Thunder and Phantom Ability/Merc Balancing Suggestions

(Reddeadcap) #1

I don’t really know where to write this discussion as it involves both the mercs in question and his ability but I wanted to bring up a couple of suggestions to balance out Thunder and Phantom as they’re pretty much seen sitting on the sidelines and having no real purpose another merc can’t do better.

Thunder’s Concussion Grenade Ability

  1. Removal of their blinding effect, this effect is completely inconsistent.
    It blinds you if you look at it, even from a mile away, it blinds you if you arent, it doesn’t blind you if you have a deployable infront of you, it burns the player’s corneas the very second it goes off and it’s all pretty much for naught as once someone hit’s Thunder his health bar is the only thing avaialble

  2. The reintroduction of their ability to lower player’s mouse movement speed based on how close one is to the center of the blast radius, along with how distorted and greyed their vision becomes, which is still visible if one isn’t seeing the concussion grenade and is, if the planets are aligned affected by it.

I want to bring a closer analysis on Phantom, as this is both based on his ability and his character design.

  1. The removal of the refractive armor’s shielding effect.
    It doesn’t really seem fitting for this game to have a character to have some sort of passive shielding effect one way or another, especially when applied to a character who is meant to be a Recon, Spy or Commando of some kind. Trust me it’ll make sense when you read further into the ideas I’m bringing up to change him.

  2. 120 health but the speed of a 100 health merc
    Phantom’s health is brought back to 120, but his speed is that of a 100 health merc, best described that Phantom’s Refractive Armor, while durable is pretty light weight, fitting how the game’s character designs visually indicate what health and movement speed they have.

  3. Minor Changes to Refractive armor
    A faster cooldown and longer lasting length, but one would have to activate and deactive their Refractive Armor, Rather than simply have it simply disappear once someone attacks

  4. A unique detection tool.
    Based off the Comm’s Hack from Brink.
    Phantom can interact with a downed or recently killed enemy with their bodies put on a timer so once doesn’t simply tap out to deny Phantom the use of his ability, the ability would have a long cooldown, maybe that of 1 minute, but would detect every living enemy team member in a wide radius, this would have Phantom vulnerable while interacting with the downed enemies for a couple of seconds unlike other Recons who are at a safe distance when using their own abilities but for the highest ranged and longest detection tool albeit the riskiest and longest to wait time to reactivate.

  5. Detection, loss of cloak.
    Simply put, once detected by another Recon’s detection tool, Phantom can’t cloak himself.

What are your thoughts?
If you have your own ideas to change these mercs for the better, please share them.

(streetwiseSailboat) #2

I don’t want to say anything about Phantom because he has a lot of varying opinions on what should be done with him.

I totally agree with the Thunder change though. The mouse sensitivity reduction was really scary. I’m imagining being fully concussed without the flash, seeing the Thunder gunning at you with little you could do about it.

(Reddeadcap) #3

[quote=“streetwiseSailboat;144038”]I don’t want to say anything about Phantom because he has a lot of varying opinions on what should be done with him.

I totally agree with the Thunder change though. The mouse sensitivity reduction was really scary. I’m imagining being fully concussed without the flash, seeing the Thunder gunning at you with little you could do about it.[/quote]

little but use wasd keys to align oneself properly, I’m guessing people were having Vietnam flashbacks of when they did that to melee weapons after Phantom was released.

(TheVulpesFox) #4

I like the Thunder idea (concussion grenades don’t actually have flashes).
I heard that the devs were already planning to give phantom a team based ability but I don’t know if that’s true

(PleasantWheat) #5

i would like the concs to also stop people from sprinting and jumping. As hilarious as it is to conc a room of enemies and walk in to them all bunny hopping madly, fumbling for cover, it makes them a pain in the ass to take down. If a thunder player is skilled enough to get a full conc on someone they should be near guaranteed the kill IMO

(XavienX) #6

I like both ideas, especially for the speed and health change for Phantom. If he was given the katana and invisibility but can die easily when he misses a melee strike due to the retardedness of the hitbox and animation timing, he dies quick and does not have the speed to catch up to people in the first place or to escape.

(bontsa) #7

Rework on both mercs is a must, that’s what I think pretty much everyone agrees on. Good ideas are being thrown around here and there, is nice.

