My Tank Feedback

[quicklite]

So, I've been playing this game for enough time to get a pretty good idea on the functionality of most of the tanks. And so I figure that it's time to give a little bit of feedback about how I think some tanks should improve, and what tanks I think there should be (though we're talking themes of tanks here, not precise tanks). Bear in mind that this list will change and update when I get/change new opinions.

Tanks that could be improved

Cobra

The problem

The Cobra is a great concept. Have one of the most damaging CQC tanks and one of the most potent shields in exchange for being vulnerable from every other side other than the front. However, the former just really isn't. I spent 10 seconds of point blanking just to kill a drill minion. One that a Hurricane, Mustang, or even something like a Fury could've killed in 3 seconds or less. And given your shielding, you can't always point blank things. So, keep the tank and it's shielding, but the shotgun needs some serious buffing imo.

The Solution

There are 2 solutions: One that keeps the tank vaguely the same, and one that makes it unique. The first one is to buff the shotgun's damage. Simple as that. But the second one is to nerf the damage, but quadruple the fire rate. Think flamethrower. If the first idea happens, keep all the triggers the same. If the second one happens, then switch the 'boost fire rate and damage' trigger for a 'add slight, but stackable DoT to shotgun' trigger. Because that would be awesome ^^.

The Wolverine

The Problem

Even after the nerf, this tank is still undesputably the best tank in the game. Which no tank should be. Ever. Why is it like this? Well, firstly, it has great shielding, meaning that if the user isn't an idiot, he can rig the Wolverine to take really heavy fire. Couple this with trigger 3, which still has a fast enough cooldown to help steadily replace your shields when they die, and with triggers 2 and 4, which when combined give the wolverine possibly the highest dps in grid12, and you have a seriously powerful tank. Which can take out entire drills and deltas on its own in relatively little time.

The Solution

Choose. Either nerf triggers 2 and 4 so that they can't punch a hole through a drill's defenses in just 1 go, or nerf the shielding as well as replacing trigger 3 with some petty slow-hull-regen trigger, so that the wolverine is still a total beast at CQC, but when its shields go, they will just go instead of being constantly restored to max instantly. In other words, choose between a bullet sponge or a glass cannon, because it really shouldn't be both.

The Valkyrie

The Problem

The Valkyrie should be a pretty cool tank.It seems to be a combination of a Mustang, a Cobra, and a few random triggers and it is pretty awesome. But it really isn't. Its shotgun is pretty, but I have yet to see it actually damage something. Its shields are understandably crappy, and its guns can kill stuff, but not even nearly as fast as every other gun on on every other tank. Its triggers are meh so all you are left with is a pretty unremarkable tank. Unremarkable dps, unremarkable shields, unremarkable triggers. Where's the fun in that?

The Solution

There are several solutions to this, but I'll just say my 2 favourites imo. The first one is to keep the guns as crappy pea-shooters, but then to seriously buff the shotty's damage, but also seriously nerf its fire rate. So every 4-5 seconds or something you get an awesome shotgun blast that takes a sizable chunk out of your enemies, but aside from that, the valkrie is left extremely vunerable and needs to survive. The other option is to buff the guns, but change the triggers to not only have very fast cooldowns, but also so that the triggers apply debuffs to your shotgun. That way, although your shotgun still doesn't do much, it can be rigged to decrease movement/ turret rotation speed/damage/etc. of your enemies, which would give the valkrie a new use entirely.

The Scorpion

The Problem

I want to love the Scorpion. I really do. I love the concept, I love the design, and I freaking love shooting missles. Just the one problem is the missles. Firstly, aside from the missle turret buff, there are no missle triggers. A missle tank should really have missle triggers. But that isn't the main problem. The main problem is the missles themselves. Firstly, if I position myself correctly, my tank will start firing off missles, but highly irregularly and inefficiently, meaning that I have to stand very still and take loads of damage in order to let off the 8-12ish missiles to damage something. Out of these missles, 1-3 will malfunction, spin out, sputter and die, 1-2 will have targeting issues and go after something that not only wasn't I aiming at, but wasn't even a threat anyway (seriously, I've had 3 missles go around an entire drill refinery that I was aiming at just to hit the minions of the mini-fort behind it), and then 1-2 will just miss entirely. And then the remaining missles do a decent amount of damage, but not an extraordinary amount. Therefore, I view the Scorpion as a tank that you have to put loads of effort just to have it be an okay tank.

