Neogumbercules

Mobile and at work but as I sit here on my break I will do my best to explain quickly why it's so bad (old arguments from a million years ago still apply). Body Armor: this is an inoffensive free resist buff and IO mule, but IMO the free nature of it does not justify its lower resist values compared to something like Temp Invul or Fire Shield. It's especially worse than the defense buffs from something like Frozen Armor because defense is so much easier to stack. It'd be a worthwhile sacrifice if the set had other powers worth taking, alas... Cry Freeze Ray: This is the only standard power in the set that's comparable to the other APP holds. You could argue it's worse due to redraw (it does draw a gun IIRC) , but overall it's simply passable. Sleep Grenade: In my opinion this is the first truly awful power in Munitions Mastery. First, there's a weapon redraw. Secondly, I always felt the value of sleeps was dubious at best. 99% of the time your first action against a group of enemies is to open up with a huge AOE based alpha strike or a melee guy is gonna run in and grab aggro. What does a sleep afford you at this point? The enemies were already blissfully unaware of your presence. This power adds nothing for the player. Compare it to Bonfire or repulsion bomb slotted for - KB. It's vastly worse. Bonfire provides massive AOE control and good damage. Repulsion bomb gets you good KB/KD and a disorient. Force and Electrical get you God-mode powers. As far as the "utility" power in the set, it's garbage. Surveillance: Finally, a decent power. Oh wait, Flame Mastery gets an AOE version of this power, and the whole rest of the powerset is better than anything else in Munitions? Damn! LRM: Okay, I suffered through MM and finally got to the good power. BIG ASS AOE. Sounds great. Except let's see... Awful recharge time (4 bloody minutes), mediocre damage (and it just so happens that it's purely s/l damage as an end-game power that the majority of enemies are highly resistant to) high endurance cost, especially if you clicked too soon after moving and and accidently triggered its ridiculous interrupt penalty. In my testing on Justin there is absolutely no situation where I would use LRM over literally any other AOE. It's impossible to use in combat and I would take a KD slotted Bonfire over LRM any time, period. I don't have a lot of suggestions right now, as I think the community can come up with better ideas but I think on a general level I would improve sleep grenade by maybe making it a stun instead of a sleep, make surveillance some kind of AOE, and remove the interrupt from LRM and change it to a Targeted AOE ability instead of a sniper ability, reduce the range, recharge, and add fire damage.

This right here. These changes were made by people who would literally have tens of thousands of posts about the deep game mechanics and behinds the scenes mathematics, and would argue about it all for months and months on the official forums. I'm not disparaging their contributions to the game overall, it was great, but this Rage change is exactly the kind of balancing that you'd get out of people that derive every decision based on all of that math and yet totally wreck an entire powerset because they made the actual gameplay way worse. Maybe even with this defense crash SS is still great on paper, but they've killed the basic playability of the set.

Having played AR for the first time in 7 years on Justin this morning I was suddenly reminded of two things. First, the AOE size of Ignite needs a huge increase. It may as well be a single target attack its so small, and secondly, the cone on flamethrower really is way too narrow.

SS/Fire was only every especially awesomly good in very tailored farmable maps and specific AE content. In most normal gameplay it was decent, not amazing. That's exactly why the real devs never did anything about the Rage crash. Again I think this change was really just a solution in search of a problem.

Thanks for the feedback guys. If you couldn't tell, I wrote this in a hurry this morning when I got into work. I know some of the things I suggested might be OP but it's cool to see that I'm not alone in wanting some buffs to AR.

