Beam/Bolt balance

thanks Szlat was wondering what the situation was

Spacey wrote:

People go on about how all powerful the beam, bolt, artifacts, etc. are, how powerful the AM class is, etc., but I think there is a fair amount of skill and luck entering into things, and that the AM is nowhere near as powerful as many folks think. And I have lots of screen shots showing countless AMs, even Elite and Ratar or other top AMs, way down in a pack with medics or engineers (sometimes with half their levels) owning them.

Now regarding last night... I would love to know who Dragon-somebody was, and just what their skill set is (wish the player stats were working). But whoever they are, they outscored my 210+ level AM (one of the first AMs on the system) BIGTIME. I know all sorts of tricks to do damage, and try as I might have, I could not get anywhere near that score. Not even trying to use the bolt/beam, or other tricks I could try to gander from looking at the F3 breakdown for them, watching, etc. could improve my scores. No way could I kill more than a few bugs with the beam or bolt before my adren was empty, even with a Energy+4 weapon. Frustrating? You betcha... the exact words I would use would get me banned by Dru and Shan in a microsecond. But I would not use the term "abuse" with regards to the game, even though my ego was feeling abused. And regarding it being a "skill-less" ability... remember, there is still in adren management, in using your tools to their fullest, and just being able to hit the darn bugs and not have that censored gack of a 10 adren for missing... a gack which IMO should not kick in when you bump the use artifact key when there is no bug even remotely in range/view. But anyways... all three of those are skill. Just as an engineer putting a drone at a critical location is. It is all similar to the folks back in UT99 who said that the flak was a noobish no-skill weapon, as was the cutter, vortex sphere or proxy mines (chaos weapons).

And BTW... while I will do maxes, make weapons, etc., just as many AMs do, if you want to have me or some of the other AMs work less as a long-distance killer and more of a support role, I suspect making it so that we could get the same sort of XP in a game might go a long way to encourage that... of course, it still does not take into account the competition on the F1 scores.

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

thought I'd give this a bump and ask what the situation with the yes or no on your changes Szlat

I've had a couple of occasions lately were I've seen the what I shall term "abuse" of the bolt cause me to either outright leave a game or become so frustrated that I've bumped this topic.

I've watched most AMs whom have played for a long time (eg:Buster,Ratar) whom use it sparingly, if at all , but some of the others use it as a primary weapon to the point of 300+ kills with it and less than 100 kills with all other weapons.
I've come to the conclusion that it is a skill less ability and is FAR too powerful, especially for something an AM has every wave/after every death.
Give my LW a Vorp shock 10 and piercing Flak 6 every spawn and that would be less powerful .

and Yes I'm a little irritated with this lately , I watched a 60th lvl AM outscore my 200+ lvl LW by almost 1000 points today.

sorry all but something needs to be adjusted badly

Meekly raises hand. That would be me. I will fully agree that bolt with triple is OP'ed, Espically on wave 10 where there is nothing to severaly drain adreanaline (skarrij and kralls) on a bolt attack. Bolt on its own is ok as without triple, a bolt on any monster over 250hp drains it. But when its triped and not hitting a Giant Gasbag, Queen, Warlord, Titan, once you get a spree going, its pretty hard to run it out of adrealine. Also it pretty much takes the use of keybinds to minimize the adreanaline use of tripple while its on.

I have 2 keybinds that I use regarding bolt. (Actually I have 8 keybinds for all my important artifacts). One turns on triple and the other selects my bolt and my mouse has a keybind to use my artifacts. When im using the combo, I pretty much run triple in spurts of 5 seconds, wait 3 seconds for monsters to reappear then run triple/bolt 5 more seconds, wait 3, etc. For one it allows the adreanine to not run down to fast from draining triple, and 2 its fast enought where I can keep a spree going and recover the loss adrenaline from the spree bonuses.

Plus another thing that bolt has is that you can practially spam the heck out of it, not lose any adreanline when nothing is in range (unlike beam with takes 10 away regardless) and does not require to aim at anything.

I didnt start using the trip + bolt until I was around level 50 after spending one game watching Elite go and learning that was a keybind for bolt. Before then I had only Trip/Rod/Globe keybound and had to hit my triple keybind, then 2 presses of my prev. artifact which caused me to severely drain my adrenaline and a lot harder time to turn it on and off.

I know elite has a macro that turns on triple, switches to bolt, and selects his translocator so he can translocate around while spamming bolt.

I feel that at least giving bolt a base cost of 10 adrenaline like beam has would cut the spamming part down but more drastic fixes would prob have to be made to cut the use of it down. Even the proposed 3s cooldown on it would fix the quick killing of everything with it.

