Buff Wagner back

I was going to make another thread on Wagner, but instead I'll necro this one. I feel like Wagner is still in a bad spot, at least in casts I watch I never, ever, ever see it built. I'm not sure why and don't have a coherent case against Wagner as it is now, but I want to loosely summarize my thoughts on Wagner so we can figure it out.

First, raw stats, taking each T2 tank as reference:

• Versus Blazes: Wagner is 65% more expensive, has 10% more health, twice the DPS, 0.6 less speed and 2 less range. Compared to 2 blazes, Wagner is 20% cheaper, has 55% of their combined health, same DPS.
• Versus Yenzynes: Wagner is 35% more expensive, has 10% less health, 66% more damage, 2 more range and 0.3 less speed.
• Versus Riptides: Wagner is 8% cheaper, has 33% less Hp, 5-10% more DPS, 4 more range and same speed.

Just like OP post wrote, when looking at pure numbers Wagners are the worst tanks in terms of sqrt(DPS * health)/mass ratio by some margin, especially against Blazes. It's not a huge difference, so why are they not being built? I think the answer lies in the fact in them not being good in many scenarios where other hover tanks are.

• First obvious scenario is fighting navy. All other tanks can do that, Wagner cannot. That covers maybe three quarters of all hover tank usage.
• Second scenario is crossing water to get to another landmass and do major raids, e.g. kill a bunch of factories or a smaller land force. Obviously Aeon is strictly best here (hover flak + shields) followed by Seraphim (hover flak), but even between UEF and Cybran Wagner is at a disadvantage, because of worst DPS * health/mass ratio but especially because of abysmal HP making them very vulnerable to air.
• Third scenario is small raids across water, e.g. sending a few Wagners on Roanoke to kill a few mexes. Wagners are good at it and were nerfed specifically to not be OP doing this. This one is an unknown to me. Does anyone build Wagners for this still? How does this compare to Zthuee spam on maps like pizza?

I feel like there is a problem, but don't know what it is. Maybe Wagners are overspecialized and therefore almost never worth building? Maybe it's okay for them to be really, really good for some things, uniquely so, just like Zthuees, Auroras or Ilshavohs, and a nerf was an overreaction? Or is it a case of FAF community not understanding that Wagners are still good and it will eventually rediscover the unit?

Wagners work great against cancering UEF navy, what are you gonna do, send a 1k mass boat to deal with each 250ish mass wagner driving around the map?

Doesn't do much against Aeon and Cybran because they have torpedo spam built into their navy mix. Sera it should also be fine against.

Torp bombers cost less than Wagners, can target Wagners and they 2-shot them. Doesn't that work? Conversely, if I have Wagners driving around the map in enemy half, I'm not going to send my air force to all of them to protect them from torps.

To think about it, that's another Wagner weakpoint: only amphibious T2 tanks that can be targeted by torps like the rest of navy can.

@advena I totally think that the wagner should be a kickass amphibious tank... Particularly given the difference between 'hover' and 'amphibious'... (Namely, that I really think an 'ocean bottom' unit should probably beat a 'hover' unit in a mass-for-mass fight... All other things being equal.)

Now this part is a bit of an aside, but can you elaborate on your 'justification'?
quote: "I use DPS*HP/mass^2 as combat effectiveness estimation"

This seems like an interesting equation to use, but I feel like it's one that skews results or points to unnecessary and perhaps misleading conclusions.

The nature of the game, as far as I have experienced it, is that more expensive units have an effect of 'compacting' mass on the battlefield, giving them a significant advantage against equal mass spent on more spread out (cheaper) units.
Most of this is simply down to units not being able to attack until they are in range, and thus the more expensive units always being able to bring 100% of their firepower to bear in a battle - compared to cheaper opponents.

Your equation suggests that Titans are much more effective than percivals, but neither are as good as strikers...
(And this isn't even taking overkill into account!)
That equation generally suggests that cheaper units are better, mass-for-mass, than expensive units, which is something I don't see ingame.

I'm thinking you might just be better off not squaring the mass cost before dividing by it. Just a thought. x

Give the Wagner some torp defense

Gunships and bombers can't target amphibious tanks, and they're harder for the enemy navy to kill (frigates dont hurt them, destroyers do less damage or in the case of UEF almost no damage).
Torp defence could mean they're able to take on subs and win mass for mass in a naval fight.

