I am not gonna start a melee discussion here - this topic is not about that.
But I don’t like dividing things into black and white. Just because ranged is too strong, doesn’t mean that melee isn’t too weak or doesn’t have problems and needs fixing.
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These statements are much more logical, though they contradict a lot of things you previously said.
As for melee damage, dps and survivability - I don’t see a reason, why melee classes should deal less damage. Also for ranged characters range is their survivability. This is cooperation game. There are melee classes, and no one forces ranged characters to go into melee, except for force majeure situations.
When we say nerf ammo regeneration, it doesn’t mean that ranged careers will have to melee. It means that they will have to leave some of the threats to melee teammates. This might sound unbelievable now, that some mobs can be left for you mates, but this is how it is.
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If ranged cannot or should not be nerfed because melee first requires fixes then are those problems not directly relevant to the current topic?
They are indeed relevant, but their discussion will just turn into yet another endless argue on top of current argue, turning this already not so ideal discussion into complete mess.
It’s better to make a separate topic, like this one for example.
Or an old post could be bump, like my old post about legend melee problems. After playing on legend for a long time, I don’t completely agree with some stuff listed there, but I think it’s still very accurate.
I can’t speak for everyone but I listen very carefully to all argumentation and assess the logic of the assertions carefully. Just because people are presenting valid counterpoints doesn’t somehow give the argument being challenged some bizarre ideological martyr status. The suggestions presented are bad because the logic and facts simply don’t support them. Here’s a relatively mechanical rundown of the whole discussion:
1. It’s suggested that “ranged” classes should be nerfed, specifically that they shouldn’t be able to have so much ammo, because they outperform “melee” classes and are intrinsically better than them.
a) As repeatedly pointed out, skilled players on frontline characters keep up just fine with skilled players on ranged characters. Average players do average regardless of class. Good players do good regardless of class. Some players are better with “ranged” characters than they are with “melee” characters and vice versa.
b) Every “melee” character, save Slayer, has a ranged weapon. In some cases (eg. IB, Shade), the “melee” character has extremely strong ranged potential that rivals their “ranged” counterparts. Not only do they have access to the exact same sustainability traits, the fact that their “ranged” counterparts are self-sustaining means that the “melee” character can generally take the ammo pickups, meaning they’re on pretty close footing as far as ranged potential goes and they have much greater melee potential and melee survivability. Logically, then, there is no reason for them to fail to perform.
c) The scorecard does not properly reflect the most critical melee contributions. It does not show how a “melee” character held a line or deleted a CW or kept a patrol from overrunning the entire group. It is not appropriate to reflect solely upon the scorecard when assessing the value of a character.
2. From there, the next point of debate becomes, “but ‘ranged’ characters can do it easier. It’s harder for ‘melee’ characters to do so well.”
a) As per 1a, if lots of people are doing it just fine then it’s a simple matter of skill. A case was made to make melee easier to play, however, which we’ll touch on in 3.
b) As per 1b, “melee” characters have all the same exact tools in their kit and despite not being self-sustaining when it comes to ammo, the very presence of a “ranged” class in the comp means that every “melee” character has waaaaay more ammo to play with, so there’s really no excuse to lose out vs ambients or vs hordes. “Melee” classes have a lot of horde delete ranged options and excellent melee potential.
c) As per 1c, even after fully recognizing 2a/1a, you have to remember that a lot of what “melee” classes do simply isn’t reflected on the scorecard, and “melee” classes can do a lot of things “ranged” classes can’t, like handling a much wider area of enemy engagement, surviving more challenging situations, dealing with mixed (especially heavy) threats, and holding lines or facetanking the things ranged characters simply can’t.
