So the NPE patch notes contain this: "Reduced maximum damage of Cortium Bomb against completed construction objects from 9000 to 5500." The health of an elysium spawn tube is 8000. I absolutely don't understand the thinking here. First, the cortium bomb received a massive buff by removing placement restrictions in one of the previous updates. You used to be able to make it extremely difficult for cloakers to plant a bomb inside a garage for example by smart module placement. Skill in building used to be rewarded, but now it just doesn't matter, you can place your bomb pretty much anywhere. This of course made it extremely easy for cloakers to just rush through your garage and plant a bomb that would take out your spawn, pain spire, rep module etc. And what's the solution? Just reducing the cortium bomb to just damage and not destroy most construction items, even ones that are soft targets. I have several suggestions on how to improve the cortium bomb meta: 1) Reinstate the restrictions for cortium bomb placement, and maybe also remove the ability to place the bomb on top of modules or other construction items. 2) Add an arming process that takes three seconds to the cortium bomb during which you have to stand still, instead of just being able to drop it off while running. 3) Allow destruction of the cortium bomb by shooting it (hp could be tweaked as needed to make it not too easy and not too hard) Placing the bomb should be difficult. Defusing it should not be instant but also not impossible. And when the thing goes off, it should have an appropriate amount of damage done.
The only positive here is that they are even looking at the thing but yeah this change wont really do anything.
Oh, so you're upset that Cloak Sundy using solo Infil ****ters are killing your construction with a dinky bomb, and you can't stop them from constantly trying over and over like the gremlins they are? Okay! Then Cortium Bombs won't kill! That'll fix the problem, right? ...Er, right? (and as Botji says, at least they're finally looking at the damn thing instead of pretending it doesn't exist.)
I would rather they just got rid of them entirely, but that would involve admitting they were a mistake. At least they can't one hit kill my spawn tube faster than a redeploy anymore. It's not what I was hoping for, but it's an improvement, so I'll try to keep the griping in check on this one
Yeah the way it's now, they could as well delete it. I agree with that. But it's not the fact that they made a cortium bomb in the first place that was the mistake. They are simply too quick to place and there's almost no restriction where you can place them anymore. If that were fixed, using them would be a lot harder. Also I think you should be able to shoot them - though that should either take a bit more damage to do, or shooting it could result in a weaker explosion.
The fact it can still be placed anywhere Instantly but requires a long defuse time isn't even the real problem with them. The real problem is that anyone can just pull one, drop it, then use a Resupply terminal from either a bunker or a Sundy to just spam as many additional bombs as their "Merit" can afford. And considering it's what, 100 merit each? ...there's really no limit to how fast someone can instantly destroy a FULL silo. I think they really need to limit that first, If a player puts a second Bomb on the ground, it should remove the first Bomb that's still counting down
Considering how vulnerable the spawn tube is to simple small arms fire I doubt you will be able to redeploy anyway, drop bomb and shoot the tube a little and the bomb will kill it anyway. Only way to have a fighting chance is to completely seal the base with high enough walls that they cant park their Sundie next to a wall and jump over it... not even sure if its possible to prevent that, Catlike implant + Sundie might be enough to jump over anyway. Main problem with this is that a single person doesnt really have enough walls to do it unless its a really small base with pretty much just a air terminal but not everyone builds bases just to spam aircraft :/ Depending on the location it can be possible to put a turret outside the walls and enter/exit the turret through a small gap or window as a way to get outside the wall but its just stupid how much planning and effort is required to stop what is pretty much the worst type of players(both in skill and attitude) in the game from just walking up to your base and blowing it up because no one is there for the 20-30 seconds it takes them to neuter the base.
I do a lot of sealed base Configs. And the only config which allows you to fit an Air Terminal and a Garage inside the base itself, is generally going to be vulnerable to Cat5-jumping or Lag-Wizard wall climbing if it's on any sort of slope. The other main issue is as soon as you place the Air Terminal outside your main base, you're just giving the Infil enemy player a free Valk ride over your sealed walls anyway. ...then there's the other issue of them rolling up in their own Sundy to a back side wall and just flying over it out of line of sight of your AI Turret and spamming their Bombs that way... Even if my base was sealed perfectly and one of these Bomb Exploiters was in the area, I'd remove one of the walls myself to replace it with a Gate-Shield instead so I could wheel in my own Deploy/Shield Sundy because that's the only real way I've discovered to defend your base Solo against one of these cowards who only comes out of hiding to SMG or knife you in the back while you're trying to disarm the 5 or 6 Bombs they're spamming down Aside from that, the most "defensible" spawn config outside of Babysitting your own base the entire time, is to NOT put a shield Module in your Garage where the Tube is, instead have the AI turret overlooking straight into the open garage where the Tube and the Targeting Module can both be covered by the turret on one side and a Pain field on the other side ...I've learned to not clump modules together in general, gotta spread them around
The solution is much simpler. Just remove those bombs. Or make them unavailable for infil. These bombs are a mistake of developers, which they are trying to change with crutches.
