A Sticky Situation

Stick or get stuck!

Over time, grenades have had their damage radius reduced due to how easy it was to spam them into capture points and get massive amounts of kills. Frags took a nerf over a year ago, and more recently the AV grenade was drastically altered for the same reason. The sticky grenade however, maintains its original damage profile, making it one of the most powerful grenades in the game (in terms of raw killing potential).

Graph of damage values (before the AV grenade nerf) - Just look at that inner blast radius!

However this was not a significant issue until the resource overhaul was implemented, and consumables were given the same pool of nanites to draw from as vehicles and aircraft. While it's not hard to run out of nanites by pulling a few tanks or aircraft, grenades and medkits become nearly infinite - even with bandolier, unless you are doing nothing but spamming them. Fights on Auraxis became very heavy with grenades, as there was no real scarcity of resources and every motivation to spam them at your enemies for some easy kills.

Which brings us to this video, a sticky situation. While I'm a bit over-the-top with satire of the MLG gameplay, I hope this video shows the serious quality issues that arise when you have powerful AOE weapons combined with near endless supply. A few scenes show that it's not just me throwing 4 stickies onto the point, but both sides hurling dozens and dozens of grenades all around. Between broken grenade indicators, AOE damage and the additional pulling of force multipliers on both sides (maxes), massive battles in Planetside tend to devolve into what you see here. A complete and utter mess.

A simple solution would be to give stickies the same treatment that frag and AV grenades got - a reduction of the inner blast radius. A more comprehensive solution would include addressing the nanite system as a whole. I'm not against "excessive lethality" and I don't like feeling that my tanks and grenades are wimpy little farts against enemy troops. But there needs to be either scarcity or a reduction in lethality to address this particular balance issue.

Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy! Feel free to discuss further in this thread. I know DBG has a lot going on right now but it's still important that we don't lose sight of simple balance issues in the game! Ultimately, I want the massive battles to be fun, intense and skill-based clashes of outfits and platoons, and hopefully these suggestions can bring us closer to that ideal.

Gameplay/Script/Editing: Mustarde
Voice Acting: Romas

I just really think stickies need to cost more, or the old resource system was brought back.

Also 90 was my record. ITS HAPPENING.

Dunno As a non-member I find myself running out quickly if I just spam them non-stop ...

But that's as a non-member , so maybe some of the issue is also the plus 25-50% members resource gain that adds to the over ease of spammability ...

Maybe that benefit needs replacing with something else ?

The worst is when you stick it on the back of an unsuspecting enemy as he runs into a spawn room filled with his buddies. Special delivery! Never done it, but watched it happened and the kill feed exploded.

i actually took the liberty of testing this, with a membership, a f2p account, and membership with 1day resource boost.

No difference at the fight i was at. (SNA i believe)

The time it took me to get to the front lines, dump my grenades, run back to spawn, get more grenades, i never ran out. i dipped to having to work with 2-3 instead of 4 some runs on the f2p, but never had to wait on nanites. I went in on all originally with 750.

The TLDR is that you need to address either the supply or the lethality. The quick fix is lethality reduction. Supply issues are much more complex, but may be viable in the future.

Either way, right now most big fights are a spammy sticky mess, and I would love to see that change one day

I must admit 96+ fight are pure nade spam.

Aint fun...

If I ever see you in a base, I'll actually have had a reason to have certed Flak 5 on all damn classes.

The amusing part about the last few seconds of that video is that I'm probably the biggest abuser of sticky nades in the TR on our server. Guess that was karma!

Good freaking grief I love sticky nades.

Sticking one to a biolab max who then runs back to his engies for repairs.

Arcing them just perfectly over a wall with a sundy parked on the other side.

Sticking one to those rocket launcher guys who poke out just long enough to fire a rocket, then run back to their friends.

Oh your MANA turret is up on a ledge or a hill? That's great, my nades don't roll.

Tower defense sticky nades down the stairs.

Any time I see a chokepoint full of hostiles, I immediately run gleefully, while twisting my mustache, back to the nearest terminal to swap to engie.

In most chokepoint situations poking your head out to do something really dumb, like actually fire a rifle, will just get you killed with no return on investment. Sticky nades get me absolutely minimum exposure while still generating death.

Non-issue, move along

< guilty as charged

forgive me padre for i have sinned

I think stickies are okay simply because they're restricted to engineer. It's a class almost no one wants to play (except as the driver class) unless there are hordes of MAXes around, so you don't see nearly as much sticky spam as you might. It's nice to have some other reason to pick engi in an infantry fight besides being a MAX babysitter.

pretty much my entire activity on double xp weekend,
grab your grenade bandolier and start hurling ammo packs and sticky nades! XD

Damn. And to think I felt bad about spamming Claymores Nice video OP. The bad habits one learns on these forums is just freakin awesome. Thanks

b-brb

nade bandolier....


also thank the lord for no dubstep jesus

they would have been a less of an issue..... if rocket splash didn't get nerfed.

Your video made my day !

And we all know how lethality reductions suggested by mustarde involving explosives have totally not caused issues.....

Hey just be glad the thumper is gone.

The NS thumper is coming eventually.