Guns Of Icarus Online
Main => Gameplay => Topic started by: Echoez on July 14, 2013, 10:48:57 am
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This is a suggestion I e-mailed to muse briefly before 1.3 launched, I haven't received a reply yet, though I am infortmed they looked at it, but I can see how the team is busy and can't personaly reply to everyone. Anyway, I decided I should share it here as well to see how the community reacts to it as well.
I am not gonna post the whole e-mail, just a brief summary. So let's start with the changes.
Change Log:
GUNS:
Mercury Field Gun: Penetration through the whole ship now included, Piercing damage is now 10 (from 75), Reload time increased to 7 seconds (from 6), Magazine size reduced to 1 (from 2)
Artemis Light Rocket Launcher: Explosive damage swapped out for Piercing, Now deals 35 piercing damage per shot, Shatter damage reduced to 85 (from 120), Range Increased to 1500 meters.
What we accomplish with the changes:
-Shortening the long range game
-The Mercury doesn't accomplish 2 roles at once anymore and can't be spammed across the maps for easy armor piercing.
-Penetration can work as it was intended
-Retain both a long range disabler and a long range armor piercer
-The shorter version of the long game should greatly help ships choose their engage distance
-By making the Mercury's piercing weak and not a Jack-of-all-trades, we'll finally see a variety of light weapons for used for long range instead of just 2 mercuries.
The Artemis has a stock of 4 rockets, these, as you noticed with my changes, now deal less overall damage than 2 Mercury shots, that's to compesate a bit for ammo types that give it extra shots, hence giving it more armour piercing power than the current Mercury, but, it doesn't do so at a ridiculous range. It still keeps some disabling power, but can't take out Heavy guns as reliably as the Mercury. Turning into a component bruiser and armor piercer.
The Mercury on the other hand loses all of its armour stripping capability, being the extremely long range gun that it is, I believe it restricts a lot of movement from the enemy team with few to absolutely no drawbacks for the defending team, but now it is a very powerful disabler, able to penetrate through whole ships and knock out multiple components. It's clip was reduced to 1 shot per reload as to prevent the weapon from being an absolute bane to Galleons and along with the longer reload, it only rewards an accurate gunner that goes for components.
Why these changes though? Well, the Artemis is underused, only ever utilized in Junker/Spire trifectas most of the time and can only disable and probably provide a little bit of a kick to your finishing power, yet is not that effective at either.
The Mercury is both a very efficient armour breaker (at a very long range might I add?) and component disabler, making people favor it over the artemis immidiently unless the gun slot doesn't allow it to overlap arcs with an other gun and is very detrimental to many more loadouts and playstyles that could occur if it wasn't for the Mercury's immense power at range.
Well, that's it, hit or miss, I shared my thoughts, you are free to agree or disagree or blast them to the ground and never look back, but whatever it might be, remember, have fun and fly safe :P
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It could work.
I personally like the idea.
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I like the suggested Merc changes at face value, but instead of making the Artemis piercing, because it doesn't make sense to me that a rocket would do piecing damage, have a new weapon with those suggested Artemis specs. Then maybe buff the Artemis a little. Only a little though, it's borderline perfect imo, just needs a tiny bit more shatter to make up for the difficulty of hitting specific targets.
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I like the suggested Merc changes at face value, but instead of making the Artemis piercing, because it doesn't make sense to me that a rocket would do piecing damage, have a new weapon with those suggested Artemis specs. Then maybe buff the Artemis a little. Only a little though, it's borderline perfect imo, just needs a tiny bit more shatter to make up for the difficulty of hitting specific targets.
Well, missiles have more piercing capabilities than most think, I am aware that HEAT tech wasn't invented till near the end of WWII, but hey it's a Diesel/Steam Punk game, we can invent crap on our own as well instead of just looking for them in old wreckages :P
The Artemis's missiles are very close to what HEATs look like anyway.
