I swear to god some people just cant sit by and let people enjoy powerful things.
What is nerfing of the dueling sword gonna achieve? Are you so hurt by people having fun with a particular weapon? Guess what, if the game is too easy for you with then just play with something else, challenge yourself and push your limits, but leave the weapons alone.
Majority of the playerbase can hardly clear auric damnation and yet these posts make it as if everyone is a 3k hour god-killer 5000 levels veteran main that oneshots 40 crushers just by looking at them. News flash, these people are way more rare than you think.
I’m closing in on 2k hours with most of my time on auric damnation/maelstrom and i swear to god, never did i ever went “huh this weapon is a bit too strong for my tastes!”. If somebody uses an overpowered weapon I don’t give a single damn because that person is just as entitled to use what they want as I am, so why would I want to impose my idea of ‘game balance’ upon them?
tl;dr shut up and let people enjoy the game.
Weapons good = nice
Weapons bad = not nice.
What is nerfing of the dueling sword gonna achieve?[/quote]
What nerfing the weapon would achieve for a number of players is increasing their own enjoyment of the weapon. Beyond sheer challenge - which I can understand rejecting as a compelling reason - a balanced weapon is tactically more interesting, and encourages a reliance on teamwork. Given that this is a coop game, I’m going to insist that’s a very compelling reason.
Plus games are, in general, better when balanced. Of course, they don’t need to be perfectly balanced … And beyond the current state of the DS, there is certainly an argument for making a handful of weapons in a game OP: Some players enjoy OP weapons more than non-OP weapons.
Some players enjoy weaker weapons.
Some players enjoy balanced weapons.
I imagine a lot don’t even think about it.
Some players like to discuss improvements in the game and give their feedback.
This forum is for them.
Some players like to tell other players to shut up.
I guess this forum is for them, too.
I don’t really care if you think it’s a braindead take, you and your ilk seem braindead to me for constantly demanding nerfs without seeming to make your own challenge.
“I want to use powerful things, but because they’re powerful I don’t want to use them waaaa”
I mean that’s not actually contradictory though. I do want to use powerful things and optimize, this is fun in itself, but if they’re too powerful they can trivialize the game.
That’s generally why even singleplayer games balance the game instead of just giving you a “nuke everything for free” skill. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to theorycraft and make a fun build in a CRPG, though, for example. It just has to be balanced.
The nuance is important, but the nuance also often gets thrown out.
So do you remember that key part of game design where the game itself is meant to create the hurdles for you to jump? And using all the tools you have available in potentially creative or synergistic way to jump those hurdles is like, half the fun?
Like how low are your expectations that you think players should just cut themselves off from half the mechanics in the game to enjoy the challenge level they want?
Only the truly brain-dead want overpowered things. There’s no real strategy to using them, little skill curve. You don’t need to build craft or consider how to efficiently cover their weaknesses (there aren’t any to cover lmao). Just slap whatever other weapon you feel like to pair with it, your decisions barely matter. You don’t need to consider which team member would be most effective to stay close to. Basically all of the interesting decision making, all of the complex and nuanced interactions that make an experience interesting and diverse are sapped away
Defending overpowered stuff by saying things like “just play with greys lmao” is openly declaring a love for labotomised gameplay and I will never understand how that could be desirable.
More than half of the problem tbh is the obsessive use of the term “nerf” in this community.
DS being a powerful tool is fine… should it be clearing hard armor as effectively and effortlessly as it does? No. I agree with this point.
Adjusting Agile to require weakpoint kills to trigger seems entirely reasonable.
Balance is fine. It’s nuanced, it’s necessary.
“Nerf” is not.
Fatshark has been terrible at taking a measured approach to adjustments. “Balance” to them is a nail and they’ll hit it with a hammer.
For the record I’m an asshat running around with a MK II(?) dueling saber and Chorus, because I tend to run team support given that I almost exclusively run QP Damnation.
I don’t like running Stealth, and I’m not terribly fond of the Dueling sword with FOTF.
I mean ok, but both those things you listed are objectively “nerfs”?
Regardless yeah don’t want anything to be butchered, and small, iterative changes are almost always the best approach.
Personally I think its problems are two fold.
