[Level9Drow]

I still don't think it's OP post-bug fix. Played with it on HBaT last night at 60% difficulty and I couldn't even kill the wardogs dropped off with any reliability, sometimes only killing 1 of them unloading the full mag. If they all clumped up like the top dropship, I could sometimes get them all, but the one near the barrier is always scattered more and if any shots missed they would survive (and heal). Mag dump did 1/3rd of a Hades berserker's health.

It's weird, and I agree. We have a unique situation where there has to be balance for weapons between them working on other players, and then working on AI, but AI difficulty changes based on MMR. So we have to have weapons that kill AI in a reasonable manner, but since AI have so much more health than players the weapons become exceptionally lethal to other players.

so if you nerf or balance a weapon to make for fair play between PvP it will be too weak against any AI above 40% MMR, but if you make it balanced for AI above 40% it will be too strong against players. It's really baffling to me, to be honest. I get your concern and agree. I just don't know the solution. I think it was a mistake to make the AI so much different from the characters in the first place. it cause inconsolable balancing issues.

EDIT: And to me this is more of an MMR AI problem than a weapon problem. I think that enemies at higher MMR shouldn't necessarily have more health, but do more damage akin to what players do, move faster and become more accurate, maybe more numbers and competent (stumbling less, calling on their coms less, better CQC reaction). But giving them more health makes for a lot of issues.

[Deathprize]

This is the problem with Alicia right here. She isn't that great against the AI at greater difficulties but she is really good against other players for all the reasons Level9drow states in his post. The gun can still deal 900 damage in about 2 seconds while moving through the air to another player. I also feel due to the wall jumps that if you are downed you can't really fight back as your aiming takes a hit due to the reduced movement speed.

It's not unbeatable by any means but again as Level9drow says the full team has to stop what they are doing and get her or you will die very quickly. You can't really restrict her movement by positioning your team well either as she can wall jump through or past.

Some characters cannot do anything to really retaliate either, Loaht can't do anything unless in beast mode for example. Outside of the hook Ayana has a bad time too, you are usually downed before the tension bar fills. Any character with a projectile based weapon rather than hitscan will struggle especially on the consoles.

These issues are also present when playing as the antagonist against an Alicia on the raiders team.

But on the flip side it takes forever to kill any enemy with her at high MMR.

[XjabberwockieX]

Yes Drow the main problem with finding the right balance with weapon damage lies in having to deal with the mmr level of enemies, never players. Players will die the same way to an exploding  headshot from Iune's Wisdom, but at 60 mmr it takes me 3 friggin headshots with a max forged Wisdom built for max lethality to kill them. That is beyond ridiculous. Make the enemies less clumsy, less likely to jam their weapons, increase dropship rate, increase their numbers, but for the love of Christ if an engineer needs two headshots on hanging by a thread then I dont know what else Mercurysteam could do to make me feel underpowered on the broken planet.

[Level9Drow]

Areana mode?? Is this a thing or just a hopeful community desire? And with people nowadays needing safe spaces and just being general babies, I don't feel anything but joy when they rage quit. If they can't take the heat get outta kitchen kinda thing. I toughed it out and got pretty decent... And no, not just with Alicia. I don't want to play with quitters anyway. Abandoning an mpossible mission though is absolutely acceptable.

Here look at Draco's post:
https://www.raidersofthebrokenplanet.com/community/index.php?topic=1651.msg8443#msg8443

[LordDraco3]

Yes Drow the main problem with finding the right balance with weapon damage lies in having to deal with the mmr level of enemies, never players. Players will die the same way to an exploding  headshot from Iune's Wisdom, but at 60 mmr it takes me 3 friggin headshots with a max forged Wisdom built for max lethality to kill them. That is beyond ridiculous. Make the enemies less clumsy, less likely to jam their weapons, increase dropship rate, increase their numbers, but for the love of Christ if an engineer needs two headshots on hanging by a thread then I dont know what else Mercurysteam could do to make me feel underpowered on the broken planet.

This is why I always hate seeing players asking for nerfs on things that WE ALL USE. It's why I fight pretty hard against ALL of these posts and why I went to find out why R&R seemed "so OP" when I don't remember it ever being a problem for the past several months that it has existed, until just recently over the last few weeks. It's not OP, it's a very above-average gun, but nothing special in any way.

Alicia falls into the same category as Hans. High mobility is good against players because mobility is power. Againt AI, not so much, because they just hitscan you to death with their infinite range perfect tracking death machines. But Alicia and Hans can move fast into player engagement while pelting them with damage and take them down quickly. But against massive bullet sponges that out-tank and out-damage them, they are pretty much useless. I consider myself a main Hans player, and I know that he's just a liability over a certain MMR.

Nerfs are stupid.
(Except for Tolchok, which is also stupid).

