Final touch to Assail, are removal of the Quick Shards talent (or lock it, making players choose faster ammo regen or more targets each shot) and/or reduction of max ammo to 5.
Also introduce bodyblocking to all psyker’s projectiles, unless they have big enough piercing/cleaving stat to go through allies.
The lack of bodyblocking for psyker attacks never made any sense to me, they have often auto-aimed attacks and effectively infinite ammo. Bodyblocking would also hinder Assail’s performance, wasting it’s targeting charges on hitting ally.
Aside from all psykers taking it at lvl4 and then basically facerolling their keyboard until they’re lvl30 - it’s fine.
But it’s pretty hilarious how little resources psyker needs to get to max level in absolutely comfy and fun ways. It doesn’t even compute for poor poor vets which have lots of slogs on their road to lvl30.
Well, at least with P14 it stops in T4 rather than in T5.
Sadly I know better than to give you the benefit of doubt and assume sarcasm.
There is no character with issues on the road to 30, especially not Veteran.
Up to Malice difficulty, you can run up to any enemy and shank them with your basic White starter gear. And that’s all you need since Malice carries you well into the late 10’s in terms of XP.
If by lvl 20 you haven’t found or crafted anything usable, then are you even trying?
Did you factor in new specialists spawning, monstrosities, and influx of console players? Or do your memories about getting to lvl30 come from ye olden times where things were quite notably different?
Sure, I had very little issues getting my vet to lvl30 back in beta days. It was quite smooth sailing.
But after P13 I deleted most of my ops (because only my ogryn had some gear that could be called top-tier) and leveled up a bunch of new ones, just to see how things changed. And oh boy they changed a lot.
Zealots start slow, but at around lvl10 they’re just zealots doing zealots things and never dying unless you made several grave mistakes in a row. Psykers faceroll with assail. Ogryns are still ogryns doing ogryn things and never dying much like zealots. Vets in particular were given the shortest stick without any doubts.
Of course you might be just carried by other players without much issues, but if not (and likely not in randoms) - then ohhhh boy, good luck doing things without at least one good (not “usable”) weapon.
Smite obviously needs work so I don’t think it’s fair to compare, but between Assail’s fast-engaging and highly responsive left click that can quickly clear entire groups of specialists and elites at close range, and it’s ability to precision engage targets at a distance with right-click, it’s hard to see where I’m not actively gimping myself taking Brain Rupture over Assail, and at least my own performance results bear that out.
Part of that is some weirdness with Brain Rupture, in that targeting it among hordes of moving enemies and channeling its casting is more difficult than just spamming left-click on self-guiding projectiles in the general direction of the target. Part of that is that half the things you’d use Brain Rupture against, Assail’s right-click can often be just as good at engaging (a scab gunner on a distant gantry for instance) or better (if there’s say, a group of such gunners). About the only place Brain Rupture is really better at is dealing with carapace foes and bosses, but then if you’re running Assail you still have plenty of effective tools to deal with such targets (e.g. Force Sword, Surge staff), much moreso than when you’re running Brain Rupture and have to deal with a pack of hounds or groups of shotgunners.
And that’s kinda the general issue. The Assail changes nerfed some of the spammability slightly, but also increased its utility in filling the role BR fundamentally fills in doing so with the right-click targeted ability. Assail is good against the vast majority of stuff in the game, can still be spammed highly effectively (especially in conjunction with a Psykers other weapons), is highly responsive, and takes little effort to employ. Smite isn’t doing what it’s supposed to by Fatshark’s own admission, while BR has nowhere near the general utility or ease of use. There’s a reason the overwhelmingly vast majority of Psykers I see in games are still running Assail, including my own most games.
To add to it, it also doesn’t help that BR and Smite really only seem to be taken in conjunction with Empower, while Assail can work just as effectively (if not more so) with Warp Siphon, meaning Assail works with a wider array of build types better as well.
The problem is that people started complaining about it and never want to stop doing that.
They made up their mind at some point and although almost all guns and melees got buffed by quite a bit (while assail got nerfed and enemies got buffed), and although assail is not even very competitive anymore when it comes to killing anything other than trashmobs, these people are not going to change their mind.
No matter how outdated or made up their complaints are, they will keep going until they get bored of it, because they will not see reason.
I just played a round of Uprising+ Hab Dreyko Investigation, just to see what the fuss here is all about.
After seeing what I saw, I am honestly confused about these takes on balancing you guys come up with.
There is barely an ambient enemy spawning. You get transported into a semi-empty level. Occasionally a handful of pox walkers stumble out of a door so you can experience the pretty gibbing effects.
The only time you face opposition is during a mission event and it’s barely anything. Only one to two specials at a time. Back in the early days of Gaming we had tutorial levels with more challenge. That’s not even Sedition, but Uprising+.
I am seriously baffled and have to ask: What is there to balance?
These enemies die in one hit for the most part, no matter what you do. Only ragers can take a few hits more.
There is nothing to balance, because it’s not the proper game and cannonfodder doesn’t need balance. It dies either way.
Yes, it dies to Vets, too. But you know, as the FPS soldier cover-shooter guy, you need to hit your shots. Your Lasgun damage will be enough to instagib anything that’s not a special or rager. I don’t see the issue.
Just played damnation hi int with assail and it was fine. Didn’t feel too strong. Killed hordes quite well. Wasn’t popping elites as easily but I held my own just fine. IDK man, feels fine rn. Maybe theres a combo I’m unaware of, but it seems in line with other strong stuff.
This was done at work. I was noticeably lagging and also just playing like ass in general. I can put out this kind of damage gap with a lot of stuff in this game, but nothing so easily as this. I doubt my build is even optimized. Assail is still very much easy mode.
While it’s probably fine balance wise, for me I dislike how you can do a map effectively while using assail 80% of the time or more.
I definitely wish there was an assail talent that made it do a lot more damage with a much lower ammo count / slower recharge. Basically high impact, high cost. It feels bad when you want to take the talents around it but feel pressured into using assail for a good chunk of the map instead of a staff or a gun.
Yeah, this is the key issue, a Blitz ability should be just that, not a replacement primary weapon.
Edit: the more I think about it, the more I wish theyd used the Assail functionality as a Gunspyker Ability, that essentially allowed projectiles from whatever gun you were wielding to home and seek weakspots the way the Shards do for X seconds or something, and get in some serious Matrix/Equilibrium style Gunfu.
How is asserting that a newly added ability that is both insanely powerful and mind-numbingly easy to use deserves a nerf trolling? Once more, how is your assertion that everyone I play with must be terrible at the game supposed to be taken seriously?
Alot of psykers kit is overpowered still but most players don’t know how to use it. You could go 1 million damage in 30 min with void, surge, or trauma only, while veteran could never hope to get that much even on their best games.
