Upcoming Balance Changes

[Hannova]

Going to go down the list and critique these individually.



What is the point of this? there's nothing unique about it so you increase pellets (which makes it less accurate at a longer range) and reduce the damage per pellet making the damage stay the same pretty much if you happen to hit with all 12? again, this makes zero sense and does not address the "complaints" and actually ends up being a nerf.

Great idea, this has been needed for a while. Maybe now the vot blaster will be worth using. They still need an increase in range before falloff damage starts kicking in.

Very stupid change. The reason they're out performing other LMGS is because the other LMGS are downright terrible, they need to be completely overhauled. Nerfing the only useful gun in that class range is a dumb idea.

Great idea, if you can fix the seizure inducing effects as well (don't get rid of them, just make them less flashy), then really good.

Great that you're reducing the camera effect. Changing the burst mod is going to hurt immunizers but make the already automatic guns more lucrative. So it'll give me a reason to bring out my invader and canker again, like this idea.

Not sure how I feel about this given that some guns like rarely ever proc and some proc a lot.

About bloody time, how about adding some ammo to them as well?

Which leaves semi-automatic sniper rifles needing an ammo boost, big time.
Other detonators need to be tweaked so they're as useful as the ground pounders.

The devs have read your slightly long and well thought out post and agree: The ground pounder needs a nerf to bring it in line with the other detonators.

[otter]

I will not be buying anymore bits if this Saw nerf is enacted!!!

[lilith]

Get the dame dlc out already and don't nerd saws nobody complains about them. You guy need to get your s!$t together and stop fixing s!$t that doesn't need fixing.

[lilith]

Trion devs are so beyond common sense that I'm starting to fear that it's actually a medical condition...

I don't even use the SAW because it's inferior to other weapons, so nerfing it makes less than no sense. As so many others have pointed out, buff the useless ones instead.

The nano effect is also so incredibly badly thought through that it scares me that anyone who's in theory an intelligent human being can come up with it. If some weapons trigger effects too often, then make those weapons have a lower trigger chance. By adding a 1.5 sec cooldown, Trion manages to do the following:

• Nano effect-based weapons such as the Blast Rifle will become pointless
• Cannoneer synergy will now be massively nerfed to the point where the second set of bonuses is useless
• Effect trigger mags, as if not inferior enough to high cap and reload mags already, will become even more useless
• Insult to injury perk will become useless for many weapons
• This will affect more weapons than trion says. Any efefct trigger within a 1.5 second period will be cancelled out, which means that if an AR normally would have procced at 1 second and 2.4 seconds, then not again until at 10 seconds, it would skip one of few proccs.

The pistol ammo thing? Why the F not just up the ammo pool? It's like they sat down and planned the most annoying way of doing it.

I don't pvp, but I don't see that infector "fix" really fixing anything.

This need to be seen by trion maybe they would see

[chilipino]

Given that there are (as of the start of this reply) 17 pages worth of replies, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that some of these changes aren't going to be well-received :P I'm also going to assume that countless counter-solutions have been proposed. So rather than rehash all of those great ideas/suggestions, I'd like to take a stab at how these changes will affect the trend of a metric that's vital to any multi-player game: Daily Active Users (DAU).

And we all (players and developers) want DAU to trend upwards (or else why even bother to post on these forums, eh?).

• FRC Heavy Scattergun – We have heard the complaints that the current version has nothing really unique about it that makes it a compelling choice. So, we are going back into it and increasing the number of pellets that it fires back up to 12, but dropping the damage per pellet to compensate for that. The overall damage if you hit with every pellet will be about the same as before.

The current issue with the FRC Heavy Scattergun is that it deals the same damage as the FRC Scattergun while having a downside to accuracy. Unless I'm missing something, keeping its overall damage the same will not materially change anything.

Effect on DAU trend: neutral

• Pistols – We are upping the ammo pool and the amount of ammo that you get from enemy drops to help keep some of the higher rate of fire pistols fed. You won’t see more ammo drops from enemies; just the amount of pistol ammo from each drop has gone up.

This makes the pistols weapon category more appealing though I'm not quite sure it'll be enough for non-pistol-using folks to replace their secondary slot.

Effect on DAU trend: neutral to slightly positive

• SAW’s – The SAW weapons (FRC SAW, Frontier SAW and Machinist’s Gun) were all outperforming both other light machine guns and many other weapons. We have lowered the damage on these weapons to bring their overall effective DPS back in line with other weapons.

There needs to be interesting trade-offs among ALL weapons and it takes more time to bring a dozen weapons up than it is to bring one down. Unfortunately, this one weapon is highly popular and it may be the "last straw" for some folks. Balancing is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. It's an activity that requires taking into account the entire system (all weapons, weapon categories, weapon effects, etc.) and is only undermined by spot fixes.

