The new ranged meta - a prediction

Question is, are they actually an issue or solution to and issue?

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Kind of both, but we shouldn’t aim to balance around bugs. In a bugless game, they’d still be an issue in how they negate the difficulty and gameplay of a great many situations.

This is an interesting point, I think. It does indeed seem that for at least some Careers, their ranged options got more weight, and that can certainly take it to be way more effective than melee - which isn’t a particularly good thing in a melee-focused game.

On the other hand, reducing the effectiveness of ranged combat runs a pretty significant danger of making it too weak - the careers that are already strong at range, usually are at a disadvantage in melee, so their more effective option being too weak to be useful would make them significantly disadvantaged.

I see pretty much two options here. One is the situational aspect mentioned by @BizarreSalp just above. If it’s situationally effective, then you can apply it in those situations but reduce your effectiveness in others, inherently limiting its use. For the most part, this is the case already, but some weapon setups are too easily applicable in most situations - Sienna’s Conflagration Staff (for example) deals with hordes magnificently, can stagger (and keep staggered) practically infinite amount of Elites (while still dealing some damage to most of them), and deals with Specials too at least adequately.

The other option, I think, is limiting the frequency they can be used at. For most weapons, this means their ammo; for heat-based ones, it’s their heat generation. For ranged Careers to be able to keep up their ammo infinitely, either by merely shooting more (through the Traits, especially Conservative Shooter nowadays) or through no special effort (like WS has had all the time) means that they can indeed keep shooting all the time and thus rely in their ranged abilities all the time instead of having to fall back to their melee in any but the most tight situations. An interesting part of this could be (in addition to limiting the inherent ammo generation abilities some) to move the ammo generation Traits from ranged to melee, but it has its own problems.

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I think being able to get ammo back via melee is probably a good solution for at least some characters. Go the RPG route where killing enemies gives you stacks, and at enough stacks you get some % of ammo restored. They’re liking stacking buffs now, and I don’t think that’s bad at all. You can, through this method, make various enemies be weighted differently, so that you don’t have to kill x enemies or only elites. If it takes 15 Slave Rats to get enough stacks, it might only take 3 Stormvermin, for example.

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I think I was overthinking the issue. It’s kinda obvious why weapons perform well, AoE weapons have not been impacted by cleave nerf.

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This is something that has occurred many times that I’ve mentioned in the past.

AoE weapons are undoubtedly going to be potent in a game with hordes, but that’s okay. However, enemies stacking up heavily in this game is what makes them even more useful. When enemies just stack so tight, the more AoE or cleave something has, the more powerful it’s going to be. When hyperdensity occurs it makes melee with certain weapons exceptionally challenging and something that helps “even the odds” is going to really shine in that scenario.

When choosing to further the balance of a weapon, obviously it’s important that it’s balanced in the right way. Sometimes changing the damage is the solution. Sometimes stagger. Sometimes ammo. So on and so forth. Fatshark’s design of the game(they mentioned this ages ago) has allowed them to tweak various parts of the game and give them better control on how they can change or balance things. It has given them much more versatility rather than just “changing damage”.

I’m not necessarily advocating for any buffs or nerfs, but rather just pointing out an observation.

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In addition, having entire hordes of enemies that are too dangerous to allow into melee range (gors) doesn’t help the meta either.

Yes, this is one of the main problems in the game right now, and why hordes are so much more dangerous I guess.

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Aye, this is all very true.

If they aren’t going to go the way of skill-based ammo regeneration I’d even say (low) sustain-based would be the way to go, like replace ammo on ult for WS with a different talent and give back the ammo on health regen one (but maybe have it only activate every 2 ticks now or less even, and have it take away health regen if you’re running it).

This would reward people who are tactical about using their ammo and let the ranged careers always have ammo on hand if played carefully, instead of firing them all off and then getting them back a moment later thanks to a talent.

What puzzles me is they got rid of ammo with health regen for WS but then added 30% ammo back when empty on BH if you kill an elite/special and I think 10% ammo per elite/special kill on huntsman. I think that’s due to losing track of their overall vision with talents however, like how they gave huntsman THP on ranged back (despite removing all THP from ranged so many months ago as they deemed it too good).

If they fixed slotting it might alleviate that somewhat. Before it used to be skaven worked best with slotting, you’d often get some standing aside cheering the others on. Chaos and worse yet, their physics bending cloven brethren, largely ignore it.

Relatedly, I often had a similar thought with Legend+ patrols, how one bomb can nuke an entire SV patrol with ease (unlike chaos). I think if SV patrols walked in a spaced out column (as in, you have part of the patrol at the front, the vanguard, then a gap between it and main force, then another gap before the rearguard) one bomb wouldn’t be able to launch them all to the next dimension. It’d also increase the value of fire bombs as the area denial would help to clump up the reinforcements as they circumvent the flames.

