EXPLANATION OF CHANGES:
Ultra-Rare Weapon Weight Range Changes:Ultra-rare weapons, and particularly promotional weapons, are infamously difficult (or even impossible in the case of promotional weapons) to fully level up. While this is part of the drive to keep on progressing, the fact remains that weight is such a barrier to entry for so many builds that many players can't really make much use of many black card weapons if they "only" have them at 2 or 3. I suggest narrowing the weight range of ultra-rare weapons in order to make them more accessible to players with lower ranks, while still maintaining a serious incentive to progress (a considerable damage boost, extra capacity, and a smaller weight range still grants weight improvements). With this change, players would feel rewarded right off the bat and would be able to put weapons like the Wraith into use right away, whereas currently the Wraith is a rare sight because its primary advantage, weight, takes so many ranks to manifest.
This change does not buff the weights of any fully levelled weapons. The only weapon which received an actual weight decrease in our changes was the Crusader. The Valiant, Indra, Hurricane, Eagle, and Talon actually got nerfs to their minimum weights.
Weapon Balance Changes!-The
Krysae Sniper Rifle can no longer kill shielded Gold enemies in one shot when wielded by a Geth Infiltrator. Its effectiveness on non-Infiltrators has not been affected.
- The
N7 Hurricane is no longer capable of being levelled up to be extremely light, and its max weight has been slightly increased. This weapon shreds; it doesn't need to be able to become lighter than the Carnifex.
- The
Talon's minimum weight has been increased back to its pre-buff value, but its maximum weight has been decreased. The Talon is already the highest damage pistol and deserves to have the same minimum weight as the Paladin. However, like most ultra-rares, we have made it more accessible at lower ranks.
- The
Javelin can now kill a Cannibal with one body shot in the hands of any character with at least a 7.5% damage bonus. Still super heavy though.
- In addition to being 10% more damaging, the
Disciple now fulfills a unique role as an "anti-Phantom sidearm." In order for switching to a lightweight sidearm to really be worth it in this game (with its long weapon switching times), said sidearm needs to really accomplish something unique from the primary weapon. In this case, many weapons struggle to get past the Phantom's "hand of denial."
- Some have described the
N7 Crusader as a heavy Paladin. As a result, we didn't really think that simply nerfing the weight would be a good idea... too much competition with the niche of the Paladin and Saber. Instead, we opted to make it hit even harder and have only a slight weight decrease, turning it into a deadly run and gun Black Widow for classes that can take the weight like the Human Soldier or Krogan Sentinel.
- The
N7 Eagle got a damage buff, but it can no longer become as light as the Phalanx.
- We felt that
the gun that killed two presidents needed at least a 30% damage upgrade. This would still leave it with less burst damage output than a Phalanx as well as various other disadvantages (no piercing mod, 5% heavier, less accurate, more damage loss against armor, et cetera). However, it now has slightly more sustained damage than a Phalanx.
- We are planning to go over Common and Uncommon weapons, but are focusing on the Rare and Ultra-Rare weapons first. We are also planning to have a Geth Pulse Rifle and Geth Plasma SMG damage increase.
Sniper Rifles!All sniper rifles save the Krysae have had their damage increased by 15% (20% for the Javelin) alongside a 15% reduction to Tactical Cloak's sniper rifle damage multiplier, keeping the effectiveness of sniper Infiltrators the same but making sniper rifles more competitively viable for other classes. This also effectively nerfs the Krysae in the hands of sniper infiltrators just enough so that it doesn't one-shot shielded Gold mobs, while not affecting its potency in the hands of any other characters.
Vanguards!There's a lot of division regarding Vanguards. Some say they deserve an instant kick and do nothing but charge off to their doom, while others claim that they're invincible. I say that neither of these paradigms are true. The Human Vanguard may have invincibility frames, but it carries with it a lot of risk. It's vulnerable to staggers, stray rapid fire shots sneaking in between its invincibility frames, and most notable of all they are extremely vulnerable to sync kills, which are more important than any other form of damage because they immediately and irrevocably remove a player from a wave. And while they are powerful and have useful tools, they struggle for relevance in the current metagame. It has been said that Vanguards are excellent tanks, but they are tanks that require a high level of skill to use effectively (evidenced by the infamous Vanguard death rate). However, let's think about what that means... in a team of skilled players, tanking isn't terribly necessary or helpful in this game, and for less skilled players, well, they can't really use the Vanguard effectively, so instead they opt for things like the Salarian Engineer which make it very simple to hold down a flank indefinitely to make up for the slow rate at which they and their teammates deal damage and clear enemies. So tanking just isn't enough. They also are good at triggering combos... but most classes are good at triggering combos on their own and they don't really offer any force multipliers to detonations or anything. So we thought Vanguards could use a little bit of love (though only a little, we think Vanguards are pretty awesome) when it comes to their other intended role... being highly mobile close quarters attack dogs who walk a tightrope of risk vs reward in order to do some serious damage (something they're readily outclassed at by characters like Geth Infiltrators or Drell Adepts. Nova just isn't that damaging). We also think there's room for a bit more depth too (after all, people complain about "two button spam").
