Weapon Scaling In Dust 514

So anti vehicle balance has been a hot topic recently. I decided to try out all manner of different means to destroy my enemies. Some saw success, some felt lacklustre. After getting some different opinions on the matter, I decided to take a break from playing tonight to see if I could crunch some numbers.

The Weapon Scaling Formula

So there was one constant that I found within the majority of the different weapon types I looked at. The following formula appeared

y = zx-x

x = Standard weapon damage
y = The difference between weapon ranks Standard->Advanced and Advanced->Prototype
z = 1.05

There are several notable points we can gather from this.

• A fully skilled commando using a standard light weapon does more damage than another dropsuit with a prototype light weapon.
• An advanced weapon with a complex damage modifier is slightly better than prototype weapon without one.
• A standard weapon with maximum specialization skills is slightly better against it's specific offence type (shields/armour) than a prototype weapon that is boosted by a complex damage modifier.
• Prototype weapons have a pretty bad price:performance increase ratio compared to using an advanced frame that provides an additional high slot for a complex damage mod.
• Skill points give a bigger improvement to damage over equipment.

Now there's some balance issues that weapons have right now, but generally the difference between tiers of weapons is reasonable.

But while this formula applies to most weapons in the game, there are a few notable exceptions.

The Swarm Launcher

These are every Duster's first anti vehicle weapon. Every player is given a militia variant of these on one of their starter fits. They also have both the best and the worst damage scaling in the game. With a z multiplier of 1.25, they get a massive boost of damage between ranks. This would be great, if it wasn't scaled from the top down.

What does that mean?

Typically when balancing competitive games, you want to make sure the game is balanced at it's highest levels of play. This is due to the fact that you want your game to either be as good or better as players improve at the game. It's also harder to balance lower levels of player skill, as it becomes harder to determine if there's an imbalance within the game or between the player's level of skill (although developers should try). In Dust, this balance also exists between tiers of gear, with standard vs standard, advanced vs advanced and prototype vs prototype supposedly being balanced against each other. This is all further complicated when you throw vehicles into the mix.

Because of this balance issue, the need for prototype to perform well against prototype means that scaling has to be fairly equal between the different tiers. In the case of Swarms, their huge scaling multiplier makes them weak at lower tiers. When there's nothing stopping someone from using a prototype fitted tank against a player who only has access to a militia swarm launcher, you end up with a situation where the new player's anti vehicle weapon deals negligible amounts of damage. Considering the gap between a basic swarm launcher and an advanced, it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't performing well enough to kill tanks at their own level.

In summary, the difference between most weapon tiers is a complex damage modifier. The difference between swarm launcher tiers is 2 complex damage modifiers and 5 ranks of specialization. This is really bad for new players and forces people to use prototype weapons to be competitive.

The Forge Gun

Unlike the swarm launcher, the forge gun benefits from having a more normal scaling system. With a z multiplier of 1.1, it tends to be balanced at different tiers. Forge guns were bugged when they entered 1.8, so it's hard to determine how balanced they are.

From a personal perspective, they seem to perform well at killing vehicles and at killing infantry. So maybe 1.1 is the correct z multiplier for an anti vehicle weapon? I'd be interested in hearing opinions on this.

If so, it puts the plasma cannon in a poor place. As the Gallente anti vehicle weapon, it gets stuck with a 1.05 z multiplier. The regular plasma cannon does a reasonable job against standard tanks, but considering it's level of scaling compared to other anti vehicle options, maybe it could do with being on the same z multiplier as forge guns.

Nova Knives

These have a pretty crazy z multiplier at 1.66. If you're looking into using knives, you should definitely be using the advanced ones at least.

From a damage over time perspective, they also lose charge time between tiers. The base skill also increases this too, so they become amazing at the prototype level compared to the standard ones. Although it could be argued that the advanced ones already do enough damage to make the jump to prototype not worthwhile.

