RPG Rebalance Idea (Feedback Appreciated)

[7cyantropican7]

Hello all,



This is my first forum post on any site in like 6 years so if my formatting is terrible that's why. I'm a demo main and have been playing KF2 since 2017 and have about 2000 hours, so i've been around for a while. I've heard people say the RPG is too good, and for the most part it's true. The RPG is generally stronger than most of the alternatives and has a unique and reliable way of dealing with what is essentially demo's weakness, RPG headshotting scrakes.


Recently I read a reddit post stating that demo has a problem, and that it's the RPG is just way too good compared to other options. They proposed to give demo an extra 5 carry weight for a total of 20 so you could create more interesting loadouts without having to sacrifice not taking the RPG. Of course when I read this, I thought it was absolutely insane. They were right about one thing though and that nerfing the damage of the RPG would only make demo less reliable as a big zed killer. So, how do you make the RPG more balanced?


Well to me it's an easy fix. Let's turn our attention back to KF1 for a moment. In that game, you had a weapon pretty similar to the RPG, the LAW. It had only one shot before needing to be reloading, but because of that, that one shot had a lot of power to it. Sure you had the M32, but the individual shots were pretty weak, it was the fact that it was semi auto that made up for that.


Anyways being able to kill a fleshpound in about 1 shot compared to the M32, is a big deal. Obviously there has to be a downside for taking such a powerful weapon right? and you'd be right, you know what they did? They made it weigh an absolute ton. Taking the LAW was like putting all your eggs in one basket, putting all your damage into one weapon. Taking the RPG should be the same way, for a weapon that does so much you should be reducing options by making it weigh more. If you're gonna take the RPG, the downside should be that you can only pair it with very few things. You guys did it with the M99, why not the RPG?


Well how much should it weigh and what can you pair it with. I propose a weight of 11, not 12 since you'll be able to upgrade unlike the M99. Your options will be:

RPG (11) + C4 (3) + HMTech101 (1) This is a loadout for Demos who want to take as much explosives as possible while also being able to heal others.

RPG + 1 (12) + C4 (3) Alternatively if you have a medic on your team, you can spend that extra block on the RPG upgrade for maximum damage.

RPG *+1*(11/12) + *Insert Gunslinger Pistols* (2/3) You can opt out on carrying C4 for better self defense with the aid of Gunslinger's wide variety of pistols.
You have access to the 1858 Revolvers, M1911s, Desert Eagles, and depending on whether you upgraded the RPG or not, AF2011 and Magnum Revolver.


Even with this weight change I still believe you have a reasonable amount of options for taking what has been called for many years "the best demo weapon". Now of course this is my opinion and i'm not saying that this is the best way of handling it, i'm just a guy who thought KF1 did things better balance wise and the LAW was a perfect example. I appreciate feedback and would like to hear your thoughts on this proposed change.

 

[OnionBubs]

This is one of the better thought-out posts I've seen on this site in a recent while so there's no reason to worry on that, and it's a good topic, too. The RPG conundrum in this game is always interesting to explore because it's such a weird dichotomy from the rest of the big game hunter weapons.

In KF1, the LAW was very much a situational weapon that would often be eschewed in favor of the M32 because of its limitations, yes. But there's been so many changes from the base mechanics from KF1 to KF2 that it's really hard to compare the two. Impact damage along with explosions, the inclusion of close-range "dud" attacks, Zed-Time: Destroyer of Worlds, and incaps other than stun (read: knockdowns) are just the beginning of the list.

Specifically, the KF2 RPG has the following advantages over basically every other explosive Demo weapon:

• Scrakes in KF1 were resistant to explosions so they acted as sort of a counter-force to Demos, who were anti-Fleshpound and anti-boss units. While Scrakes are technically resistant to explosives in KF2, this is made largely irrelevant by one other major weakness: they take 400% extra damage from the RPG's impact. This is a weakness that literally no other weapon can take advantage of because it's specifically coded to the RPG.
• The overwhelming spike damage on the RPG lets you kill Scrakes before they can rage, and when comboed correctly with other tools like the C4, allows players to kill Fleshpounds before they can land hits on players during/after the rage animation. There is no other weapon in the Demo's arsenal with takedowns this easy; anything else is practically guaranteed to rage HVTs and cause problems, meaning the Demo needs to be disproportionately skilled and prepared to make clean kills with said weapons or they and the team will suffer for it.
• The Quarter Pound, whose main gimmick is that it generally spawns in multiples and has a disproportionate head health/body health ratio, is of little concern to someone who can straight-up delete them with little concern given for head damage, as all of Demo's main damage on QPs affects the body. No other perk in KF2 has it quite this easy against QPs.
• Strongest attack values for Destroyer of Worlds, giving it the best damage specific to that skill because of how the DoW blasts work.
• Being a largely one-and-done weapon means that you have little to worry about in the way of difficult or situational combos, making it overall much easier to use in the grand scheme of things.

