Hello!
In this post I wanted to address the mercs at the bottom of the viability pool (in competitive scene at least).
The mercs I’m going to talk about are: Aura, Redeye and (arty)… the reason why arty is in parenthesis is because I don’t consider him unviable, but more on the fact that he needs an improvement.
Before I jump into it though, please, remember, I only wish to provide feedback to my experience, I don’t play either of these mercs to a point where I’d call myself knowledgeable, this is what I’ve gathered by playing them for the duration that I have and from what I have seen. Players who are good with this mercs may disagree and that’s fine, i’m looking to provide constructive feedback and if you feel I am wrong, you can politely argue and point out my flaws if I already haven’t… and by all means, do provide better alternatives.
My argument on redeye is, I rarely see one picked and when I do, they are rarely successful.
Now there are a few things that “may” factor into this:
1- the size of the smoke being too small … (this isn’t my main argument, I just feel if it was a tad larger it’d be much more useful.)
2- his infrared vision… (the reason behind me saying this is, his detection is nothing like vassili, where vassili could deploy his detection in places without needing to expose himself, red eye has to have constant vision, I believe that the duration of the infrared should be at least the duration of the smoke before it needs to recharge, or maybe for the infrared to be a flash type, where say he uses the infrared, it marks all the enemies he sees for him for X seconds and his vision goes on a cd. Then there is also the way his infrared looks, it, to my experience makes it real hard to focus because everything looks so weird.
3- his knife… I think the hitboxes are fine, but for him to utilize his knife, he is mostly always too slow and his hp too low… to my understanding, the aussie’s special forces have a shadow dance, they can chain their “melee attacks” because they move like ballerina’s in a sense… maybe his animations should see some work so that he can chain attacks better.
Aura is a bit tricky to balance… her station makes it so that she is either just that much better or just that much weaker… Imagine a scale of 1 to 10 where 4,5 and 6 do not exist, aura is always either a 3 or a 7.
I’m not sure if any of you have played Mass effect 3’s online mode, but in that, there is a mission to escort a drone, the drone provides heals every few seconds and it moves from one location to another… the drone cant be damaged.
Now I thought if aura’s station was something similar it’d be much more useful for her “fast paced in and out of combat medic” type.
I think if she deploys a station that’d follow her and be a bit smaller so that it’s harder to hit (sort of like the drone in destiny) she’d end up being more of use… maybe she could order the drone to protect a certain ally, say rhino and the drone would constantly top them up, the drone may be destroyed but is much harder to hit, she can also change her command to swap between healing different allies… if the drone dies, it’ll go on a long cd.
^just a theory.
For arty, I think in terms of his indoors combat, he could benefit from something like skyhammer, atm when we go indoors, his ability becomes dead because there is no use for it… I think if his laser lock-on was to act sort of like skyhammer’s signal and shoot a small explosive which dealth a certain amount of damage, he’d be more viable.
now let me explain what I mean:
Imagine his laser to have a small rocket… lets say his normal arty strike would do “100” damage, this one then should do something like 20-35% of the damage of the strike and then the remaining 65-80% would be dealt through the airstike, now if its indoors it acts as a quicktime launcher and the cd will be 80% of the original call for airstrike.
Share your thoughts and tell me what you think… do you have better ideas? do you hate mine? 
let me know and lets provide constructive feedback!
