Design 514: Balancing Cloaks

As a quick note, I have only 4 or so hours of laptop battery to last the next 3 days while I'm visiting family. Boots on the Ground was meant to happen before I left, but ended up not due to DST shenanigans and me needing to be up early the next day. I'll be writing a couple of blogs while I'm gone, including this one.

So anyway, Uprising 1.8 was released recently and while not perfect from a balance standpoint, it seems much better when looking at the overall design. Classes now feel like they have actual roles. Sentinels are kings of point defence, Logistics are no longer just better assaults with more equipment, Commandos actually have a role as long range damage dealers and Scouts are fast, sneaky little buggers. There's still balancing to be done (Assaults are close to being good), but picking a dropsuit gives you a purpose on the battlefield.

One of the biggest additions with this update was the cloaking device. This was seen as controversial from the moment it was announced, but has actually turned out pretty well. Moving around while cloaked makes you visible to the keen eye, allowing good players to kill bad cloaked players. Cloaking in and of itself has been designed well and has allowed for new play styles to arise.

What has become problematic however is not cloaking itself, but rather the other benefit of the cloaking device. Not only do these provide the cloaking effect, but also a (stacking penalty free) 25% reduction to dropsuit profile. This means that scouts can be invisible to most types of detection based purely on using a cloaking device. The player Haerr has provided a handy spreadsheet that shows how this all plays out. There's a few key points I want to touch on based on this info.

Gallente can get under all detection with skills, a cloak and an enhanced profile dampener. This means that I can (and do) run a basic suit that costs barely anything but cannot be found by people spending more on a single Gallente bonused scanner or a Caldari Scout with a full stack of precision mods. The fact that my cheap suit that isn't even dedicated to avoiding it's counters can do this is a balance problem.

Outside of Gallente, other suits can get under most detection with a single complex profile dampener and under the rest with a single enhanced. So not only are they part of the same problem, but have made the benefit of being Gallente a moot point. Why specialize into Gallente when you can pick another race and get more out of it? The only advantage left to Gallente would be if you didn't care that much about avoiding the specialized counters. Unless you don't care about being a Scout.

Which brings me to the armour stacking. At the current time of posting this, the Gallente Scout that simply stacks armour is a much better than the Assault that does the same. Sure you might lose when purely comparing health, but the increased speed, the reduced dropsuit profile, the extra equipment slot and the easily fit cloak means you're just better where it matters. Throw on an enhanced dampener instead of the 4th plate and you're basically an invisible Assault. The other races are having similar issues, but the Gallente is really where the problem is most apparent.

The final problem is that there's no reason not to use the cloak when it's available. I can't think of a single instance where being cloaked isn't advantageous. Cloaking just seems so mindless when compared to other actions in the game. When I fire my weapon, I sacrifice ammo and risk the enemy knowing my position in exchange for damaging my opponent. When I drop a nanohive, I exchange an equipment slot for my team gaining additional ammo and the risk of losing said gains to the enemy destroying it. When I cloak, my only risk is when I can't find a position within 30 seconds to decloak, at which point I get my cloak back after a short period of waiting. There is no risk when it comes to cloaking. It's essentially an anti-risk device that has no drawbacks other than short, manageable periods of time where you don't use it.

While I can see what CCP were going for when they gave the cloaking device it's profile dampening, it just dumbs down the gameplay of those who use it. It allows players to be great at avoiding detection without the need to invest into anti-detection modules. It makes racial parity somewhat pointless and gives Scouts the capability to do other roles better than those who should do them best. It enables a 1 dimensional play style that has no drawbacks.

So what's the solution to this? Give it a drawback.

When CCP announced the cloaking device, my initial thoughts were that the scanner would be it's hard counter. If they reversed the dropsuit profile bonus on the cloaks, that could very well be a reality. Switching it from a 25% reduction to a 20% increase would force people to think more about when they should use their cloak. It would also force people who want reduced detection to use modules for it. It would keep Scouts from being able to do both their own role and the Assault's role at the same time. Running some quick numbers, new detection would work out like this.

