Speeder=Tesla Bolt+Item balance system...

I’ve always used Tesla with my mk4... just speed it’s pointless because you don’t have 3 yellow slots. 3 sniper cannon shots and you’re dead.

 

Yeah, and I do run across other M4's that equip it. But it is pretty uncommon. When I approach a M4 I assume no bolt and a M5 yes bolt.

To me, in a situation where every single opponent can 3-shot me, I find speed about as far from "useless" as you can imagine.

 

Tactics means varying forms of offence and defence. Right now the bolt is only good for defence. You can't go on offense cos there is a basic flaw underlying the whole stun concept which no one seems to understand.
Suppose I have a bolt that stuns for 30 seconds and has a cooldown of 20 seconds. Going by what every one says, I'll be God of the bay. Unbeatable cos I have 30 secs stun. What everyone seems to ignore on purpose is that how many times will that 30 sec stun remain on any boat? I guess 1 out of 20 is the best I can think about. Rest of the time someone with a firebomb or a cannon or even a minor splash from a mortar or a torp breaks it and you are vulnerable for 20 secs. So offence goes out of the window and you have to rely on your evading skills. And now-a-days most of the times I use stun when my OB is on cooldown. Think about it. You can't run away and someone breaks your stun in 2 seconds. As a mk5 speeder you are toast.
My point is speeders were meant to play offensively most of the time. While there are different play styles but the basic purpose was to rush, kill, return hence the speed that comes with the boat. Stun was there as support.
I don't want a Tesla shield nerf but I want a bolt to be restored with a minor de-buff at least. I can even tell you the advantage Tesla shield has over a stun. Now that bolt and shield are on same cooldown the consecutive use of a shield doesn't reduce it's duration while the repeated stuns add resistance every time. Is that how a support weapon is supposed to work?
I say reduce the resistance and we can call it even, a fair nerf.

 

Unfortunately 90 percent of mk5s add tesla bolt as their third item. So did I , eventhough it was just a rare tier 1. Tesla shield is 2 slot points so is not worth it.

 

5*, but hyperbole does enchance arguments I suppose 10% of players using 1 specific item isnt exatcly drastic?
Compared to the 20+ speeders that has dominated the top 50 for over a year sure, but that had to end at some point. Looks like the Enforcer buff did a good job of breaking the speeder domination.

Going by your logic the fact that there's only 2-3 fixers in the top 50 must mean that Fixers need a serious buff. Happy to hear it!

(I do have a mk6 speeder with an epic stungun that I have put time and ressources into, trading longer CD for zero healing hasnt felt like a drastic change from either perspective).

 

Lol you used excatly same argument to show in every snapshot that fixer need a buff as they represent so low in top 50 when it came to speeder argument you took a different route on it.
It makes one wonder if you really wanted a fixer buff or nerf the only ship that killed you the most in the past.
The top most played boat in the top 50 went form 22+ strong to hardly 7-8 in number.
Enforcer buff had nothing to do with it if it had top players would have shifted to enforcer 2 updates ago when it was buffed.
According to weeze snapshot speeder were still going strong at the top last to last season despite ur quoted enfo buff.
Before tesla nerf there were 22 speeders and 10 enfo on top so atleast 25 bolts were being used.
A nerf lead to the usage rate of an item from 50+% to 8-10% isn't drastic at all right?

 

That's interesting that you say Nitro/OB is good for a "duelist". Maybe this is what you mean but the reason I favor it is strategic. It lets me add my muscle to pretty much any 1v1 in the bay. It isn't so much "dueling" as sneaking in behind an unsuspecting enemy and slaughtering them. It makes my speeder a really good support boat for the whole team. Maybe though that's just an artifact of being stuck with an E10 overboost so I also rely on the Nitro to get me there in a timely fashion.

To the larger point, if the reduction in use on tesla bolt is really as drastic as @Crashedup is quoting then I need to reconsider whether it was too harsh a nerf. That's too much to just be hand-waved away with "a few whiny players".

 

Fair enough, but in real life I find it goes like this.

Assassin is the preferred strategy. It is, by far, the most effective in terms of impact to my team.
Duelist is what happens when the fight has broken up. Now, while I seek out 1v1's to add into (assassin) I'm very likely to run into my own 1v1's.

Like you my personal inclinations lean towards duelist but if I'm to make that a primary strategy I'm going to need to get a lot better at it.

I think all speeder play is heavily dependent on "rhythm" so yeah, it's predictable that the accepted rhythm has been disrupted and people are struggling. I've seen that effect clearly myself when dueling enemy M5 speeders. It's hard to believe, though, that people would quit speeder and bolt in such numbers over a simple change in strategy. Here's my personal best guess (not to be treated as anything resembling 'fact'). I think bolt was, in fact, OP and it enabled a level of aggression that is outside the "glass cannon" design of the speeder. Accordingly, Rovio toned it down to get it within design spec. As is always true, people who have gotten used to the OP thing are pissed. Now they need to play more like I play with hit & run passes and careful boat positioning rather than a bolt-enabled slug-fest.

