The Revive Train

(Kimerex) #1

I had a conversation with a buddy of mine, and though I don’t agree with a lot of what he says about what a good game is since he seems to have fallen from hardcore pro to hyper casual, he did shine a little of our old-school hardcore light about the topic of ressing.

We came to the conclusion that this is a game of resources. Big and destructive resources have serious cooldowns while small resources have slight cooldowns. Nader really has both. If you want 1 grenade it won’t take that long, but if you want to saturate a large area your gonna need to wait afterwards to do it again. And although probably not perfect, most of these resources seem to be well connected to these cooldowns, All of them but ressing. (Plz put down the pitchforks)

I know this has come up in the past and has probably been talked to death, but all I’ve seen about it are people simply stating that a large cooldown is needed between each res. I agree this could screw with the pacing of the game, so when my friend brought up a 3 second cooldown i sorta cringed. Mostly because of how crap the ragdolls can still be in this game (tried ressing a guy stuck in a railing, couldn’t hit the res spot). But with this new gib mechanic it got me thinking of a sort of other direction for this.

Just in case I’m wrong, It seems like as a player dies the excess damage goes into a sort of health negative pool that moves that person towards gib status. I know this has a lot of vocal community members up in arms cause META SHIFTS BAD!!! ARRRRRRRGHHHHH!!! but I think it has opportunity to shift a different meta people have issues with in a possibly good direction.What if defib charge pulled back health negative pool points before reviving, so depending on how destroyed someone was as they fell it would take a bigger defib charge to get them back.

The reason I have for this is back to the idea of resource. Past all the artillery and health packs and nades and such, the most powerful resource in the game is the player. The person who has access to all these abilities as well as bullets that go ping ping and can kill other players. Now when thinking on the scale I normally play in I never saw the “small victory” side of the game. Its usually run at each other and meat grinder to see which side wins. But if some one successfully knocks an enemy down but has to disengage before finishing that would be a small victory, but there is next to no gain with how ressing works. Quick tap followed by a quick heal and all the work gets countered with little to no down time. What I’m suggesting is the difference between a Fragger nade knocking down 4 people that instantly get ressed and healed no problem before he can even come around the corner to 4 down and the medic has to choose which one of them will be best to take on whats coming to cover him as he tries to get the rest up.

Of course the numbers can be tweaked and played with to try and create a good pacing for this, but it can also help in regards to the sparks train that people still seem sad about despite the last nerf. If she absolutely has to charge longer to get them up it forces her to choose between holding a bolt for a dying target or use it to knock out an enemy, and that indecision can cause an overheat.It would also make for less drive by resses, since the basic animation cooldown of what feels like .5 seconds should be enough to get that medic killed if he waits.

Again just suggestions. And to people who might be mad that I’m trying to make medic harder cause i hate them, the mains I tend to play are Phoenix or Sawbonez, and I pick Sparks when I want to go against SD’s “Don’t be a dick” policy.

(Demolama) #2

There is one. It’s called a charge, and if a player gets rezzed before that charge is full he has less health upon being revived. I’m sorry but I don’t think reviving is so broken that medics are a problem. The problem of the meat grinding effect is caused by the lack of flanks on the maps.

(Kimerex) #3

I love that you quoted a part of my interaction that I even said wasn’t the best idea and used it as though it was my solution as well. Again, what I’m saying is in a small victory skirmish the whole fight can be undone in a blink of an eye by a medic. If the opposing team has to fall back for whatever reason before finishing people (incoming airstrike, nader cover fire, whateva) all it takes is a bunch of split second charges followed by a few med packs/ pulse heal to get everyone up and topped. takes like 5 seconds. its almost inconsequential to the overall push and pull pacing, and there isn’t even any depth to who to get up first to ensure you can’t get overwhelmed right away really. And as to having to charge paddles, .4 seconds tends to get people up at 3/4 health on my full support reser loadouts. Thats usually the long jump i initiate just before charging. No issue. Again this is mostly for small victory moments. It shouldn’t feel much different during the meat grinder moments. It just adds another layer of tactics to situations where a specific res could turn the tide in a system that really requires the charging of paddles to get the revive in the first place. No quick taps.

(Raviolay) #4

I think it might be good to try a revive timer on friendly players. So if a ally gets killed shortly after being revived, he is instagibbd. I would also make the revive shield effectiveness based on how much charge has been put in. And lower the revive values. RE 100% charge gives 70% health and full sheild.

