Why the nanoweave rebalance is probably a Bad Idea

So to make snipers "useful" again (lmao) SOE has decided to change nanoweave from a pure health buff to a damage resistance against small arms. Along the way they decide "Hey, infantry combat is in a pretty good place right now, let's change it for no reason." So now you get a double nanoweave nerf where NW will lose its effectiveness against headshots for all weapons.

Why SOE thought this was necessary is beyond me, but let me explain why this will be bad idea for the benefit of everyone here.

This change is going to end up shaking up balance for no good reason. Infantry vs. infantry combat has long been in a good place ever since the general shotgun nerf. So what I see here is first of all a shotgun buff. A pretty big one actually when you consider how easy it is get a lucky pellet headshot when aiming for upper chest/collarbone area. Something like a random pump pellet goes from taking 1/4 of a NW users health with the current mechanics to eating up 40% with the revised nanoweave.

Other issues that I see is the way knife attacks will interact with nanoweave now. It will likely be an unresisted attack type. You can already pretty well destroy nano 5 users by putting in a few shots and then mashing your melee when you think it is the right time.

It’s not as dumb as CoD knife mechanics, but I don’t think fights should be abruptly ended with the push of a button. Nanoweave changes will favor this type of “fight” even more if knife attacks come in unresisted after someone takes your shields down with 3-4 shots.

There is also no way to tell at this point whether this will favor high rof, low damage guns or whether low rof, high damage guns will start owning even harder on headshots and after the change to nanoweave resists. Personally, I think shaking up the balance in this way is a bad idea. Both “camps” are in a good place. High damage weapons like the TMG-50/Cyclone/EM6/Saw are all objectively amazing guns. The same for their counterparts that weigh in at xxx@143. I think if anything things like carbines and SMGs will become even better for the ease with which you can headshot people with them.

These sweeping changes for the sake of a vocal group of players are not worth it. The simple thing to do would be to make bolt action rifles a special gun that is headshot guaranteed at 150 meters, regardless of nanoweave. Then tweak the headshot multiplier of semi auto rifles so they are competitive against nanoweave resists. Done. It doesn't have to be any more involved than that.

Head shots being deadly - Great
Giving choice of armor some gravity rather than NW being the default go to - Great
Putting a cap on sniper headshot distance - ******* ********

Why do you think all this is done to buff snipers? Nanoweave is a flawed concept. It gives you a flat 25% health buff, without any balancing cons.
they will buff flak, but i guess at one point that will also be nerfed. one cert being superior to anything else is just bad game design.

The one I am worried about is Flak. Why the hell should infantry survive a direct rocket to the face? Unless it is a phoenix of course.

The way SOE is going about nerfing nanoweave is pretty moronic. Just by making it a small arms resistance exclusively is enough to make other choices like flak and grenade bandolier more viable now. It does not need a blanket reduction in effectiveness against headshots on top of all that to make different suit slot choices happen.

Nanoweave was being used to the exclusion of anything else. Because it was too good in too many situations. Now it's just a sidegrade, like the rest. Which is fine. No one sidegrade should be vastle superior


It's not really "shaking up balance" since weapon balance essentially hinged on 1000 health to begin with. The game was just fine before nano-weave was this overly useful suit slot that both "shook up balance" and created a noticeable gap between new and old players alike in infantry firefights. All it's doing is bringing it into line with other suit upgrades. Not to mention a significant raw health increase translated over to other areas, like dealing with explosive damage.

they like to double and tripple nerf things, nothing we can do about it. if it gets nerfed to hard it will (maybe) be buffed again, if not, i will still not cry that a flat upgrade in a direct firefight is not as useful

So rockets should be survived apart from certain types... Just make Phoenix less agile but a direct hit should kill again.

Less agile? It's already a brick with wings; if it was any less agile I would be better off running out and bashing my target with the launcher.

Will have to see how it works out with any other changes they planned.

I dislike how the change lowers the overall ttk which is a bad thing in my opinion but other than that i don't mind.

well, as long as those TTKs arent taking into account NW5, then they shouldnt be changing at all. the only thing really changing is the fact nanoweave will no longer be as overly useful as it is now

SABR-13 and go to town with those headshots baby!

Less agile so that it is only viable to hit vehicles, which is its original role

Indeed.

