Damage Reductions...

[pooty]

Forgot about Arbiter’s primary fire, it needs changing or fixing, it’s completely useless.

It fires a plasma burst. Might be fun to make it fairly damaging, but slow firing. Good for high damage to nodes, slow tanks, Levis, but would be easily dodged by players, flyers and mantas. This would give the Arbiter a bit of another purpose besides just anti-air.

[Enyo]

Forgot about Arbiter’s primary fire, it needs changing or fixing, it’s completely useless.

It fires a plasma burst. Might be fun to make it fairly damaging, but slow firing. Good for high damage to nodes, slow tanks, Levis, but would be easily dodged by players, flyers and mantas. This would give the Arbiter a bit of another purpose besides just anti-air.

That's not a bad idea, maybe something slightly less damaging than a link tank's primary fire, but similar in rate of fire and plasma size.

Now, how about that rail tank alt fire range?

[pooty]

For the Primary I am thinking slow fire, 1s, as it fires a "volley" of six plasma bolts. Thinking those would do about 150 damage total (25 each), and have a high vehicle multipler (1.75) to do about 262 per shot to a vehicle... which is more damage that 1s of sustained falcon fire. But it delivers a big whallop all at once. You could swoop in, or pound a node from far away and do pretty good damage.

Rail Gun Range 17000 (same as SR). Really anything farther, at least on AJY, puts you out past visible and no one wants to be sniped by something they can't see.

Damage, so it has the option for variable rail damage. It was at 350/350, but rather than a complete nerf to say 200-225, I can set min to like 175, max to 275, so you don't always get a one shot kill (on raptors), but you might get lucky and get a one shot kill... that might be more fun since its more "random".... Also if I will use vehicle damage scaling so players take half... which should give those on foot a chance to fight back, maybe.

[pooty]

Updated Arbiter 1.42 on server.
Rail Gun Range 17000 (was shortened to 14500). Still shorter than the Dragon though.
Rail Gun Damage is now variable 176-276 (random spread), on foot takes 1/2 damage. So yes you can one shot raptors occasionally.
Primary fire is a slow firing, heavy damaging six plasma volley. Should be good on slow vehicles and nodes.
Health 200 to 275
Improved strafe and some agility -- its still not a "dogfighter" and it still has slower rise..

Lets see how this works and we can tweak from there.

My impressions against stupid bots.. with some timing primary fire is (might be too ) damaging. Rail fire still is pretty lethal to flyers, and any wounded flyers are likely dead.

[pooty]

After much

People complained the arbiter is too weak. Which was sort of ironic, given that RacerX and I were discussing overpowered flyers....

So I propose:
Rail Gun Damage is now variable 200-300 (random spread), on foot takes 1/2 damage. So yes you can one shot raptors more often.
Speed up secondary shot from 1 shot every 3s, to maybe 2.5s?
Health stays at 275, not sure where people say 1 LG and 2 SR kill it? That's no even 200? (70+45+45)

The real goal I think, is we just don't want 1 shot kill hit scan flyers. Its no fun to get in a fly get zipped and basically instagibbed from some flyer you can't even see...get in another flyer get zipped again immediately.. not fun. At least with mino you know where it is after the first shot, with Arbiter it flys away and hides...

Many of the flyers are too powerful. It comes down to balance, and this applies to all vehicles...
Take the Wasp, lots of damage, but has limitation has to be upclose.
Same with BioTank, lots of damages, no range.
RailTank can zap flyers in one shot, but angle is limited.
etc.

So I think we should take another look at the vehicles, I think mostly flyers, since the flyers have such an advantage...A Falcon can easily destroy a mino...

So if something say has great range, then it needs to be either easy to kill, or not agile, or some other weakness to offset.
So say the Predator, Falcon -- great range, moves very well, very little weakness... are those balanced? not sure myself. They fall prey to a good laser gunner and many, many vehicles have good lasers. I think part of what RacerX felt (please jump in here), is because of the Randomizers...you get a free for all of vehicles... and you might get some good flyers without good anti-air, whereas on other maps, I at least try to build in counters (if theres falcons, have a centaur or other tank with lasers).

Some of this might be skill related as well. Enyo in Falcon is going to be devastating to the other team if they don't counter, same with the Mino. Can't always blame the vehicles for skillful usage. Its also map related, think Odin in certain spots on Torlan-Linker... but put the odin on other maps and its not quite so devasting...

People complain about OP, but always VOTE OP.

[Enyo]

After much

People complained the arbiter is too weak. Which was sort of ironic, given that RacerX and I were discussing overpowered flyers....

Yeah, see my other post “is it really OP?”

[captainsnarf]

Variable damage sucks.

I'm fine with 200 damage for arbiter as long as it's range is restored. It used to be fast, good boost, have 300 hp and did 350 damage. It was then nerfed to be very slow, shitty boost, and 200 hp. This latest nerf is too much. It's now worse than most flyers. At least restore the range.

