Recovering from disables aside (something monitoring very closely, rebuild modifiers will probably get revisited), there are a few things people are getting wrong here.
Every range is a valid one, that's the goal. As others have mentioned, each have their own risk reward to them. For example, long range weapons have fewer shots to compensate for the fact I am hitting you from across the map. This coupled with the enemy engineer's ability to rebuild/repair during your reloads makes it hard for snipers to get the actual kill. This is where teamwork can really help.
Another example is a brawler. You have a lot of ammo but closing in should be difficult. The enemy engineer's won't be able to repair/rebuild your DPS but it's an issue for you to get in range to be effective. This is where teamwork can really help. Not to sound like a broken record but brawling was previously extremely effective and therefore range skewed to close quarters—not ideal, a bell curve would be nicer.
Some changes, admittedly, are heavy-handed. However, it's much easier to over shoot the line and inch back up to it rather than forever trying to find the line in the first place. By hearing the voice of the community, I can find that line much more easily. Except that this time around, a lot of people are taking it very personally. Please remain calm, courteous, back up your findings with methodical examinations of the problem at hand. Only then can I reproduce those cases and test them to find alternative solutions.
I don't believe any one strategy has been negated at this point. There are more now. Is gat/mortar too difficult to pull off now? Maybe. Will other weapons shine? Yeah, I hope so. Will other weapons become OP? I hope not, and I hope these changes collapse the decision space in another way. Please have a conversation with me and work together. Muse has our own design goals and what we know to be a good game. You have your own ideas of what fun is. They can work together. We're willing to work with you but are you willing to work with us?
Finally, after all the drudgery, there have been a few suggestions here and there that I will consider and test. Here are a list of things that I am testing. There is no guarantee which ones will make it in.
- Increased piercing dmg on gatling (and therefore lower clip size to maintain dmg/clip ratio)
- Increased shatter dmg on gatling and perhaps carronade (giving close range weaponry some disabling on the distance close)
- Reduced chance of fire on Hades
- Increased arming time on Hades
- Faster rebuilds on guns and engines
and further in the future:
- New gunner skills that will further augment gun usage cases (think of it this way: each vanilla gun has its own particular area where it's most effective in. Some ammo already push it outside of it's effective area. New ammo will expand on this idea, perhaps push guns even further outside their intended use case)
And seriously, we don't have a QA team. AAA QA teams are huge. To be perfectly clear, you are our QA team. This is why poop hits the fan so much because we don't have adequate testing.
So... go apply for Dev App!
I DON'T LIKE POOP HITTING THE FAN IN PRODUCTION.
