Nerfing Indirect Fire

you are so lol...it is wrong what i wrote? No..it isnt.

if iam not under rank 1000 ..i dont allow write something in this forum?
Bist du dumm?
Du dürftest dann auch nichts schreiben...bist ja nicht mal top 100.

dude, it's true and we get sick of it. it's so damn annoying to see every thread turned into axis fanboy bs, and it's always the same people... highfive is right here. you keep saying people are allies biased but the one that is biased, is YOU.

This is what I'm suggesting, lets change most rocket arty to high risk high reward units similar to pwerfer, where they have to get closer to the action in order to deal any real damage. My theory for this is that most of the maps for team games are usually long and narrow, hence it is almost impossible to get through any flanking unit to deal with katy; not to mention, high ranking players will shift queue their artillery pieces back to base once its done with barrage. By increasing scatter at max range, players will be more incentivised to think whether they should barrage from max range and risk wasting their long cool down or to go in closer and have a chance of doing a lot of damage to enemies.

Such mechanic is already implemented: the further is the target the higher is the spread. The problem you guys might have is that while in case of alpha strike units like PW lower spread is always better, in case of area denial like LM it is sometimes better to have higher spread in order to lock bigger area. I can't think of any solution to that though other than decreasing max range of such units and that may make them useless.

You also need to consider that allied rocket artillery has low trajectory rockets that can't be shot from behind many shotblockers, like forests, becouse they simply hit them. PW and stuka, if well positioned, do not have that problem and it is an important advantage.

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I certainly agree with the point about spread and range. Pretty much all rocket artillery is useless at max range except for the landmattress, which has very poor range and high minimum range.

I think they are for the most part too hard to dive. Incredibly fragile units but often killing them will require you to sacrifice a vehicle IF you can even find them. Locating a rocket artillery vehicle can often come too late to react when yo must micro your units immediately not knowing where a first volley will land. Subsequent seconds are used repositioning your troops more effectively and finally only AFTER PEOPLE ARE DEAD, you can see where the artillery is, but by then they are running.

If Rocket artillery was revealed when it fired rather than when it hit you, that would make it much easier to counter which i think is necessary since it is really not in any standard playbook to kill them. It takes a big misplay by your opponent to kill them 95% of the time.

This would also be a reasonable tradeoff between quick firing axis units and slow firing allied ones who seem to perform better presently without impacting the fire power or usefulness to skilled players.


TLDR: Rocket artillery should be revealed when firing not hitting, creates risk, does not affect effectiveness vs campers.

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I certainly agree with the point about spread and range. Pretty much all rocket artillery is useless at max range except for the landmattress, which has very poor range and high minimum range.

I think they are for the most part too hard to dive. Incredibly fragile units but often killing them will require you to sacrifice a vehicle IF you can even find them. Locating a rocket artillery vehicle can often come too late to react when yo must micro your units immediately not knowing where a first volley will land. Subsequent seconds are used repositioning your troops more effectively and finally only AFTER PEOPLE ARE DEAD, you can see where the artillery is, but by then they are running.

If Rocket artillery was revealed when it fired rather than when it hit you, that would make it much easier to counter which i think is necessary since it is really not in any standard playbook to kill them. It takes a big misplay by your opponent to kill them 95% of the time.

This would also be a reasonable tradeoff between quick firing axis units and slow firing allied ones who seem to perform better presently without impacting the fire power or usefulness to skilled players.


TLDR: Rocket artillery should be revealed when firing not hitting, creates risk, does not affect effectiveness vs campers.

Good point. That change could be really beneficial to the game.

I have never hit more rockets on shot blockers than with the STUKA though, not high enough of a trajectory for me apparently

Probably becouse you haven't even try to shoot katy from position such close to the shotblocker It is true though, that for some misterious reason, it is really easy to misjudge stuka positioning.

oy vey, no more annoying OP schwer camping on important points. muh
and as if OKW takes long to cap point.. with volk spam or kübel. LUL

Such mechanic is already implemented: the further is the target the higher is the spread. The problem you guys might have is that while in case of alpha strike units like PW lower spread is always better, in case of area denial like LM it is sometimes better to have higher spread in order to lock bigger area. I can't think of any solution to that though other than decreasing max range of such units and that may make them useless.

You also need to consider that allied rocket artillery has low trajectory rockets that can't be shot from behind many shotblockers, like forests, becouse they simply hit them. PW and stuka, if well positioned, do not have that problem and it is an important advantage.

Agreed.

Also imo stuka(although not as bad) and especially werfer are still wipe machines. Allied rocket arty tends to just gib support weapons causing some mp bleed but preserving there vet. And Vet support weapons this patch seem more important than ever. Pwerfer and make a quick alpha strike and wipe a vet 3 squad almost instantly or support wep. Werfer by far the most effective rocket arty this patch i think. 2 of them in 2v2 is insane you can almost never cap a point with out a good chance you lose the squad caping.