(To go a bit more off topic for a moment I’d love it if beastmen patrols had warhorn carriers that, if left unkilled after you aggro the patrol, blow their horns to summon a beastmen ambush in addition to the patrol. That’d make them actually scary unlike they are now. First I think FS needs to balance out the beastmen and fix the bugs surrounding them though)

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Oh come on. A thread to complain about people just shooting things in Cata now? Not even about FF or bad team play, but just shooting things? Even shooting things that need to be shot?

THP on damage would be awesome.
It can be also combined into some middle ground talents - get THP from damage and some additional amount from killing blows.

Why do you theorize that BH, RV and HM will “eat” THP, and call them out specifically, when your team runs Hagsbane and Fireball?

It seems too perfect and coincidental that you randomly call out every ranged-heavy build your team is not using, but fail to call out the worst offenders (literally, the biggest problems when it comes to the overpowered ranged combat).

Hagsbane has been overpowered in theory and in execution since VT2’s inception.
Sienna in general has been busted more often than not since VT2’s inception. Add the “burning enemies deal 30% less damage” talent of Unchained and it just gets dumb.

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About flamethrowers and armor by the way: As it is now (since latest patches) the horde clearing charged shot does very little against armor and elites in both damage and stagger (Stormvermins, for example, can walk right through it, and Berserkers, Monks, Bestigors, and Maulers really do not care at all), while its very heat-expensive uncharged burst has great stagger versus everything but hardly does any damage at all. It is already a very situational weapon that is only really effective in killing unarmored common enemies. Now, those are way more dangerous since 2.0 so flamethrowers are relatively more valuable because of that alone, but they are not really good all-round weapons at all anymore. They leave you very vulnerable vs. specials as well.

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Its not even ranged weapons getting off. Its mass destruction weapons. Why punch 3 rats if you can burn 30 at the same time? Why bother with lengtening the fight, if it safer to kill things faster. And there always would be builds or heroes or weapons that do it better then others.

If melee weapons would become somewhat more efficient than flamethrower, then maybe you ll see melee play.

He doesnt actually output insane damage like daghagshade or infinteburnwizz. By performing well, you mean he is actually somewhat combo of the FK UC and WHC. Control, self damage reduction, team damage reduction, team temp health. And better cleave and critchance on top of that.

Almost same with IB. Crowd control. Insane survivability, self-save frome disablers. Dmg boost for allies. And flamethrower on top of that.

Who else gonna be “true” melee options performing good?
FK? His toolkit is crap.
Handmaiden? There are better choices.
Zealot? Why even bother.
UC? Idk, too inconsistent.
Slayer? What does he even bring to the fight?

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Oh, my bad if this is the case.

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Yikes! Assume negative intent much?

Its because, hagstalker and fireball dont eat temp health on kill as effectively, and that was the point of the sentence. While the other more dedicated elite killers will limit or eliminate the temp health that can be generated in melee by careers that use temp health on kill.

A good BH, huntsman, or RV will literally kill 100 elites a map if that many are spawned. Leaving only trash mobs for thp. Cleave THP is very weak in general (or at least I havent found a very good generator).

Hagstalker and Fireball basically kill the rest, but when it comes to elites a melee at least has a chance to grab the THP from the kill. This is not so with the dedicated elite killers.

This is not to say that a frontline isnt useful. However, its unlikely that Im gonna run Axe+shield and xbow on IB, and just push and taunt all day because it doesnt matter at all if I do damage.

Was that clear enough? Also, the people I play with run whatever they want and succeed. I made this post to make a prediction about what would become meta because I observed a team composition trend in our easiest games, and the community will drift towards whatever is easiest.

I think the problem is not with AoE Ranged weapons. The problem is melee is broken and Ranged is the only reliable way to work around the busted combat system we are now dealing with. If we could have cleave back, and THP back, and the ability to RELIABLY dodge back you wouldn’t be seeing this meta shift to a narrow focus on ranged. If you make more options viable more options will be used.

Any weapons were viable pre 2.0, that is no longer the case. Melee based damage no longer functions at a reasonable level. Combat 2.0 has drastically narrowed what weapons function at Legend.

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Solomon, I’m sorry, but I dont share that experience. I soloed an entire beastman horde today on Cata Dark Omens while my QP team was glitching a minotaur on a little shelf right after the drop down after the initial scrap.

Melee is completely viable when your team isnt annhilating everything at range, its just slower and much more dangerous. Still, its totally viable when you can kill some elites to coverup the chip damage from the horde. Had I had a Bounty Hunter xbowing the bestigors, we would have both died.

Isn’t it their job?

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I think you conceded his point, actually.

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