It seems that barrage no longer is engaged if you just land consecutive hits. Now one needs to hit the same target indeed to get stacks. This makes it pretty much useless against anything but bosses, because everything else goes down either pretty quickly or those few percent more dmg usually don’t help much anyway (Stormvermin dies from 2 shots anyway - and it is not really viable to shoot him with drakefire pistols anyway, barrage or not, chaos warrior takes serious head clobbering, maulers maybe?).
Before I could just spam drakefire pistols at crowd and get 5 stacks pretty quickly. Now I can only get stacks vs horde via shotgun mode (because it doesn’t 1-shot anything but slaverats).
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I was under the impression that Barrage was always supposed to be against the same target and that hitting multiple targets was the buggy part.
Yeah, the direct description says same targets. Has it worked differently than that?
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Yes, all it required you to do was to shoot enemies I guess of the same armor class consecutively. Now you have to really hit the same target, making it another useless trait.
Fatshark continues the idiotic policy of “crit builds = best builds” because yet another non-crit reliant trait is now useless. Same thing happened to parry, Sigmar bless its soul.
It’s too bad, because I enjoyed the dmg boost it gave my Ironbreaker, start SS with axe, shoot faster with pistols, score barrage stacks, switch to axe, get SS again. It was fun and required some weapon management, which added a bit of spice to the rather bland IB gameplay.
Well, I’m not sure that this is a problem.
So… the trait description is now accurate. Good! That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You were leveraging a bug to your advantage, which is good (because we all should), but I don’t think it’s a problem that they fixed it 
I agree that crit-builds are very strong right now, but I don’t think “The Meta” should be involved with FatShark being true to their word.
Well, there were several trait descriptions that were inaccurate, and guess what - Fatshark simply fixed descriptions! Yes, it can be THAT easy.
If you consider description to be more important than trait viability, then I guess our priorities are way different.
Anyway, we went from having a decent alternative to crit build scrounger, to mostly useless. It’s sad, but shows that for FatShark there is one priority - to shoehorn everyone into +crit builds, because they are simply A LOT more effective than any others, because +crit works with the most useful and effective traits, with the single exception of conservative shooter.
Fatshark needs to start handing out 5% crit talents as a replacement for more useless talents as an option if they really wanna push towards crit meta(damage reduction when solo/downed, HP regen when monster dies, THP when reviving players). For careers that already have native crit and crit talent as an option (over att speed), just give them another 5% crit free! Crits all around!
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Hey, man, I think it’s great that they are just getting everything in line. Whether it is trait to description or description to trait…
In most cases, I think they changed descriptions not because “They are viable and we want to keep it that way”, but because “The way it works is the way we intended it to and we are clarifying the description”.
That being said, I don’t think it’s destructive of them to make it do what they intended it to. I don’t disagree that crits are very good right now (because they absolutely are) 
Our priorities are certainly different, but that’s okay! I get that you want more things operating on the same tier; I’m just saying that not every move they make has to be towards that goal.
The point is, don’t give me options if you want me to play a specific way.
If I tasked you to daVinci me a master piece and I hand you 3 crayons of different color. The balance is that all three are crayons and you select ONE color of your liking. As opposed to if I gave you the option to select from a rock, a piece of cheese or a Sharpie.
I hate the illusion of “choice” in regards to optimal loadout, unless I specifically CHOOSE to hinder my ability to play. In which case, were I given the choice in a vanilla challenge, I’d choose white weapons and DE-select all talents, and try and run through Legendary. I’ve done that before in V1 using only vanilla weapons and no trinkets, but that’s a choice I made not because it’s effective.
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I don’t deny that this is certainly a rut that many things fall into, but I think we (as players) underestimate the ability to make things truly balanced without making 5 of the same ability. Things can get very complicated very quickly.
Look at all the factors we have to consider when thinking of a trait/ability/weapon:
- Damage
- Damage vs Armored
- Damage vs Monster
- Attack Speed
- Critical Hit Chance
- Critical Hit Damage
- Movement Speed
- Health Maximum
- Health Regeneration
- Healing Potency
- Damage Reduction
- Ammo Replenishment
- Ammo Bank
- Reload Speed
- Range
- Potion Duration
- Potion Potency (flat or percentage?)
- Cooldown
Can we ever firmly say that 1 trait won’t be at least a little bit better than another in most situations? If Trait A yields 95% but Trait B yields 97%, Trait B will be used for practically everything.
Again, I totally agree, but unless they make traits super situational, it will be remarkably hard to bring more than 1-2 traits even close to one another.
