213 replies to this topic

[deusex2]

He only good thing that came out of this patch was Raider nerf(about damn time). As for Hawkins and Brawler "buffs," please, take away Hawkins and give Brawler Slug Rifle if you want it to be somewhat useful at range, because sustained damage became irrelevant beyond any repair.

As for Brawler itself-so it regenerates three more hitpoints per second in it's mode-whoop-tee-doo! With 500+ burst damage and no damage reduction Brawler is still screwed big time, since his ability is still the most useless one.  

So if devs want Brawler to be on par with others-either grant it ability dodge while in turret mode or give it burst heal ability(hell, any C class could use some active ability for non-turret mode).

[Requiem132]

ShadowGTR, on December 03 2013 - 08:25 AM, said:

StruttingStray, on December 03 2013 - 07:43 AM, said:

davek1979, on December 03 2013 - 02:30 AM, said:

Raider is not OP. It has a serious weakness with its limited range and needs to compensate for it with a lot of burst in short, dynamic CQC engagements.

Raider is OP... in lower level servers. Without any internals equipped, and just a basic emp, it's starting power level was far above all other starting mechs in my opinion. Hell, I pulled off a triple kill the first time I took it out for a spin.

That being said, with the MIRV damage being lowered so close to it's grenade mode damage, I think a slight reload speed buff would have been acceptable.

However, in lower level servers, you tend to have players who stand still while shooting or barely move around. Dodging and quick 180s are rarely seen and they often lose track of you when you dodge into their blind spots. All this adds up for an easy target, and one which allows the Raider to do what it does best: excel at CQC.


But regardless of any reasons folks have given to leave the Raider as it is, the Raider is getting nerfed. I can only hope this nerf doesn't send the Raider into nigh-worthless territory.

Worthless no but you wont be happy lol, the spread on that weapon is too damn high to consistently hit all bullets from mirv making you not apply full damage from good ranges between 40-70. Really best way to do it is face hug. To make this nerf fair they should change some more things like either spread or reload time. Its too long of a reload time for a secondary that isnt a huge splash explosive (oh ya did I mention you hurt urself for facehugging and mirving someone thought id mention that).

[ShadowGTR]

Requiem132, on December 03 2013 - 08:39 AM, said:

the spread on that weapon is too damn high to consistently hit all bullets from mirv making you not apply full damage from good ranges between 40-70. Really best way to do it is face hug. To make this nerf fair they should change some more things like either spread or reload time. Its too long of a reload time for a secondary that isnt a huge splash explosive (oh ya did I mention you hurt urself for facehugging and mirving someone thought id mention that).

Good point about the reload time (and spread). I probably will be pushing for a change to reload time, although spread would definitely help as well.

Requiem132, on December 03 2013 - 08:39 AM, said:

Worthless no but you wont be happy lol

Its like you read my mind.

Spoiler

Edited by ShadowGTR, December 03 2013 - 08:58 AM.

[FRX23]

Patch day, no play

[davek1979]

FRX23, on December 03 2013 - 09:56 AM, said:

Patch day, no play

Judging by past experiences it's more like the day after patch day, no play.

[FRX23]

davek1979, on December 03 2013 - 10:36 AM, said:

FRX23, on , said:

Patch day, no play
Judging by past experiences it's more like the day after patch day, no play.

Yup that i had in mind too, (btw just trolling and hoping to be wrong )

[ropefish]

3:30 still no patch :C

[eth0]

ropefish, on December 03 2013 - 12:34 PM, said:

3:30 still no patch :C

It'll be at ~5pm for us in the EST.

[ropefish]

eth0, on December 03 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

ropefish, on December 03 2013 - 12:34 PM, said:

3:30 still no patch :C

It'll be at ~5pm for us in the EST.

q-q WHY TIME ZONES WHY!!!!!

[BradersVal]

ropefish, on December 03 2013 - 12:43 PM, said:

eth0, on December 03 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

ropefish, on December 03 2013 - 12:34 PM, said:

3:30 still no patch :C

It'll be at ~5pm for us in the EST.

q-q WHY TIME ZONES WHY!!!!!