All of the above synergize extremely well with Demo's default toolkit: extremely straightforward, easy-to-use anti-HVT that trades aim requirements for requiring positioning and meta knowledge. The other weapons are best served for removing trash (M32, M79), are gimmicky at best and poor at worst (Seeker Six, Seal Squeal, Gravity Imploder), or serve to only barely patch holes in Demo's toolkit and are generally just bad on the whole (M16). Which is why the best meta loadout as Demo, for the longest time, has been (RPG + C4 + .500) since that covers your bases for HVT killing and lets you pick off the odd trash Zed getting in your face. Trash-killing loadouts, while viable to a point, underperform at that role compared to even the Firebug at actually clearing trash reliably since most of Demo's trash-killing weapons are slow and clunky to work with by comparison, and most pro players will expect a giant slayer when a Demo shows up.

The only way I could see this changing is if there were adjustments to weapons like the Seeker Six or the M32 to bring them more in line with the RPG as well. Current HoE and CD consensus seems to be that the Seeker Six is the closest thing to Demo's "utility weapon" in similar vein to the Sharpshooter's M14, but it also has the problem of being a fair weapon with duds but pitiful at actually using explosive damage, and even with the buffs it's gotten over the years, it still underperforms compared to the RPG. (Also, why is its single-fire recoil so dumb, but the alt-fire isn't?)

Maybe if the S6 focused on direct damage and weakpoint advantages, leaning fully into that, while the M32 remained as the trash slaying multi-shot alternative? I know right now the M32 still isn't affected by faster reloads, which would help a fair bit...


ADDENDUM:
In all honesty, while the RPG is certainly a balancing issue to consider, there's another problem related to your weight concern: the Kaboomstick. I would honestly consider this a bigger issue than the RPG on its own design, but right now it's possible for a player to take both. The Kaboomstick allows players to spam down even Scrakes (who, mind you, are supposed to be quite resistant to explosives) with little thought for shot placement while also giving them a free out against trash (via close-range no-self-damage scattershot AND the shotgun jump), which is supposed to be Demo's primary weakness in the team (stuff getting close, particularly trash Zeds).

I hate this thing on a conceptual level and right now it's too easy to use for how effective it is, but if things were weighty enough that you couldn't use them together, that would go a long way towards Demo balance.

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

I subscribe to this opinion from the height of my thousands of hours in this game and a vet status.

Would like to add that the problem described here was exacerbated by the kaboomstick, as it's just a very good all-round weapon to carry with an RPG. Before that you could only do that with M79, which has a major weakness of being very hard to use against a pack of crawlers and especially stalkers that suddenly can surround a demo. Kaboomstick doesn't have any drawbacks if paired with RPG and make a combo that allows a demo to deal with anything, which further advances the TWI perk role dilution agenda which makes the game worse than it was before.

I personally, however, prefer an upgraded RPG for that 1-shotting 6P scrake ability and a gunslinger pistol, either deagle (if I do C4) or AF, so this loadout kind of already makes RPG so heavy that one can't basically carry anything good for self protection against packs of smaller enemies. So at the very least, unupgraded RPG can't 1-shot 6P scrakes, making it worse than M99 at that, while upgraded one makes it close to M99 at the "all-eggs-in-one-basketness", as one can't carry good sidearms.

Another option is to make both kaboomstick and M79 (and M16) weigh more.

Also, since we are at it, the game design should really prohibit overcapping. Now, with the buffing of "extra rounds", with overcapping one can have 30 rockets without sacrificing the damage, which is more than enough for a 10th round HoE, making C4 completely unnecessary to carry with RPG.

 

[Aze]

I know right now the M32 still isn't affected by faster reloads, which would help a fair bit...

A quick reponse to this: That statement is actually untrue. It reloads 25% faster with elite reloads (i.e. 0,8x reloadtime). But reloadspeed is so non-meta, sadly.

----

The RPG - and Demolitionist as a whole - is a bit complex in regards to how it should be rebalanced.

First question: Is it even a good idea to keep the Demolitionist to be that good against Scrakes with the RPG? Alternatively to nerfing the weight, how about reducing the Scrake impact multiplier?
I ask this not just from a balance point-of-view, but also from a "fun" point of view. If you can basicly just equip the RPG, with barely any other gun alongside it, you have the M99 situation; You carry a powerful weapon, but also requires you to play with a wait-around-a-lot mindset, which I bet most people don't find particularly engaging.

After that: How much are the talents (or "perk skills") supposed to be a choice vs meta?
If it's supposed to be about personal choice, it's failing MISERABLY at that, for all perks mind you, not just the Demolitionist, but the Demolitionist has it the hardest overall (basicly, Demo needs to pick all the damage talents or higher difficulties are a no-go). If it's supposed to be about meta, well... is that actually fun?
Personally, I would love to rebalance all perk skills so that damage NEVER competes with plain utility. It should be damage style X versus damage style Y. Or utility X versus utility Y. That could prove to make the choices into actual choices.

