Thank you for the video, although it didn't contain anything new for me and my judgement of its performance was therefore not influenced by it.
Now, you say that the stuka is OP for 2v2+, from which follows that it is not op in 1v1. Therefore by issuing such a drastic nerf, it will then be underpowered in 1v1 after the patch hits. Wasn't 1v1 the most important gamemode for balancing?
The primary reasons why you don't see Stuka that often in 1v1 are:
- The pinpoint-accurate attack pattern, which is super-OP vs team weapons is also easy to dodge; especially when armies have the space available to 1v1 maps
- This makes the Stuka barrages hit-or-miss
- You can't afford hit-or-miss stuff, especially if it's pricey
However, the predictable barrage of singular stukas becomes a fucking nightmare to dodge when two or more stukas are involved. Since fog of war visibility and range don't matter, any noob can easily synchronize the barrages. Any map with a long strip of land becomes automatically unplayable. Especially since each well-placed rocket has the potential to wipe an entire squad.
Allied weapon teams also require veterancy to be any use at all. Pak howitzer and the USF AT gun are particularly woeful at that. However, what's the use of amassing veterancy when a single rocket can outright wipe the crew.
If you follow through the changes to Stuka in FBP, we already had the following:
- Reducing the price of the stuka to make it more affordable
- Making an incendiary barrage available earlier to help uncamping
- Reducing the cooldown of barrages
- Increase the reliability of rockets so that near-misses still do some damage
- Make the creeping barrage pattern more tight, so that you can hit emplacements
In return, the just nerfs that Stuka received are:
- Reduced one-hit-kill ratio, to match the fact that the Stuka issues no warning about where it is aiming (unlike Katyusha)
- Scatter now scales with distance to the target; so that you can't rely on max-range barrages anymore
- Scatter now penalized when firing in fog of war. Ditto.
IMO those changes would make the Stuka a lot more viable in 1v1, and a lot less cancerous elsewhere. Do you agree with that treatment or not?
Additional reasons why you don't see Stuka, particular to 1v1 are:
- Everybody goes luchs
- Nobody has fuel to throw around, when everybody has to fight using call-ins
Massed Panthers are not a problem in 1v1 or 2v2, same for elefant and jagdtiger!
Panthers were actually buffed as far as 1v1 is concerned. OST one got an AT boost and a hefty AI improvement. The OKW one got a price decrease .As far as I'm concerned Panthers don't spawn starting at vet2.
Panther spam in 3v3+ will (hopefully) be reigned in by their new popcap, and normalize repair speeds.
And why don't you address the problems of 4v4 and 3v3 in a smarter way, like changing the ressource inflation in those modes by changing caches or ressource points?
Resource inflation won't help. If anything it will make camping and mortar (pit) spam even more cancerous than before, since there are fewer MP-heavy stuff to counter them.