“The main difference in gameplay with the current bug is; All classes become proficient vs hordes as everything has higher than intended cleave. Everyone can also stagger enemies with much greater ease as we should be scaling stagger output the most. Tank classes thus becomes slightly redundant. Higher damage output puts a lot of weapons over thresholds of oneshotting, often without intended crits or headshot requirements. Killing stuff faster means lack of enemies and puts a greater emphasis on ranged combat over melee combat.”
So i was reading this and it well… is kind of insanely backwards. With the hero power fix coming soon, we’re all going to have significantly less damage, knockback and cleave. As a result the developers believe this is going to fix ranged builds being better than melee? What? This is going to have the completely opposite reaction. If you’re weaker in every aspect of melee but do less ranged damage, people are just going to be endlessly spamming infinite ammo builds and nothing else. How does nerfing the fundamental basics of melee combat help combat fix this? You’re just going to see a LOT more Bounty Hunters with volley crossbows in response.
How about we make Handmaiden/Battle Wizard/ Zealot and the other terrible classes more viable? How about we stop with patrols spawning inside groups and instantly being triggered? How about we stop spawning multiple hordes during boss fights? How about we look at the huge amount of just awful awful melee weapons first? How about we look at the gigantic amount of genuinely useless talents?
This update is just going to make the bad classes even more unappealing as you’re pushing more and more into “meta gaming” to be able to win.
I get that balancing takes time but when nothing has been done but endlessly nerf and nerf and nerf it really seems like the main focus is over “hardcore gameplay” instead of having fun. Yes i’m aware that most of the responses will be just telling me to “get good” in some way. I’m more concerned that the game just genuinely is hitting a point of not fun now when your options to play other classes are whittled down more and more with every update. I think a beta should seriously be considered if they’re going to make such changes. A hero nerf overall will need to come with buffs somewhere else to many of the less than viable classes. I don’t see them coming anytime soon though…
More enemies being around longer means that enemies will be near players in greater quantity for longer periods of time, making ranged combat more unsafe than it currently is - also the same amount of ammo won’t go as far in killing power. That’s the impression I got, but either way, such a major bug should be fixed before actual balancing takes place, why balance around a bug? if melee is still in a bad place afterwards it can be tweaked.
I’m saying they should be changed together if that’s the case then. As for the ranged, you’re only losing a smallish amount of damage. You’re mostly losing a lot of cleave more than anything when it comes to hero power. If hero power say… altered reload speed, penetration on ranged weapons, damage drop off distance ect it would be an equal nerf, but they don’t. Hero power ONLY changed the damage of range weapons while melee attacks have more than 1 use of hero power.
Quick response: Ranged use the same calculation and scaling as melee for cleave and stagger, all changes are across the board.
And balancewise - the scaled stuff is what we’re running inhouse when we do balancing. It’s either rebalance the whole game based of what’s live or send the more balance stuff to live and then move forwards from there. We will be tuning and balancing stuff moving forward. Useless weapons and other community issues are on our radar.
Now, crowd enemies are killed with ONE hit by melee and by ranged pg. This makes melee pg useless.
With this nerf, I think, melee pg (thanks their bonus, now useless) still kill with ONE hit, but not ranged pg.
Thanks for the response, much appreciated. I would like to explain that i do agree with the existence of the “nerf” because some weapons just have endless cleave. That does need to go but if we’re doing that there are other issues that need to be worked on first. Hordes can spawn way too close to players at times, often inside the group itself. Enemies stacking inside of each other such as chaos warriors. Some classes being just outright terrible. Patrols designed to be avoided yet spawn in unavoidable places or literally right next to you.
Just as i said, it looks like the focus is to be as hardcore as possible while ignoring a lot of issues that don’t work with that. I really fail to see how nerfing everything is going to specifically reduce the Bounty Hunters using Volley crossbows. It kind of feels like we’re going to have to stop and snipe enemies one at a time more than ever before.
