(Repost from reddit) I'm in full support of unrevivable Maxes idea and thus de-facto moving them more into vehicles category, but, like you mentioned in PTS notes, effectiveness of certain anti-max options should be reconsidered, as it was created for revivable Max meta. So, after PTS change, in essence, Max is a 350+* nanite "vehicle" that trades it's -firepower, survivability, mobility, ability for driver to get out and repair without NAR and ability for driver to escape it's destruction -for it's small size, letting it fit inside doorways and transports. I'll cut to the chase right away, and list things in order of importance. "Importance", in this case, focusing on rather vague, but still very real player's sense of game's "fairness/integrity/making sense" – like a player would expect his 450 nanite MBT to be "significantly stronger" than 300 nanite lightning, etc. 1) 50 nanite Flashes should absolutely not be able to roadkill 350* nanite maxes. 2) Like any other ground nanite option in the game, Maxes should be able to survive a pocket OS without any additional investment or suit slots. Normal vehicles do that by either tanking it outright or having high enough escape window, Maxes can do none of it, this is a true "click things out of existence with no effort or counterplay" option now. No issues with base OS, those require at least some work to set up and hold, have long cooldown, and Max players will know they are in range of one. 3) Current Archer/AMR stats have been designed for revivable Maxes meta. A rifle that takes out 70% of non-revivable 350+* nanite content health pool in a single shot and completely shuts down Maxes in non CQC combat even when said Max has an engineer repair is too much. Archers should not be able to 2-shot a Max that is under active repair. Just because I could only find a couple Archer users during several hours of Maxing on Emerald doesn't mean it's the same on other servers, people actually actively use that thing on Cobalt. 4) Maxes should be able to survive a brick of C4 without doing Ordnance armor, but just barely. Ordnance armor Max should still die to 2 bricks. This, aside from providing proper 350* nanite option survivability, moves Ordnance armor from "no brainer critical breakpoint "2nd life" suit slot that you have no choice not to equip" to a more general "increase your resistance against this type of threats" Nerf the Engineer healing on Maxes while doing 2, 3 and 4. There's one thing for a Max that stands out – it's small health pool + combined with high resistances to certain damage types + combined with fixed rate repair speed of engineer tools, that are normally meant for 2500-5000 health pool vehicles. Which is why I’m proposing to increase the max health to alleviate above issues while correspondingly reducing it’s damage resistance to other damage types to compensate for general health increase so it would have no effect on small arms/etc balance. If you go this route, don't forget scale up Berserker/Salvage implants as well. (NAR will scale up automatically, I guess). * Increase Max cost to 375. Current Defectors are a bit too easy to chainpull. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNRELATED MISCELLANEOUS CHANGES that were ignored for too long. Buff ZOE – don’t change it’s damage or resist values, but increase it’s recharge speed considerably. This is a nice multipurpose abilty that has solid utility even outside of direct combat as a Mobility boost. While duration is fine, it’s recharge speed is too low to use it’s movement booster abilities often enough. With unrevivability of Maxes this ability will also see less direct combat use, so there’s that. Quasars and Heavy Cyclers – Supposed to have similar capabilities as jack of all trades starting Max weapons, but they are worlds apart – personal experience. Quasars have very significant (they are right between HCyclers and Mercies, being best of 2 worlds) accuracy advantage and better damage drop off which makes them so much better to use, while Heavy Cyclers have negligible 1.(dot)6% dps advantage. Either buff Heavy Cycler DPS (my preferred approach for asymmetric balance) or other stats to match up (or outright remove DPS “advantage” and give them Quasar accuracy, drop off and reload speed), or nerf Quasars accordingly. (my least preferred approach, variety/asymmetry is good). Blueshifts are also slightly superior to Mercies in accuracy while being exact same in everything else, but the difference is nowhere near as staggering as between Quasars and H-Cyclers, so not a big deal. TR guns lack of firing audio that makes it so much harder to subconciously time your bursts compared to playing VS Max... I have no hopes on this one anymore, so nvm me.
Nice forum bugs, I Ctrl+V reddit thread's name and it automatically posted the thread instead of copy-pasting thread's name (Firefox). Moderators, if you read this, please move bold text in beginning of original message to the thread's name. (no need to have it bold there, ofc, just a proper thread name)
