u/LucatIel_of_M1rrah

With fast rolling being mandatory in 11th, using a canoness "emperors Grace" ability to get a 2++ means statistically unless the attacking unit is putting through so many attacks you roll 13 1's you physically cannot lose the unit to a single melee activation. So the logic goes:

1. stand on a point with the sac + canoness + Hospitaller  block.
2. Get charged by a scary melee unit from a melee heavy enemy army.
3. The entire unit dies except the canoness and Hospitaller  because of the 2++.
4. Use fight on death and have the full squad fight back with +1 hit +1 wound.
5. Use a miracle dice on the Hospitaller and ideally recover 4 sacs.
6. In your turn fight with 4 sacs so still +1, +1 and use the full rerolls on below half str squad strat.
7. Ideally whatever you were fighting is now dead and you have a functional squad still on the point that can recover to 9/10 models next turn.

Has anyone tried this and if so did it work well?

Having a blast is a phrase that refers to someone experiencing "a blast". A blast is a quantifiable thing that everyone has a limited number of. You can have a blast but once you have exhausted your own blasts you must take blasts from others to continue "having a blast".

In the beginning there were 88K concurrent blast havers. Each was experiencing their blasts, however quickly they burned through their own blasts. The more experienced or skilled players began extracting blasts from less skilled players, so they could continue blasting.

The least experienced players found themselves out of blasts and were no longer "blasting". With no blasts left they leave the game. The next group of players who were the lowest skill soon found that they were having their blasts extracted by everyone else and quickly were out of blasts.

This cycle continued until very quickly all the blasts were being horded by a small group of 10K concurrent players.

These players were having such a blast that they became super defensive of the game that was supplying them with endless blasts. They became hostile to anyone who suggested that the game was not proving enough blasts to less skilled players. They told them to "git gud" or go play Arc Raiders as they continued blasting.

Soon all the players found themselves blastless and continued leaving the game leaving a core group of 5K concurrent players who were trading blasts back and forth with each other. However those at the bottom of the 5K soon found they were running low on blasts and were unable to blast at the same rate they were before. (We are here).

This will continue until a lone player, John Marathon himself has all the blasts and is blasting so hard and fast, more than anyone has ever blasted before.

Bungie is trying to allow players to extract blasts from PVE enemies but the player base has experienced blast highs far greater than killing bots can provide and it turns out the most pure form of blast is extracted from another living human, and false blasts from PVE don't provide the same blast high. These are the end times of Marathon, when the last of the blasts flow into John Marathon himself before he ascends to godhood and the servers explode.

Already everyone is crying for game wide changes to systems without even understanding why those systems exist the way they do.

1. No ability to block/parry/dodge.

• Part of creating a scary environment in a game where 90% of the enemies are some variation of thing that runs at you and mindless swings is taking away players ability to "cheese" or game the system. If you could dodge and parry etc you could with enough skill fight off endless zombies on your own.
• The flow on of this is players will see enemies not as something scary but as momentary speed bumps on their way to treasure, this takes away from the atmosphere of the game. Also removes the need for ranged weapons which currently do the bulk of the heavy lifting at the cost of being slow or loud.

Possible Compromise: You can block but it mitigates incoming damage by 50-75% rather than stopping damage entirely. Players engaged in melee need to take attrition from fights or they feel no sense of urgency to leave or engage in ranged combat.

2. Weapon Durability

• Exists for exactly the same reason as the above system. To create a sense of urgency, that your run is on a timer and every fight is costing you something permanent.
• Currently overturned, especially for upgraded weapons that break super quick and are not worth the investment.

Possible Compromise: Your weapon never breaks but dulls and does progressively less and less damage down to 50% of normal damage. Could even buy sharpening stones to resharpen weapons mid run etc.

3. No persistence of weapons between runs

• Games like this always form meta's where people will only ever run 1 loadout that is optimal and it creates stale gameplay (people are already running the axe as its the best melee weapon for example). By forcing different loadouts each run they are forcing players to try new things and keep the combat fresh.
• Who takes what weapons is an interesting social/team planning dynamic where people will take on roles based on what weapons they get. This further spices things up and keeps it interesting.
• Also prevents toxic gameplay where people will always favour saving their loadout vs helping them team out of a tight spot.

Possible Compromise: Rather than spending coins on upgrading an individual weapon, upgrading gear is a long term progression goal with a quartermaster where you can upgrade a weathered matchlock into a normal matchlock, then a pristine one and then a flintlock etc etc. Then when those weapons appear in the pool when you pick them up they are always upgraded for you. Cements people working towards a goal or weapon type they like. May cause problems when that weapon type isn't in the weapon pool but some problems will always occur.

Alternate Solution: Just say fuck it and let people buy weapons from a vendor. When you die you lose it. The devs will now forever be balancing weapons to prevent meta's.

Sig was always a bit of a meme character. If you equipped your Warpath Sigil you did middling damage but became an absolute glass cannon. Sig got buffed so Warpath now gives you -30% dmg reduction not -50%, this a big deal when you consider his mastery tree now gives lots of defence and +Hp to offset this.

You can build fully into a support build you can still put out massive damage because he has all his damage baked in and you don't really need any damage sigils to hit cap.

