Is mercy too strong in team games? What you think?

@MazorNoob said in Is mercy too strong in team games? What you think?:

I'll believe that once I see them used more often than once in 200 games. Or is the entire FAF community too stupid to understand, after half a year, that beetles are a good unit now?

Considering how bad people are at adapting and that LoL pros who get payed milions and are still often slow to adapt to new meta I can see a bunch of random faf players to be not so great at adapting to new stuff.
Even more when you consider how most of them are not even remotely interested in pushing the gameplay even further but just want to chill by doing the same shit again and again.

You hardly ever see beetles in pro ladder either, not even as a cheese option. I think I've seen them maybe twice, as sort of a counter to unmicroed mongeese/hoplites.

I should give up. I tried to make the beetle balance thread conform to every single feasible balance forum guideline and I'm still waiting for a response, instead the balance team responds on a whim to a single sentence "Are mercies good? Y/N" thread.

well i never agreed on the beetle change, so i wouldn't answer you on your thread as to why it has been design like that.

I think changing mercies is a bad idea because it makes faf even more mechanical. Mercies are a cheese mechanism, and a comeback mechanism much like tac missles. It offers alternative ways for games to take and therefore makes the game more exciting. Of course it sucks to be mercy sniped, or tml sniped, or old beetle sniped, or corsaired, but its a nice cheese thats super costly and all-inny. mercies have insane bt, so if you do your homework and scout and dont neglect air and radar and play zoomed out, they are super easy to counter.

Now i dont want to talk about mercies, but about the direction the balance has been going since im here. The game became more and more "be efficient in eco and grind down your opponent" style with less abilities to make plays, ie. Use units to conclude a game fast. If you remove mercies the games objective boils down more and more to "acquire mass to make t1 tanks to hold map"-style. Or in teamgames "be as greedy as possible and upgrade mex style", and i think thats boring. I like it when games have cheese options like fast ml that doesnt require half its mass worth of bp to be constructed within the relevant time window, or beetles to snipe acus, because thats exciting to do and punishes people who are lost in basebuilding and efficiency optimisation playstyle.

Oh and deribus please cut it with "please provide a replay" . We all know what a mercy snipe looks like and I think in general its possible to have an informed discussion about balance matters without looking at it. Anyone who needs a replay to look at in order to understand the matter shouldnt participate in the discussion, because clearly he lacks the imagination to provide relevant insight.

@BIG-BENNIS-MAGIC we don't talk about purging mercies from the game,we're asking for a nerf,it doesn't matter if you did scout them or not same for aa,their activation radius is just too big,you need to keep your aa too close to the acu and even in that case you'll kill at best 3 mercies only and no,they are not costful.
the only bad thing that might happen when you build them is the early stage when your opponent is going t3 air in any other case it's efficient to build them(considering they will connect in the end).

also that's the reaction you'll get when sniped by some only aeon boy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCHtnfKRjk&ab_channel=TotallyJustABean.
live with that.

If you nerf the activation radius, they become unusable, because they are countered by 50 mass t1 AA.

I agree with Bennis, it is nice to have cheese tactics available, and the essence of cheese tactics is that it can go either way : if you're spotted you lost the game or you just put yourself a lot behind (you've all experienced the situation where your air player made corsair/mercies, failed to kill, and all the team gets strat bombed).

Aeon air is very average/mediocre right now in my opinion (bad t1 bomber, no fighter/bomber, mediocre T3). I think having mercies available is the only reason you see aeon picked in teamgames air spot really ...

i wouldn't call restorers bad and the t2 gunship is also a very good burst damage for hit and runs,same for swifties,why would they get another strong unit if they have op com,op navy,strong land?

cheese option aren't lacking. The issue of mercy in comparison to other cheese is that it is "press key to win".
It's just the philosophy of cheese pushed to the max. 0 skill involved, just cross finger. Honnestly a different design would be way more useful to the gameplay.

The main issue of Mercies is the fact that even if a player foresees them and prepares in advance there is a good chance he will still die. I think the design behind Mercies was simple, if enemy has AA next to his ACU he lives, if he doesn't then he dies and you win. While discussing if such mechanic is healthy for the gameplay is another topic the main issue right now is that because of the activation radius which is 25 (that's quite a lot, for comparison the vision of an ACU is 26) and the fact the projectiles that AA shoots needs to reach the mercy before it can transform itself into projectiles that cannot be stoped creates the situation where even if you have a lot of aa around you then if it's not between your ACU and the mercies you will still die.
On the other hand the Mercies are extremely annoying to use due to their fuel constraints and the fact that a single intie can get in kill a few even if you have a bunch of your own aircraft escorting the mercies.
Right now I am playing around with a Mercy rework and I have a couple ideas but there is nothing concrete as of yet.

I think lowering the activation range would be enough. It would turn the use of mercies from punishing aggressive players to punishing out of place ACU's who don't have aa/inties in their unit mix. I think the major issue with mercies is aa doesnt have enough time to shoot at them and that you can brute force them through a decent amount of t1 aa by tanking the t1 aa fire with inties.

