u/haydonclampitt

Absolutely generational DMR action. “Not in the meta” my ass using that thing in the midrange is an AMAZING experience, it’s genuinely the most fun I’ve had in this game bar none.

I can only hope more of you get to experience the glory of the gold BR33 in your time on this game. Awesome work guys!

PS: if ever there was a retouch done to it visually, this user did a stellar job: https://www.reddit.com/r/Marathon/s/p16c0RDLA2

They cost FORTY THOUSAND credits, yet don’t meet the gear ante?

I get them being cheaper in the name of not letting people flip them for cash, but come on! A purple-grade prebuilt kit should be enough to get onto the Marathon ship.

If I’m not feeling like getting sweaty with my buddies and rolling our best gear into Ranked/Outpost/Cryo, last season the options were a bit naff. Green kits were a bit lame and free kits were a pure gamble on landing MIDA or not.

For this season, I think this was the single biggest improvement - almost all free kits feel fun with the new guns in them (NOT SEKGEN), and the higher tier kits feel nice too. But if there’s one thing that they improved the most for this season, it’s encrypted kits.

Not necessarily in competitiveness, but in fun - loading up a kit and knowing you can get just about any combination in the game is an amazing experience. Sometimes you’ll get a nicely kitted Overrun, sometimes a naked Impact, sometimes a Channel Rifle and a D54 (not kidding, I got that once. Died immediately).

The fact they’re so much more random now just makes the whole experience ten times more enjoyable, and I’ll often take it over free kitting if I want to just muck about a bit. You should try it!

I’ve played a hell of a lot of Marathon (recently passed 300h on main release, then another 50-60 btwn a playtest and the server slam), and I’ll defend this game to the ends of the earth for 99% of things. The gun balancing is generally good (as much as there are a couple of broken guns, you can at least somewhat counter them in some scenarios), the dev team is great, so on and so forth. I want nothing but the best for the game, and I think it’s good enough to pop off with the right opportunity.

That being said, the 1% for me is centred around the onboarding. Being blunt, it’s not very good.

What made me realise this is that, starting at the free week, I got an IRL friend into the game and helped him learn the ropes. Where I thought it would be lighter guidance of the game’s systems and more to do with learning how to fight, it wound up being the opposite - I ended up teaching him most of the systems in the game, while to his credit, he figured out the combat mostly on his own. I wound up gifting him the game as an early birthday present as he was having fun, and we’ve kept playing since.

As much as it worked out well for him, not every new player will have someone on hand to teach them these things, and I imagine that has been a big part of the smaller player count - people getting lost in a network of systems that isn’t the easiest to get the hang of, and deciding to leave instead of learn. I don’t necessarily blame them.

For a really bold opinion that I hold on this, I honestly think this is the biggest reason ARC blew up like no other extraction shooter has - of the ones that I’ve played, it was by FAR the easiest to get settled in with. Regardless of relative quality, the onboarding was good enough that it hooked people faster than others in the genre.

If S3’s onboarding improvements can land (and land well), that could create a positive feedback loop that bolsters the player count with time. Game is easier to figure out -> players more likely to get hooked like a lot of us have -> stronger player base. So on and so forth.

What do you all think?

I've been playing with the buffed Magnum (awesome job on this one, feels MILES better now) along with the V11 Punch and Battle Pistol lately, and I can't help but think that we're one tune away from a pistol sandbox where we have three genuinely viable pistols that are about equal with each other. In my opinion, that tune is a smallish D54 nerf.

The change: reduce damage splits from 16 base / 24 crit to 12 base / 18 crit.

What this does: Takes base dmg per burst from 48 down to 36, and optimal damage per burst from 72 to 54. Against purple shields, this increases the BTD (bursts to down) from 3-5 with all shots landing to 4-6.

Adding that extra burst to knock should take the gun down a peg, from the current borderline OP state to something more balanced. Also, it means the gold Daredevil Stock is no longer capable of theoretically one-bursting purple shields.

Thoughts?

Title. As part of some experiments regarding planet-side means of food preparation, Master Chief is given a task: based on some numbers ran by heaven only knows who, he is given an uncooked chicken of average size and told to cook it by striking it - preferably in one single hit.

Can he do this?

(For the sake of preserving the edibility post-strike, assume the chicken is covered in a film that converts the physical force of the strike into thermal energy without damaging the meat itself. Otherwise it would just be a pile of mush, and I doubt even a Spartan would want to chow down on that.)