It certainly fell short of the hopes for it. There are reasons for that, but that’s an entirely different debate, and probably getting into off-topic territory anyway.
Not really. The nerf bat is the lazy ‘get rid of fun’ tool and used to knock everything that stands out down, which is itself bad design, (Might be better described as wack-a-mole game balance) which … and so the dominos fall.
The chainsword needed to suck to preserve the hatchet and the shovel, and the hatchet needed to be in game to ‘preserve the vt2 experience’ which is the kind of thing a lightbulb salesman who wanted to sit at the cool kids table says in creative meetings when he should be out buying advertising.
I’ve seen that stage of the creative process in person, and it’s ugly.
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VT has a long track record of NOT nerfing weapons that desp needed to be nerfed for years. And at the same time nerfing ones already under used and under powered
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Nice points
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Nerfing requires a solid knowledge of the systems, and a good understanding of the players and how they use the items in question. So far, FS have given me no reason to believe they have the requisite skills for the tasks they undertake.
Yowzers! Spicy. Eloquently put.
Very nice, sir.
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To remove meta’s to encourage other choices.
To remove playing with people on meta, when you’re off meta, that steam roll the whole game and ruin the experience for you.
In a perfectly balanced game every choice should have some drawbacks or consequences.
Part of the “never nerf” crowd may just prefer a power fantasy over the challenge. A difference in feeling. A reject struggling to survive, overcoming difficult challenges… or a demi-god slaughtering everyone in joyous glee.
I personally like challenge. I like tough choices. I don’t want to feel like I got my cake and have eaten it too. Or to feel like like of the list of choices in front of me, one is the obvious and superior one.
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I feel powerful when I overcome powerful challenges.
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I get it’s a horde game, but I’m looking for two things;
1 - Large hordes that are fodder. This is the fun bit, the glee, razing them to the ground.
2 - Specials and Elites that require a more thoughtful, tactical approach.
And on 2 - what I want are things like weakspots, a particular slowness in movement or attack, maybe mixed armour types, susceptibility to a weapon type, or … just basically some element that I can exploit.
Problem is right now: you just take the biggest gun you can get and mow every enemy until they drop. Or you take (ironically) the smallest hand weapon with broken blessing and trivialise it.
It’s become a bit of a war of attrition, where the {best weapon} > {the best enemy}, until eventually we need a nerf so that it’s a challenge again… until a new meta appears and the cycle repeats.
I think hordes are immaterial right now. They should probably be tougher so that if you get swarmed, you’re out of there. Get your back to the wall, get some team mates. At the mo - that’s not needed and I think that’s a missed opportunity. Maybe cleave is to blame? Cleave might be too high.
And Elites and specials are just spammed by the AI. That massively devalues them, and as a side-check, it’s actually breaking the game: sound cues, instant spawn through door, packs of mutants and 8 crushers rocking up etc.
So on nerfing weapons: yeah it is needed. But it should be better communicated so people can see it coming. And it also needs the crafting system to change so you don’t lose xx hours/days of grind overnight.
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There’s a couple of middle grounds. First, you might want epic power, and epic opposition. Superman vs another of his own people would be a clash of titans, even if you can also call it a ‘balanced conflict.’
Second, there’s logic. Weapons and classes should perform in a logical way for what they say they are. A pump-action shotgun shouldn’t be balanced in any respect with a muzzle loading shotgun, it should do the same job better in every way, a direct improvement. A game dev would make the muzzle loading shotgun of the same bore and load hit 100 times harder. That’s illogical, but you see it all the time with .308 sniper rifles and .308 belt fed machine guns.
The same should be true for the top end of the Imperium’s purpose built highend melee weapons over tools forced into the job like a shovel or even a combat/utility knife. IF you put those in at all, they either should be progressed past or be considered a handicap.
A guy in a speedboat with a .45 shouldn’t be able to take a battleship because he’s more maneuverable and it’s therefore ‘balanced.’
But you know that.