But, perk skills aside, only looking at the Demolitionist's weapons, I'd alternatively suggest to rebalance them more or less like this:

• RPG - Scrake impact damage multiplier reduced from +300% (x4) to +150%. (x2,5). With this nerf, you can only oneshot them on solo and duo HoE. This could even allow some small BUFFS for it (like a bit more ammo etc).
  • It still holds the role as the heaviest hitter, and still helps with Scrake takedowns - but doesn't trivialize them either.
• Kaboomstick - Weight increased to 8. It's definitely too good at self defence to occupy merely 6 blocks.
  • With this, you have to reconsider your role in the group; AoE-trashkiller, or heavyhitter? If you want to be a heavyhitter, an 8-block Kaboomstick won't let you do that very easily, with your strongest heavyhitter choices now being either the Seal Squeal or the Blunderbuss. Considering you are removing your main weakness (close combat), that should definitely come at a pretty high cost (i.e. removing most of the heavyhitting options).
• Seeker6 - Reduce reloadtime by about 15% or so. Reduce recoil for non-seeking shots, to be the same as seeking shots. Increase impact damage a notch (to 140, from 125)?
  • Seeker6 is one of the spammiest guns for the Demo with lots of ammo, but has a bit overly lengthy reload to even generally be able to spend all that ammo in due time. Also, it's penalized with stupid high recoil for manual firing (WHY?!). By also giving it a impact damage boost it might actually have more clear role too; A single target destroyer.
• M32 - Reduce or even remove horizontal recoil. Increase spare ammo to 42 (i.e. 6 more shots). Reduce cost to 1750 dosh. Slightly speed up the "opening chamber" part of the reload
  • Its recoil is stupid, it has low ammo for its weight and cost, and it is just too costly in general. Its reload is also clunky. Even with these changes, it's probably still gonna remain a pretty garbage gun, I bet. Sidenote: If the perk skills were also rebalanced so that things such as Elite Reloads were guaranteed (or not hard to pass up at least), the M32 could also get some indirect improvements, maybe even enough to make it semi-useful?
• M16 - Needs to have better damage-boosting from passives and perk skills.
  • Because it just sucks right now.

Something like that I guess?

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

Something like that I guess?

Well, since you propose a 10% speed boost for all perks and removing the downgrade to jogging while reloading, I'd discard your opinion completely as one that is built on wrong priors. This game doesn't need any speed boosts, it's the opposite, because speed boosts incentivize lone wolf/kiting/abandon the spot behavior. This is one of the reasons zerk and survivalists are hated. This is one of the reasons the last man standing scenario oftentimes results in 40 minutes of everyone (who doesn't leave the game) watching a zerk or survivalist kiting through the map barely killing anything. This further disintegrates the team oriented behavior.

Instead, the game should incentivize killing and as quickly as possible at that. For that to happen the players should know that they can't outrun the menace and have to deal with it on time as a team instead.

Moreover, the game already allows every perk ability to deal with pursuing trash, instead of turning one's back and running away one should learn how to backpedal while killing the pursuing trash at the same time, it's not impossible. As for pursuing raging scrakes the 10% speed boost does almost nothing and for pursuing raging FPs it does literally nothing.

As for the speed degrading to jogging while reloading it's a very important mechanic, which forces one to learn when one should reload and when one should abstain from doing it to avoid being hit by trash.

No speed boosts, period. Instead, speed nerfs.

Overall, your suggestions I'd say way too intrusive and overboard. Balancing is hard and one is better off treading lightly in order not to introduce more imbalances. I'd personally just stick with the OP suggestion of merely increasing the RPG weight by 1 (or 2) and see how it goes and get back to the issue after a few hundred of hours playing. This leaves plenty of scenarios when other weapons can be useful, such as 2nd demo on a team that already has an RPG demo but struggles with trash, <6 players team, etc.

 

[Sarcy]

Well alphabet soup has spoken so case closed I guess...

Fundamentally balance needs to be at the forefront of the next game because there are so many areas that require addressing it's like playing Kerplunk wherein one bad decision could ruin the entire system.

Personally I'd switch the RPG to Tier 5 and put the M32 as 4 because it's really not that good, as for everything else, I must be playing in an alternate universe because they're all viable imo.

 

[Aze]

Well, since you propose a 10% speed boost for all perks and removing the downgrade to jogging while reloading, I'd discard your opinion completely as one that is built on wrong priors. This game doesn't need any speed boosts, it's the opposite, because speed boosts incentivize lone wolf/kiting/abandon the spot behavior. This is one of the reasons zerk and survivalists are hated. This is one of the reasons the last man standing scenario oftentimes results in 40 minutes of everyone (who doesn't leave the game) watching a zerk or survivalist kiting through the map barely killing anything. This further disintegrates the team oriented behavior.

Instead, the game should incentivize killing and as quickly as possible at that. For that to happen the players should know that they can't outrun the menace and have to deal with it on time as a team instead.

Moreover, the game already allows every perk ability to deal with pursuing trash, instead of turning one's back and running away one should learn how to backpedal while killing the pursuing trash at the same time, it's not impossible. As for pursuing raging scrakes the 10% speed boost does almost nothing and for pursuing raging FPs it does literally nothing.

As for the speed degrading to jogging while reloading it's a very important mechanic, which forces one to learn when one should reload and when one should abstain from doing it to avoid being hit by trash.

No speed boosts, period. Instead, speed nerfs.

Overall, your suggestions I'd say way too intrusive and overboard. Balancing is hard and one is better off treading lightly in order not to introduce more imbalances. I'd personally just stick with the OP suggestion of merely increasing the RPG weight by 1 (or 2) and see how it goes and get back to the issue after a few hundred of hours playing. This leaves plenty of scenarios when other weapons can be useful, such as 2nd demo on a team that already has an RPG demo but struggles with trash, <6 players team, etc.

