Endorsements and Balance

Think about the endorsements you prefer on characters. Certain endorsements will pop-up repeatedly (armor, RoF) and others almost never (Juice.) While the overall balance of the game is fairly good, there is room for improvement.

I think enough time has passes that it is worth a serious look at the endorsements. Which do you use the most, what are your preferred set-ups? What endorsements suck and why?

Armor
Absolutely mandatory for some classes, heavily favored by most. Armor is arguably the best endorsement in the game. I doubt anyone who understands the game would argue against it being one of the top 3.

The higher health levels resulting from most players taking armor seems to be good for the game. It helps prevent being one-shot due to random misfortune or luck on the lower health classes and gives the higher health classes more time to have a proper battle when surprised. It lets the more mobile classes use their mobility, stops one-shot face grapples, and overall the game feels fairly health with it.

At the same time as long as armor exists in its current state it will dominate endorsements. I think the solution here would be to take 100 health off the armor endorsement and simply give it to every class. Then make armor +66/66/67 health.

This would have two effects, first helps classes escape one-shot range for face grapples, shotgun blasts, and other unfortunate events that barely kill the lighter classes. It also reduces the marginal gain of each level of armor. The gap between gold and no armor will only be 200 HP while the gap between bronze and gold will only be 133 HP. This indirectly helps make other endorsements better.

Juice
This endorsement is considered fairly bad overall. Mainly because it is a one shot deal. It would be like if the armor endorsement only worked vs the first 300 damage and then never replenished. You can't run a strategy with this endorsement. To utilize it best you have to die every time you juice and sacrifice all streaks.

Make the juice permanent, If you take gold juice, you always have 2 free juice boxes, effectively shrinking your juice meter. After juicing you are reset back to 2 juiceboxes. Also increasing it to 1/2/3 instead of 0.5/1/2 might help, maybe even just 0.75/1.5/2.25 juice boxes.

Rate of Fire
It is simply the best way to crank up your DPS by a long shot. While it isn't the best with all classes it is extremely good with others. A straight nerf might be appropriate here. Nothing huge, just a little bit to help other options shine a bit more.

Crit Rate
This one is tricky due to its random nature. It just strikes me that the early levels of this skill are pretty weak, while it starts to get significant at gold level. It is also eclipsed by RoF on most classes. Maybe 3%/4%/5% instead of 2%/3%/5%?

Skill Regain
This is massively weighted towards bronze. 20% CD reduction at bronze, 26% at silver, 33.3% at gold. The step between bronze and silver is negligible. Perhaps this should be reworked to put bronze a little closer to 15% reduction making the gains from silver upgrades worthwhile.

Rate Of Fire
Armor
Skill Recharge

Are far too effective. I don't think they need nerfed, I think others need brought up on par, so as to make them viable replacements.

I believe the biggest problem is that ARMOR is almost nessecery in every build. Main because of face grappling. You are ALMOST (almost) forced to take gold or silver armor depending on your class, because if you do not, and the assassin finds out (you kill him) its all over from there, hes going to lunge face grapple you ever time he sees you.

Now I'm not saying fix face grapple, I'm saying give me endorsements that might make the risk of that worth taking.

That is the problem, NOTHING is currently more useful than surviving a face grapple.

And because one slot (gold or silver for most class's) is locked in, the other endorsements start to fall off as well, you don't wanna run gold accuracy on an assault for instance, if you cant squeeze in clipsize, and since bronze clipsize is pathetic. There yeah go, accuracy becomes far less useful (not useless, just far less useful).

Now tanks and to some extent gunners have a little more wiggle room (gunner if hes got a support) but tank just has the same problem in different terms. He has to decide rather anything is more useful than surviving a back grapple, or a head shot.

It is not an easy thing to fix, at all. So I leave it to uber to figure it out, and wish them good luck.

This is the type of problem you will always encounter in a game where On Hit Kill type skills exist, and counter skills exist. The counter to One Hit Kills, becomes a nesseccity.

May want to call for a nerf on clip size too then since in 5 out of 12 cases it proves to be more useful for DPS than RoF.

