(Yet Another) Thunder Rebalance Poll

(Demolama) #21

Right now he has the lowest dps of all the assault mercs because he is the only one that has to rely on his primary rather than his specialty for total damage output.

His nade stuns are useless if he cannot follow it up by killing the mercs he just stunned. Most of the time if he is lucky he can kill two mercs before their stun wears off. But in the process he ends up wasting all his ammo, which ultimately leaves him vulnerable due to the huge reload time. And this doesn’t include the possibility of all those mercs he just killed getting revived.

Ultimately Thunder needs to be in between Fragger and Rhino for damage output using a LMG in order to be anywhere close to being useful as an “assault” class

(GiantGiant) #22

After todays fix his grenades are weaker :s with full concusion (no flash) I could easily kill Thunder, so if conc nade doesn’t blow in front of enemy’s face it’s close to uselessness especially when it can’t be cooked. I think it was better when granades caused the mouse sensitivity reduction.

(titaniumFalcon) #23

Dunno what they did to thunder, the things I don’t like about the hotfix is the removal of cooking his concussion nade and mouse restrict, only thing he was good at, and now its gone.

([WAR]Larknok1) #24

I’m livid with today’s update. Check my new forum post about it. They’ve just turned Thunder into the worst merc in the game.

(Verticules) #25

My experience so far, if you happen to actuallly get flashbanged, Thunder will end up with an assist if he is lucky.

I haven’t played him much, but I have seen countless Thunders in PUGs. You have to be almost brain dead to get flashed, outside of Thunder somehow brisk-walking around for a flank.

If you are moving as a team, Thunder will never successfully flashbang the entire squad. He will likely go down, or retreat and wait for his CD to come back up.

He is soooooo bad. I can honestly say, I have never died to the concussion effect. White-Screen is the only scary part of Thunder’s tool kit.

(bontsa) #26

Nice to see some more organized enviroment experienced too. What I feel simply from public (normal + matchmaking) experience playing with, as and against Thunder, SplashDamage should’ve simply fixed the noticable bugs with the concussion grenade, and kept stuff like cooking still in to give us another week of testing with fixed, properly functioning “product.”

After that week we could’ve been able to give proper feedback about it, since a) it could be used to full extent as intended and b) people have by now gotten over their initial spit-splattering “i cant counter diz iz op iz new” reaction

What we now have is practically a major set-back of at least a week, recuiring what least I foresee a month and a half of going back-forth with tinkering Thunder’s nades function, range, effectiveness, numbers, etc everything one by one. This exactly is why mercs, abilities and maps shouldn’t be changed radically in a hurry. Number tweaking is completely other issue itself, those can be changed even weekly if wanted, but strong core changes should be let to be done in peace and thought.

(CCP115) #27

Thunder was not “Really bad” when he came out, his flashbang was ridiculously strong. Now it’s a heck of a lot weaker.

Not being a Thunder main, I can’t directly say much, but he was too strong before, and too weak now.

Thunder is just in a weird place. His 160 HP and guns and movespeed (aka raw merc stats) are pretty bad, so SD thought “Why not just make his ability amazing to compensate?”
Terrible idea.

Also that’s probably why Fragger is so good. Strip him of his nades, and he still has three excellent guns, and 150 HP, with alright movespeed.

And to be totally fair, Thunder still excels at 1v1s, so you can’t ignore that.

(Phantombrotherhood) #28

[quote=“CCP115;118316”]Thunder was not “Really bad” when he came out, his flashbang was ridiculously strong. Now it’s a heck of a lot weaker.

Not being a Thunder main, I can’t directly say much, but he was too strong before, and too weak now.

Thunder is just in a weird place. His 160 HP and guns and movespeed (aka raw merc stats) are pretty bad, so SD thought “Why not just make his ability amazing to compensate?”
Terrible idea.

Also that’s probably why Fragger is so good. Strip him of his nades, and he still has three excellent guns, and 150 HP, with alright movespeed.