I'm also starting to sense, however, that they went too far with it somehow. I don't personally understand that because even a 5 second stun every 20 seconds sounds HUGE to me. But if usage has really gone down by 80% or more that's not a positive sign.

I don't really understand the ex-cannon problem either but that, again, is probably due to the way I'm forced to play without bolt. If I already have to do 12 second long hit & run passes while my weapons recycle how is 15 seconds really that different? It's just a slightly longer path. For dueling purposes it'd comes down to "how many shots to take down an enemy" rather than "how many HP". In general, a smaller, more frequent dose of damage is going to take less overall time because you have less wasted over-damage. One of these days I'm going to mount my std cannon on my speeder just to see how that plays. I imagine that'd be quite a surprise to enemies in a duel. It really wants to be paired with a tesla shield though and rares are worthless.

 

The bolt was useful in 1v1 scenarios not in team fights same as tesla shield because someone is bound to break it. Tesla stun is useless that way. But when you find a boat wandering off on it's own whole team can't turn their attention to that ship in time only speeders can reach their to engage them.
Which they cannot do anymore.
Previously you would flare blast stun untill you reload your weapons then again flare blast stun but this time stun will be of reduced duration because of resistance so you have to return to team as you can not take down 7k 6k hp in 3 4 shots.
Now with stun reload duration increase and 2x resistance you can barely do the combo once and leave half or less hp, as shooter or defender will attack you too.
Now its all hide and seek game if enemies have fixer matches are so boring and everyone just camps and shoots with me being just near fights out of range. No fun.

 

Agreed. 1v1 is a deathmatch for speeders now. A lot of players just jumped over to enfo and the general consensus is that it's not OP. I agree enfo is not OP. It's doing what it's supposed to. We can call it a balanced ship unlike speeders.

 

I understand the rhythm. It's just that I have to replace it with flare/blast/dodge since I don't have the stun. So to my eye it looks like there's a workable alternative that takes more skill but is otherwise nearly as effective. Yet I'm loath to just ignore such huge drops in usage. More and more I feel like I'm missing something. For instance, maybe higher infamy captains are simply too good to allow the turret dance to work?

 

See I have 10k battles speeder all my life. I was comfortable in 3300 to 3700 before nerf. Now I am struggling to cross 3k because whole match I am useless as my setup is mid to close range.
With new achievements everyone is rocking epics and legendaries and I can't stop them as my stun is on reload all the time I can't jump in and save any of my team mates.
Maybe it will take time to adapt previously it took like 20 30 battles to adapt I already have 100+ this time and no strategy is working for me.
And new aim assist means I can't take cover of waves to dodge shots too. Everything this update has turned against speeders believe me I never complained this heavily before I got used to everything te balanced previously except for frost torp.

 

And how is the huge slump in infamies of only speeder class especially mk5 all I knew are struggling except some, maybe I'm just not that skilled or there is something wrong going on. I know it wasn't easy to keep up in 3.5k it has become ever worse now.
I am simply disappointed and don't want to play anymore. Tired of losing endless battles.

 

LOL on the aim assist (and also whatever happened to target sticking). I think that was a stealth nerf to speeders it's so awful. I rely on target lock just to steady my camera even if it's just a handy target on my way some where that i have no intention of shooting. I just use them as a way to anchor my view so it doesn't go wildly swinging somewhere. I can't be the only one thinking, I have sticky targets turned off. Why is it sticking at all?

Regarding learning this skill, assuming I'm right at all, it's a deep skill meaning I think more like 1500-3000 matches is what it'd take to learn it. Or, at least, I'm still struggling. I can see the impact of the bolt nerf though because my win rate against M5 speeders has gone up considerably. I think the open question is whether speeders will recover or is the nerf judged as insurmountable by the player base.

 

Speeder has always recovered since july 2017 from there it all started. They nerfed ob( speed loss), they nerfed hp( saying speed and hp should not go hand in hand but previously they nerfed speed which they didn't returned), they nerfed stun I supported this change and all previously done changes too. Then they triple nerfed frost, again they nerfed fire EC and finally they made mk5 class useless by doing nerfs to all their combos and supports.
And some idiots here think every speeder is in nightmare league and is mk6 so nerf is deserved, pathetic logic they have. They should scale nerfs according to level to items people have tier and rarity wise. Like it is for damage commons have less legendaries have high. So lower class does not suffer from balancing.