There are other factors besides raw DPS that RoF favors over increased mag size. Faster RoF may have less DPS overall when considering prolonged periods of engagement where shots are constantly exchanged and constantly connecting, but higher RoF will clear a bot wave sooner than w/o high RoF and after the wave is cleared the reload time isn't a factor because there's nothing left to shoot.

What about someone who just barely makes it around a corner with a sliver of health left? If you had higher RoF you would have landed more shots sooner and killed the opponent.

My point is that most endorsements are situational in terms of their effectiveness, but I agree, RoF, Armor and Skill Regen are the top 3 and most often included, yet that doesn't mean Speed, Crit, Mag size, reload time, health regen, etc, are outright ignored or useless in their own right.

I would argue for buffing, the lesser endorsements, before nerfing the existing.

ROF/Clipsize depends on class and playstyle.

For instance:

Assault
ROF is the best for DPS against turrets for nade spamming. And his quick reload speeds on all weapons, make clipsize not nearly as useful.

Gunner:
Clipsize beats ROF for DPS against pros, but again MORTARS for turrets ROF is king. Reload is good here though, I prefer ROF/Armor/reload to anything else.

My point is this: Certain endorsements need to SHINE more to make the loss of others viable.

I would never take clipsize over ROF as an assault, simply because ROF makes nade launcher 100% better, and clipsize does not add nearly as much, if anything. Sure it helps in 1 situation, where its you and a gunner, and you run out bullets with his life at 10%, but playstyle can overcome that, where no amount of playstyle can over come the ROF buff to nade launcher.

Maybe combining some of them would be more appropriate.

Clipsize/reload speed could be called ammo handling or something. And could be one endorsement. Though that would be hugely OP on some class's, so its not the best example.

I think the main problem is that the top 3 (Rof, skill recharege, armor) bring far too much to the table when compared to the others. But nerfing those would give certain class's an advantage more than hurting them.

I mean without armor wed all be assassin food, and without ROF, turrets would be nearly unstoppable to most class's. I think skill recharge should be taken out of the game quite frankly, it causes a lot of imbalance, especially with assault bomb 3, and charge 2/3. but its probably fine.

I think one thing to consider looking at is the BRONZE slot in general, only a few skills are worth putting there.

1) skill recharge
2) armor
3) clipsize (for sniper)
4) health regen
where as others are worthless there

1) speed
2) crit
3) acc (for most class's, though assault gets some benefit from it as does gunnner)


But yeah, before we nerf any, lets buff a few.

Well they end up ignored, simply because Armor is a must, ROF is for turrets, skill recharge is useful for everything.

Its not that they are worthless its that they are simply worth less.

tinygod I meant exactly that by my statement with 5 out of 12 cases (in fact only 11 because I have the formula twice for minigun, single-barrel and double-barrel).

The five cases where it applies are as follows:

Sniper Rifle, SMG, Assault Rifle, Double-barreled Minigun and Shuriken Launcher.

Arguably no one would ever take Clip Size for Shuriken Launcher, as rarely anyone would gimp their nade launcher like that however I'm talking calculations here. As for example the Sniper benefits from clip size on both weapons

Yes it is situational, that is the point of endorsements.

Crit on bronze for example works nicely on assault, when you're not the bomb-chucking type, accuracy is really nice on SMG as well as AR and Minigun.

For every class there is a generic "do this and you won't do wrong" type of build, as well as cookie-cutter builds but the only 2 endorsements where I truly acknowledge that they are worthless (not just worth less) are juice and speed.

So yes while some endorsements may benefit certain classes more there are situations where all of them are useful in one way or another.

Armor is, to me, only arguably in the top 3 because it allows you to commit to more mistakes. Given a player's development you wouldn't need armor with most classes after a some progress. Skill recharge and RoF however I agree are easily in the top3

I agree with no nerfs to top 3. Buff the others.

Juice - increases rate at which you gain juice by certain %
Speed - stacks with pickups
Crit - much higher multiplier, at least +100%, currently gold gives +25%, worthless
Accuracy - increases falloff
Health regen - buff silver/gold
Reload - buff silver/gold

How about this:

Remove the following:

Remove ROF
Remove Armor
Remove Skill recharge

Force class's to play with those as vanilla

Add 200 health to all class's, to combat loss of armor (face grapple)
(this may need adjusting, just a starting number, may need to change per class)

And thats that.