Moderately dampened uncloaked Gallente Scout
Heavily dampened uncloaked non-Gallente Scout
Heavily dampened cloaked Gallente Scout
Gallente Logi focused scanner/Heavily precise Caldari Scout
Moderately dampened cloaked Gallente Scout
Lightly dampened uncloaked Gallente Scout
Moderately precise Caldari Scout
Moderately dampened uncloaked non-Gallente Scout
Focused scanner
Heavily dampened cloaked non-Gallente Scout
Gallente Logi proto scanner/Lightly precise Caldari Scout/Heavily precise non-Caldari Scout
Lightly dampened cloaked Gallente Scout
Lightly dampened uncloaked non-Gallente Scout/Regular dampened uncloaked Gallente Scout
Regular Caldari Scout
Lightly dampened cloaked non-Gallente Scout
Regular uncloaked non-Gallente Scout/Regular cloaked Gallente Scout

There's more to that list of course, but in terms of balancing it's much better than it is now. There's a sense of progression for both sides of the detection war. The best detection can only be trumped by a large investment into dampening. Being cloaked opens you to being vulnerable against certain targets while being safer against everyone else.

Does this fix everything? No. There will need to be more numbers tweaked and fine tuning. But this provides a first step in a more balanced direction.

The Plasma Cannon In Review

So after watching a video on this weapon, I figured I'd hurry up and do a review of it before too many people base their thoughts on a single opinion. I was going to save this to be part of the Mordu blog, but that is looking more and more like it'll get delayed until September (you'll see why when it comes out). But anyway, before we look into the weapon, here's a bit of backstory.

So during the Mordu event, one of the goals was to blow up 100 installations in a week. Not specialized into heavies, I decided to stick to my advanced swarm launcher. The problem with this is swarms can't target neutral installations. With the best way to score killing blows, on them being to pick empty regions and play Ambush OMS, killing neutrals was needed. This led to me trying out the Plasma Cannon.

My initial reaction was similar to the one seen in Pyrex's video. The weapon felt weak and hard to aim, requiring 4 direct hits to kill an installation with a reload between shots. It was the only thing I had though, so I grinned and beared it. Thus began my journey into learning this weapon. At this point, I wasn't keeping track of my stats at all, so I just kept hammering out games with this weapon I'd previously considered a joke.

After I'd deemed myself having passed the magical 100 destructions barrier, I decided to take it into regular matches with friends as I was still unsure of my kill assist count. Having gotten used to aiming the damn thing, I figured I'd try it out in a more "real" environment. This took a lot of getting used to as the weapon plays very differently to how you figure it would do. It's somewhat fitting that it's a hybrid between being effective against everything (Gallente use "Hybrid" weapons in EVE Online). It's an anti-vehicle weapon, but isn't as good an anti-vehicle weapon as a swarm launcher. It's a 1-hit kill weapon, but isn't as good as the shotgun or sniper rifle. It's an area denial weapon, but isn't as good as the mass driver or flaylock pistol. It's a mid-range weapon, but also works up close or far away.

Once I realized this, I experimented more with different ranges and outfits. What I discovered is that the weapon itself wasn't bad, it just had a different role to anything else in Dust. The cannon fits the role of a mid-range support weapon, designed to be used from the back of a group of players. With it's arc, you can fire it over your team-mates and score kills from range. If a vehicle shows up, you're also able to do decent damage without needing to switch to an AV fit. With enough practice, you can land shots up close or far away, it just takes time. I see those "amazing long range Plasma Cannon kill" videos and remember how I hit a multitude of similar shots earlier that day. The curve is no more different than the difference between gonewild and gonewildcurvy once you're experienced with it.

Hell, even it's weaknesses are great once you see how people try to exploit them. The natural reaction from someone who survives your shot is to instantly charge into you and try to rush you down before you can reload. Seeing this, I've started putting skill points into the new commando suits. I'd tried to use shotguns a few weeks back and am now reaping the rewards. A simple switch to the shotgun after ducking behind cover and boom, dead enemy. The commando suit has several nice benefits with using the plasma cannon alongside this too. The decrease in time reloading has a big impact on your ability to project damage. You also have enough base health to survive small bursts of damage, while the loss in speed has little impact due to fighting from the back.

