Medics imba ?

[sylphaen]

So I just saw Higby use his MAX suit in the red zone without being repaired. After 2-3 minutes, he finally got shot by a NC player and got revived in 3-4 seconds by a medic.

What bothers me ? He had his full armor back.

Either medics can or cannot heal MAXes but reviving with full armor is equivalent to medics being able to repair MAXes.

What also bothers me a lot: the unlimited ammo on healing guns.

It should either have a cooldown, a battery ala jumpjet or ammo requirements. A pack of players in a stalemate situation who can keep reviving their players have it too easy perpetuating a stalemate, imo.

The crown hill fight when Higby was streaming NC was such an example.

[Boone]

They should let you die a few times before not being able to be revived again or just half health.

[Pepsi]

Reviving someone should put their health at 25% with possible certs or side-grades if you want to revive someone with more health.

[Wumpus]

Yeah that's terrible. Reviving a MAX should not reload your guns nor fix your armor.

[RoninOni]

:eek:

I know medics gotta be worthwhile, but reviving full armor MAXs certainly sounds like too much.

Maybe MAX's should get destroyed... it's kinda sorta vehicular in a way ;)

On that subject, they should also DEFINITELY have a cooldown between spawns. 5min minimum (maybe 2-3 after Certs) I mean cmon... if you can't keep a MAX suit up you shouldn't be able to just infinitely crash them...

also no Drop Pod (squad/beacon) spawning of MAXs :nono:

Back to medic... overheat/recharging energy meter would be my preference. We want healing to be relatively easy and not something to hoard, but we should also limit the healing rate.


However, keep in mind fellas this is first round of Beta... there's a LOT of things not yet in... and they haven't even BEGUN on balancing... so nothing to fret over yet

[SFJake]

Back to medic... overheat/recharging energy meter would be my preference. We want healing to be relatively easy and not something to hoard, but we should also limit the healing rate.

I disagree. No ammo limit is an unlimited amount of health anywhere there are medics. To me, thats non-sense.

[RoninOni]

I disagree. No ammo limit is an unlimited amount of health anywhere there are medics. To me, thats non-sense.

Negative...

Put an 'ammo count' on healing and watch how fast people start hoarding their heal ability.

REVIVES... maybe... but currently they're tied to the same action apparently...


I agree that it would be better balanced with limited healing... but you are almost never going to see cross-squad healing if you do.

Plus, outdamaging the heal rate is pretty much a non-issue anyways

[Envenom]

Reviving someone should put their health at 25% with possible certs or side-grades if you want to revive someone with more health.

I like this idea.

[picchu]

If you cap meds ability like this you will never see them healing others. Getting revived would be once in a blue moon.

The way it is now seems fine. You can say yes or no, it has a recharge/is not instant revive, you seem to die easier (unknown but from vids people go down fast when revived and fired instantly after), your position/what you looking at is kind of random (meaning you often don't see someone revive then get a jump on the one that killed him)

It looks better then most revive mechanics

Also a med can not heal/revive a max from what I read.. maybe it was a engineer?

[Toppopia]

Reviving someone should put their health at 25% with possible certs or side-grades if you want to revive someone with more health.

I agree, this is probably the best way to do it, because to then get that soldier up to fighting condition, the medic then spends 10 seconds healing him, which is keeping him from the battlefield/reviving/healing other people. So this is the best course of action.

[RoninOni]

^4thed

[Rivenshield]

I concur with OP. In PS1 when you revive anybody, you also have to fix their armor. It doesn't spontaneously fix itself.

[picchu]

I concur with OP. In PS1 when you revive anybody, you also have to fix their armor. It doesn't spontaneously fix itself.

Could just be ignored in beta like a dozen other things.

[RoninOni]

Could just be ignored in beta like a dozen other things.

They've got a lot goin on yah know... and it takes work to compile beta updates...

In fact, I had a good discussion with a dev at a small pre-release event and he actually talked about how beta's can actually be disruptive because they more than double the amount of work involved in game development.

How's that? Well because large scale beta's need to have a lot more polish and a LOT more stability than in house test builds. In test builds there might be SERIOUS instabilities that only allow really for testing a particular modification to whatever it is that team is working on.

The beta on the other hand needs to marry many many different works in progress, and then debug that at least enough to make it 95% playable... amd then come up with placeholders for missing pieces and make sure that doesn't mess up too badly being that whatever the placeholder is isn't an ideal resource to use for the task.

That's why so few companies do REAL beta's where they actually update the main client more than once, if at all, to actually test the modifications they've made from the beta feedback.

