introduced, the guided mode is neigh useless (ok, it’s just ‘extremely hard’ to use). So it’s practically noob tubing in scrub mode getting cheap kills (most of the time one) every 30 seconds. I’m only using her, because I love the Shar-C.

(n-x) #7

I suspect that Aura got nerfed not because of herself but because of the latest additions (Turtle and Guardian) Before those 2 you had 3 possibilities to attack an aura station: shooting it, explosives, air support. With Turtle they took care of the “shooting it” option. So we just had to spam the area with explosives or air support. Now Guardian took care of those 2 options as well.

If you now have a healing station in a corner plus a turtle and a guardian it is just annoying as hell. Either you get lucky with flanking or, in a worst case scenario, you have to shoot the guardian shield (or wait til it is run out), to take then down the turtle shield to then take down the healing station to then engage the enemy mercs.

The only 2 fast ways are a kira, if the healing station is in the open or a phantom, but we all know that 99% of the phantoms in this game use their ability to get one katana kill before they die.

I wont deny that the healing station itself is problematic, but there would have been better ways to deal with it. Lot of people suggested a cool down of x seconds after its destruction. I personally would have liked to test a healing station that works more like a stationary medipack. If you get shot while standing in it, your healing would be canceled for maybe 1 second until the healing resumes. This way you would have a constant healing source on the map, but you wouldnt have those annoying strongholds.

Well, guardian and turtle are now in game and wont go away. So they will keep “balancing” Aura with those 2 in mind.

On a side note: I would bet, Hunter has an EMP from distance ability which can penetrate guardians shield. So all the new mercs can play rock-paper-scissors together.

(Guziol) #8

The only problem i ever found with aura is the fact that she gets the blish. Having a health dispenser up your arse while being hard to hit and wielding a fully automatic destroyer of worlds sniper rifle just does not feel right. I’d rather get blasted by a remburg when i cross around a corner. Other low hp mercs, is tough to say. On some maps i feel like i’m gimping myself bo not picking smoething bigger but on some maps it’s allright. Maybe that’s why i like trainyard so much. I had the most success with low hp mercs there.

(Press E) #9

@Guziol said:
The only problem i ever found with aura is the fact that she gets the blish. Having a health dispenser up your arse while being hard to hit and wielding a fully automatic destroyer of worlds sniper rifle just does not feel right. I’d rather get blasted by a remburg when i cross around a corner. Other low hp mercs, is tough to say. On some maps i feel like i’m gimping myself bo not picking smoething bigger but on some maps it’s allright. Maybe that’s why i like trainyard so much. I had the most success with low hp mercs there.

The blish is a fairly low-tier SMG compared to other weapons though. If you can do well with it, you can most likely do better with some other weapon. Sure it can be a pain in the ass to get hit in the head with it, but so is any other gun on a decent player.

@n-x said:
I suspect that Aura got nerfed not because of herself but because of the latest additions (Turtle and Guardian) Before those 2 you had 3 possibilities to attack an aura station: shooting it, explosives, air support. With Turtle they took care of the “shooting it” option. So we just had to spam the area with explosives or air support. Now Guardian took care of those 2 options as well.

Yeah, that’s what I figured too. Still really annoying though. I don’t want Aura to only be viable in a team with Guardian and Turtle. Merc versatility is supposed to be a thing after all.

Maybe if Phantom or the like were more practical at disabling deployables we wouldn’t need to nerf the hell out of her.

(OwynTyler) #10

@STARRYSOCK said:
Not only am I struggling with that, but I’m also struggling against constant rockets, assault mercs and one-shot felix kills. And new players are struggling even more.

Explosives spam is a real problem, especially when just ONE hit would kill you despite you being at your FULL health lol, what kind of bs lunatic danmaku is that?

*Looking at you Nader

(aminuseternal) #11

Welcome to the world of nerfed squish medics muhahahahahahahahahahahahahhaha

Anyways, i havr noticed that it is a lot easier to kill people and not actually have to worry about destroying the station. I don’t know how i feel about that, because how aura was, you could just drop the station and go afk and people would become way more difficult to kill.(and be topscoring)

I think the point about turtle and guardian making a well turtle defense position being really tough to get through is true. For me though, having all of these stationary defense builders seems a little out of place on the gane thats supposed to be about fast paced parkour manuvering gameplay.

(Press E) #12

@aminuseternal said:
how aura was, you could just drop the station and go afk and people would become way more difficult to kill.(and be topscoring)

Honestly from playing aura so much, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that most people have no idea how to properly counter an Aura, especially in public matches. If you don’t know how to counter her, she’s OP as hell. But if you do, she’s not that bad. Imo that’s the main problem with her.
Yeah, she was fairly easy to do somewhat well with, but being a step up from that isn’t as easy as people make it out to be. A lot of focus goes into monitoring your team, where they are, what their health is, how much damage they can take, who the enemy is playing, where your medstation is, who to revive, etc.
It can be a pain in the ass to play against an exceptionally played aura, but then again, it’s a pain in the ass to deal with any exceptional merc.

But yeah, TL;DR most auras are only hard to counter if you don’t know how to counter them, which for some reason, most people don’t. A good aura is hard to deal with, but then again so is any merc played by a good player.