What's somewhat disturbing is that a Minmatar scout with maxed out suit and knife skills does less damage with standard knives than someone without bonuses using advanced.

Grenades

I'll finish with grenades as it's getting late and I'll look at vehicle turrets another time. But these seem to be on a separate scale when it comes to damage.

The AV grenade has a z multiplier of 1.2, thus making it closer to the swarm launcher than other weapons. AV grenades fell out of fashion after being nerfed in Uprising 1.7, but can still do serious damage to vehicles when used as a group.

The other 2 grenades get a 1.25 z multiplier, so perhaps it's the role of a grenade that makes them unique for this. Flux grenades bring great utility beyond just their damage and said utility increases at a 1.1 multiplier due to their radius increasing. Locus grenades I'm not so sure about, since their biggest impact on me is to force me out of cover. They do this well regardless of their damage, since I'm trying (and get the opportunity) to avoid that completely.

Grenades have a fairly low cost at all tiers, so you could say they give the biggest bang for your buck when you upgrade to higher tiers.

So What Does All This Mean?

Well if you're looking for better performance at killing vehicles, I'd suggest that you work towards the better tiers of swarm launchers as the lower ones are under-performing right now. If you're looking for a lower level means of anti vehicle, both the forge gun and the plasma cannon have better standard level performance.

Nova knives scale like crazy and you should be using the advanced ones as they truly shine over the standard. Skills are less important compared to ISK investment and prototype level knives are mostly only worthwhile if you're looking to chew through health stacked sentinels.

Grenades are an extremely cost effective means of bumping up anti-vehicle damage, although they are more skill point intensive. If you're looking for other long term investments of skills, you should pick up weapon specializations and commando skills (for light weapons).

When it comes to other weapons, skills are king here too. Specialization  You're also better off using standard or advanced dropsuits with complex modules, rather than upgrading your weapon from standard to advanced. Upgrading a weapon to prototype gives the lowest benefit for cost, so really the last upgrade to a suit you should make.

Please don't argue about balance on twitter

Last couple days, my twitter feed has been full of messages with 3-5 people tagged while said people try to argue their point. Because twitter only has 140 characters (including @ mentions), you're left with something like 70-100 characters to make your point. When it comes down to discussing anything, 70-100 words normally isn't enough to make a valid point, let alone 70-100 characters.

If you want to discuss balance, there are far more platforms that suit it better. Blogs are a great way to write a detailed explanation about something for example. Reddit is a good way to have a lengthy discussion while allowing people to downvote off-topic posts and fallacies. Chat locations such as IRC or private Skype groups are a good way to get a quick back and forth going. Hell, even the forums can be reasonable sometimes when people put the effort into their posts and ignore the trolls.

Twitter is inferior to all of these when it comes to any kind of discussion. Twitter is great for promotion, reporting problems, dick jokes and talking about what you just ate. It is not good for lengthy discussions where people need space to make a point.

I've spent the last 2 days watching my twitter feed be filled with people who all actually agree on the same thing (more spread out objectives). Due to the nature of twitter however, it's devolved into ad hominems and strawman arguments. What's funny is that talking about this on Skype with a group resulted in a paragraph that put the entire argument to rest.

Tower camping is only an issue when they can lock down half the map, including points. And blap anything that tries to get up there are take them off (bar a sniper. And snipers can't always get great angles in-map.. coz the mountains that go high enough are in the redline.

-Black Jackal

So can we keep this off twitter in the future? I'd greatly appreciate it and I don't want to have to unfollow people who otherwise tweet useful things I want to read.

Initial Thoughts On Uprising 1.4

So 1.4 is finally here and now that the bugs are slowly being cleared away, we can start to see the intended direction CCP want the game to move in. While 1.3 fixed the flaylock pistol, the meta simply shifted to the 3 weapons that shared it's biggest strengths: mass drivers, forge guns and locus grenades. Shortly before 1.4 hit, it seemed like mass drivers were falling in usage in PC matches due to the strength of grenades and forge guns. This patch seems more likely to really shake things a bit, so here's some of my initial impressions.