(mccrorie) #5

“What I’m suggesting is the difference between a Fragger nade knocking down 4 people that instantly get ressed and healed no problem before he can even come around the corner to 4 down and the medic has to choose which one of them will be best to take on whats coming to cover him as he tries to get the rest up.”

How is this even a problem or a thing that happens a lot? Aim for the medics next time?

The only way these people are “instantly” rezzed and healed is if there are at least 2 or 3 medics doting on them who miraculously avoided the grenade blast that downed 4 people at once. So in summary, Fraggers one grenade was respectably effective against a group of at least 6 people who are reasonably clumped together and were brought to a halt by one player and his grenade. This really, really bugs me a lot, and brings up an issue I’ve had before, and that is people suggesting revive trains are a problem from within a hypothetical bubble where there is only one opposing player (often themselves) dealing with the unfairness of quick revives.

Let’s be fair to the medics and include one more player on Fragger’s side… say… I don’t know… NADER. So Fragger lobs his well timed grenade and scores FOUR takedowns, and two medics immediately spring into action, but not before the downed group of players is assailed with a barrage of explosives from an out of sight Nader who manages to gib two of the downed players and severely hurt the two medics in the process. End result is Fragger and Nader messed up the opposing team big time without exposing themselves to a single bullet of return fire. Conclusion? Nerf medics.

(Kimerex) #6

Alright. I’m sorry for trying to add depth to an otherwise simple and throw away mechanic in this game. Again all under the idea that there isn’t as much strategic value as we like to pretend there is in terms of who to revive. How to revive them. Whether its better to revive or go for a kill. All with the idea of small skirmishes in mind. Where plays are made outside of the alpha strike parameter of gibbed before the fall down animation ends. The mechanic I’m trying to get across would only be truly noticed in those situations. Its not that it has to happen a lot. Just that its thought of in a way that might make the game a little more dynamic and give a little more focus to the human player as a valuable resource as worthy of a proper balancing as adding or subtracting a couple seconds off a cooldown for an ability. Without thinking of these things we might miss worthwhile functions.

(mccrorie) #7

I find this a bit vague…

I almost always go for the quick-tap revive because it’s easy to gib people unless the attacker is far away (unless they’re Vas I suppose). If you are involved in close combat you sometimes don’t get the chance to revive because your teammate is knifed before they hit the floor. This happens a lot. How is making a medic’s job harder going to change that for the better or make play more deep? (I think the real answer has nothing to do with medics and is more about class redundancies)

Besides all that, medics have to manage healing as a resource, so it’s not all mindless button clicking and zapping.

(Mustang) #8

You lost me a bit with that last post, I think the idea of remaining downed hp having an impact on revived hp has merit though, however my concern is that mixing it with the mechanic where charged paddles give more hp is too confusing, convoluted, and over engineered.

I’d be pretty pissed it I took the time to do a full charge revive and the guy only got up with 20hp because he was already basically not worth saving, or even worse if I did a tap revive and it wasn’t enough to get him back up, I guess you’d say just to balance this as a numbers game to where these extremes wouldn’t be possible, but to do that effectively I can’t see there being much difference in feel to how it is now, not to mention you’d be stacking a mechanic that people already struggle to figure out with another that is even harder to comprehend.

I think where this would work is on a merc that wouldn’t have the ability to charge their revives, so you’d have some mercs who’s revive hp depends on their paddle charge, and others who’s depends on downed hp.

The only concern then is that in comparison to paddle charges it’s more difficult to convey, but heck health bars are already a gameism anyway, so perhaps people won’t care.

N.B. Yes overkill damage does dig into your downed hp pool, it is on a per case basis though, so there may still be some exceptions, I can’t remember.

(spookify) #9

Just Gib the downed player and problem solved.

Its actually very easy to gib and you have a large window to do it. Even after the animation starts you can still gib.

(Demolama) #10

[QUOTE=spookify;541007]Just Gib the downed player and problem solved.

Its actually very easy to gib and you have a large window to do it. Even after the animation starts you can still gib.[/QUOTE]

^This. Gibbing is probably the hardest thing for any pub player to learn to do.

(Rémy Cabresin) #11

Yes let’s nerf all medics again just because Sparks is broken… This already happened twice lets do it some more.