And to be totally fair, Thunder still excels at 1v1s, so you can’t ignore that.[/quote]

I’ve used Thunder a good bit since he came out and post “fix” I’d say he’s basically a fragger with a crappier gun, a useless nade, and a rhino sized hitbox. It’s a joke and honestly makes me feel as if I wasted credits getting him

([WAR]Larknok1) #29

[quote=“CCP115;118316”]Thunder was not “Really bad” when he came out, his flashbang was ridiculously strong. Now it’s a heck of a lot weaker.

Not being a Thunder main, I can’t directly say much, but he was too strong before, and too weak now.

Thunder is just in a weird place. His 160 HP and guns and movespeed (aka raw merc stats) are pretty bad, so SD thought “Why not just make his ability amazing to compensate?”
Terrible idea.

Also that’s probably why Fragger is so good. Strip him of his nades, and he still has three excellent guns, and 150 HP, with alright movespeed.

And to be totally fair, Thunder still excels at 1v1s, so you can’t ignore that.[/quote]

Explain to me how it was “ridiculously strong.”

I have given reasons why I think it was bad as was: see 1-4 at the top. Please do the same thing explaining why they were good.

If by “ridiculously strong” you mean “it occasionally let you get double kills on unwitting enemies that you sneak up on, don’t blind fire you, and don’t have a third friend handy” – you need to check your understanding of “ridiculously strong.”

As a long-time Fragger main, I can honestly say that pre-patch Concussions were still hands down, unquestionably worse than Frags.

If you want, you can think of a direct-hit of a Frag as a 10-20 second disable of a player’s weapons and abilities. In the same vein, I don’t understand why when I suggest that Thunder’s Concuss should simply disable weapons and abilities for 4-6 seconds – they freak the fuck out. It’s almost like people straight up prefer to be killed than to have a chance of survival if it means that you’re disabled but alive for that period of time.

(Phantombrotherhood) #30

Yeah, I completely agree with this, because the way I see it, he got Phantom’d because the player base is too lazy to adapt to new mercs inb4 “IZ NEW MUST BE OP, NERF PLIS”

(SaulWolfden) #31

Ironically Phantom is a better assault than Thunder who is ironically a better recon than Phantom.

([WAR]Larknok1) #32

I’m absolutely livid right now. Poor, poor Thunder. What are they doing to you?

At release, Thunder was bad. Really bad. The last update only made it worse.

At 160 health, most guns kill him and Fragger in exactly the same number of shots. The only difference is that Thunder has a hitbox 20-30% larger than Fragger’s, he’s slower, and he can’t jump to avoid getting shot because he doesn’t have the accuracy of the M4.

So he’s incredibly, incredibly squishy.

Then they give him a gun with the same damage as the Kek but with higher bloom and the highest reload time in the game? So he’s not even a glass cannon – he’s just glass. Wonderful.

Then they give him an incredibly situational concussion grenade. This is pre-patch. Let’s enumerate why, shall we?

  1. It only works around corners (Thunder will flash himself for a full 4 seconds)

  2. It only works if they’re not facing you when it goes off (they’ll blind-fire you to death)

  3. It only works if you hit all of them (an un-concussed enemy can easily melt Thunder.)

  4. It only works if Thunder can rush into the room and use his sub-par primary to kill all of them – in under 4 seconds.

The concussion thereby only had two advantages to the Frag:

#1) You could infinite cancel it with no cooldown.

#2) The cook time was less than the Frag, so you could more easily get a perfect air-burst near your targets (of course, you can’t do it if they’re already after you though – see problems 1) and 2) ).

Now let’s see what the new patch did to the concussion, shall we?

  1. No more cooking on concussion grenades. They will always detonate in 1.6 seconds after it leaves Thunder’s hand.

This is straight-off a huge nerf. This means he can’t properly even concuss his targets. He has to cross his fingers that they’ll just walk into it. The only conceivable way he could land this is if he tosses it at a distance to bounce off a wall and detonate out of his sight. Then Thunder only has the problem of covering that distance in less than 4 seconds to capitalize on the concussion. Goodbye advantage #2.

