After testing for a few hours with M00 Ben and Hexodious I have to say I strongly disagree with this change. To summarize some of the points myself and the others made when we were testing:
To put this whole thing in context, a few years ago when I was on the beta team we were trying to come up with a solution to how saber vs gun fights worked at the time. Flinch was the result of a long process which started with a solution put forward by myself which never saw the light of a public build (increased damage reduction, increased drains on consecutive fp draining hits, major increase to damage-caused knockback) and what is similar to the solution you seem to be aiming for with the changes I see in the beta version. Years ago the changes were scrapped because knockback feels very inconsistent to both the giver and the receiver. The way the fight usually unfolded is that you would drain some or most of the saberist's FP, he would take a swing and take ~50 hp damage, get knocked back and the fight would virtually reset as it would be virtually impossible for the jedi to score a killing blow or for the gunner to drain enough FP to kill the jedi after he was knocked out of IDR. This creates a low risk-high reward situation for the jedi in what should be an even fight. There are 2 equally likely outcomes to the fight, the gunner either fails to knock you back, meaning you kill him, or he knocks you back and you lose 50 health.
The above scenario is currently a hypothetical, as the knockback is nowhere near significant enough to play a role at all in the saber vs gunner fights I was part of in the beta version. If the current beta version were to go live we would go back to what we had before flinch was implemented - saberists would be free to 'trade' a portion of their health (since they have damage reduction it's very very unlikely they will die during 1 swing animation) for a chance to instakill any gunner in sabering range. It eliminates the skill factor flinch introduced, where if you had good aim you were in control of the fight as long as you landed your shots consistently. Now the ball is entirely in the jedi's court, and the only skill he has to possess to 1v1 a gunner effectively is the ability to answer the question 'can I survive swinging my saber?'. Am I in a 1v1 situation against a much better player? Doesn't matter, there's almost no way he can land enough shots to kill me in 1 swing animation, might as well press m1 and see what happens.
Flinch was a great solution which finally made gunner vs saber feel consistent, skill based (for both sides) and EXTREMELY rewarding to play against. If I'm hitting my shots on the day I know I can beat almost any jedi with any gun because I'm playing the game well and aiming well, knockback + no flinch just feels like a lottery tbh.
tl;dr flinch was amazing and saved the game, please don't remove it
IDR calculations are now one linear scaling instead of a mix of linear scaling and static multipliers depending on what range you're at.
Have to say I don't like this change either, for the simple reason that in a 1v1 situation from the gunner's perspective it makes it way too hard to estimate the FP of the jedi you're fighting, it was hard enough when there were 3 (2?) IDR values before, but it wasn't impossible, now it pretty much is.
- Torso locational modifier raised from 1.3x to 1.4x
- Legs location modifier increased from 0.6 to 0.8
Increasing the leg modifier is a good idea cuz it brings it closer to the torso/arm/midriff values, I have to say I don't see the reason you would increase the torso modifier, I don't think anyone was complaining about it and it just throws some things out of whack (specifically wookiees feel like they die way too quickly, T21 primary and alt fire feel like they melt things way too quickly, pistol 3 damage feels too high, probably some other things I haven't tried). My general feeling is that the time-to-kill is too short now with the increased projectile velocities (is that the live patch or the beta patch? I'm lost tbh) and the multiplier changes so maybe they should be toned down or scrapped.