Moreover, that is a bit different than my point about whether or not it is alright for FatShark to update the ability. They are within their right, regardless of trait balancing. They are two different issues that need not be addressed side by side.
Meta is meta in all games for sure. A lot of ppl praise the spear/halberd. I’ve seen very talented players make excellent use of them. However I personally dislike the style it brings. V1 did it right by NOT having pseudo RPG stats and just giving a set of tools to players and let them figure out what works best for them. I would have much preferred that it remained that way in V2. I’ve seen lots Salts players be master fencers with the rapier but I for the life of me just hate it and suck at it. So I go axe/sword and just Conan everything, finesse be damned!
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Preach it, brother!
And I agree that style/preference is a very important part of a game that offers you this sort of choice. I preferred twin-swords on Kerillian for a long time but got made fun of so much that I had to switch. I really just wanted to play like a Wardancer would, but was scolded hard enough that I haven’t touched them since launch.
My hope is that other traits will come into balance soon so that we can all play the game our way and not have to worry about ‘Meta’ or not.
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ALL I WANTED IN V2 FROM THE START… was Wardancer as a CAREEERRRR ;_;
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Making a symmetrical or near-symmetrical game (i. e. one where each side acts the same or nearly so, like Chess, older RTSs or such) a balanced one is easy. After all, a perfectly symmetrical one is inherently balanced, and a near-symmetrical only needs small aspects balanced (like advantage of a starting move). Balancing an asymmetrical game (one where each side, character or whatever performs in different ways, for example fighting games or the more modern RTSs) is very hard unless there are some pretty strong, unbreakable default mechanics built in.
If balancing games and what goes into it interests you, I recommend looking at David Sirlin’s writings about it.
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It’s very interesting that you mention the symmetry of gameplay. I’ve thought about that for a while and wondered what the term for it might be, but that’s a great way of putting it.
I’ve not heard of them, but I’d love to take a look at it! I’ve been a dev for a few years now and worked pretty tirelessly on my homebrew settings for D&D to try and perfect fun magic items, zones, and monsters without absolutely shattering the core gameplay and become pretty successful.
I can’t wait to dig into them! Thanks for the tip!
There are several possible gameplay mechanics, that would allow us to escape crit meta:
- traits activated on headshot
- traits activated on charged shot/strike
- traits activated on block
- traits activated on push
- traits activated when drinking potions
- traits activated when out of stamina
- traits activated via using parry window
- traits supporting “standard” game mechanics - f.e. blocking - f.e. a parry-like trait for 2h weapons, that instead of reducing block cost to 0, reduces only heavy strike block cost by multiplicatory 60%, but speeds up 2h weapon block significantly and/or staggers hard the attacking enemy.
Crit is pretty horrible because it not only ruins trinkets, but also 2 out of 4 weapon slots on many careers/weapon combos. So we have 0 choice on trinket (cause Curse resist is just THAT good more oftne than not), and only 50% choice with weapons. Doesn’t sound good, doesn’t it?
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I agree. Those are all great things to base traits off of and I’m glad you mentioned them, but that’s not the point I made nor was it the point that started the thread. Should we move to a new one?
My argument was that patching the trait made it work as intended, which I believe is okay because they weren’t trying to affect the Critical Hit system, they were trying to fix a bug. There’s no problems with that IMHO.
I absolutely agree that there are many useful, cool mechanics we can base traits off of to get out of this Critical Hit trend; then again, I don’t particularly mind it, but that’s a different story altogether.
And I believe that it went from being good to being bad, no matter what was “intended”, as the “end user” I’m not really happy with the change, because, well, I’ll just have to go even more +crit to get more dmg and it’s not like IB was particularly powerfull offence-wise anyway.
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And therein you make a good point 
Regardless of the intentions behind the bug-fix, I am sorry to hear you are enjoying it less and that you are irritated with the current state of things.
That being said, I have faith that FatShark will come around and hit us with some good balances at some point 
Yeah, I agree that crit (and Attack Speed) builds are too strong (and easy to arrange, too) at the moment. I’ve mentioned it since the BBB, but I’ve grown to thing tying the Trait activations to crits was a bad idea.
In paper, it sounds nice - tie everything to a single probability that can be manipulated through Properties, Talents and balancing changes. In practice, especially as crits also add Power, they ended up too strong and easy to stack. Also, those same balancing changes make certain aspects almost impossible to balance: Either they proc so often that they’re completely overpowered (when stacked for crit chance), or they’re so limited as to be near-useless even when the chance is stacked. Resourceful Combatant, in particular, has seen both sides of this.
I still think Trait activations should be separated from crits and both balanced separately, turning crit chance into a true balancing tool instead of hampering balancing through the abilities it activates.
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