Effect on DAU trend: slightly to moderately negative

• Multi-Projectile Explosives – We are toning down the camera shake that you get from the explosions on the child projectiles. Getting several of these in an area was being more disruptive than we had intended because of overlapping effects. These should be much better in the future.

This will be a welcome change to those on sub-par/older computers like me. Though a positive change in general, I wouldn't have played any less without it. I also don't think most explosives users in general use those weapons largely because of the camera shake effect.

Effect on DAU trend: neutral

• Infectors – We are removing the pulsing camera effect that remained on for the full duration of the DoT from the infector. This should make them less disruptive. We have also changed the burst size mod. It was setting the burst size to one, not adding one to the burst size, which can cause issues with very high Rate of Fire fully automatic infectors. We have changed these to just have a 10% increase in Rate of Fire.

We all know what the issues are here (there are tons of threads on the forums about infectors and PvP). These changes shouldn't hurt infector PvE performance much if at all and it can be seen as a possible boost for the non-burst infector types. It might improve the infector vs. non-infector weapon mix in PvP (which is a relatively small population).

Effect on DAU trend: neutral to slightly positive

• Nano-Effects – Some weapons and mod combos were capable of getting nano-effect procs faster than was intended. We have added a 1.5 second cooldown to all the nano-effects. For most weapons, this will not be a noticeable change. For high rate of fire weapons, this should bring their proc rate over time more in line with lower rate of fire weapons.

This one comes as no surprise and is clearly addressing the disproportionate siphon nano usage. Unfortunately, many players rely on siphon to get them through a Volge emergency. A much smaller number of people (game population, not PvP population) use them for PvP.

Effect on DAU trend: neutral to slightly negative

• Rocket Launchers – The prior balance passes on rockets took them down a little too far, so we are looking into bringing their power back up a bit to make them more balanced with other weapons.

Not much information here but if rockets will be more effective then I can only assume that some people may want to try them out. And, in general, build diversity leads to a larger population enjoying the game.

Effect on DAU trend: neutral to slightly positive



These are just my hypotheses and I encourage Trion San Diego to go through the same exercise if they haven't done so already. Anything with an estimated "neutral" or worse effect on DAU is an opportunity to re-think the solution.

Positive DAU trend = more revenue for Trion = more content for us

[Tekrunner]

The pistol ammo thing? Why the F not just up the ammo pool? It's like they sat down and planned the most annoying way of doing it.

Wait, what's wrong with the way they're doing it? They're upping the ammo pool and ammo drops, what's annoying about this?

[BONNY]

thanks trion for giving me a reason to use a SAW in pvp matches now ...... oh wait my mistake you guys really now how to piss people off !

[Combo Breaker]

I am astonished at this. I really expected that joke called the Disruptor to get a buff. Instead you nerf the #1 gun in the game. I am at a loss.
It seems that you enjoy taking the FUN out of the game.

Took the bounce glitch out of Muir.
Took Charlie.
Tried your hardest to take Arkfalls.

Cmon guys, really. How much am I supposed to sit on here. I have taken everything in stride without complaining so far, but we all have limits.

PS: Crappy so called shot-gun upgrade (actually a nerf). No Immunizer nerf (The actual gun that gets complained about). Crappy nerf to nano effects (Hooray,PVP wins again, hurting PVE).

There. You finally pushed a negative post out of me.

[Elric1]

Good to know. But now I don't think I'll like my Frontier SAW after the changes take effect... guess ill replace it with the wolfhound then...

*high fives* Era

Well, look at it like this. Trion isn't talented enough to balance guns and it's FAR easier to nerf. They have and will always be bunch of lazy bunch who expect people to lemming their stores. I mean it's obvious that SAW was really the only gun to use in pve and it needed but talented people would have boosted the others instead.. which is why the SAW was nerfed.

[Pandur]

Hi everyone,

I’m back and today I want to go over some of the balance changes we are working on. This is not a comprehensive list of everything that we are currently looking into, just a quick breakdown of those things that you can expect to see soon. Keep an eye out on patch notes to see when these changes are going live.

• SAW’s – The SAW weapons (FRC SAW, Frontier SAW and Machinist’s Gun) were all outperforming both other light machine guns and many other weapons. We have lowered the damage on these weapons to bring their overall effective DPS back in line with other weapons.

Actually i think one thing that needs to be told is how much you're nerfing the saw damage, what are we talking about 10%, 20%, 50% ?
Since you say you have lowered the damgage it should not be a problem to tell us how much it's lowered.
I'd like to know if i should still bother with the saw or should look to get used to something else once my LMGs hit 20.