The Issue of the 10%-20% Power Differentiation

[legendary]

Please keep the game mechanics level, and let are human abilities shape the outcome. What we need from the design team is the chess board and the pieces to play.

You have an opportunity to make something lasting, don’t muck it up.

[Raymac]

The example people keep giving of supreme power advantage is ducking behind a pillar and healing? Really? That's the argument? Two common certs? Any other certs? How does unimax help? How does driving a vanguard help when you're indoors? Or air support? Two support certs are all you got to go on and it's sketchy at best considering one could be substituted with medkits and the other was so common every infantryman carried one.

Clearly the PS1 system was supporting power gain over time because Engineering and Medical existed.

Because the entire game is situational, and the engie + med firefight is the most common, the easiest, and most black and white situation to illustrate the point. I'm not going to go down the list on which situation each cert is good for, because you already know anyways.

[Sirisian]

The example people keep giving of supreme power advantage is ducking behind a pillar and healing? Really? That's the argument? Two common certs? Any other certs? How does unimax help? How does driving a vanguard help when you're indoors? Or air support? Two support certs are all you got to go on and it's sketchy at best considering one could be substituted with medkits and the other was so common every infantryman carried one.

Clearly the PS1 system was supporting power gain over time because Engineering and Medical existed.
I think you prove the point further for power gain. It doesn't effect anything in battle until it's used. Meaning upgrading a vanguard would only help you when you're in a vanguard. Meaning you've chosen to specialize in a vanguard. For people that specialize in grunt combat they'd be good indoors and better than a vanguard player.

Having unimax for instance only helps when you're indoors. The only time it would show that it was really more upgraded would be in a fight against 2 maxes of the same type, but then again every max in the game is different so it would be really hard to tell if the upgrades helped.

Most players aren't going to notice the upgrades at all when a veteran has them anyway. Most of them are going to be rock-paper-scissor fights. "Oh the AA max killed me in one less round" kind of stuff.

Is anyone really arguing against progression through these meaningless upgrades? I've read the past few pages and it seems like no one cares. Really wish Higby would have said 50% advantages and such for specialized characters so people could really argue about hypothetical damage scenarios in a trade-off system. Every vehicle and weapon would have it's own play style then without the predictability of PS fights.