A few 1.3 perk tree balance comments
Posted: Sat May 20, 2017 5:23 am
I thought I'd consolidate thoughts I've had about the 1.3 class trees. They are better than ever in terms of balance, power, and interesting choices, but here are some specific rows where I think the choice could be improved
Assault
Gunnery Sergeant: Bring'em On, Close Combat Specialist, Untouchable
Bring'em On I feel is a fairly no brainer "don't pick me." This is because it is quite generally overkill damage. The reasons it is overkill damage are 1) because the shotgun's natural damage and crit damage are such that if you are on par in terms of weapon tech, when you crit it's going to kill (bonus: factor in talon rounds and killer instinct), and bring'em on doesn't kill them any deader 2) bring'em on is so high in the tree that you will additionally have a double shot of some kind for sure by that point that you learn BoE (rapid fire/hit & run/CE) so even if you don't quite believe point 1, I can all but guarantee you will see overkill when you get 2 critical shots at the same target. BoE is certainly better than no trait at all and you can theoretically make up situations where that extra bit of crit damage was the difference between a kill or not, but the sheer excellent consistent and broadly useful powers of CCS/Untouchable far outweigh those fringe situations where BoE might once in a blue moon mean the difference between killing or not killing.
To me an interesting choice here would be Combat Fitness or Sprint. I'm admittedly a little biased to suggest extra movement because I think assaults really live and die on movement points and they could use that option somewhere on the tree. It's pretty depressing how slowly they move when you're obligated to weigh them down with plating/vest/talon rounds. It might make excellent competition with CCS/Untouchable.
Note that BoE is totally fine in Ranger specs since their weapon is light years away from being able to one shot things (on crit) compared to the shotgun.
Grenadier
Sergeant: Boosted Cores, Formidable, Bluescreen Bombs
Formidable stands out as a "don't pick me." If you are using a grenadier in your lineup, you're going to be using it for either offensive or defensive grenades, and both boosted/bluescreen are indispensable upgrades to those grenades. You may ask why not pick on the previous tier where its heavy ordnance/protector, but here I can see that those aren't necessarily indispensable as you may not actually use all your grenades in every mission or you may have additional sources like airdrop to compensate for limited ammunition. But if you are going to use your grenades at some point, which is totally reasonable, I would be somewhat if not extremely dumbfounded if you didn't pick boosted cores for offensive grenades (huge dps increase, especially for dot grenades), or bluescreen bombs (ability to control robots in addition to organic???? sign me up). Lastly, formidable isn't quite as strong as it once was, grenadiers aren't on the frontlines getting hit a lot like assaults, and grenadiers don't naturally come with other skills that make them strong candidates for tanks. All of these are not issues that need to be corrected or anything, but the end result is formidable makes little sense for this class in this tier. Perhaps the "Suppression" skill would make a very interesting choice actually instead of Formidable in this tier. Or Fortify.
Note that I'm generally fine with formidable in other classes in their particular locations, just not this particular instance for the aforementioned reasons.
Gunnery Sergeant: Volatile Mix, Bombardier, Salvo
In this tier Volatile Mix seems like a "pick me always." In 1.3, the radius of flashbangs were decreased, and the advanced grenade launcher provides +2 range instead of +1 range + 1 radius. Since radii have gone down, it almost feels necessary to pick Volatile Mix to get good radii again. Additionally, since you get bonus range essentially for free from the new advanced nade launcher, Bombardier's range improvement is directly less of a need. Range wasn't a problem to begin with in 1.2, and it's even less of a problem now that we have +1 range compared simply from carrying the 1.3 launcher. I find myself hard pressed to find a situation where bombardier makes any sense, and volatile mix is just so necessary to get decent/powerful radii again. Salvo's probably ok, but to reiterate the 1.3 changes to the grenadier class have vastly shifted any reasonable choice from bombardier directly into volatile mix.
One cynical solution would be to downgrade the range bonus to +1 from the adv nade launcher, but I think that's just a spiteful direction to go in and doesn't really fix that radii is so important to the power of all grenades. One direction is to really exaggerate bombardier by giving say +5 range or something. Might not be the right way to go, but the point remains.
Gunner
I'm not going to beat these to death and we don't even necessarily need to discuss these any further in this thread, as I started a discussion about these gunner skills in a different thread; just listing them here for completeness as far as listing the skills I don't think are interesting choices
Corporal: Flush, Formidable, Lockdown
Flush still feels bad. You should use Focus Fire or Holotarget if you want to hit something better. Flush can miss, it can send enemies to bad positions. Just because it can stack with other debuffs doesn't mean it's worth casting (spending too much time debuffing is rarely if ever a good choice; you want people actually firing after debuffing once). Demolition also makes this skill feel silly. Yes again it's true they're on separate cooldowns and you can choose both, but the action economy of flush feels very poor and can backfire. I would suggest a rework/reimagining of flush. Maybe it always hits and has no cooldown? Sounds op but at the end of the day, you are combining a lot of classes together and only dealing with one enemy at a time, and there are still enemies who are immune/resistant to OW. Or replace with holotarget?
