So tonight Panro started to ask about the push back and weapon balance on VSH during tonight's session and asked if anybody ever made a topic about it. I recall Juuud did but that seem to have died out. So I'm creating an up to date topic about balance issues in VSH. I'll put wall of texts in spoilers and short versions under it for the lazy people. Due to a stream of updates all issues addressed have been fixed. As far as I can think of, these are the major balance issues in VSH. Any additional issues/solutions will be posted in this main post.
What about the Baby Face's Blaster? I don't know how it exactly works as I never used it in vsh before, but I'm certain that a skilled player can outrun any boss forever.
Most scunts use that soda popper now due to the ability to jump around infinitely for a short period... they combine that with bonk and are useless for a damn long time.. Which is kind of an issue.. Regarding boss balance issues, I'd suggest the resistances to even out with hale himself, but less uber time on vagi, nothing to downside hhhjr (Maybe increase his rage radius?), and cbs should have roughly 50-75% of vagi's rage radius (think that might be better). Still hate the issue with "Long range" on all bosses though.. or rather the randomness of the hits due to hitboxes being sh*t. Some people know how to exploit this.. or they often try to.. and succeed. Regarding maps, I am gonna post this in the other thread as well, but I'm kind of busy these days, and haven't finished the other projects I had, so I'd rather not in take anything new, unless it's an emergency. Will put a more detailed explanation in the other thread.
I think there are plenty of things that need to be looked at on VSH, both on just weapons and on the servers is general. Here are the what I think that should be added or changed, including things that should be balanced. Happy reading! Servers: Bosses: Classes: Scout: Soldier: Pyro: Demoman: Heavy: Engineer: Medic: Sniper: Spy: And that covers most of he things I wanted to mention. I won't bother with the maps since they aren't my thing, but I hope that these things have pointed out some of the things that I would look for. Thanks for reading if you did! ---EDIT--- Typos...
As far as I can tell thats all part of the plugin code. Can you take a look at that Jelly? I mean, generally what is possible and what isnt.
I've actually taken my time and read all that and I'm thinking that some ideas would a bit too much. :!: A knockback reduction, yes, PLEASE. But if all bosses get such a high reduction, it would be kind of unbalanced, due to the special hales having "extra" abilities. While Hale can just stun people, Vagi for example stuns people, makes himself invulnerable AND resists knockback completly. CBS should have a small boost, but not that much, because he can, as you said, use his arrows to attack from afar. Non-dustructible arrows alone would be pretty good, because they already do almost 600 damage with a headshot. Maybe do the teleport-near-people, but no stun. You can just as easily shorten the time HHHJr gets stunned after a teleport. Attacking him with a high-knockback weapon is the only way of getting him away after you are chosen and if you get stunned, your taunt won't give you crits after its finished, the crits you already had fade away and you are basically dead if there's no medic with uber around. Now THAT is a really good one. You can basically get all your boost with one crit shot back, so there would be a reason to make it so your boost is gone in 10 seconds (or maybe even less). This will probably end up in having soldiers with 200 rockets in reserve which will jump all around the map, collecting health packs and not damaging Hale. It should have a cap at like 50 rockets max. Also, will you get ammo for all weapons or just for your primary weapon? That would be a little too much. Yes, noone uses it and yes, it does almost no damage. But: The Fan-O-War for Scout removes 5% rage and is FAR more risky to hit than with the bison. Even if hale would get near the Soldier, he could just jump away. Scout puts himself in an extremly dangerous situation by hitting hale with his fan. And that's not even mentioning the slowdown. Hale gets slowed by high-damage sources enough. Pyro with airblast is the only effective way of countering a Vagi-rage. And 2 seconds of cooldown would be too much to blast him of a cliff or a little box. Maybe do something that it would consume more ammo the more you airblast hale away in 10 seconds, every blast takes 10 more ammo or something like that. Sounds