None of that was relevant to what was being suggested though. You're speaking of my ideas in my megadocument, which is still very heavily WiP and inspired by other, better balanced games (Deep Rock Galactic, being one of them) - the document not being the point of the discussion right here.

Please stick to the subject.

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

None of that was relevant to what was being suggested though.

It is relevant, as pretty much any balance change affects indirectly the whole game balance, e.g. a faster perk would have a less need for self protection side arm as it would just outrun all trash and scrakes, so it makes sense more to run around with an overpowered RPG and no anti-trash weapon, etc.

Pretty much everything balance wise is interconnected and one better understand that before suggesting anything, because, since TWI/Saber don't play the game themselves to any even half serious extent now, they listen to the community when looking for what to tweak, i.e. people like you. That's why we have disastrous things in the game, as they were just suggested by someone who wasn't careful enough to think through potential implications of their suggestions. Whoever was the mastermind behind the key game design decisions in 2015 left to work on something else and people who maintain it now don't subscribe to that old vision, if they subscribe to anything at all instead of just going through the motions.

This, of course, bites them in the ass as well, which may be one of the reasons the game's player base remains flat and doesn't grow at all over the years, as too many people feel pissed after some update and leave.

Suggest carefully before posting and don't suggest them WiP things, that's all I ask.

 

[Aze]

It is relevant, as pretty much any balance change affects indirectly the whole game balance, e.g. a faster perk would have a less need for self protection side arm as it would just outrun all trash and scrakes, so it makes sense more to run around with an overpowered RPG and no anti-trash weapon, etc.

Pretty much everything balance wise is interconnected and one better understand that before suggesting anything, because, since TWI/Saber don't play the game themselves to any even half serious extent now, they listen to the community when looking for what to tweak, i.e. people like you. That's why we have disastrous things in the game, as they were just suggested by someone who wasn't careful enough to think through potential implications of their suggestions. Whoever was the mastermind behind the key game design decisions in 2015 left to work on something else and people who maintain it now don't subscribe to that old vision, if they subscribe to anything at all instead of just going through the motions.

This, of course, bites them in the ass as well, which may be one of the reasons the game's player base remains flat and doesn't grow at all over the years, as too many people feel pissed after some update and leave.

Suggest carefully before posting and don't suggest them WiP things, that's all I ask.

Dude. I told you to stick to the bloody subject! We're not talking about my document here - we're talking about Demolitionist's weapons, RPG moreso. Just because I have my document stickied doesn't mean it has to be brought into the discussion as well. So please, ignore the document, it's not the place for it here...

(Also, that document is semi-canned anyway, I made it almost 2 years ago, and I lost like 99% of the passion for "the big revamp" I was trying to do in the past, considering the devs quickly went to ignore this game anyway - I just stick to these smaller, more specific threads because those actually might do something... I dunno why I even care to do so at this point... So yeah, please ignore that document)

 

[CitronVert]

I'm not sure why we'd want to nerf demo, he requires some skill to use and does not break the game (at least not as much as medic/surv/zerk/gunslinger). Demo deals massive damage at the expense of survivability and is well balanced in this respect, for starters he absolutely needs a medic to be viable whereas the other classes in the previous list don't.

Regarding RPG being the best weapon, well, most classes have a weapon that is by far the best of their loadouts: healthrower for medic, Deagles for gunslinger, clobber for zerk, if you think the other weapons are bad, then those should be buffed instead of nerfing the best ones but apart from M32 I think all demo weapons are at least satisfying to use.

In other words, I could agree with this topic if it was part of a full rework of the classes, but for now this is just needlessly nerfing demo when he's already a very average option.

 

[pie1055]

Something like that I guess?

These are all great changes that help make the demo more specialized and I agree that they would increase the fun and diversity of playing as the perk.

...That said, they'll probably never happen. Devs seem to be against perk specialization with the entirety of KF2's development and with the rest of the game and meta as it currently is these changes would open up gaping holes in game balance far too large for the apparently minuscule budget they have to work with. Maybe that's a bit of a negative outlook but it's what feels most likely at this point.

 

[Aze]

I'm not sure why we'd want to nerf demo, he requires some skill to use and does not break the game (at least not as much as medic/surv/zerk/gunslinger). Demo deals massive damage at the expense of survivability and is well balanced in this respect, for starters he absolutely needs a medic to be viable whereas the other classes in the previous list don't.

Regarding RPG being the best weapon, well, most classes have a weapon that is by far the best of their loadouts: healthrower for medic, Deagles for gunslinger, clobber for zerk, if you think the other weapons are bad, then those should be buffed instead of nerfing the best ones but apart from M32 I think all demo weapons are at least satisfying to use.

In other words, I could agree with this topic if it was part of a full rework of the classes, but for now this is just needlessly nerfing demo when he's already a very average option.

It's not entirely about nerfing Demo, it's about making the RPG less oppressive as the "king of all weapons" for the Demolitionist. And the Deagles and Clobber are in a similar boat for their perks.

