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Messages - ButterPoached

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Spacelords’ Advice / How to enjoy this game at a low level?

on: September 03, 2018, 06:13:38 PM

So, I have managed to sit through the long matchmaking queue a few times and leveled up to 11. I turned on quick match, and ended up as an antagonist, ok cool.

Then it dumped me into a game with a level 135 Genebra. How am I supposed to play a game where I require 7 consecutive melee strikes vs. their 1, not even counting the edge they have from from additional hours of gameplay and upgraded weapons AND THE THREE ADDITIONAL CHARACTERS.

So I play through as best I can, get a 1.5 score, get reamed out by Uras Beherit, it burns up one of my EXP boosts, and I re-queue. Again, I end up as an antagonist against a team of 30+ characters. I get frustrated and turn off the game, and now I am writing on the forums while I wait for my punishment time to elapse.

Is the answer just "don't play Antagonist mode until you have maxed out gear"? I keep seeing streams where people talk about what a raw deal the antagonist gets, and I assume that the reason why I keep getting queued into Antagonist is because, even though you need 4x as many Raiders to play a match, and you don't get an Antagonist for every match, there STILL aren't enough people taking the role. If I am missing something, please, enlighten me.

EDIT: okay, so I loaded back into the game. My MMR is at a toasty 28%, so when I queued into into Antagonist (again), I managed to get matched against other people of my level or lower... but the mobs in the misson had their difficulty scaled down, too. The whole thing was over in 8 minutes, with a whopping 2 kills on my part. As I type this, I'm being told how unworthy I am. Fun game.

Gameplay Feedback / Re: What makes the antagonist mode unbalanced and not fun.

on: October 07, 2017, 02:58:27 AM

Quote from: ShadowofDoubts on October 06, 2017, 07:07:08 AM

concerns noted. All I want is for the mode to be fairer for both sides without it being one-sided favoritism for the raider or antagonist. A good ability would be for the antagonist to call for aid from nearby mobs or they can use aleph to provide an edge such as timed buffs or hell, being able to give aleph to elite enemies on their side. These small things don't overtly make the antagonist better seeing as they need to be able to make good decisions, but it hopefully spices the game up while keeping it fair.
Any of the proposals above should be scaled to an optimal degree, you can be summoning the entire map to help you, that would be ludicrous. The suggestions are just a utilization of your feedback and I appreciate it.

Actually, I really like that idea! The game already has an emote system, and if the Antagonist could use it to direct goons on the map, it would make being the Antagonist more rewarding AND use some buttons that currently have no purpose for them. Good idea!

Gameplay Feedback / Quality of Life changes

on: October 06, 2017, 06:44:05 AM

So I put some time into Shae and, while I like the idea, the design feels a little rough. I know that this forum is 90% people complaining about game balance, but I do have some requests for gameplay clarity.

-Provide a visual indicator of when a Bewitched target will be able to see you. I know that, when you are close enough, you reappear, but I'm never sure exactly when that is. Not knowing if the enemy can see you or not is almost as bad as not being able to see the enemy, which feels bad as a character power.

-When you hit the lockon button, I'd really like the reticle to actually lock to the target until you break line of sight. It is very disheartening to be 1 second from firing, only to have a grunt wander into your reticle and break your lockon, starting the charge process from 0. I get that Shae shouldn't be good at targeting groups, but as it is, she is trash at fighting anything that isn't alone...

-Stats! It would be nice to see the HP, stress ratio (is it just weight? Konstantin gets stressed way more easily than Harec, for instance), and the stats on the different guns would be a great thing to be able to see from the Raiders menu.

-More stats! I'd like a breakdown at the end of the mission of who did what on the team. Aside from bragging rights, I don't really have a good idea of when I am getting carried in a game as it currently stands. I FEEL like I am doing well, but I'd like to know if I am, in fact, a chump.

Edit: I am a chump and only just now noticed the way Shae's reticle works. However, I thought of other stuff.