Coz huge giant not square thing go spin spin! And Dark-no-more only go pew pew

[Xacius]

davek1979, on December 03 2013 - 12:21 AM, said:

MIRV nerf.

My goodness me.

Have these guys played a Raider lately _ You RARELY output its max damage as you need to be literally hugging the enemy to do so for all pellets to connect. It's not easy to get that close unnoticed and once discovered, no one willingly lets you get close, only the ones with Failsafe.

To get it "close to other secondaries" _ Does MIRV have splash ___ Does MIRV have any usable range beyond hugging distance _ Yes you can tickle with it at mid range, that's about it.

I wonder where these ideas came from because they surely did not come from those who actually play Raider.

From the day Raider was released, it's been in the top 3 on my mech choice/lineup.  The mech has been consistently powerful from the day the patch hit.  The MIRV/Corsair combination is still better than most secondaries, even after the nerf.  Burst damage still needs to be brought in line with sustained damage, and this change is long overdue.  

- The Korsair Grenade's AOE is larger than any secondary weapon AOE, by a wide margin (LEL PUN).  If enemies are clumped together, it's not hard to hit more than one of them with at least ~80% damage from the splash.  
- The MIRV is still bursty, just not overly-so.  Is the MIRV harder to aim than most other secondaries_  Sure, but not by much.  Even after the nerf, it still does more damage than almost every other secondary.   Personally, I feel that other secondaries need to be addressed as well. The GL and TOW should have a 20% damage reduction on manual detonation... currently, it's far too easy to deal consistent damage with these weapons.  

I find that the Korsair KLA is still more useful than the GL and TOW.  The lack of manual-detonation is pretty easy to manage with such a massive KLA AOE.

Edited by Xacius, December 03 2013 - 01:33 PM.

[ExAstris]

Can't imagine the devs will mindlessly heed the masses of whiners about balance.

Everyone is complaining about hellfires and failsafe, when in reality, the two biggest balance problem mechs were the raider and infiltrator.

Devs struck gold by nerfing the raider's secondary. Next up should be the Infiltrator. It has every advantage of a light skirmisher + reliable cloaking for ambush and fades. Having such a huge strategic advantage has to have a cost, and the Infiltrator currently has none. Its just as good at dueling as the scout, but has additional options. Plus, if use is any indication of effectiveness, this is by far the most common mech I see in lvl30 matches.


As for hellfires and failsafes, I'm not sure either of them need nerfing. Failsafes were useless at their old values, so if they do get reduced it can't be by much. And right now I debate constantly between whether I want a TOW or a Hellfire on my assault and bruiser. They're equally good, just at different things.

Medium to short range against a light_ Hellfire>TOW
Wide open terrain_ Hellfire>TOW
Cramped terrain_ TOW>Hellfire
Point blank range_ TOW>Hellfire
Up against a heavy_ TOW>Hellfire

Nerfing hellfires overall effectiveness by more than a few percent will make TOW universally better.

I wouldn't be surprised if the huge call to nerf Hellfires is just because 3/4 of the players spend almost all their time in lights. If they spent their time in heftier mechs, they'd appreciate the bad damage/heat ratio and low overall dps (especially when considering the lock-on time in addition to reload time) that Hellfires have. Then they'd start noticing how they can chew threw them faster with any other secondary.

[Zhoyzu]

why aren't all the fixes listed. isn't this something the community should know about regardless of how big or small the bug was____

[davek1979]

ExAstris, on December 03 2013 - 09:54 PM, said:

...
Everyone is complaining about hellfires and failsafe, when in reality, the two biggest balance problem mechs were the raider and infiltrator.
...

Can't stop laughing. There's good humour right there, well done.

[44ug3n]

1gb update wew thats alot wish we can use other weapons or something that would be awesome

[The_Silencer]

End-users running the game at 1024x768 video resolutions has been intentionally blocked and kicked out of the Hawken' scene.

My question is: Perhaps any of these end-users were representing any danger to the Hawken's venture and/or causing any harm to the game and/or community by just running the game at that video resolution, privately, in their respective rooms_

P.S. I'd like to thank, in a very sensitive way, to the guy or guys behind such an important and relevant decisition in the engineering lab. It's been very kind from you. Thanks a lot!...

