Balance patch 3696 Feedback Thread

[moonbearonmeth]

Does this greatness also account for glorious OC restructure?

[JoonasTo]

Has anyone else got the feeling that air got a lot more valuable? Sams are still crazy OP, that's not what I mean but rather sacrificing your air control for defending an attacking experimental. Suiciding air to prevent enemy from killing experimentals used to be a really bad idea and only done if absolutely necessary(or highly profitable) but because of the buildtime increase and T3 nerf, it seems like a choice I want to make more often.
Also weaker commanders in the mid-game are easier to snipe now so commander pushes with them are even more dubious but that much should be obvious.

If you spend the 2500 mass it costs more now on bp then the buildtime nerf for t4's might as well be nonexistant.

Furthermore, you barely see this combo used in the current balance because the second gun is quite useless vs t3 units because you OC them anyway. The extra hp from t3 and the extra bp are most of the time better to have.

In beta you need 7 shots to kill a harb, in normal balance 8.
Othuum 9 in beta, 9 rn
Percy 12 in beta, 13 rn
Brick 13 in beta, 13 rn
Etc

There is a very very small increase in the effectiveness of killing t3 units with the acu, but i doubt its enough to make it viable compared to OC.

Fyu, i just realised i forgot to add the original 100 dps to both sides, but i doubt it'll change much.

Just some math to go with that:
DPS: 1700 --> 1440 (2.7 AoE) -15%
Health: 31500 --> 30500 -3%
Energy: 270000+42000+450000+24000=786000 --> 800000=270000+56000+450000+24000 +2%
Mass: 4800+1200+4500+800=11300 --> 14000=5400+1800+5800+800 +24%
Buildtime: 4200+1200+4200+800=10400 --> 11800=4600+1800+4600+800 +13%

Energy cost change is negligible, so is health. Mass cost change is quite significant, as is damage. Buildtime change is meaningful but not comparable to T4 buildtime change. 27500 for a monkeylord compared to 11800 for the commander is just different leagues.

Add to that OC (3.0 AoE) and Vet, you get:
DPS: 5033 --> 4773? -5%
Health: 40250 --> 39250 -2%
Energy: 270000+42000+450000+24000=786000 --> 800000=270000+56000+450000+24000 +2%
Mass: 4800+1200+4500+800=11300 --> 14000=5400+1800+5800+800 +24%
Buildtime: 4200+1200+4200+800=10400 --> 11800=4600+1800+4600+800 +13%

Damage change also becomes negligible. Now the only nerf that matters is mass cost. It's pretty big one but dwarfs in comparison to experimental BP change. That said, new OC can be both good and bad. But if you can afford double nano, you've probably got pretty good energy income so your actual DPS is going to be higher vs experimentals than before. Full vet commanders are really dangerous against experimentals, anything short of a GC is in serious danger but you pay a little more for OCing T3.

Killtimes:
Harbringer 3,5s --> 2,8s (20% from close to OC time to under OC time, pretty big difference)
Othuum 4,0s --> 3,5s (13% gets close to OC time)
Percival 5,5s --> 5,0s (9%)
Brick 5,3s --> 5,2s (2%)
Loyalist 1,9s --> 2,1s (-11%)
Titan 2,0s --> 2,2s (-10%)

Like you mentioned, no big changes there against T3 units(aside from Harbringer,) however, let's look at it the other way around.

Harbringer DPS: 370 --> 320, Range 28 --> 26, Slower
Othuum DPS: 400 --> 287, Range 32 --> 28
Percival DPS: 400 --> 334, Range 35 --> 34, Slightly Faster
Brick DPS: 375 --> 312.5, Range 35 --> 32, Faster
Loyalist DPS: 205 --> 185, Range 25 --> 20, Slightly Slower
Titan Range 20 --> 22, Slightly Slower

And suddenly the light shone down on him and he saw that it was tough to be a T3 unit in this new world trying to kill this 200hp/s regen, 40k hp, 5k DPS monster.

But don't get me wrong, I don't think the strength of it is too much. Just that it's too easy to obtain. The second nano buildtime should get a serious nerf to reflect the position it holds as an experimental tier tech. When you consider a commander might already have other upgrades, getting the full rambo going is really fast compared to getting supcom or experimental on the field. It should be faster, but not by this much.