With the changes I've suggested here, a number of options open up for Vanguards. By mixing improved melee and improved charge synergy into their attack patterns, Human Vanguards are under even more pressure to keep up the chain of attacks in order to maximize their damage potential, further emphasizing their dynamic of risk vs reward and giving them a chance for more weapon or power damage. With the changes to Sustain and Biotic Charge's Evolution 5 (options that, previously, were almost never taken over the 100% damage bonus and 100% barrier recharge), the option of "Gambler" Vanguards that need to pay attention and dynamically react to random changes in the attack patterns available to them opens up.
The new Biotic Charge evolution 5 also allows players to emphasize the Vanguard's trademark dynamic of risk vs reward on other classes, too. For example, Krogan Vanguards can sacrifice some of their invincibility by giving up the 100% barrier recharge feature in order to have a fair chance of being able to detonate their Barrier (or use Carnage) immediately after a charge, giving them some extra crowd control and offensive potential at the expense of durability. Ex-Cerberus Vanguards also benefit, if one's bold enough to make them even more squishy.
Anyways, the only thing that's purely a buff is the modest increase to biotic charge's weapon/power synergy. The rest are supposed to bring up underused build options like Sustain or melee Fitness.
Melee!For the vast majority of characters, skipping over melee Fitness is a no-brainer choice. Choosing it is a large character building resource sink, comes at the direct opportunity cost of shields and health alongside encouraging you to put yourself in unsafe situations, and the payoff just isn't worth it. We don't like that, so one of our biggest changes that we've spent a lot of time and discussion on is rebalancing melee Fitness to be an attractive choice for many more characters than it was before.
- Human Soldiers: Their melee is slow, but with Adrenaline Rush melee boost and a Bayonet they can pick off the occasional straggler Nemesis or Cannibal for a quick melee synergy boost. Their extra shield gate can help to mitigate the risk, but it's still definitely not safe compared to having shield fitness and running around with a hardened shield restore adrenaline rush shooting all day in the open without a care in the world.
- Turian Soldiers: They have a fast and damaging melee attack (though not as much as their Sentinel cousins) and weapon synergy is more meaningful to them than anyone else because Marksman works as a force multiplier, and as such they can effectively do the most single target damage. Of anybody. Neat! Of course, they have trouble with survivability (low "true" health/shields, not speccing for Fitness, no roll, no great survivability tools to speak of compared to pretty much any other class), but they have a powerful offense for those who can play them as aggressively as possible. Their melee also helps them out against Phantoms, which their oft-favored automatic weapons struggle to deal with.
- Human and Turian Sentinels: With their fast melee attacks and bonus melee damage option from Tech Armor, I feel the nudge in damage and synergy opens up options for these guys and will see more players considering melee over power damage... and in turn boosting weapon damage. Additionally, their Tech Armor mitigates the loss of Fitness. On the other hand, Sentinels will be starved for those 6 points to invest in melee Fitness, because there aren't any powers they really want to give up (applies more to Human Sentinels than Turian Sentinels).
- Human Adepts: Did you know that Human Adepts have an area melee attack that does piddly damage and some force? Well they do! And with the newly buffed version alongside the buffed Singularity, they can finish off enemies lifted by Singularity for a quick Weapon Synergy... which combines well with the Warp debuff if you're willing to give up points in Throw, Singularity, or Training... and deal with having only 500/500 health.
- Asari: Asari are another race that don't like to give up points for Fitness at all (Stasis, Warp, Throw, Biotic Charge, and Lift Grenades are all Nice Things), and even if they did, well, they have their squishiness to consider. On top of that, their melee is super-slow and super-risky and barely does more damage than other, faster area melee attacks. Asari are squishy (except for Justicars) and melee fitness makes them MORE squishy and using heavy melee leaves you fairly defenseless. As such, we felt that the Asari melee could really use some extra oomph.
