What needs to be looked at!

(INF3RN0) #21

In some NA pugs back at the Kira update a lot of us refrained from overplaying her because it seemed some significant alterations were inevitable and it felt like a game of peek-aboo when there was a lot of them lol. The experience was that she had the fastest and most consistent TTK with headshots, where in one well aimed headshot would pretty much be an insta-kill because of the RoF (unless this changed now because triple dinks seemed fairly common). The problem I have with her is that she feels like a sniper that can spam from the hip without a whole lot of penalty. The recoil is really very minimal comparatively and she gets the benefit of reliable high damage and consistent spread. What I’d rather see is a slightly lower RoF between the bullets, normalized HP, and more useful team abilities- unless you’d rather have more vertical recoil which I’d be okay with also. It just makes more sense in how it would fit into the larger scope of weaponry, and I still think it would be much different than stoker or arty.

The problem here is that all these more unique weapon types try to justify themselves by lowering the merc’s HP and turning them into a glass cannon. This ends up encouraging overly defensive tactics and forces the player into a role of primarily frag picks or trying to force out duels. Maybe I’d say that every player with above average aim does well with Kira on defense, and not to antagonize you either (because I do think you have much better aim)- but you are the only person I’ve ever seen get 30+ frags over their team and still lose the game horribly. Still I don’t think Kira’s rifle is nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. It is again just my personal preference to have as few one-trick-pony mercs as possible. Kira is at least better than the mercs that even the cc guys can frag a vet with because you do have to aim fairly well, but I still think everyone would be better off if her primary gave other mercs a better chance in 1v1s and granted Kira more long-term momentum.

Also the same thing happened with Sparks, where on the first couple weeks everyone was playing her until it was agreed that she was imba. She was much worse than Kira though because she could OHK and continue forward spamming from the hip too with low recoil and spread. Can’t say the rework went well, but a lot of people will abandon the OP mercs once they know changes are incoming. I’m quite sure that it didn’t have anything to do with specific players.

(Ashog) #22

imho The Eye is the most OP char now. Was feeling bad when tonite scored multikills by applying only moderate efforts to counter recoil. Her pistol is pretty deadly now too. I couldn’t figure how to peek into the 3rd eye cam though. Did they remove this?

(Mustang) #23

All mercs are OP, nerf them all, longer TTKs FTW!

(INF3RN0) #24

Aimee is strong indeed. I think it’s mostly because of how fast you can spam and the lack of progressive recoil. I’d decrease the RoF a tad and increase the recoil over consecutive shots fired.

(RasteRayzeR) #25

She should be renamed “Gatling”. I was surprised to get killed so easily by her yesterday.

(INF3RN0) #26

It can get a bit out of control when you rapid fire, but it almost feels like you get away with murder sometimes. I just recently started playing her and I’d appreciate some less forgiving mechanics there, especially having played Vasilli before that.

(INF3RN0) #27

If I were to put on my care pants and get picky here, the issue with the combat in the game is that there’s too many situations where yea sure X player is really good at X merc, but then there’s the bigger picture where any player is just better with X merc regardless of any given variables or that merc X simply impacts the game more by default. I know you can’t scale every weapon or ability upwards equally, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a strong enough foundation yet. The highest level of play across all mercs should plateau somewhat and getting to that level should really involve the same amount of work.

To be clear out playing another merc should of course involve utilizing all your tools and being intelligent, but the more even both the weapon and abilities become between mercs, the less balance discrepancies appear. Simultaneously the more even the effort to performance output ratios across all skill levels and the more opportunity to perform better than others, the less likely people are to complain. What I find too often is that either I’d have to try much harder to achieve the same results all the time or that everyone performs about the same due to a stunted cap. Not surprisingly this occurs most often in mercs that have these discrepancies.

