Monday Night Combat Title Update, DLC, and PAX Discussion

As someone who plays support I think the cloak nerf is a good thing, however I am also in agreement that the smoke bomb effect should last longer, particularly against turrets, and especially at higher levels. If I'm standing next to my 3.3 firebase and an assassin grapple kills me and gets away scott free I get pretty peeved. If they run up, smoke bomb, and then grapple kill me, well good on em. Clean kill and they deserve to live to kill another day.

I also agree with requiring hacking 3 to be able to hack enemy turrets. I'm not crazy about hack 1 and 2 not lasting as long, but I guess until I see how much the time is reduced I can't make much of a judgement on that. I'll also have to reserve judgement on the HH gun change, and how much the RoF endorsement affects it. So long as bronze RoF keeps it at about the same level I don't really have an issue with it, but more of a nerf than that I'll be a little irked by. Even as a support player I thought they were a little overpowered, but I the only real change I thought necessary was the hacking 3 required to hack enemy turrets change. I thought the HH gun was pretty balanced already, since you can't easily kill someone with it (they have to be already hurt, a fairly bad shot, or unaware of you for a little bit) and while the healing works great on turrets it's a little lacking on pros and bots.

Hacking was only really useful to hack enemy turrets at 3 anyway. Even then it had to be an unguarded turret, or you needed some cover while you did it. It just took too long at 2 to be effective unless juiced.

The only other things I might consider justifiable nerfs for support would be to not allow use of the HH gun while hacking, and not being able to switch to the shotgun while in a grapple. I know the latter would anger a lot of support, but it just doesn't make sense. As it stands if I get front grappled by an assassin I still win 80% of the time, even without my firebase there.

I didnt say learn to play your class. You need to learn to play against a class. I know a gunner can kill me in about a second (as Support) but it doesnt stop me from wrecking them 90% of the time.

Just thinking... does this include grapples and the assassin lunge?

Also Massa, the no cloak while grapple isn't going to stop you getting killed next to your firebase unless you don't build it within range of one of the bot lanes :3

I'm still vaguely curious why people have this arbitrary rule of "oh grappling me next to my gun is cheating unless you use a smokebomb", especially when, as sniper, I can headshot you next to your gun and a whole bunch of your friends and then take your gun down all in a quarter of the time it'd take an assassin AND from a safe distance. Oh but that's fine I guess.

Long range instant death with low risk and I can chew your firebase up like it was made of paper; that's dandy, no complaints here.
The girl who has to get near you without being noticed, hoping to god the firebase doesn't glitch and start shooting her through cloak before she even does anything and then dies horribly if the grapple goes wrong for whatever reason (yay lag!) due to being at shotgun range... now SHE'S the problem!!! Burn her! Burn the witch! :/

People are strange XD

If I had a nickel for every time a Sniper has really given me problems, I'd have like .50 cents. If I had a penny for everytime an assassin haas given me problems, I'd be over a dollar.

Sniper vs Assassin is not a good comparison IMO. Fact is there is only so much a Sniper can do camping across the map vs someone is running all over the place getting up close aand personal :lol:

Well, I can only give my experience of it from me playing a sniper and an assassin because when I play support myself, neither class is really a problem... ironically my biggest problem as support is other supports
Then again it's rare to see a decent sniper or assassin in the first place.

As an assassin a support with a firebase was a big thing. An obstacle to overcome. I'd have to make sure there's no other enemies nearby to shoot me when I went for the takedown and as soon as the support was down I'd have to retreat to a safe range and shuriken the firebase. Any lag or slip-ups at best would result in an aborted attack and a chunk of time wasted, at worst it leads to death. Either way, a support with a firebase is a time consuming thing.
As a sniper it wasn't even a minor inconvenience; one quick change of position, a few shots, and the lane is open for business again. I stopped countless support rushes too by just shooting them in the head (doesn't matter how overhealed you are if it auto-kills you :3 ) and ice-traps disrupt and demoralize most groups quite nicely too.

