Dys Patch 1.5.4 Feedback

[xx]

These are, like, my opinions man, but I think they are fairly representative of the community in general, particularly those that partake in PUGs. There has been quite a bit of discussion amongst said community about the patch, but I don't think I've seen any feedback actually documented anywhere, so, err, here it is!

The tl;dr -

• Assault rifle secondary fire is too much damage.
  
• GL 0s fuse time makes the weapon a bit too strong - and its probably a bit too low effort for high reward.
  
• Pretty much everything else was good. (I'm not gonna touch the Minigun changes! - Sorry bauxite!)

The tl;readitanyway -

Assault Rifle
The secondary fire is too much damage. Complaints about the pre-patch secondary mostly stemmed from the fact it only fired 5 shots in a wide spread, which made it a bit of a lottery. The change to 20(!) shots and fixed spread is welcome for the sake of consistency, but the accompanying damage boost from a max of 108 (15dmg * 5shots * 1.5hsmult) to 180 (6 * 20 * 1.5) is just way too much spice. It tends to mostly only be an issue at very close ranges, where you can connect with most of those 20 shots, but those perfect point-blank headshots happen more frequently than one might imagine. Getting into very close ranges in Dystopia is often not very difficult, either thanks to map design or legboosters + bhop, so it is not uncommon to see a single shot kill lights entirely, near enough do the same to mediums, and remove almost half a heavy's hit points.

Some observations:

• Part of the high damage potential comes from the ability of the secondary to headshot. If this was removed it would no longer be able to one-shot lights with the current damage values. Bit boring tho.
  
• There is sort of an anti-synergy between the primary/secondary fire modes. Not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but firing a single shot from the primary cuts the number of times you can fire the secondary to 4, and firing the secondary will reset the primary fire rate. You are sort of disincentivised to mix fire modes.
  
• The change to the AR primary made the weapon considerably better. It always had the ability to shred, but now its just a bit more consistent, particularly at longer range. AR always felt a bit lacking compared to the other medium weapons, but now even discounting the secondary fire I think it can compete with other medium weapons. Good change.

What to do?
My suggestion would be to drop the damage per shot on the secondary from 6 to 4, set the ammo consumption back to 5 (from 8) and keep the headshot multiplier. This would represent a very slight buff over the original, but the damage would cap out under that 125 threshold so lights can't be one-shot. Lights with no armour would still be able to be one shot.
An additional change that could be considered would be to reduce the spread slightly (perhaps a 10-15% reduction in the spread radius) to compensate for the damage loss, keep some effectiveness outside of melee range, and further reward good aim.

Grenade Launcher
This is a tricky weapon because I think a lot of its power comes from chokepoints and other favourable map geometry, but then players are much faster and more agile than they were when the weapon was first introduced. So on one hand there is this weapon that is virtually unmatched when it comes to holding those chokepoints, and simultaenously a weapon that feels laughably weak when caught on unfavourable terrain, so to speak (at least it was!). I think it probably did need a bit of a buff to its effectiveness outside of chokepoints and small rooms with low ceilings, but removing its fuse time makes it even harder to play around in the situations where it was already good.

Some more observations

• Ping is an unfortunate factor here, as it is with all projectile weapons. Not quite sure how latency and the fuse time interacts exactly, but it always felt to me like your ping was sort of added to the existing fuse time, which often made it frustating to play with higher ping. The 0-fuse does make it significantly less frustrating to use at higher ping, as you can be sure the nades will explode immediately.
  
• ...but the unfortunate consequence is that its just too easy to shoot the ground around your feet and kill most anything in your proximity without too much effort. Self-damage is a small price to pay if it means you survive and they don't. I feel shotgun light suffered here in particular; they used to be a threat to GL players if they could pick their way through the spam, now the only thing waiting for them on the otherside of the chokepoint is more explosions. It's all a bit noobtubey.
  
• Good GL players were good because they found ways to work around the weapon's weaknesses. Now there is little need to.
  
• The 0 fuse time makes GL jumping easy. It's fun and I'd be sad to see it go, but it probably needs to.
  
• The LOL direct grenade killfeed has sadly moved from critically endangered to extinct.

What to do?
Tweak the fuse time. 0s is too low, .3 was perhaps too high. Could we try .2?

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On more general feedback - I think a lot of people I've spoken to were not aware that there was any sort of playtest for this patch. I think I only found an announcement on Steam after the patch had already happened (I don't think there was anything on the PH discord?). I still don't actually know if that playtest actually happened or not as I haven't spoken to anybody that was actually involved. It's a shame because to be honest I think a lot of initial reactions to AR and GL specifically were sort of along the lines of "oh no" and "what have they done?", and that's pretty much the same sentiment now. I appreciate that its not really realistic for Dystopia to have frequent, iterative updates, so when/if there is another to Dystopia patch it would be good to have that opportunity to see to at least see proposed changes and to give some feedback before it happens, if not to have a chance to playtest it.

[bauxite]

[You're Pissed Off]

I agree with this. And shill the getDrafted Discord server which is the comp hub for Dystopia

[Infrequent]

True as. It's a shame to be blindsided by changes like this, while we did expect specific weapons to be buffed, to this extent is a shock.

[Pr.Jitterskull - best bug fixer]

The game balance shouldn't have been changed to begin with if it was unchanged for like 10 years after certain period, but even if you have to change something then it's life improving changes that been suggested by many for years like having spawn points actually capable to heal and repair armor (even if slowly), which is a more sane and healthy alternative than of going full emo and cut your wrists to suicide and respawn again; or just rejoin the server like I do.
Also Tesla's primary fire is objectively underpowered as I've explained here ---> https://steamcommunity.com/app/17580/discussions/0/3759976246173417913/
The new altfire ammo usage ♥♥♥♥ up with it's amount of ammo you've given, means you can barely shot 4 tesla balls which is less than rockets, and thus you'd be forced to go to ammo cabinet just to barely have enough balls to shoot.

[Tope]

For what it's worth, I agree with everything said here.

I'd like to add that knockback needs to be addressed. Armor, (either bugged or intentional), no longer provides any protection from knockback, and I believe knockback numbers were increased across the board along with the additional boost to minigun. While this has led to some more creative jump styles and map strategies, it has largely removed melee as a viable means of combat.

You no longer see ion heavies because that heavy is never going to get close enough to use the second half of their kit. The rocket heavy will never move up because they'll never get close enough to use their fist. The medium/light now hopes they can get the reload off in time instead of switching to their katana.

Keep minigun the way it is, but for the love of Prox please someone fix armor and/or knockback.