Edit: I just feel if we don’t see any buffs to the useless classes and weapons soon then the game is going to get boring really fast. Kind of feels like you’re forced to play certain classes at this point. With this fix i think we’ll need to see some buffs in other places very quickly. There are so many issues that screw you over in the game right now as well as mentioned above.
the volley crossbow bit will probably get feedback at another time, and honestly with some of these changes, something like shade actually seems a lot more interesting. not only because her % power increases will actually work, but that they will actually be very noticeable as a result of everything else. of course that still relies on putting yourself in a bad position a lot of the time and someone else will have to fill the sniper role, but still. this will most certainly increase difficulty and people will play differently as a result, which can lead to different character choices/builds in ways people don’t expect.
I hear you. We want to get at alot of stuff and I am really keen on getting to the balancing of stuff. Alot of the things you’re describing with the spawns needs to be dealt with and we’re working on it. The fix does change things across the board but mainly gives you the balance we’ve actually intended (and it will still not be perfect but it will give us a way better starting point) but also fix alot of the buffs used by careers which should bring something to the mix.
We’ll be paying close attention and want to be ready to adjust things quickly.
With that response may i ask what kind of issues are considered high priority right now? I completely know that things take time, especially when getting user feedback. I would just like to know what you guys consider the bigger are issues right now. I’m not demanding for everything to be fixed instantly with perfection, just generally concerned with the direction the game has taken after the beta.
So there was no reason to balance up to “now” because alot of stuff was not working as intendet and therefor you had wrong date / people who gave feedback did not get the real deal to play with.
I am really excited to see what the next few patches hold and cannot wait to play all the careers that have a major part of their power taken from them because of these bugs!
Also thank you Ratherdone for taking the time and communicating. Must be around 20:00 in sweden right now and you are probably doing this in your spare time!
Mmhm, i work in the game industry myself and it sadly involves a lot of work after normal hours. If a patch is planned today or soon they’ll most likely be doing over time at the moment.
yeah, Fatshark usually don’t play like that. We have overtime and stuff at times but the only message from management during those times are “don’t go over the swedish regulation timelimit of 8 hours a week max” since it’s mostly us devs that want to hang out and fix stuff. The crunch for this release was a bit harsh though, or I’m just getting to old for… stuff.
Anyways. it’s 21:28 here, kids are asleep and I kind of like hanging with the community a bit so…
Regarding future patches, I can’t really give any official info - we’ve been focusing on the crashy bits and the buggy bits first. There are some balance things in the pipeline and we are in the process of setting up both shorterm and longterm targets. We want to be rational about the balance work we do though so alot it’ll be low hanging fruit (number-tweaking and the like) first and heavier stuff (mechanics and stuff requiring content) later.
Ah understandable, well do appreciate someone posting in their spare time! Usually people who work on it all day need a break from it by the end of the day! As for the balancing kind of the response i was expecting. Crashes always taking top priority on a release, just like i said, the direction as a whole of constant nerfs have concerned me a lot. A few number tweaks will help with the weapons mostly but yeh things like Handmaiden and Shade need a lot more work.
If this update makes me too unhappy i think it’ll be best to put the game on the shelf until some of the in game issues are resolved that cause you to end up losing. Still optimistic about the game as a whole and absolutely love it. That’s exactly why i made this thread to start with, because i love the game and don’t want to see it turn into something i dislike. Especially with a lot of the feedback on the forums being simply “get good” most of the time which added to my concerns about the constant nerfs.
Sure - I really want to bump a couple of things in the near future. Most of the nerfs have been part of grander fixes - this one in particular. We have a pile of other fixes included in the upcomming patch so some stuff should see a buff, but the focues balancing is still to come.
Understandable, as i mentioned i’m just concerned about lot of things with nerfing. Hopefully we’ll see some buffs to the places that need it as well. Personally my main concerns are just things such as hordes spawning too close, hordes during bosses and just range shot spamming being too effective. I’m aware i’m just one of countless voices shouting about the game right now.
With that said, congrats on how successful the game has been! I hope you’re genuinely enjoying working their because most of the work has been great!