Matchmaking

This is the probably the biggest change Dust will ever see and it's amazing how many people didn't realize how big a deal this would be. In an ideal world, this should have been in the game from open beta or even before then. For too long were new players getting completely wrecked by squads of proto bears in public matches. I can still remember what the #Dust514 feed was like on twitter during the months of seeing What The French drop 2-4 tanks in every ambush match and just rolling over the new players.

After the rough first day, matchmaking is now grouping players together by some unknown algorithm. This seems to be working as intended so far from what I can tell, with matches being far more even than before. I have no idea what this experience is like on the new player's end of the spectrum, but for a veteran it's exactly what I wanted. I have no desire for some hollow victory over those who can barely fight back, so even the losses I'm getting feel good.

The best part about this change is the complete role reversal for the older proto bears. Seeing those who used gear as a crutch come up against players around their own level and get crushed because they have no idea how to fight competent at the game is hilarious. I'm seeing people put this solely on the new auto aim system, when in reality it's mostly just because the playing field is actually level now. With improvements to hit detection and armour, the game plays very differently.

New Controls

Going to be upfront here, I barely use the pad to play. So when speaking about the new auto aim, I can only do so from the perspective of someone who plays against it. From what I've seen so far, it's barely been noticeable. I'm constantly fighting against people who I'd consider my betters, so I don't mind having to sharpen up if I want to win. The best player I squad with uses a DS3 (without aim assist) and you can see for yourself how well he does.



What I do want to mention is the issues with mouse controls. For some reason the turning rate when moving normally and when aiming is the opposite of what it should be. I'm currently restricted to hip firing most of the time and turrets turn crazy fast for me. Hopefully they can switch them around because aiming is pretty much broken until they do.

Outside that, I still have my polling rate set at 125hz as maxed settings on 1khz still doesn't reach the turn speed I currently have.

New Maps

4 maps were added to the pool with the 1.4 patch. Overall I like them over the previous maps, but they have their issues. In general the maps seem huge and feel as though they were designed for 24v24 or 32v32 sized teams. Border Gulch is a great example of this, as the bridge alone makes for an amazing 16v16 experience. I've heard rumblings about the Research Facility having problems in PC, but need more time to play on them myself.

Based purely on their layout, they clearly want people to start using more vehicles in matches for Skirmish on these. Having an LAV running around to help initiate assaults on points will be key on maps such as Border Gulch and Fracture Road.

What these maps do make me truly excited for is the possibility of new game modes. Fracture Road looks like a perfect map for Skirmish 1.0 and the bridge section on Border Gulch would be great for 6v6 domination.

Only thing left to say is it's frustrating to play on the old maps now. Ambush on Border Gulch is just so much more fun than any other map with the same game type.

New Meta and Other Changes

The changes to scanning have had a good impact on the way equipment slots are used. It's worth using up to 2 equipment slots in a squad to bring those scanners instead of more uplinks. The squad view changes combined with this now give those who used speed and shields to tank, an alternative in the form of profile signature reduction to sneak around.

The armour changes seem like they could make plates and repair tools dominate the meta. Armour tanks are now incredibly beefy and are doing well despite the increased accuracy that auto aim brought in. They're still vulnerable to things like grenades and direct mass driver hits, but they benefit from high damage output and third party repairs.

Speaking of repair tools, armour also has the advantage of generating more war points than shields due to gains from triage and guardian. This means another equipment slot is being taken away from uplinks in favour of more varied equipment. The final benefit to all this is armoured vehicles are more survivable in combat. Repair tools are pretty good when used on vehicles (especially the flux), so those armour tankers will need to work more with their logistics.

