Some feedback Smileyface
Prelude of the prelude
Hello, this is my kind of a farewell post, which will try to be as constructive feedback from a few years of gameplay as possible.
Obvious apologies for bad London; spelling errors, grammar and sentence structure gymnastics, etc.
Also, I hope this complies with the 5 years old Feedback guidelines that probably nobody even cares about anyway.
Actual prelude
MB2 sucks - and weirdly enough I don't think it sucks because of the gameplay and I do share the dev's forum hearsay that gameplay-wise, MB2 is probably the best it has ever been.
There are obviously some gameplay choices/mechanics that I personally find out of place but I don't believe many of those calls are shared by pretty much anyone so feel free to call them out as r-word-ed and that I'm a noob (that probably has put more gameplay hours into this game more than all of those "B16 veterans" at this point even though in comparison I'm a pretty latecomer as I first heard of MB2 in 2009/2010 but have only been more-or-less consistently playing since 1.3)
Community, Playerbase and "Game Rules"
Non-Tryhards
The main problem this game faces right now, at least on EU, is broadly speaking the 'community' - the rounds are simply non-games for most of the time. (If You're an MTG player, a non-game is a match where you're mana-flooded or land-screwed; you technically are in a match, have cards and stuff but You didn't get to play in reality)
Why is that so? There are a few reasons. The main one is the group of players who unite themselves under SS7 tags. If You have had the opportunity to 'play' the game with them on the server, they simply join the game to troll. This includes not shooting the enemies, throwing grenades at teammates, sitting in completely random spots on the maps, etc.
Normally, in a "proper" video game community, such people would just be constantly banned/forcespecced when causing strictly gameplay-related problems but not in mb2. In mb2 it's very funny and hilarious behavior if You don't let people play the game. The counter-argument here is obviously 'I'm JuST pLAyInG tHe GaME BuT mY WAy'. This is obviously a valid point of view and I will get a little political here - one's freedom ends where others' begin and playing the game "that way" is just inherently disruptive to playing the game "normal way" if that makes sense.
Continuing with shit-tier analogies - if You enter a chess match, your opponent will probably except you to respect the rules of the game - moving pawns by 1 square, bishops diagonally, etc. Those rules are also, well, inherent game mechanics. In mb2 the general game goals are in short: 'work towards the objective, shoot enemies' and due to the nature of the video game as a shooter, it's a little more open-ended how You can tackle the mechanics that will accomplish those goals. So for chess match online, You can have the game engine restrict illegal moves - You can't however mechanically restrict timewasting/assisting the enemy team on purpose in mb2.
To sum up that point - in my opinion, the currently active player and server admin/owner base isn't very keen on enforcing the gameplay rules and this makes the game very difficult to enjoy nowadays. I mean half the day the map is mb2_dotf_classicb where as an imp you spend 4 minutes in tjunc because the teams are 10v10 but 8 of the rebs are sitting on cw as rocket arc and nothing is happening.
For dotf in particular this can also go the other ways - because in the rare occasion that rebs aren't sitting in the hangar odds are that imps are sitting in throne also doing nothing really. (But at least due to time win being a thing it can be an actual strategy - what bothers me with this is that the people don't 'want to try' defending outside the throne when there's no good reason for that more often than not)
On that note, since teams are technically 'even', you can't switch to help the struggling team because for instance, the players who are actually playing, for a 10v10 population example, will amount to something like 7v3 among them. So if you switch to make it what in reality will be 6v4, it's now 9v11 ON SCOREBOARD. The team with 11 players is STILL undermanned and someone next round (most likely one of the players who was actually one of those who 'tries') will happily "even" the teams back into "10v10". More often than not people who 'do not try' will also often stack a team so hard, depending on map (so my example - rebs on dotf), it's not even worth trying to maintain balanced skill-wise teams (because, again, on dotf - You will be probably the only one going main even though there are 11 people on your team) turning this into closed loop/self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever is the proper phrasal verb for this situation - I believe I described this sufficiently though.
Cheaters
Another gripe with the 'community' I'm having right now is cheaters. We've had this whole Oink fiasco recently where I think we can agree that the general consensus was that he's cheating and that's that. The fact that Oink never at all tried to simply deny the fact that he's cheating and rather taking the stance of "This all would've worked out if not for this damnedkids qwerty! I bet he's wallhacking himself" simply affirms the accusations, at least in my perception.
Now how did the server owners respond to that on EU? They largely didn't. Oink still continued to play the game and I'm pretty sure he's still not banned anywhere and just got bored of playing (or cheating rather) for now. Nobody really cared.
Yesterday (at the time I'm writing this particular section) I've had a feeling that a player that goes by "Jean the Slutty Whore" was wallhacking on Lunarbase in particular. Of course, I'm easily tilted and 'git gud', etc. but I really felt that for a Sense 0 Jedi he seemed to be oddly keen on having basically almost negative reaction time to pushing me down when walking around the corner. Obviously playing Sense 0 is not a good argument to begin with since I don't run Sense either. I pmed Atska and suggested that he may be wallhacking. In response, Atska did spec him and while he didn't respond to me with anything, Jean was indeed kicked a few rounds later - I assume he'd also confirm that with some other BG members that were present on the server.
What did Jean the Slutty Whore player did in response? He reconnected on next map (probably under a VPN) aliased as "." and continued to play normally (obviously doing an "Oink" and going 'wow fuck you loser, for a wallhacker you suck' in chat himself, imo further reaffirming with his reaction that something was afoot).
Something more about 'tryharding'
Lastly, what I'm also jaded about the currently active player base is their inability to 'try'. I'm being constantly called a tryhard even though all I do is hold the m1 and run straight down main - which more often than not gives me the top score because of the fact that, as you can gather from the above points; nobody is actually playing the game. I have people constantly tk me and disrupt my gameplay for getting top score like that for some reason and I'm not even talking about the SS7 players here.
The game is simply unpleasant to play with most of the currently active players because their idea of what to do in a round tends to be so out of place from what I consider 'working towards objective' (one of those objectives is killing enemy team). (Inb4 this subpoint is just a show of my arrogance and I just have too many expectations of people who don't play nearly as much as me - I guess feel free to feel that way, just like I feel free to feel my way
)
Obligatory excuses section (shoutout to Gargos I guess since he thinks that makes me a hilarious person)
Trying to move over to the more gameplay-related feedback there's one bridging topic I would like to touch first as well - and that is broadly the game's netcode. This somewhat ties into the cheating for the reasons that are very much up for discussion.
Disclaimer: After Klark section You can probably skip to next 'chapter'
The Klark section
I don't know how many of You pay attention to that but if You spectate players like Klark or Baczek they will most notably not move very smoothly. I can describe that like this: If my game runs at 144 fps, those players' positions, in particular, are updating on my screen at only, like, 30 fps.
Why is that a problem? I believe It's something that can be set with your netcode/max_fps setting I believe. So for whatever reason, some players are harder to hit (for me) because they decided to 'tweak' the settings in their own way. Obviously, a good player (which I'm not) could hit such 'lagging' players either way but personally it's very tilting for me when I have to shoot/aim in completely different pattern because the game just behaves differently for such players, for, in my opinion, no reason. In Klark's case, since he's playing a saberist mostly, it also screws with the perceived swing animations and the response time I'm given to react to those.