[Rivenshield]

In fact, I had a good discussion with a dev at a small pre-release event and he actually talked about how beta's can actually be disruptive because they more than double the amount of work involved in game development.


/nod

I keep on trying to describe how software development works in the real world, but nobody wants to listen....

From a developer's POV, you take your baby out of this nice safe controlled environment and users start screwing with it in a big nasty *uncontrolled* environment. Even if they're screwing with it in the way you ask them to, it's still a kind of traumatic event work-load-wise.

[Drakkonan]

The heal time is too fast, the revive time is too fast, and they're both too effective. Since they're not going to increase TTK, they should increase the time to heal, and as suggested earlier, start revived players at low health.

That being said, the biggest abomination of all is that no points are awarded to the medic for performing these actions. I've got to imagine the same holds true for resupplies and repairs. Even the designers at DICE realized this was a necessity to promote teamwork.

I know this is beta, but I don't understand how this type of stuff could've been overlooked for so long.

[RoninOni]

/facepalm

It's not overlooked, the systems aren't done being made for crying out loud.

They have a huge outline of stuff to come. TONS of meta game, and TONS of balancing... plus 2 more whole continents! I don't even think they're finished with this one yet :huh:

[Drakkonan]

Why bother putting the game into beta unless the major design decisions are already made and implemented? Server stability and other population-based issues can be tested simultaneously with development, but that should be the job of stress-tests, not betas.

[RoninOni]

This isn't an EA beta.......

this is going to be a long beta into a soft launch.


LOTS of things aren't in yet, they're just excited to get us playing it and they need LOTS of data and feedback to properly balance a massively scaled true FPS

[Toppopia]

Why bother putting the game into beta unless the major design decisions are already made and implemented? Server stability and other population-based issues can be tested simultaneously with development, but that should be the job of stress-tests, not betas.

You get the basics of a game running, so that you know nothing bad will happen, then you start adding in stuff and testing it for balance issues, and if bad things happen when something is implemented, remove it and fix it. This would be happening with hundreds of other systems at the same time, so if 2 things don't work together, you have to search through the thousands of lines of code to find the 1 tiny little line(s) of code that stops it from working. So we need to give devs the time they need to implement the things they want to add. And some things are lower priority than other things.

[RoninOni]

Forgive him... He's been trEAumatized :rofl:

[Trip]

get your dirty stinking hands off my class of I'm leaving you all dead.

:P

[sgtviper]

So I just saw Higby use his MAX suit in the red zone without being repaired. After 2-3 minutes, he finally got shot by a NC player and got revived in 3-4 seconds by a medic.

What bothers me ? He had his full armor back.

Either medics can or cannot heal MAXes but reviving with full armor is equivalent to medics being able to repair MAXes.

What also bothers me a lot: the unlimited ammo on healing guns.

It should either have a cooldown, a battery ala jumpjet or ammo requirements. A pack of players in a stalemate situation who can keep reviving their players have it too easy perpetuating a stalemate, imo.

The crown hill fight when Higby was streaming NC was such an example.

also dont forget he is an ADMIN so one keystroke and he can have full everything even revive himself

[Noon]

:nono:

This is what beta testing is for, to work out the kinks.

Its kinda ignorant of people to go in expecting anything other than a flawed game, considering your whole reason for playing it at this point is to spot those flaws.

So in other words, keep spotting stuff and commenting on it; but don't go about it so pessimistically.

[Ashnal]

Forgive me, but I seem to recall when Higby played medic during the Aug 8th beta stream that it had the meter that dictates special ability use like the light assault, infiltrator, and heavy assault.

One would assume that that meter would control how much a medic can heal, but I couldn't quite confirm it from watching the video. Perhaps someone else can take a look? The meter did fluctuate, but it didn't seem to be in response to healing.

Also from what I've seen, revived players are revived with 25% health, but the medics reviving them usually heal them right away. Max's on the other hand, should require both a medic to revive and engineer to repair, perhaps the full health max is a bug or oversight?

[ParanoiaComplex]

No! Do NOT nerf the medic! Because....I said so! :D

[Ivam Akorahil]

So I just saw Higby use his MAX suit in the red zone without being repaired. After 2-3 minutes, he finally got shot by a NC player and got revived in 3-4 seconds by a medic.

What bothers me ? He had his full armor back.

Either medics can or cannot heal MAXes but reviving with full armor is equivalent to medics being able to repair MAXes.

What also bothers me a lot: the unlimited ammo on healing guns.