Mass drivers don't seem quite as good as before as they didn't receive a damage buff, weren't missing many shots before and are now hitting people who have more health. Forge guns have a slower projectile from what I've been told (and the new PC map has more cover against the high ground sniping spots). HMGs and scrambler rifles are much improved over their previous iterations.

I guess that just leaves grenades to be nerfed.

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.

The Problem With Gear Scaling In Dust

So after playing yet another match against people in full prototype gear and watching those in standard or lower get chewed up, it's beginning to dawn on me how badly some of the modules in Dust scale. I've recently started PvP'ing in EVE again, so the comparison between the way each games handle tiers of modules is really being driven home.

In Dust, prototype gear is for the most part the only thing you want to use in a slot if you can manage it. The most extreme cases of this are with high slots. Advanced damage mods jump from a 5% damage increase per slot to a 10% damage increase with the prototype counterpart. Shield extenders double from a 33 bonus to shield health, to a 66 bonus. This leads people to ignore advanced versions of some modules because of how little benefit they give. It's far more beneficial to simply blaze the path to certain prototype modules, an advanced or prototype weapon and base what's left of your fit to support that.

There's also issues of the reverse happening. Basic armour plates are so good because of poor drawback scaling, that it's rare to see anyone going for higher tiers of plates. Having more health pales in comparison to being able to move around effectively and a 3% slowdown isn't huge.

The end result of this is that some modules are leaps and bounds ahead of everything else to the point of making certain modules worthless. This becomes a problem because the gap between tiers becomes wider the higher you go, a stark contrast to EVE and a balanced system in general.

If you look at how EVE does scaling by comparison, it's strange to see this issue coming up when they had such a good base to work from. In EVE, gear scales fairly evenly between each tier from a power perspective. However, the cost goes up exponentially with every upgrade. Lets take a look at the different ranks of Magnetic Field Stabilizers.

.	Meta Level	Damage Multiplier	Rate of Fire Bonus	CPU Fitting	Cost (ISK)
.	0	1.07	7.5%	30	140000
.	1	1.077	8.25%	31	78500
.	2	1.084	9%	32	88000
.	3	1.091	9.75%	33	166500
.	4	1.098	10.5%	34	390000
.	5	1.1	10.5%	30	880000
.	6	1.09	10%	27	38000000
.	6	1.1	10.5%	24	85000000
.	8	1.125	10.5%	20	101200000
.	8	1.125	10.5%	20	106000000
.	11	1.1325	10.5%	22	800000000
.	12	1.1375	10.5	24	1180000000

Data taken from Dodixie.

As you can see, the differences in cost between each meta level (basic modules are a bit different) jumps in leaps and bounds. The differences in benefit however are much smaller, at around a 20% increase per meta level. Compare this to damage modules which go 3->3->5->10 in bonuses with a similar cost pattern. In EVE, a newer player can fit some meta 3 modules and not be at such a disadvantage in terms of ship strength. But in Dust, you're looking at 100% boost between ranks in some cases. This leaves new players at a bigger disadvantage than is necessary and forces grinds towards certain skills. It also makes certain advanced modules somewhat redundant. Why use 2 advanced damage mods when you could use a complex and save a high slot?

The differences in ranks should really be brought closer together while keeping a reasonable gap between ranks. 3/5/7/9 sounds better than 3/3/5/10 (damage mod/armour plate drawback) and 20/33/46/60 sounds better than 22/22/33/66 (shield extenders). Prototype would still be king, but more affordable fittings should actually be viable.

update: Someone on the feedback thread on the forums pointed out that with percentage based scaling, the shield extenders would give something like 22/27/32/39 or 34/42/53/66.

Dust 514 and Why The Metagame Is Important

I was hoping to write about something else today, but this has been nagging at me for the past week and people were talking about it today. Despite the topic of the article, I should note that I'm not against change for the sake of balance, but simply that it should be left in the hands of the players first.

