Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread

If there is one thing that could almost be universally agreed upon in faf, it’s that shields don’t need to be stronger as a general rule.

@ftxcommando said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

If there is one thing that could almost be universally agreed upon in faf, it’s that shields don’t need to be stronger as a general rule.

Shields were just one example.
I'm sure many other structures could have any stat buffed with adjacency.

~ Stryker

Hello,

@SpikeyNoob Here some feedback to the new UEF bubble shield upgrade.

First of all I love the idea of making the bubble shield as an alternative option to the personal shield. I can see a lot of fun for UEF players to go Rambo with a bubble shield ACU and a couple of percy's. I would really love to see such game play!

but right now the shield is just ridiculously weak compared to the cost. Below is a comparison of all mobile shields.

I think the bubble shield upgrade is most comparable to the Athanah mobile shield. Same size and similar amount of HP (9k vs 10k). But more than 4 times less HP/mass and if you also include the energy costs, the bubble shield is just so bad in terms of bang for bug.

I really see no reason why the upgrade is so much more expensive, especially since the other mobile shields have less than half the recharge time and are much faster and you can have as many as you want.

Even the SACU bubble shield is more than twice as good in terms of HP/mass with a shield HP of 52k!

So I would say give the bubble shield at least the same HP as the personal shield, i.e. 19k. The recharge time should be still at 90s because every arty shell typically hits and the shield will be down pretty quickly.

Because the ACU-shield is resistant against Overcharges while the mobile ones are not. The main reason for getting the bubbleshield is to protect your Percies from getting overcharged, which is a thing a normal shield doesn't fulfill due to dying instantly, especially since the patch where the remaining DMG from the OC gets directed onto the unit itself.

@sladow-noob You can have 10 - 11 Parashield (and if you include energy costs much more). I would argue even with OC killing the Parashield they will do a better job. Simply because of the amount of Parashield you can have.

So the torp upgrade got changed? Same dps but less torps. Is this not a nerf against torp defence?

And if the laser does less damage should it not have cost less?

Please don't put that Self-repair crap on the Cyrban com, really not needed and will only end up in more silly changes to other faction coms to "balance". Cybran coms regen more anyway. Plus are we really gonna have tele laser nano coms fresh everytime they tele to the next area?! I only play as Cybran and think this change would be tragic.

@burni said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Please don't put that Self-repair crap on the Cyrban com, really not needed and will only end up in more silly changes to other faction coms to "balance". Cybran coms regen more anyway. Plus are we really gonna have tele laser nano coms fresh everytime they tele to the next area?! I only play as Cybran and think this change would be tragic.

Teleport and Nano cannot be obtained together.
They take up the same back slot.
It's only one or the other, not both.

As for Self-Repair, the Cybran com was arguably the weakest early on.
This only makes up for the deficit.
It needed something to make up for it.

Also, too much work already went into the upgrade in the programming, testing, and balancing standpoints.
And it may be a little late for feedback as the changes go live in about 2 days.

Cybran coms regen more anyway.

They do now.

~ Stryker

Where can I go to read more discussion about the vision range changes?

I'm sure I'll be talked around as soon as I see people's reasons for wanting it... But at the moment I just feel like I've always loved how including scouts was an important part of supcom combat; even having some great opportunities to bomb the enemy scout to render their forces weaker etc! At the moment I feel like it would be a massive shame to reduce how essential scouts are.

As I said, I'm sure I'll understand better as soon as I see the discussions where people talked about why they wanted this... I just don't know where I can read it all. x

I believe the best place to look for a discussion about this is on the FAF Discord in under the BALANCE section in #balance-suggestions &/or #balance-discussion.

@mostlostnoob Damn, I already searched both those places with the keyword 'vision' and saw nothing recent besides discussions of ways to change the fatboy.

(plus other or older, unrelated comments like 'Jip's original vision', how to make blodir's vision meta, units disappearing inside vision range, seraphim scouts giving vision when they die, artillery requiring vision to get built facing an enemy, "vision/radar and bombers idk what those were about" etc etc, going back to February this year! )

I'm sure I just don't know how to use discord search properly. Thanks for the pointer, I'll try to learn! I'd just hoped to find an actual discussion between people about why vision needed increasing 15%.

@Sylph_ I did search on Discord too & also didn't find anything relevant for the 15% change. The only thing I've found is the brief description about the change on the fafbeta patchnotes page: https://patchnotes.faforever.com/fafbeta.html#vision

@mostlostnoob
That's the only place I read about it, too!