The Solution

Firstly, the missles. Either buff the damage so that all that effort means that you can kill stuff, put some increased speed into the missles, as well as increased thrusters and possibly a 'lock on' targeting thing so you can know what your missles are actually going after. Or you could ditch that, and go for a salvo-esque burst fire paired with the lock-on thing I mentioned earlier. That will let you get into range, let off a swarm of missles to take out a chunk of health of a structure, or at least kill a few minions, and then retreat to assault again. Secondly, the triggers. A shotgun and a blink-forward trigger does not belong on the Scorpion, which dominates at mid-range, not close range. Replace these with 2 of these 3 triggers:
1) A swarm of missles that fly directly forwards. Think rocket launcher from Bubble Tanks 3. If you've never played that game before, just look up the rocket launcher on youtube or something.
2) 5 fast-flying seeker missiles could be released.
3) A single, straight-flying missle that explodes on impact with a decent amount of splash damage.
Secondly, add some aesthetic to the missles! Without actually changing them, add a little explosion animation on impact, just to make using them that much more satisfying :3

I'll add more tank feedback things later, when I have more time.

Tanks there should be

1) A DoT tank. And we're not talking about an assassin-esque tank which has guns with one DoT special. We're talking about a true DoT tank. It would have main guns that do one sort of DoT, mini guns that would do another sort of DoT, a shotgun and AoE trigger that would do DoT, and everything stackable. You could literally watch your enemies melt over time.

2) A debuff tank. If the Valkyrie isn't made into one, then one should be made to be like this. Basically, a tank that fights its enemies by de-buffing them to the point where they are seriously weak, and them mopping them up. Would be an interesting concept and a pretty sweet team-mate.

3) A gatling gun tank. Seriously fast RoF and dps, but the gun should have a very small turning radius to shoot things with (so that the enemy has to be practically in front of you to be killed, a bit like the hornet). A spray n pay sort of tank

4) A melee tank. See my other thread .

I'll add more of these too, when I can think of them.

What do you guys think? Did I get anything wrong? Sorry for the bad grammar, I have this forum bug where if I make a grammatical error, I can't really correct it.

[bejkee]

Regarding the Cobra:
I feel that the damage output is quite good if you manage to position yourself in such a way that you can simultaneously hit several enemies. However, from my experience it feels as if the damage to a single damage is more or less equal if you hit them from point blank, or from maximum range. This sort of feels wrong. A large-spread shotgun should i.m.o. deal quite a lot higher damage at point-blank, than at maximum range. This would open the exciting possibility of risk-vs-reward, if you could drive in and massively shotgun something and really be vulnerable, or stay back and quietly dispose of 10 enemies at the same time.

[hypevosa]

I think we can fix the cobra with some good abilities.

1. Triple tap - the turret fires 3 shots in quick succession for massive damage. (lowest cooldown)
2. Circular Sweep - The turret rotates and fires resulting in a complete circle of destruction over 6 seconds (long cooldown)
3. Instant full heal
4. Blink (to get into the middle of things for circular sweep or out of trouble)

[bejkee]

I was more thinking about having the damage dependent on your distance to the enemy.

Lets assume, that the maximum range equals 1 (I don't know exactly how distances are defined anyway). Let d be the distance between your tank and the enemy. Let B be the base damage and DMG equal total damage to the enemy.
Your damage would then be:
if d<0.15:  
.     DMG=B * 3       % do tripple damage if the enemy is closer than 15 % of your range
elseif d<0.7:
.     DMG=B * 3 - 2*B*(d-0.15)/0.55        % do linearly decreasing damage
else:
.     DMG=B     % do base damage to enemies farther than 70 % of your range



I'm assuming, the game already knows the distance to all the nearby enemies, since it has to decide where to aim the turret, so this shouldn't be too computationally intense. You could then reduce the base damage a bit and still have the shotgun deal massive damage to nearby enemies.

EDIT: comments in the pseudo-code

[hypevosa]

Mar 19, 2013 6:00:24 GMT -5 bejkee said:

I was more thinking about having the damage dependent on your distance to the enemy.

Lets assume, that the maximum range equals 1 (I don't know exactly how distances are defined anyway). Let d be the distance between your tank and the enemy. Let B be the base damage and DMG equal total damage to the enemy.
Your damage would then be:
if d<0.15:  
.     DMG=B * 3       % do tripple damage if the enemy is closer than 15 % of your range
elseif d<0.7:
.     DMG=B * 3 - 2*B*(d-0.15)/0.55        % do linearly decreasing damage
else:
.     DMG=B     % do base damage to enemies farther than 70 % of your range



I'm assuming, the game already knows the distance to all the nearby enemies, since it has to decide where to aim the turret, so this shouldn't be too computationally intense. You could then reduce the base damage a bit and still have the shotgun deal massive damage to nearby enemies.

EDIT: comments in the pseudo-code

I understand, but I don't think we can scale the damage so much to make it desirable. You either would end up with no damage on distant tanks, making the tank utterly useless at distance, or you'd end up with such high close range damage it would be game breaking since they could sit on otherwise difficult targets for any other high damage class. If we buff it's HP too much to compensate for the necessary mechanics, it again becomes broken.

