Blind2Society wrote...
Well, if it did more damage but was harder to use (or vise versa) it wouldn't be better now would it? It would just be different. So what you're saying is, no there shouldn't be a better sniper than the BW, right?
Right. There generally shouldn't be a sniper that's flat-out better than the BW without introducing a fifth rarity tier.That's a pretty tricky issue. I think the BW and Valiant are acceptable upper bounds for balancing new sniper rifles. I'm generally against power creep as a phenomenon, but I do accept that if new content doesn't offer anything beyond novelty stagnation is a risk. Those two black sniper rifles are especially useful as yardsticks because they're so hard to get - if they're the carrot people are chasing, it would be a bad dev move to make a nicer carrot that's easier to get.
Let me break my thinking down a bit more. It's commonly accepted that greater rarity = greater utility, especially if you're on higher tier play. Ex: A Mantis and a Widow headshot equally on Bronze, but the Widow still pops melons on Gold while the Mantis needs all sorts of swag to do the same. So if we accept that maximum rarity = maximum utility, then the black snipers are the obvious choice for determining what the
rough power limit for new sniper rifles should be. BW I believe is a solid generalist; it can do solid damage to single targets and rapidly mop up the little guys so again it's a great yardstick unlike the Javelin which is highly specialized towards hitting single targets. It's not a great idea to balance against the Javelin because the circumstances in which the Javelin's combination of attributes make it the best choice are funky - lots of cover pierce, or maybe a team that utterly melts all shields so you don't have to worry about shield gate?
So yeah - if they want to make a weapon that's better in most situations than a BW at the things a BW does, which is be generally great at everything, it should be a higher rarity than the BW. Such a rarity does not exist yet, so if you want to make a new ultra-rare sniper that has stronger statistics than the BW it should have a smaller niche where it can dominate or some other mechanic that makes it less reliable than the BW's point-and-click simplicity.
In a nutshell: No. No black or lower quality sniper rifle should be as good or better than the BW, a black-quality general-purpose sniper rifle. Definitely not while also being very simple to use. Now, I don't think 'easy to use' should be an excuse to hit any gun with the nerfbat Falcon-style! There's great arguments for easy to use weapons and I strongly support a variety of them existing. Easy to use weapons shouldn't come packaged with the same level of damage as the generalist weapons of the same tier though because then there's no point beyond personal whimsy or a need for 'a challenge' to use the conventional guns.
Hopefully I've laid out the thinking that led to me making that statement fairly logically? In my opinion, new gold-tier SRs should be balanced to be competitive with the same level gold-tier SRs while still being fairly solidly outperformed by the same level black-tier SRs. That way the pre-existing black-tier SRs remain a viable goal for players to strive for while total diversity increases.
Modifié par Talhydras, 02 juin 2012 - 05:49 .
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