However, balancing isn't a "black-or-white" ordeal. It's not just going with "nerf nerf nerf" to the strongest option - as that is just a sour feeling in general. NOR is it right to just buff everything else, because that leads to power creep, which again ruins the originally intended balance. Balancing means you can nerf the strongest stuff a bit (or a lot, if it's truly oppressive), but ALSO buff the absolute weakest options alongside it, so you have actual options.

Think about it: Killing Floor is a franchise that kinda has taken quite a lot of its pride in its variety of guns - so why should just a handful of weapons be allowed to have the spotlight of usefulness? That's a complete waste of development.

Which is why I don't agreed with purely nerfing the RPG as the sole solution to the RPG's superiority, as that only removes the power without any form of compensation whatsoever, which certainly might leave the Demolitionist to be potentially underpowered as a result, and that's just no fun either.

 

[7cyantropican7]

Thank you all for replying, I enjoy talking about balance especially in a game like KF2, where balance seems to have been left by the wayside for some time now.

In KF1, the LAW was very much a situational weapon that would often be eschewed in favor of the M32 because of its limitations, yes.

I would very much agree with you, in KF1 the M32 was mostly the better option. Also like you said however, the KF2 RPG can do things that a lot of other alternatives just cannot which you listed perfectly.

ADDENDUM:
In all honesty, while the RPG is certainly a balancing issue to consider, there's another problem related to your weight concern: the Kaboomstick.

yes the Kaboomstick, honestly it's a weapon that I believe should be removed from the game as it goes against one of demo's balancing mechanics, self damage. When you think about it, demo's quite a powerhouse. Doesn't have to be precise with aiming, can blow many things up at once thanks to splash whereas a precision perk would have to shoot each one individually, great at crowd control (as long as no scrakes or fleshpounds are raged in the process), and the most dangerous zed in the game (excluding bosses) is vulnerable to him.

The downside to demo is his inability to use his powerful weapons at close range and self damage. This is why positioning yourself well as demo is important to learn as letting zeds get to close to you makes you more inefficient in, well, blowing stuff up. Also since self damage exists, demos can either choose to shoot the ground nearby to dispatch nearby zeds, risking self damage, or self restrain and using their pistol. (C4 also works but most people blow it up too early and cause MASSIVE self damage, this is why it may be actually a good thing explosives like the M79 and RPG have an arm time, cuz you definitely would be blowing yourself up the same way)

The Kaboomstick throws all these things out the window. Normally when it comes to self damage, it's mostly due to a demo being surrounded by trash of some sort. This is normally when you'd be shooting explosives near you to kill these trash getting close to you. However the Kaboomstick has none, so there's no thought into it. Just shoot that horde of trash pestering you with no cost to you. Meanwhile demos of years before (before the Kaboomstick and Tommy Boom were added) had to learn how to minimize self damage by knowing when a good time to use your M79 or pistol, or timing a C4 charge right so you would kill a group of zeds in front of you without blowing yourself up. And the fact that you can pair it with the RPG? Utterly ridiculous. RPG for big zeds and Kaboomstick for trash, literally the most crutch loadout.

I tell you, once you give players an option to just do things themselves aka giving an HVT an easy way to dispatch trash himself aka not being reliant on others, then teamwork just becomes redundant. Who needs trash clearers when the demo can just do it himself, as if demo was already killing most of the things in the wave. Yes, I am a demo that's self aware, surprised?

i'd be fine with the kaboomstick if it had self damage. This would mean no more rushing up to big zeds with this thing out and blast it in a few double shots if it meant almost killing yourself with one blast, same goes with Tommy Boom.

M32 - Reduce or even remove horizontal recoil. Increase spare ammo to 42 (i.e. 6 more shots). Reduce cost to 1750 dosh. Slightly speed up the "opening chamber" part of the reload

• Its recoil is stupid, it has low ammo for its weight and cost, and it is just too costly in general. Its reload is also clunky.

I recently tried the M32 again after a couple years and yeah, just as bad as I remember it. The reason? The god damn reload. Honestly i'd say the seeker six is a straight upgrade from the M32:

• Has 6 shots, just like the seeker six
• Has ridiculous recoil and there's nothing you can do about it
• Reloads each round individually AND DOES IT PAINFULLY SLOWLY
• Cannot lock onto zeds
• Costs 2000
• Ammo pool is painfully low

Meanwhile the M32:

• Has 6 shots, just like the seeker six
• Has ridiculous recoil and there's nothing you can do about it
• Reloads each round individually AND DOES IT PAINFULLY SLOWLY
• Cannot lock onto zeds
• Costs 2000
• Ammo pool is painfully low

While I do consider both of these weapons decent at best and awful at worst, I would say the seeker is the better choice of the two.

The main issue with the M32 for me is it just reloads too damn slow, so I was disappointed to see when equipping shock trooper it only sped up the animation but a little, nothing major. I'd say make the shock trooper reload speed the default reload speed, but when equipping shock trooper, utilize some kind of BF4 style M32 reload where you reload two shells at once. I could see the M32 being better like this.

