Gunner Pre-Nerf Discussion

I'd like to sit down and have a discussion about what you guys feel needs changing about the gunner.

His gun is a beast but at the same time it is basically the only tool you have. In order to be successful no other class I have played requires as much guile as the gunner. You have zero movement powers, you have a point blank ability (which is wonderful), a deploy ability which is extremely situational (which is usually not going to help and will more often only make things worse if you try it), and the worst skill in the game. Let me stop here and explain why the gunner's grapple is the worst skill in the game. He has zero movement powers so you're never going to grapple someone unless you grab them from behind (see guile statements above) or they are stupid. Considering alternate fire on the mortar is a grapple I don't see why he needs a second grapple skill. The gunner has the second slowest land speed so again the grapple makes very little sense. In the time that the grapple animation goes off, I could have shot the bot to death without the vunerability of the animation. There's no way I am going to pay to upgrade that POS ability when I could use the same money to have an extra juice that game (which has the possibility of paying for another juice or keeping my streak alive).

The gunner along with the assassin are the only classes that cannot leave something behind to help claim territory. Considering that map control is extremely important this leaves the gunner in a lackluster position. The gunner and the tank are the only two classes lacking a one hit kill*. Three classes lack a speed boost power: gunners, supports and snipers. Over and over again you see that gunner is the "have not" class.

*I will make a small mention of the pancake power here.... as it is possible to get a one hit kill it doesn't happen very often and has next to zero range. All things considered it does not equate to the one hit kill powers of the other classes and is therefore omitted. You are at least 3 times more likely to get a ring out instead of a pancake. But there again we are talking about specific map relative positions and that is a very important consideration.*

The gunner's upgraded spray is very innacurate at range..... but with a bit of skill and a lot of practice you can hit people who are standing at the beginning of sniper rifle range with no accuracy endorsements. But you won't kill them at that range unless you have a good accuracy endorsement or they are in the red (or they are in the skill menu for a while). The spin up time seems just about right: if it were any less you would kill enemies without needing to pre-spin. If it were any longer I'd say we are approaching the unreal tournament version of the minigun which is the most retarded cyclic rate weapon you will find in any game to date.

Your starting health is decent but even with gold armor you cannot survive a headshot or a rear assassin sword grapple without an overheal. Your speed is pathetic unless you have a few pickups. The "extra health" from the deploy is pathetic as snipers can still body shot you in about exactly as long as they can normally kill you with their passive gun upgrade (hello balance check... why not have deployed characters stop penetrating bullets and prevent the aoe explosive effect).

In order to be competitive with the gunner against most opponents you must fully pre-spin your weapon before you fire. If you've ever walked around a corner into a face full of support buckshot you know exactly what I'm talking about. This means you have about a second and a half of near immovability before you fire (so you can fire at full speed). If you don't pre spin most of your enemies can just run away and you have no chance of catching them considering the snare effect doesn't kick in until you have gotten a certain number of hits. The problem with holding a pre-spin is that it makes you walk at half speed. This is especially exciting as the gunner because you don't move very quickly to begin with.

The mortar is good for killing snipers and people who think they are safe behind cover. It also doubles as the best turret killing weapon in the game....wait maybe I got that backwards.

I don't even need to mention how crappy bouncers are, but I will just for the sake of completion. This is not a jab at the developers, but was it a time issue that the gunner and tank share the same damn bot? Bouncers and tanks make sense...... but gunners just can't make good use of them in part because of the speed difference.

I realize this is a game you made and therefore decided to balance some skills around Blitz. Regardless of whatever you wanted Blitz to be.... I think it ended up being a way to try out a class in a less intense environment. If you polled most players I think they would agree Blitz is the pre-game practice for crossfire and not a main event. If you think I'm wrong then why not hold a poll?

Bearing all of this in mind, I really don't think the gunner deserves a nerf. Although I might consider lessening the power of his gun if he had a red button one hit kill attack (horizontal version of the airstrike) which could be spammed three times when fully upgraded. I know you said the gunner had a rocket launcher at one point, but I doubt that's the kind of change you had in mind.

If you're looking for a class to nerf I think you will want to revisit the sniper.

[Reserved for future use]

My vote is to slightly increase the spool time for the Minigun, making the Left Trigger pre-spool become much more involved; to also decrease the damage of the Minigun over distance so that just like the Assault their bullets are only effective within a given range; and to only allow a Deployed Gunner to be able to hit distant targets effectively, i.e. only when Deployed will a bullet deal full damage at long distances. Now, with those changes in place the Gunner's Grapple should be improved or possibly even replaced. I would suggest giving the Gunner a Bouncer-like lunge grapple once upgraded.

Keep in mind that the Sniper should also be getting 'nerfed' so even with these drawbacks for the Gunner the Sniper will be less effective as well.