One thing though about bolt and to a lesser extent, beam. Without Triple, its a lot more useless due to it draining excessive adrenaline on anything with a decent hp count.

But simply, I have to agree that it does need some serious reworking cause all it takes to do it is a few simple keybinds, some fast fingers to turn trip on and off, and a decent adrenaline level. Once you get a spree going, unless you bolt something with a lot of hp, you can keep going for a bit. Even then, when you do run out of adrenalien, an AM can use 1 wave if they have an energy weapon and be back full again for the following wave.

And I do apologize for using it but I did want to get out of the stupid levels for AM's (40-60) who i believe has the worse time since we have practially little survivability. Also I'm not the greatest at it since both Elite and Micron are much higher level with more adrenaline/damage/skill since they constantly outscore me by 2-3 times when their in. Kinda wish we had an artifact where it drains adrenaline and gives us health like booster but at a faster rate and the ability to turn it on and off.

Also I agree that if were forced a bit more into a support role, I would love to see some better xp gains from doing so. I mean right now you have the choice of giving someone a double damage for 20s that could net them 100+ xp (on titan waves) while you get 10 and are out 100 adrenaline which is basily an AM's lifeblood. 0 adrenaline is a useless AM and I know the good ones have very good Adrenaline management.

Don't put me in the middle of this as if i were the one responsible for all of these posts... Dragon as for you, you've been abusing quite some, not to be pointing fingers but since you humbly revealed yourself, just to mention.
I know i do play aggressive when i play as my adren but i also switch to my other characters to let the others have a fun and good game. No hard feelings?...

I appreciate that you've used your junkie much less lately Elite, and like I said I don't want to point fingers at anyone
but this just proves my point though if you know its a tactic that creates an imbalance please resist the use of it , or keep it to a minimum to be used when its really needed.

Why would I try to play it off that I wasn't a user of it. The regular's know all the peeps that use it.

As for not playing my other characters, I play them on a rotational basis of about 2 weeks. I played my engineer from 5-41 straight then my medic straight from lv 5-35. My adrenaline master was my first character (well my 2nd since I had a 31 before I reset him) and was my main character (which was before the bolt issue arose). Friday was already my last main day on him as I've started back on my engineer again for the next couple of weeks (3k xp so far on Saturday).

Occasionally I will get on another for a single map before switching back to the main class for the weeks.

And elite, dont be saying i abuse it more cause I physically cant since I am not at your xp level. Considering time wise, maybe only cause the last few day's i've been on pretty often since I've had some more free time then I usually do but map wise, you still use it way more often then I can based on score wise in terms of bolt kills when you're on yours. I play agressively as well when I have to (such as much, you see me pretty much dying in all the later waves (no ghost

ftl) since I still cant use trip/bolt much due to not having the adrenal reserves or damage and instead settle for just trip and globe. Just cause some people change their class every map, doesn't mean I have to be like them. I prefer to be on one class for a while then go to another class after some time. Its what I've done on pretty much any game I do have multiple classes and such since for me, each class has an entirely different keybind set in terms of weapon choices, and the like.

And in terms of my skill, I've had some great scores on my engineer and my medic I play a much more of a support roll healing people instead of killing things (unlike other medics who ignore people at low life to go for kills instead which is just their playstyle) since I do have fun healing people.

So for my AM, he's done for the next month or so so no one has to worry about him now for a while.

I just like to kill things. What else can I say.

Micron(Micron) wrote:

I just like to kill things. What else can I say.

was wondering when you'd pipe up

but before everyone gets all angry with each other ... I think we all agree that the bolt/triple needs adjusting for the betterment of the server, and I wouldn't expect anyone to shelve a character because of this

All I'm asking is for some more consideration to the other players on this server as we have an AWESOME server here and accusations get us nowhere

Eh im not shelving my AM, just sending him on vacation as before when I decided to take up an Eng and Medic. He'll be back full time in about a month. Even if the whole issue was non existent I would still be rotating him with my other 2 on a 2-3 week basis. I just like to play one character for a period of time since each class does have its own play style and switching between them quickly for me makes me less effective then say if I just played 1 for a long period of time then readjust a few weeks later. It's pretty much how I've done it in all the games I play or played.

I think we are all in agreement that the bolt or beam/triple needs to be changed. All the other changes are not necessary. Seriously, fix the problem, dont ruin the class altogether.

Micron(Micron) wrote:

I think we are all in agreement that the bolt or beam/triple needs to be changed. All the other changes are not necessary. Seriously, fix the problem, dont ruin the class altogether.

Yeah, what he said.