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There was already piercing ammunition in the era as well as being the early age of tanks. Something like HEAT was bound to come along in short order if war research continued at such a pace. According to wiki articles, the WWI armor piercing rounds were tempered stainless steel tips bored out and given HE ordinance. Basically it penetrated armor, then detonated inside the armor leaving a large hole at point of impact.. Which, while being bullets, sounds an awful lot like something that can easily translate into the structure of the artemis rocket.
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Huh, this is actually something that was coming under consideration when the artemis and mercury were first being separated role wise a couple patches ago. You know me though. I tend to always be a fan of harder kills.
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Huh, this is actually something that was coming under consideration when the artemis and mercury were first being separated role wise a couple patches ago. You know me though. I tend to always be a fan of harder kills.
Well it seems like they lost it somewhere in the middle cause the Mercury is pretty supreme now while the Artemis is the 'I only equip it cause it can have an arc' weapon, this level of tetriary usage is pretty ridiculous for a missile launcher of that caliber, plus the Mercury can do what the Artemis does and do it better and at a safer range.
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Huh, I didn't know about the HEAT rockets... the things you learn :)
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I like the proposal direction (and the suggested changes), specialization should definately come from the options a weapon provides you for changing the long game, not with just shortening the overall engagement by immediately destroying the target completely.
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Not to be too critical; but based on the new stats of these weapons relative to other weapons currently in the game, I don't think a single person would use either of these anymore. Far too little dps in any category to be worth a gun slot.
Also not saying the arte couldn't use a tiny bit of love but I almost always use an Artemis on my squid and sometimes as my trifecta gun on my Pyra. The gun also gets frequent usage on the Goldfish leaving only two ships it's almost never used on.
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Not to be too critical; but based on the new stats of these weapons relative to other weapons currently in the game, I don't think a single person would use either of these anymore. Far too little dps in any category to be worth a gun slot.
Also not saying the arte couldn't use a tiny bit of love but I almost always use an Artemis on my squid and sometimes as my trifecta gun on my Pyra. The gun also gets frequent usage on the Goldfish leaving only two ships it's almost never used on.
Why not? The Artemis deals the same total damage as the Mercury right now and can deal even more with the right ammo with the range change it has more than double the Gatling's range, let alone you won't be hitting anything at 700 meters with the new gatling anyway, so even more of a difference.
The Mercury will be able to penetrate through the whole ship which gives it tremendour disabling power against Heavy gun ships, so I don't get what's the problem?
The Artemis is harder to use than the Mercury as well, providing some well needed skill indexing to the mindless mercury spam wars that the game becomes in sniping matches. So, explain your reasoning?
As for the fact that the weapon 'appears' sometimes doesn't mean anything and you yourself proved, it is just the 'I can get an arc' weapon so you just use it because it can get an weapon arc, I don't think this reason is good enough to bring a weapon alone.
So, if you have anything to suggest go on as well, unless you like Mercury spam wars that is. I want something to be done with that weapon, both the Artemis and the Mercury require some looking at, especialy the Mercury and its stupidly high power of both disabling and armor breaking, if people think that is fine to do that at the range the Mercury has, I think I don't know, maybe I'm not playing the same game . _.
DPS can be fiddled with as well, this is just a speculation after all, but still I don't believe that long range light weapons should bring such power at that tremendous range, pick and choose what you want to do, not just pick one gun that does both things and does them too good as well.
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These are interesting ideas.
I usually turn my ship in weird ways to attempt to prevent Merc rounds from ruining my everything. With this penetration change that'd be moot, but I'd still retain my lovely hull armor.
Part of me fears that I'm behind the non-duality of the Merc just because I'm not good enough to effectively use it though.
Perhaps a slight reduction on the shatter damage of the Merc, so it requires 1.5 shots to take down a heavy weapon?
This might be a realism vs authenticity argument again, but I've managed to close the gap against Mercury-equiped ships and take them down. It's just a bit more of a challenge and your engineers need to be amazing at prioritization. Or you need to select the right tools.
I guess I'm on the fence with this one. I'd love to see it demo'd in the dev app, just to see how it changes the game!