3. As mentioned in 2a, it was suggested that melee be buffed to make it easier to play, eg. by improving cleave to be balanced against the fact that VT2 hordes are substantially larger than VT1’s. The counterpoint to this has been, “but then ‘ranged’ characters get stronger too.”
a) This assertion is a huge problem because the statement defies all logical thinking and directly contradicts the original complaint and suggestion’s premise in its entirety. If the argument is that “ranged is better than melee,” or “ranged doesn’t need to melee,” the suggestion that “ranged” characters having a melee buff helps them more than it helps “melee” characters is entirely paradoxical and the whole thing falls flat on its face. Further, if we consider 2 to be the counterpoint to 1a-c, 3 is impossible. It renders all earlier arguments logically inert. 3 would mean the problem has nothing to do with “ranged” classes.
b) As per 1a/2a, if skilled players already have comparable output regardless of class, making melee easier to use would only mean that less skilled players would be able to do the same. This directly solves the “problem” presented in 2. If you someone denies that, their goal isn’t to improve" balance" or “equality,” it’s to make “melee” intrinsically better than “ranged.” Which leads us to,
c) If, as per 2a, skilled players have no issues matching output regardless of class, improving melee would mean that “melee” is outright better than “ranged.”
4. From here, the argument for nerf starts to get pretty muddy but the next clearest logical statement is that it would be better if “ranged” classes simply didn’t have as much ammo sustainability.
a) 1a/2a, again. I know lots of great “melee” players who have no problem keeping pace with other great “ranged” players. I see lots of average “melee” players who have identical output to other average “ranged” players.
b) This suggestion obliterates the ammo balance portion of 1b entirely. Right now, when a ranged player is present, everyone’s ranged potential improves because “melee” players get more ammo pickups. If “ranged” players need ammo under this plan, one of two things is going to happen: either the “ranged” player is going to take the ammo and the “melee” player isn’t ever going to have any or the “melee” player is going to take the ammo and the “ranged” player can’t do their job. This screws up every aspect of the entire game.
c) As per 4b, the “melee” players, being closer to the frontline, are pretty much always gonna get the ammo unless there’s way more communication and, again as per 4b, if the team divides ammo the “correct” way, the melee player just gets screwed and is at even more of a disadvantage.
5. The next point is typically along the lines of, “people should be forced to melee for their ammo.:”
a) See 4b / 4c. This is all well and good except it means the “ranged” character is now a “melee” character who will still need all the ammo pickups because if there’s nothing to kill, they aren’t getting ammo. This creates a dramatic imbalance in the favour of "melee classes.
b) A ranged character who is doing their job isn’t sitting right on the frontline. They would have to step their squishy, 3-hit KO self into the trenches then back off to fire, then repeat. This, again, creates a major imbalance in favour of “melee” classes.
c) See 2b. This kind of trait would extensively benefit “melee” classes, effectively turning them into better “ranged” classes than the actual “ranged” classes by guaranteeing they’d have non-stop ammo sustainability combined with their ranged weapons’ often wide arcs of fire and extreme lethality. This is most likely why Scavenger isn’t a thing in VT2: Every character has a unique identity and is balanced uniquely (and pretty evenly right now for the most part).
6. Argument gets muddier still and devolves into citing adverts with the term “melee action.”
a) Melee action =/= only melee action
b) While I think one’s grounds for complaint in this regard are dubious, take it up with the marketing department
c) The trailer is evenly divided between “melee” and “ranged” combat. It is very clear that “ranged” weapons are a huge part of the game, as they were in VT1.
d) Ranged was far more prevalent in VT1 by virtue of even stronger drake weaponry, tf bow, better hb bow, better sb, better rh, basically better ranged weapons altogether and waaaaay more ammo all around. All this combined with Haste + HoD + Regrowth/Bloodlust (or Haste + Skullcracker or any haste + combo, depending on what you wanna do) means that VT1’s ranged combat is vastly more prevalent and abusable. With the exception of the fact that cleave has not been appropriately scaled in VT2, melee combat is a much more integral part of the game and it is on par with ranged combat (see 1a, 2a).