It should either have a cooldown, a battery ala jumpjet or ammo requirements. A pack of players in a stalemate situation who can keep reviving their players have it too easy perpetuating a stalemate, imo.

The crown hill fight when Higby was streaming NC was such an example.

since everyone faction has medics, they are not imbalancing battles or faction strengh

[rigsta]

Forgive me, but I seem to recall when Higby played medic during the Aug 8th beta stream that it had the meter that dictates special ability use like the light assault, infiltrator, and heavy assault.

One would assume that that meter would control how much a medic can heal, but I couldn't quite confirm it from watching the video. Perhaps someone else can take a look? The meter did fluctuate, but it didn't seem to be in response to healing.

We might not be thinking about the same thing, but medics do have a cooldown/recharge ability in addition to the heal-gun - their AE heal wave.

[Nemises]

a res should allow the person enough health to beat a path back from the front-line to the health/ammo fob....res to 25% hlth / 0% armour perhaps..

this isn't just gameification...killing someone should take them out of the fight...if they get res'd then they are still effectively out of the fight, at least till they recycle back from the fob.

..also, I thought that little fob in the canyons on the 8th Aug stream was awesome...just 1 engi with a deployed turret and an ammo pack down all hidden in the underpass of the rock bridge...just add a medic there and wammo , awesome little base...

[Boone]

Negative...

Put an 'ammo count' on healing and watch how fast people start hoarding their heal ability.

REVIVES... maybe... but currently they're tied to the same action apparently...


I agree that it would be better balanced with limited healing... but you are almost never going to see cross-squad healing if you do.

Plus, outdamaging the heal rate is pretty much a non-issue anyways

Watch how quickly people starting throwing ammo :cool:

I still think something like limited revives (guy dies 3x, can't be revived again) or anything from 25 - 50 % health once revived. Anything in that ballpark would work for me.

[Goblin]

You can't have someone be revived with 25% health because he'll just get killed immediately since he's most likely already in a fire zone.
Needs to be worth it for the medics to stick their own necks out.

50% is more reasonable.

[Trip]

How about they get resurrected with no shield and 60% health, also give the medic a healing station he can set down that units can heal around. like the supply box in bf2,tf2

[Zetsubo]

To draw a parallel to another recent game:

In Guild Wars 2, EVERY character has the ability to revive others. This is done through a channeling effect which takes 3-5 seconds to get somebody back up to 100%. This system is far from imbalanced in both WvW (which is similar to PS2's huge maps) and normal PvP.

So, I'd expect medics in PS2 to heal or rez using a channel mechanic, requiring 3-5 seconds to get people back on their feet. Don't see what's so imbalanced about getting back up at max health. Just don't make it instant, so the enemy has a chance to prevent the rez, and it should be fine.

Of course, rezzing a MAX suit back to full armor doesn't make sense: full health yes, armor no (you'll need an engineer for that). I fully expect this to be a beta bug/oversight.

P.S.: watching Higby's stream, when they were bunched up with like 20 infantry guys on a small hill just outside a base, made me wish I was accidentally patrolling that area with a Lib and a gunner. Could've had 20 kills, medics or not.

[Pepsi]

Don't see what's so imbalanced about getting back up at max health. Just don't make it instant, so the enemy has a chance to prevent the rez, and it should be fine.The idea behind these balances is to give a downtime between killing someone and that person coming back at you again with full health. It's the reason there is a respawn time and a travel time between bases. Contrast this to Battlefield where slapping someone with a gunshot wound to the head with the paddles and he's back up to 100% (with no revive channeling, btw) ready to get back into the action. Personally I'm in favor of a channeling time and having to heal that person back to 100% (as they'll start at 25%), but neither of us know about how the balance is going and I'm just being paranoid about medics creating stalemates too easily and reducing the penalty of death too much.

[Blackwolf]

PS1 started you off at full health after being revived, but your armor was in whatever condition it was when you died. The delay for reviving someone kept it more or less a non-combat ordeal and this didn't contribute to stalemates because the newly revived player died almost immediately if revived in the crossfire.

PS1 also used ammo.

I think we could drop the ammo part, since it was more irritating then anything (a 2x6 block for 100 health packs was a lot, and I think each health pack was worth 4 HP so reviving someone only took 25 packs). As a medic, I typically died or the situation requiring ammo ended long before I ever ran out with just 1 pack.

I think the only problem with the situation is the MAX getting up with full armor and ammo (if he got up with full ammo). It sounds like it took a few seconds to revive and that's all that's needed to keep the system from being broken.