The LAV

There's been a lot of talk recently about LAVs since the buff they received to their health. Since the buff, they've seen a huge spike in popularity. It's rare to play a game of Dust without running into (or getting run over by) an LAV. They're cheap/free, they're fun to use, they're extremely powerful against any dropsuit they slam into and people are using them en masse because of this.

Despite what some people might think, this is actually a great thing! Players of all levels are adapting to be competitive in an environment that rewards thinking about how to beat what is currently strong. In other words, the metagame is shifting. The previous strong tactic of squads with full proto/advanced gear stomping is now facing a decline against the rise of the 4 wheeled menace.

Now if Dust turned into a bumper car game and using LAVs became the only viable way to play, we'd have a problem. Many are calling for LAVs to be nerfed and while there's somoe valid points being made. A slow moving vehicle shouldn't really 1-hit KO a heavy and it's a bit strange that the LAV doesn't take small amount of damage it return for hitting a sold metal suit.

Despite this though, there are already counters to LAVs in the game. Off the top of my head, I can think of 6 standard weapons that are at least somewhat effective against LAVs (not including sniper rifles killing drivers). AV grenades do strong amounts of damage to them, with the other 2 classes being moderately effective. Equipment such as remote and proxy explosives are also highly effective. On top of just infantry equipment, turret based platforms such as installations and other vehicles are also highly effective against them.

The story of so called "cheap" tactics such as spamming LAVs has existed in competitive games for decades. The book 'Playing to Win' by David Sirlin goes into detail about about this.

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely.

By this same token, the LAV could be seen as similar to the throw example Sirlin uses. People who were using superior gear, teamplay and gunplay that would previously wipe the floor with others are now faced with a literally "cheap" tactic that can cause them to lose in situations they would previously win. A call for LAVs to be nerfed because people think the spamming of them being a dominant strategy is stupid seems to be a popular sentiment right now. The issue with this is that people haven't had time to adapt to an environment where LAVs are this strong. As more and more people use this and it becomes truly dominant, smart players will start to use more and more anti vehicle gear to counter it. The cool part is that by doing so, those players leave themselves open to being countered themselves. Eventually you'll end up with someone hitting a few sweet spots that combine a mix of different infantry and vehicle loadouts. This process comes from a shifting metagame and is called "Perfect Imblance".



I asked Counter-Strike 1.6 commentator Darryl "SyN" Kucmerowski for his thoughts on how this played out in Counter-Strike.

Some maps have seemed to change, while others have always been one way or another. One thing is almost all the maps have, at one time or another, changed from seemingly CT based to T and back to CT again.

What makes those changes happen is the evolution of tactics. A team will develop a set of strategies that works for a map on a particular side and then once word gets out of how that seems to work, you see the copy cats start and eventually, someone finds a counter for that tactic simply because they have to.

For instance, Inferno used to be a pretty heavily CT based map WAY back in the day but then we started to see people boosting window and that forced a lot of changes as to how you would defend that map.

Some maps though just evolve through the execution and timing of tactics, like dust2. If you time things properly you can get CT's moving one way and hit another on dust2 pretty easily.

Now of course, with no changes you'll eventually start to see this process decay over time. But there's a lot of things in the pipeline that will shake this up. There will be balance changes and sometimes the meta of the game might get silly. But as players adapt to each other, strategies will come and go. Just as they always have across many genres and will continue to do so.

But What About The TAC AR

So the TAC AR was deemed too strong and was nerfed. Where this differs over the LAV for example though, is that where the spamming of LAVs is a counter to certain strategies, the TAC AR made other weapons almost redundant. When comparing it to other weapons of a similar role, it outperformed them in pretty much every way. It had higher damage, a longer range and better accuracy than pretty much any other light weapon. With certain types of auto-click mice and pads, it could out-damage every other hitscan light weapon in the game.

With such power it quickly became the dominant light weapon and made other weapons invalid. It remains to be seen if CCP nerfed it too much, but one thing is for certain: the metagame will decide how good it is, not CCP.