Knockback/Swingblock/Hit Detection
The problem with what I broadly call netcode in this game extends to some more aspect of this game - where the damage/hit detection will behave differently based on ping/w/e other settings - however, I don't have concrete proof/evidence rather than my perception (except possibly one case).
Examples of stuff that I feel happen very often include getting hit when I'm behind a wall, getting hit by an opponent who was still behind a wall when he started shooting, getting headshot damage by a shot that I jumped and which visually hit my legs on my screen, getting chest shot damage on what is clearly a headshot (pretty much the only reason I spend the 5 points on DLT scope - to get mad about my hits doing less damage than what I'd expect them to be doing based on seeing where I hit).
Some more frustrations that I perceive happen when it comes to sabering. If I try to saber someone with 20 ping (like Arkdodyadyaki) he can hit me with about 4 e11 shots between my Yellow stance's windup and the hurtboxes on the saber spawn-timing giving him plenty of room to trigger a knockback/swingblock (neither of them working consistently, but more on that later). However, in a similar situation, when a 20 ping saberist rushes me, between the animation start and the animation with the hurtbox triggers I will have maybe 2 e11 shots-long window (naturally I'm talking about the same stance, same direction swing).
Going back to the swingblock/knockback interaction. Sometimes I can hit certain people playing saberists even up to three times during their swing and despite of me backpedaling while they are being hit, they would still be close enough to hit me with Yellow. Meanwhile, when I run up to someone like HTD playing clone, I get hit once by a Clone Rifle shot and there is now about two saber-lengths distance between us. Now, why I think this is netcode related? This behavior is consistent for a given player (again, in my perception). In the HTD example the knockback worked (as intended) from him shooting me EVERY SINGLE TIME with a Clone Rifle. Now, one of such Saberists that I have trouble knocking back and they just hold m1 through getting hit is... well HTD himself as well. I'm quite confident I have never had knockback work on him in meaningful way. Pretty much every single time it's just a small pat that barely budges him. However, there are players whom I shoot and they get knock backed just fine, analogous to me getting knocked back by HTD.
Elaborating a bit further on swingblock - I feel like the input gets eaten more often than not; again depending on my ping (yes my internet is trash and inconsistent). There are lots of situations where I explicitly do a single-swing to pressure a gunner, making extra sure I'm swingblocking as quick as my mouse input allows me to but I still get hit for a random 40 dmg shot, and again, there are days where it's working flawlessly every single time.
Of course, as I mentioned I don't have concrete proof and this may be just my perception issue so feel free to treat this issue as something that's not a reality and a 'git gud problem' I guess. The only proof of netcode doing random stuff I can provide is the reload times. I believe it was tied to either max packets/snaps or max fps. You can check that by going on a server (not localhost) and setting those to low values. After that, try shooting the whole clip of A280 (4 bursts) and then reload. The reload will take FOREVER compared to having 'normal' settings Speaking of A280 and bursts - the burst fire rate also seems to be weirdly related to the ping; at least when You're shooting (possibly is fine on server side but it's very annoying when Your ping is even slightly inconsistent like mine - about 30ms swings)
Again, feel free to dismiss the above part as excuses/crying/git gud issue, w/e - as I'm aware I'm not backing up my claims with any concrete examples or video proof (If I had good upload I would just stream and then try to go through vods to single out the situations but oh well. I've tried just recording videos locally but that eats too much of my disk space)
Actual Gameplay commentary (that nobody will agree with)
Recent gameplay changes:
Dodge changes - Short story, I like it. The previous Genji-deflect might have been slightly more annoying - there's no visual indication someone is dodging (unless you hit them) so it was quite tilting as you can't tell if Your hit was towards the end of dodge or he the opponent read the hit well and just now started dodging - this may influence your decision to hop back behind cover. Technically this does remain a problem.
Now, with the dodge being slightly remade, I understand that it's in a reality a Temporary HP bar. Previously, every shot drained the same amount of DP (right?) so, like Genji Deflect, it was just press x for invincibility. Current dodge decays slower but is drained more based on distance/hitbox hit so You can 'burn through the dodge' if You're just hitting more. I don't know, maybe that's not how it actually works (definitely didn't get the impression it works like this from patch notes description) but when I look at it this way, AND it does seem to work this way, I'm completely fine with it. Maybe the only problem currently is that there seems to be no minimal DP amount to dodge a shot so You can mash the dodge button in a firefight to keep dodging single shots sometimes. (At least it feels like that when I spectate some players - I don't usually bother to keep tapping my dodge during a firefight)
Proj Changes - I also like it. Makes playing Mando/Hero/BH/ARC much less of an all or nothing class where You can just sit in spec for the rest of the round because You got AWPd when You ran through the middle on de_dust2. The only issues I'd have with proj is: Not oneshotting Clone, Doing pathetic damage to SBD (and just tickling them if they have Blast armor), and being basically useless against deka. Getting projd as either of the classes I started listing out in the beginning is still very damaging and will shift the behavior towards more passive play which in my opinion is completely fine and makes the classes less self-sufficient which is a good thing.
Knockback reimplementation - I touched on this in the netcode section qqing. I think flinch worked much better in that regard and personally, it worked much better (consistent) in my favor both as a gunner and a saberist pov. If for me the knockback was consistent between players/ping/movement I would probably be indifferent to either of those 'solutions'.
Recent FP drains - I'm very negative towards them. It still takes forever to shoot through somebody standing around the corner holding down m2 but now a single aggressive attempt obliterates your fp into oblivion, also makes FB3 pretty much mandatory for open unless You want to just, well, stand still on a corner I guess.
Wookie changes - You took an incredible bugged class and made it more bugged from what I can gather, good job I guess. Just do the Cortosis 2 approach and remove Rage 2 (Barge namely, because I take it you now get Barge at Rage 1?) from the game at this point. Alternatively (or in addition) You could also remove pistol from Rage 2 wooks because on map like smuggler there is virtually no consistent counterplay to Rage 2 wookie with the way the Slap/Barge animations work and in addition to that, You have to deal with the game dropping your swingblock inputs (as mentioned in one of the sections above) to abuse the fact that on, again, something like Smuggler, You have to basically pre-swing randomly to have a coin-flip chance at killing a wookie.
The entire mind-games approach would be fine if the slap animation wasn't sometimes randomly lingering two melee punches into and at other times spawning the hurtbox even before starting the animation. On that note, I saw barge was still bugged and it still kills saberists post-mortem on occasion.
EE3 snipe damage nerfs - I think this is fine in the vacuum actually. Not gonna lie, I thought it was a pretty radical change but I definitely see how this makes Mando more manageable class to deal with while Mando's gameplay is kept largely the same. If anything, You could make the snipe-shots be run/jump-accurate like ARC's so You don't have to do this awkward millisecond-long movement stop when sniping anymore - considering the base gun is run accurate, to begin with. Again, the only gripe I would have is having to hit clones up to 3 times now, I could also see the snipe shot cost 2-3 ammo less per shot maybe.