Notable with every new character... I think NW4/5 actually brings the game to a proper pace. I would like to see a minor health buff at least if they change NW that much.

They are redesigning nanoweave to make it "balanced" and ofc other options more viable, but well for the most part the rest options are still pretty useless. Flak armor getting buffed against direct impact. Sorry but how is this more useful? Are you constantly gettin shelled by tanks? Are you afk midway to quartz ridge from excavation site? It is so rare to get killed by rocket in your face...I even die on claymores quite more often.
In what possible environment you will need that explosive resistance other than zerg rock where you get shelled from all sides by enemy tanks? Whereas people who use nanoweave will still have more chances at gunfights over you no matter what. I say 60 to 70% of this game is infantry, so not having better survivability against prime threat is kind of stupid. In the game of bad netcode and average latency one additional bullet you eat will often make sense, I dont see how anyone would use flak armor over it other than dedicated tankers to avoid getting shelled while repairing.

On the other side of the coin, MAX getting direct hit resistance is going to be invulnerable with an engi or even without him.

Lets talk about other options to NW and FLAK

Advanced kill shield capacitor, they made a buff to it, but its still a joke. This is like upgrading you Nanite repair to repair faster. It doesnt give you straight away upgrade over standard infantry suit. So, basically other than for infiltrator it is useless.

Ammo belt just gives you 2-4 more magazines, its good enough but hardly a replacement for health/resistance upgrade, because unless you're LA shredding oblivious BR1's you wont need all that ammo. You will get killed.

Grenade bandolier is better than the rest, but its still not viable option over the health/resistance upgrade, because every player wants to live longer in the game and kill more and will almost always chose armor over more guns. Besides, frag grenade is horrible and often is deflected by some random ally head. For the rest grenade types, its not worth having them more then just one.

No sane person would pick adrenaline pump, while you can have drifters and be twice more effective.

Utility pouch is also a joke, 5 ranks to get 1 more proxy mine? Total cost of gazillion certs? For having exposive that you might wont use at all, whereas NW or FLAK works all the time.

SOE should not put together survivability upgrades and extended ammo upgrades in the same slot. Nobody would use new flak other than first week after change, everybody will be back to nanoweave so no recert is needed anyway.

P.S. With all these changes to the changes to the changes and hotfixes to the hotfixes to the hotfixes it seems like SOE is a bunch of first grad college students that pay zero attention to what are they actually doing and not even caring to think through.

Because you've spent like 1500+ certifications on the Flak armor and yet it helps you against only half of the explosive they are throwing at you, it just doesn't feel right, everytime I get ohk by a br10 or even br90 with a Rocket Launcher with my Flak Armor 5 I feel bored, I've woked hard for it and I'm sacrificing 50% more health from the nanoweave for a suit that doesn't help me in the vast majority of the cases?
The flak armor buff will finally make it viable.
The nanoweave "Change" will help a lot against stray bullets when running from cover to cover and still be viable,
indiret godsaw commissioner buff muahahah!
The Sniper changes are well welcome as you won't have to bother with having nanoweave anymore just because you fear snipers headshots, you'll deal with it and be free of choosing your suit regardless of snipers.

I only see benefits from the upcoming changes, as we've been asking for them for 4,5 months now, how could we dislike them now?

The problem is many vehicles can actually outrun it now.

I suspect it'll flip back to Flak 5 being the go to option (as it sort of was a few months ago before they nerfed things then).

Regardless of the outcome I believe it'll still be a better experience than having 75% of the players out there with an increased health pool which helped against all kind of damage, falling / explosions / small arms fire and everything that comes to your mind, instead we'll have an average number of people more resistant to one hit kills which helps especially in squad actions as a teammate dying out of nowhere is always a potential factor of failure of the action, also it'll add to the MAX av weapons nerf, for which comets/fractures/ravens will be heavily weakened against Infantry (atleast on paper), in the end I foresee a quality of life improvement for the average infatry player and less nanoweave's ruled 1v1 fights, as of now if 2 good infantry players encounters each other the outcome is certain if one of them doesn't have nw5, things wil change and for the better!

just wait and see the flurry of grenade bandolier hate threads when a biolab fight turns in to dodging the red icons popping up all over the map