In this clip, as soon as my toughness breaks, I am using my scrollwheel to dodge as soon as humanly possible in order to survive. This is without ping as a factor as well, where your inputs for movement will be constantly rolled back while you are in the shotgun’s knockback, then rolled back during any stun state. This is most apparent with gunners, where your toughness breaks, you get a huge stun state, then continuously freeze in place despite using dodge or slide tactics.
My preferred solution is to remove the limitations of stun on dodges and blocking, allowing for more fluid movement. It can still limit your ability to attack, or even be limited to applying a strong debuff to attack speed, but currently, it feels awful to have your toughness break anywhere near gunners due to the frustrations of stunlock.
i dont’ see the issue. It’s 6 shotgunners, there is an element of threat to enemies in this game that needs you to kill them or they kill you. That’s why you have talents that restore toughness when you do this on vet. The way it’s balanced makes it necessary to kill things while you dodge evade them or they’ll eventually whittle and pin you like this.
Dodge tanking 6 shotgunners without firing back, retreating, or doing anything else to replenish toughness shouldn’t be possible
The issue comes from the fact that I dodged most of the damage but was grazed enough to break toughness (or on broken toughness) and I end up getting stunlocked. Because of the stunlock, I get hit by another shotgunner, which causes stunlock. Because of the stunlock, I get hit by another shotgunner, which causes stun-
This issue becomes more obvious on ping, where the knockback that shotgunners deliver rollsback your movement inputs and throws you in a direction. Because of this rollback, you can end up feeling stunned by shotgunners longer than usual when in reality the servers just refuse to let you move.
This can also lead to other side effects on ping. When toughness breaks, you can’t attack and you can’t block. You can get grazed, have toughness break, be frozen in place, and be completely open to any subsequent attacks for what can be seconds. The game also starts to really mess with your inputs during this, not allowing dodges, pushes, or canceling attack strings, heavy attacks, or push/pushblock attacks. Being frozen in place is not fun.
Those issues are more obvious with gunners though, I mainly wanted to highlight the obvious problem with ranged stunlock, which is that it leads to more ranged stunlock and subsequent death by ranged stunlock.
That’s the design intent. Toughness broken amidst gunfire = very very bad time. It’s an actual named mechanic called suppression. I think it makes sense as a gameplay mechanic. You have all the tools in the world to prevent that from happening though, and disengaging tends to also save you with some foresight
Suppression is the mechanic where your aim wobbles when you are being shot at but not necessarily being hit. Being hit without toughness is being stunned.
I thought the way it pins you is also part of suppression but I guess you’re right. It still remains that it’s fully the design intent that you get anal probed by ranged enemies if you’re caught with your toughness pants down, and I don’t think it’s too punishing.
One mechanic that does suck is when you get knocked back by gunfire even though you have toughness. It feels a little too disruptive for no real reason
I don’t mind the knockback by heavy fire like from heavy stubbers (dreg gunners, reapers), volleyguns (scab gunners), longlas (snipers) and shotguns, it was when even the little shooters and stalkers that were doing it that it got really overbearing.
That said, being executed by a dozen gunners that poof into existence silently shouldn’t be a thing.
I think the real ‘problem’ is less the stun/stagger but the fact that shotgunners ignore the toughness break damage immunity. Against every other enemy, you are immune to damage for 1 sec after your toughness breaks. Shotgunners ignore that and shred you. Which I like. It makes them distinctly dangerous and they really stick out as a threat from the horde.
Yes. And both Veteran and Zealot have talents that nullify it if you desire: Get Back in the Fight and Thy Wrath Be Swift.
The knockback is fine for me as well. It lets shotgunners exist as a threat in melee (although they probably shouldn’t pull out melee weapons or in general be more sticky to ranged) and it makes reapers threatening as mobile gun platforms that can actually somewhat enforce ranged interaction or heavy flanking from the player. Gunners could serve to have more knockback, but I feel like if they do manage to deploy with a large clump they can be fine, but that can be a big if with high mobility melee weapons existing.
I might be wrong, but is this the toughness break grace damage reduction that the “path to redemption” patch notes mentioned? If so, this was lowered as well. I’m not extremely familiar with the mechanic or its values from before this patch, but I believe telopots mentioned it was changed from 75% damage reduction for 1 second to 50%.
I’m also fine with the damage that ranged enemies can do to you after your toughness breaks, I just don’t find it particularly engaging with hitstun working the way it does. It can be extremely brutal as I showcased with shotgunners, but any ranged enemy can initiate a stunlock, and the effects feel compounding (losing health leads to stun, stun leaves room for more shooting/being attacked, which leads to losing more health and potential stun). This creates moments where ranged groups can take you from 100 to 0 percent in a single stunlock, and surviving an encounter can leave you with barely any health left for another volley. With server rollback working the way it does you can feel, at the very least, stuttery trying to recover from this. Then you factor in other enemies that can be at play, active specials or melee elites, and the stunlock becomes very punishing in really intense moments.
I’d have less of an issue with knockback if lag didn’t make it absolutely obnoxious. In actual games you often full dodge a shotgunner volley and take 0 toughness damage but the phantom hits still knock you back half a mile so now you’re forced to disengage