How really was the old ZOE?

I usually hear about "old ZOE" but Im not playing PS2 long enough to remember it. How that really was?
And, "It was OP." isnt answer

It was decent. The truth is you still went down like a sack of bricks if people actually didnt run away from you and actually shot at you. The dmg was always negligible and thats a fact. But prepare for people to tell you that it would mow down entire platoons and zig zag out of bullets and rockets and never take damage. A pink glowing object with 30% extra damage wasnt all TR and NC thought it was, it just made VS pull MAX since for the first time they had a reason to do so as VS MAX is pretty lackluster. Its the "best" at range, but still complete **** at that, and loses to TR and NC close range.

It was pretty broken at first with no momentum ADAD, but after they added that it was fine. People dont realize how much +30% extra damage is. Its _alot_. Also the pink glow had vapor trails making it hard to actually see targets.

ZOE now a days is complete suicide, it _only_ has drawbacks, zero upsides.

Except, anyone who used it well knew to just turn it off once you started taking fire, and because of how quick you were, you could almost always get the drop on people. I went on just silly kill streaks with the old ZOE. If you were good, it was almost impossible to hit you with rockets, C4, or anything else, and like I said. Once you actually started taking fire, you just deactivated it.

It was as OP as everyone says. It also stacked incredibly well. 2 Maxes could hold a point almost indefinitely.

There uses to be armies of purple crabs everywhere.

Seriously though, on release you couldn't fly an ESF anywhere near VS territory, or park a Sunderer, or enter a Biolab....

Liezzzzz.....

It was OP. Oh you want the longform answer?

It was a damage boost and movement speed buff on toggle with no cooldown.
The only downside is if you happened to get hit while it was active, but if you saw a rocket coming just hit F quick and boom! No downside.
You were faster than SPRINTING infantry. ZOE with bursters and vortexes were suitable replacements for skyguards and Engineers with AV turrets.The fact that SOE let this go in for six months is bafflng to anyone that didnt play VS. Vs players of course claimed during this time that ZOE was fine and its a L2P issue with the other factions.

This pic exlplains what an average engagement against the VS looked like:


From :
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/highby-just-tweeted-some-max-stats.161813/

ZOE in a nutshell (not my picture):



It was absolutely broken. What are the best counters to a MAX? C4, rockets, AV grenades. What did ZOE let you easily avoid? C4, rockets, AV grenades. A single ZOE could solo clear rooms full of infantry.

ZOE let you move faster than infantry. Just think about that for a second. A MAX gives you way more firepower and health than infantry. What is the downside? You move slow. What does ZOE do? It makes you move fast. You're a super infantry unit with no downsides.

The additional damage taken was a situational disadvantage; the additional mobility meant that you actually got hit with less, and the additional damage output meant that you killed your opponents even quicker (and therefore took less damage).

The worst part? It took SOE months to do anything about this.

ZOE turned you into a god. Thats all I will say.

The main problem was not if it was op or not, the problem was everyone thought it was op and acted accordingly. The amount of MAXes the VS brought been completly out of control and on my side everyone ran like a chicken and got mowed down.

sindz gives a pretty accurate account. Though to fill in some blanks;

The non momentum ADAD was only ever present on the test server, it was very obviously a bug as there previously was momentum and the devs stated they were looking to add more momentum than normal for ZOE, and there were other very obvious bugs like non scalar speed increases causing the ZOE to give the max ludicrous speeds, but during the test events, the people who got owned by this ZOE took it rather personally and continued to act as though momentum was not added and it had the speed bug for months after ZOE was released.

The main thing was that people just didn't try to shoot back at the ZOE - people would go "OH SNAP ZOE!!" and freeze in place not knowing what to do or run... which is exactly the advantage of ZOE, the ability to take down runners. As freezing and running did not work, many came to complain that they had "tried everything!" and the legend of ZOE started up.

That said I don't think the current ZOE is as terribad as people make it out to be, it's just not very fun to use, as it feels like a marginal increase over regular abilities, with a glowing pink deathwish.

It made you into a god, every downside of the max was removed and basically turned you into a HA with more health with 80% resist shield, speed buff, and damage increase all in one. There was literally no HA for VS that weren't on max cool down, all the fights you would see was a sea of purple crabs and they just kept on coming.
Don't believe anyone that tells you ZOE was fine because they are just ignorant or talking out of their behind, and I dare someone to show how old ZOE was fine, I dare you.