What I really want to see is for the game evolve to a place where the majority of people pick their mercs based on how they effect the team or for broader strategical reasons- and not by what weapon they frag the most consistently with. Of course fragging is important, but I see it as a problem when mercs feel dictated by their weaponry. For ex. Thunder shouldn’t be picked just because he can straight up out perform, but instead maybe because there’s a lot of choke points where his skills become useful. Like wise I shouldn’t ever feel like I’m playing a merc just to troll around either, and if I do avoid mercs it would be simply because they involve extraneous skills I have trouble mastering. The transition into “weapon abilities” might improve the situation, but anyhow that’s about as constructive as I could communicate the issue I see.

(RasteRayzeR) #28

[QUOTE=INF3RN0;496076]
What I really want to see is for the game evolve to a place where the majority of people pick their mercs based on how they effect the team or for broader strategical reasons- and not by what weapon they frag the most consistently with. [/QUOTE]

That’s what I do in drafts when I’m the only engineer, but I get K/D of -3 or -4 and the game becomes less enjoyable as it turns into a lemming rush. It’s even worse if you lose the match because then you feel like you completely failed.

The objective player who lacks some killing skills won’t enjoy the game much imo

EDIT : happens mostly on LB

(BAMFana) #29

She does have a bit of a sniper feel to her, but it’s offset by significant damage falloff penalties and a bad/bugged scope. I think I remember them stating that they wanted her to be a mid-long range field support specialist, so that fits within their design parameters. I don’t think it’s been entirely successful though: Her scope is pretty much useless because of the shaking and negligible accuracy bonus, and even worse is that it removes the only thing keeping her alive in firefights, her mobility, so her most effective range is actually close-mid range.

If SD’s gameplay stats tell them that Kira is overpowered, then I’ve no problem with them adjusting things like damage and recoil. I really don’t think they should touch the within-burst-rof or HP, though. I really couldn’t disagree with your more on this point, it will make her a lot less interesting and similar to Stoker/Skyhammer.

I don’t think playing Kira ultra-defensively is a particulary good use of her. Her low HP means she burns through medpacks too fast and sustained firefights against multiple opponents is a bad idea. She has excellent movement speed, however, and a low TTK weapon when used right, which means she’s great for flanking and catching players out of position. If you look at the VOD posted from the gather last night, you’ll see me constantly flanking the other team for good effect. At one point I remember someone asking “where’s chump?” on teamspeak during the second round, because he didn’t understand why we were winning all the fights so easily. If I could’ve talked I would’ve answered “waiting to spawn”, because what had happened was that I had doubled around behind them and caught him out of position three or four times in a row, preventing him from participating in the action for a good minute or so.

Come on man, are you channeling pulley now? This happens quite frequently to good players. Hell, even during the gather chump was only a couple of frags short of this during the first round of Bridge_alt.

The argument that players “agreed that she was imba” and collectively decided to not use the merc really isn’t particularly credible, nor does it fit with what I observed on the scoreboard and ingame during that period. Similar to Kira now, actually perhaps even more so than Kira, I only ever saw a couple of other players use Sparks effectively, and I rarely saw another Sparks playing on the same server as me after the novelty effect wore off after a couple of weeks. What I did see, however, was BomBa, and a couple of other vocal critics, launch into long forum rants about Sparks being OP immediately after ragequiting servers where they were playing against my Sparks. I could literally log out of the game 30 minutes after them leaving the server and open up the SD or Nexon forums to find a new post or thread complaining. Now, I can’t say how SD’s decisionmaking process works, what processes they go through when deciding on changes, and I’m sure they don’t base their changes entirely on complaints, but I do have to assume that logging on to the forums and seeing players complain has some effect on their decisionmaking.

I also have to comment that what you’re saying about the revivr spread isn’t true. Sparks has huge spread during continuous fire, which is something that hasn’t changed since she was introduced. You can join a server right now and shoot 15 shots at a wall at max ROF and see the bullets go anywhere but where you’re aiming.

One thing I do agree with you on, though, is that the revivr shouldn’t be able to OHK on overcharge. Instead of fixing the “permanent” overcharge bug, which was the only thing that made the merc playable, they should’ve just reduced overcharge damage.