I'd rather we get some good abilities on it first and see if it really needs any more balancing after that.

[rob]

Mar 19, 2013 6:00:24 GMT -5 bejkee said:

I was more thinking about having the damage dependent on your distance to the enemy.

Shotgun weapons such as Cobra, Valkyrie and the many triggered shotguns already work like this. Damage falls off linearly to zero at extreme range.

[hypevosa]

Mar 19, 2013 8:29:43 GMT -5 rob said:

Mar 19, 2013 6:00:24 GMT -5 bejkee said:

I was more thinking about having the damage dependent on your distance to the enemy.

Shotgun weapons such as Cobra, Valkyrie and the many triggered shotguns already work like this. Damage falls off linearly to zero at extreme range.

Thought I'd remembered reading that somewhere, wasn't certain enough to say it outright though. Thanks for confirmation.

[quicklite]

Since this thread has focused on the cobra (and I'm fine with that), I'll state my thoughts on what the cobra is, and what I'd want it to become instead.

Firstly, I know that the cobra is supposed to hit multiple enemies, and that the shotgun can't be too powerful because it is technically a trigger on every other tank (except the valkyrie, but that shotgun is pretty meh anyway), and it is undesputably one of the best tanks for clearing small fortresses, but I still think that against anything bigger, it just doesn't do enough to either clear out minions (have you tried getting a cobra to kill a plane squad?) or destroy structures to compensate for the fact that if either a) your only shield is depleted, which happens a lot because it takes all the fire for obvious reasons, and b) if something gets behind you, you will be badly damaged and have to fall back or escape. However, I don't think that the way to fix this is just seriously OP triggers. I like the idea of a tank which relies solely on its powerful main weapon to make up for its highly inadequate shielding and triggers. That's why I brought up the flamethrower idea: it would do this exact thing in a very unique, relatively easy to program and highly aesthetically-pleasing way. And it would be a tank that frankly I'd love to use.

[hypevosa]

I suggested the triggers I gave because the motif of the tank seems to be severe lack of defenses and options for attack in exchange for overall badassery, otherwise the slowly rotating triple laser cannon of doom with it's overdrive is many times better at everything, and the wildfire offers better crowd control.

Compare my triggers to any other current high damage output triggers (avenger, wildfire, wolverine) and you'll see they're not even remotely OP, unless you're saying all the tanks on overdrive are OP.

I'm just working with the tank as is and trying to balance it this way, I'm not sure how the flamethrower idea would work, but it's easier to make triggers I'd assume than a brand new weapon/effect.

EDIT: As a note, my 360 sweep was also meant to disable movement/rotation to prevent abuse, and it should probably take 3 not 6 seconds.

[bejkee]

rob: That's cool! Imo, this is .how shotguns should be. tbh, the last time I played it, with the HP bars on I felt that it is made like this, but wasn't quite certain.

hypevosa: actually I kind of like your ideas for triggers, except perhaps for the 360 one.

quicklite sorry for de-railing this, I'll try to make up for it.

New idea: how would you feel if the tanks with the shotguns (cobra & valkyre) did more damage to minions, but less damage to buildings? this would make them more of a team player and the valkyre more attractive with the front turrets more geared towards killing structures and the shotgun taking care of the pesky minions.

[hypevosa]

The 360 sweep is intended as a means of dealing with being surrounded (really important for a tank with no shields to the aft or rear). I wanted to do something a little more interesting than just having a centralized explosion or adding a random new weapon. I also wanted it to be a strong offensive option for those who are not to attached to their 12/12 prisms.

[quicklite]

bejkee imo, you didn't derail the thread at all. I mean, the thread was about 'tank feedback', and we're technically still discussing tank feedback, be it just for one tank instead of multiple tanks. So, as I said earlier, I'm completely fine with the direction that this thread has went.

hypevosa that wasn't exactly what I meant. Looking back at it, I have to agree that OP was completely the incorrect choice of word though. What I was trying to say is that I thought it might be interesting to improve the cobra via its primary weapondary, instead of via its triggers. There's already a whole lot of tanks that basically derive their power from their triggers, and it would be nice to have another tank that thrives in its normal weapons, with its triggers as just a nice addition. If you see what I mean there.

And the flamethrower-ish idea was just to nerf the damage, but quadruple the fire rate. To get a sort of flamethrower-like feeling. Coupled with trigger 3 being replaced with a slight, but stackable DoT being added to the shotgun. To summarize that idea, it is 'as long as you can keep the enemy in front of you, and your shields intact, you can slowly degrade them via your onslaught of rapid-fire shotgun awesomeness'. I'm not saying that this is the best idea, and I could see why you'd disagree with this, but s'just an opinion ^^.