Bonus Point: The suggestion that there is a “ranged meta.”
a) See 1a, 2a-c: Good players keep up fine. How “hard” something is to do subjective. The suggestions for making “melee” easier led to 3, at which point the argument falls apart.
b) “Meta” is defined by the players, not the game, not the devs. From 1A, “melee” jobs have as much potential to perform as “ranged” jobs. As such, balance has been achieved in general, despite some characters needing buffs.
c) As per 1c, 14/15 characters have ranged weapons. The presence of a “ranged” class enhances the ranged capabilities of all “melee” classes present. This means that for all intents and purposes, “ranged” classes have little intrinsic advantage when it comes to ranged combat and an intrinsic disadvantage when it comes to melee combat.
Bonus Point: Using scorecards as proof that something is OP/UP.
a) This is a bs, illogical, weaksauce tactic and everyone knows it.
b) 1a/2a again.
Repercussions if FS listens to this kind of idea:
a) Game balance (see 1a/2a) is thrown out the window in a game that’s already struggling to make basic, fundamental fixes.
b) Half of the playerbase will be alienated. World not be surprised to see a large exodus.
c) Pace of the game would be altered in its entirety and every aspect of combat and director behaviour would need to be rewritten to compensate for the fact that half the classes simply aren’t doing the same job they used to do (ie. The job they are designed to do from which all director behavior is based)."
For all these reasons, the suggestions made in this thread are simply not very well thought through and often completely illogical. There is a mountain of logic as to why the game is actually very well balanced from a “ranged” and “melee” standpoint as is. There is very little logic to argue that, vis-a-vis 1a/2a, there’s a disparity in output potential. Lastly, not to straw man or be rude, but there’s evidence to suggest some of the most vocal proponents of this sort of change have no idea what they’re talking about.
The correct solution to the problem being presented, which due to 1a/2a is clearly a matter of “ease of use,” is to somehow make “melee” classes more forgiving w/o further enhancing their overall potential. I would suggest basically doubling the cleave of all weapons to compensate for the fact that hordes in VT2 are over twice as large as hordes in VT1 while the weapons are the same or worse. The damage tables on this cleave should not be programmed to greatly affect lethality on additional targets, only stagger and knockback (ie. the additional targets should be affected by the strike but take zero damage unless under the affect of STR potions). Further, shields must be given back their innate enhanced knockback from VT1 on push and they should have much greater tank potential than they currently possess. All this, combined with much needed fixes to ghost hits, running hits, skateboarding CW, etc, will correct the issue.
4 Likes
Eh, not a battle I’ve chosen to fight but yeah. It’s a lil goofy. Also makes it hard to make changes to the character because adjusting her in any category just makes her more goofy in either solo or in team. Personally, I think it’s dumb that she can do that cuz like… you’re literally invincible forever without even trying so she more or less plays like someone who’s got a Game Genie in…
Anecdotally, I do think ppl who exclusively speedrun with HM come out on top with loot in the long run cuz it’s pretty much a guaranteed win every 3-7min. Know a few and they were doing very well in the red category even before the loot “fix.” I don’t personally care because that’s so boring and that style of play translates poorly to teamplay kinda so meh. To each their own I guess. I certainly don’t consider HM speedruns to be anything to write home about as far as skill goes. On any other class it would be a much greater accomplishment.
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Most of those problems are in encounter designs. Bosses that teleport all over the damn place. Bosses where the price of missing one dodge is 75% of your health in damage (looking at you stormfiend). Specials with pushback that spawn in firing range (warpfire thrower and rattling gunner). And let’s not forget that since the 1.08 beta specials (specifically disablers) spawn at a much higher number and in up to combinations of 3 chasing individual special spawns. And I WILL be making a topic on that, because their changes are extremely anti-fun.
Boss damage not appearing is a glitch and has been around since the beta. Melee kills don’t glitch on the scoreboard. And way to throw around insults when somebody has a differing opinion.
These are scores from two games I played, combined into one for convenience. Next time at least try reading what’s written on a picture, cause the names match, and this could be concluded by simple logic. Or is that also too much to ask from you?