[SandSpider]

I can see in Predator vision at last.....YAY!!!

[Super_Pickle]

I have several responses to this thread. This gif sums up these balance changes pretty accurately.

Spoiler

While I do appreciate the lag fixes and another attempt at fixing the godawful match making, you guys don't seem to understand the idea of balance. I've only seen around 5 people actually attempt to defend the broken hellfires, but every single thread I come across has to mention how stupid and broken they really are, and inside the advice threads it's almost mandatory to mention how to avoid hellfires because they have screwed up the metagame almost beyond recognition. (Count the number of people talking about 5+ hellfire classes in one game. That should never happen with just two classes.) It's almost like hellfires have replaced Hitler as part of Goodwin's law. You can't have missed the community complaints about the hellfires, and there's no reason to avoid small nerf the damage and mention that you're going to make more changes to the hellfires. Seriously, pay attention to your community. Throw us some bones here.

What I really want to know is who wasted time with an unnecessary nerfing one of the most difficult to use weapons in the game. The MIRV waits nearly half a second after you click the button until it fires fairly slow moving high spread projectiles with almost no splash. It's incredibly rare to see all the shots hit unless its at point blank range, the target isn't moving, or the pilot holds the weapon for a few seconds after it is ready to fire before releasing the shot, lowering the effective DPS of the weapon. In combat, you'll find that the MIRV performs on par or worse than the ke-sabot if you aren't godly with your aim. If you are amazing, you'll probably average somewhere around a good TOW user. There are rare cases where you hit all the shots and you feel like a god of destruction, but those are rare enough that the thing feels kinda underwhelming when you're in an intense fight. I find that even with the stupidly slow slug travel time, I can still hit more consistent shots with the slug.

Considering the problems with the MIRV, it appears to be one of the more balanced weapons in the game. Extremely high skill, very situational, but extremely powerful. Even though I love playing peekaboo at close ranges, I find that I'm rarely close enough to make effective use of the MIRV. If you don't balance the high skill and huge restrictions compared to the other weapons, no one will use the gun. Heck, the Corsair-KLA is one of the largest reasons the raider is one of the most difficult mechs to pilot properly. Both forms require a stupid amount of practice before you can manage to start scratching stuff, and both forms have huge restrictions compared to the other secondaries. The restrictions appear to offset each other, but fights change fast enough that swapping between both forms tends to not work so well in the middle of a fight. Most people I catch complaining about raider balance issues mention the ability as the source of their pains. I've heard more people complain about the difficulty of using the MIRV that I have seen complain about getting hit with it. There was no reason to nerf the MIRV, but hey, at least now you've given me a good reason to exclusively use the slug, when I didn't have a really good reason before.


I hope you guys get the voice chat fixed soon, because I don't seem to actually enjoy playing without voice chat. Seeing your own team crippled because you can't get everyone to work together is very depressing. The best course of action at this point might be hosting an official vent/mumble/team speak server. It would at least be slightly better than no voice chat, since I could get a couple of my friends to download it and work together. Voice chat needs to be a huge priority, even if you have to rip out every piece of sound in the entire game and replace the whole system, playing with voice and without sound for three months would be better than the current situation where I don't even want to play at all. At this point I'm kinda hoping that I can hold out until TitanFall comes out to satisfy my thirst for high skill fast paced pvp combat. I'm thinking that I can subside on 3DS games or cheap steam releases until then, but I may come crawling back here to try and scrape some enjoyment out of this game.

[Saturnine]

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

While I do appreciate the lag fixes and another attempt at fixing the godawful match making, you guys don't seem to understand the idea of balance. I've only seen around 5 people actually attempt to defend the broken hellfires, but every single thread I come across has to mention how stupid and broken they really are, and inside the advice threads it's almost mandatory to mention how to avoid hellfires because they have screwed up the metagame almost beyond recognition. (Count the number of people talking about 5+ hellfire classes in one game. That should never happen with just two classes.) It's almost like hellfires have replaced Hitler as part of Goodwin's law. You can't have missed the community complaints about the hellfires, and there's no reason to avoid small nerf the damage and mention that you're going to make more changes to the hellfires. Seriously, pay attention to your community. Throw us some bones here.