[Level9Drow]

What would you say if they nerfed the health on AI and just upped the accuracy, speed and skill of the AI? Would it be ok then? Because if you're making the "mobility is good" then ALL characters would need the same mobility, otherwise the only good characters are the ones with mobility. OR they need to make some incentive for characters with low or no mobility. Because as it is you have weapons that kill other players too fast. Good weapons in the hands of characters with high mobility. You're suggestion would be buff all weapons. Then we have power creep and ALL weapons can instakill ALL characters and then there is no more value in characters like Harec, shae, Doldren, etc... Then there is also no more value in 5th Council because damage reduction will no longer matter. Then the ONLY characters that will matter will be the regenerating Wardogs becasue all weapons instakill, because AI health. This does NOT sound very fun to me.

Buffing all weapons isn't the answer. Nerfing AI health is the answer.
As far as R&R there is no risk for using it. ALL other weapons have risk either because of the characters limitation (Konstantin/Tolchock) or the weapons has weakness. I personally feel there is no risk to playing R&R Alicia, and that to facilitate risk damage falloff should be implemented, because the range, in conjunction with mobility, is a bit ludicrous.

[LordDraco3]

Characters like Harec and Shae have long range, since most weapons have absurd falloff, so they will still have a use. Harec also has high mobility with Stalk, Shae is stealthy. Their value does not even lie with their damage, since 5th council out-damages and out-survives them.

I also never said "buff all weapons" nor implied it. I said stop nerfing things. Some weapons very clearly need buffs, but I never implied everything does.

And yeah, nerf AI, if anything.

[Level9Drow]

Characters like Harec and Shae have long range, since most weapons have absurd falloff, so they will still have a use. Harec also has high mobility with Stalk, Shae is stealthy. Their value does not even lie with their damage, since 5th council out-damages and out-survives them.

I also never said "buff all weapons" nor implied it. I said stop nerfing things. Some weapons very clearly need buffs, but I never implied everything does.

And yeah, nerf AI, if anything.

To be fair, I'm not saying you did say buff all weapons. But it has to be implied if you are saying not to nerf weapons like R&R, because MOST other weapons suck compared to it. You would have to buff them all or have a situation where we have now, where most weapons are made obsolete and therefore characters are obsolete because the only characters people should be playing is Alicia, Konstantin, Ginebra and Kuzman, otherwise why play anyone else? Their weapons are to good, and if as you say (which is fine) they're not OP, this would imply all other weapons are underpowered.

How would you resolve the disparity of weapon viability in it's current state without buffing the other weapons or nerfing the powerful ones?

Don't let the emotionless typing mislead you, I am not arguing, but asking a question. Again, not a diatribe. I fully accept I may get an answer that will make me think otherwise.

[LordDraco3]

All characters are viable in certain roles and tend to have weapons that work. Every character also has good and bad weapons. I don't agree that 5th council + Alicia is the best or only viable team.

Even this team has plenty of weapons that are weak and not really viable. If you take Schtorm+S.Bogen+Ingrid+Eager you're gonna have a bad day

[Level9Drow]

Well you may be right and I may need to just wait and see what happens next. More characters will be added, more weapons, more updates. I need to think about this as well. I'm just positing questions to inspire discussion the devs will read, and not necessarily towards my opinions either.

I may not have room to talk because I haven't reached 150 yet and have 30+ blueprints on hold and many of them are below 20th level forge level. But we can agree on AI health.

I think it's so funny how you see people playing peaceful antag just to lower MMR. And sometimes, when I am playing peaceful antag to gain affinity and lower MMR I see entire teams at high MMR surrendering as soon as they can. What a strange situation we are in when highly skilled players of 160+ have to lower their MMR because either the AI is too goddamn hard (and doesn't reward you for it) and/or you simply can't find a game in solo queue at that high of an MMR.

[XjabberwockieX]

The MMR struggle is real. 

[B30]

The MMR struggle is real. 

I agree - the other day my MMR was at 57, somebody would think it's not that high, but I waited more than 20 min. to find matches (you don't always have the opportunity to play in a team). I don't have that much time to wait that long for every match to start (I also got other stuff to do). Then I played a few "peaceful" antag matches and my MMR is back in the forties, now it's more bearable again.

[Level9Drow]

Thank god for the ability to play peaceful antagonists. The only other option would be to throw games, which is fine if you are in a 4 stack and they all agree, but you really can't do this in solo queue without pissing people off. I hope it never becomes a "bad thing" to peacefully antag. I don't imagine Raiders raging on the keyboard reporting for, "HE LET ME HAVE INCREASED REWARDS AND DID NOT ATTACK ME AND THIS RESULTED IN ME WINNING, PLEASE BAN!!", but you never know.

[LordDraco3]

There is one guy in the discord who *hates* afk antags, and tries to make games longer if he sees that. I really don't understand the logic behind complaining what someone else is doing, or rather, not doing, when it's beneficial to you.

[Deathprize]

Yeah I don't get that, especially since a lot of the time people do that is when trying to lower their MMR at 60% everything dies so quick it doesn't make a difference if you spawn or not, which is more apparent on the boss levels. I think it because most teams average about 50%.