I think that’s fair but there’s a lot of “game logic” in… Well. Games.
A lot of our skills and blessings don’t make any sense at all. I am fine forsaking some logic for balance and fun. Like pressing “e” and immediately storing ammo and crafting on the ground while running. Not stopping to pick it up, sling your back pack down, open it, store the item, zip your back pack back up, and continue moving slinging it over your shoulder kinda deal.
The issue with power is it’s relative. You can’t feel more powerful unless you’re more powerful compared to something. Enemies or other players.
Cleave system needs a rework in term of power it gives to players
Plasma gun and revolver are great example, but also CA by example.
I did not say that I would like no cleave however… but, by example, the plasma gun should cleave through anything, but any body hit should have an impact and the beam that should stop cleaving after killing the equivalent of its power of destruction.
For revolver, I like the idea of a falloff in damages… so a weapon for close combat.
Anyways, cleave system is clearly the culprit for a lot of problems. And still, I would hate that my axe would not cleave…
I would really like to see the Kant XII get a radically increase overpen against soft targets. Ideally, they could take their existing system with flak and carapace and unarmored and just apply that direct, with pox being extra low on the scale.
Flak could say, be overpenned by plasma but not laser, laser could overpen soft but not flak, and take several shots to soften carapace.
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Those weapons are quite strong in terms of dmg but I don’t really care. I don’t even use them myself. In T5 Maelstrom I’ve never seen a single one of them hard carry. When they get enough pressure, they all die. No guns can outkill the amount of enemies this difficulty throws at you. If you don’t know how to kite, you’ll eventually die. And 99% of ppl play do or die anyways. So it doesn’t really matter.
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You may be right. I admit I don’t play maelstrom, except from time to time.
Having to play the most difficult mode to just be able to play is not the solution… especially if you become an handicap for your team.
I can play maelstrom, but I don’t need that… Auric is sufficient for me, and even normal damnation (where you always meet 1 or 2 players that are clearly in wrong difficulty level) is good enough for me.
Plasma and revolver need really a nerf…
But, as we see that they revamp their system a long time after the game was released, then I would prefer that they revise the cleave system.
This is the most insane take I’ve ever seen on balance.
Something is an OP outlier, so your solution is to change the entire game to fit that thing.
I should really copy this down somewhere:
- The game is coop, 1 person soloing everything removes gameplay for others
- Buffing all other builds takes more effort than just nerfing one
- The Weapons aren’t implemented in the most balanced state. There’s usually a period of “lets see how this does” where it’s usually changed
- The game and builds should and will not be balanced around the build you want to be OP (unless you make a YT tier list calling the most broken things mediocre)
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Welcome to w40k, where we waste entire planets with the population of a million Earths because of one demon summoning got out of hand.
But actually, yeah. Players are ALWAYS going to find what’s good. The laziest thing a dev can do is to wack-a-mole anything good until everything sucks.
And we’ve seen it in game after game. We should almost look to make a law that nerfs can get you a refund ten years later.
Lazy lazy lazy. IF it sucks, take it out of the game and leave the good. Taking out the good and leaving the crap is honestly a metaphor for so many things, and it has no place in fantasy escape.
It’s the worst possible solution every single time, the laziest, and sadly, the easiest.
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It’s not lazy it’s common sense.
You have a baseline of balance across 94 Weapons and who knows how many Talents, one specific build comes out as too strong, and you nerf it back in line that baseline of balance.
What you don’t do is change the entire game just because of one build. That’s the most absurd suggestion you could make for balance issues.
Again it’s 4 player coop, not 1 guy is OP because it’s fun for him.
If you want to play OP things, you can just play on lower difficulties.
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It’s lazy. We ended up with about 85% junk and a small amount of gold, so what do they do? remove the gold.
Lazy Lazy Lazy.
And if you are running into too many OP guys… you can just play on a lower difficulty so you can keep up. Would be better then ruining the good weapons.
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Irrelevant to Weapon balance.
Doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
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im still waiting for chainsword to not feel like trash again
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