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If the merc has to take more than one shot to kill a heavy gun, then the best counter to the sniper Galleon is dead.
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If the merc has to take more than one shot to kill a heavy gun, then the best counter to the sniper Galleon is dead.
Exactly, this is why it has to retain all of its Shatter damage, it only gets on shot and I think it's proper to reward it well if its a good one, but it is still limited by making this one shot count, the Mercury needs to retain its long range disabling capabilities.
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I'd much prefer the Merc be a specialized component killer so you know.. it takes skill to use effectively. That's the major issue with the long game right now: Any monkey can merc and the weapon is able to cause immense pressure due to being far too effective at two jobs.
Meanwhile, the Artemis takes a backseat as the "I cant get an x-fecta without this arc" weapon instead of being what it was originally intended. On top of being limited in its use, it's a bugger to master and land long hits with. So as was mentioned above, there's no reason to ever take this weapon unless you need its firing arc since a merc will do the artemis' job better as well as punch through their armor like nobody's business.
Considering long range piercing is what causes real pressure to a ship at range and a leading factor to their death. I would say it makes sense to make a long range piercing weapon require effort and skill while a less-than-lethal disabler not as much. With penetration on the merc, as is being proposed, you might even find a varied sniping loadout base.
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I don't see this changing much besides it making an artemis required to do a merc's job, while making the merc a further bane by disabling everything in one shot. Good gunners will only need 1 shot to annoyingly disable rows of components.
Sure, art is harder to shoot, but toss lesmok in there for the faster missle, you get 3 rounds instead of 2 from merc, and net more damage than a merc with 3 hits. Then toss in burst at short range and yea, no. That's a terrible thought. You would have to nerf it's turning arc to that of a merc to balance it out.
The only time I liked penetration was when awkm made it so "heavy" components took 2 shots. Otherwise, you just get a dedicated boat disabling everything on anything that doesn't also have the same loadout, and a kill boat, which here would just be 2 or more artemis'.
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I don't see this changing much besides it making an artemis required to do a merc's job, while making the merc a further bane by disabling everything in one shot. Good gunners will only need 1 shot to annoyingly disable rows of components.
Broadsides are easily disabled now that it has two shots, a good gunner can disable a whole broadside in one go if he is good, with the penetration you might do damage somewhere else, but you won't be getting a broadside if you are charging them, if the enemy let you get a good shot on them from any other angle, their fault and should be punished. Dedicating a ship to doing just that will be a massive hit to your DPS. Also the Mercury is already being used as an approaching weapon.
Sure, art is harder to shoot, but toss lesmok in there for the faster missle, you get 3 rounds instead of 2 from merc, and net more damage than a merc with 3 hits. Then toss in burst at short range and yea, no. That's a terrible thought. You would have to nerf it's turning arc to that of a merc to balance it out.
You either didn't read the change log, in which case I'm realy mad at you, or I don't even know..
So, the equation for the total damage the Mercury does on armor with Charged rounds, which is what most people use when armor breaking with it: (75*1.5+300*0.2)*1.3 = 224.25 * 2 = 448.5 total damage with its 2 rounds.
And that is with a range of 3000 meters and an easy to shoot gun.
Now the changed Artemis on Lesmok as you said: (35*1.5+85*0.2) = 69.5 * 3 = 208.5
With Burst rounds: 347.5
(Do keep in mind that the current Mercury with normal ammo deals 345 damage to armor with its 2 rounds)
At 1500 meters with a harder weapon to shoot and need to make more shots count.
So you were saying something? I think this is a pretty fine number for something that fires at these long ranges, despite the arc and it retains a lil' bit disabling power.
The only time I liked penetration was when awkm made it so "heavy" components took 2 shots. Otherwise, you just get a dedicated boat disabling everything on anything that doesn't also have the same loadout, and a kill boat, which here would just be 2 or more artemis'.
