Stego and Tricera fortress modes

[Simply Cerberus]

Can we give them a cooldown? Being able to move and plop yourself down every 2 seconds is kinda nuts. Like at least 5 or 8 so theres a bit of time to poke at their standard armor or hell even melee them while they're moving

[Sorenthaz]

Yeah it certainly *feels* like they lack any proper punishment for that, unless the counter is supposed to be shooting them from above with specific airborne mechs.

[Mokuwu]

It's ridiculous that they can continuously go in that state. Skyraider can't counter it either because their AoE doesn't do anything for damage and they nerfed their ammo capacity. They seriously overtuned every tank and nerfed the harder mechs

[renten]

use blast or energy attack. not on their shields

[TangoLimaRomeo]

I don't know about Stego as much but with Tricera the main thing is you have no meaningful way of dealing with fluid armor on your own (not a complaint, it encourages working with your team and giving Trike FA pen would be OP) and an overall vulnerability to being tagged in melee. Your main defense relies on not moving, also, which is a big negative. 1v1 with a Welkin is basically a death sentence and anyone like Skyraider or Falcon can outmaneuver your turrets with almost zero effort. Being able to pop out of fortress mode is basically your only way to guarantee not being gibbed the second more than one mech looks in your direction at the same time, too.

I will admit Trike could use some changes, though. I would slow down the actual animation of switching in and out of fortress mode instead of a timer, so that abusing it just locks you in a vulnerable animation loop and encourages you to use the pop out in a smart manner and focus on repositioning over just hopping out, dashing once and hopping back in. The slow recharge on the shields (which unlike regular shields don't parry to my knowledge) kind of manages the rest.

[TangoLimaRomeo]

Originally posted by Mokuwu:

It's ridiculous that they can continuously go in that state. Skyraider can't counter it either because their AoE doesn't do anything for damage and they nerfed their ammo capacity. They seriously overtuned every tank and nerfed the harder mechs

I feel like we might be playing different games honestly, the fast aerial mechs are a nuisance in every match I'm in.

[glitchead]

Originally posted by TangoLimaRomeo:

Originally posted by Mokuwu:

It's ridiculous that they can continuously go in that state. Skyraider can't counter it either because their AoE doesn't do anything for damage and they nerfed their ammo capacity. They seriously overtuned every tank and nerfed the harder mechs

I feel like we might be playing different games honestly, the fast aerial mechs are a nuisance in every match I'm in.

As a Falcon menace, I hard agree with this actually, but I also believe Stego and Tricera are problems too.

Originally posted by TangoLimaRomeo:

I don't know about Stego as much but with Tricera the main thing is you have no meaningful way of dealing with fluid armor on your own (not a complaint, it encourages working with your team and giving Trike FA pen would be OP) and an overall vulnerability to being tagged in melee. Your main defense relies on not moving, also, which is a big negative. 1v1 with a Welkin is basically a death sentence and anyone like Skyraider or Falcon can outmaneuver your turrets with almost zero effort. Being able to pop out of fortress mode is basically your only way to guarantee not being gibbed the second more than one mech looks in your direction at the same time, too.

I will admit Trike could use some changes, though. I would slow down the actual animation of switching in and out of fortress mode instead of a timer, so that abusing it just locks you in a vulnerable animation loop and encourages you to use the pop out in a smart manner and focus on repositioning over just hopping out, dashing once and hopping back in. The slow recharge on the shields (which unlike regular shields don't parry to my knowledge) kind of manages the rest.

You're right that they can't do HUGE damage (except for the triple Howitzer burst that clears anyone's fluid armor instantly AND stuns them every 15 seconds) but they don't NEED to. The fact that on Palmbay Harbor, you can just sit on the point, and NOTHING can get you off, means that it doesn't matter if you can't kill the panther, welkin, falcon, and narukami all blasting you, you always have the "Advancing Payload" locked, and nothing stops you. You always win. It creates situations where the enemy team can have a pretty clean and balanced team composition, say Hurricane + Panther + Pinaka + Narukami + Falcon + Alysnes, and can get absolutely DECIMATED on Palmbay Harbor by Pinaka Stego Tricera. None of them will do that much damage, and none of them play excitingly well in ANY metric. The turrets just each sit on YOUR payload and THEIR payload, and whichever one you hit, they'll just ping to their team and pinaka will come and shield them for regen + an extra entire life bar + more damage + giving them time to regenerate their fluid armor AND their shield to reset the entire cycle over again. Final score, 100 to 33, and it takes 6 of you to beat 2 of them which leaves the other turret out of the fight and three of their allies to do whatever they want and run a TRAIN tearing apart your backline. If you turn to kill the leftover 3 teammates? Who cares, they respawn in 20 seconds, and you're still losing. In fact, all you did was give pinaka, stego, and tricera a chance to keep charging up their shields. They'll do it on Kraub sinkhole too, and they will stack as tight as possible to draw aggro on Observatory so that the pinaka can just dismantle in front of your face and you have to manually aim the entire time because autolock FORCES you to target the tricera or stego first. Which, hey, guess what doesn't work during manual aim? Falcon's missiles. and god forbid you try to circle strafe and manual aim in plane mode, which means you're probably going to be in non-plane mode to shoot, which means you can't use your howitzer either, and your guns deal half damage cuz you're stuck in mecha mode.

