Abilities balenced, or are they?

MiNi_D

It often springs to mind by the comments of other players on syntax and from the forums that everyone seems to have a Problem with hackers. This becomes Very apparent when a player loads Despoiler and Artillerist together in PvP. To me coming from a FPS background to an MMO inspires me, its not how you win, but winning that counts. I myself have given up on using Operative abilities. I admit i am proud of being a hacker.

When you think of it out perspective as a game but more as in computing terms, at the games most basic elements, button presses are inputted and dead RSIs are the output. It is the process speed that creates a winner. There are many ways of doing this fastest, noticably Master Knife Thrower and Arblest, also on occasions assasins have shown me that 2000 damage in 1 hit is possible. On the other hand i have noticed that Martial Artists are challeneged by hackers, in the manner that myself a lvl 39 Arblest at present has nearly 100% evade combat, yet i cannot be interlocked, nor can my evade "bubble" be burst by somone who hasn't a large amount of force combat. This leaves a Martial Artists at great disadvantage to a hacker as nearly all Martial artists abilities require interlock to function well. However If a Martial Artists sucessfully interlocks a hacker a large amount of damage can be done providing the Martial artists very first attack causes a state that stops the hacker rolling out of combat. In a high percentage of these circumstances certain death for the hacker will occur. Added to this that It is easy for a charachter to load 400 viral deflection. Are Martial Artists so hard done by after all?

So Where does all this nonsense lead you might ask? In light of a new system being developed (Combat revision 2.0) At present, prior to the abilities being balenced as of 12/1/2006 a level 38 hacker could happily take on a level 50 operative and win via interlock. (Though i understand at present the rolls for interlock have yet to be fixed.) This leads me to my final questions should existing abilities be transferred in line with current statistics and abilities, or should hackers be downgraded, or operatives upgraded? Also are there any more suggestions to create a more balenced gaming environment?

**zeroone506**

All I can say is that the soldier tree is the one with all those fantastic animations and not hacker, it's sad that some people chose hacker for winning pvp and ignore soldier. But actually I agree with you.

HCFrog

I think one thing to take into consideration is that the Martial Artist in the above example has had to strip his/her one MA tree down to barebones in order to load up abilities from the Hacker tree, to get their 400 VD. The Hacker hasn't had to do anything similar, and is in fact able to pull abilities from several Hacker disciplines (like Artillerist/Destroyer combos as mentioned).

Other factors that make the issue murkier:

The way you can get out of interlock even if your opponent has enraged you or otherwise held you in, by hitting rollout before their move goes through.
The 5-second rollout timer.
Uncontested rollout.

Of course the whole balance is going to be shifted around a lot with CR2.0, so we'll have to see how that plays out... SMILEY

**Rexxhavukk**

Haking is cool but watch out for MKT they will stun you every time

MiNi_D

omg your uncosted rollout thing just took its revenge on me, some vectorite on QA kept me in combat for ages.

MiNi_D

Just played for a decent amount of time and i think that the dev who altered the stats over compensated for hackers. Stun is too short, upgrade attacks is too short. Casting times make the whole virologist tree useless. Effects dont last long enough. Especially despoiler. bottleneck has no use now. Cant wait for the balence. you ruined my favourite trees atm.

Also Rifleman trees are too powerful. i was hit by a level 2 lol. ignoring that fact full auto redux does over 2000 damage. So does the Ki kick thing.Clearly stats are the last thing on the mind of the developers amongst the stability problems but sill these hypermoves need to be toned down a little. BRING BACK POWERFUL HACKERS.

Detrius_MXO

What is the length of bottleneck now and I'll tell you if it's useless. What was useless was being bottlenecked for a full minute.

Votan1

Detrius_MXO wrote:
What is the length of bottleneck now and I'll tell you if it's useless. What was useless was being bottlenecked for a full minute.

/agree

Cognoscente

Stun is 8 secs.... lol. I guess it's just good enough to run away now.