Wagner's don't have much DPS if any I thought

Buff torpedo damage and lower torpedo rate of fire. Their torps are tactically useless

@mazornoob said in Buff Wagner back:

Torp bombers cost less than Wagners, can target Wagners and they 2-shot them. Doesn't that work? Conversely, if I have Wagners driving around the map in enemy half, I'm not going to send my air force to all of them to protect them from torps.

To think about it, that's another Wagner weakpoint: only amphibious T2 tanks that can be targeted by torps like the rest of navy can.

Except you’re not catching each underwater tank underwater and now need to build both torps and surface air to ground meaning you spend even more mass investment to deal with the problem than if it were riptides.

@ftxcommando said in Buff Wagner back:

@mazornoob said in Buff Wagner back:

Torp bombers cost less than Wagners, can target Wagners and they 2-shot them. Doesn't that work? Conversely, if I have Wagners driving around the map in enemy half, I'm not going to send my air force to all of them to protect them from torps.

To think about it, that's another Wagner weakpoint: only amphibious T2 tanks that can be targeted by torps like the rest of navy can.

Except you’re not catching each underwater tank underwater and now need to build both torps and surface air to ground meaning you spend even more mass investment to deal with the problem than if it were riptides.

I was arguing specifically against the "Coopers chasing Wagners" argument. Torps are faster, cost less and kill Wagners more effectively than Coopers. There's a T2 air fac opportunity cost, but the player building Wagners already paid one with T2 land. Coopers can't kill Wagners on land either.

Either way, having to build air to ground and torps isn't such a huge deal given that Wagners have two thirds of Riptide health for around the same cost, so you need one third fewer gunships AND one third fewer torps than if they had Riptide health, and only need gunships for those that slip past. Plus on a navy map these torps can be repurposed against enemy navy, something T2 gunships aren't great at.

Me having to build t2 air spam to deal with wagners rather than just winning with kiting destros is a cost purely put on them as a UEF player. This cost is magnified because I need both the terrible uselessness of a stinger, the innate friendly fire of a janus, or a torp bomber that can put a wagner at 600 hp but now it just raids my loose t2 mexes anyway.

Your opportunity cost doesn’t hold when UEF already needs to sink more mass into t2 navy than every other faction to accomplish anywhere near the same utility.

I’ve had games on metir where any other faction would have been trivial to deal with in terms of hover but wagner spam made me lose more eco dealing with it via unit investment while still killing my stuff.

The thing with Wagners is that it's tough to catch them unless you have proper defences in place. You usually have some radar coverage (mostly from frigates) but you don't have a lot of sonar coverage until T3 sonar. Thus, you can spot hover units but can't reliably spot amphibious ones. This grants Wagners a unique advantage that is not visible in their raw stats alone. Unfortunately, this also makes them way more specialized compared to other hover units. They are primarily a raiding unit, that's what they are best at and because of that they are worse in other scenarios. Perhaps they are currently slightly too weak and need to be looked at since I don't really see them used too often. But it would be only a slight buff for sure.

They literally just got a buff that like doubled their torp dps, I've seen them do decent damage to frig gameplay now. Especially since it isn't like you can use your own subs to chew thru like 8k hp in the space concentration of 1 frig.

https://replay.faforever.com/20622191

^Waffelz showing the way of the Wagner to roll our team

Wasn't the Wagner's torpedo damage increased with the latest balance patch?

~ Stryker

(Torpedo dmg increase or not, I don't see wagners working like submarines, currently. I find the comments about wagners necessitaing torpedo bombers to be really misleading, since if the wagners are doing much of any damage, they are vulnerable to the usual air-to-ground solutions that work against hover units. gunships, bombers etc. If wagners are using torpedoes to clean up submarines and the like, then I stand corrected - but I can't see how it'd happen, currently.)

@tagada I totally agree with the idea that wagners are simply too different from hover units - it seems that comparisons between wagners and hover units are basically not useful.
At the end of the day, the final metric, I think, just has to be whether wagers are:

1. dominating games,
2. used-but-NOT-dominating,
3. or underused.

My very personal experience is that they are underused, but it's not an important opinion - I'm not pro and have limited experience, so I defer to the opinions of other players. Ultimately, though, I think it's just important to adjust them based on whether they're overperforming or unused, rather than trying to draw parallels to hover units.