From one side, I disagree… bur certain aspects are understandable.
I mean, if in your team composition you bring a ranged career, you lose in survivability and similar things… so it’s fair if a ranged career can bodyshot most specials… it’s his job. Pro and cons.
But ye, lately ranged careers can easily be replaced by more “complete” and tough crowd control careers.
I haven’t made my mind up about everything in this thread, but I hard disagree with this. That some situations are going to be very hard for certain builds is perfectly fine, but automatic no-win situations regardless of skill just plain suck.
I’m fine with careers like BH 1 shotting specials as BH has significant weaknesses and generally relies on a Blessed Shot to do this. Issues start appearing when careers like WHC can also bodyshot specials. The overlap results in ranged careers only being justfiable if they bring truly insane range dps, which is bad direction for the game to go imo.
A good example is Huntsmen and Merc. Huntsmen is rarely chosen over Merc, yet Huntsmen has a fantastic kit, great build diversity and incredibly high sustained ranged dps. But Merc is also way safer, provides way more team support, doesn’t have any issues with ammo sustain and can still reach similar and often the same bodyshot breakpoints (meaning the melee career has enough of the two main advantages of a ranged career - ammo sustain and ranged breakpoints, but with more safety).
The automatic no win would be: Special is at full health, you have no option to stagger it or stealth, you have no allies that can help you, you haven’t got a build specifically for killing specials and you’ve been pinned into a spot with no room to dodge.
It would only take a single one of the above to be false to prevent a fail. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for WHC to 1 shot headshot Packmasters at close range, but bodyshot? That is surely too much.
tbh I think packmasters are sufficiently threatening
90% of the time though that’s because of bugs like silent spawns, spawning right next to the player etc. Take those away and what do you have left? A slow Assassin that likely can’t even grab you if you’re trapped.
If you can reach attack speeds which are half of enemies fastest attack animation (outside of pushes).
If you can headshot on mid and far range with sniping weapons without actually using the RMB aim function.
If you can bodyshot Stormvermin without much investment on the highest available difficulty.
If you can theoretically never run out of ammo on non-ranged careers.
If you can stack crit chance to values of 25 % or higher so that you have insane increase on dps and uptime/activation for crit related talents and traits.
Non of this has to be removed. But it should be reigned in.
No, this is a “Let’s balance stuff against the difficulty.” This is not a PvP game where you can get away with just buffzerking the living **** out of everything. This is a PvE where it is far more important to balance all talents, weapons, traits, etc. against the difficulty the game wants to provide. This is why it is necessary that these things are getting toned down to not further break the game.
I mean it isn’t like conservative shooter only avoids running out of ammo if you headshot all the time. It actually enables you to recover ammonition as well. Take anything with cleave like the obscenely strong crossbow and shoot into an approaching horde and congratulations you have three ammo more than before which you can now spam away.
Well, that’s the point. The devs cannot fix the sounds of specials / backstabbing / footsteps of enemies behind you / specials spawning around a corner one meter away, etc. And until they fix it, talking about the balance of specials without taking this into account is impossible.
Basically even if only half of your ranged shots are headshots you’ll still have some spare ammo by the time you reach the next ammo source on Cata. This is all the ammo the player needs, meaning a single trait choice makes ammo management no longer a relevant concept, simplifying the gameplay.
Alright. I’ve edited the original post with “Provided bugs with specials are fixed.”. Impossible or not, the condition has been added.
Simple change like making Conservative proc only once can fix that, but I don’t really see many players purposely trying to line up hordes tbh
I think that you need to look at the overall picture when comparing these situations. Verm1 had a cap of 3 specials with considerably less noise around them. Hordes were made only of slaves and the ambient was mostly clan rats, with stormvermin few and far between. The gunner himself was a lot slower in cranking the rattling and, if memory serves, less accurate and slower to turn/reposition.
In contrast, in Verm2 Cataclysm specials can come in batches of 5 at a time. Hordes are mixed with elites, the elite density is far greater in the overall ambience and elites themselves are way more dangerous. Speaking only of Skaven, you have running attacks on stormvermin with halberds, you have stormvermin with shields that can mitigate your attacks and you have packs of plague monks on top. Also, the gunners here shoot almost instantly once they are in position and generally have a lot more cover and distractions going for them.