good, but the heads should fade away very slow. Like one head every 15-20 seconds, because you actually have to get into melee range of hale, he can hit you all the time when you can hit him, and you basically surivive only one hit (two with the shield equipped), when you don't have 4 or more heads. Would be nice too see some Caberdemos jumping around and hitting him for 405 damage, then jumping to a dispenser/medic and doing the same thing again. Would actually be pretty balanced, due to the caber not having extra range. Ok, I understand that Heavy with a critted shotgun is fairly immortal to an inexperienced hale, but hale can outdamage the shotgun (even with crits) and does not have to reload. And Heavys can not get crits via taunting while having more than 500 hp, so hale can kill him in 3 hits. Basically the only way a Heavy can get more than 1k hp (= 5 hits do die) is via goomba-stomping. And if the hale lets a Heavy do that more than one time in rapid succession, its just a lack of skill. So, do we have a solution to kill an engi with basically unlimited supplys of metal and a SC? Yes we have. Raging. Sounds stupid, because Echo correctly said, that a Eureka Effect Engi can just escape while he is stunned, but here comes the awesome part: When Engis use the Eureka taunt, their metal will get set to 200. So if he had 2k metal before, hale can easily wait out till the engis metal ran out and kill him. Metal on hit would be good, but as with the slowing and rage reduction, that would be too strong. It would even need a better buff, because you still can't get very much metal and hale can see where you are, due to a line connecting the building with you when you teleport a uilding to you. It DOES give 10% uber when you hit hale. And its always critboosted and has a slight damage buff. So the crossbow is not like the Syringe Gun, to get uber quick while hale is near you, but for getting some damage as medic while not needing to get close to him. The huntsman is rarely used, just because the regular Sniper Rifle is so good. And you can't just Point-And-Click-Adventure on hale, but need to calculate the projectile speed. Now about the taunt: The only way to get hale stunlocked, is by having him in a tight corridor, where he doesn't see you beforehand. Because if he does, he knows what you're up to, and will just take another way or wait until you're done taunting and kill you one-hit. What's the point of that? Just to let new players get killed by hale easily, because they did not know it? Or having normal players get killed easily because they forgot to change their loadout or couldn't change it fast enough before the round starts? Really, its fine the way it is now. Stuff that I did not quote, is fine in my opinion. Hopefully you won't see me as an asshole, who just points out every bad point in your post, because there were some really nice ideas.
@Panromir: All of what has been suggested is possible However, with the current code, anything to do with modifying weapon attributes is likely to fall victim to the first round bug (eg flare gun with no flare jump) @HHHJ Suggestions: The big thing everyone seems to agree on with this...thing... is the lack of bravejump. So how about this: Give HHHj the bravejump Cause HHHj to teleport to the nearest player when rage is used and teleport that player to where HHHj previously was* AND stun everyone around HHHj (plus the teleported player) in a reduced radius *if the player is teleported to or above a deathpit, respawn them
I honestly disagree with so many things that JUUDOLF said.. I was too disappointed to read further from "Nerf demoknight" So not to say anything about other ideas.. other than I can't believe nobody sees anything wrong here.. Demoknight loosing heads over time? Insane.. hale already sits out ubers.. sitting out the time to let demoknight lose his heads ... this game turns into an even bigger camp fest with a decent excuse to add to it.. Won't say more... really too IMBA what he suggested.. the balance would shift very quickly.. and we'd lose people due to everyone losing always unless they move in a deathball... Quote Starcraft 2: OP Protoss Ball Just my opinion though.. if you all agree on it.. go ahead..
Nerfing all the classes seems kinda dumb for me. I think that the Hale and the players are kinda balanced with each other, it just takes skill to survive/deal most damage. (Scouts will be a problem, always, thats why there are admins and Hale has a rage to take down a scout) FF2 server hales need more nerfing, some of them are too OP and some of them just weak.