Except a single shot Mercury with penetration and no armor piercing is useless against any boat without Heavy guns, and ships with heavy guns are now punished less cause it only has one shot that needs to be landed else you need to wait for a reload, the penetration is there to make up for that a bit. It no longer destroys both armor and components, you can not fully disable a Galleon's broadside in one magazine but you still have a weapon that has a massive role in approaching ships with heavy guns, can potentialy take out multiple engines and is still good at fending off enemy ships with heavy guns.
The only other change I could think of that didn't include penetration is lowering the Piercing further down to 10, basically what a single gatling bullet would do, take out the penetration and leave the 2 shots instead of 1.
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Broadsides are easily disabled now that it has two shots, a good gunner can disable a whole broadside in one go if he is good, with the penetration you might do damage somewhere else, but you won't be getting a broadside if you are charging them, if the enemy let you get a good shot on them from any other angle, their fault and should be punished. Dedicating a ship to doing just that will be a massive hit to your DPS. Also the Mercury is already being used as an approaching weapon.
True, and they don't penetrate to the other broadside, also disabling that one as well, with which your idea would accomplish on one shot. If I charged to get in closer, you could take out a full broadside, and potentially a turning engine with one shot. If you have two mercs, well then that's everything except main engine, hull and balloon. Sure, that's not doing much to my hull, but a ship with half hull armor and one gun to shoot is far more useful than one at full health, and no guns at all.
Im not going to bother quoting your math. You assume I prefer charged in my mercs, which I don't. Also, you aren't hitting much of anything (even less so accurately and consistently) with a merc at 3km out and charged rounds.
You also don't account for reload speed which adds more DoT to the artemis.
And even if the math still makes an artemis less effective than current mercs doing the same armor strip job, that isn't my point. You simply make mercs a highly accurate and long range hwacha, and make artemis the new long range armor stripper. I don't get the reasoning behind swapping the roles of two guns when you should just tweak the current guns.
Has the current merc wronged you in some way that facilitates the change? It isn't something that is unbeatable by any stretch.
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So, the equation for the total damage the Mercury does on armor with Charged rounds, which is what most people use when armor breaking with it: (75*1.5+300*0.2)*1.3 = 224.25 * 2 = 448.5 total damage with its 2 rounds.
And that is with a range of 3000 meters and an easy to shoot gun.
Now the changed Artemis on Lesmok as you said: (35*1.5+85*0.2) = 69.5 * 3 = 208.5
With Burst rounds: 347.5
(Do keep in mind that the current Mercury with normal ammo deals 345 damage to armor with its 2 rounds)
At 1500 meters with a harder weapon to shoot and need to make more shots count.
So you were saying something? I think this is a pretty fine number for something that fires at these long ranges, despite the arc and it retains a lil' bit disabling power.
I see you have in fact done the math. Both of these guns would be incredibly weak. The Artemis would give you about half the dps of the mercury with almost no disable and the Mercury would be useless with only one shot and virtually no armor damage. I suppose people might still take a trifecta Artemis but your intentions are obviously to nerf the long game away.
If that's your intention wouldn't it just be easier to change merc range to 1000 M and call it a day.
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Sooo you're saying it's better to have a long range hwacha that also cripples your armor? I really fail to see the argument here besides exploiting a gun that's exceptional at two roles. I remain unconvinced that keeping a weapon that ruins armor AND components without any real skill required is not something that needs attention and change.
I'm pretty sure the numbers can be tweaked to rebalance the game and see no 'dps issue' considering this capability. Let us sit on the idea that numbers are malleable and the mechanics themselves are what's being discussed here.
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Then just make it so engines and heavy guns require 2 merc shots to destroy them? That hurts the galleon counter a bit, but you'll see more goldies.
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Then just make it so engines and heavy guns require 2 merc shots to destroy them? That hurts the galleon counter a bit, but you'll see more goldies.
Well, I don't mind that, you can make the Merc require 2 shots to take out a heavy gun, it would need to do at least 80%+ of the gun's total health as damage to it in order to keep it from being repaired up unless you miss the second one. That was my main concern with making the Merc requiring 2 shots to destroy, the repairs that could potentialy make it so it needs 3, but I see it's doable after looking into it a bit.
