Tremarl wrote:Personally I don't think you see it much (usually shield or ras/aras is preferred)
nb: really the point where a shield becomes ineffective is when u hit t3 stage which Imo Chrono won't save you from. You reduce 60% of DPS from t3.. but you still at max vet have what? A 18k Hp com? Pretty poor if you ask me
The E cost is certainly the thing which balances it out (that and the fragility of the Aeon ACU, especially since to maximize efficiency the ACU has to get both arms on a gunupgrade or simply get outranged by most t2 t3 units).
So I personally believe its balanced as is.
I've seen it in action on two occasions. The most notable was in an FFA game with short distances between bases. A friend installed the thing and used it to cancel out my whole ground army. I then had to stop everything I was doing because I'm Cybran, turtle up with PDs to keep his inferior army out of my base, then spam bombers to snipe him in one pass.
On the second occasion I barely noticed it was there, but in that case it was a 1v1 on Badlands. The other guy dug in with some shields in the middle of the map and then got the Chrono Dampener. Again, it completely upsets ground forces for Cybran because you can't advance on a fortified position with bricks if the bricks are going to constantly freeze up on you. I wound up attacking along the other sides of the map until I had enough MMLs and T3 mobile artillery to kill the guy.
Lacking a personal shield isn't really balance. The Dampener is just worse than the shield for the same cost. What the upgrade does and what it should be used for - though only against Cybran, to be perfectly damned frank - is turtle play. The Chrono Dampener is pretty good for turtling as long as the enemy units don't have a strong alpha strike. Turtling will protect the ACU from sniping of all forms, and the EMP also prevents harassment from air since bombers can't make a second pass.
On neither occasion did the Chrono Dampener win the game for the other guy. It just made the battle infinitely more obnoxious because it calls for you to carefully draw a noose 35 meters around the Aeon player. In the FFA where I couldn't devote my full attention to the person using it, it was infuriating. It's not that good of an upgrade, but I really have to insist it isn't a balanced upgrade either. I'm trying to think of any other unit or upgrade that so completely shunts the standard ground war, and nothing is springing to mind.
Tremarl wrote:If it was to have a rework to make it more usable that'd be great. I really like the idea mentioned earlier about the Triggered ability. So long as that is balanced so that the dampner isn't any weaker than it already is.
Maybe have a 3 second stun 120 second cooldown, to cast costs 30K E (So you'd need at least 6 storage to run it) To upgrade into it, it costs 1000 M 50,000 E (or maybe similar cost to shield)
And make it able to stun every unit in radius (even enemy coms) , but T4 and Enemy coms are only stunned for 1 second. [feel free to edit numbers as appropriate] [also a triggered ability would either become to spammy or probably act as a nerf vs the every few second stun]
I don't think it needs a nerf. It needs a good buff and a respective cost increase to go with the buff. That way it's less all over the place. I think it would be a lot more balanced if it were designed to basically stop all ground forces from T3 on down, and have it be a T4 upgrade. That way it works on everybody, you can predict what it will do, it's consistent, and it's pretty darn viable on a defensive basis. The lack of health upgrade makes it dangerous to push with and experimentals can still put pressure on it.
If it were a triggered ability, I wouldn't give it a two minute cool down. Not unless you plan to give it a ten second stun or longer - something very potent to make up for the fact that you'd realistically only be able to use it once in a fight. As is, it stuns for two seconds once every five seconds and as a consequence has very little impact on units with firing intervals longer than two seconds.
I think the idea behind the triggered ability is that it can stun-lock the enemy army until you run out of power. That might be more interesting but I still think it's hard to balance something like this as a T2 upgrade. At the least it would scale with the quality of your infrastructure, which would make it more dynamic.
Tremarl wrote:I like it as it is at the moment.
I don't really see what's likable about it and I'm not reading what you like about it either. It's your most inferior T2 upgrade. It doesn't work equally against all factions. When you do use it, it changes everyone's strategies to become more cautious if your opponent doesn't simply outright snipe your ACU, which makes a worse game for everybody. For me as a Cybran player, my feelings towards this upgrade can only range between indifference and outright hatred.