Asari Vanguards can follow up an area charge with melee, Asari Justicars can blast weakened enemies walking into an offensive bubble while remaining fairly safe with her damage reduction, and Asari Adepts can finish off stasised enemies reduced to health for a synergy bonus, now having just enough oomph to be able to one-shot unshielded Cerberus mobs with a proper spec and martial artist activated.
- Infiltrators: Not too much has changed other than Weapon Synergy being more meaningful for non-Geth Infiltrators. Notably, only Human Infiltrators get Weapon Synergy (good news for Kasumi fans... try making a human female Infiltrator with the buffed Cryo Blast and a full melee spec! Throwing Cryo Blast at melee range also can free up points spent on Bonus Power and prevent enemies from being able to dodge it). Geth Infiltrator melee damage works out to be about the same and the weapon synergy buff does little for them. We felt that Geth melee was pretty much fine as is... it's still fairly situational and it isn't so good that good players like Sp3c7eR aren't considering taking shield fitness over it. In fact, I feel it is an example of a case where the Fitness tree is actually fairly well balanced.
- Krogans: Because they should smash things even more. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. Really though, I'm serious... there's not far too much point to taking Fortification and meleeing on Gold instead of just tossing Inferno Grenades to your heart's content and setting off explosions with Carnage, other than the occasional Phantom, a slight buff wouldn't hurt. And that's just what it is... slight. Perhaps the most meaningful thing is that they're under a bit less pressure to melee all the time, because the rage window is lengthened a bit.
- Batarians: We wanted to help the investment in Blade Armor look more attractive to compete with the Batarians who run around nuking spawns with double stunlock blades and inferno grenade spam. With this change, A Batarian with full Blade Armor and full melee spec can one-shot a Marauder with martial artist on. They can also one-shot a Pyro with
either a melee amp or a bayonet, and with both they can do it without Martial Artist. Along with a little extra damage reduction, they can very reliably get the buffed weapon synergy bonus.
- Engineers: Probably still not terribly viable on Engineers sadly, but I didn't want to buff Infiltrator melee attacks much (I think they share the same ini entries. Not sure though). Overload lockdown or the last straggler on a decoy may provide opportunities for picking up melee synergy, though.
- Human and Drell Vanguards: With improved Weapon Synergy on both biotic charge and melee, Human and Drell Vanguards have even more incentive to keep up the pressure and break up the spam with a variety of different kinds of attacks chained together, knowing when to use what to keep their damage potential maximized and making their moment to moment choices of risk vs reward even more meaningful than before.
Powers!-
Tactical Cloak This change accomplishes a few things. First, it makes the Evolution 1 Duration option more attractive (after all, who doesn't take the 40% damage bonus from Evolution 2 instead?) by moving some over Evolution 2's damage into the base damage bonus and by making the difference in duration much more notable.
Secondly, this change emphasizes the old ME1 style paradigm of choosing between being an Agent or a Commando. You can choose to
either be able to run around with Cloak all you want, capping objectives, reviving teammates, and comfortably taking your time to maneuver, or you can go for maximum damage at the expense of utility. The base cooldown was changed to make the cooldown in practice even out with the new duration (since cooldown is linked to percentage of duration used up, and the duration is shorter. Thanks to Kronner for figuring out how to adjust the cooldown to compensate).
Third, Evolution Rank 6 now adds a 1.25x sniper rifle damage multiplier rather than 1.4x. However, at the same time, most sniper rifles have been buffed 15%, causing things to more or less even out and at the same time making sniper rifles more competitively viable for non-Infiltrator characters. The exception to this is the Krysae, which hasn't gotten a buff, and as such does less damage on Infiltrators than it used to (and can no longer one-shot shielded mobs on Gold).
The change to the melee damage bonus evolution simply compensates for Fitness being buffed, since we didn't feel Infiltrators needed much more melee damage, particularly with melee synergy being buffed.