The class struggle against the bourgeoisie:
- No comments on sold, haven't played that in forever. Could probably fix the bug where if You a/d/a strafe while walking, if You don't let go of the walk button between the movement key presses, your move speed goes to near-zero (also applies to like 3/4 of reb classes for some reason, for me making them really awful to play because that's the movement pattern I instinctively prefer)
- ET/Com - I would remove firenade completely at this point, if only because of the current player base. I can easily tell you that in over 10 years of playing I haven't seen more than maybe 10 good firenades with an actual thought out purpose by the player that has thrown it. Also, it bugs the sounds and is a tk machine. Sonic nades are much better designed in my opinion. However, they should probably be switched around to imps (since sonics are useless against sbd and deka anyway).
- Pistol 3 (is a class on its own) needs like a 8 base damage nerf. Just a reminder that it currently does enough damage to one-shot (with a headshot) armor 3 (or maybe only armor 2, can't recall; also depends on damage roll) ET/100hp Saberists WHILE being run accurate with humongous hitbox and fire rate that feels like faster than or equal to e11 primary. As compensation, considering the already non-existing reload time, You could maybe fit more shots per clip.
- Hero - stuff costs too many points. You can't even get Dodge3/E113/Armor3/Ammo3/Dash1 build going on (You have to settle on either Ammo or Armor 2 iirc) which doesn't even look that good on paper. I can't really understand how people manage to fit proj AND a normal weapon option in their builds and still manage to enjoy the game. Heroes also for some reason, with all the problematic point costs, get less armor than BHs for that...
- Clone - in my opinion, this is the currently most overpowered class in the game. (Yes, that Achilles guy was right and nobody listened) 80/80 over two lives makes this class more tanky than 150 mag plating SBD (and if You're playing 200 mag plating sbd your FP is at least trash) and non-raging Hp 3 wookie. Basically only deka is more resilient than this class.
On top of that, they get blobs. Blob is like secondary nade. Except it costs next to nothing and doesn't have the inconvenience of having to switch weapons. It's quite literally the least interactive thing currently in the game with very little counterplay given the speed and size of the hitbox, both in gunner vs gunner and gunner vs saberist situation. I'm not even going to touch on Ion blobs only because nobody uses them. No, wait, if somebody does use them, they charge them for half a second, shoot at deka and go 'BUT WTF I PULSED YOU!!! in chat'.
A thing I would propose (besides just plain out removing blobs from the game) is to, for the duration of blob cooldown, have the fire rate of your clone rifle drop by 1 level. That means if You run CR3, during the time the blob is recharging you shoot CR2, CR2 turns into CR1 and CR1 just jams or turns into Clone Pistol for the duration. That way they are little less self-sufficient for a 2 lives-class.
- ARC - remove Rocket launcher from the game. Point costs are problematic but at the same time a necessity I suppose. Dex and Westar are better than people tend to give them credit for. I would personally remove bounce shots from the game just because losing Your entire armor when You sit somewhere in the middle of t-junc as imp to a guy who's completely behind a reb main corner isn't the most thrilling experience and the arc will not even know that this happened.
I'm happy with the FP drain nerf on M5 because for some reason it was quite literally 5 hits for 90 FP dmg - on a class that can pretty much freely sprint-run since neither pushing nor pulling an arc is a very good idea (unless they run pulses and dropped dex for that; lol).
- Wookie - remove Barge from the game. Rest of the feedback in the netcode cryage pretty much.
- BH - Gun kick shouldn't be innate, it should cost like 10 points or so - BHs don't really have anything to spend points on compared to the hero. Maybe bump TD to 20/25 so we don't have morons auto-buying it because again, there's nothing to spend points on, so newbs buy those and then tk half their team.
Possibly theirs and hero armor values should also be swapped. Also if You do insist on keeping poison darts in-game (even though Saberists are already very trash even if nobody on imps runs poison) they should probably not do damage anymore.
- SBD - I hate playing this class, and I hate playing against this class. Everything about this class is frustrating to play against and play as. First of all, any build that doesn't have Battery 3 is straight off unplayable garbage where taking a single hit quite literally halves whatever is your firerate, not even mentioning taking a hit while shooting and running. If You run Mag Plating and get hit by anything that doesn't get reduced by mag plating You want feel like committing sepukku with the battery loss that comes with it. Same if You run cortosis/blast and no mag plating and get hit by blaster shot. On the other hand, if You're getting hit by stuff that You have armor against, it takes fucking FOREVER to kill.
Jedi matchup is complete garbage (like with melee Wookies I suppose). You can't rush a jedi because of sbd gun fp HeartEmoji drain and movement speed but he can't rush you either due to just the POSSIBILITY of having cortosis and slap hitboxes lingering just like wookie's. If jedi has any deflect level You can just stand there and do nothing pretty much because shooting will be a waste of ammo and/or hitpoints.
Firepower 3 costs a million points but the upgrade from Firepower 2 is not even THAT noticeable (especially compared to CR2 > CR3 difference).
Sadly, besides ranting about this class I can't give any ideas about what to do with it. I could however suggest making it visible and distinguishable (on model) which armors the SBD has bought - so Saberists would be more inclined to be aggressive if they can be sure that the SBD doesn't have cortosis.
Pulses are bad counter to SBD realistically, same reason as for deka (more on that below in deka bullet point as well). The worst thing that happens from getting pulsed while not being out of position to begin with is losing the 150 ammo pretty much. Basically any time I got rushed AFTER getting pulsed, I would have just died to that rush regardless if I was pulsed or not; I would just do slightly less damage in return as I die (keep in mind pulse doesn't last long enough if You're full hp/battery to make you completely unable to do damage back)
- Deka - remove from the game. This class's only real weakness is that the controls are garbage pretty much. Pulse nades do jack shit and no lasting damage by themselves, require deka to be out of sith support and HEAVILY out of position to followup with any lasting damage and Ion blobs do just jack shit even if followed up. The best advice to kill a deka anyone can give is to have multiple people shoot at it. Yeah, no shit, anything dies when multiple people shoot at it; thanks; very helpful. This is the shittiest example of a raid-boss class design I've been seeing in video games I play. Even if You advocate that 'this game is rock-paper-scissor design' (yeah nothing like auto-losing a round pretty much just after the start due to class selects) and Pulses are the Rock to the Deka's scissors; for the reasons above, Your "Rock" is actually made of paper so the scissors don't really care (You can tell I'm really proud of coming up with that).
Not to mention that due to ARC point costs, spending points on Pulses is gimping Your actual gunplay ability. I can personally manage to buy 2 pulses at most and this will cost me so much in armor/dex that my round is bound to feel like garbage.
- Mando - remove Rocket from the game.
Fully charged Westar shots probably do a little too few FP damage but I can't really tell since nobody ever does that If I'm playing saberist so I can't really tell how much they do.
I will disagree with Mandos having the need for side roll getups and/or ability to jetpack/shoot from knockdown.