[Steel_Panther]

Thanks for posting all those stats Joonas, I agree with you that it has become relatively more powerful with the patch. And now that loyalist stun is gone it might be a bit op.

See, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_TV0yMkqgk

Farms I think you have to also factor in the AOE, which is very significant. In basically all situations where you use this com, you are facing hordes of t3 and possibly t2 units or arty mixed in. you are probably hitting two units with every shot, on average. T3 certainly has advantages, but the second gun really adds a lot of dps. If you are doing 1440dps, to two units due to aoe, that's more like 2880, plus you still get the overcharge. You just want to manually overcharge to make sure that you never oc the units you have been hitting with your normal gun (which you should just finish off with the normal gun).

I would still hesitate a lot before making buildtime or cost anywhere close to a t4, because this is, after all, an all-in where if you die it is game over (unless you play fullshare, in which case then it is even more op since you kill a huge amount of enemy forces, explode, denying the reclaim, and leave your untouched eco for your team. Again, see above...).

[Evan_]

Does the balance team feel that the reduced damage of overcharge overweighs the mass left behind from oc'd wrecks now? I think that against small groups of T3, ACU is more effective. Would it be possible to change the oc formula to add a bit of overkill if the user has enough e?

[keyser]

we are going to talk about it.

[TantrumDesire]

Since this patch I have encountered a fundamental problem with auto OC that has unexpectedly turned a few of my games around.
Not a bug or anything, just a change in target prioritisation that can mess up your game.

So imagine this scenario: You are chasing down an acu (or vice versa), an acu on acu battle, and the opponent has a land unit or more involved.
Your acu is firing at the enemy acu while chasing it/running away, and you have the auto OC on, expecting the OC shots to target the acu, but then all of the sudden a bloody snoop walks in and your auto OC fires at the insignificant land unit instead of inflicting critical extra damage to the enemy acu.
One or two misfired overcharges like this can make the difference between a win, loss or draw.

Now you may say, "auto OC sucks, better use it manually instead", and while you'd be correct in most cases, in the scenario above, ordering a manual OC would make your acu stop walking in order to fire, and then you'd have to reorder it to walk after the shot. In those critical moments where every second counts you just can't afford to waste that time stopping to fire, lest your target may walk out of range.

Before this patch this problem did not exist. If your acu were firing at the enemy acu while walking, and you had auto OC on, it wouldn't suddenly switch targets to fire the overcharge.

I reckon this change in auto OC prioritisation arose because of this new 'overcharge takes up as much power as it takes to kill the unit'.
An OC does a fixed amount of damage to ACUs and therefore can't kill in one shot (unless acu has under 400hp, ofc), so the auto targeting would rather fire the OC at a unit it can kill with the power in storage, rather than one it can't (acu).

[moonbearonmeth]

"Before this patch this problem did not exist."
Of this I can say you are 100% wrong and would encourage you to look at replays prior to the patch.

Further more this comes back to the old issue everyone always complains about in targetting priority of moving units, probably worth noting that if you are actually attacking an ACU with auto-OC on the OC will target the ACU.
Personally I prefer the system as is. as I would consider it more likely that the ACU will vet from the OC vs units than killing an enemy ACU

[Plasma_Wolf]

Auto-OC was always bugged in targeting when there was an ACU involved. I remember clearly that I was targeting and chasing an ACU with mine. Turned on auto-OC because i needed to do the last bits of damage, and his tanks were about to block my ACU. It then just decided to fire at a tank. And not one that was blocking me or near his ACU. My ACU turned it's gun
90 degrees to fire at some random tank far away.

This was a game of about a year ago.

We need a system where we can manually prioritize ACU/other units. When you're going for the kill you don't want crappy targeting to be the end of you.

[JoonasTo]

I should note that this was discussed in amongst devs and other people last winter. It boils down to if you're an aggressive or a defensive player. The aggressive players hate the way it currently works because they can't OC while chasing a commander if there's anything nearby. The defensive players love it because they can just bring one t1 scout to disable enemy ability to OC while running from a commander.

The solution to this istarget memory but I'm not sure what happened with it?

[Farmsletje]

aggressive players hate it! defensive players love it1!1!!!

no. its just a limitation within the game and i've never heard of anyone that doesnt hate it.

but yeah. Target memory would be a welcome sight