When comparing the two pictures, you can see why a 1shs demand is more than reasonable in the first situation, but I’d say that for specific weapons it needn’t necessarily be the case in the second one.
If you look at the handmaiden with a longbow for example, if you aren’t running Focused Spirit and Enhanced Power you need an investment of three properties (10% Skaven and 20% Infantry) in order to 2sbs all specials with a charged arrow. The sole exception is the assassin, which falls in the 1sbs range. And you have only 20 arrows to work with if you don’t pick Quiver of Plenty, which isn’t much in a Cataclysm game where specials can come in bundles of 5 and maybe you won’t land a perfect streak of headshots to conserve ammo.
With this example in mind, the support power creep issues that you mention aren’t too much of a concern in my opinion, because they are completely out of your control. Having a Witch Hunter Captain and the tag prepared, a Grail Knight with the right duty rolled and being in range of an Engineer’s aura constitute quite a lot of “ifs” in a game where the party is made of 4 players and the only things that you can control most of the time are how you kit your character and how you play. Of course that there is a lot to say for many careers and builds, but my point is that the “issue”, if any at all isn’t global, and applying a global fix may needlessly hamstring gameplay options that aren’t overpowered by any stretch of the imagination.
yeah that’s fair
although I think weapon rats rn in V2 are a bit on the weak side of things; warpfires in particular struggle to mean much of anything outside visual clutter
I agree, the only time warpfires feel threatening is if I’m already at low health or in conjunction with assassins, hookrats or monks/zerkers. (Simply blinding me as other enemies attack)
Half the time they don’t even damage me even though I’m getting directly sprayed.
I can’t agree with this part
I’m assuming this will be how Versus will be balanced
Since getting 1-shot by everything including autoaim ults isn’t much fun
I hope they will balance the hero careers around Versus and not the special health, L4D Versus worked so well because you were at risk of one shot most of the time but your respawn times were fairly short.
They could limit WS ult to one arrow only or something, but this is all Versus balance talk so unrelated to the thread.
Understandable speech, but I think it’s a little bit more complicated… because yep, Huntsman has really few space compared with Merc… but imo, even if Huntsman is far from being a trash career, he would need a rework/some love.
For example, if we compare BH and WHC, two careers among the strongest ones, BH keeps a solid advantage… even if, yep: probably ranged careers are going to be overshadowed by versatile crowd control ones.
Ranged careers need a revisit in general, I wouldn’t say nerfs or buffs but just changes.
Huntsman is probably the least in need of a rework. RV, BH and WS are a toss up imo.
Non ranged careers being able to compete at special sniping could be something to look over.
Ranger Veteran’s Survivalist special scaling may also be problematic; I rag on it a lot for being mediocre to trash in lower difficulties but it also goes the other way. With enough specials survivalist can potentially turn non ranged careers into jacked up ranged careers, most notable being Merc/FK with blunderbuss or WHC/Zealot.
Should something like that exist?
To me this is a pretty core part of the issue. People complain about ranged classes deleting hordes with their ranged weapon, but when most of the melee classes compete so well on special sniping what role do we honestly expect ranged careers to fill? What roles are really available to them?
The way I see it the potential roles of a ranged class can be:
And obviously their role can be some combination of these. However, point 1, which is arguably the most important one to the success of a run, can be handled just fine with melee classes, who also get a myriad of other advantages over ranged classes. I think this is a big part of why AoE weapons seem to feature so high in the ranged meta. If everyone’s a competent special sniper, what are you left with other than just trying to pump out as much general DPS as possible?
This leaves us in a very dangerous situation where the only way to make ranged classes competitive is give them access to infinite ammo and pretty damn high ranged DPS options.
This is a pretty extreme suggestion I know, but I’d honestly be pretty fine with all ammo generation, including weapon traits being available only to ranged careers, then rebalancing ranged careers to have less AoE options and more focused on special sniping. Now to be clear I’m not genuinely advocating for such a change, mostly because it would be too much work to rebalance at this late stage.
I do think FS have shot themselves in the foot by making melee classes such competent special snipers. It makes balancing ranged careers properly feel like a borderline impossible task sometimes.
Not exactly a ranged vs melee career ammo sustain in this case but mostly because Kruber is an excellent frontliner.Having a Kruber slot taken by his ranged variant feels like a “waste” so to speak.