Profile of CieZ

OKW are not designed any specific way other than being a resource starved faction. If you want to play more mechanized you take the mechanized HQ, if you want to play more defensively with lots of infantry you go Battlegroup HQ.

OKW doesn't have any good blob counters outside of 3 things: 1. Just blobbing harder, which is the easiest option to do 2. Sturmtiger which even top tier players have a hard time using and 3. Spamming MG34's and praying for good RNG.

OKW's biggest problem vis a vis blobbing in my opinion is that they only have 1 area denial unit; the Schwer HQ. The Stuka Zu Fuss can't deny territory due to the long cool down and easy to avoid barrage. OKW getting a heavy artillery piece or a Self Propelled Howitzer would fix a lot of things in my opinion.

Please remind me when Relic hired you as one of their designers?

Who are you to think that you have any clue about the design intent behind any of the factions?

When was the last time you spoke with any Relic employee about anything CoH 2 related?

I'm interested as to the source of your knowledge about the design of OKW.

As for anti-blob OKW has: Flak HT, Luchs, MG34 (doctrinal and could use a buff), IG (pretty much sucks unfortunately, except for on a few maps it's okay), Stuka, Sturmtiger (actually one of the easiest units in the game to micro, you literally drive it straight up to your tiger, push 1 button and get a free squad wipe), and the KT. Not to mention mines, and potentially MG bunkers.

They're not as strong against blobs as Ost, but they can deal with them. It's not that complicated.

Btw - people don't get the Sturmtiger because a lot of the time you don't have the extra fuel, but it is a perfectly viable unit and plenty of top players have used it in high level 1v1s and 2v2s. Lemon and Vindicare come to mind in recently history as having used the unit effectively.

No clue why you think MG34s have anything at all to do with RNG? Suppression is one of the least RNG based mechanics in the game.

It's quite shocking that you'd have the gall to try and make such sweeping claims regarding a game that you so obviously lack knowledge about. If you spent 10% of the time playing as you spend posting ignorant comments on the forums, you might have more luck getting people to respect you.

Sad to see a top tier player encouraging blobbing.

Every faction should have tons of blob counters because blobbing is turbo cancer.

When did I ever encourage blobbing? I simply said that OKW, from what I can tell, has been designed to lack an abundant amount of stopping power, at least until very late game.

OKW has plenty of ways to stop blobbing, but they're still more vulnerable to it than other factions.

The fact of the matter is that blobbing rarely, if ever works, in a high skill game. All factions have too many ways to punish it. Whether or not you can properly employ said tactics is another question.

Katitof and Alex should probably stop trying to talk about things that they literally have zero clue about so this thread can get back on topic.

As far as I can remember, Relic adjusted the cover seeking behavior because players incessantly complained about how "out of control" they felt when it came to giving their squads precise orders. As others have stated, models would randomly decide that it was better to stand on the red cover road rather than behind the stone wall you ordered them into, thus suppressing the entire squad, or causing unnecessary bleed.

Overall the new squad cover behavior is a good thing, however a few squads need to be able to spread out slightly more when walking/outside of cover. For example, Obers have a very solid spread resulting in them rarely being wiped at full hp/full models from things like: ISU shots, 120mm shots, HE Shermans, etc. Compare that to the default squad formation of Falls, who really like to bunch up constantly. Lot's of death and frustration ensues as a result of that.

As far as mortars go, the 120mm is the only culprit in terms of frequently one-shotting squads, unless you consider the Scott a "mortar" since it sort of acts like one... kinda. Anyways, reducing the damage of the 120mm would be the best solution to preventing wipes in my opinion. Alternatively the AoE in which 80 damage is dealt could be reduced further. They both basically accomplish the same thing, but in different ways.

Oh and precision strike. That crap is stupid.

Watched it on 2-4x speed, so I may have missed a few things but my general constructive criticism is this:

-Your capping and map control was good, and what I believe ultimately won you the game.

-The 221 seemed like a wasted purchase. I'm not sure what the intent behind getting it was but it arrived way too late and didn't really do anything.

-Too many bunkers early game. Maybe it is just a play style preference but I find bunkers to be most useful very late game if floating manpower, or in a situation where you can't lose a VP. I'd rather spend the early manpower on a cache or another squad for a stronger early game. Strong early game tends to roll into strong mid game and thus into a strong late game.

-CAS plus T4 was interesting... it worked out but I don't think it normally would. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd rather go T3 with CAS, or just stay on t1/t2 with like 4x PaK and a million LMG grens.

-Oh back on the bunkers note, you also spent a ton of munitions on bunkers that could have been invested in LMGs or mines.

-I generally find 2x mortar HT to be overkill. One usually does the job fine.

-Teching T4 as spearhead after getting 2x mortar HT felt awkward. Might as well have just called in a tiger and stayed on T1/T2.

-The biggest area of improvement for you both is squad/vehicle preservation. Sometimes squads can be lost late game with no way to prevent it, but there were a lot of squads lost early/mid game. Unit preservation is one of, if not the most, important aspects of CoH 2. The tank micro in particular was sloppy and overly aggressive (mostly from your partner). Tigers are solid tanks, but they have to be supported - they can't be allowed to charge in like they did, especially against Mark + P47. They should always be escorted with a sweeper, they're slow enough that this shouldn't be a big problem. Try using them more like damage sponges that protect your PaKs while PaKs do the dirty work of tank killing.

I hope none of this is being overly critical. Everything I've said has been said in the spirit of constructive criticism as you seem to have asked for (which I genuinely respect). Keep practicing, you will probably be a pretty good team in the future. You guys support each other well, just need to sharpen up your mechanics, timings and knowledge of unit counters/interactions.

The total player base is way more than 15,000, and not everybody plays all modes anyway

At 5 million installations, 11.2% would be 550,000 players

Copies sold =/= active player base.

And a portion of the active player base only comp-stomps, therefore does not need to be considered when balancing the game (since they generally don't care).

There are probably between 10k-15k people who actively play multiplayer, maybe 20k... Relic is the only one with the real numbers.

I'd say balancing within the top 1500 is fair. I think anyone that cares enough to push up the ladder will at least care enough about balance to be considered when making balance decisions.

Although, with a significantly smaller player base than LoL, Relic might need to focus on the top 5-7% instead of ~11%.

Overall the point still stands that for a competitive game you have to balance around the top subset of players. Anything below that can either be overcome by increased skill, or is a skewed perspective because of a lack of mechanics and/or game knowledge.