On a side note, does the Gunner's head shield from Deploy 3 always work or does it only function when Deployed? I honestly cannot remember as I have not used it in a very long time.

I'll paste what I posted from our other gunner discussion in here (since not many people read the 18 page thread in the feedback forum):

I think the gunner needs:
-A better/different bot spawn
-Something that replaces grapple (but does NOT add mobility)

He is in an interesting spot though, because his weapons are incredibly strong and suit him well. I don't think he is underpowered, but he is poorly designed in regards to grapple, which makes it difficult to give him a new skill and still be balanced.

I'm wondering what would happen if we gave the gunner an "Armor Lock-like" ability from Halo. The gunner takes a knee and becomes invulnerable to ALL damage/knockbacks/grapples (but not other CC) for 1/2/3 seconds. Targets who attack the gunner have their attack and/or movement speeds slowed by x for x seconds (maybe have them stack more for the more damage they attempt to put on the gunner). You could even toy with the idea of this armor lock reflecting a % of the damage blocked back at the target. The gunner would not regen health (without high enough endorsements) or gain juice during this time, but would be capable of being healed (but maybe not overhealed?) by a support.

Maybe allow him to regen his other skills (but not armor lock) while he is locked.

No idea what balance implications this would have on the game, but it certainly would be different and would solve the issue of his grapple without making him more mobile.

The improved hit detection does feel like a buff to the gunner [even though ALL classes benefit from it], but it also buffed the rail gun which IMO can counter [or at the very least, deter] most gunners at range with a RoF endorsement.

Bear in mind that the gunner and assault are well balanced at the moment. Basically the assault wins at longer range or if he catches a gunner who is not spun up (or if he plants a bomb or hits a charge). The gunner wins at close range. The assault can run away if he's losing but the gunner cannot. I can only hope we're talking about nerfing the assault's gun to keep him balanced with the gunner as well. Otherwise there's going to be little reason to play gunner.

Hiero.... the gunner already has a damage tapering effect at range. You can observe this by shooting at the ball from point blank and from far away (the corner nook on steel peel is quite dramatic, but you can also observe the difference on the LaseRazor high side platforms. At range you also tend to miss a lot more than you hit so someone has to not be paying attention to die at long range (unless he's got gold accuracy). As I covered in another thread if he is playing with accuracy he deserves that kind of range because he's going to lose a lot of up close damage as a result (meaning he will lose to assault more often, other gunners, support shotguns, etc). The head shield only works while deployed and even has a delay before it starts (you can be killed while you are hitting Y.... this cheapens the experience even further considering that a good sniper can kill you in that downtime). Consider a gunner with deploy 3, passive 3 and gold accuracy vs a sniper with explosive shots. A bad sniper would still kill you very quickly if you tried deploying against him. If the deploy is supposed to help you vs snipers then I say the skill is also poorly designed. As far as I am concerned the only functions for deploy are for a quick accuracy/damage boost. Deploy 3 just isn't worth the cost and I'm better of using the money for juice.

How exactly do you want the spin up mechanic more involved? It takes about a second and a half to get decent damage right now. How long do you think is fair? IF we were talking about increasing his damage and the spin up time (ugg) I think the gunner would lose a lot more matches. Good gunners know when to pre-spin and right now I'm walking around at half speed for a good portion of any match. If we're going to increase the spin time we had better be greatly reducing the spun up speed penalty to compensate.

I'll briefly mention that mines would be a perfect skill to replace the gunner's grapple.... but the developers have no current plans to replace any skills at the moment.

If you weaken the minigun you're basically making the decision for people to just play tank and go gold RoF. You'll get more survivability, better mobility, better skills and close to the same damage with no spin up mechanic. Overall I would say the gunner is poorly designed but has great firepower. Please don't take away the one thing that makes the class worth playing.

There's a lot of assumptions in this post, mainly starting with what's changing with the minigun. As I said, there are balance and fixes coming. We're always looking to fix things we find that are simply broken, or polish issues.

With out going in to any detail there's a bug with the mini gun that makes more powerful than it should be in specific situations that could be exploited. So far we haven't seen anyone knowingly exploit the issue, or at least no one recognizes it as an exploit. In all likelihood if we don't mention it in the patch notes no one will even notice, but a very small percentage of fights the gunner will likely lose where before they might have won.

The point of the mini gun is for people to be afraid of it. If you stand in front of a spun up mini gun at anything but long ranges any player should be afraid of dying.

As for a one shot kill, the gunner is the only character in the game that has a one hit kill on any player regardless of the opponent's health. If a gunner slams on the head of another player or fodder they will die.

As for the gunner's skills, there are certainly improvements we would of liked to have made, but there are improvements we would of liked to have made to all the skills.

^ You mean someone can survive and airstrike stick?

