My two cents on the phantom nerf

(PowerReef) #1

I’ll start by saying he is a particularly hard class to balance and that I don’t blame the devs for taking a while to come up with these changes or for releasing phantom in the state he was first in. That said, he was totally and undeniably overpowered against NEW players. A level 6 phantom could absolutely destroy a team of the same level because his melee was easy mode. But what I quickly realized was that he was at best balanced or underpowered against players who knew what they were doing. The problem with how this worked is that phantom presented a massive wall to new/bad players hence the backlash of his release. They nerfed him into the ground to be easier to fight for new players but he’s now useless against good ones. He was borderline UP in min10 servers so now he’s utter crap. Overrall i’m glad he’s not as much of a wall to new players but making him underpowered was not a good idea. Just for the record I bought phantom well into level 10+ and I hated it. I main fletcher and I haven’t been killed by a phantom in days, he certainly was crap before and he’s worse now.

Tl;dr Phantom not OP to new players anymore but is crap against good ones and this needs a fix

(Gi.Am) #2

Good points, but I think that is what makes balancing him pretty hard. Obviously you would want to give him more viability against good players without making him too hard for new players to overcome.
Thing is, the main problem, new player have over good ones is. awareness, positioning, and going into panicmode as soon as phantom shows up.
So buffing/nerfing his cloak affects how newer players interact with phantom. While better players are not as affected by it.

I would say to buff him for comp without hurting the bottomline, it would propably make more sense to either improve his survivability/effectiveness when he is spotted (which would be stupid tho, since then there is no point in the coak at all).
Or give him some unique ability/mechanic that would benefit the team more (since he is a recon spotter ability would be the most logical but it could be something else), giving him something that makes him usefull despite his lack of combat power.

(PowerReef) #3

I just wish they made him more of a stealth class rather than a slightly invisible tank (which they made even worse because of the nerf). But yeah, giving him another ability that helps out the team more would definitely make him more viable than he currently is. I’m thinking they should give him some kind of binocular/scope that highlights enemies for the team (the same way vassili can), as his secondary ability. This allows him to sneak behind enemy lines and give his team the recon advantage.