However I am on Thunder’s case on the boat of mouse movement reduction being tad overkill. Every 17 seconds you can create most infuriating effect videogaming knows without the victim being able to do pretty much anything about it aside positioning. It’s a super strong psychologically too: when only flashed aka blind you can still spray’n’pray, hoping to land some hits around, having that “last-attempt to fight back” feeling. With removing the healthbars visible- idiotic mechanic, making flashed people see absolutely none of these valuable UI elements, it would be just that, spray’n’pray. This game has healing mechanics, its 1/10 situation when flashed actually would get a full kill instead of just barely scratching the Thunder and his fellas barging in. But it still gave victim counterplay chance.

With mouse movement reduction you can pretty much just watch your guts being outsourced of your body to the lovely floor this post-apocalyptic rumble of a building has. Unless you’re like some people who will have quickswitch for sensitivity giving them quite of a tool to counter this effect. Not 100% sure since reduction depends on blast distance, but just enough to compensate quite well.

Thunder TL;DR: more consistency on flashing effect and it’ll work out, remove the stupid ability to see UI elements when flashed, change flash for Pete’s sake into blank greye’d effect instead of pure white.

To the Phantom then…I’m starting to feel like SD implemented cloak’s shield as his team oriented ability as well as to give him chance to more easily position himself in explosive spam filled enviroments. The times I’ve saved my team’s Engineer planting/defusing the bomb by simply standing in between them and the enemy shooting at them are quite abundant. So if that got removed something else should definitely be added instead. Not saying straight-out that it shouldn’t be reworked, just pointing out there are actual team helping usages for even seemingly selfish abilities. But ye, thats just one thing, nothing compared to spotting-ish ability or such.

One of his most frustrating mechanics and the one thing making it so that his cloak cannot be made completely invisible without being blatantly overpowered then, is the fact he can exit cloak instantaneously. It feels bullshit to use when I manage to get doublekill on light mercs by simply standing on top of C4 cloaked and lunge both Proxies racing to defusal without them being able to retaliate in any meaningful way. Yes, they could’ve checked the premises first but then again should you walk everywhere and watch every single corner double-checking your route upping your volume so much your ears bleed from gunfire but hey least you can hear chirping of the cloak? Just slows the pace down so much for so silly reason.

I’m all up for Phantom having to manually exit his cloak, and when it runs out he’d still have to “fiddle” with his armor’s console. To prevent it overheating, getting shortcircuited I don’t care what “reason” SplashDamage gives the action, as long as it’s implemented. It should be repositioning tool, not “let-me-stab-you-in-the-face-without-counterplay” bullcrap. This would allow many buffs to be added to his only ability already, not to mention it’d justify another ability more too.

Phantom TL;DR: remove instant decloak under all circumstances, allowing his cloak to be buffed in terms of invisibility at least. Something “teamoriented” is coming up for him so we’ll see soon what ever that means. You have your chance now SD.

(Eox) #8

I like your ideas, especially the Phantom ones.

I think you had an oversight with Thunder though : if the grenade has the same range than the frag grenade, I don’t think there’s a point about bringing him over the frag grenade. This is why the Flash effect was introduced, allowing you to affect enemies at a much longer range than Fragger’s grenades. You have to think about something that would give to someone a reason to play Thunder over Fragger, because I don’t feel like there’s a good enough one yet.

I’d say, keep the blinding effect. But tweak it and tune it down for yourself, so you don’t get blinded that much if you look at it. Or remove the blinding effect as you said, but push the CD to 25 and give Thunder a second conc grenade.

(CCP115) #9

No way, please stop suggesting reducing mouse sens.

This is far too detrimental a change, it physically makes me incapable of fighting back. Having an ability that just stops you from doing anything? I’d rather just get instagibbed by a Fragger nade than watch my slow but sure demise.

Also I still don’t get why people complain about the flashing effect, it’s just a white screen? Do people play in the dark or something… literally every other FPS in existence uses flashbangs just like that.

(Reddeadcap) #10

[quote=“CCP115;144303”]No way, please stop suggesting reducing mouse sens.

This is far too detrimental a change, it physically makes me incapable of fighting back. Having an ability that just stops you from doing anything? I’d rather just get instagibbed by a Fragger nade than watch my slow but sure demise.