Actually, nothing hitscan should have range reduced like that. Shock and LG have 17K range. We should standardize on that for all hitscan. When it's short like arbiter it's very hard to discern if it's legit out of range or unreg. It just makes everything more frustrating. The only reason it's even slightly feasible now is because we have hit sounds now. The outlier is levi blast at 25k but it is the levi blast after all. We have a couple bugs like 50k (100k?) range for mino lasers that should be fixed, but nothing should be shorter than 17k. Technically link shaft is hit scan but it's also a continuous beam which I think is a special case that should be short.

Other than the range, I'm fine with arbiter nerf. I think xexx is right saying it's more balanced now, but other vehicles need balanced too then.

Starbolt fire rate is as fast as link shaft, but range of shock rifle, speed of wyvern, and can turn on a dime. Even the bomb is stronger than most, with big radius. I think only dragon bomb is larger. Now before you scream Enyo ( ), I only suggest nerfing it as part of a bigger strategy to nerf all the vehicles. In the end it should be just as powerful relatively to the other vehicles, as long as they all get nerfed too.

Pallas got nerfed. Spanker got nerfed. Now arbiter got nerfed. Why everyone picking on my mods?

I get it though. They were made strong to match all the OP vehicles already on the server. But now we just have more OP vehicles.

[pooty]

Range right now is 17000. The only things that are shorter (Omega - 14500, because ION blast is powerful and wide AoE, and LinkBeams--which are continuous). The one exception is the AG Spider...that thing is a bit OP too.

For Damage, how about 215 constant for the Arbiter, 200 feels weak, even I think 225 wouldn't be too bad?

Its at 275 health, so two Aribiters can't one shot each other...

I'll review the Starbolt, the bomb might be too much. Dragon does 800-1000 or so, the new FireBlade tried to keep it around 500-600, starbolt shouldn't be more than 500, more like 400ish? Think two bolt bombs to kill a goliath. I only want to reduce rate of fire because I think its hard for the server to keep up....

BTW Mino lasers are 80000, we've kept them mostly because that's the way it was and it helps the mino defend against long range flyer projectile attacks (eg. Falcon, Predator). There are vehicles with more powerful lasers but less range. The two vehicles with hitscan beyond 17000 (20000 for lasers) are the mino lasers, goliathII turret which is 28672 (not sure where that number comes from but that it is.)

Keep in mind most projectiles (tank shells rockets etc) have much longer ranges too... falcon with proper aim/leading can pepper a tank (other than mino) and be relatively safe, although 20000 is good distance on most maps (often longer than the fog).

[pooty]

From the Vehicle Guidelines thread:
As stated below we've more less standardized ranges.

But Damage is another matter. Its pretty helpful now that we have the Damage done shown in game, you can see which things do a shit ton of damage.

I am happy to adjust the vehicles but the whole point of this thread was what's standards....for Damage and Health.

For Health I think:
Manta types 200-325
Raptor types 250-375
Scorps 200-400
Badgers 600-700 (Sorry but no point to a 900 point badger)
Trucks 500-700
Base Tanks 650-900 (Goliath is 800)
Heavy/Big Tanks (1250-2000)
MAS (3000-6500) (Kraken at 10000 is just too much).

But all that depends on Damage done.
I've started spreadsheet on Damage.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

I think most vehicles should leverage the VehicleDamageMultiplier. This allows vehicle weapons to do less to players/more to vehicles. So think tank shell that does 300, maybe it only does 150 to player (VDM=2). This gives players on foot more of a chance...
For example Centaur, does 25 pts per hit on players, but 37 on vehicles.

See post below. We should set some limits on Damage
Miniguns ~150ish/s
Lasers - 150-200 ish/s
Tank Shells - Variable based on Tank strenght, DamageRadius etc.
There's always the odd ball weapon like Dark Neptys (black hole tank), or the WebCaster/Tick Scorp web, but often those have to be deployed/shot "just right"

I also wouldn't mind nerfing the spammy shit like Hurricane rockets, dragon rocket, nuke tank rockets etc.. make them work more like the Wraith where you get a certain number then firing slows and it does a "reload". It eliminates the sit and spam...better gameplay and less stress on the server....

Ultimately I use the spreadsheet to try to fit the vehicles so there isn't an OP vehicle that breaks everything.

[pooty]

Ok. Arbiter 1.43

Range for RailGun still at 17000.
Damage is 113, with double to Vehicles, so other flyers will take 226, damage previously was averaged that but the variable made it less sometimes, the original arbiter was 350! At 226 it two shots most flyers including Cicada, Wraith etc. Wounded raptor types go down easy.
Increased firing rate from one shot every 3s, to one every 2.75s
I also put some of the agility back, its still not as nimble as standard bomber.

Hopefully these changes are closer to the mark without unbalancing.