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Yea awkm did it on the final day of the dev app with merc changes in there. He referred to it as the "double tap."
He still had penetration in there, and the fire rate was crazy fast. It wasn't ideal yet so he scrapped it for the patch.
Anyway, two hits to take out a "heavy" component seems like a fair trade so long as the gun is still damaged after repair. It still lowers the component's effectiveness even if you cant manage the 2nd hit, yet takes out the "luck" shots.
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Am I the only one who finds the merc's disabling perfectly balanced as it is?
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Minus merc vs goldfish, I do.
Any long range goldfish will just get it's front gun sniped out by a merc, by which is its only really way to make damage happen. It's something I've seen and felt a lot lately.
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I see you have in fact done the math. Both of these guns would be incredibly weak. The Artemis would give you about half the dps of the mercury with almost no disable and the Mercury would be useless with only one shot and virtually no armor damage. I suppose people might still take a trifecta Artemis but your intentions are obviously to nerf the long game away.
If that's your intention wouldn't it just be easier to change merc range to 1000 M and call it a day.
Come on Smollett, you know that's not true, Artemis would still knock out unattended components in 3 shots, while the Mercury would be still a very good counter to Heavy guns and engines just without the ridiculous piercing as well.
And I think you also know how silly lowering the range of the Mercury to just 1000 meters sounds :P
What I'm trying to do is reward pin point accuracy with the Mercury more and take out the absolutely ludicrous damage it does to armor, hopefully enabling shorter range ships an easier time in open maps (which are the vast majority in this game) while not completely giving up on a longer ranged armor piercer and it allows for more positioning options cause the Artemis will have a much more limited range.
Does it nerf the long game? Yes and I personaly think that it's a good thing to do that, considering how powerful all the long range guns are and how they slow down the game a lot.
also Zill makes a good point about the Goldfish's gun and the current Merc and let's not forget the Spire falls in the same category.
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Spire at least has another light gun to use, which is usually also a merc, so less useless than a goldfish.
Nerfing the long game isn't what we need. Brawling isn't some sick puppy of a thing that cant hold its own. It does however get heavy in terms of the tactics involved over "turn ship" and "shoot that guy" so that's a big underlying factor. Just because games take long doesn't mean its broken. In fact that's a good sign. If long range only battles were short, we'd have a much larger problem. Yea a lot of long range guns are heavy hitting, but you aren't hitting with them consistently at 1.5km. The only one that comes close is merc, which only takes away armor and disables those larger guns, which balances that. If you let yourself get whittled into swiss cheese trying to outrange mercs, that's not a gun issue but one of tactics.
Opinion of course.
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Spire at least has another light gun to use, which is usually also a merc, so less useless than a goldfish.
Nerfing the long game isn't what we need. Brawling isn't some sick puppy of a thing that cant hold its own. It does however get heavy in terms of the tactics involved over "turn ship" and "shoot that guy" so that's a big underlying factor. Just because games take long doesn't mean its broken. In fact that's a good sign. If long range only battles were short, we'd have a much larger problem. Yea a lot of long range guns are heavy hitting, but you aren't hitting with them consistently at 1.5km. The only one that comes close is merc, which only takes away armor and disables those larger guns, which balances that. If you let yourself get whittled into swiss cheese trying to outrange mercs, that's not a gun issue but one of tactics.
Opinion of course.
It is a gun that does too much with little to no downsides. It restricts positioning by a large margin and makes approaching too difficult, plus the only counter to it is to find cover and then hope you get the jump on them, sure, I won't be sitting there trying to out-merc you with my close range loadout, but it is litteraly the only gun that forces enemies to cover unless you have something to overpower the damage it does, then you just hope you get the jump on the enemy before they soften you up considerably with their Merc sides. Doesn't seem like all that many more tactics if you ask me, it just forces a situation in which you either find cover and hope you get a jump, or just get demolished cause usually it's not 1-2 Merc, it's 3+ and they can easily chip away at your permahull. Correct me if I am wrong, of all people I'm willing to be proven wrong on this hopefully.