We should take these step by step. First let's try buff on bosses with push back resistance of 50% MAX. See how that goes. In addition we could add the useless weapons' buffs. Specifically for HHHJr teleport, it would be difficult to swap places cause it's hard to decide what is a deathtrap and what isn't. I propose the target player getting swapped gets teleported back to their own spawn. Once we tested how the buffs for resistance and useless weapons work out, we see if the class nerfs are still necessary.
I think that everyone can agree that bosses needs more pushback resistance, i've been able to send hale flying away from a raged sentry nest countless times but IMO, vagineer shouldn't have a big pushback resistance (should be buffed, but not as much as the other). I pretty much agree with most of what JUUDOLF suggest except a few things : I think that, like PixelBacon said, we need then a cap for the maximum rockets or else we'll se more useless soldiers (well, we don't see useless soldier that often and even when there is, they aren't usually good at rocketjumping but it's still a possibility) I don't think this one is a good idea, because if many people start using it, hale is going to get stuck without being able to rage. Also, if 2 engs put their sentry next to each other, it's pretty hard to destroy them without rage. With that buff, soldiers can just spam as much as they want (since the lack of ammo restriction) and screw hale. I think an interresting idea would be instead of that a little % of rage each airblast so pyro airblasting like a machine gun would make the team in a bad spot. I don't think it's needed as demoknight tend to stay in the fight with the eyelander/reskin and even if they start running away, they don't have to mobility of the scout so it isn't really a big deal. Metal on hit is ok but slow + rage reduction, it's not a good idea for pretty much the same reason i don't think it's a good idea for the Righteous Bison. Also, with that, engineer will need absolutly no teammates to help him defend his sentry since he can stun hale (with the SC) AND making it really hard to rage. I don't really see an issue with that. You can see that comming miles away, just like the telefrag from the eng. Also, i think the Cow Mangler need a buff as it's impossible to crit with that...maybe the fire on hit like the charged shot but for every shot? (But that would make the charged shot pointless).
I actually talked with JUUD0LF about that and he said that the normal ammo capacity (20 rockets) are enough. So you can't get extra ammo, but just refill your ammo that you already shot. Maybe put it it a little higher like 30 rockets in reserve or something like that, depends on balancing.
Short Circuit is titally useless now. Doesn't matter if I hit him or no, hales can kill me randomly. Can you change something?
I played around with the crossbow some days ago and as far as i could notice, the crossbow doesnt do ANY crits meaning that a sucessfull hit on hale only does 40-50 damage, with far distance something with 90 damage. You also cant taunt crit with it, so only way to get crits with it to do atleast some damage with it is a Amplifier or last person alive crits. It also didnt gave me any ubercharge when i hit hale, so the only usefull thing with the crossbow is actually that it can heal teammates over distance and for that you technically give your life because you cant get a uber if hale focuses on killing you (exept you are lucky and get some hits with the ubersaw) So i agree with the 25% add of uber on hit. That way crossbow Medics could life without doing much damage with the crossbow. Has to be something with you, do you usually have a high ping? and it feels like you have to point towards the hale for it to actually hit, since the area effect got removed as mentioned by someone. It also takes some skill and practise to use the SC sucessfully ^^ Edit: Oh and also, would it be possible to make that "(Name) Became Saxton Hale" message at the start of each round just take as long as the warmup phase takes or move it more to the top? Its really annoying to have that big white text in the middle of the screen and having some problems on maps where you confront hale after 5 seconds running :/
As already some mentioned, if you use the SC it wont have a full circle effekt, in the past you could stun hale while he was behind you. This got changed and you actually have to point to where you wannt to zap, what makes the SC harder. And sometimes the Hale just like laggs and hits you while being stunned, or not even reacting to the stun. We all know that feeling.
^^ Yoshi kinda explained everything. I think that there is not much we can do about this lag/SC nerf.
Yes, I know how I have to use it. I think I can play well as engi, but 9/10 cases I get killed after I spammed all my metal into hale's damn face. Try to play with it and escape just once. Some older SC versions were better, and weren't too op.