1.3.3 GUNS AND GUNNER SKILL BALANCE

[NoWuffo]

Ok, as much as I'd like to be weighing in on this debate, I do need to take a step back here and try to keep the peace. Much of this is devolving into rather heated and pointed attacks. Keep discussions based on the patch balance, please no attacks in any direction. Ya hear?

That being said, the nerf was very much imbalanced.

[-Mad Maverick-]

i dont mean it to be personal i apologize allow me to edit my response to further explain why i mentioned competitive play

[Echoez]

Ignoring the whole clan debate.. you guys better keep it civil.

Cold truth is that close range is finally close range, very close if I might add, hooray. Or not?

Time for Echo rant.

I think it's clear that the difference in power of the long range builds and shorter range builds has become quite obvious and I'm realy enjoying the combustive atmosphere, you know that thing with napalm in the morning? Yeaaah, that's the stuff.

So, I've been busy this month before the patch, to the best of my ability, trying to explain and reason with people (even those of subpar understanding of the game at the Steam forums) on why short range loadouts are fine as they were in 1.3.2 and needed no changes. You know what people did? They just kept repeating the same thing to me:

Carronades are OP, take no skill, Gat/Mortar takes no skill, you can't nerf the LJ cause it takes skill to fire, or this or that, blah blah I can't counter that, they charge me head on but I'm too stupid to take their gun out.

Well congrats, you nerfed the shit out of them, the Goldfish is back to useless status, can't even ambush withouth getting seen due to the retarded range cuts and the hitbox enlargement makes it even more braindead to snipe my gun out, BECAUSE IT WAS SO HARD BEFORE DUHH ECHO! Let me guess which ship doesn't care about close range range cuts... oh yeah the Galleon, cause you will have to use the same guns as them so you will be in range of their short side if they need to aim at you and guess what, they have more guns, Goldfish goes pop in a second.

Gatling has such a slow rate of fire even with greased that it takes forever to empty a clip, its disabling power is shit now that it doesn't have much of a range and gives the enemy all the time they need to destroy you faster. Mortar nerf was, litteraly, not needed, maybe reduce the clip by a shot or two, but 4? seriously..

I don't get it guys, the game was pretty fine in 1.3.2, why did brawling have to get shafted again? Close range builds could finally utilize carronades and banshees on par with Gat/Mortar, sniping was still as fucking powerful as ever but now they had more obvious counter play in the form of carronades and fire.

In the meantime it's okay for the Heavy Flak to one-shot Pyramidions, it's okay for the LJ to be able to do the carronade's job at triple the range and doubly as effective. Because those guns take skill and piloting your ship and taking the risks of trying to spot good snipers by poking your nose in there JUST take a glimpse didn't take skill right? It's all fine.

Some people say it's too soon to 'call the game', well that time is now for me I'm sorry, I simply can't go through this shit each time a horrible balance change goes in and the light ships keep getting shafted one patch after an other. Let's all fly skybricks ya?

Junker turning rate still not nerfed ya?

/endrant

In b4 echoez yells at me for carronade nerfs.

Just for you Eric, because I love you.

[Destroyer Bravo]

So, it is time to replace gat/mort, a combo which pugs picked up on well, and could be taught to aim and shoot fast, with a hades/flak, arming time, I can't even fire the hades, and I no longer can close in to 100m, and still be useful at 400-500m.

OOOOHHHHHHH.....

I see what you did there. The gat was a bit excessive, and the mortar didn't need a range or clip nerf, it's hard enough to aim, and lesmok (the round most noobs use) brings it down to like 13 already. But putting two types of pierce/explodey damage types, that was kind of smart, I guess.

[-Mad Maverick-]

Time for Echo rant.

dude i totally agree it has been like this since beta, and really the squid gets no love?!  i think it is fairly clear that muse doesnt want dog fights they want naval battles in the air.

BF4 comes out today and instead of being excited to celebrate with the game ive been playing since beta i will be playing a game that encourages dog fighting with a number of different aircraft...

[NoWuffo]

I want to echo Echoez's rant... but I won't because that would be ironic.

[Garou]

Ok, as much as I'd like to be weighing in on this debate, I do need to take a step back here and try to keep the peace. Much of this is devolving into rather heated and pointed attacks. Keep discussions based on the patch balance, please no attacks in any direction. Ya hear?

My apologies for going off topic, and I'd like to just go on record as saying that I respect most of the guys in Cake and I have a lot of fun flying with you guys when I get the chance.

Echoez makes a lot of good points. A good LJ/Flak duo with Loch rounds and a floating engie with a buff hammer can easily hull strip and one-shot essentially anything that isn't a galleon pretty reliably. Add a merc and a tri-artemis junker to the mix and just getting into the -old- gat/mort range was a Sisyphean task. With the range cuts combined with the previous hull nerf to the pyra (really the only ship that had the speed and armor to withstand the bombardment somewhat and get into brawling range) and the bigger weapon hitboxes (which I'll concede needed to be fixed), what answer is there?

I've never complained about sniper setups (match length aside) because I always felt that with skill, tactics, and a little luck, they could be beaten or at least countered. Now, I'm not so sure. It really feels like now the only way to combat sniping is with sniping, and that's just never been my preferred play style. Again, I'm going to give the patch a fair shake, but from what I've seen so far, I honestly don't see another outcome.

And again, I'm not speaking of pubs, but rather the upper tier teams who use sniping and do it well (MM, Gents, Paddling, and COx come to mind, much respect to each). Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't see an alternative to combating it.