Even the Lumberjack doesn't force such a situation.. and it is a heavy gun for pete's sake.
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Well, in the 3v3 tourny, the Ducks damn near beat Polaris while using mainly brawl ships. Granted, they lost 7-6, but I don't attribute that loss to the mercs.
Doesn't seem like all that many more tactics if you ask me, it just forces a situation in which you either find cover and hope you get a jump, or just get demolished cause usually it's not 1-2 Merc, it's 3+ and they can easily chip away at your permahull.
Our tactic of splitting up and keeping their focus on one ship worked out in the end. The way I think of it, is in fact that the positioning is so important. You want them shooting at the tanky target. You want to give them the lowest profile when you do charge them. You want to be really high or low in comparison to them. The merc's weakness is its arc. You can literally force a merc team out of position if you give them a nice enough target. That's a big tradeoff to me.
If they don't focus a target, they wont do enough to stop the charge. Once you're in short range, all bets are off with the merc.
Charging blindly into a gun-line should never work though, even with mercs.
Even the Lumberjack doesn't force such a situation.. and it is a heavy gun for pete's sake.
A well shot LJ should force a situation. It forces you high to negate the balloon going down, but that is its best arc, so that's potentially worse.
I think we're at a point though where our opinions are firmly entrenched. At least I feel close to that point.
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I'm not saying it can't be countered at all by tactics, I'm saying that you can not deny it is a broken gun, it does destroy components in one shot and pierces through armor as well, of course superior tactics can still overpower it, but it doesn't change the fact that it needs to be looked at.
The LJ can force a situation if well shot, but it can be easily disabled by a well shot Mercury (We all hate Sunderland.. :P), while the Mercury can't be as easily disabled. Which is why I think it shouldn't be allowed such power at range.
the reasoning is pretty basic, by making the Mercury a disable-only gun, you now have to choose between piercing and disabling, while right now, you can have both on one gun which you can bring twice, hence why I think a gun that can be abused like this should be tended to, since Gat/Flak is limited in that you have to bring both guns to do the job, well, I think long ranged guns should be bound by the same law.
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I just think instead of the pierce change, you play with the disable. 2 shots for "heavy" components. Light guns aren't easy to hit, so one is still ok there. Then you look at artemis. I forget its range now, but up that a touch. Give it either a slight aoe or shatter buff. Make it disable better than a merc, basically, with a range that is still hard to hit for heavy guns. 1.5km? 2km? Giving it that range without changing the projectile itself would be pretty hard to hit at max range.
That's something I can swallow over completely flopping the guns or playing around with piercing.
I'm still of the opinion that it's fairly balanced as is. You do bring up good points though, and I do honestly think I see less goldfish now a days because the main gun is pretty easy to aim at. The only time it isn't is when you're in short range, but that limits the goldfish in terms of builds pretty hard.
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I'm not completely swapping the guns roles, despite the title of the thread, the Mercury already has 2 roles right now and it is a very easy gun to aim for armor, hence why I do not want it to remain like it is. Making the Artemis a better disabler than the Merc currently is would be disastrous for the Galleon, since its explosions would probably knock out multiple guns instantly.
I want the harder weapon to be used for something as important as armor piercing and the weapon that is easier to aim for the ship to be actually be forced to go for components.
The Artemis is in a weird place right now, as I have stated multiple times, it is only used as a Gun arc extra, I'm pretty sure that any ship that uses the Artemis right now would probably use a Mercury (Hell many of them already do even if the Mercury doesn't have the extra gun arc) if the Merc had the same gun arc, hence the weapon's only saving grace is it can turn a bit more, which is why I think it should be given a new role.
Anyway I rest this debate here, the rest is obviously just opinion, but I think good points are brought up from both sides of it.
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die merc die
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I don't think that's really the point here, MasX...