Pw often pin only..

I agree and I will quote myself from another thread here:

There's one thing I would like to suggest which is a general redesign of light indirect fire. It's cancer. Moreso in team games but random mortar shells wiping squads are just too much for a competitive environment and this shit happens on a regular basis.

I would propose making mortars more responsive overall and changing them as follows (I'm only looking at non doc, so we can get that straight first. As was said before, one problem with the game in general was it's lack of coherent design decisions and the gap filling with commanders which has done a lot of damage to the balance (see doctrinal flamers, M10 vs Jackson etc.).

All Mortars should have their core function in effectively combating team weapons (forcing pack-ups, retreats and repositions) and softening garrisons/emplacements (but not outright hard-countering them). Further, all of them should have smoke.

OST and Soviet: Ost and Soviet both have a mortar in an early tier and rocket artillery in T4, but that's it.
Therefore I'd say these two mortars should have a "quick barrage" and a "long barrage", where the difference between two barrages is that the long one takes longer to get started, but overall has a way longer duration, like 8 shells or something, making it best suited for anti garrison and anti emplacement (softening them up!). The short barrage should be kept very responsive, since it will mainly be used to force team weapons away and thus it consists of about 4 accurate shells.
For flavour we have the vet abilities which can stay as is, I see no big deal here, except make that flare shell work properly please, since it's been bugged since forever.
The late game rocket artilleries on Ost and Sov should be heavy blob and emplacement/garrison killers, but they are not the main concern here so allow me to skip that part for now.

OKW is in a similar spot with ISG and Stuka, but their timing isn't as distinctively spread apart like for Ost/Sov. I don't know how to fix the ISG without making it UP/OP, so maybe give it slightly more AOE first to make it more consistent and appyly similar changes like for the Ost/Sov mortars.

USF are bloated with indirect fire and I would suggest giving the mortar only the quick barrage option and leave it at that, plus smoke obviously. The long barrage should go into the Pack howie, but apart from this distinction it's getting fuzzy, since there's still the Scott which could be/stay a long range squishy Stug-E type of unit?? This is a part in my proposal that could use some more work, but I can't think of anything good right now. Maybe making the Pack howie a doctrinal airdrop and replacing it's role with the Scott would be good like it was already suggested here.

UKF is also in a wird position, but you already have great ideas for it and I'd go with the little mortar pit that you drafted there. Maybe have the long barrage locked behind being inside the mortar pit and otherwise treat it like USF mortar? There are base howies for late game heavy artillery so I don't see much of a problem there.

That's all the factional indidrect fire units covered, but here's the most important change of them all which should be applied to ALL of them:

Nerf automatic firing! Either increase the delay between aiming and firing, increase scatter, decrease rate of fire, decrease auto-fire range or maybe all of that to preserve their role as anti team weapons and soft garrison/emplacement counters. As of now, they add inconsistency by wiping squads randomly and just increase the "explosive noise" on the battlefield.
I'd hope they'd be more micro heavy and thus more rewarding compared to their passive use, which isn't all that worse than microing them heavily as of now. This is my personal pet peeve with this game and I hope It's okay that I post my ideas here, but since this area of the game needs some major work IMHO, I thought it could be done in a mod and you asked for ideas, so there you go!

TL;DR
Make mortars fit their role (anti team weapon + soft garrison/emplacementcounter) more distinvtively and make them more rewarding to play with and against (by rewarding micro and punishing negligence), all by nerfing their auto-fire heavily and splitting the normal barrage in two distinct versions, each sercing a specific puprose each which have been mentioned above.

cheers!

As an Allied player, I understand the need to have strong indirect fire option to counter team weapon spam, but when you invest 135 fuel into a tech building and you place it down on your cutoff near base sector and it still gets wrecked; It's just a bit unfair isn't it?

So don't place it there and defend your cutoff with units like everyone else? So tired of hearing that using the flak HQ for defending a main area of the map is part of OKWs "design". You know what else was a part of their design? No stock MGs. Well you get one now, and while it can't kill models for ****, its just fine at suppressing.

Like of all the reasons to suggest indirect fire needs a rework, this is the last one I would point to. For me its how much infantry killing they do with little to no micro. I think auto-firing needs a little nerfing (across all factions mortars) to encourage manual barrages more, but the ability to destroy an aggressive flak HQ is the last thing I want to see nerfed.

Pw often pin only..

No, it's one of the better tools in the game for punishing blobbers. Maybe if you used it competently you would figure that out.

So don't place it there and defend your cutoff with units like everyone else? So tired of hearing that using the flak HQ for defending a main area of the map is part of OKWs "design". You know what else was a part of their design? No stock MGs. Well you get one now, and while it can't kill models for ****, its just fine at suppressing.