They do pay attention. Quite a bit actually - this patch was locked in when all those hellfire and failsafe threads just started popping up. The design team is, to quote [HWK]Vanashinkaku...

[HWK]Vanashinkaku said:

Design is putting a major focus on balance and we're working hard towards fixing a lot of the major hot-topic issues such as :

Player Progression and New User Experience
Mech Design / Balance
Weapon and Item Design / Balance
Economy / HC Balancing

Vana, and most of the rest of the development team, was unable to show up for the podcast last night because they're so busy working on the various balance problems currently in game, whether it's stuff like Failsafes and Hellfires or unbalanced teams.

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

MIRV -snip-

To follow up on how the devs don't listen to the community, the devs listened to the community on this since there were actually a lot of people saying that the MIRV was too strong compared to the other secondaries. Did the nerf maybe go a few points too far_ Perhaps, but this is an example of them listening, not being out of touch. I wouldn't be surprised to see it get a further adjustment in a coming patch.

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

I hope you guys get the voice chat fixed soon, because I don't seem to actually enjoy playing without voice chat.

Sooo.... Did you try using the voice in game_ Cuz it works. Go do it. I've been hearing all sorts of chatter in game with this latest patch.

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

At this point I'm kinda hoping that I can hold out until TitanFall comes out to satisfy my thirst for high skill fast paced pvp combat.

Because the COD devs knew all about high skill and fun when they made the same game 5 times in a row.

Edited by Saturnine, December 05 2013 - 08:21 AM.

[Aregon]

Saturnine, on December 05 2013 - 08:20 AM, said:

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

While I do appreciate the lag fixes and another attempt at fixing the godawful match making, you guys don't seem to understand the idea of balance. I've only seen around 5 people actually attempt to defend the broken hellfires, but every single thread I come across has to mention how stupid and broken they really are, and inside the advice threads it's almost mandatory to mention how to avoid hellfires because they have screwed up the metagame almost beyond recognition. (Count the number of people talking about 5+ hellfire classes in one game. That should never happen with just two classes.) It's almost like hellfires have replaced Hitler as part of Goodwin's law. You can't have missed the community complaints about the hellfires, and there's no reason to avoid small nerf the damage and mention that you're going to make more changes to the hellfires. Seriously, pay attention to your community. Throw us some bones here.

They do pay attention. Quite a bit actually - this patch was locked in when all those hellfire and failsafe threads just started popping up. The design team is, to quote [HWK]Vanashinkaku...

[HWK]Vanashinkaku said:

Design is putting a major focus on balance and we're working hard towards fixing a lot of the major hot-topic issues such as :

Player Progression and New User Experience
Mech Design / Balance
Weapon and Item Design / Balance
Economy / HC Balancing

Vana, and most of the rest of the development team, was unable to show up for the podcast last night because they're so busy working on the various balance problems currently in game, whether it's stuff like Failsafes and Hellfires or unbalanced teams.

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

MIRV -snip-

To follow up on how the devs don't listen to the community, the devs listened to the community on this since there were actually a lot of people saying that the MIRV was too strong compared to the other secondaries. Did the nerf maybe go a few points too far_ Perhaps, but this is an example of them listening, not being out of touch. I wouldn't be surprised to see it get a further adjustment in a coming patch.

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

I hope you guys get the voice chat fixed soon, because I don't seem to actually enjoy playing without voice chat.

Sooo.... Did you try using the voice in game_ Cuz it works. Go do it. I've been hearing all sorts of chatter in game with this latest patch.

Super_Pickle, on December 04 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

At this point I'm kinda hoping that I can hold out until TitanFall comes out to satisfy my thirst for high skill fast paced pvp combat.

Because the COD devs knew all about high skill and fun when they made the same game 5 times in a row.

Why can`t everyone be like you and actually find both positive AND negative stuff, not only negative_