I disagree with the gunners grapple being useless. When just a simple speed endorsement or a pickup, or fighting a tank, or many situations others find themselves it, it's useful. The problem with it is that it's far to weak to be considered a useful move when during the grapple animation you could have simply shot the person to death and it would be over.

What if the B atk was a poison cloud? It slowed those around him like the shaveice for a short time. Could give him a combo with slam.

Juiced upgraded tank.

Gunners can kill Assassins with 4 bullets. 4. Have you seen the clip size on that thing? 4 is not a lot. Their bullets slow the enemy when the hit. If you slam someone and don't end up killing them, you're doing something wrong. On top of that, my friend who has never played Gunner in his life went 43-6 earlier. When I asked him what he did, he said he held down RT and sprayed.

With a gun like that, I don't see what's wrong with having bad skills. I do, however, believe that some of them need fixing.

Level 3 Deploy gives a head shield. Ok... The Sniper is still going to kill you faster than you can undeploy. I find the headshield to be pretty useless, and not worth upgrading Deploy to level 3. As a skill in itself, the deploy needs to become more useful than it currently is.

The Gunner's grapple is particularly useful when Assassins decide to face grapple you. If you have it at level 1 or 2, it might buy you enough time for someone else to come kill her. If you have level 3, you'll either get her far away from you or get a ring out. Due to the lack of power behind the grapple, what do you think about perhaps allowing him to grapple from a short range? Just throwing that out there.

As far as spinning the gun goes, I don't see a problem with him walking a bit faster than he already does.

I truly don't think the slam should stun, because in almost all cases it's a free kill for the Gunner.

I thought the Gunner was fine before the patch, but now I think he's very overpowered, which could just be due to the hit detection. While playing today, I noticed that the only class that could consistently kill me was a Gunner, which I thought was absolutely ridiculous considering the distance I tend to keep from them. The friend that I mentioned earlier called playing Gunner the "God mode" of this game, and I'm starting to believe that.

have you guys (devs) ever toyed with the idea of overheating on a minigun?

This, and walking under a walkway. I've it done a couple of times, sometimes can't make it under something though.

I haven't really played the gunner much since the game launched. At first he was the only class I played. I find the mini gun to be the only thing he has going for him. Once I got my dual mini gun, I would usually upgrade to slam 2 and thats it. His grapple is pointless because you can usually kill someone with the mini gun before the animation is even over with. I can only see it being useful in a last resort such as having to reload. Deploy is not worth it either. If there is a sniper on the other team he will most likely head shot him, and with the face shield he will most likely die to a sniper before he can undeploy. I feel he is quite balanced.

Thank you for alleviating my fears. I (and others) got the impression that you guys were going to nerf the crap out of minigun. Perhaps I went and jumped the gun, but I just wanted some kind of idea what was coming (and I know other people did too).

I have never seen anyone survive an assault's direct bomb hit (head crab). With juice I can survive an airstrike but not a head crab. As I mentioned.... yea the pancake happens but it just doesn't line up very often. Airstrikes, headcrabs, headshots, assassinations and ring outs happen WAY more often.

It sounds like something that needs fixing.... but I hope you will tell us more after you have implemented these changes.

Shadowrun style-
Holding down the right trigger means that the gun spins up, starts shooting slow, and then builds up to full. You have to keep shooting, otherwise it resets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J8paROR ... re=related
That's really the only vid I could find of it.

Ya that's how I assumed the minigun would work in mnc when I first started playing
You should not be able to just spin up while hiding then drop somebody before they can even blink

The gunner imo needs to have his red skill changed to something nice, probably a defensive ability of some sort.

And have his deploy become useful as an offensive tool.

Only if the minigun gets toned down though, you just simply don't need extra skills when your primary weapon destroys that hard. (Sniper anyone?)

I don't know if anyone you have noticed the little Offense, Defense, Specialties bars for each pro. The Gunner has 5 for Offense, 3 Defense and 1 Specialties. Meaning his is deadly with his weaponry and doesn't have skills that he relies on. The only place a Gunner has trouble with an Enemy is right next to him so I think Slam and the Grapple work great for that situation.

I will agree that his Minigun needs a slightly longer spool time. Like when holding the Left trigger should be the default spool up time and then make the Left Trigger take a bit longer than that.

Don't mess with the gunner please.

Now not to start a fight or get all uppity, but what do you expect us to talk about? We aren't privy to designer/developer notes, so all we can do is make assumptions using the little information we get from you and likely changed to be made from our own game play experience.

Hey we all heard the saying "You know what happens when you assume?"

Oh yeah, I know the saying, when you make an assumption, you make an *** out of u and mption.

But my point is, and I know the developers probably don't realize this, but they come off a bit cocky and arrogant when they answer like that. I'm really not trying to start a fight with them, but it seems like they want to have an open discussion with the forum and customers (i.e. Us). I'm just trying to keep things polite.

wait, what?