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other/none |
You're out your mind if you think the creeping barrage sucks. You get a discount on reload time, you have a significantly more predictable bombardment area, you can reach out of max range, and you increase the total ordinance delivered per cooldown period. The creeping barrage is one of the last few effective tools of the USF. I'm waiting for it to get nerfed into the ground again(I think it was nerfed before and then undone).
the priest's cb is great, i think no one here denies that. however, if you read the op and the responses to it carefully you'll see the complaints are not directed at the priest or USF but at the sexton's creeping barrage. and comparing the two it's pretty obvious that the latter is vastly inferior to the priest's cb due to the much larger scatter. if anything i'd like to see the sexton's cb buffed a bit closer to the priest's power level since, as it stands now, the regular barrage does a much better job without even draining your mun reserves. |
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wtf did i just read... the stuart is a waste of fuel and serves no role for USF?
this is arguably one of the most useful light tanks in the game and literally build in 90% of all USF games (1v1) as a result. decent AI paired with excellent AT against anything of its class or lower - and to top it off you have vehicle crews for quick fixing and shell shock to give it some utility in the later stages of the game.
the ATHT might pale in comparison, but i wouldn't say it's a bad unit at all. it deals decent suppression and can stand its ground against most other light vehicles when supported properly, although it does lack some survivabiliity due to being 320 HP and not having any sort of defensive smoke. i think the major reason it is not built all too often is that it comes in cpt tier and the lt / .50 / stuart combo is much safer and more efficient to play. |
the sexton's creeping barrage is probably the worst of its kind, even though it has four (more or less) pinpoint accurate shells instead of just one (1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th). the length of the scatter box is much larger than what the ingame indicator would suggest, making it very unlikely to hit anything with more than one shot.
i've done a bit of testing a while back here and came to the conclusion that it sucks even more than the katy's cb did before it got reworked/bugfixed... maybe if the length of the scatter box was cut in half it would actually be useful, but I doubt that this will happen. |
this would be a straight up nerf imo, because ability is primary used vs slow heavy targets like elefant or JT. Ram + offmap was already nerfed with nerfing of the ram and removing bombing strike from meta commanders. If the ability gonna receive similar treatment I'm afraid the only way for SOV to deal with heavy TD on his lane, is the same route of dealing with ST - straight up outplay of your opponent.
well, certainly, lowering the single-target damage would be a straight-up nerf in this very scenario, but exactly how much lower would ofc be up to debate. to be clear, i'm not advocating a nerf to 1/4 of its current live value but rather sth in the range of 66 to 75%. most of the ram/offmap combos were adjusted in a rather sensible way as well and AT-OW should be no exception. however, by giving it back a bit more multi-target dps through some form of scaling (and maybe some other adjustments like slightly greater targeting circle) it should perform much better versus groups of tanks while still having enough oomph to aid in taking out the big cats. and the emphasis is on aid, since outplaying your opponent should require more than just two button presses in my opinion.
Wouldn't this make it very weird if the ability starts with 5 tanks in-range but after 1 shell drops 4 tanks leave the circle and halfway through the ability those 4 tanks return.
to make the ability more consistent/predictable it could be set to fire a set amount of shells per tank say; 5 shots of 120-240 dmg with 1000 pen. during a 30 seconds window while the ability duration is 90-120 seconds
this could ofc also work well. although that would mean the strength of the ability scales 1:1 with the number of targets involved, which would likely rather end up either too weak vs single targets or too good against large unit concentrations. that's why i'd suggest to start from only a slightly lower base damage than the current and add only about 33 to 50% dps with each additional tank in range.
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i wouldn't say the ability is op per se, just very strong under the right circumstances.