Like of all the reasons to suggest indirect fire needs a rework, this is the last one I would point to. For me its how much infantry killing they do with little to no micro. I think auto-firing needs a little nerfing (across all factions mortars) to encourage manual barrages more, but the ability to destroy an aggressive flak HQ is the last thing I want to see nerfed.

I'd like to see autofire eliminated and just having attack ground and barrage, with any special abilities such as smoke, HEAT, etc, tied to the barrage.

I do wish they had nerfed the auto-attack range of the 120 to match the auto-attack of the ISG.

In 4v4 randoms, I think I've lost the majority of the trucks that I've built outside the base, at least in competitive games.

I agree and I will quote myself from another thread here:
There's one thing I would like to suggest which is a general redesign of light indirect fire. It's cancer. Moreso in team games but random mortar shells wiping squads are just too much for a competitive environment and this shit happens on a regular basis.

I'd like to see autofire eliminated and just having attack ground and barrage, with any special abilities such as smoke, HEAT, etc, tied to the barrage.

This is the most broken part of the game. Mortar is meant to dislodge static units from garrisons and heavy cover. It is not meant to wipe full health squads on the move in autofire mode. Turns the game into a complete joke and a waste of time.

In real life it would take several mortar shots to get close to a target, yet every game I lose a squad moving thru a field to autofire no sight bullshit. #EsportsNeverReady

Such mechanic is already implemented: the further is the target the higher is the spread. The problem you guys might have is that while in case of alpha strike units like PW lower spread is always better, in case of area denial like LM it is sometimes better to have higher spread in order to lock bigger area. I can't think of any solution to that though other than decreasing max range of such units and that may make them useless.

You also need to consider that allied rocket artillery has low trajectory rockets that can't be shot from behind many shotblockers, like forests, becouse they simply hit them. PW and stuka, if well positioned, do not have that problem and it is an important advantage.

I am aware of that mechanic, and I'm proposing that the max range scatter be increased even more for all rocket arty units, axis and allies.

Perhaps, just increasing the cooldown of barrage and reducing the vet 2 cooldown bonus would be enough? I feel that the "low trajectory" rockets don't really factor much into team games; On maps like road to kharkov, minsk pocket, rails and metal. I'm not as worried about land mattresses as they are relatively slow and easy to catch out, however Katyushas don't really risk much for the player using them. As long as allied team has sufficient infantry and anti-tank, katyushas just help to control the map even more, even more so that forward reinforce points such as the OKW battlegroup has already been nerfed. Team-weapon centric strategies are basically fish in a barrel at that point, including the current state of soviet sniper + guards combo.

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Add a setup time for all Rocket arty, something like 3/5 seconds

Post patch, most artillery feels way less harmful than before in my opinion. If you place your OKW truck so aggressive that it can be destroyed by indirect fire without the enemy having to push then it is your own fault. I usually place my Medic HQ in my base (in 1v1) and the Flak HQ at the fuel/cutoff to defend it.

The Flak HQ didn't get an "extra anti air ability" - The ability to target airplane is now just toggable with a 30 seconds cooldown. In this time, the flak WILL NOT shoot at infantry. So it is now either/or and not, shoot down the planes and then immediately fire at inf again.



No, we're not.




I honestly don't give a damn about your posts because every single one of them is just a stupid biased Axis fanboy rant. You're rank is far beyond 1.000 and still your personating as the balance guru in person: https://www.coh2.org/ladders/playercard/viewBoard/10/steamid/76561198079087631

L2P or learn to give constructive feedback. But reading "huhuhu I can't win easily while playing Axis" is getting extremely annoying because you want to turn every single CoH2.org thread into this fanboy bullshit.

How I loved that gif

DAMN That bias.. you can't possibly hope to understand the difficulties of each faction when all you play is... one side man.

https://www.coh2.org/ladders/playercard/viewBoard/10/steamid/76561198079087631

DAMN That bias.. you can't possibly hope to understand the difficulties of each faction when all you play is... one side man.

https://www.coh2.org/ladders/playercard/viewBoard/10/steamid/76561198079087631

250games on alli side are nothing? lul
right..its not that much like okw..but you lie when you tell something like this..

Your W:L ratio is also basically 50/50, so what's so unbalanced?

its the easy cheesy playstile which allie faction have...its nearly boring to play them, cause of no trouble with extrem wiping from sqauds, no hitting tanks, arty that do shit, call ins that not really effective..allof that u dont know as allie player.

want to kill a KT? here you get 2 penals and a TD. done

Well I hope you were there screaming when the ISG was pinning, squad wiping and spammed. Or how the OST turbo mortar can still wipe squads without any micro at all.

I don't have any of these issues in 2v2 games. But as the games scale to 3's and 4's it's just an arty party. Though, it's kind of always been that way just the brits and their arty grenades are getting nuts.