Phantom - As viewed by the community

(Amerika) #81

[quote=“Kaori1;100875”][quote=“Amerika;84959”]He’s horribly underpowered. Please buff. If he was properly balanced I would have won.

So wait, you’re lvl 47 playing against 6 players under lvl 20…and you’re killing them. Yup hes balanced, case closed! Thank you for reminding me why I stopped playing this game.

Your steam profile: http://steamcommunity.com/id/amerika 505 hours played
One of the random lowbie pubs you were fighting: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197965552177 42 hours played

“Levels means nothing”…but playtime speaks volumes and levels are a small representation of that. [/quote]

A boxer who has 10 years experience in boxing isn’t necessarily better than a boxer who only has 4. Or does every boxer win every single match that has has more matches and more years of experience in your opinion? How about we ask that same question in regards to any other sport or game? What do you think? And how do you account for all of the games where I put up pretty much the same numbers from level 1 on? I didn’t have any more time than anybody else and in fact had much less time than most due to me not playing in the earlier CB’s.

Also, @jazevec, I told you quite clearly exactly how I play in pubs and what I like to do and that it isn’t representative of how a player or myself would play in competitive matches. Do not use me as ammunition for your argument. Especially when you willfully ignore what I’ve told you.

Mostly a lot of people agreed a while back that Phantom lacks utility. We came up with some great ideas to fix that lack of utility and tweak his other abilities. Nothing was agreed upon (come on @Watsyurdeal), but we gave it a pretty good go and came up with some compromises that looked like it would appease a lot of people. However, SD has shot that down and even has went so far as to say that “not everyone will be a great choice in competitive”. I hate that answer and I’d like to see it changed.

(KattiValk) #82

Phantom’s cloak lacks utility. Buff it even more and it gets kind of cheesy, but it won’t hide him and really is nothing more than a convenient shield that doesn’t even activate in time to avoid good player TTK. It helps, don’t get me wrong, but it isn’t really doing much that regular skill and slightly conservative play can do. Thus he really is just a 110 HP merc with SMGs. I would definitely love to see an interesting option for a second ability (separating invisibility and armor and buffing both w/ recharge nerfs to the latter, EMP, some spotting mechanic, etc).

Another thing to take into account is map design. Simply put, DB maps aren’t built with flanking in mind. The new bigger maps have more lanes, but in the end, all of them are extremely restrictive on movement and any team that can cover their lanes will have no real issue making Phantom lose purpose. You can’t really say you want Phantom to be able to flank at a distance on a map like Terminal for instance where the entire Defender side can sit at the end of a funnel where all the Attackers must push into and you can’t ask for his cloak to become good enough to where that actually works because you could cheese that. The maps don’t facilitate being able to lock down a successful flank. All the enemy has to do is successfully eliminate the Phantom which is no harder than killing any other merc (skill gap applying of course) when his location is made aware which isn’t that hard to do when map lanes don’t allow for much “creativity” with flanks (again, less of an issue with the newer maps).

If DB wants to be lazy, the cloak is easy enough to take down that you could possibly just let the damage protection stay when he attacks so he actually has an edge in an engagement (invisibility would be negated upon firing though). Hell, you could give him so much purpose by just letting the ability apply while he does things in the game: doing objectives, reviving, etc. being able to cloak and pull those off would make him a much more viable merc. Of course, balancing applies to every suggestion.

(JJMAJR) #83

What about a context action where the Phantom cloaks his body to hide while waiting for a medic? Teammates see him highlighted (and easy to aim at in the case of Sparks) while enemies see nothing.

Or, the Phantom can have a “play dead” ability where he becomes (completely) invisible, but as a penalty he’s completely immobile, prone, inactive and it takes 2 seconds to set up and 2 seconds to get back to moving and shooting? Kind of like TF2’s spy cloak, but somewhat worse to account for the fact that there’s no cooldown.

The bonus would be that both abilities help with the Phantom’s flavor, in that both are connected to death as well as stealth, while being poor in public servers due to the abilities not helping with tanking or combat as effectively as usual.

(jazevec) #84

@Amerika by this logic any 110+ merc with an SMG is fine. This includes mercs released in the future.

Does the “Sneaky” augment reduce the humming noise of the cloak ?

(Amerika) #85

[quote=“jazevec;103674”]@Amerika by this logic any 110+ merc with an SMG is fine. This includes mercs released in the future.

Does the “Sneaky” augment reduce the humming noise of the cloak ?[/quote]

By what logic? I stated that people on this forum has come up with some fairly good ways to give Phantom utility without making him cheap.

And I honestly do not know if the sneaky augment reduces the humming noise. I’ve never tested it. It would be nice if it did though but I have a feeling it does not.