Enough with the perma-stun and perma-shield

Follow up question: What's your infamy?

My experience is something like this:
Low infamy = Heavy overrepresentation of shooters - Its the boat people start out in & the concept of equip weapons -> deal damage is easy to understand as a new player.

High infamy (i.e. battles that involve the top 50 players -- That's not me, but at 3.5k infamy you do end up with & against them regularly) = Tons of speeders, often 3 pr team. Heck I sometimes lack just 1 shooter or defender to follow & heal.

Just because you like playing speeder doesn't mean that every concern about game balance that involves speeders is bitching & incompetence.

 

This game feels more like something the company is just milking, the devs hardly respond to any fair threads that talk about changes that make complete sense. They only respond to the ones they can easily explain and move on from, the ones that would require discussion, the ones that seem fair for people are mostly ignored. I haven't even seen any news about any updates or changes even though SO MANY things have been pointed out. Maybe they do consider these threads, but they should at least let people know, else it just feels pointless.

 

I can leave the game. If I spend tons of time stunned, I'm just going to uninstall and play something else. Whenever I play a game where my favorite character/class is unplayable, I just don't play the game anymore. That's why balance is a big deal. The only reason I'm still here is because my favorite class is Enforcer, and I'm not in high-infamy games. Shooter gets 5 weapons slots, the most in the game, with no yellows to worry about. It can be, and probably is, the most fun ship in the game for a lot of people. When those people level up and are faced with Speeder Bay, they're going to be really discouraged.

The strength of Shooters is the fact that 5 gun slots means they can wield multiple long-cooldown (high damage/long range) weapons at the same time, without significantly leaving themselves open. The strength of Defenders is the fact that they get very high base armor, health, and five blue slots. One always has the highest DPS, the other always has the highest TTK. If both of those classes were also able to snap to enemies as fast as an Enforcer, or faster, not only would Enforcer be pointless, but Shooter and Defender would become overpowered in every rank below 3000, where you would need the stun-spam to even deal with them. The strength of the Speeder isn't just in it's high speed stat, it's also in it's high ship rotation stat. Shooter and Defender aren't supposed to be able to wipe Speeder or Enforcer out at close range.

The problem is that Speeder gets the advantage of being hard to hit at close range and hard to hit at long range. They can nerf Bolt into the ground and Speeder would still be pretty powerful, since it's the one class capable of completely avoiding most of the damage thrown at it, even easier than Enforcer can. Enforcer may be able to do the stun-combo, but it otherwise has average ship rotation and a base speed that's barely better than Defender's. It can't run circles around other ships like Speeder can, it's only saved by it's high, Carronade-friendly turret speed. But then Carronade spends the majority of the game being complete garbage since nearly 100% of it's damage can be blocked by armor, so you can't use it until you get an Epic and unlock it's damage buffs, extra shots, and, frankly, ridiculous status effects from the crew tree. But then you spend most of the game shuffling around trying to help teammates or getting blown away by snipers, since your crap speed barely lets you get near a Shooter using a Turbo, so you don't get to fire it anyway. BUT I DIGRESS. Point is, Speeder would still be good without the Tesla Bolt.

Also, you can't make yourself useful when you're under a 14-second stun that's only removed by DAMAGE. Trying to block a shot for anyone else is difficult a lot of shots just sail right over you, half the shots are mortars so you can't block them anyway, and most people won't even fire in the first place unless their reticle is green. If you rush forward, you're just doing a suicide run. The good news is that the stun is off, the bad news is that you're dead.

 

Alternately you could define what a ´normal´ variety of ships is in your view?
In mine, a perfect destribution would be 20% of each boat -- Which we'll never see, but when 1 type of boat is around double I suspect that changes are resonable.
---
I decided to track how long it would take to see just 1 game with 2 or less speeders involved --- All games played in a row between 3200 & 3400 infamy.
I was playing a Fixer.

#of speeders pr game:
5
5
6
5
5
5
6
4
4
3
4
4
1 [13 games before seeing a game with the expected average or less of speeders].
3
4

Average amount of speeders pr game = 4,27
Perfect distrubution would have been = 2

Thats more than twice of what it would be in a perfectly balanced scenario & ignoring that I wasn't a speeder so only 9 boats were random (i.e. it should be 1.8 speeders in average). Most games take steps to fix inbalances as heavy as this & I'm sure Rovio will act eventually (if they intent to balance the game around endgame matches).

Granted it's only a small sample size -- But it does not seem far away from my everyday experience, expect perhaps for the long streak at the end where half the boats weren't Speeders!


Suggestions: [Obviously not suggestion to do everything at once].
- Cut down on the amount of blue slots/points a mk6 speeder has.
- Rework Turbo (& perhaps Overboost, Rudder, Gear Lube) into providing a flat amount rather than a %. This should indirectly buff the slowest boats & nerf the fastest.
- Consider if the ability to stun for upwards to 14 seconds is perhaps abit over the top.
- Rebalance the base stats of the mk6 speeder (Hp, speed, etc).

 

Thanks, Kit, for doing some due dilligence around matches/ship dispersion. I tried to do something similar, but I got 3 games in, and got an epic stun-fest game and had to turn it off before I frisbee-ed my ipad off the roof. It would be really nice if ROVIO MADE SOME KIND OF STATEMENT ABOUT THEIR INTENTIONS TO BALANCE THE GAME so we're not stuck convincing everyone we game with not to play this title. I'm confused by their silence. They must not appreciate the power of word of mouth. Or economics. Lol

 

To be fair Ill have to admit that the tracking I did last night (Eu evening) ended with a different result.

Still over 2 spenders or game, but nothing gamebreaking and far too many Shooters around.

Suppose time of day matters - Most of the long time top 50 players are Asian, so if you want to avoid banana-stunfest then play while they're asleep

Ill keep at it for a few hundred games and try to play at different varying times (although being a Fixer its far more beneficial to play during Shooter hours, easy 300infamy climb that was!)

 

To be honest, Rovio likely knows but will do nothing about it. First of all, the pricing for the shop system and their items are through the roof. Global release new players who have spent lots of money in to the game are now finding the problems that most of us that have been playing for awhile knew about. Secondly, the issue has always been balance of the weapons and the ships. What you'e seeing now is the exaggerated Legendary stuns and Legendary frost cannons that have very long durations, something that the Devs already knew would possibly be a problem but figured that if someone paid that much for these items, they wouldn't care less for balance at that point(because they are running to the bank!). Same goes with all the Legendaries,

 

Ya so its pretty much pointless to seriously play this game in a competitive manner if you don't wanna switch to a speeder because so long as the company is getting the $$ they wont do anything.

Supercell is lyfe.