Well, since you propose a 10% speed boost for all perks and removing the downgrade to jogging while reloading, I'd discard your opinion completely as one that is built on wrong priors. This game doesn't need any speed boosts, it's the opposite, because speed boosts incentivize lone wolf/kiting/abandon the spot behavior. This is one of the reasons zerk and survivalists are hated. This is one of the reasons the last man standing scenario oftentimes results in 40 minutes of everyone (who doesn't leave the game) watching a zerk or survivalist kiting through the map barely killing anything. This further disintegrates the team oriented behavior.

Instead, the game should incentivize killing and as quickly as possible at that. For that to happen the players should know that they can't outrun the menace and have to deal with it on time as a team instead.

"No speed boosts, period. Instead, speed nerfs."

Yes, Yes, and Yes, am I the only one who thinks Gunslinger just doesn't need the passive speed. People seem to underestimate what giving extra movement speed does in the grand scheme of things. You can already outrun most raged scrake attacks just by sprinting, You don't have to worry about taking damage if you can just outrun the zeds. I've had boss fights against King Fleshpound as Gunslinger without taking a single hit cuz you just move too fast for his attacks to hit you. Mostly why I think bosses like KFP and Abom are just poorly designed, all it comes down to is "you win cuz you run fast."

idk how many people here play minecraft but i've got a comparison. In the alpha days of minecraft you had no sprint, so when you encountered monsters it was kinda scary since your walking speed was only barely faster than the monsters themselves. Having a creeper chase you was tense since one slip up and your gonna get blown up. Modern day minecraft you encounter monsters, you just sprint away and you'll be out of danger's way in seconds.

It was the same way in KF1, if you were full health with the knife out you still only barely walked faster than a calm fleshpound. This meant running away from it was inefficient and it was better to kill it instead of just running away. KF1 actually taught you to deal with threats, not run away from them. KF2 is like modern day minecraft, just run away from your problems instead of dealing with them now.

Which is why I don't agreed with purely nerfing the RPG as the sole solution to the RPG's superiority, as that only removes the power without any form of compensation whatsoever, which certainly might leave the Demolitionist to be potentially underpowered as a result, and that's just no fun either.

I don't want to nerf the damage of the RPG, I think it's fine how it is. What I don't like is how many things you can pair with it, ESPECAILLY the Kaboomstick. If you're gonna take the RPG and be super effective against bigs with it, then you're gonna be **** out of luck when it comes to everything else. That's what specialization is.

 

[7cyantropican7]

I recently tried the M32 again after a couple years and yeah, just as bad as I remember it. The reason? The god damn reload. Honestly i'd say the seeker six is a straight upgrade from the M32:

• Has 6 shots, just like the seeker six
• Has ridiculous recoil and there's nothing you can do about it
• Reloads each round individually AND DOES IT PAINFULLY SLOWLY
• Cannot lock onto zeds
• Costs 2000
• Ammo pool is painfully low

EDIT: I was copy and pasting these trying to figure out how to get the bullet points to show up. Here's what it's supposed to say:

Has 6 shots, just the M32
No recoil on "lock on" mode (the recoil on the free aim mode is unnecessary)
RELOADS ALL SIX ROUNDS IN A MAGAZINE (this is the big one for me)
Locks onto zeds
Costs 1500
Comes with decent ammo

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

All, the chance of TWI paying attention to proper balance tuning is pretty much zero at this point. They don't care and they don't know better. The lunacy of their recent balance changes (like buffing the VLAD-1000 even more or buffing the medic's resilience skill or introducing weapons such as healthrower or hemoclobber) proves that whatever channel they use to get informed about current imbalances is of inferior quality, probably comes either from their beta surveys many of the vets never fill for the reason that many if not majority never participate in betas or from usage stats that reflect the average usage of a certain skill, perk or weapon, which has many factors influencing it, besides the actual power of it, such as the general use satisfaction (e.g. some weapon might be considered 'bad' because it 'sounds unsatisfactory' or because animations are of inferior quality or because it breaks the perk specialization such as FAL on commando), use because of historical reasons as people oftentimes get used to run a certain loadout and are oblivious to whatever else.

Therefore, as I've already been suggesting in other balance related threads, especially considering that TWI may be on the brink of stopping all the care about the game, including updates, it's up to the community to rebalance the game.

There are many opinions how to do this, even as this thread shows. I personally run a couple of modded servers none of which provides the vanilla game experience, with balance changes that are uncontroversial for the most part. E.g. everyone who's worth their time in this game agrees that the FP/QP spawnrage is a bad mechanic or everyone agrees that the support starting spare ammo is too low. However, many changes are controversial, at least on the surface, like the one suggested in this thread and need to be discussed, tested and surveyed first.

As a community we can greatly benefit from running a place where we can 1) discuss the issues and come up with solutions most players agree with 2) conduct surveys among vets to measure the opinion quantifiably 3) distribute the modding work between the capable to address the identified issues. The resulting consolidated balance patch can be made available for every community server owner to run under agreed upon trademark so people can distinguish between the vanilla and the modded balanced game experience. The RPG weight bump is one of the balancing questions to address. I don't think official TWI forums or Steam Discussions are a good place for that.

I guess I'll start working on all that slowly myself in hopes that other interested people eventually join. Suggestions on how to get 1-3 done greatly appreciated.

