The last patch made a mostly miss attempt at balancing. Im not going to look at which of the changes i think are reasonable and which are hillariously misguided but i will say this…
Somehow the “temp hp on stagger” talent has not been touched for way too many years. It has been one of the single most broken things for as long as i remember. Its one of the major contributors to why BW was so overpowered. Its the ultimate crutch in every game mode across all skill levels to the point that videos of people true soloing cata while corner camping inside gas but outhealing the gas by shield bashing the horde are a thing. People are soloing weaves with Warrior Priest by sitting in corner and constantly getting hit but outhealing all of it in a swing or 2. Its beyond silly and somehow its still unchanged.
The dwarf cannon thing is unchanged and so are saltz shotguns. A lot of infinite/high cleave weapons got nerfs in 1 way or another(particularly bw related). Why not those 2? Where is the consistency? These weapons are insane in the right loadouts just like FireSword was on BW.
The cannon in particular is hillarious to the point where it can solo a cw patrols and bosses easily and for some reason not spend ammo on doing that because it can run the headshot ammo refund trait.
The bots…
I dont know what youve done to them but Jesus Christ… I used to run the unmodded bots because in a good number of situations i prefered their behaviour to the mod changes (minus the “dont heal the zealot” option - guess im back to never playing that class again).
But something about their action priority was changed. They stopped peeling disablers. Straightup. Thats the only real function they have and the only reason to play solo with bots over true solo. Ive seen them sooo many times in the last couple of days just casually walk away from me while i’m getting 100% to death’d by a single assassin its really not funny. One observation in particular is they seem to prioritize literally “walking at a boss” over everything else now. But even when there is no boss they dont really give a crap about peeling disablers anymore.
The other thing is patrols. Bots used to be reasonably okay at not pulling patrols if you manually dragged them away from them. But now they dont care anymore. If there is ANYTHING near the patrol they will just walk into it.
They just seem to not care about player movement/distance anymore and just wander off to do their own thing regardless how far away you are. The only way you can get them to change location is if you get far enough to where they teleport.
I will second on your comment regarding bots and their frustrating unstated downgrade and their weird new prioritization and behavior
Bots should ALWAYS place players at a high priority…and I noticed they place an insanely high priority replenishing even a single missing ammo if an ammo crate is somewhere in the map regardless of how far…this is a NIGHTMARE in massive open maps like Khazukan Khazit-Ka where bots would go on a long journey across entire areas just because they know a crate is out there somewhere
I even think the OE buffs was unnecessary. It was just because he was unpopular - he will probably return to that level once the hype dies down. You could already do insane damage as him with like 3-4 builds, but the bad things didn’t get buffed, they just added bomb spam and buffed the Crank gun.
Getting OE and BW in your group has to be one of the most boring matches ever.
Balance changes are just way, way too slow, combined with being complete hit or miss like OP mentioned.
Why even make new weapons, when you can do tiny number tweaks on already existing but dogshit weapons? You’ve essentially made a new weapon then and there, only that it took you a few hours tops to do some balance tests.
Same thing goes for talents really.
Much like OP, i’ve been on a long break from the game as well and it will sadly continue indefinitely, unless crap weapons/talents are looked upon.
they were made to always start at maximum size aoe now which is an extremely difficult change to deal with for all the wrong reasons.
The intended reason - as i understand it and feel free to correct me if im wrong (not that anyone actually makes changes to tide games with reasoning in mind but whatever) - is to punish corner camping.
Ironically it completely fails to do that but has the exact opposite effect. Why is that?:
Well first of all most classes that are good at corner camping with temp hp on stagger can survive being stormed with no problems due to in kit damage reduction + health pool and they also have a really easy time to get health back due to said temp on stagger.
However if you play an open area and you circle kite the horde and a max size storm comes down on you youre completely screwed unless you have one of the top tier ults and its off cooldown.
You can usually barely leave a max size storm as its being cast if you immediately rush to the outside but if you were just circle kiting and theres mobs behind you, you will probably have to block or get clipped by an attack - both of which slow you down just enough to where you cant actually leave the storm anymore.
This change actively made playing in the open much harder and did nothing to corner camping. I dont even care about stormers casting from behind walls. The starting size of storms in open areas is insane.
I am salty, i recently trusted my bots to cover me for a sec when i had a single, lone and solitary Packmaster waddle up to me from the front when a stormer started casting from behind.
I turned around and started shooting the stormer…and realized my bots had somehow ran halfway there when i zoomed in, so they could melee the stormer that just died.
I get grabbed from my now behind.
Bots start running towards me, a handful of shields and a firearat appear.
I die, bots also die, because shooting the firerat with any of their handguns or pistols is unfeasible for some reason