Also bosses aren’t guaranteed to spawn, even on Legend. Simple as that.
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I understand you’re trying to defend your friend here, but you really, really need to examine your standards for evidence. Certainly your standards for hard evidence.
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Scorecards are evidence of nothing. A player can achieve huge numbers on any class, especially if carrying average/bad players for most of the map. It could even be manipulated by playing a deed.
At best, a scorecard is showing a player is good. None of the scorecards presented showed performance outside of the mean for good players, sans boss damage. This is fact. Arguing against this would simply imply you’ve never seen good players on other classes, which would be unlikely. -
Videos of good players being good are also not evidence. In how many games throughout the years have some pro player taken something the community thinks is UP, and made a video where they performed insane with it? It’s in fact really common, because it’s an ego boost to the pro/twitcher/whatever. Again, the videos in question showed the broken boss damage. Nothing else in those videos stood out as anything special compared to what other careers can do.
Jsat recently made a video where he played with elven 1H and did really well. Does that mean elven 1H is the best elven weapon and is now OP? Of course not.
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Even if we were to take screenshots as evidence, which they clearly are not, double standards were applied. When screenshots were shown that completely deflated the very notion that HS could achieve things other classes couldn’t (again, sans boss damage), suddenly screenshots were not evidence anymore.
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Do you know what would be evidence? Detailed statistics from the developer - showing winrate, killrate, damage done etc, for both an average and for the, say, top 5% players, per career. Even then, as with all statistics, they would have to be examined and analyzed to gain valuable knowledge from them. And even then the very game itself isn’t designed in such a way that all careers should be the same DPS wise, as they have different strengths and weaknesses, so ultimately even those statistics could be hard to parse for truly valuable information. If one career stood out as far below/above the average winrate, it would indicate a problem.
In short, yes obviously HS boss damage needed to be fixed. All other claims about his performance were greatly exaggurated and incredibly spurious, and in fact not backed up by relevant evidence of any kind.
I think some people might need to take some classes on critical thinking, reasoning and evaluation of evidence.
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I can address these all in order
- Their the only spectrum of measurement and large amounts of players achieving similar results with a single career is not an indication that every single one of them just suddenly became more skilled during the 1.08 beta.
- Videos are used for the same reason. Watching a stream even more so because it shows consistency which addresses the issue of people only showing their best performance
- Consistency is the main point. People post individual screenshots of a few good games all the time. Large numbers of people, even people who’ve got next to no experience playing huntsman, should not be able to consistency be good whilst playing as huntsman to such a large degree if it was as bad as you’re pretending it was.
We don’t have access to that and we don’t know if they have access to that. Secondly you can’t appeal to a developers ability to make informed decisions based on information we don’t have. Next, if they DO have the ability to make decisions from this data, then your argument falls on its ass. Lastly,
You mean that every measurement of information collecting that’s available to the community doesn’t help frame a narrative and so you don’t want to count it. Goodness you’re quite reasonable, aren’t you.
It would be extremely ironic if some reasonable person was to make some faux intellectual claim on the concept of evidence and critical thinking and the person they were glib to made a living troubleshooting complex technical problems involving jets using critical thinking, reasoning, and evaluation of evidence as well as trend analysis and pattern recognition.
It would also be extremely ironic if some reasonable person said something like
and reasonably mention statistics in the same post whilst being glib. Not even realizing why this is unreasonably ironic at all.
So is 1H the best elven weapon? Is there tons of information involving Elven 1H that you can use right now? Does this video even satisfy a large sample size that can be used when taking the law of errors into consideration? You tell me. I do and have done well as WHC. Am I going to pretend that my solo success is suddenly a reference of performance of the community at large, blatantly ignoring average performance and success and spitting on easily viewable problems?
I think some people would be better off not making ending posts insulting the intelligence of other people. And since we’re both being so reasonable, i’m going to reasonably assume that this is no longer a thread I care to continue to engage in with some reasonable poster(s) I care to continue to converse with. Ciao.