In general, the first beta, all the damage was so high that people died in microseconds and it was unfun for people, so they lowered it to give people chances to counterplay, but instead they lowered it so much that any mecha that can stall or tank a lot of damage becomes a NIGHTMARE to deal with. That's why Alysnes was a JOKE the first beta but now is the most annoying suit ever. Before, killing him 4 times just meant 4 seconds, but now, it's 50 seconds of you bursting him constantly, even if he doesn't get to play, then 20 seconds of him respawning with everything. And it gets even worse when you look at the actual monsters of stalling, like Pinaka, Tricera, and Stego.

(Random aside, I really hope they fix the out-of-bounds abuse that counters falcon. So many people just sit on specific points as anyone that Falcon counters to win e.g. the top rock in the center of Kraub Sinkhole or the buildings at the very edge of the arena at Gracelynn SkyCity, and there's nothing I can do about it because if I fly there, it screams "OUT OF BOUNDS!" and disables my UI, makes everything fuzzy, makes my auto-aim disabled, and blurs my vision. Then they just shoot me or run away. A narukami can sit up on the Kraub Sinkhole rock, I hover at the PERFECT height to not get the out of bounds, I scan them, they instant drop onto the bridge and start loop-de-looping and hiding behind the rock pillars which blocks all missiles and they stall my scan out, then they go RIGHT back up to the out of bounds rock. For the fastest mech that is supposed to deal with people like that, I sure get countered by movement and map design a lot.)

[Hommnom]

Originally posted by TangoLimaRomeo:

(which unlike regular shields don't parry to my knowledge)

Just FYI, they do parry, which is probably all the more reason to make the transformation a bit slower. I mean, meleeing a Tricera head-on (and getting parried over and over) is kind of a noob/bot trap, and a decent player will just use the unparriable jump attack (or in the case of Welkin, just walk behind you and spin, since they know you turn around at the speed of an arthritic grandma), but I still agree that the transformation is just a little too fast/spammable regardless. And I say that as someone who plays a fair amount of Tricera.

Originally posted by glitchead:

(Random aside, I really hope they fix the out-of-bounds abuse that counters falcon. So many people just sit on specific points as anyone that Falcon counters to win e.g. the top rock in the center of Kraub Sinkhole or the buildings at the very edge of the arena at Gracelynn SkyCity, and there's nothing I can do about it because if I fly there, it screams "OUT OF BOUNDS!" and disables my UI, makes everything fuzzy, makes my auto-aim disabled, and blurs my vision. Then they just shoot me or run away. A narukami can sit up on the Kraub Sinkhole rock, I hover at the PERFECT height to not get the out of bounds, I scan them, they instant drop onto the bridge and start loop-de-looping and hiding behind the rock pillars which blocks all missiles and they stall my scan out, then they go RIGHT back up to the out of bounds rock. For the fastest mech that is supposed to deal with people like that, I sure get countered by movement and map design a lot.)

Oh man, I couldn't agree with this more. Like, I get that they have "soft" boundaries on these big outdoor maps for the immersion or whatever, but from a gameplay standpoint, the maps should really all just have hard boundaries. For the sake of the visuals, they could be transparent from a distance but come into view as you get closer, similar to the boundaries in the training/challenge modes.

Even if you aren't being cheesed by someone abusing the soft boundaries (which I haven't run into much yet through Plat, but sounds like a nightmare at higher ranks if people there have figured it out), it's just annoying not really knowing where the map ends, flying out of it as Falcon, and getting the annoying static / "TURN BACK NOW!!!". There's really no need for it to be that way.