This also has an issue that TWI hasn't approved for whitelisting a single workshop mod since AFAIR 2018 and one can't really expect them to approve a rebalancing mod. My hope here is that when they stop caring about the game and the updates we can work on modifying the game such that our mods don't derank the game. So I plan to start these activities after they announce that the game will no longer be updated (as this necessarily means we are more free at game modding and less bound by their EULA), hopefully the today's update is the last one.

 

[7cyantropican7]

All of this I kinda already knew, if tripwire actually cared about balance why would they add a weapon like the Kaboomstick and Tommy Boom in the first place. A demo weapon with no self damage (HX-25 is alright in my books though, cuz it only has one shot before reloading and is generally inefficient). This post was more of a "I just need to get this off my chest" kinda deal as opposed to "maybe tripwire will listen and get this changed."

like buffing the VLAD-1000 even more or buffing the medic's resilience skill

I read the patch notes and it said people said it felt weak to use not on zerk, but on support. When I read that I thought to myself, who the hell uses this thing on support to begin with? I certainly don't and have never seen a support use it in any pubs that i've been in, so that was a head scratcher. As for medic's resillence skill, I wasn't aware of this buff, when was this a thing?

introducing weapons such as healthrower or hemoclobber

Healthrower is probably the strongest medic weapon when it comes to being a "true" medic. Can easily buff players even when they're at full health (if you wanted to do this with dart weapons you'd actually have to shoot it at players without the aid of heatseek aka KF1 style) and can easily heal many people at once. Also the damage it does against light trash makes it laughably easy to keep trash at bay. The best part is it's tier 3, you can get this thing with only 1000 dosh.

I think you can still balance it, here's my thoughts. Reduce the mag size so you'll be reloading more often, make it at least tier 4 for 1500 dosh, and this next one may be a stretch, but I think you should remove the darts from it. If you've got a weapon that's fantastic at close range healing and isn't a pain in the ass to buff players at full HP (not having to KF1 style shoot darts), and the easiest to do so for multiple players at that, then the major downside to this weapon is that if you move too far from your teammates, then you won't be able to heal them. This weapon is the best healing weapon BUT ONLY if you stick to your teammates. This would mean if you want to cover this weapon's weakness, then you'll either HAVE to stick to your team like glue, or HAVE to pair this with a weapon that has darts (which there's plenty of options.)

As for hemoclobber, just reduce the amount of healing it does to teammates. From my experience using it on zerk, it's pretty bad when it comes to healing yourself, but smacking a teammate for a couple seconds at most can get someone up from 1 to 100 just like that. Slow that healing rate down and i'd say it'll be good.

As a community we can greatly benefit from running a place where we can 1) discuss the issues and come up with solutions most players agree with 2) conduct surveys among vets to measure the opinion quantifiably 3) distribute the modding work between the capable to address the identified issues. The resulting consolidated balance patch can be made available for every community server owner to run under agreed upon trademark so people can distinguish between the vanilla and the modded balanced game experience. The RPG weight bump is one of the balancing questions to address. I don't think official TWI forums or Steam Discussions are a good place for that.

I'm all for this proposed "rebalance mod." I run a KF2 server myself, but it's only vanilla for now. I've got max prestige on everything recently so deranking isn't really that big of a deal for me. However I have a couple friends who are still on that grind but after they're done I planned on making my server CD so I could remove as much bull as I could and maybe make a few tweaks myself, at least as much as CD would allow me.

As for suggestions, I could do 1 and 2, I like discussing and I don't mind taking surveys, as for the modding itself, i'm not a coder so I couldn't help you there. And if tripwire forums and steam discussions isn't a good place for topics like this, where would it?

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

As for medic's resillence skill, I wasn't aware of this buff, when was this a thing?

Killing Floor 2 Spring Update - Dystopian Devastation

Event Dystopian Devastation (Live until April 20th) A dark future will arrive for all of us if you mercs don’t do anything about it! Dystopia 2029 is your new destination, join the fight and recover the downtown, explore the smoggy alleys and buildings, and clean the streets out of Zeds. But...

forums.tripwireinteractive.com

I'm all for this proposed "rebalance mod." I run a KF2 server myself, but it's only vanilla for now. I've got max prestige on everything recently so deranking isn't really that big of a deal for me. However I have a couple friends who are still on that grind but after they're done I planned on making my server CD so I could remove as much bull as I could and maybe make a few tweaks myself, at least as much as CD would allow me.

People like their dailies, weeklies and seasonal progressions, people go after skins and other trophies, even if they play maxed perks. And peopl don't like some other inconveniences of unranked games, such as skill selection isn't preserved between game sessions, etc. People also tend to refrain from joining servers with the unranked icon.

From my experience of running unranked servers, whether it is CD or ZedTernal or whatever else non-whitelisted for quite a while is you get maybe 5-10% people joining as compared to a ranked server.

As for suggestions, I could do 1 and 2, I like discussing and I don't mind taking surveys, as for the modding itself, i'm not a coder so I couldn't help you there. And if tripwire forums and steam discussions isn't a good place for topics like this, where would it?