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Fitness Everyone's got Fitness, but for so many characters, the melee tree is hardly even worth considering. You need to invest a lot into melee to get the most out of it (a mod slot, a melee amp 3, constantly trying to keep up limited time bonuses like martial artist, spending a lot of points in Fitness, and taking melee damage bonus options for other skills, for starts) and this comes at the direct cost of your survivability even before you consider how risky melee is simply by virtue of being a slow point blank attack that seriously punishes whiffs. We've aimed to change that by increasing the bonuses (particularly its weapon/power synergy aspect) and increasing the base damage of melee attacks. See the "Melee!" section for more details.
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Singularity I've basically turned Singularity into a death sentence for unshielded and unarmored enemies. With a larger radius, Singularity provides improved reliability and crowd control. With an improved lift duration and improved damage evolution, enemies take significantly more damage (sometimes having their health bars removed entirely by Singularity) and are more likely to be affected by the Detonate function... which on top of the improved damage over time will kill most unshielded enemies. With the decreased singularity duration, the Detonate evolution becomes more useful (since it comes into play after 10 seconds rather than 25). Incidentally, this new version of Singularity (hopefully, not quite sure on the physics, must test) synergizes with Lash and Smash, allowing you to set up your own little killzones. Grab shielded enemies with lash, fling them into the Singularity, and let it hold them there and whittle away their health. If things get close, detonate everything with Smash! And of course you get the occasional bonus detonation. It also synergizes with the Human Adept's area of effect heavy melee.
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Pull Like Singularity, Pull has become a death sentence for unshielded and unarmored enemies. We mostly have focused on improving Evolution 1 and Rank 5 and 6 options, however, since many people already find 4 ranks with Evolution 2 worthwhile. With evolution 4, Pulled enemies will simply die on their own. With evolution 5, you can trivially finish them off at your leisure while using them to set up biotic bombs. With evolution 6, cooldown is very fast even with heavy weapons, allowing you to get right back to biotic charging or throwing Reave or whatever, but this competes with the +50% detonation evolution option and is diminished by the fact that Pull already has a very fast cooldown.
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Combat Drone and Sentry Turret We feel these powers could stand to have rather significant buffs, but we haven't determined exactly what those buffs should be yet. One of the issues here is that I don't have all the information I feel I need... like what the "rate of fire" is for the sentry turret's gun, for example.
Update: We now have this information and should be posting suggested changes for these powers soon.
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Energy Drain and Overload Engineers could use some love, especially in the face of the new and amazing Male Quarian Engineer, or when compared to the other guys who regularly make tech bursts... Infiltrators. This change simply greases the wheels by allowing Energy Drain and especially Overload to combo into other powers for a self-created tech burst more easily, allowing Engineers some extra leeway for maneuvering, range, or weapon choices.
The change to Energy Drain does little to benefit Salarian Infiltrators since their effective recharge speed is principally determined by the cloak cycle, and they can't cloak-->ED-->cloak-->PM fast enough to trigger a tech burst. They still rely on following up disruptor ammo shot with ED or PM (or having team mates set things off) for tech bursts.
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Submission NetThis power is unique to an underperforming class, the Batarian Sentinel. As it is, this power has often been referred to as a "ghetto stasis." Stasis is instant and affects multiple targets with its bubble (as well as reliably affecting Phantoms without having to set a trap ahead of time, giving it its most important usage) and sets up biotic combos for good measure, and is added onto an already useful chassis (Warp/Throw or Biotic Charge/Lift Grenade).
With the improvements to Submission Net, it offers better crowd control and more damage, focusing on aspects that make it unique from Stasis.
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Cryo BlastThis power doesn't offer a whole lot compared to its competitors like Warp and Proximity Mine, and the classes that have it are generally recognized as inferior to their most direct competitors (such as Human Infiltrators vs Geth Infiltrators or Male Quarian Infiltrators).
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Incinerate The only place I've actually really liked using this power is on the Male Quarian Engineer, and even then, well... it's directly competing with Tactical Cloak (since the Male Quarians are copies of each other with only one power slot different), and therefore probably has a little room to grow for the sake of improving the FQE, SE, and HE. But only a little!
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Biotic Charge and Nova See the "Vanguards!" section for more details. Anyways, Sustain had little to offer over a +100% bonus to damage against most defense types, and extra power had such a low proc rate that it was rarely taken over a 100% barrier restore if people dropped 6 skill points into rank 6 at all. The change to synergy, on the other hand, serves to give the Vanguards a little bit more teeth when they pop up in an enemy's face, giving them a bit more reward for their risk.
Modifié par GodlessPaladin, 29 juin 2012 - 04:01 .
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