Tech Sergeant: Cyclic Fire, Danger Zone, Cool Under Pressure
CuP is a strong skill in general and works wonders in other classes, but if you are going for an OW gunner then Danger Zone really feels like the only way to do it right. The ability to catch even 1 more enemy than a regular Area Suppression gives you both more control and damage on average than going CuP would. If you catch say 3+ enemies than you normally would, CuP looks like a disastrously bad pick. Arguably, if you are fighting low numbers of units/spread out units where DZ doesn't work so well, there are better classes suited to those situations so CuP seems unnecessary and maybe you should have gone cyclic fire to help wipe out those couple units, but there are few classes suited better than DZ against large numbers of enemies. As long as you do a bit of damage beforehand which is totally reasonable like a grenade to remove cover, CuP crits aren't even necessarily relevant to one shot enemies as mayhem + lockdown + softening up + DZ probably is good enough.
Sharpshooter
Staff Sergeant: Long Watch, Independent Tracking, Low Profile
Low profile stands out as the best pick here. It is an incredibly useful +20 defense essentially which is turned on all the time. Even when I use sharpshooters that try to stay away from the action, sometimes the enemy still gets within range eventually just because of the pod size and availability of cover, and some enemies have squad sight as well. It's amazing and like xwynns put it recently when deciding on which to pick, he was saying even if it saves you once it beats out the other "janky" picks, long watch needs an AWC companion to be good, and independent tracking just feels lackluster. Usually when I holo target something, it's going to die in one turn. If not, it's bad luck or bad planning and not worth giving up massive +20 defense for. Maybe if Independent Tracking were instead an aim malus? And if long watch removed the OW aim penalty? Then we'd have a fight on our hands.
Shinobi
Just a general comment about Lone Wolf (which isn't even specific to the Shinobi) - I think it might be interesting to consider making it so it's a bonus that scales with distance, instead of a binary yes or no I'm this far away check. Tile counting is really annoying and we don't always want to use mods like Gotcha again to track it. Unless it's hard to code or something, why not make it so the bonus scales up to a max of 10/10 when 7 tiles away, but you get graduating bonuses in between? Like maybe between 1-2 tiles you get no bonus, but then you get a bit better the further you are away. It'd be a nice QoL change.
Assault
Gunnery Sergeant: Bring'em On, Close Combat Specialist, Untouchable
Bring'em On I feel is a fairly no brainer "don't pick me." This is because it is quite generally overkill damage. The reasons it is overkill damage are 1) because the shotgun's natural damage and crit damage are such that if you are on par in terms of weapon tech, when you crit it's going to kill (bonus: factor in talon rounds and killer instinct), and bring'em on doesn't kill them any deader 2) bring'em on is so high in the tree that you will additionally have a double shot of some kind for sure by that point that you learn BoE (rapid fire/hit & run/CE) so even if you don't quite believe point 1, I can all but guarantee you will see overkill when you get 2 critical shots at the same target. BoE is certainly better than no trait at all and you can theoretically make up situations where that extra bit of crit damage was the difference between a kill or not, but the sheer excellent consistent and broadly useful powers of CCS/Untouchable far outweigh those fringe situations where BoE might once in a blue moon mean the difference between killing or not killing.
To me an interesting choice here would be Combat Fitness or Sprint. I'm admittedly a little biased to suggest extra movement because I think assaults really live and die on movement points and they could use that option somewhere on the tree. It's pretty depressing how slowly they move when you're obligated to weigh them down with plating/vest/talon rounds. It might make excellent competition with CCS/Untouchable.
Note that BoE is totally fine in Ranger specs since their weapon is light years away from being able to one shot things (on crit) compared to the shotgun.
Grenadier
Sergeant: Boosted Cores, Formidable, Bluescreen Bombs
Formidable stands out as a "don't pick me." If you are using a grenadier in your lineup, you're going to be using it for either offensive or defensive grenades, and both boosted/bluescreen are indispensable upgrades to those grenades. You may ask why not pick on the previous tier where its heavy ordnance/protector, but here I can see that those aren't necessarily indispensable as you may not actually use all your grenades in every mission or you may have additional sources like airdrop to compensate for limited ammunition. But if you are going to use your grenades at some point, which is totally reasonable, I would be somewhat if not extremely dumbfounded if you didn't pick boosted cores for offensive grenades (huge dps increase, especially for dot grenades), or bluescreen bombs (ability to control robots in addition to organic???? sign me up). Lastly, formidable isn't quite as strong as it once was, grenadiers aren't on the frontlines getting hit a lot like assaults, and grenadiers don't naturally come with other skills that make them strong candidates for tanks. All of these are not issues that need to be corrected or anything, but the end result is formidable makes little sense for this class in this tier. Perhaps the "Suppression" skill would make a very interesting choice actually instead of Formidable in this tier. Or Fortify.