Also, since there's a flamethrower related thread up there I can also give me 2 cents about that. I think current Flamethrower is literally just a win-more mechanic. The fact that You have it will only matter if Saberist is like <15 hp where it's a seal-the-deal kind of thing. In other situations, where You are either outnumbering the Saberist, the fact that You had flamethrower probably didn't matter in the end. If You are being outnumbered - it doesn't help either. If it's 1v1 it's mostly a wash since unless You are really slow to react You easily either run backward out of range or close enough to force the mando to stop/get into dead-zone. Also, it's completely useless against gunners. What I would propose is to rework it in such a way:
Pressing flamethrower button eats like 2 fuel bars; triggers ~15 seconds cooldown and instantly sets on fire people in the cone in front of you. This way You can go against gunners aggressively and put some pressure on them during a firefight - panic the player a little, maybe even force a roll if they feel threatened enough by the flame damage. Same with saberists basically - You retain the current usage of flamethrower against them (forcing someone holding down m2 to move) but make it more manageable to extinguish themselves if they get set on fire in an already unfavorable situation - because of the cooldown. However, with this change, the fire should probably do even less damage than it does now so it's merely a pressure tool rather than straight out kill weapon (even though it barely can be considered that now).
- Saberists - I can agree with the sentiment that saber-vs-saber sucks for strictly dueling, but I think the current system works well for open when You take into consideration the gunners. You are able to put pressure (with some gunner advantage) on someone holding m2 around a corner with single-swing spam until You get enough AP to force them back and at the same time it's possible to hold Your ground long enough to stall for Your gunners to help you as well. It's also much easier to pick up and 'get' as a new player I'd say. I wouldn't be opposed to dueling simply working differently between duel mode and open/fa.
As a whole, with the FP changes the saberists are probably a bit TOO reliant on the teammates to have an actual impact on the game and I was more content with the FP drains from before the knockback reimplementation in that regard.
I wouldn't mind both Staff and Duals being removed from open. Their visual hitboxes don't often make sense; some of the swings are faster than blue/cyan while keeping normal damage and in case of Duals - the stance is overloaded with stuff. Bigger blocking arc, good kata moves (crouch mostly, butterfly arguably worse than YDFA though), stabs without rolling, 5 hit combo access while having quite high base bp damage already; probably some more minor things I'm forgetting.
To comment on the whole 'nerf push, push bad' sentiments that have been popping up here and there recently - I think the whole push/pull/walk dynamic in its current form is inherent to this game functioning correctly in a vacuum, has been like this since I have started playing and for the entire time has been in completely fine place. (Although I need to leave obligatory 'fix stair-push/pull' and fix having to hold BOTH crouch and walk if You don't want to get crouch-pushed/pulled (mostly just after getup))
Legends feedback:
Jedi Temple FA is notoriously garbage and one of the reasons for that is a certain unlimited <1 model-scale saberist class with 3 lives.
Guess what has <1 model-scale saberists with respawns (and a knockdown means and cortosis(????) as well because why not)?
Overall pretty much every single <1 model-scale class is totally awful to shoot and swing at and I'd rather there were no classes that have this attribute modified.
This includes R2 which is such a mix of bad design points it hurts to think about.
- R2 gets melee moves but no animations - You get fly kicked/crouch swept/normal kicked and it's entirely unreadable based on the animations shown and telegraphed to you.
- R2 is not knockdown immune but he gets, I believe, ET's Coinflip getup. But he doesn't have an animation for that. This leads to You shooting him while knocked down into what You see is clearly his model but there's no hitbox there because he happens to be doing the getup.
- R2 gets BLUE FLAMETHROWER and I think 1.1 speed multiplier as a class - I'm not 100% sure but I think that speed multiplier affects the flamethrower so you get set on fire (that does double damage because blue) quicker while also R2 can backpedal at the 1.1 speed to counteract the usual aggressive response of trying to run point blank for a swing and into the flamethrower dead-zone. If you try to run at him like You would run at open mando You will 100% get set on fire before You can get into that dead-zone. So You can't really take down this class in close range but neither You can take it at a range due to regenerating armor, speed and size; while at range he still whittles you down with what is essentially infinite ammo wrist laser. (Also the flamethrower is really good at obscuring the R2 so coupled with all the damage reduction he gets, trying to trade while on fire will generally get you killed first)
- Because of the size of his model it's hard to tell if you're hitting headshots/chest shots (or for that matter if he even has different damage zones at all). This coupled with regenerating armor AND flat 0.15 (iirc?) damage reduction makes it really difficult to gauge how much damage R2 player has taken and whether You should make a commitment to try and move on to him more aggressively.
- Again, because of the size of his model it's incredibly frustrating to hit with just a single saberswing and on top of that, he gets cortosis (which with damage reduction and armor will mostly be absorbed by that regenerating armor, doing no real lasting damage most likely)...
Same model-scale/reinforcements issue by extension applies to that recent Kowakian class; not to mention all the bullshit hitbox issues with barge.
Assaj is completely busted and much like open's deka only actual weakness is the shit controls, Assaj's only weakness is the pass-throughs that come from the ultra-speed swing speed and the sv_fps 40 that we're all playing on. (Plus the occasional swingblock input drop so You get slapped even if You're just spamming single swings) This class gets too much stuff for no really good reason. Good call on replacing the butterfly and crouch kata with much shittier moves though - I'd imagine crouch kata with her would've been beyond mortal comprehension. I think she should have either dropped almost like all of her force powers or all of her saber speed/dmg buffs.
Aurra Sing is in a weird place because when legends initially came out I think she had Assaj's spot as the most overpowered class - Bp bar, 100 FP with deflecting ability AND (good) guns on top of that (+ flip kick because why not). Now however she doesn't really do anything. I think recently You removed her dodge but gave her 25 fp in return... (so she can deflect again?) except it takes like 1 fp per second to regen or something close to that and well that does like nothing when compared to some other classes in legends. Currently, she's basically just like a regular open bh that gets to saber someone if they turn a corner You have sat behind for like 2 minutes prior.
It's hard for me to give feedback on the Team Heal/Energize classes (because as outlined in my first points of this rant nobody "PLAYS" this game) - I would imagine if we had a more serious player base for this, the team that didn't pick the class with Team heal would be bound to lose more often than not and I don't believe this is a good design for a round-based game. An anecdotal story, the first Legends round I ever played I picked K2 and took easily over 3000 hp dmg (I can assure You, I'm not exagerating) in that round on Jedi Temple - yeah... personally I'd hold the opinion that in the long run if Your goal was to indeed have this mode be balanced, those classes (or force powers rather) should go away - but with more gameplay put into the mode, I could probably be convinced otherwise.
I can't really recall any other glaring issues that I've felt while playing legends but again, given how many different classes there are and the 'quality' of our player base + the limited time I've spent I might be omitting some problems that I didn't get exposed to. For example, I think Jyn Erso gets something like smoke nades. Smoke of which spans out to quite literally the entirety of Smuggler? Don't think the covered area is quite sensible but maybe if it's smaller it would be completely useless on any other map.
loser[24601]
Prelude of the prelude
Hello, this is my kind of a farewell post, which will try to be as constructive feedback from a few years of gameplay as possible.