With uplift, cascade and cooldown reduction maxed you can give your team permanent substitute and a rotating buff of life steal +debuff immunity and 70% damage cut. This comes from his new mastery tree that gives substitute to the whole party on any buff skill used, including self buffs.

It's fairly disgusting how strong this is on a character than can build insanely tanky and still do impressive damage.

I have accepted the game will never be finished and even if it gets a 1.0 sticker slapped on it the game will never function as Ue5 is simply not an engine capable of making the game work the way it should due to AI actor limitation. Something the STALKER 2 devs learned the hard way as well.

But maybe the game inspires some company with actual funds and a large dev team to make a PvEvE style scav game in an engine that can handle it.

For those that don't know the original vision and prototype was one huge interconnected map with a battle simulation raging across it that you ventured out into. Enemies didn't just spawn 20m around you out of sight they were engaged in the battle with actual objectives across the front. Imagine an RTS layer being played by two CPU commanders and you just ran around in that battle.

With smarter choices in the beginning maybe one day we would have got that game from the devs, but I doubt we ever will.

This sub is easily the most hostile place for any new player and serves solely as a place to encourage new players to keep feeding their kits to sweats, while being fed fantasies like you can beat geared teams with free kits as a random fill. Or that you don't need a Mizzriah, D54 and bubbles, you can use whatever and still win. These are fantasies born of a misunderstanding of the tiers of being "geared" or out of genuine malice to try and keep fresh victims in the ecosystem.

There are basically 4 main tiers of gameplay.

Top tier: Mizzriah's + D54/Bully/DRVVISH 2x Recon three stack with multiple bubbles each.

• Nothing but an equally geared team has any hope of beating this squad. I don't care about that one time you caught 3 of them in a bag and killed them, or that one time you third partied them and cleaned up the last guy who was weak. STOP making excuses, STOP thinking that one time in your 400 hours of gameplay means they can be beat. I have done both of the above but to think its common or expected is beyond coping.

Low tier: Organised 3 stack with purple gear but not running Mizz/D54/Bully/Bubbles or a Recon.

• Will beat the above team once every 100 tries and beat any team below most of the time but can be beat with a decent pick and play. The gulf in power between this team and the above team is orders of magnitude.

Dumpster tier: Most fill teams regardless of gear being run.

• There is a high probability of there being a communication break down, a weak link who has bad gear or someone making a throw play due to no team cohesion. Will lose to basically everything given the right circumstances. Most commonly seen as that team where 1 guy randomly has blue shields when the rest are purple, or 3X blue shields. This is the tier people here post clips of killing thinking that they have killed a "geared squad".

Actual Hell: Random fill free/green sponsored kits.

• Might beat the above team once every now and again. Maybe 1/5 tries if you are a good player. Might beat low tier once every 100 tries and will realistically never beat the top tier.

The gulf in power between these teams is so extreme and most people realistically sit in dumpster tier. When 90% of your player base is just being destroyed in Cryo by the top tier teams they lose the will to play it. Meanwhile the remaining maps are just not engaging enough to hold players long term and are often filled with top teams during the week anyway.

The game NEEDS to protect the dumpster tier and below (the 90%) from the top 9% (low tier) and the 1% (top tier) to ever have any hope of retaining new players. The player base is so small now that level based match making isn't working (not that it ever did), and more and more lobbies are filled by the top tier teams.

• A big part of this is going to be fixing the gulf between taking random stuff and taking the best stuff. The Mizz needs to be properly nerfed. Revert the fire rate buff. Base miz without slick mags is as strong as the gun needs to be. Remove bubbles. They are toxic for gameplay and turn every fight into a cqb stat check of do you have a Miz or not. They are honestly the most destructive thing to gameplay along with the Recon buffs and invalidate any ranged play beyond 20m. D54 and Bully are the kings and other things need to be made viable (like the magnum getting a nice buff into viability).
• Recon needs to be nerfed. Being able to find weaker teams anywhere on the map is super toxic for gameplay. Her ult should probably alert you to a player but not show what tier of shields they have and only indicate they are a player after being hit by 2 or even 3 consecutive pulses.
• The game needed SBMM at launch and still does. This season is a wash. All the new players tried the game, got dumpstered by sweats and quit. Next season do another free week, advertise SBMM and see how much better retention is when you don't have turbo sweats farming the noobs. To everyone saying they were in protected lobbies, they were not for long. In random fills I got matched with brand new players (told me on mic) who didn't even know how to heal at the start of the season and was killing lobbies filled with them.
• IF the player base grows implementing high stakes versions of the base maps (Like Night Marsh) and attaching a gear ante is a way to create modes for the turbo sweats to play without destroying the rest of the game.

Obligatory:

• I am not skill issued when I gear up with the boys I roll over lobbies.
• It's possible to complain about something while also being good at the thing.
• If you don't see this as a problem you are likely in the top tier or more likely low tier but think you are top tier, and just want to keep pub stomping and don't care the game has 0 new blood.
• Saying, "just adapt", "its fine as it is", "git gud", "skill issue", has gotten us to where we are today. 0 new players, back to 10K concurrent max 2 weeks into a new season. At some point you must realise you can't just keep gate keeping the game.