It kills carapace unreasonably well for all the other advantages it has.
Hordes aren’t threatening enough to make you actually feel its theoretical weakness at controlling/clearing chaff efficiently (also true of knife).
The first problem can be addressed by nuking uncanny and possibly the weapon’s base carapace modifier as well if necessary.
The second problem lies outside of the weapon itself. Just like a number of previously liked guns that have dropped off would pop up a lot more frequently if shooters became threatening again. Enemy balance is a crucial factor to weapon balancing.
No, words mean things. To “nerf” something is to make it significantly less effective… y’know… like a foam dart for which the term derives its name.
Tweaking the damage to Carapace so that it’s not tearing through Crushers in a couple heavies doesn’t significantly impact the tool.
Nor does removing the ability to dodge endlessly while flailing about instead of hitting weakpoints.
The tool remains effective, but not a “gotcha” for everything.
Agreed. Shooters lost their teeth after beta. I don’t think they should be quite that effective since they were deleting people almost as soon as they entered rooms; and in a dark game with dark enemies with only the glow of the lasbolts it’s hard to counter unless they’re highlighted (hence the suppression system which… sometimes works)
Speaking of… Why do Scab shooters not have the burst fire that Scab Stalkers do? They’re using lasrifles, I’d expect them to be a little more dangerous than the enemies with laspistols… that for some reason have a 5-7 round burst…
I’m just weighing in on the semantics topic but as far as I’ve seen it used and used it myself, nerfs can be very slight too. The things you listed would all be considered nerfs, I don’t think the word itself is tied to severity.
Maybe if Fatshark didn’t have the habit of making many, many, drastic changes at once and then leaving them to fester for months before iterating on it, there would be less apprehensiveness about any balancing changes.
Most balancing changes should be numerical, they have the scripting infrastructure to make the changes relatively easily and replacing a few hundred KB of lua scripts should be well within their hotfix budget (size-wise, I mean, they already use it to load the assets for the slop in the MTX shop). An issue is that Fatshark also tends to over-engineer or re-invent things, so it’s almost certainly something going on in their design philosophy.
These self-imposed challenges like “play with grey weapons” don’t work if you are the only one in the team who is challenged. You will just be carried by other players with upgraded weapons in the team.
i dont see how they can nerf it without outright trashing the weapon or the nerf itself changing nothing in the end.
if its going to be a blanket nerf to literally everything it has (mobility, infinite dodges, carapace mod, rending(way overrated), thrust, moveset) its just going to turn into a very shitty mutant poking stick for everyone but zealot. maybe its worth looking into several nodes that rival the power of weapon blessings on said zealot first?
I’m in my thirties and I’ve been playing games since I was pretty young. Never heard “nerf” being used exclusively for heavy reduction in power, but always for any decrease in effectiveness however large or small. Probably dependent on the specific communities one frequented though.
Definitely sympathetic regardless, illiterates shifting the meaning of “meta” and even trying to turn it into a damn acronym absolutely does my head in.
That aside it’s probably unhelpful to argue semantics. You and I both agree it deserves downwards adjustment. We agree said adjustment should be thoughtfully targeted and approached conservatively. So it seems we agree on every important point.
Fair point, though I don’t think any of the human classes lack for the finesse bonuses DS truly craves. Would anyone genuinely complain about duelist getting tuned down to 30%? That one’s probably a bit too free in terms of both placement and power level.
As somebody who used DS a lot pre patch 13 I do think some people are sleeping on how respectable it was even before FS buffed its damage to the moon. High mobility with great reach and an accurate poke heavy for picking out what you need to die right now are all lovely to have. As I said above though conservative nerfs are usually the best. Nerf uncanny, tune down carapace mod as well if necessary, then maybe flatten the finesse curve a touch. See how it feels from there.
Honestly I think this weapon is a pretty good example for why making almost every weapon cross-class was kind of a poorly thought out idea. You have the same duelling sword, which does huge crit and weakspot damage. Then you put it on two classes who both have vastly higher amounts of potential crit chance and weakspot damage on their trees. Then you scratch your head and wonder why it’s OP, because you’re Fatshark and you truly thought this would just be a quick and easy way to give two classes another weapon each.