But wait, it gets worse.

  1. No more infinite cancel with no cooldown. Goodbye advantage #1.

I’m speechless – but of course, it gets worse.

  1. The flash blinds less over distance, and effectively does not flash at all if it detonates behind enemies – which they can easily do by turning away, because it can’t be cooked now.

Bravo, SD, you’re almost there – you’ve almost made Thunder the worst merc in the game. Let’s see what you have left for us, ey?

  1. “Concussing” an enemy (detonating it right next to them) no longer decreases mouse sensitivity. All it does is make the screen a little blurry and slow the enemy for a short time which decreases with distance to the concussion. This means that a concussed enemy now has literally zero problem shooting back at Thunder if it detonates even an inch behind them.

There you have it, folks. Thunder is now the worst merc in the game.

([WAR]Larknok1) #33

Thunder is horribly, horribly broken and unusable at the moment. A small fine-tuning to his bloom, or a % increase to the slow of his concussion isn’t going to fix that.

Let’s be very real here: Thunder doesn’t have much going for him, and if SD wants people to like him, but not find him annoying, some radical changes are in order.

He’s got 160 health, but he dies in the same number of shots as Fragger does to most guns. His hitbox is 20-30% larger, which means he just dies so, so fast.

The only job Fragger/Thunder have is to make sure they never lose a 1v1 gunfight. But guess what? Thunder loses even those, barring a gap in player skill.

His LMG is sub-par. The bloom is insanity after the first five or six shots, and at 11 dmg per round, nothing is going to die anytime soon. The only good thing about it is it’s incredible ADS. Too bad that forces Thunder – the second slowest merc – to come to a nearly complete stand-still.

His concuss was deemed “annoying” and “overpowered” at release simply because it did what it was designed to do: disable enemy players for a short amount of time. So now, it doesn’t even do that anymore. Instead, it can’t be cooked, and it imposes a completely irrelevant slow (5-10%, doesn’t even stop players from sprinting), and shakes their screen for about 1 second. If you somehow manage to be facing it when it goes off, despite the 1.6 second warning time, it also blinds you for about 3 or 4 seconds. That’s it. That’s Thunder’s mighty Frag-equivalent.

Here are the changes I propose:

  1. Thunder’s health is increased by 10, up to 170.

  2. Thunder’s hip-fire bloom is reduced by 10-15%.

  3. Thunder’s LMG damage per round is increased to 12 (from 11.)

  4. Thunder’s hitbox and character model is decreased in size by 5-10%, somewhere inbetween his current size and Fragger’s size.

  5. Thunder’s movement speed is buffed to just 5 less than Fragger’s.

  6. Thunder’s concussion disables devices for twice as long, is once again cookable, prevents sprinting, slows enemies more considerably, and (most importantly) disables player weapons and abilities for 5 seconds.

I am willing to defend every change claim here. I truly believe that he needs all of it to hold up as a Fragger alternative.

(Amerika) #34

I merged your three threads since there isn’t a reason to start up three separate threads that all discuss essentially the same thing.

(Glot) #35
  1. let go flash.
  2. leave the slowdown and a little bit of mushrooms.
  3. play/tweak with radius
  4. return the cooldown, and make it exactly the same as Fragger’s

the slowdown is a great help

(moonlitAbility) #36

man… patch was a huge letdown. I thought changes were needed… but this was too much too fast. if they fixed the turn your back and blinding allies things only I think that would have been fine.

before the patch they at least felt like they worked. now ill concuss a room, breach, and everyone is firing at me like nothing happened. also i got ‘concussed’ by someone elses grenade, and without the sensisitivy i was able to easily see and shoot him like it didnt matter. stupid.

at least hearthstone gave u the ability to refund your cards when they raped them

([WAR]Larknok1) #37

They were different in one critical respect: before and after patch, but I see your point.

(cornJester) #38

I swear if Fragger got the Stark instead of Thunder I would drop him like a hot potato. Stark is now my bae.