Obvious apologies for bad London; spelling errors, grammar and sentence structure gymnastics, etc.
Also, I hope this complies with the 5 years old Feedback guidelines that probably nobody even cares about anyway.
Actual prelude
MB2 sucks - and weirdly enough I don't think it sucks because of the gameplay and I do share the dev's forum hearsay that gameplay-wise, MB2 is probably the best it has ever been.
There are obviously some gameplay choices/mechanics that I personally find out of place but I don't believe many of those calls are shared by pretty much anyone so feel free to call them out as r-word-ed and that I'm a noob (that probably has put more gameplay hours into this game more than all of those "B16 veterans" at this point even though in comparison I'm a pretty latecomer as I first heard of MB2 in 2009/2010 but have only been more-or-less consistently playing since 1.3)
Community, Playerbase and "Game Rules"
Non-Tryhards
The main problem this game faces right now, at least on EU, is broadly speaking the 'community' - the rounds are simply non-games for most of the time. (If You're an MTG player, a non-game is a match where you're mana-flooded or land-screwed; you technically are in a match, have cards and stuff but You didn't get to play in reality)
Why is that so? There are a few reasons. The main one is the group of players who unite themselves under SS7 tags. If You have had the opportunity to 'play' the game with them on the server, they simply join the game to troll. This includes not shooting the enemies, throwing grenades at teammates, sitting in completely random spots on the maps, etc.
Normally, in a "proper" video game community, such people would just be constantly banned/forcespecced when causing strictly gameplay-related problems but not in mb2. In mb2 it's very funny and hilarious behavior if You don't let people play the game. The counter-argument here is obviously 'I'm JuST pLAyInG tHe GaME BuT mY WAy'. This is obviously a valid point of view and I will get a little political here - one's freedom ends where others' begin and playing the game "that way" is just inherently disruptive to playing the game "normal way" if that makes sense.
Continuing with shit-tier analogies - if You enter a chess match, your opponent will probably except you to respect the rules of the game - moving pawns by 1 square, bishops diagonally, etc. Those rules are also, well, inherent game mechanics. In mb2 the general game goals are in short: 'work towards the objective, shoot enemies' and due to the nature of the video game as a shooter, it's a little more open-ended how You can tackle the mechanics that will accomplish those goals. So for chess match online, You can have the game engine restrict illegal moves - You can't however mechanically restrict timewasting/assisting the enemy team on purpose in mb2.
To sum up that point - in my opinion, the currently active player and server admin/owner base isn't very keen on enforcing the gameplay rules and this makes the game very difficult to enjoy nowadays. I mean half the day the map is mb2_dotf_classicb where as an imp you spend 4 minutes in tjunc because the teams are 10v10 but 8 of the rebs are sitting on cw as rocket arc and nothing is happening.
For dotf in particular this can also go the other ways - because in the rare occasion that rebs aren't sitting in the hangar odds are that imps are sitting in throne also doing nothing really. (But at least due to time win being a thing it can be an actual strategy - what bothers me with this is that the people don't 'want to try' defending outside the throne when there's no good reason for that more often than not)
On that note, since teams are technically 'even', you can't switch to help the struggling team because for instance, the players who are actually playing, for a 10v10 population example, will amount to something like 7v3 among them. So if you switch to make it what in reality will be 6v4, it's now 9v11 ON SCOREBOARD. The team with 11 players is STILL undermanned and someone next round (most likely one of the players who was actually one of those who 'tries') will happily "even" the teams back into "10v10". More often than not people who 'do not try' will also often stack a team so hard, depending on map (so my example - rebs on dotf), it's not even worth trying to maintain balanced skill-wise teams (because, again, on dotf - You will be probably the only one going main even though there are 11 people on your team) turning this into closed loop/self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever is the proper phrasal verb for this situation - I believe I described this sufficiently though.
Cheaters
Another gripe with the 'community' I'm having right now is cheaters. We've had this whole Oink fiasco recently where I think we can agree that the general consensus was that he's cheating and that's that. The fact that Oink never at all tried to simply deny the fact that he's cheating and rather taking the stance of "This all would've worked out if not for this damned
Now how did the server owners respond to that on EU? They largely didn't. Oink still continued to play the game and I'm pretty sure he's still not banned anywhere and just got bored of playing (or cheating rather) for now. Nobody really cared.
Yesterday (at the time I'm writing this particular section) I've had a feeling that a player that goes by "Jean the Slutty Whore" was wallhacking on Lunarbase in particular. Of course, I'm easily tilted and 'git gud', etc. but I really felt that for a Sense 0 Jedi he seemed to be oddly keen on having basically almost negative reaction time to pushing me down when walking around the corner. Obviously playing Sense 0 is not a good argument to begin with since I don't run Sense either. I pmed Atska and suggested that he may be wallhacking. In response, Atska did spec him and while he didn't respond to me with anything, Jean was indeed kicked a few rounds later - I assume he'd also confirm that with some other BG members that were present on the server.
What did Jean the Slutty Whore player did in response? He reconnected on next map (probably under a VPN) aliased as "." and continued to play normally (obviously doing an "Oink" and going 'wow fuck you loser, for a wallhacker you suck' in chat himself, imo further reaffirming with his reaction that something was afoot).
Something more about 'tryharding'
Lastly, what I'm also jaded about the currently active player base is their inability to 'try'. I'm being constantly called a tryhard even though all I do is hold the m1 and run straight down main - which more often than not gives me the top score because of the fact that, as you can gather from the above points; nobody is actually playing the game. I have people constantly tk me and disrupt my gameplay for getting top score like that for some reason and I'm not even talking about the SS7 players here.
The game is simply unpleasant to play with most of the currently active players because their idea of what to do in a round tends to be so out of place from what I consider 'working towards objective' (one of those objectives is killing enemy team). (Inb4 this subpoint is just a show of my arrogance and I just have too many expectations of people who don't play nearly as much as me - I guess feel free to feel that way, just like I feel free to feel my way
) Obligatory excuses section (shoutout to Gargos I guess since he thinks that makes me a hilarious person)
Trying to move over to the more gameplay-related feedback there's one bridging topic I would like to touch first as well - and that is broadly the game's netcode. This somewhat ties into the cheating for the reasons that are very much up for discussion.
Disclaimer: After Klark section You can probably skip to next 'chapter'
The Klark section
I don't know how many of You pay attention to that but if You spectate players like Klark or Baczek they will most notably not move very smoothly. I can describe that like this: If my game runs at 144 fps, those players' positions, in particular, are updating on my screen at only, like, 30 fps.
Why is that a problem? I believe It's something that can be set with your netcode/max_fps setting I believe. So for whatever reason, some players are harder to hit (for me) because they decided to 'tweak' the settings in their own way. Obviously, a good player (which I'm not) could hit such 'lagging' players either way but personally it's very tilting for me when I have to shoot/aim in completely different pattern because the game just behaves differently for such players, for, in my opinion, no reason. In Klark's case, since he's playing a saberist mostly, it also screws with the perceived swing animations and the response time I'm given to react to those.