I would love to see what the game looks like, without ROF mortar/nade/sniper spam, without SKILL RECHARGE empowered, tank charges and assault bombs and more importantly with 3 options to choose from.

This could be more FUN IMO.

but thats just me. I think nerfing ROF/Skill recharge would only make them useless if you are going to change them, just remove them and let players focus more on things like accuracy, clipsize, speed, reload

i mean those are the ones that are more fun to play around with for builds anyways.

Armour is misleading like grim said. As people get better armour slowly drops from gold to silver to bronze then gone.

At first assassins face grapple is the bane of everyone but as you learn to play better you can avoid getting grappled. This, imo, is why armour is very popular.

I can't agree with you there.

You can learn to avoid it, however it is GOING to happen occasionally. Especially with 2 assassins on the map, or if you are in the middle of a fight with someone else (distracted).

If it werent for the LUNGE grapple I would agree, but as that still exists, I still feel that is is just too good to not take.

if it were a GRAPPLE endorsement, than yes I might decide if its worth it, but since it stops grapple instant kils and it also adds breathing room during fire fights, It is just NOT worth taking anything else. Though I only take enough to survive the face grapple.

I believe you have the numbers wrong here.
A bronze endorsement takes the amount of cooldown your skill has and multiplies it by 0.75
A silver endorsement takes the amount of cooldown your skill has and multiplies it by 0.65
A gold endorsement takes the amount of cooldown your skill has and multiplies it by 0.5
You can use your skills twice as often at gold skill regen. I do agree that silver is largely not worth it, though.

Actually you're both wrong. The math for skill regen is a bit different than others. Gold is actually +50%. You will get to use your skills 50% more often than no skill regen.

Code:

BAL_END_SKILL_1         =0.25
BAL_END_SKILL_2         =0.35
BAL_END_SKILL_3         =0.5

Those numbers lead you to the belief that skill recharge is treated as regular factor, I'm with mail on this one. (Could very well be misleading, I admit that. It just makes sense compared to the rest of the endorsements which work in similar fashion)

Like I said, it's calculated differently, there are other variables to factor in. You can go ahead and check ingame. You will easily notice gold skill regen is not half

I think you guys are just arguing two different ends of the same truth

Skill recharge reductions of 20/26/33% correspond to rate increases of 25/35/50%, respectively.



I agree with your armor suggestion. The number of moves that can 1-shot an unarmored assassin is so absurd that I feel bad about killing them.

As for RoF, I think instead of nerfing it, the others should be made better.

Juice should increase the juice gain rate and/or make juice last longer. If they want to stick with it giving free juice (basically the same as increasing the rate) you should also go back to that amount after juicing, not just when you die.

Crits numbers should just be increased. Maybe to the point where Crits increases DPS more than RoF while juiced, but less than RoF when not juiced. This would give it a nice niche use, without being universally worse or better than RoF.

Accuracy should increase the effective range for weapons with damage falloff points, like the AR and minigun. This would probably annoy the crap out of me because I think long-range hitscan weapons are complete BS in a game like this, but at least it would make sense..

Clip size.. Not sure what to do here. I think this would get a boost just from making this change though: viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8193

Reload speed, again not sure what could be done. Even if gold was made almost instant, it still probably wouldn't be worth using. If all the other collateral for endorsements wasn't already created, I would say combine this and clip size into one

http://denkirson.xanga.com/738334142/mo ... ht-combat/
Generally the most accurate compilation of PC specific Monday Night Combat statistics I've found, but if you have a better source, let me know. As far as I'm aware the math in this one checks out, unless I'm misinterpreting it.

Mail, defaultbalance.ini

Zarakons numbers are right, but we're not arguing the same thing. They are trying to say gold gives double (+100%), which is obviously not true.

Code:

BAL_END_SKILL_1         =0.25
BAL_END_SKILL_2         =0.35
BAL_END_SKILL_3         =0.5

So how is this calculated then to achieve what you're talking about, I want to know how this works, exactly.

There's no point because you wouldn't understand the math. Go in game and test for yourself. Easiest way for you.