Soldier feedback from 30th Oct

[Questra]

Well, from those perk changes it seems that Funcom have at least looked at the soldier wishlist or some soldier threads. Thank you, although we feel that we've gained an inch and lost a meter.

We're happy about the changes to Draw Blood, this archaic perk was long overdue for some moderisation. I'm wondering about SL mobs though. Will enfs and solds be able to land the perk in PvM on inf mobs? If any mobs have 4-5k NR this is a concern. I'm not too bothered since I rarely solo in PvM, but some people seem to enjoy that (weirdos, I know).

(edit: will AAO be applied to the Body Dev vs NR check? if not, the NR check on Draw Blood should be lower, because it not only will fail to land in many PvM situations, but also in some PvP situations... we asked for a bit of improvement to the perk, not a nerf)

It's nice that we'll be able to land Contained Burst now, and nice that Muzzle Overload and Clipfever will do 1k PvP damage now... since they did virtually nothing before.

But Funcom, what happened to PU? That's the majority of our perk damage down the drain!

Other profs with 11s capping specials have huge DD from their perklines, Assault Rifle soldiers not so. We rely on PU for perk damage, and it's going to hit us incredibly hard without it.

Shadow Bullet - Aimed Shot Skill 2000: Damage: -4557 .. -9594
Night Killer - Aimed Shot Skill 2000: Damage: -5193 .. -10932

These perks require only a ranged weapon, why can't PU perks be the same?

I'm requesting one of four things.

1) Make the Xan of Anger 99% Assault Rifle and 1% Ranged Energy with an added 2k RE requirement to equip it. Nerf the RE perks from the 30th Oct PDF to be 120s recharge rather than 45s since they no longer require Energise.

2) Give soldiers more RE skill in the Ado Brain and other items, comparable to AR attack rating, so that if you want to make us to go back to the EC3, we can actually land these perks on people.

3) Like you've done for various profs recently, make a new 10-perk perkline open to soldiers. Leave PU as it is and take away our perk DD, but make a soldier perkline which gives us something viable to put our 10 useless perks into now. Something like a Drain and/or BR/nullspace disruptor resistance line with 1 or 2 removal perks and up to 33% resistance. Or make Power in Numbers a SL perkline rather than AI, so soldiers can max another AI perkline like CoNC or Alpha/Beta lines. Or just talk to us about what sort of perkline we'd like and tell us if you think will be balanced.

4) To compensate for all that lost damage, increase the damage on Heavy Ranged perks and the new Triangulate Target... 200 PvP damage DoT is almost worthless at tl7.

As it stands, noone is going to use Power Up in PvP. Every prof PU is open to now already has a better weapon or weapons to use. Soldiers are the only prof who can benefit from that perkline and wasting 10 perks for +50 damage and no DD perks is just ridiculous.

Do you want 99% of all soldiers, either PvP or PvM focused, to be running around with 10 perks in General perklines like NCU extensions and Enhance Health? Because that's what it's going to come to. So many profs have 11s capping specials and still have large DD perks along with very strong composite defenses. I don't see why soldiers should be singled out like this.

[Techmagos]

this is absolutely a problem, and your solutions seem good too (first one is a little bit odd).

[Mamman]

Assault rifles goes down the drain completely if power up and heavy ranged is implemented like proposed. SMG+RE will probably be the new flavor of the month, will be kickass damage on lowish evades with both SMG and PU perks. Attackrating will suffer so I guess back to EC3 for high evade targets.

[Questra]

Made an alteration to my OP. Instead of suggesting that PU perks should have a 90s lock, I changed that suggestion to 2mins, to keep it in line with the current timer (once every 2mins).

Also, a loophole occured to me. If PU perks were made Ranged Weapon only, many profs would be able to use them with their current weapon (i.e. traders putting 10 perks in PU and having PU perk DDs that check general AMS vs Dodge (no need for IP in RE).

The solution to this would be to make PU perks check RE skill again vs 90 or 95% Dodge, which would be similar to the AMS vs Dodge which is listed in the new PDF. Or just RE vs 100% Dodge, I'm more concerned about losing the perkline entirely than about actually landing PU.

I considered docs using PU in PvM for DD whore setups, with CC and a Peregrine + KEP, but I doubt a doc using a lower DD weapon like the KEP in the offhand would actually OD a pure pistol setup over time. So it seems like PU really will be pretty useless if the changes in that PDF hit live.

PvM DD solds will still be able to use the perks, but 95% of all PvP soldiers who currently use Envy + Onehander or ABC are going back to Assault Rifle because a soldier's AR with SMG is crap. The vast majority of soldiers, who are Assault Rifle users, will have to consider whether or not to reset RE and think of which 10 general perks are least worthless.

[Rktim]

The vast majority of soldiers, who are Assault Rifle users, will have to consider whether or not to reset RE and think of which 10 general perks are least worthless.

Enhance DNA =p

[Questra]

Enhance DNA =p

Was this your idea Tim? :P

"Well the hotswap nerf just wasn't enough, soldiers can still kill enfs, let's get rid of PU too!"

Haven't seen you communicating with the soldier community lately, have you been busy making more suggestions to the devs?

[MassDebater]

1% RE wont make it count as RE wep iirc 51% does.

[Saetos]

The solution to this would be to make PU perks check RE skill again vs 90 or 95% Dodge, which would be similar to the AMS vs Dodge which is listed in the new PDF. Or just RE vs 100% Dodge, I'm more concerned about losing the perkline entirely than about actually landing PU.

Even as a Trader, this I think is best. Logic assumes if you're gonna max Ranged Energy to land these skills you're gonna either have an RE weapon equipped or you're going to be sacrificing parts of your equipment and/or perks to use these. 90% Dodge may be a tad low though, considering you guys get a 125-point buff to RE alongside your universal 125 buff - lots of AR potential there.