(INF3RN0) #30

It’s not childish smack talking that you’d get from pulley lol, but in many cases your performance can exhibit a highly defensive fragging focus. In Chumps case he was leading his team forward with really aggressive plays and taking the obj. Not really a big deal, though I was just trying to point out that a lot of play styles can have negative effects on KDR, however result in better map times when you can make the plays that impact the obj like in Chumps case. No disrespect or anything, just relative to what you were saying. Maybe a better means of accurately balance testing merc weaponry would be to bring TDM back? I also think that there are quite a lot of other mercs that are more niche than Kira and Sparks were- even sawbonez can be more difficult to play well. Most of my perspective is based on pugs and gathers as well and I’m not one to scream for nerfing whenever a better player kills me either. Anyway I’ll start play testing these mercs again and maybe I’ll change my mind.

(BAMFana) #31

I wanted to put this in a separate post because it is something I fundamentally agree with, but don’t think is feasible, or even possible, within the current design of Extraction. There are currently only a few mercs/abilities that have this effect: For example, the merc with the med station can be extremely effective on defense when holding certain positions. To counter that, the other team will want to pick a fire support merc, typically Skyhammer since his airstrike is the most effective, to prevent the defense from utilizing that advantage for a short while to enable the offense to push through. Unfortunately, many of the current design decisions prevent this from being more than a “one in twenty games” occurence. For example, map design is such that in many positions calldown abilities can’t be used because there’s roof cover. If the choke point has roof cover, which it often does, then suddenly all the fire support abilities become useless and the offense have no other option than to rush it head on. We even have a map, canary wharf, that has 90 % roof cover, which is a design decision I could scratch my head to baldness before understanding the reasoning behind.

I could write a long rant on all the different factors that cause the problem you’re describing, but in the end I think I’ll just say that there is a systemic issue in the design of key gameplay mechanics like objectives, maps, mercs, abilities, and the lack of in-session progression and merc selection limitations, that all work together to prevent depth in the merc selection process, and prevent opportunities for an interesting meta to form. (By “merc selection limitations” I mean things that prevent an unlimited amount of the same merc appearing in a game at the same time. I think the game would be a lot more interesting if only one of each merc was allowed in each game (“highlander”), with a merc selection process (“drafting”) in the lobby before each map.)

I really think this game has a lot of potential, but for some time I’ve been worried that it won’t be able to deliver, and that worry continues to grow. The latest dev post on State of Play: Modes, Movement, Mercs, & More is as good an illustration as any. It’s all reasonable stuff, but it’s so unambitious. There’s absolutely nothing there that makes me go “oh hey yeah, that’s something other FPS games haven’t done before”, or “wow that’s a great twist on an old mechanic”, or even just a “hell yeah that sounds awesome”. It’s all just “yeah, I guess that’s OK”.

(INF3RN0) #32

We could try a single merc pick draft next gather if people are interested. I’d like to test some variations of conventional drafting systems and see how it plays out.

(BomBaKlaK) #33

yep this is an important point

(titan) #34

standardize her hp to 100 and change her body size / speed to skyhammer / stolker. (A little boring I know)
fix her buggy scope so that she becomes a mid / long range character as intended which also ties in to her abilities (Ammo station and orbital laser don’t scream that she’s a flanking character)
lower RoF to stop her being one of the best 1v1 duelers in the game

g g

(RasteRayzeR) #35

[QUOTE=titan;496113]standardize her hp to 100 and change her body size / speed to skyhammer / stolker. (A little boring I know)
fix her buggy scope so that she becomes a mid / long range character as intended which also ties in to her abilities (Ammo station and orbital laser don’t scream that she’s a flanking character)
lower RoF to stop her being one of the best 1v1 duelers in the game

g g[/QUOTE]

A first real cross traditional classes merc. That woukd be a first !

(Glottis-3D) #36

in real life i am all for skiny gals, but here Kira seems to be too thin, i cant spot her sometimes. =(

(BAMFana) #37

There is clearly only one solution, give Kira the Rhino body type and a burst-fire minigun.

(Rex) #38

Helga is it you?