Note that I'm generally fine with formidable in other classes in their particular locations, just not this particular instance for the aforementioned reasons.
Gunnery Sergeant: Volatile Mix, Bombardier, Salvo
In this tier Volatile Mix seems like a "pick me always." In 1.3, the radius of flashbangs were decreased, and the advanced grenade launcher provides +2 range instead of +1 range + 1 radius. Since radii have gone down, it almost feels necessary to pick Volatile Mix to get good radii again. Additionally, since you get bonus range essentially for free from the new advanced nade launcher, Bombardier's range improvement is directly less of a need. Range wasn't a problem to begin with in 1.2, and it's even less of a problem now that we have +1 range compared simply from carrying the 1.3 launcher. I find myself hard pressed to find a situation where bombardier makes any sense, and volatile mix is just so necessary to get decent/powerful radii again. Salvo's probably ok, but to reiterate the 1.3 changes to the grenadier class have vastly shifted any reasonable choice from bombardier directly into volatile mix.
One cynical solution would be to downgrade the range bonus to +1 from the adv nade launcher, but I think that's just a spiteful direction to go in and doesn't really fix that radii is so important to the power of all grenades. One direction is to really exaggerate bombardier by giving say +5 range or something. Might not be the right way to go, but the point remains.
Gunner
I'm not going to beat these to death and we don't even necessarily need to discuss these any further in this thread, as I started a discussion about these gunner skills in a different thread; just listing them here for completeness as far as listing the skills I don't think are interesting choices
Corporal: Flush, Formidable, Lockdown
Flush still feels bad. You should use Focus Fire or Holotarget if you want to hit something better. Flush can miss, it can send enemies to bad positions. Just because it can stack with other debuffs doesn't mean it's worth casting (spending too much time debuffing is rarely if ever a good choice; you want people actually firing after debuffing once). Demolition also makes this skill feel silly. Yes again it's true they're on separate cooldowns and you can choose both, but the action economy of flush feels very poor and can backfire. I would suggest a rework/reimagining of flush. Maybe it always hits and has no cooldown? Sounds op but at the end of the day, you are combining a lot of classes together and only dealing with one enemy at a time, and there are still enemies who are immune/resistant to OW. Or replace with holotarget?
Tech Sergeant: Cyclic Fire, Danger Zone, Cool Under Pressure
CuP is a strong skill in general and works wonders in other classes, but if you are going for an OW gunner then Danger Zone really feels like the only way to do it right. The ability to catch even 1 more enemy than a regular Area Suppression gives you both more control and damage on average than going CuP would. If you catch say 3+ enemies than you normally would, CuP looks like a disastrously bad pick. Arguably, if you are fighting low numbers of units/spread out units where DZ doesn't work so well, there are better classes suited to those situations so CuP seems unnecessary and maybe you should have gone cyclic fire to help wipe out those couple units, but there are few classes suited better than DZ against large numbers of enemies. As long as you do a bit of damage beforehand which is totally reasonable like a grenade to remove cover, CuP crits aren't even necessarily relevant to one shot enemies as mayhem + lockdown + softening up + DZ probably is good enough.
Sharpshooter
Staff Sergeant: Long Watch, Independent Tracking, Low Profile
Low profile stands out as the best pick here. It is an incredibly useful +20 defense essentially which is turned on all the time. Even when I use sharpshooters that try to stay away from the action, sometimes the enemy still gets within range eventually just because of the pod size and availability of cover, and some enemies have squad sight as well. It's amazing and like xwynns put it recently when deciding on which to pick, he was saying even if it saves you once it beats out the other "janky" picks, long watch needs an AWC companion to be good, and independent tracking just feels lackluster. Usually when I holo target something, it's going to die in one turn. If not, it's bad luck or bad planning and not worth giving up massive +20 defense for. Maybe if Independent Tracking were instead an aim malus? And if long watch removed the OW aim penalty? Then we'd have a fight on our hands.
Shinobi
Just a general comment about Lone Wolf (which isn't even specific to the Shinobi) - I think it might be interesting to consider making it so it's a bonus that scales with distance, instead of a binary yes or no I'm this far away check. Tile counting is really annoying and we don't always want to use mods like Gotcha again to track it. Unless it's hard to code or something, why not make it so the bonus scales up to a max of 10/10 when 7 tiles away, but you get graduating bonuses in between? Like maybe between 1-2 tiles you get no bonus, but then you get a bit better the further you are away. It'd be a nice QoL change.