I'll try to keep it short and sweet. Trying to keep the flavor and intent of AR, but making it more... better? The theme of AR is ridding baddies with bullets and/or setting them on fire. Also in some instances I'm asking for KB to KD. I know there's a IO for that but IMO we shouldn't have to dedicate a slot to reduce KB, people that love the KB (not many) can dedicate a slot to adding it back. Keeping that in mind... Burst - Make this a narrow cone. Everything else stays the same. Concept: spray and pray. Slug - Give this ability a small -res to s/l effect. Concept: the Slug can damage/shatter armored plating. Buckshot - increase the range of this attack so you can hit enemies deeper in the pack, or more spread out enemies. Change KB to KD. Not much conceptual stuff here, I just think the power would be more useful if it could spread more. And it fits the theme. M30 Grenade - KB to KD. Animation option - add an option to give this power the hand grenade animation. Not all gun options make sense with an underbarrel launcher. Change the smashing damage aspect to fire damage. Concept: It is an explosive after all. Beanbag - change to Flashbang. Animation choice, shoot from gun or throw grenade by hand. Change power to a targeted AOE stun and to-hit debuff. Adjust stun mag and duration to be in line with the power type, etc. Concept: this power is in line with a munitions/soldier type and it actually makes the power useful. Sniper Rifle: Add "Headshot" mechanic. Power will crit if the user has > 22% tohit buff. Concept: UT99 rules. Flamethrower - Speed up the cast time and the power deals 75% of it's damage as an upfront burst, the rest as Dot. No concept here, just a buff to usability. Ignite - Change to Incendiary Grenade. Animation choice, shoot from gun or toss grenade animation. Increase range. Effect: Exactly the same. Full Auto - Increase target cap to 16 and add a high stun effect whose duration is equal to the animation time of the attack. This will keep you a little safer during its notoriously long animation time. Concept: Think Arnold mowing down trees in Predator. The stun effect simulates the reaction of being Full Auto'd "OMG I'm being Full Auto'd!" no time to shoot back till the hail of bullets is over. Other tier 9 nukes have secondary effects so its not unprecedented. That's all I got.

My thoughts are simple. Sorry. The actual developers of this game left SS alone for years, not because they didn't get around to "fixing" but because they knew that the set was fun the way it was and a lot of players enjoyed it. "Balance" does not always trump fun or playability or other, immutable values that can't be punched into a spreadsheet and argued about in forum math pvp. Furthermore, changing sets that are considered "too strong" (I'm avoiding the term nerf here because the rage thing is being considered a bug fix) will only result in that set being abandoned by players who will all flock to the next best farmer. Evidence, go to AE in Atlas Park and tell me how many Spines/Fire Brutes you see. IMO you put SS back to the way it was and leave it at that. This is a completely unnecessary change. You don't need to rebalance the whole powerset. Just undo the rage change and that's it. Some changes this team has been working on are positive changes to sets that long needed the update (devices) but this is definitely not one of them. I wanted to add here that although my memory is fuzzy at this point, I do not remember that the devs actively balanced/nerfed/buffed the game around the behavior of the the 1% farmers except in extreme circumstances or exploits (herding whole maps pre-aggro cap) and even if they had to, they never just fucked over the playability of the whole powerset, nor flat nerfed somemthing without bringing it up somewhere else. They never touched Fire/Kin controllers, SS/Fire Brutes, etc... Because they knew that was only a small subset of the player base and it wouldn't be fair to other players to have their sets nerfed because they were good farmers. This is one of the reasons why this change to Rage feels so arbitrary and overdone.

Happy to see some buffs to devices. One thing I noticed in my testing last night was that I never used trip mine or time bomb. Why would I, with fire ball, rain of fire, fire breath, Bonfire slotted for - kb, etc. These changes are going to make leveling and playing a devices blaster a lot more tolerable.

Just got a chance to actually play with it. My first experience upon trying to activate the snipe in combat "Out of range!" And my feedback... This feels wrong. So I'll reiterate what I said before. I love the idea of making instant snipe automatic but I really dislike the range reduction, and I dislike that /Devices loses a big part of what made it special.

I like the concept but the attempt to balance it by increasing recharges, reducing damage, and reducing the range really kind of kills the idea of the snipes. Like even if the math works out the gameplay feel is worse for a lot of players.

Seems like this change is pretty universally disliked. I know the instinct is to try to give and take with balance changes but this change has totally negated one of the defining (and only big advantage) features of an entire powerset in devices. This is too much for what amounts to a QOL update. It's not just the nerfs, it changes themes and functionality negatively for no real reason. Just introduce that IO or make snipes instant, but buff /dev if you do.

I literally just made a fire/dev blaster last night to take advantage of the fast snipe with targeting drone. Oh well! It's still fun as heck. Edit: just noticed the range reduction. I really think that's a step too far. It just doesn't feel like a sniper attack without extreme range. Range is one of the things that makes the power fun, and if I have to sit around for 15 seconds to snipe a runner, that's lame. Also I specifically built /dev to have fast snipe, and now out of combat that fun aspect is gone. That does kinda suck. Mayne just introduce that fast snipe IO and leave it at that. So I guess now I'll beg for an update to trip mine, time bomb, and gum drone. Trip mine - faster cast, no interrupt. Time bomb - faster cast, no interrupt, allow me to trigger it somehow. Gun drone - moar damage!

Hello hello @Urobolus here. Looking forward to some more RO shenanigans. Might be less frequent now with kids to take care of and a house to fix (man times change) but you WILL see me around.