I like mercies, mind you, as an aeon player I'd rather have some sort of reuseable bomber, but I get swifties so it's fine.

I think tweaking their activation range is a good slider to dial in on a good place for them. I have also seen the idea of the ground AOE thing as well, but think it would be best if (somehow, I know the code isnt there) the AOE duration stacked instead of damage. Like, really get your com out of there my man, pay attention. Or perhaps giving them other abilities, like an alternate 'conversion attack' that has enough umph to convert a 2t mex? Nah, that would be a unit called a 'missionary' or something. Or a wide EMP effect. Just spitballin.

Here is a working concept for the Mercy as a Crowd Control unit through low dmg over time. Mind you that this is just a concept and the dmg, hp and everything else is a place holder. I mainly wanted to test the visual side of things here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yhyemj-tMs&t=13s

Hm. If the total damage is high enough to kill a building (unless the ennemy goes for a panic repair), this could be interesting. Instead of sniping ACU you could snipe building and/or zone away units, just like other faction do with fighter-bombers.

@Tagada
yeah,that's something better i guess but need to consider giving them somewhat a balanced dps and it's a great unit

I honestly think mercies are fine for everyone but Cybran players. Sky slammers cant do fuck all vs a mercy due to their terrible projectile speed. Regarding mercies, Its a fairly huge investment that takes time to pull off, and I think in most cases equal mass spent in t2 gunships/figher bombers will yield the same/better result. I do agree that the gameplay mechanic is poorly thought out and not fun, and could use a change. But I disagree that they are OP.

IMO the only time mercies are a problem is in huge teamgames when players aggressively push without scouting, AA, or air, and that's mostly their fault for doing so, especially if they see enemy air player is aeon.

That being said, I would be onboard for changing the role of the mercy, or even tinkering with it to make it less 'feels bad man' when you get sniped. I would support either lowering the speed of the mercy, or keeping the speed the same but making activation radius super low, making it so that AA even with/slightly behind ACU can stop mercies from killing ACU.

Someone had a crazy idea of making the mercy behave like a dumb TML missle, which sounds pretty cool if it could be balanced. Buff HP, make it not able to track units, but weak to TMD/AA, and use it to snipe stationary targets.

TLDR: I don't think mercy is OP, but I think its a bad unit that could benefit from a rework.

It isn’t pushing without aa, shields, scouting. You need to keep your aa in front of your ACU and even then, there’s no actual guarantee that all your aa won’t target the same mercy and now need to reload at which point the surviving mercies are all in activation range. I’ve even had flak that just flat out missed entire groups of mercies.

You can even send your own scout plane as an Aeon player to force aa turrets to need to turn around to hit the mercies, wasting even more time and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

It’s not like gunships or strats or bombers where you can gain several seconds of survival through decent micro which then controls for the variance of early aa targeting. Mercies by design are entirely dependent on that first 1-2 seconds which in a game that doesn’t use something like hit-scan, means even proper preparation won’t save you in some situations.

I could imagine giving mercies bit more hp but a smaller activation radius. That would make it more predictable AA wise. You wouldn't be puhished so hard for mispositioning your aa. But one or two AA wouldn't cut it anymore if there are a couple redundant mercies coming your way. Cybran AA would still be crap but mobile flak might have a decent chance.

@Tagada said in Is mercy too strong in team games? What you think?:

While discussing if such mechanic is healthy for the gameplay is another topic the main issue right now is that because of the activation radius which is 25 (that's quite a lot, for comparison the vision of an ACU is 26) and the fact the projectiles that AA shoots needs to reach the mercy before it can transform itself into projectiles that cannot be stoped creates the situation where even if you have a lot of aa around you then if it's not between your ACU and the mercies you will still die.

It seems to be both unrealistic and problematic for gameplay that the mercy has basically nil hitpoints, but is still invincible during the most important phase of its attack, which should be the most dangerous phase. So what if we made it into a more realistic actual kamikaze plane? We could give them a more normal amount of hp (similar to what other bombers or fighters would have), a lot less maneuverability and slower speed, but targetable the entire duration of the attack. I am also imagining a very cool stuka-like sound effect for the attack path (about what the activation period would have been, or longer).
I concede this would be a significant change and probably requires quite a bit of testing to figure out the best balance of hp, damage, etc.

edit: to get an idea of the type of sound effect, this clip gets the point across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W3KDB0yHYM

Also, perhaps you could make it so that the mercy can only begin its attack dive from a certain minimum distance away (30, 35 perhaps?), and the sound effect begins at that point and so it gives a little bit of advance warning of the impending attack.

Area denial is a neat idea. Personally, I would buff the mercy's fuel/manueverability/health but write the projectile script differently. It fires I think four projectiles? Write the weapon script so that the first projectile hits the selected target but the other projectiles will home in on other targets, if present. This would constitute a comprise in that ACUs could be sniped by mercies still, but only if they are alone and or if the mercy player takes more time and micro (it there are 10 tanks with the acu, each mercy will hit 3 of them, so 4 mercies have to attack one at a time to take out 10 tanks before following mercies will fire all shots at the target acu.)