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Just some food for thought regarding how to deal with the “ranged meta”: Remember when people first started playing Shade and thought she was garbage? Pretty much all it took was to reduce the cooldown on her active and suddenly, BOOM, shade becomes a viable pick, people played her more, found out how to play here and you see her almost more often than WS Keri now - and guess what, it’s because she just absolutely WRECKS stuff in MELEE (gasp!). Shade, to me, is the absolute prime example on where we should go. Give the “melee carreers” the tools they need to fill their role and they will take of for everyone.
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They were posted in a vacuum. If said parties were interested in actually providing anything even resembling evidence, they would also have posted their screenshots/vids of playing WS, Pyro, BH.
There were only a few people posting screenshots with good numbers. Most of the screenshots were posted with 5-8K damage, which is objectively not very impressive at all, and easily achievable on any career. There is no overwhelming mass of players posting, and again, everything was posted in a vacuum, with the players unwilling to post their screenshots of other, comparable careers. This is not evidence, this is anecdotal hogwash.
Whatever you do or don’t do for work is so far beside the point it’s not even funny. The world is full of scientists who believe in god, of otherwise sane people believing vaccines cause autism because a celebrity said so, and all sorts of manner of internal inconsistency. There are a great many books and reports about the compartmentalizion of the brain, internal inconsistency and self-delusion. Oh, and confirmation bias.
The only thing proven by the various screenshots and vids was that HS was too good at boss killing. That’s it. If you don’t see comparable number of kills/dmg all the time on other careers, you’re simply not playing with good enough people.
If you actually think screenshots are evidence, fine. These are just a few shots from the last few days, showing several classes performing on par and better than the posted evidence of HS during 1.08.
If you will now disregard this evidence as anecdotal, or proving nothing, then you have in fact proved my point for me.
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To frame the narrative that you’re trying to debunk right now?
Here have some random sampling taken each from completely different sources from random youtube videos, to twitch vods, and one from yours truly.
Good job.
Your sample size is still nil in any significant comparison.
Also, I predicted you would use my screenshots with random pugs in them to try to justify the intent of this thread, despite a slayer performing very well in one of them.
All of this proves that screenshots are total BS as evidence, and anyone can twist them to try to make any kind of argument.
If you were really so interested in sample size, you would encourage people to post all screenshots from other classes to.
A thread about huntsman generates lots of huntsman screenshots. OMG shocking. Meanwhile there were no comparable threads about other classes to pull similar numbers of screenshots from.
What you think of as evidence just isn’t, in so many ways.
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It’s called a counter example, pops. That I have an extremely good chance that I can pull literally any screenshot pre 1.08.2 and grab evidence of any random huntsman doing really well.
And must like I predicted. Evidence to the contrary which doesn’t frame your argument nor support your point was registered as invalid.
I’ll get hot on telling people to level up things they don’t play for the purpose of rendering me a now useless voluntary sample.
These threads weren’t about huntsman. They were about the game in general. Now ain’t that cute.
Actually there are plenty and most are used to frame the narrative that range in some cases was too strong. We’ve been having these threads since the beta. OMG shocking I know 
It’s not a differing opinion, it’s a call out to a blatant lie.
I do believe he specifically played to get zero melee kills to try to prove how OP huntsman was. How many tries it took is anyone’s guess. Think he posted a vid with it too, where it actually looked like he did at least one melee kill but meh. It was indeed done intentionally and isn’t representative of a normal game.
In any case it was done in 108 where he could regen ammo from the ult.
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Well, map final bosses are actully Lords and Bosses are Roger, Sfiend, Troll and Spawn, so “Boss damage” stat shows you only damage done to those 4 but not to Lords.
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Evidence was registered as invalid because no screenshots are evidence. I didn’t post screenshots as evidence, I posted them to show how they really, really aren’t.
You seem to miss the main point I’m trying to make.
If I had taken screenshots of every match I’ve ever done I’d have enough screenshots to ‘prove’ whatever I wanted.
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