Knockback/Swingblock/Hit Detection
The problem with what I broadly call netcode in this game extends to some more aspect of this game - where the damage/hit detection will behave differently based on ping/w/e other settings - however, I don't have concrete proof/evidence rather than my perception (except possibly one case).
Examples of stuff that I feel happen very often include getting hit when I'm behind a wall, getting hit by an opponent who was still behind a wall when he started shooting, getting headshot damage by a shot that I jumped and which visually hit my legs on my screen, getting chest shot damage on what is clearly a headshot (pretty much the only reason I spend the 5 points on DLT scope - to get mad about my hits doing less damage than what I'd expect them to be doing based on seeing where I hit).
Some more frustrations that I perceive happen when it comes to sabering. If I try to saber someone with 20 ping (like Arkdodyadyaki) he can hit me with about 4 e11 shots between my Yellow stance's windup and the hurtboxes on the saber spawn-timing giving him plenty of room to trigger a knockback/swingblock (neither of them working consistently, but more on that later). However, in a similar situation, when a 20 ping saberist rushes me, between the animation start and the animation with the hurtbox triggers I will have maybe 2 e11 shots-long window (naturally I'm talking about the same stance, same direction swing).
Going back to the swingblock/knockback interaction. Sometimes I can hit certain people playing saberists even up to three times during their swing and despite of me backpedaling while they are being hit, they would still be close enough to hit me with Yellow. Meanwhile, when I run up to someone like HTD playing clone, I get hit once by a Clone Rifle shot and there is now about two saber-lengths distance between us. Now, why I think this is netcode related? This behavior is consistent for a given player (again, in my perception). In the HTD example the knockback worked (as intended) from him shooting me EVERY SINGLE TIME with a Clone Rifle. Now, one of such Saberists that I have trouble knocking back and they just hold m1 through getting hit is... well HTD himself as well. I'm quite confident I have never had knockback work on him in meaningful way. Pretty much every single time it's just a small pat that barely budges him. However, there are players whom I shoot and they get knock backed just fine, analogous to me getting knocked back by HTD.
Elaborating a bit further on swingblock - I feel like the input gets eaten more often than not; again depending on my ping (yes my internet is trash and inconsistent). There are lots of situations where I explicitly do a single-swing to pressure a gunner, making extra sure I'm swingblocking as quick as my mouse input allows me to but I still get hit for a random 40 dmg shot, and again, there are days where it's working flawlessly every single time.
Of course, as I mentioned I don't have concrete proof and this may be just my perception issue so feel free to treat this issue as something that's not a reality and a 'git gud problem' I guess. The only proof of netcode doing random stuff I can provide is the reload times. I believe it was tied to either max packets/snaps or max fps. You can check that by going on a server (not localhost) and setting those to low values. After that, try shooting the whole clip of A280 (4 bursts) and then reload. The reload will take FOREVER compared to having 'normal' settings Speaking of A280 and bursts - the burst fire rate also seems to be weirdly related to the ping; at least when You're shooting (possibly is fine on server side but it's very annoying when Your ping is even slightly inconsistent like mine - about 30ms swings)
Again, feel free to dismiss the above part as excuses/crying/git gud issue, w/e - as I'm aware I'm not backing up my claims with any concrete examples or video proof (If I had good upload I would just stream and then try to go through vods to single out the situations but oh well. I've tried just recording videos locally but that eats too much of my disk space)
Actual Gameplay commentary (that nobody will agree with)
Recent gameplay changes:
Dodge changes - Short story, I like it. The previous Genji-deflect might have been slightly more annoying - there's no visual indication someone is dodging (unless you hit them) so it was quite tilting as you can't tell if Your hit was towards the end of dodge or he the opponent read the hit well and just now started dodging - this may influence your decision to hop back behind cover. Technically this does remain a problem.
Now, with the dodge being slightly remade, I understand that it's in a reality a Temporary HP bar. Previously, every shot drained the same amount of DP (right?) so, like Genji Deflect, it was just press x for invincibility. Current dodge decays slower but is drained more based on distance/hitbox hit so You can 'burn through the dodge' if You're just hitting more. I don't know, maybe that's not how it actually works (definitely didn't get the impression it works like this from patch notes description) but when I look at it this way, AND it does seem to work this way, I'm completely fine with it. Maybe the only problem currently is that there seems to be no minimal DP amount to dodge a shot so You can mash the dodge button in a firefight to keep dodging single shots sometimes. (At least it feels like that when I spectate some players - I don't usually bother to keep tapping my dodge during a firefight)
Proj Changes - I also like it. Makes playing Mando/Hero/BH/ARC much less of an all or nothing class where You can just sit in spec for the rest of the round because You got AWPd when You ran through the middle on de_dust2. The only issues I'd have with proj is: Not oneshotting Clone, Doing pathetic damage to SBD (and just tickling them if they have Blast armor), and being basically useless against deka. Getting projd as either of the classes I started listing out in the beginning is still very damaging and will shift the behavior towards more passive play which in my opinion is completely fine and makes the classes less self-sufficient which is a good thing.
Knockback reimplementation - I touched on this in the netcode section qqing. I think flinch worked much better in that regard and personally, it worked much better (consistent) in my favor both as a gunner and a saberist pov. If for me the knockback was consistent between players/ping/movement I would probably be indifferent to either of those 'solutions'.
Recent FP drains - I'm very negative towards them. It still takes forever to shoot through somebody standing around the corner holding down m2 but now a single aggressive attempt obliterates your fp into oblivion, also makes FB3 pretty much mandatory for open unless You want to just, well, stand still on a corner I guess.
Wookie changes - You took an incredible bugged class and made it more bugged from what I can gather, good job I guess. Just do the Cortosis 2 approach and remove Rage 2 (Barge namely, because I take it you now get Barge at Rage 1?) from the game at this point. Alternatively (or in addition) You could also remove pistol from Rage 2 wooks because on map like smuggler there is virtually no consistent counterplay to Rage 2 wookie with the way the Slap/Barge animations work and in addition to that, You have to deal with the game dropping your swingblock inputs (as mentioned in one of the sections above) to abuse the fact that on, again, something like Smuggler, You have to basically pre-swing randomly to have a coin-flip chance at killing a wookie.
The entire mind-games approach would be fine if the slap animation wasn't sometimes randomly lingering two melee punches into and at other times spawning the hurtbox even before starting the animation. On that note, I saw barge was still bugged and it still kills saberists post-mortem on occasion.
EE3 snipe damage nerfs - I think this is fine in the vacuum actually. Not gonna lie, I thought it was a pretty radical change but I definitely see how this makes Mando more manageable class to deal with while Mando's gameplay is kept largely the same. If anything, You could make the snipe-shots be run/jump-accurate like ARC's so You don't have to do this awkward millisecond-long movement stop when sniping anymore - considering the base gun is run accurate, to begin with. Again, the only gripe I would have is having to hit clones up to 3 times now, I could also see the snipe shot cost 2-3 ammo less per shot maybe.
