Weaker blasters are less affected by the reduction if someone can aim relatively accurately. Pistol 1 gets a 5 dmg loss where as pistol 3 is 9 for example. However, over the course of 5 shots P3 and P1 both lose a single shot worth of damage. Over multiple consecutive shots things tend to even out across all weapons. The only things you see issues with are the "skill shots" being EE-3 sniper and T-21 primary but if you have enough skill to hit them properly (headshot) they should still kill or be close to it with the hit location multipliers.
But the difference in skill gaps was widened severely between HRoF weapons and skill-shot weapons. My point being, flinch/damage resistance buff the *wrong* weapons. Only certain weapons should flinch, and the damage reduction should be removed.
Do you know how trivial it is for me to kill certain gunner classes with lightning 2+Cyan, even with flinch? Only classes that actually gave me trouble in 1.4, are the same classes that give me trouble in 1.3.
Passive perks really aren't flavor. They're cheap and uninteresting ways of simulating differences without actually creating it. Real differences need to be added in terms of animations and active mechanics. Passives require nothing to use effectively. Passive perks are not fun. Is hero heal fun? Nope its just kinda there, is soldier speed buffs to CC fun? Not really, its just nice to have. Certain classes having the passive ability to roll over others doesn't really add fun to their classes it adds frustration when its not there. They were removed because it was the cheapest route because developers do not work 40+ hours a week with a 300 man team. We should be doing a lot more work to ALL of the "perks" that exist in the game.
If were not successful and not doing the right thing why has a very popular PC critic praised us several times alone in the past few months? Why did everyone harping on battlefront tell people to go play Movie Battles for a solid experience? Why have I seen random people I don't even know tell developers of other games on reddit to look at Movie Battles as the best example of asymmetrical balance they've ever seen and to use it as an example? Why have I seen developers say that they based their Melee systems off of Movie Battles (Blade Symphony, Chivalry, etc. have stated it before) if were so bad at this? All we did this build was realize a mistake we made in terms of saberist vs gunner and reverted it. Should the damage reduction stay? Probably not but you can't just remove the perks without adding what was there prior so that you can adequately see the affect of all of the other changes that happened between that.
I completely disagree. Cyan was my favorite style because I enjoyed the interaction with parries, and how it felt to use against multiple opponents. Using superior footwork to quickly parry stray swings until I got something that I liked to Mblock/Pblock->Counter. It was my favorite style, and it had nothing to do with it being 'OP' or the like (Because it wasn't), if I really needed to stomp someone, I would *not* use cyan. Cyan to me was a decent style that had strengths and weaknesses like any other, wasn't OP, or UP, BUT people didn't know how to deal with a style based around parrying, and as a result, they made it boring for the wrong reasons.
Passive perks are perfectly fine, active perks are also fine. It depends on what they are. Staff's perk gives it flavor. Red's perk gave it flavor. Cyan's perk gave it flavor. Although now pretty much every style plays the same as another.
And I don't think you did, because Movie Battles II is not the perfect example of any of these things. I think you're seeing this with tinted glasses. MBII should be looking towards other games for ideas/balance suggestions, rather than this weird congealed mixture that feels like CS;GO tried to turn star wars.
Battlefront has *vastly* superior gun play. The one thing that I loved about MBII over any other game, was the saber system, and how it seamlessly transferred from fighting gunners to other jedi. Sadly, 1.4 is just boring to me. It is honestly like a slightly more complicated version of battlefront's dueling now. Yes there is still skill involved, but it certainly doesn't feel as good as 1.3, and I just get so bored, whether I win or lose (and I mostly win).
As for the gunner vs saberist stuff, I'm perfectly fine with nerfing saberists, infact I want saberists to be nerfed, I want shots from blasters to have more weight to them, and I want the game to feel more like the movies. However, that isn't the route people seem to be taking it. To nerf Saberists, I would have just made deflection require more skill, and have a smaller deflection radius, and heavily nerf certain weapons, like CR3. Flinching would also only work on skill-shot specific weapons, like T-21 Primary, or Westar charge shot.
I feel like the best path for a new dev to take, would be to leave 1.4 in for a while, but revert back to 1.3 and work to perfecting the already stable system. Nudge has to go, and it will go at some point. 1.3 was stable and fine, it just needed minor tweaks/polish. From what I've heard from numerous people, these kinds of changes have happened over and over in MBII's history, and when people get it, they realize how bad it is, then remove it, then later on they want it again.