The cannon has it's share of annoying problems though. There's an annoying reload bug that can get you killed more often than not. The projectile is slow enough to people to dodge direct hits a lot of the time. Scoring direct hits can suffer a lot from the game's hit detection sometimes letting your shot pass through an enemy without harming them. There's also an annoying grace period after firing that delays switching weapons. With a bit more speed (20% faster or so) and a bit less post-firing delay, the weapon would be in a really great place.

It's a good weapon overall in the end. Huge skill ceiling, has a useful role to play and can stand it's ground against a variety of enemies. It's not a weapon for everyone and it's not meant to be, but I like many other cannoneers seem to have fallen under it's strange charm. It also kills anything below a heavy with a single shot (including proto gear) which is just wonderful.

I give it a B- out of 10. Needs some tweeks, but an otherwise good weapon.

Thoughts On 1.2 So Far

Been really busy over the past couple weeks so haven't had much of a chance to do anything except work. With the triple skill point week though, I've made an effort to try out the 1.2 patch with the time I do have to spare. There will possibly be another one after this going into more details, but here's some initial thoughts.

Framerate and Performance (tangent ahead)

Dust now runs at a solid 30 frames a second on the console side it seems. This is a huge improvement over previous implementations and the audio issue causing the problem has been fixed according to the CPM members I've talked to.

The downside to all this is the poor server side framerate/connectivity has been unmasked by this client side improvement. Before it wasn't as obvious because sometimes you weren't entirely sure if it was just your console lagging or the server, but now it's obvious that there is some game impacting problems. The thing is though, I don't think this is an issue that can actually be "solved". Dust matches are hosted on CCP servers and those have to be located somewhere on the planet. As long as people are playing together from different parts of the world, you'll have latency issues.

What this means in practice, is moving targets won't be exactly where the game tells you they are at times. With an issue like this, certain weapons and dropsuits benefit more than others. In Dust's case, area of effect weapons (mass drivers, flaylocks) remain at almost 100% power because they don't rely on direct hits. I'm hearing a lot of people having huge success with flaylocks right now (despite being nerfed in 1.2) and this is part of why. Automatic weapons such as the assault rifle and the submachine gun are still OK in this environment because they rely less on being 100% accurate and their natural spread of fire will allow shots to still hit their targets. The guns that really get hurt by this though are single fire weapons such as shotguns and pistols. Those rely on the enemy being exactly in the right place when you click to fire. I don't think I've died to a shotgun while I've been moving correctly to counter it since the update.

Anyway, that's enough of a tangent for one blog. Hopefully CCP can improve on this, but until the internet is powered by Quantum Entanglement Communicators, we'll just have to live with it.

Weapon Ranges and Falloff

This is one of the best changes to the game so far. Bullets now travel much further than they did pre-1.2 with a reduction in damage over distance. This changes the way many weapons operate as they are no longer limited to short range. The most notable cases seem to be the pistol and the submachine gun, which can actually be used effectively at range now.

The short end of the stick goes to the shotgun though. It only seems to be effective at short range against targets that aren't moving or are moving in a straight line. I used one for a few matches in 1.2, but it just doesn't have any range compared to the other options you get. Maybe scouts will still use this, but I can't see much of a reason to personally use one right now.

LAVs

I wrote a blog a while back about this subject and I'm glad CCP didn't make any changes to LAVs yet. It's obvious at this point that something needs to be done, as their countermeasures seem to be struggling against the more expensive fits. Enough time has passed since their buff though, that CCP can gauge their relative power to everything else in the game and can start making adjustments based on that information.

Personally I'd like to see impact damage from running people over, more velocity required to kill people and Logistic LAVs made slower to differentiate them from their Scout counterparts.

The Rest

Nanite injectors work most of the time now and people are shifting back into using them again. Being able to move straight away after being injected is really nice too.

Strafe sprinting is way too fast, not exactly sure what happened there to result in such a change. It makes me wonder if we'll see someone called CCP Krieger pop up on the forums soon.

New female avatar walk animation is better than the old one.

The radar changing depending on your speed is really annoying. I didn't get a chance to see if I could turn that off yet. If not, then I'd really like to be able to.

TLDR

Uprising 1.2 is a good step forward and I'm enjoying the game a lot more now because of it. It's far from perfect, but the core gameplay is in a better place and the new direction from CCP Shanghai leaves me with high hopes for the future.

In the mean time, here's some fun I had with a drop uplink spawn.