The class struggle against the bourgeoisie:
- No comments on sold, haven't played that in forever. Could probably fix the bug where if You a/d/a strafe while walking, if You don't let go of the walk button between the movement key presses, your move speed goes to near-zero (also applies to like 3/4 of reb classes for some reason, for me making them really awful to play because that's the movement pattern I instinctively prefer)
- ET/Com - I would remove firenade completely at this point, if only because of the current player base. I can easily tell you that in over 10 years of playing I haven't seen more than maybe 10 good firenades with an actual thought out purpose by the player that has thrown it. Also, it bugs the sounds and is a tk machine. Sonic nades are much better designed in my opinion. However, they should probably be switched around to imps (since sonics are useless against sbd and deka anyway).
- Pistol 3 (is a class on its own) needs like a 8 base damage nerf. Just a reminder that it currently does enough damage to one-shot (with a headshot) armor 3 (or maybe only armor 2, can't recall; also depends on damage roll) ET/100hp Saberists WHILE being run accurate with humongous hitbox and fire rate that feels like faster than or equal to e11 primary. As compensation, considering the already non-existing reload time, You could maybe fit more shots per clip.
- Hero - stuff costs too many points. You can't even get Dodge3/E113/Armor3/Ammo3/Dash1 build going on (You have to settle on either Ammo or Armor 2 iirc) which doesn't even look that good on paper. I can't really understand how people manage to fit proj AND a normal weapon option in their builds and still manage to enjoy the game. Heroes also for some reason, with all the problematic point costs, get less armor than BHs for that...
- Clone - in my opinion, this is the currently most overpowered class in the game. (Yes, that Achilles guy was right and nobody listened) 80/80 over two lives makes this class more tanky than 150 mag plating SBD (and if You're playing 200 mag plating sbd your FP is at least trash) and non-raging Hp 3 wookie. Basically only deka is more resilient than this class.
On top of that, they get blobs. Blob is like secondary nade. Except it costs next to nothing and doesn't have the inconvenience of having to switch weapons. It's quite literally the least interactive thing currently in the game with very little counterplay given the speed and size of the hitbox, both in gunner vs gunner and gunner vs saberist situation. I'm not even going to touch on Ion blobs only because nobody uses them. No, wait, if somebody does use them, they charge them for half a second, shoot at deka and go 'BUT WTF I PULSED YOU!!! in chat'.
A thing I would propose (besides just plain out removing blobs from the game) is to, for the duration of blob cooldown, have the fire rate of your clone rifle drop by 1 level. That means if You run CR3, during the time the blob is recharging you shoot CR2, CR2 turns into CR1 and CR1 just jams or turns into Clone Pistol for the duration. That way they are little less self-sufficient for a 2 lives-class.
- ARC - remove Rocket launcher from the game. Point costs are problematic but at the same time a necessity I suppose. Dex and Westar are better than people tend to give them credit for. I would personally remove bounce shots from the game just because losing Your entire armor when You sit somewhere in the middle of t-junc as imp to a guy who's completely behind a reb main corner isn't the most thrilling experience and the arc will not even know that this happened.
I'm happy with the FP drain nerf on M5 because for some reason it was quite literally 5 hits for 90 FP dmg - on a class that can pretty much freely sprint-run since neither pushing nor pulling an arc is a very good idea (unless they run pulses and dropped dex for that; lol).
- Wookie - remove Barge from the game. Rest of the feedback in the netcode cryage pretty much.
- BH - Gun kick shouldn't be innate, it should cost like 10 points or so - BHs don't really have anything to spend points on compared to the hero. Maybe bump TD to 20/25 so we don't have morons auto-buying it because again, there's nothing to spend points on, so newbs buy those and then tk half their team.
Possibly theirs and hero armor values should also be swapped. Also if You do insist on keeping poison darts in-game (even though Saberists are already very trash even if nobody on imps runs poison) they should probably not do damage anymore.
- SBD - I hate playing this class, and I hate playing against this class. Everything about this class is frustrating to play against and play as. First of all, any build that doesn't have Battery 3 is straight off unplayable garbage where taking a single hit quite literally halves whatever is your firerate, not even mentioning taking a hit while shooting and running. If You run Mag Plating and get hit by anything that doesn't get reduced by mag plating You want feel like committing sepukku with the battery loss that comes with it. Same if You run cortosis/blast and no mag plating and get hit by blaster shot. On the other hand, if You're getting hit by stuff that You have armor against, it takes fucking FOREVER to kill.
Jedi matchup is complete garbage (like with melee Wookies I suppose). You can't rush a jedi because of sbd gun fp HeartEmoji drain and movement speed but he can't rush you either due to just the POSSIBILITY of having cortosis and slap hitboxes lingering just like wookie's. If jedi has any deflect level You can just stand there and do nothing pretty much because shooting will be a waste of ammo and/or hitpoints.
Firepower 3 costs a million points but the upgrade from Firepower 2 is not even THAT noticeable (especially compared to CR2 > CR3 difference).
Sadly, besides ranting about this class I can't give any ideas about what to do with it. I could however suggest making it visible and distinguishable (on model) which armors the SBD has bought - so Saberists would be more inclined to be aggressive if they can be sure that the SBD doesn't have cortosis.
Pulses are bad counter to SBD realistically, same reason as for deka (more on that below in deka bullet point as well). The worst thing that happens from getting pulsed while not being out of position to begin with is losing the 150 ammo pretty much. Basically any time I got rushed AFTER getting pulsed, I would have just died to that rush regardless if I was pulsed or not; I would just do slightly less damage in return as I die (keep in mind pulse doesn't last long enough if You're full hp/battery to make you completely unable to do damage back)
- Deka - remove from the game. This class's only real weakness is that the controls are garbage pretty much. Pulse nades do jack shit and no lasting damage by themselves, require deka to be out of sith support and HEAVILY out of position to followup with any lasting damage and Ion blobs do just jack shit even if followed up. The best advice to kill a deka anyone can give is to have multiple people shoot at it. Yeah, no shit, anything dies when multiple people shoot at it; thanks; very helpful. This is the shittiest example of a raid-boss class design I've been seeing in video games I play. Even if You advocate that 'this game is rock-paper-scissor design' (yeah nothing like auto-losing a round pretty much just after the start due to class selects) and Pulses are the Rock to the Deka's scissors; for the reasons above, Your "Rock" is actually made of paper so the scissors don't really care (You can tell I'm really proud of coming up with that).
Not to mention that due to ARC point costs, spending points on Pulses is gimping Your actual gunplay ability. I can personally manage to buy 2 pulses at most and this will cost me so much in armor/dex that my round is bound to feel like garbage.
- Mando - remove Rocket from the game.
Fully charged Westar shots probably do a little too few FP damage but I can't really tell since nobody ever does that If I'm playing saberist so I can't really tell how much they do.
I will disagree with Mandos having the need for side roll getups and/or ability to jetpack/shoot from knockdown.
