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Both the ISU-152 and the Elephant are stupid right now.
The ISU needs to stop constantly insta-gibbing squads but other than that I think it is okay. But right now you pretty much just have to stop using infantry until you manage to get rid of the ISU because otherwise you will just lose all of it. That is not fun.
The elephant itself probably doesn't even need much or any nerf. The problem with the elephant is that the main default commander (Jaeger Armor) with the elephant has Spotting Scopes, Recon, and Stuka Bombing Run all in the same doctrine. It is like the doctrine is completely designed to make the Elephant ridiculously broken. You cannot counter it with tanks because spotting scopes allows the elephant to just gib every SU-85, ISU or KV2 on the field easily. You don't even need something to scout for it and that is really really dumb.
Before anyone suggests like Death's Head did that two T-34s can flank and kill an elephant...that is not possible against a good player or team unless they are already in catastrophically bad shape. Yes it would be technically possible, but of course the player with the elephant and his allies are going to have other tanks and paks backing it up. It just isn't going to happen unless they are terrible.
So how do you counter it? Well not with Katyushas. They do pretty much nothing to an elephant. You cannot use howitzers. While the B4 can be deadly to an elephant the first time you use it they will immediately recon and stuka your B4 making it worthless.
That only leaves bombing run, and that will only work if they are not paying attention to their most micro intensive and valuable unit (unlikely) or you manage to engine damage it somehow (less unlikely but still extremely difficult). And only a handful of Soviet commanders have this ability.
The elephant is just way way too difficult to kill in team games and I think that is largely because of the other abilities on the Jaeger Armor doctrine are TOO GOOD in combination with the elephant. At least make the players on the team coordinate to make the elephant that strong. |
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The shock ability on the Puma seems really powerful. |
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I would prefer they focus on team games. CoH is just more fun playing with friends. |
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Thanks guys! I really hope more game companies (including Relic) will start to put more care into how their game is presented as a spectator sport. |
We're certainly interested in offering more support to tournaments, and we think we've been doing a pretty good job with it through our social accounts. The fact is that our Facebook posts get far more views daily than our website.
In terms of in-game support it's something we hope to improve.
We're definitely open to suggestions.
As to Twitch, we have a good working relationship with them but have no control over what games or casters they feature. I believe that the more viewers someone has the more likely they are to be featured, which tends to be how it works for other networks as well.
You guys should just hire me! I created the GameHeart overlay which completely revamped the way people spectate Starcraft 2 games and it has been in use worldwide by organizations like Dreamhack and the Global Star League in Korea. Blizzard created their own spectating interface tool in response to my work (and it is still far less powerful).
Here is some info on the GameHeart overlay in case anyone is interested. |
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Buildings are definitely really weird in CoH2. Units seem pretty much invincible inside buildings until it randomly collapses. I think I remember reading somewhere that they are looking into buildings though right now. |
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The entire point of my post was to illustrate that thinking in those kinds of terms is at odds with creating a fun and interesting game. We are not trying to balance the MG42 against the maxim. They do not exist in a vacuum. They exist within the context of their own faction with it's own strengths and weaknesses.
Giving the MG42 an extra man has indeed made it stronger against the maxim, which was the problem they were trying to address. But it has also made it stronger in every other situation, particularly against conscripts and engineers which has a huge impact on the early game.
You have this thing going on in your brain where you think "it's only fair that our squad should get more men because their squad already has more men!"
But if you go about balancing the entire game that way you may as well just turn on mirror matches because that is all you are going to get. I am deliberately avoiding being drawn into a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the maxim because this is not what this discussion is about. It's about whether or not giving the MG42 an extra man has damaged the balance in ways unrelated to the maxim, and how best to deal with that problem if it exists. |
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I don't understand why so many people seem determined that the maxim and the mg42 need to be perfectly balanced against each other.
They don't.
They just need to fit into the same game without giving either faction too large of an advantage. The idea is for the factions to be different, so if one machine gun is worse than the other I don't see anything wrong with that.
The problem here is that there was nothing wrong with the MG42 before. The MG42 is and has always been an amazing unit which fulfills it's role very well. It has an incredibly wide angle of fire which makes it very difficult to flank, and very fast suppression which makes it very difficult to escape and will almost certainly require a retreat if it catches your units out.
The MG42 has always been strong against conscripts and other soviet infantry besides the maxim, the mortar, and the sniper. Two of these are obvious counters for an MG42 so there is no problem there. The third, the maxim, is only a counter because it for some reason can still setup while it is suppressed. We had soviet players literally just attack moving maxims at MG42s because they could setup in zero cover while be suppressed by the MG42 and then proceed to kill it.
The obvious solution to this problem was to make it so that the maxim can no longer setup while suppressed. But we didn't get that solution.
Relic decided the best way to deal with this was to reduce the damage of the maxim significantly. Okay, I guess that is alright because maybe the damage on the maxim was a little high to begin with, but it's a dangerous change because you are starting to mess with not just the interaction between the maxim and the MG42, but the maxim and everything else.
This is the beauty of the suppression solution, it literally only affects the specific ridiculous situation that was occurring between the maxim and the mg42.
But then they took it further. They went ahead and added an extra man to the MG42 squad. This change was obviously going to have a dramatic effect on how the early game was going to play out. So now we are seeing it. MG42s are drastically more difficult to dislodge, which is really hurting soviet early game map control. Particularly for soviet players who tend not to spam maxims or scout cars to begin with. It's like they have directly tried to nerf the one soviet opening that wasn't broken.
Anyways, I hope they will undo the extra man on MG42 squads. It just has too much of a negative impact on the soviet early game.
And for the discussion here about the MG42 change I hope that you guys can stop comparing it to the maxim because it really isn't that relevant to the discussion. This isn't mutually assured destruction. It's not a game of "well you guys have this annoying thing so we should have something equally annoying so nobody wants to play!!"
It's about finding a strong balance between the two sides so we can get unique and interesting back and forth games on a regular basis.
For the record, I think German mortars and AT guns are probably well served by getting an extra man. It's just the MG42 that really bothers me. |
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