Also I still don’t get why people complain about the flashing effect, it’s just a white screen? Do people play in the dark or something… literally every other FPS in existence uses flashbangs just like that.[/quote]

Some people might have sensative eyes and are playing in the dark and the blinding effect is incosistent as one can instantly hit Thunder and instantly know where he is since his healthbar shows up and lastly because these aren’t flashbangs, they’re concussion grenades.

(JJMAJR) #11

Thunder should keep the blinding, but have it be triggered in the same manner as a concussion. I.e. you can’t just look at it and be blinded right away, nor can you just look away from it while in concussion radius to avoid being blinded.

Phantom has numerous options to make him more of a team player. Either he becomes a spotter, or he uses a nonlethal grenade. Either way works.

(RustKnight) #12

I think the Comm’s Hack idea for phantom is perfect and just what he needs to finally fit in as an actual recon merc, out of his current cloak and the one you suggest with health and speed changes i’m leaning towards your idea but don’t really see how it would really play out yet.

For Thunder’s Conc, Its really a flash grenade no mater what change goes though with it, is better suited with a combination of both the flash and mouse sensitivity drop. The Flash like Bontsa brought up needs to block all the UI and health bar mechanics that ultimately serves just to defeat the purpose of it, and all the usually if you look away from it you block it. The distortion effect, mouse sensitivity does not exceed some max value, of the Conc comes into effect if you are within the blast range of the grenade. The duration of both the blind and the distortion effect would both decrease in duration based off the distance from the center of the blast going to zero with the flash part having longer range and the distortion being relatively localized to the blast area it self. These grenades would be significantly better so to compensate Thunder can carry two at a time but the recharge rate for one would be like ~30 sec or so with an internal cool-down of 6 seconds between throws.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

(Amerika) #13

If there is any change to Phantom’s refractive armor ability that makes it more viable as a stealth tool then he needs to lose the ability to directly attack out of stealth and make sure there is an audible sound queue that is made when he exits the cloak and a small window of time to react to. We don’t need people who can’t be seen walking up to other players and melee them down without them having any kind of a chance to counter it.

In his current form SD could remove the buzzing noise he makes, leave his armor/visibility in place, make the player come out of stealth manually and do what I said above and give him either a spotting ability or some other team based ability and he’d be good to go both for pubs and potentially useful or at least more useful in competitive play.

(watsyurdeal) #14

In regards to Phantom, disagree with 4 and 5, and I would like to emphasize the importance of cloak has perfect visibility if he is not allowed to attack while cloaked.

That and I think a Decoy would be a good fit for his role, he seems like an Anti Recon merc.

(LifeupOmega) #15

Decoy would be so easy to detect that he’d still be useless in competitive.

Thunder needs a speed increase let’s be real, conc needs a few buffs too but I really don’t know how I sit on that outside of knowing how weak it is.

(ASTOUNDINGSHELL) #16

@LifeupOmega or an HP buff, i think his hitbox deserves it

(LifeupOmega) #17

Honestly I’d take the speed. His ability lends itself to getting to the point of detonation fast enough to capitalise on its incapacitating blast, you can’t do that because you’re so god damn slow.

(Reddeadcap) #18

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;144667”]In regards to Phantom, disagree with 4 and 5, and I would like to emphasize the importance of cloak has perfect visibility if he is not allowed to attack while cloaked.

That and I think a Decoy would be a good fit for his role, he seems like an Anti Recon merc.[/quote]

[quote=“LifeupOmega;144692”]Decoy would be so easy to detect that he’d still be useless in competitive.

Thunder needs a speed increase let’s be real, conc needs a few buffs too but I really don’t know how I sit on that outside of knowing how weak it is.[/quote]

A Decoy that would have just the AI to just B-Line towards the nearest merc swinging a katana around would be hilarious.

(watsyurdeal) #19

Still better than nothing, besides if Phantom can get into position perfectly, then he will still be good in comp.

Especially since he has a GUN

(m86edit) #20

i think the only change thunder needs besides MK46 buffs is tweaks to the concuss effect on the the concnades, it doesnt do much to hinder or disorient an enemy unless they’re right on top of it.

im thinking that a much more disruptive visual effect is the best way to go, But until then the best way to use the conc nades is like a flashbang.