u/BJgobbleDix

Seems like this issue occurs moreso on the weekends for me and about every other week.

I must have missed some patch notes regarding the Class Active Abilities but I notice they RARELY get used now due to the cost to unlock is insane. I just played a handful of Escalation matches, twice I was number 1 in points on my team (14k points in one game, 16k in the other), and still did not unlock the Active Ability as a Support.

But this leads to a bigger issue as I started thinking: balance. Having 64 player with access to active abilities begs the question of "how impactful can we make them?" Well, I remember during launch, UAVs were a constant and a bit annoying. There was no team-wide cooldown. Thus the issue with BF6's current system.

BFV just did it better, plain and simple. Having it tied to a team-wide system allowed for greater control of balance and impact. It took the "Commander" role and gave it to squad leaders to improve importance of working as a squad. If all 8 Squads had access to UAVs, there could be a simple limitation that only 2 can be active at a time. A call-in for a long range ballistic missile could have a team-wide cooldown of 60 seconds. This was how BFV operated to maintain balance and usefulness of an ability (though further balance could have been made at times lol).

Implementations like this allow for certain abilities to have more Shock & Awe but at higher costs and less spammable. While others that offer less lethal support can be more accessible.

With greater variety of larger maps on the horizon, I actually would suggest a change from Class Active Abilities to Squad Reinforcements.

Some ideas:

Low Level Call-ins

• Armored Supply Cache: larger radius ammo supply but also offers a good defensive barrier.
• Smoke Barrage
• UAV
• Weapon Emplacement AT and HMG (limited ammo, cannot replenish, cannot move once set)

Mid Level

• 80mm Mortar Barrage
• AT Kamikaze Drone Strike (target must be painted to initiate)
• Air-to-Ground Strafing Run (quick single strafe attack, jet can still be shot out of the sky).
• AA Drone Strike (target must be painted to initiate)
• Cluster Mine drop
• Thermobaric missile strike (strong vs infantry but ineffective against armored tanks)

High Level (cost more and/or longer team cooldowns)

• 155mm Howitzer Barrage
• Drone Swarm (a half dozen drones will focus a designated area and home in on targets, painted targets taking priority)
• Ballistic Missile Strike

Behemoths (most expensive, single use or long cooldown for team depending on game mode and map)

• AC-130 (given)
• Destroyer ship (naval maps)

Twist to Behemoths and Call-ins ("Desperate Measures" mechanic): This will replace the horrible "catch-up" mechanic currently in place. For example, if a team in Escalation ends up 2 points behind, a notification will mention that a team is now declaring an emergency "Desperate Measure" to turn it around. Their Behemoth will instantly be called at no cost to any squad minus the cooldown once destroyed.

Play the game at your pace the way you want. That is the beauty to the Carcosan Modifier and this specific setting.

Though I do wish making the game harder came with some of its own minor rewards -- currently playing at about +30-ish. Nonetheless, this was a good addition to the game.

A simple value to show how far along a weapon's decryption progress is during pickups would be a nice QoL benefit. I have maybe half of the weapons finished but sometimes forget which ones especially when during some of the fights, I dont even notice the popups from the chaos.

Little things like this would save a lot of time of constant checking in the menus. Its the same as with the lack of explanations for weapon attributes and whatnot.

A couple days ago, I tried the final boss for the first time (no spoilers as I think its post Act I technically) and I died on his final phase due to constant beams he sent out along the ground and they were really hard for me to notice. They were orange and blended too much with the environment and boy was it a bit irritating since I was close to defeating him.

So I decided to change the color of all Corrupted Projectiles and Beams to Pink (which in Returnal, Purple were the Projectiles you could not dodge through at all) and boy does it help A TON! I did a full clear of all biomes (minus the Marsh) and made seeing Corrupted beams and Projectiles so much more clear to see even in chaotic moments. Thats when I realized how much of the environment plus particle effects from our weapons were some sort of yellow or orange tint thus making Corrupted Projectiles harder to see.

So if youre especially struggling, I would recommend looking at adjusting colors for projectiles.

Volatility system is extremely limiting on runs when the Armor Matrix becomes 3/4 complete. After only 1~2 Biomes and about 8~10 Artifacts, its super easy to reach the Volatility threshold. And it only gets worse because of Attribute Enhancers.

I feel like this system was not well thought out and tested with progression.

Honestly, it's a legit step back. Theres been times I see a minor improvement to clip size for the same weapon, pick it up and ZERO increase because it does not meet the threshold.

In Returnal, it was a little frustrating but each tick at least "felt" a little impactful. In Saros.....not a clue. Weapons of similar categories (Rifles, handcannon, etc) feel way too much alike and insignificant in their growth.

Overall, the mechanics around weapons was a MAJOR downgrade from Returnal imo. We honestly went from:

• 10 weapons with a good diversity between Traits (most that were clear upgrades) and 11 Alt Fires (these were more akin to Power Weapons in Saros) to

• 5 Weapons with 3 Sub Categories each and less Impactful Traits (at least visually) plus 4 Power weapons (which was kinda like upgraded variants of Returnals Alt Fires).

For those who may not know, many of the Alt fires in Saros were similar to Trait variants of the main weapons in Returnal (excluding Chakram and Crossbow since these are new weapons). This design killed a major component of the "rogue-like" structure by oversimplifying the RNG (which the RNG of weapons is the most fun part imo to test out different builds and make each run more interesting).

Let alone, Alt Fires in Saros are more akin to just another Primary Fire for the weapon. Mainly involves: do you want long range or short range benefit. Or aim assist (lower damage) or non aim assist (higher damage). Thats literally the difference between the two in most cases. Its not like theres cool tech by coexisting them. The closest is Stalwart Shotgun where you can setup a Pellet Wall then very quickly use normal Fire to launch them at distant enemies. I like these kind of interactions. I wish a Trait played more into combinations between Primary Fire and Alt Fires. Like a Shotguns Primary applies stacking burn and then the Grenade Launcher could trigger this burn instantly. Or, just go back to Returnal's style of having cooldowns for Alt Fire but it allows it to be more impactful.

The build diversity and power fantasy is much weaker. Not having a proper progression system for weapons directly at all took away the "emotional" attachment we could get simply from seeing weapons evolve into some of the monstrosities they became at the end. Unlocking a trait gave a DIRECT and CLEAR improvement to the weapon. Now, everything feels too incremental and fewer "unique" weapon types. Which part of this seems to be the issue of the Armor Matrix which splits some of the growth into meta progression...

Edit: Saros did improve on things from Returnal such as thr "bullet hell" structure (shields, parry, enemies, etc). It improved the issue of too long of run times by creating shorter biomes. It improved the RNG for collectibles thus helping with Platinum. It improved accessibility as well though I would be fine without the Stat Tree and just improved upon the Modifier system. But where theres a step forward, there was a step backwards as well.