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Balancing medic

Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 12:00 pm
by lucassss
I feel like medic is giving too much of an advantage to allies in infantry blob fights, especially at the beginning of the game, before artilleries are available. Here is my proposal for balance:

- Medic heal will only work on a unit that was not hurt in the last 10 seconds.
- In order to possibly compensate, medic heal range will be increased.

Your opinion?

Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 12:04 pm
by Smitty
Medic is getting a 20 HP reduction this time around. To me the problem was always their tanking power so this is a good step. We'll see how things go.

Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 12:33 pm
by Sleipnir
Implementing a heal cooldown on individual units would require new game code, which is not likely to happen. Changing the medic to heal one unit at a time, instead of all units in the vicinity of the target, would be a much simpler way to get a similar effect.

Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2017 8:56 pm
by SirCake
IT HAS AOE HEAL?????? OMFG!! SWITCHIG TO ALLIES RIGH NOW ........................ ;)
(not even attack plane HMGs have aoe, why has a doctors purse aoe? Obviously the simplest fix would be to rename the yak as "Sniper Plane")

Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2017 11:21 pm
by Blackened
Yaks/hinds have 1 cell spread damage. medic has like 1.5 cell heal range though.

Posted: Sat Oct 07, 2017 1:42 am
by AoAGeneral1
(Repost from github #14076)

This has been an issue for a long time. The reduction on medic HP has helped a bit in this regard but its good to note that medics heal infantry at full health everytime. If they healed at either 60% of their HP instead this would help to alleviate some of the damage soaking problems mentioned here. (Same method done in RA95)

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 8:25 pm
by camundahl
i've never seen medics themselves win a game at a "pro" level.

The engineer stealing husks is pretty useful though.

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 9:02 pm
by eskimo
Game of the season had a medic spam win on patches. It was rather funny but cool.

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 9:17 pm
by SirCake
Yaks/hinds have 1 cell spread damage. medic has like 1.5 cell heal range though.
Whatayatakinabout? You call killing 1 inf and dealing 15% damage to the guy standing right next to him splash damage? Ahahahaha.. I call that fake. It's a sniper plane.
Maybe we should even ask the devs to add the spy-snipe sound to it, so its properly implemented.

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 9:32 pm
by Sleipnir
We wanted to fix the yak as part of the targeting overhauls in the new release, but it was shot down by SoScared on behalf of the competitive community.
SoScared (OpenRA/OpenRA PR #13522) wrote:I've tried to keep an open mind but I'm not sure the Yak change is worth pandering towards the original game in this case. The repurposing is blind and I don't see a relevant problem with #2642 #2730. The RA mod meta has developed heavily around the current Yak and I'm not sure if it's wise to bring this aboard the official playtest if we want players to dive into the HitShape/UnitStance seriously.

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 11:41 pm
by 3.Lucian
well thank god the voice of reason can still be heard, echoing through the hallways.

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:10 pm
by SirCake
Concerning the voice of reason:
In my oppinion the current (pro)meta is not worth keeping. It is too predictabe and stagnant. Basically there is one winning strategy and you dont even need to scout if you execute your thing well enough.
This has many reasons, one is the ridiculously fast scaling of economy, slow production of vehicles, pop-up defenses and weak navy and airforces are some of the top of my head.
The playtest timidly adresses some of those, but it won't change the overall meta at all.

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:26 pm
by Smitty
SirCake wrote: Concerning the voice of reason:
In my oppinion the current (pro)meta is not worth keeping. It is too predictabe and stagnant. Basically there is one winning strategy and you dont even need to scout if you execute your thing well enough.
Just curious, what do you think that one strategy is? I see several strategies that have success, including diametrically opposite ones like the Omnom base spam and the tech rush.

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:57 pm
by SirCake
The build is: pp rax ref ref pp wf sd mcv pp ref rax rax rax pp ref dome.
Basically this, variations are just shifting around when something is built by one or two slots.
This leads to allways multi-mcv, allways infspam and defense spam into trench war.

You cant omit the second ref or the warfactory or multiple rax or sd, because if you do, you'll lose to overwhelming numbers.
This applies of course only to top level players, minions and below is relatively fine.

What I dont see at all in pro games is navy, spies, flamers, chinooks, chronotanks, gap genrators, migs, jammers, dogs, hijackers. Thats about 25% of all units! These are "obsolete choices" because they are not worth building in any situation.

I can only afford to build those if I know beforehand that I probably would win a standard game anyway or my opponent is going whacky style as well...

My dream scenario would be if you could follow any choice tree and use any units you want resulting in obvious advantages and drawbacks those choices result into.

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 3:38 pm
by Smitty
SirCake wrote: What I dont see at all in pro games is navy, spies, flamers, chinooks, chronotanks, gap genrators, migs, jammers, dogs, hijackers. Thats about 25% of all units! These are "obsolete choices" because they are not worth building in any situation.

I can only afford to build those if I know beforehand that I probably would win a standard game anyway or my opponent is going whacky style as well...

My dream scenario would be if you could follow any choice tree and use any units you want resulting in obvious advantages and drawbacks those choices result into.
We're in agreement there. I think a goal of all playtesters including SoScared and myself has been to give underused units the tools they need to be successful in competitive play. There's no grand conspiracy to keep designing balance with only the competitive meta in mind.

I won't be buffing spies though. I'd get crucified by a lot of people on these forums if I tried that.