Executive Summary / TLDR
Phantom isn’t just OP, he’s OP in the wrong ways: He’s too good at frontal-attacks and wading into large crowds. This means we need a complex nerf that addresses those problem-areas, while preserving his unique abilities to infiltrate, escape, and assassinate unwary single-targets.
- Shooting a cloaked Phantom should make it harder for him to approach you for melee.
- Shooting a cloaked Phantom should temporarily reduce his ranged accuracy.
- The Katana’s heavy-strike should be “charged and released”, which decloaks him early and decreases his sustained DPS.
- All melee heavy-strikes will be limited to affecting single targets.
- (If still needed) Reduce his uncloaked speed
These changes should have minimal impact on Phantoms who are truly being sneaky and eliminating high-value targets.
Refractive Armor & Attacking out of cloak
When a cloaked Phantom is attacked, that’s usually a good sign that he’s been seen. Therefore, some temporary negative effects should kick in, ones that degrade his own ability to deal damage.
- His maximum-speed should be reduced in the direction the attack came from. This would have no effect on Phantoms running tangent-to or away-from the enemy. So if you see a Phantom coming, shooting him makes it harder for him to get close, giving you more time to shoot him more, etc.
- His gun-accuracy should be temporarily penalized, so that run-and-gun Phantoms will do best if they too remain undetected until they engage.
Both negative-effects should persist for a brief period, even if the refractive-armor is deactivated or runs out of power.
The “directional slowing” may be based on the dot product of his movement vector and the vector to the source of the damage. Certain types of indirect damage (airstrikes, mines, etc.) should be exempt.
Katana control-scheme & Charged attacks
With its special role, the Katana should have a special control-scheme. Unlike other melee weapons, a “heavy-strike” should require the user to switch to the Katana and hold attack to “charge it up”. The stab occurs when the button is released.
Benefits:
- Phantom is automatically decloaked a little while before his melee attack lands.
- Nerfs Phantom’s multi-strike-DPS, due to the charge-time.
- Avoids harming Phantom’s burst-DPS against single targets.
Phantom’s “quick melee” button should only do the fast/weak melee swipes, otherwise it would provide a way to bypass these limitations.
Global Melee changes
All melee weapons (esp. Katana) should have a hard-limit on how many different enemies can be affected by a single heavy-strike. This prevents players from “waving” a single hit through a bunch of nearby enemies.
Benefits:
- Phantom is no longer a Blender-Of-Death to stacks of players.
- Avoids nerfing strikes against single players.
[Optional] Decrease Phantom’s uncloaked speed
Reduce Phantom’s default speed, and have a speed-boost when cloaked (if not taking any damage) that compensates for it.
This change would be if you think that Phantom is still too fast for somebody with a >100hp melee attack even without his Refractive Armor. Myself, I’d like to see what the other nerfs do first, but I’m putting it here as a possible solution.
Conclusion
These changes should eliminate or severely deter the most obnoxious stuff we see from Phantoms, because anybody rushing at your face will be much easier to counter and survive. At the same time, clever Phantoms focused on stealth, flanking, and misdirection will still be able to make a difference on the battlefield.
If Phantom is still overpowered after these changes, my hope is that traditional nerf-bats (e.g. decreased health) should be able to bring him into line without harming the genuinely interesting play-styles his cloaking ability makes possible.