Posted 15 November 2015 - 05:53 AM
I can admire the courage it takes to admit that you are not ready to do something when you have hyped it and worked towards it for the better part of half a year. However, coming less than a month before the Steam release this rebalance is...not inspiring.
Instead of what was touted as major rebalance with a move away from weapon quirks we get...this.
Instead of the skill trees being revamped, they are instead reduced by as much as 87.5%
Information warfare which was supposed to be a cornerstone of the rebalance isn't happening at all.
Some of the more egregious actors in IS weapon quirks are being reigned in at long last (though the RVN-4X retains its incredible +30% laser range, -30% laser duration quirks) but the condensing of the majority of the weapon quirks into generic (Exp. Energy Range plus Med Pulse Range into a single Energy Range quirk), enhances the flexibility of the IS mechs further.
Meanwhile the listing of Clan Quirks is held off until the very day the test server goes live. Easy enough to point at a weekend, but at what point does explanation stop being an explanation and become an excuse?
The Clans are OP. However PGI had already taken steps to balance this. Longer beam-durations, taking away pinpoint ballistics (except gauss rifle), avoiding the 15 pinpoint ERPPC entirely by going to splash damage, longer cooldown cycles on missiles, streamed LRMs that give IS AMS more time to engage the missiles, higher heat the weapons produced, more severe caps on # of weapons to produce ghost heat, were all measures put in place to generally curb the Clan's range-damage advantage.
Further increasing the disparity in LRM cooldown rates, reducing laser max ranges, increased ammunition for IS LB-10X... These are all refinements of the existing balance. If we can't have a major overhaul of how things are balanced, these are a good way to go.
And then we get to the heatsinks and engine changes.
IS Single heatsinks will have a greater capacity than double heatsinks? Really? I mean...wow. Words fail.
And players have already been targeting Clan Mech side torsos. They have less armor than CT and so are easier to shoot off, and take a good number of weapons with it. Now, because PGI hasn't been able to implement actual engine criting, they have decided to hammer Clan players with a handicap for being Clan players. (And yes, I fully realize that if an IS pilot puts an XL and his side torso gets shot away he is dead, but he has a choice to run that engine, the Clan player does not). My point is, if PGI could figure out engine criting, the robustness of Clan engines (3 crits before destruction vs IS two crits) would be offset by their volume over IS standard engines).