I don't know yet what might work here, over the years people used google docs spreadsheets (examples: Coco/Dodo's rebalancing spreadsheet, CustomWeapons/Harder Zeds rebalancing spreadsheet, that Aze dude above with his rebalancing spreadsheet), but that doesn't allow discussing the options much. For example, it has been a long standing issue that FN FAL for sharpshooter is not used by anyone because it sucks in CustomWeapons, but because of lack of discussions and the CustomWeapons spreadsheet owner being content with the current state of SS FAL it goes nowhere, besides maybe forking the project). For discussing discord may work, here one can have a benefit of having an account there already for almost all hardcore gamers, but the down side is Discord grows more ban happy over the years and hardcore modding can be construed as hacking by some (as if we were to blame for TWI not taking care of whitelisting), not to mention them becoming more political and infringing on hate speech (which can be argued a particular case of free speech in some cases), etc. Steam/TWI definitely won't work because of this reason as well, although it's easy to argue that proper balancing has a potential to make the game more popular which leads to increased revenues, but if they cared about it they'd probably did it themselves instead of outsourcing to Saber, right?

PS The "exiled community" of KF1 players is a great inspiration for this. Up to this date they steadily keep on working on balancing and modding (so no wonder that at its current state, with all the community efforts counted, KF1 is arguably a more balanced game).

 

[CitronVert]

All, the chance of TWI paying attention to proper balance tuning is pretty much zero at this point. They don't care and they don't know better. The lunacy of their recent balance changes (like buffing the VLAD-1000 even more or buffing the medic's resilience skill or introducing weapons such as healthrower or hemoclobber) proves that whatever channel they use to get informed about current imbalances is of inferior quality, probably comes either from their beta surveys many of the vets never fill for the reason that many if not majority never participate in betas or from usage stats that reflect the average usage of a certain skill, perk or weapon, which has many factors influencing it, besides the actual power of it, such as the general use satisfaction (e.g. some weapon might be considered 'bad' because it 'sounds unsatisfactory' or because animations are of inferior quality or because it breaks the perk specialization such as FAL on commando), use because of historical reasons as people oftentimes get used to run a certain loadout and are oblivious to whatever else.

Please, I agree with you 100% on the basis but stop writing it in such an insulting manner for TWI, at some point they'll think we are just here to hate on their game and that's not constructive for anyone.

I don't think all hope is lost, in fact there have been some great balance changes this year (zerk). Regarding the "bad" balance changes we have also seen; I think these are due to 2 reasons:
1) Obvious lack of time and effort spent on the game anymore.
2) A very flawed way to collect data.

1) can probably not be changed, because KF2 is old, but 2) can be. As you said yourself I think the main reason for some of the most terrible balance changes is the way TWI gets the data. That's something we can change, so let's try to convince them.

Resilience is a good example, anyone who tried it after the buff could immediatly tell that resilience is completely broken now, but somehow the change STILL went through, showing community surveys are not honest and can not be trusted. I think the main problem is that they don't filter out who can reply, I mean, someone who plays mostly SWAT/sharpshooter/zerk will not log in the beta to try if resilience is more viable than before, so if you propose a beta with medic buff, who's gonna try it? medic players themselves... so when TWI is asking whether the change is good or not, that's not really validating whether the change is actually good or not, but rather testing whether the people who reply are honest or not...

I think the surveys should be kept to make sure the casual community has a word to say, but they should not be the only decider, devs could at least read the forums/reddit, there are barely more than 100 different users here and you'll quickly see who has a clue on what they are talking about and who hasn't...

 

[o2xVc3UuXp0NyBihrUnu]

Please, I agree with you 100% on the basis but stop writing it in such an insulting manner for TWI, at some point they'll think we are just here to hate on their game and that's not constructive for anyone.

Yes, this is the best zombie shooting game I have ever played. There could be a better game in the future, but there were no better in the past in my opinion.

But it's poorly maintained and people responsible for this deserve all the insults coming their way. They make the game worse by diluting the initial high quality content with their pathetic heavy handed blunt force.

At this point I've seen enough to convince me that they don't care as much about collecting meaningful opinions on forums and they have no way to tell which are meaningful and which are not. And who will you be talking to? The developers whose names I read in the code either moved on or were backstabbed and ousted for merely agreeing with a SCOTUS decision, we deal with so called "community organizers" and "project managers" here at best. Just look at their community game nights, they don't know the mechanics of their own game and can barely play it. Not that I personally needed that, but this opinion is shared by other players whose opinion I can respect.

It's either us or nothing. Even the zerk nerfs they've finally introduced came YEARS after the problem was identified. Do I want to wait for years for a good balance change which almost certainly will come with a bunch of bad changes especially considering that it's not clear are they going to keep updating it and the quality of these updates is even worse than the ones before that? Even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day. They even refuse to do a simple thing as to share with the community the data they supposedly base their decisions on, e.g. the survey data, a very simple and right thing to do for transparency and rebuilding trust with the community.

I, as that community member and as a customer feel disrespected. Am I supposed to be respectful in return? How about no.

 

[CANUEF]

I haven't read any of your articles, but I'm going to ask you one question. How likely are you that you would survive if someone threw an RPG bullet at you in real life? Are you guys really discussing this ridiculous topic? You remind me of those players who are just starting out and the incompetent players who can't aim from the head yet.