Also, since there's a flamethrower related thread up there I can also give me 2 cents about that. I think current Flamethrower is literally just a win-more mechanic. The fact that You have it will only matter if Saberist is like <15 hp where it's a seal-the-deal kind of thing. In other situations, where You are either outnumbering the Saberist, the fact that You had flamethrower probably didn't matter in the end. If You are being outnumbered - it doesn't help either. If it's 1v1 it's mostly a wash since unless You are really slow to react You easily either run backward out of range or close enough to force the mando to stop/get into dead-zone. Also, it's completely useless against gunners. What I would propose is to rework it in such a way:
Pressing flamethrower button eats like 2 fuel bars; triggers ~15 seconds cooldown and instantly sets on fire people in the cone in front of you. This way You can go against gunners aggressively and put some pressure on them during a firefight - panic the player a little, maybe even force a roll if they feel threatened enough by the flame damage. Same with saberists basically - You retain the current usage of flamethrower against them (forcing someone holding down m2 to move) but make it more manageable to extinguish themselves if they get set on fire in an already unfavorable situation - because of the cooldown. However, with this change, the fire should probably do even less damage than it does now so it's merely a pressure tool rather than straight out kill weapon (even though it barely can be considered that now).
- Saberists - I can agree with the sentiment that saber-vs-saber sucks for strictly dueling, but I think the current system works well for open when You take into consideration the gunners. You are able to put pressure (with some gunner advantage) on someone holding m2 around a corner with single-swing spam until You get enough AP to force them back and at the same time it's possible to hold Your ground long enough to stall for Your gunners to help you as well. It's also much easier to pick up and 'get' as a new player I'd say. I wouldn't be opposed to dueling simply working differently between duel mode and open/fa.
As a whole, with the FP changes the saberists are probably a bit TOO reliant on the teammates to have an actual impact on the game and I was more content with the FP drains from before the knockback reimplementation in that regard.
I wouldn't mind both Staff and Duals being removed from open. Their visual hitboxes don't often make sense; some of the swings are faster than blue/cyan while keeping normal damage and in case of Duals - the stance is overloaded with stuff. Bigger blocking arc, good kata moves (crouch mostly, butterfly arguably worse than YDFA though), stabs without rolling, 5 hit combo access while having quite high base bp damage already; probably some more minor things I'm forgetting.
To comment on the whole 'nerf push, push bad' sentiments that have been popping up here and there recently - I think the whole push/pull/walk dynamic in its current form is inherent to this game functioning correctly in a vacuum, has been like this since I have started playing and for the entire time has been in completely fine place. (Although I need to leave obligatory 'fix stair-push/pull' and fix having to hold BOTH crouch and walk if You don't want to get crouch-pushed/pulled (mostly just after getup))
Legends feedback:
Jedi Temple FA is notoriously garbage and one of the reasons for that is a certain unlimited <1 model-scale saberist class with 3 lives.
Guess what has <1 model-scale saberists with respawns (and a knockdown means and cortosis(????) as well because why not)?
Overall pretty much every single <1 model-scale class is totally awful to shoot and swing at and I'd rather there were no classes that have this attribute modified.
This includes R2 which is such a mix of bad design points it hurts to think about.
- R2 gets melee moves but no animations - You get fly kicked/crouch swept/normal kicked and it's entirely unreadable based on the animations shown and telegraphed to you.
- R2 is not knockdown immune but he gets, I believe, ET's Coinflip getup. But he doesn't have an animation for that. This leads to You shooting him while knocked down into what You see is clearly his model but there's no hitbox there because he happens to be doing the getup.
- R2 gets BLUE FLAMETHROWER and I think 1.1 speed multiplier as a class - I'm not 100% sure but I think that speed multiplier affects the flamethrower so you get set on fire (that does double damage because blue) quicker while also R2 can backpedal at the 1.1 speed to counteract the usual aggressive response of trying to run point blank for a swing and into the flamethrower dead-zone. If you try to run at him like You would run at open mando You will 100% get set on fire before You can get into that dead-zone. So You can't really take down this class in close range but neither You can take it at a range due to regenerating armor, speed and size; while at range he still whittles you down with what is essentially infinite ammo wrist laser. (Also the flamethrower is really good at obscuring the R2 so coupled with all the damage reduction he gets, trying to trade while on fire will generally get you killed first)
- Because of the size of his model it's hard to tell if you're hitting headshots/chest shots (or for that matter if he even has different damage zones at all). This coupled with regenerating armor AND flat 0.15 (iirc?) damage reduction makes it really difficult to gauge how much damage R2 player has taken and whether You should make a commitment to try and move on to him more aggressively.
- Again, because of the size of his model it's incredibly frustrating to hit with just a single saberswing and on top of that, he gets cortosis (which with damage reduction and armor will mostly be absorbed by that regenerating armor, doing no real lasting damage most likely)...
Same model-scale/reinforcements issue by extension applies to that recent Kowakian class; not to mention all the bullshit hitbox issues with barge.
Assaj is completely busted and much like open's deka only actual weakness is the shit controls, Assaj's only weakness is the pass-throughs that come from the ultra-speed swing speed and the sv_fps 40 that we're all playing on. (Plus the occasional swingblock input drop so You get slapped even if You're just spamming single swings) This class gets too much stuff for no really good reason. Good call on replacing the butterfly and crouch kata with much shittier moves though - I'd imagine crouch kata with her would've been beyond mortal comprehension. I think she should have either dropped almost like all of her force powers or all of her saber speed/dmg buffs.
Aurra Sing is in a weird place because when legends initially came out I think she had Assaj's spot as the most overpowered class - Bp bar, 100 FP with deflecting ability AND (good) guns on top of that (+ flip kick because why not). Now however she doesn't really do anything. I think recently You removed her dodge but gave her 25 fp in return... (so she can deflect again?) except it takes like 1 fp per second to regen or something close to that and well that does like nothing when compared to some other classes in legends. Currently, she's basically just like a regular open bh that gets to saber someone if they turn a corner You have sat behind for like 2 minutes prior.
It's hard for me to give feedback on the Team Heal/Energize classes (because as outlined in my first points of this rant nobody "PLAYS" this game) - I would imagine if we had a more serious player base for this, the team that didn't pick the class with Team heal would be bound to lose more often than not and I don't believe this is a good design for a round-based game. An anecdotal story, the first Legends round I ever played I picked K2 and took easily over 3000 hp dmg (I can assure You, I'm not exagerating) in that round on Jedi Temple - yeah... personally I'd hold the opinion that in the long run if Your goal was to indeed have this mode be balanced, those classes (or force powers rather) should go away - but with more gameplay put into the mode, I could probably be convinced otherwise.
I can't really recall any other glaring issues that I've felt while playing legends but again, given how many different classes there are and the 'quality' of our player base + the limited time I've spent I might be omitting some problems that I didn't get exposed to. For example, I think Jyn Erso gets something like smoke nades. Smoke of which spans out to quite literally the entirety of Smuggler? Don't think the covered area is quite sensible but maybe if it's smaller it would be completely useless on any other map.
loser[24601]
![[SE] Maren](/data/avatars/m/5/5287.jpg?1595402847){kind=avatar}