Looks like a great set of fixes and tweaks to me. I want to add my thanks to the developers for setting a great example of how to engage with a player base and really add value to an already ridiculously great deal of a game (considering that it only cost $15 for more fun than I have with most $60 titles).

This is the internet, so saying anything is like shouting at a freeway, but for my $0.02, I have been pretty impressed with the balance of the classes from the outset. These tweaks seem mostly positive and I don't notice anything game breaking. I say this as a massive Support fan. The only thing that even slightly worries me is the decrease in hack duration. To be honest, I wasn't even aware that there WAS a duration. I had always assumed that there was a max # of turrets you could have hacked based on your skill level.

At first I was a wee bit worried about the decrease in the basic Heal/Hurt gun performance. But then I thought about it a little and realized that it gives Supports the option of having a BETTER heal/hurt gun if they want to use a gold or silver endorsement (I am assuming with almost no evidence that bronze ROF will make the heal/hurt gun perform at about the level it was pre-patch and that silver/gold will make it faster than that level.

In conclusion, game balance is hard, players are passionate about the aspects of the game they come to enjoy and so are highly critical of slight changes, and most people tend to extrapolate overly broad conclusions from small personal experience. I'd urge the devs to trust that they've done (and are continuing to do) an excellent job.

Thanks for a great game!

oh I do so hope so

I have no problem with being killed next to a firebase, or any other turret for that matter, if it's distracted in some way, be it other pros, bots, smokebomb, whatever. I do have a problem with at least not getting the post-grapple kill if my firebase is right there and undistracted.

As for why it doesn't bother me being headshot next to my firebase (at least as much as getting killed doesn't bother anyone) it's simple: snipers are meant to be a long range class, and assassins are meant to be short range grapplers. I mean how can you be mad at getting killed from a distance by a sniper? It's kinda what they do. That's not to say both classes don't have options at their other ranges, but it's not their main forte.

I do have beefs with the sniper class for other reasons, but headshots and long distance kills are not among them.

So.... you'd be fine with getting grapple killed without retaliation if the assassin was just renamed or was given a move that teleported you to them from range (like scorpion's "get over here!" move from Mortal Kombat)?
I know the answer to these is 'no' but I'm trying to work out why the sniper gets a free pass to do it cleaner, faster and safer than the assassin while the poor stealth class's already more difficult task to achieve the same goal is deemed 'not hard enough' or 'cheap'. It feels like there's a double standard here and I'm curious to see if there's a logical reason behind it outside of "just because" :3

Invis and speed. Sniper can be avoided if you know where they are camped. A lot of times an Assassin you don't unless they are dumb enough to run thru an ice shave or dash in front of you. Even if you can hear that hum (which is too low especially when in team chat) it's too late as you've been lunge/dashed at. The Sniper can be taken out a safe distance outside of their ice traps (which are at least visible when they don't clip the floor).

The only real problem with the assassin is that it has a higher learning curve & you need to know when to bail when you botch, but once mastered you've got a very fast character that can get anywhere on the map, kill bots swiftly for juice money and wipe out turrets like nobodies business.

Cool, that makes sense :3

I do tend to spot assassins approaching me despite the cloak but I guess it at least requires some situational awareness that the other classes can't exploit in the same way. I do have a tougher time knowing I'm about to be sniped though unless I spot the sniper getting into position far off in the distance (which I tend not to see as often simply due to looking closer to home for approaching enemies or assassins ironically enough ) or if I get warned by them missing with the first shot. Static snipers aren't so much of a problem, it's the ones that move about to get new angles that tend to be more problematic (and I try to be one of these as much as humanly possible XD )

Yes, I think Wired summed up my sentiment better than I could. It's not the name "assassin" that makes me think they need to do grapple kills. It's the way the class is crafted. The intent of the developers is made fairly clear by the skills given to the various classes, regardless of name. For example the name "support" would imply something fairly different from what the support class can actually do. Yes, they can heal teammates, but you can play support very aggressively and do some good damage solo.