Without ZOE
Max Walk Speed : 2.0~2.3 per second
Max Sprint Speed : 4~4.5 per second (gradually increase to full speed within 1 second)
Max Side Strafe Speed : 1.8~ per second
Max Backward Speed: 1.4~1.6 per second
With ZOE
Max Walk Speed : 4.3+ per second
Max Sprint Speed : 4.7+ per second (gradually increase to full speed within 1 second)
Max Side Strafe Speed : 3.4 per second (not factoring ADAD as i cant observe momentum)
Max Backward Speed: 3.4 per second
Light assault
Infantry Walk Speed: 3.2 + per second
Infantry Walk Speed (With adrenaline pump): 3.2+ per second
Infantry Sprint Speed : 5.0 per second
Infantry Sprint Speed (With adrenaline pump): 5.5 ~6.0 per second
Infantry Side Strafe Speed: 2.2+ per second
Infantry Backward Speed: 3.0 per second


ZoE was:
-sprinting as fast than standard infantry.
-walking faster than standard infantry.
-Strafing faster than standard infantry.
-Was mor accurate than standard infantry. (remove 0.5 ads move mult to match maxes accuracy)
-Had more firepower than standard infantry.
-Had better durability than standard infantry.


Fighting ZoE was basically this:

Almost immunite to all slow moving projectiles (Rockets, C4 ect) and was able to clean 12 guys in a room way faster than any maxes.


The damages increase was also a serious buff, especially with AV weapons, bursters or against maxes.

At the release, the increased incoming damages was only 20%, later increased to 30%.

Just before its nerfs, there was just enouth infantry to cap points, then hordes of nanorepair ZoE everywhere and vehicles.

To resume, it had amazing survivability, mobility and firepower.

Imagine a permanent buff where you moved fast enough that anti-MAX weapons had an even harder time hitting you*, allowing you to close on opponents faster to eliminate them with already-overpowered MAX weapons before they really had a chance to do significant damage with their small arms (and if they tried to switch to anti-MAX weapons they just died without dealing any damage.)

(*Keeping in mind that even without ZOE those anti-MAX weapons (rockets, C4) are incapable of stopping a MAX before I do enough damage to make the MAX pull worth it.)

I hearf that current ZOE doesnt change BTK at all and dmg buff works only in CQC, moving speed buff isnt big enough and you only get more damage when using it.. It seems to be that terribad

"Extreme Menace" freaking hard to kill well it had its upsides sometimes ZOE ran too fast into a c4 trap or you were forced to use those conc nades which wasn't so bad if you were a member .Why they an "Extreme Menace"? because they came out in droves of rapage.

It would be great if you could tell also the stats of current ZOE

I don't think the ZOE was as OP as people claim it was performance wise. The VS KPU did not change THAT much from before and after the ZOE execution.

I think the majority of the hatred for the ZOE came from how insufferable it was to fight against. Fighting against AD-AD spamming opponents suck, now imagine a MAX doing it.

Of course something as frustrating as the ZOE is not good for gameplay, no matter if it's balanced or not.

Correct. The current ZOE is completely pointless. It doesn't change BTK against infantry, and against targets that it would like Air and Tanks, the damage buff is too short. THe Movement speed is also so low that it doesn't matter, and it doesn't increase sprint speed so it's not good for escaping or pursuing.

KPU = kill/unique

Item becomes powerful = item becomes popular = KPU decreases.

KPU is a terrible balance metric because it is affected both by KPH and popularity to degrees that aren't consistent.

It's already been well described by others in this thread how bad ZOE was at the time (yes it really was that bad, anyone believing otherwise is just indulging in fantasy).

It was so bad that many of us who suffered and endured those six months still harbor an unconscious hatred upon sighting a VS MAX. I'm never aware of it at the time, but in the middle of a huge melee I will naturally gravitate towards and pursue any VS MAX that I see stomping around and take suicidal risks to put it down as I have a -deep- built in need to kill it.

Those six months were not fun times, and I haven't even begun to dish out a fraction of the payback that's owed.