Balance doesn't mean making everything the same. Balance means everything having strengths in certain areas of the game but weaknesses in others. The more powerful a class is in a certain aspects the weaker it is in others. Pretty simple concept. For example. Without there being a huge skill gap or major (non class) advantage between them, a heavy assault can kick the **** out of a medic in a face to face fight, maybe even 2. But you know what the heavy assault can't do? Throw a revive grenade and bring 20 people back to life. Sure, only looking at combat the heavy assault is powerful and the medic is weak but looking at support, it's the exact opposite. If you want everything to be the same then let's just remove all the classes and make one class that has a rocket launcher, jump pack, medic tool, engi tool, cloaking ability, etc. etc. because who wants diversity right?
That last bit actually made me think of something. What if there were no classes and instead you had to make a soldier? You could choose different weapons, abilities, equipment and choosing certain options would remove other options from being picked. It's really far fetched and never going to happen, it's just an interesting idea. =p
PS1 called and says that you could either cloak and carry the medic tool and use one engineer tools (BANK); or, you could carry all of those things but not cloak. You could carry around and use all sorts of deployables and such on either armor-type and both could hack. Only the VS MAX had jump jets, but it couldn't do any of the prior. Was this imbalanced? is what we have in PS2 more balanced?
Planetside had a cool inventory, but it also makes sidearms and playing medic mostly useless because who needs a pistol when you can cram a sniper rifle and a shotgun in one loadout no problem and everyone has a fully functional medtool of their own.
That idea wasn't supposed to be serious, just something I thought and thought I would share. The way you're explaining the PS1 class system makes it sound like there was just one dominate class you could make and the others weren't really comparable.
A cloaker with a jump jet and C4, that would end a zerg Or a cloaker with land mines Or a cloaker with a shotgun I see where your going, but these are just a few ideas that would muller this game, let alone going into detail.
The PS1 system didn't divide the game into classes but into armor-types. There were three main Infantry armors, or "Exo-suits" - Standard, Agile, and Reinforced ("Rexo"). There was also the Infiltrator Suit, the one that cloaked, and then three faction-specific MAXes that were divided by weapon use (AI, AV, AA). In this order, from Rexo onwards, you had to cert the each armor if you wanted to use it. The main difference between armors were protection (personal armor that could be repaired by a BANK), inventory-space, number of rifle and pistol equip slots, and running speed. Use of things like the Engineer tools (BANK, Nanite Dispenser, and ACE construction tools) and the Medical tool could be purchased independently through a limited number of certification points, one per level. Anti-Vehicular weapons and Heavy Assault weapons were also certifications. Vehicle use was also purchased through certs, and certs were earned by Battle Rank. All players could hack doors and facility consoles using a REK tool. In practice there wasn't enough to do everything as a new player but it was easy enough after a certain point, especially since you copuld re-assign certs, one per every six hours. (You could also get rid of a whole chain of certs by attacking the root certifcation, e.g., get rid of Medium Assault to also get rid of Heavy Assault, Special Assault, and Anti-Vehicular at the same time. Getting rid of the 2 cert unlock could yield 12 freed-up cert points.) The "universal inventory" was a loadout that was great for wasting anything and still doing stuff, and was something the devs initially claimed they want to avoid allowing players to acquire. A Rexo-suit with a BANK and Medical Tool, carrying around a Decimator and his faction's Heavy Assault weapon, costed 18 certs. You could do that at BR14. You could eschew the Medical Tool since people could carry Medical Kits and pass them around to whomever needed it, and that lowered the cost to 15 certs, which was BR10. In practice, BR10 does not take long to reach. These days, on Gemini server, well-levelled raiding parties, which are exceptionally common, have a variant of the loadout. (Occasionally, either Anti-Vehicular or Heavy Assault is traded for Special Assault. Dropping the Medical Tool is also common.)
yea.....no Heavy Assault either needs to be toned down, or the player needs to be forced to choose what to specialize in given the loadout. Mixing up some of what uses which equip slot, and making it so all rocket launchers EXCEPT the default S1 types, cannot be resupplied at engi ammo packs; Would balance them out greatly. Also making each shield type only resist/absorb a specific damage type or more/less like: NMG: Absorbs explosive weapons only Resist shield: Resists Small arms weapons only Adrenal shield: Less powerful then the previous 3 but is effected by Explosive AND small arms. I'd also like to see lockon feature of lockons removed (all of them in game), and buffed in other areas to still fill their roles (like major velocity buffs) Launchers also need to be tweaked to fit specific roles. I'd like to see some launchers made into pure AT (Anti tank/Anti ground vehicle), some into pure AI (Anti infantry), and obviously pure AA( but still no lockon) This helps because if say the Heavy chooses an AT launcher in his loadout it could be made that if he tried to use it for purposes other then intended (like AI work), it would barely scratch infantry. I think when creating Heavy Assault (and all this time) the devs forgot the second part of the saying "Jack of All trades"........... which is supposed to be "Master of NONE"..... thats right "none" instead of "all"
I'm sorry, but I still think the heavy assault shield is too much of a get out of jail free card. The number of times I've opened up on a heavy assault at 5 meters, see him shield and died more than 15 bullets into my clip isn't funny. I'm still waiting for that adjustment where it takes about 1 to 1.5 seconds for the shield to reach full effectiveness* so getting the jump on a heavy can work. But the heavy still has this tool where if they know they're about to breach a defended place they can flick the shield on just before they go to push in. * - With the total time you can have the shield running increased by that same amount.
That was PS1. IMO it could have worked in PS2 but they decided to cut-and-paste the class system from Battlefield because that's such an awesome idea and worked wonders for World of MechWarrior and Star Warcraft.
If u want this to be a serious competitive fps than all class should have the same health. Every class needs to have the same ttk. Basically everyone should be able to compete in a 1v1 situation. The weapon and accuracy should be the factor determining the outcome not the class for extra health. When 90 % of all cap points are inside small rooms than it favors the faction with the highest rste of fire. Therefore it will never be balance unless you design each base with 3 different cap point favoring each faction traits. The more simple solution would to create a competitive server and give everyone the same weapons.
Cloaker with a shotgun was some of the most fun i had in beta. It was just so broken haha. As for another poster. I miss... so much... being a cloaker medic. Picking up your dead squad while sitting on an important but not observed tactical asset in a base was just too funny. You get all these people hunting high and low for the cloaker hidden away somewhere after the second or third time.