Where is the discussion / justification behind these vision changes, devs?
Please help me understand why this change is being implemented!

@Sylph_

I'm not a dev, but I think I can partially answer your question.

The vision change was meant to try and fix an age-old problem of... well... vision.
Sometimes you have an enemy unit right on the edge of your vision, and since, it's on the edge, you technically should be able to see it and engage it, yet you don't.

This is because vision and intel rings are nowhere near a perfect circle, as FA(F) implies.
In fact, if you played the original SupCom, you can see the vision of the game updates in more of a grid-like pattern.

I can't plug in an MP4 file, here, but if you head to Discord, you can plug this link somewhere so you can see it what I'm referring to.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/862695268901453864/1129601713096114246/VisionDemo.mp4

Global vision increases just help to effectively mitigate those niche circumstances.
The perfect vision circle is just a placebo effect, sadly.
A good placebo, at that, though.

~ Stryker

@blodir said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Tbf the hp diffs were already in some sense meaningless. Like maybe someone really good has at some point thought "oh the enemy is UEF, so I will now choose to not send a raiding party because their mex has more hp", but that has never occurred to me. Yes it obviously makes a pretty significant difference, but it felt still like it wasn't impacting practical decisionmaking very much.

You're right. No one consciously thinks about not sending raiding parties or whatnot due to HP differences.
What does change is the damage.

For example, if a raiding party comes through, it'll either take longer for them to destroy a mex, or they'll just run by dealing minimal damage.

The difference between T1 mexes is meaningless, yes, but the difference between T2 and T3 mexes grows exponentially per tier and per faction.
We're talking 9000 HP down to 6000 across the biggest gap at T3.
2500 to 1800 across T2.
Large differences.

And that's what's changing.
The faction HP differences are being minimized and normalized...
But if I guess it's for the better health of the game, I guess we'll have to see...

~ Stryker

UEF bubble shield refresh rate doubled. Regen rate increased by 50%. Called small buff.

That HP normalization fucks me up as well. And in defense it favors cybran which is per design an offense faction. It brakes with the faction identities and doesn't make sense to me. It's the same with mercies going from precision to aoe but the difference is that mercies needed a change this feels just random. I get the underlying idea but the execution seems bad, especially with the reclaim change.

UEF Bubble will probably be a meme, based on the costs. Otherwise interesting changes. Hope the naval experience is well balanced.

@comradestryker How will increasing the vision range solve this issue? Won't it just make the 'circle' of fuzzy 'can I see or not' happen a little further out?

I assumed that the vision changes were more to do with what the beta changes page suggested - trying to give a player more information to act on during non-radar combat.

My immediate thoughts on it were that while that sounds like a noble goal, it has the side-effect of making radar vs no-radar combat much weaker. Ie, make scouts less crucial, and potentially mess up certain balance tightropes like aurora vs t1, and remove the advantage that range+scout can give to many engagements like, say, ilshavoh, or mongoose. Even hoplite (particularly when paired with a deceiver, which is so much fun if a little niche)...
But, knowing that I'm a total noob, I know I'll be talked around by the opinions of better players, that I very much respect! As such, I was hoping to read the discussion where they were justifying the advantage of a sweeping +15% across-the-board increase to such an important stat.

(Are you sure that the upcoming vision changes are just to try to fix a UI nuance? If so, doesn't the knock-on effect on balance and strategy concern you?
ps. I can't seem to view that attachment in discord. I tried 'search', 'find a conversation' etc, and it turned up a 'can't seem to find what you're looking for'! Basically, I don't know where I'm supposed to paste that link to reach the video you were describing. I'll keep trying (although if it's just that a unit on the edge of vision can often not be seen or come in and out of vision while trying to attack it - I expect that will happen the same when vision is increased by 15%. After all, it can currently happen to a scout, an engineer, or an atlantis!
Thanks for taking the time to reply to me. Sorry for still being confused!)

The point is that basically all units have intel that is the same as their attack radius. This means there are a lot of situations where even though you are in range of a unit, it doesn’t get engaged because of a vision bug where the unit doesn’t pop in until it’s well into the vision radius. The extra intel is supposed to smooth that over.

After a few games, Bubble Shield rework definitely feels like a new viable strategy.
I like where this new placement and direction of the upgrade is going.

Though, as stated before, the stats should be further adjusted.

I believe it should either;

1. have more SHP for the resource cost.
2. or its resource cost be reduced.
   That's all.

~ Stryker