Gameplay Feedback / Starter Weapons: A little anemic?

on: October 06, 2017, 06:34:20 AM

Let me preface this by saying that I have had super bad rolls on mission rewards, so the only blueprint I've managed to pick up is Hans' rare gun... and I haven't unlocked Hans yet. For people who have advanced gear: how much better is it, really?

I've been having a good time playing this game so far; its super stylish and (despite the amount of grumbling) it has good pacing and allows a wide variety of play. Each character has a really different feel. However, I keep running into the problem of just not having good enough DPS to shoot my way out a situation that goes South.

Ironically, it is rarely the Antagonist or elites that dooms a mission, but rather regular enemies hitting a critical mass that makes melee impossible. I'm not sure how many HP a basic enemy has, but if I had to guess, I'd say 200, as it takes Alicia a full clip to kill each enemy at her medium range band (~35 damage per shot depending on pellet spread. Does this game even use pellets?). That means a troop transport that drops 5 enemies adds 1000 HP to the field. That adds up very fast if you, for instance, have someone D/C mid map. The Gunship section of Hanging by a Thread is especially bad for this; if the Antagonist takes out one Raider, and you have one Raider on the turret, all of a sudden there is a TON of meat for two Raiders to chew through. It's not uncommon to get pushed all the way back up the ramp and into the Raider spawn section after a bad engagement, and until you pay your DPS deficit, you'll be stuck there dumping your ammo as fast as possible.

I'm not saying that this is a bad trend; it is certainly dynamic. My problem is that in the event that normal enemies pile up, there is no way for Raiders to use superior skill to fight their way back. Even if you approach an engagement on your own terms and use your weapons optimally, you will only kill maybe two grunts before you need to disengage, heal, and reload. It feels weird for the Antagonist to feel more flimsy than naked shotgun mutants...

I get that the starter weapons for each character are supposed to be "easier to use, but less powerful" than the crafted ones, but they feel a little like water pistols right now. Maybe add headshot boxes on grunts to reward tight aiming? Give starter weapons a damage multiplier against grunts so that Elites, Bosses, and Antagonists become the main attraction?

Gameplay Feedback / Re: What makes the antagonist mode unbalanced and not fun.

on: October 06, 2017, 06:10:21 AM

I have to say, this was not what I was expecting when I clicked the thread title. Every post about the Antagonist so far has been made by someone who has been back grappled 78 times by one and needs to cry about it on the forums.

The issue that I see is that if the Antagonist gets better stats, all of a sudden facing off against one head on becomes a losing proposition. I really like the rush of dueling someone, and I'm not sure I would appreciate it if they got cheat mode.

I also rarely see Antagonists working with the AI opponents or interacting with mission objectives, they are mostly Lycus players who run around trying to back grapple people. Regular grunts in this game absorb a TON of damage and deal out a surprising amount, attacking in concert with a troop transport should surely be able to rattle a 4-stacked team, even a little.

In the end, I think the Antagonist should only win maybe 25% of the games, considering that a failed mission flushes any hope of a rare reward down the toilet for 4 players. I get that it makes playing the Antagonist not very rewarding, but Antagonist mode is already the mode that doesn't have rewards attached to it.

Gameplay Feedback / Re: Don't know how much more of the combat i can take.

on: October 06, 2017, 02:46:05 AM

Unfortunately, if you don't like the brawling combat, I don't think that this game is for you. I really doubt that they are going to overhaul something that is so integral to the design.

I know that getting killed by latency is harsh, but it has been that way in every FPS ever. It just feels worse when they show you the pre-animated cutscene of you getting curb stomped.

I keep hearing people describe the combat described as rock-paper-scissors, but after putting some time into the game, it doesn't really feel that way. I mean, when you are approaching a fight (from the front), grapple is too slow to be an option. Once you are stuck in a strike combo, your only option is to dodge out of it. In every situation, there's only two viable options.

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