Well to be honest, if you place a bunker nearby you're just asking for it. BUT: I would absolutely support a larger no-deploy radius around existing cortium bombs. You could even make it so large that there can only ever be one bomb in one base. This could be done on top of the suggestions above and would tie in to the "make it harder to deploy bombs, instead of nerfing them". Bottom line is: If you build your base a certain way, it should be nigh impossible to place a cortium bomb that destroys your spawn tube in one go. But it should be building skill that rewards you with that, not a flat nerf.
As someone who plays stalker infil a lot, cortium bombs are basically your ideal honeypot. I'm sure you've all experienced getting knifed or pistoled or crossbowed while trying to use a vehicle terminal, now imagine that vehicle terminal is anywhere I want to put it, and you have to use it within 20 seconds or your base takes some critical damage. At least with a vehicle terminal you can go somewhere else, spend some time looking around with a flashlight, securing the area, whatever, but with the corium bombs you have to act right away. 20 seconds is not much time, and then you have to stand there at an enemy determined location in an enemy determined timeframe. Imagine Counter Strike with terrorists as stalker cloakers. There's just no way to balance that. Another thing that happens from time to time is I just get a guy running at my base over and over as a light assault from a sunderer somewhere just popping off cortium bombs like they're free. They can lay siege to my base while still being able to run all over the place, shoot, heal, defend their spawn, etc. God forbid it's a sunderer with an overshield, then I'm basically toast even if I find it. Usually if I play *particularly* well it ends up being a trade. I lose half my base and they die like 3 times and lose their sunderer. If I'm evenly matched or worse than they are at shooting I'm losing my whole base basically. It's pretty crazy that you can invest like 10k certs and 30-40 minutes of building into a base and then be at a disadvantage against one attacker.
Yes there is. Make it harder to deploy those things. Reward good base building by making it possible to negate the effective use of cortium bombs, and limit the number of simultaneous bombs. There are more ways to balance this, taking a rock paper scissors approach: For example, you could make it so the painfield area doesn't let you place a cortium bomb. IMHO there would also need to be a limit to the ability to place repair modules next to pain fields - but you get the idea. Bottom line: There's plenty of ways to balance cortium bombs without making them just about as weak as 11 knife swipes. EDIT: As a side note, I always found it weird how one has complete free roam deep inside enemy territory. I'd absolutely be in favor of certain attainable benefits like hex-wide motion sensing, all base turrets auto-firing at enemy vehicles like in Planetside 1, etc. - anything that makes killing people at vehicle terminals deep within their territory less of a cheap shot.
Could always just do the counter strike method and have it pulse a loud countdown timer. Personally, I think it would be an interesting minigame or side game to have a cortium bomb arm for about a minute and a half while beeping real loud after thirty seconds have passed. Attackers gotta defend their bomb stash while defenders gotta attack the bomb pile. It would coordinate well with a small squad style gameplay and reward high skill gameplay due to the smaller squad sizes that usually see construction play.
Yeah those are valid thoughts, but I guess I would just say that as long as you have a defusal mechanic which is "Person X must stand at location Y for Z seconds" as long as "location Y" is predetermined by whoever planted the bomb and "Z seconds" is more than two, it's going to be insanely easy to murder whoever goes for the defusal. If making it hard to plant is the goal, I'm not sure if there's a good way to do that that would be effective without creating other problems. I guess before charging forward on a suggested solution I'd really like to know what problem exists in this game that the cortium bomb is supposed to solve? Is it just to make it easier to destroy things that are completely undefended? If that's the intent, then making it basically impossible to plant quickly / stealthily (due to a loud noise or long arming time) would work fine, and could also involve a short offense/defense skirmish (although we do still have the problem of fragile spawns in a base)
There's two things at play here: 1) Bomb placement. Making it harder to place it (for example via interactions with certain construction items) means less chance of a cortium bomb existing. 2) Bomb defusal. I agree that the pure timer is kinda meh, for the very reason you mentioned. However there's ways to solve this! For example, you could have the decon tool decon those bombs. If you don't have a decon tool, tough luck. If you do have a decon tool in hand, you're set. Or you could have the bomb be defused by using EMP grenades. So you have to decide whether to carry EMP to deal with the bomb, or other nades. There's no good way to deal with certain bases, especially ones built using certain issues within the game that result in, say, a self-healing silo with an unreachable rep module. Right now, there's zero reason to use a cortium bomb. The fact of the matter is that a few stabs with an anti-material knife do more damage. The cortium bomb doesn't even take down a single module on its own. That's just silly. A stupidly built base should be able to be destroyed relatively easily (Looking at all you folks who helpfully put up an equipment terminal and then wonder why their base goes down so quickly). A well built base should be very hard to destroy, but not impossible. Covering all attack vectors should require multiple builders working together intelligently.