[Niels Juel]

Ok, as much as I'd like to be weighing in on this debate, I do need to take a step back here and try to keep the peace. Much of this is devolving into rather heated and pointed attacks. Keep discussions based on the patch balance, please no attacks in any direction. Ya hear?

My apologies for going off topic, and I'd like to just go on record as saying that I respect most of the guys in Cake and I have a lot of fun flying with you guys when I get the chance.

Echoez makes a lot of good points. A good LJ/Flak duo with Loch rounds and a floating engie with a buff hammer can easily hull strip and one-shot essentially anything that isn't a galleon pretty reliably. Add a merc and a tri-artemis junker to the mix and just getting into the -old- gat/mort range was a Sisyphean task. With the range cuts combined with the previous hull nerf to the pyra (really the only ship that had the speed and armor to withstand the bombardment somewhat and get into brawling range) and the bigger weapon hitboxes (which I'll concede needed to be fixed), what answer is there?

I've never complained about sniper setups (match length aside) because I always felt that with skill, tactics, and a little luck, they could be beaten or at least countered. Now, I'm not so sure. It really feels like now the only way to combat sniping is with sniping, and that's just never been my preferred play style. Again, I'm going to give the patch a fair shake, but from what I've seen so far, I honestly don't see another outcome.

And again, I'm not speaking of pubs, but rather the upper tier teams who use sniping and do it well (MM, Gents, Paddling, and COx come to mind, much respect to each). Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't see an alternative to combating it.

^^THIS!

Also, this patch has more or less killed the squid on open maps like Dunes! (well, outside 3v3 maybe) as it will get focused down and destroyed before it even gets close to being close enough to do ANYTHING! so MUSE, I too will be playing BF4 instead the next couple of days!

[Kriegson]

Really now? If you're going to play Bf4 by all means do so, but not because of the theoretical uselessness of everything other than sniping against a handful of incredibly good snipers. Might want to actually play first and see how it pans out, maybe try some combinations you haven't before, who knows!

You don't have to justify playing some other game to us -_-

[Niels Juel]

Really now? If you're going to play Bf4 by all means do so, but not because of the theoretical uselessness of everything other than sniping against a handful of incredibly good snipers. Might want to actually play first and see how it pans out, maybe try some combinations you haven't before, who knows!

You don't have to justify playing some other game to us -_-

I have (I also am in the Dev app) but as a very dedicated squid pilot (mind you I usually play in your face style squid) nerfing my approach and my main gun (light carronade) might not have made my "job" impossible but it has damn well made it close to it!

[Garou]

Really now? If you're going to play Bf4 by all means do so, but not because of the theoretical uselessness of everything other than sniping against a handful of incredibly good snipers. Might want to actually play first and see how it pans out, maybe try some combinations you haven't before, who knows!

You don't have to justify playing some other game to us -_-

Look, do us a favor and follow the line of discussion before replying to it and making a ham fisted attempt to invalidate someone else's opinion. We're talking about the patch in regards to competitive play. That 'handful of incredibly good snipers' accounts for a solid portion of the teams currently engaged in the competitive scene. We are not talking about just hopping into pub matches and playing randoms.

If you have an opinion on the patch, by all means, please share your thoughts, but if you're going to try to tear down someone else's thoughts on the matter, at least have the courtesy to do it in context.

[Kriegson]

@Garou

If I was quoting you or anyone else specifically, I would have done so, but after the third or so "I'm going to play Bf4 instead!" it gets a bit ridiculous. All I was saying is "If you're going to play another game, go ahead and do so for the enjoyment of the game, not in spite of a balance patch that you haven't even tested yet."

Metagame or not aside, you can stop acting like the game is ruined because of a handful of changes you haven't actually experienced yet. If you really consider yourself "The elite, Competitive group" then you can adapt your strategy to a few balancing tweaks.

So before invalidating someone's opinion and accusing them of not reading, you might actually want to read what they said and consider what their opinion actually was.

[RearAdmiralZill]

Ill toss in the disclaimer that I haven't tried these changes out yet so I'm working off theory and just knowing what Muse is trying to do.

Rewind before the Hades was here. All we had was merc and gat for pierce. Anyone who was in the dev app knew this was a big stickler for awkm since changing either (kinda like flak/mortar) would change a lot of things.

Fast forward to now and you have fairly distinct methods here. Merc for your long range pierce, hades for mid-long, and gat for short. Options.

Just looking on paper, I think the gat could stand to have its old RoF back, just to balance out the other changes. Otherwise, I have to try out the range to get a feel for it.

Light flak needed a buff. It was rare to see it, since it was always outshined by the mortar. Again, need to try out the ranges to get a feel. I can't really complain about the mortar changes. Lesmok in them was just too simple. Now you really get that trade off, and you will probably want a gunner on it to change ammo for your range.

Carronades had it coming. Now one might think of lesmok over heavy, which balances their "long range."

Now to the complaints about short vs long. Idk. Need to play and see. It's easy to look at the changes and throw up your hands and say "MEH, LONG RANGE OP." In reality, it'll require more finesse to get close and utilize the short loadouts.

And before you quote me and try beating me with a "YOU'RE WRONG CHANGE IT BACK" stick, take a breath and think about your post.

[Subarco]

This is a question for people in the competitive scene.

How do you propose to balance it so that brawling with gat/mort becomes viable once again among the upper tier teams, but not have it dominate the pub scene for the lower to mid tier teams?

[Kriegson]

This is a question for people in the competitive scene.

How do you propose to balance it so that brawling with gat/mort becomes viable once again among the upper tier teams, but not have it dominate the pub scene for the lower to mid tier teams?

20 bucks says the response could be condensed into "Doesn't matter because they don't know how to play."