IMHO the problem isn't the damage output itself, but rather how it is distributed between multiple targets. the reason is that number of shells fired doesn't depend on how many tanks are within the target circle, which means if you have multiple tanks in the area, the damage dealt per unit is rather low. OTOH, a single crippled tank will be focused down very quickly, making the AT overwatch really strong in taking out isolated units.
the easiest way to strike a better balance between single and multi-target performance would probably be to tone down the base DPS a bit, but let the number of shells or ROF scale with the number of targets in the aiming circle (maybe by a factor of 0.5 to 0.75). that way the AT overwatch wouldn't be an automatic death sentence for, say, a lone tiger with engine crit and do more than just a tickle when more units are around. |
Why not Vet1 flare for the USF mortar? It doesn't have vet1 ability and the unit is quite trashy compare to other faction equivalent, at least it would give another incentive to use it.
Since USF is the faction with the less stock reco unit (only m20) that would probably be better than the Major already overburden with many functions.
not a bad idea imho, but why not both? the mortar flare would no doubt be useful, but still rather situational compared to the more mobile major. |
They are fine imo.
1. Not central part of the meta in any game mode.
2. They break up the hated sandbag camping/double mg static frontline gameplay that so many people hate.
3. People who want them nerfed are mostly people who are incapable of using them themselves.
4. They create an interseting asymmetry where onen player has to be active constantly to avoid bleed and try to convert the lack of stopping power of his opponent into map control.
Absolutely agree. I mean we're talking about a unit that has been (deservedly) hit by the nerf hammer multiple times over the years and is now no longer a one-man army but rather just another valuable piece in the tactical toolset of CoH2.
Wanting certain units in the game to be balanced is one thing, but I've never understood the desire to outright remove entire gameplay elements completely. It seems like the same people who regularly call for all indirect fire to be nerfed into oblivion and all heavy tanks purged from existence are the ones who also want to see snipers gone for good.
I, for one, am glad that snipers always have and hopefully always will be part of the CoH franchise and the game isn't devolving into a WW1 simulator.
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if you want both mg and at gun a double officer build is the way to go. that or going airborne. |
And yet the barrage does nothing relevant. Balance team trashed the unit because it annoyed them on team game but with no clue to what to do with and how to articulate it around USF gameplay.
The more I look at it, the more the changes failed.
The scatter was the only thing out of this list ending up to be a real buff. The other buff was the barrage CD, but that was traded for autofire reload.
The barrage reload buff is about 10% of the previous reload, which is decent. But what does it do? AoE has been changed from 'one hit does very good damage' to 'one hit barely matters' (at least for healthy squads). This means you absolutely need a second hit to get something out of it. The scatter buff increases the chances to do so, the reload as well but overall very little. You have about 4.5 seconds to move out of the barrage, so I assume in most cases the second shot will have a chance to hit the team weapon again. The 4.5 s delay is obviously better than a 5 s delay, but overall not THAT much. To repeat myself, especially since the second shot changed from 'bonus damage' to almost mandatory to achieve actual damage.
This leaves us with the shell count buff. The barrage got a 5th shell instead of previously 4. Against infantry, this does not matter since they will be long gone when the fifth shell is fired anyway. It also does not contribute much to area denial since it comes only about 2 seconds later than old barrage due to the reload buff. The fifth shell is only good against static emplacements. However, damage got nerfed at the same time, giving both new and old barrage a max damage of 400 if all shells hit. With the better scatter, I'd say it is a minor buff against emplacements, but nothing more.
I don't disagree tbh, especially with the 'one hit barely matters' part. Thus raising the max AoE damage back to 80 seems like a good call for me, though in conjunction with the now tiny max AoE radius this is arguably not gonna do all too much.
Overall I guess the intention of the changes was to transform the barrage from an inaccurate but deadly anti-blob tool into a dedicated counter for team weapons. In this role the higher accuracy and slightly faster payload delivery does indeed matter, plus weapon teams are usually less likely to move out of harms way right after the 1st shell hits. In that respect I think the changes could work quite well, at least if the OHK radius were to go back up a bit again. OTOH, is of course questionable if USF really needed a unit for this specific purpose instead of a non-doc anti-blob tool in the first place. |
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