Bump for RE-vs-dodge and disabling RE weapon requirement.

[EDIT] Or make it so that damage is a little lower if you're not wielding an RE Weapon.

[Boltgun]

Or maybe it is time to give us new perks, meaningful ones that'll make us say "Yep I'll give up my damage perkline for this."

[Moonbolt]

just a thought.. why not add a soldier perkline that removes time from the TMS NSD.
would kinda get 2 soldier concearns at once.

[mainframe]

Power Up still checks RE vs dodge so everyone still has to raise it to land on anything. I still would be nice not to have RE weapon equipped or at least come up with a new improved RE weapon to use.

Funny energize was left w/o the RE req so hardcore dders can still use that.

[Berinda]

This is a kick in the teeth for all soldiers, not just assault rifle ones. Maxing the ranged energy skill and using all the perks associated with it has simply been how it's been done forever.

The only way this would remotely make sense is if the Dreadloch thrasher/rapier were beefed up to be competitive with the Anger and Rhat'ata. Even then, virtually every soldier will need a full IPR in order to eliminate all the IP sunken into a useless weapon line. Getting alpha symbs in the first time is no walk in the park, and forcing everyone of a certain prof to perform a full IPR is incredibly negligent.

[Kain97]

Maxing the ranged energy skill and using all the perks associated with it has simply been how it's been done forever.

"that's how it's been done since forever" didn't stop FC from mangling the SL runbuffs for fixers a while back....

[Boltgun]

Or maybe it's time to give us new perk choices. You know, other professions have a minimum of choice in that department and we can't even use all our points.

There is plenty of uses for a 10 point line, something with taunts, resistance to nemesis nanos, to CC, stuff we'll say "Sure I can discard my alpha for that" about.

[Gunfytr]

"that's how it's been done since forever" didn't stop FC from mangling the SL runbuffs for fixers a while back....

At least fixers didnt have to strip/FIPR/re-equip endgame gear to fix it.

[Esqi]

Was this your idea Tim? :P

"Well the hotswap nerf just wasn't enough, soldiers can still kill enfs, let's get rid of PU too!"

Haven't seen you communicating with the soldier community lately, have you been busy making more suggestions to the devs?

This

Would also like to agree with everything Questra has written in this post, Sold's are taking a massive step backwards.

We rely on perk dmg as well, with the amount of aad in game, fa/burst are not the superduper fantastic specials everyone makes them out to be, they require support as well.

[randomalpha]

1st look at those changes , i said OMG thats horrible but then when i looked again and checked all the detaisl clearly for all changes for all profs i found out that ppl at FC worked very hard to get very very close from general balance
the balance not the change going to happen to 1 prof but the changes over all will end up giving each prof fair chance vs others some stuff need abit fix or over fixed but very near from balance and none of those changes are horrible as most of ppl think just take better look on ur own prof and other profs changes but .. . . .
out of the 14 profs there is 2 untouched profs and all this balance will make them even more powerfull those are docs , engi and <idk to add trader but trader not OP as those 2>
with nerfing AS/FA/SA , making most of perks with 2s attack docs , getting rid of stuns giving better perks and more chance to land them to those couples those 2 profs will not be immortal only but will WTF insta pwn ppl
so any idea if heals will be nerfed or something ?
engi toolset getting nerfed ?
if yes then itis gr8 changes , if no .. . .. .. .

For us
(1)as the RE perks getting locked to RE weapon <with FA/brust/ mb fling also:> now Soldier need viable weapon to make use of them and if that happen i think AR soldier are untouched since u will be playing as u used too same setup since HR perks don't require AR weapon and we even got energiz perks fixed so we don't need to w8 2min to alpha or if we missed up the buff we say WTF we missed perking , we even got fix to Napalm spray so itis all gr8 so to make soldier happey FC gotta just give viable RE weapon
(2) for dual soldiers now ppl have more than option SMG/RE , SMG/Shooty , RE/Shooty since we lack viable shooty atm mostly all will go SMG/RE which is gr8 to have more than option , viable shotty will make things even better or if AS/FA not coming ppl can use crap hander and use the crapy AS to make up for the crapy dmg out of it .
finaly all i am asking for
(1) smg buff for soldier something around 100-130 bonus brust/fa/fling dmg will be nice too
(2) FC rethink about changing TT to dot ,< Dodge debuff (for 150-250) / RS debuff (for 1000-3000) or self AR buff (for 100-250) > something like that will make soldiers more than happey

[Esqi]

I can understand you taking the Sherlock perspective, though soldier perks have never been the source of massive damage.

A premiere artillery prof should have some attractive perks, if you use the melee's version of hard hitting mammoths (i.e. enf's) and look at thier ranged equivalent (solds) you can see the difference in perk dmg is not justififed.

You dont see soldier's askin for more, just dont nerf what already minor-medium perk damage we have.

Like soldier perks ever affected a crat, not forgetting that RE perk attack rating is significantly lower than AR perk attack rating.

Oh yes the usual M.R. dont count part

[Moonbolt]

u can also see the difference in Regular special dmg aswell.

[Esqi]

u can also see the difference in Regular special dmg aswell.

Funny coming from the incumbent pvp prof champion

Lets all play chase the enforcer.

(psst, if you dont already know aad setups negate & helps keep soldier specials under control :P)

IHHN: We just dont want to lose any resemblence of perk dmg we currently have, i know you will say but it lands on me, the issue with you is that you got low-med hp and a 3bullet fa hurtsy, just like a burst hurts. These perks have never done any sort of damage unless queued from MR, which is not applicable come balance adjustments.