It's not the name of the class that's important, so much as the tools given to them and how they were intended to be used. That said no one forces you to use those tools in the "intended" ways. After all I've seen plenty of in-your-face SMG snipers lately, and I've certainly done some damage rushing a base with shotgun in hand.

The assassin's problem is most of their tools are geared toward one purpose: grappling. They have cloak to sneak up on someone for the grapple, dash to both close for the grapple and get away after one, and smoke bomb to disable turrets/bots to assist with grapple. The throwing stars are decent, but are really just a fallback for when you can't grapple. The issue most often brought up in the new nerf/fix/whatever is it becomes difficult to impossible to grapple someone next to a turret. If the tool to allow an assassin to do this is the smoke bomb, and it's not working, the solution should be to fix the smoke bomb. They're going to increase the radius, but if the duration isn't long enough for an assassin to grapple and get away (even against just one turret most times) it seems like more needs to be done. Give it a longer duration, at least against bots and turrets. Frankly it doesn't do much against players, since the blind is fairly short duration and as soon as someone goes blind they'll probably start jumping around until it wears off, preventing most attempts at a grapple.

Assassins shouldn't always be able to grapple someone in any situation, but considering it's what most of their skills are geared towards they should be able to grapple someone in most 1 v 1 situations assuming they get the drop on the person.

~nod~ Some of the classes aren't super diverse. Gunner also suffers from a fairly one-track playstyle (shoot people!!!)

Random thought... I wonder if the permanent effects fix (being on fire until you die and whatnot) will also stop that odd thing where somtimes the gunner's jump jets get stuck on XD

Don't take either point here as me disagreeing with you overall, because I'm not.

The other five classes are fairly aptly named. Assault's about the only one you can really argue isn't, but that's because "assault" seems kind of vague in this sense.

Tank: Heavy Armour, Heavy Damage. Tank in the RPG/MMO sense, at least.

Gunner: Gunner.

Sniper: Pretty much self explanatory.

Support: Geared towards supporting the team.

Which brings me to point two: Yeah, Support can be fairly offensive, but it's not exactly false advertising.

I do agree, however, that when you set up a particularly narrowly focused class based, you expect it to be capable within that field. Since the primary focus of the class is to get you in and out of grappling range, it seems ridiculous that it's not all that capable even within that range.

But I would still expect them to call it an "Assassin" only if it was meant to be an assassin, which evidently it isn't. All the other names are apt. However, our invisible "lane pusher" really isn't.

It took me a while to realise how useless smoke bomb was except as a jumping tool. I got hosed for that mistake. And yeah, everyone's solution to the Assassin is to bunny hop the minute they think they hear it, so even with a longer duration it's still not going to help the Assassin much.

Unfortunately, most of the classes have solid fallback options or are versatile. Assassin is really narrow. Part of why the whole "learn your role" argument is so frustrating. I main Support. I can play Support offensively or defensively, and even adjust on the fly. Now, Support's overpowered, but the point stands. Snipers are long ranger hitters, but they have preytty good close quarters options. Tank's got a nice long range weapon to fall back on. Gunner's pretty straightforward. Assault is...Well, it's supposed to be versatile, so speaking to its versatility is really kinda pointless.

Assassin? Not so much.

Forgive me if this has been answered, but when does this update come out? It's taking a group of us over 20 minutes to get into a game.

I too am curious about the patches release date. Maybe within a week or two? I get tired of lobbies full of super speeders and pros shooting down the moneyball without bots (I do leave them, but it's almost commonplace now to have at least one person exploiting something...)

Patch in roughly 3 weeks. Maybe less if wee get lucky and Microsoft can get it through the approval process faster.

Well knowing Microsoft, they are going to take their sweet time on the Approval process

Im not sure if this has been answered, but Im not gunna go through 26 pages.

Has, or is, when you start a private match, can you chose sides? Or are we still gunna be put in sides which we may not want?

It works based on the order you join the lobby. If you have 8 people, for instance, the first 4 people in the game will be on one team, while the last 4 will be on the other. And it seems to me like if there is an odd number the extra player slides to the first team. So if there are 7, the first 4 are one team and the last 3 are another.