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Strong Nerf for Medic

You could have settled for "TL;DR", that would have worked just as fine.

Claiming a medic is "fine as is" when it's arguably the most versatile and prone to survive is not knowing how to play the class. But I guess it's easier to label my rant as boring bull**** than to recognize some basic game design rules?


Claiming my guy Onion is pretentious when you write an entire paragraph to explain why you're so damn good at KF2 is pure eye-candy. In case you didn't get it already, Onion mostly (or only?) plays HoE at a high level, and have a good grasp at what good game design is about (those are always long posts, but should you be interested, try to find some of his earlier comments... They are goldmines, I learned a lot through them myself)

"I've probably played this game before you knew it existed" is kind of a weird thing to say. I could say the same about TF2 : I played the game upon its very release. But guess what? I was ten years old back then ! And I had a pretty lengthy break in-between, where I played other games... Am I allowed to say I've been playing the game for fifteen years? I guess I could... But I probably didn't know how to play the game well at all. Meanwhile, many players joined the game when it turned free-to-play, maybe as "early" as five years ago at best. And they're insanely more knowledgeable about the game that I'll ever be. Time itself doesn't mean much... I could play souls-like for YEARS and still fail miserably if I don't take the time to learn and understand why I keep getting my ass kicked. You can master a game in a matter of weeks if you're dedicated, just like you can play for ten years and still be a scrub if you just persist in playing wrong.

Not every perk is deserving of a nerf? I never heard anyone asking for a gunslinger, SWAT, Commando, Support or Sharpshooter nerfs. But it is true that we're seeing a bit too much power in the hands of the remaining perks. We've already talked about the medic and zerk at length, but I can give you a quick summary why I think the remaining three could get back to the drawing board for some tweaking :

-The Survivalist is meant to be the jack-of-all-trades, master of none perk. It's very idea is to offer a very versatile option that struggles to be as good in any role compared to dedicated perks. He should be slightly better at healing than most perks... But not better than the medic. It should be able to tackle big zeds, but not as well as the demo or sharp. As it currently resides though, the perk is quite stupidly tanky. And its own weaponry is pretty damn solid, despite having no real overarching theme about it (except maybe... "sci-fi weapons" ?)

-Both the Firebug and Demo are just too good at dealing with everything these days. It doesn't just come from their skills (which are mostly fine the way they are), but from their arsenal. They got far too many weapons tailored for any role. The demo is meant to be a pure glass cannon, probably even more so than the sharpshooter. It was meant to be very bad at dealing with trash zeds, and defending itself... meaning he had to have a proper team to back him up, in exchange for pure raw power against the biggest threats which are Scrakes and Fleshpounds. As it stands, the demo can definitely take care of itself and still be able to melt everything that comes to him. The firebug is meant to be a crowd control class and a formidable trash cleaner. Yet similarly, it is now capable to hold a whole zone on its own. The ground fire is just so nasty (and now works with EVERY weapon!) that you can just fire in a corridor and watch a pile of bodies slowly increasing in front of you. Even husks aren't the annoyance they used to be : most weapons can deal with them without problem.

You CAN and SHOULD have limitations to your class. Otherwise... What's the point of having them? Sure, being CRUSHED by difficulty is not a fun way to play. But walking through everything the game throws at you ain't very fun either. And that's something that a lot of players, regardless of the game, still struggle to see... What's fun if a game NEVER challenges you? If you never feel threatened? You should be able to overcome everything the game throws at you... but ONLY with the right tools or mechanics. There's something insanely satisfying with overcoming the impossible. Otherwise, Souls-like games wouldn't be as popular as they are right now.

As far having conversations without insults... Funny that you mention that. Because I never felt like I had any conversation with you ever since you joined the forum. Granted, you didn't insult us. But you've done nothing but dismiss our arguments because "we don't know what we're talking about". If you want to have a conversation, at least try to come up with real counter-arguments that show us why we're wrong. And not come up with a praise about your skills, or a mockery of ours.


Well... Yes? Nobody said that a medic couldn't be played wrong. The closest thing I've said in regards to that was that "even a mediocre medic will rarely get some flak from its team", but I should have added "a mediocre medic that TRIES".

Of course if you go battle medic, your team will surely have an harder time surviving, and you won't contribute much to the team effort at all. Again, a dead medic is totally useless, hence why you should always stick to your team and try to focus on their AND YOUR survival. Not your score.

But as such, the class should be designed in such a way that going battle medic should never cross the mind of a player in the first place. Either beginner or veteran. And that's where KF2 fails, because the class is indeed so tanky, so versatile, so able to fend zeds on its own that going battle medic is somewhat viable. If you try to do so in TF2, you're in for a bad time : almost every class has a better damage output than you do. That's not the case in KF2, and as we mentioned numerous times, it clearly shows when the last survivor is almost always a medic.
And I really don’t care about TF2 because it’s not KF2. Go play that game instead.
 
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I’d also say the reason you never see people asking for needs on those classes is because those are the most popular classes. I’d say classes that are damage based with guns are the most popular classes in any shooting game. No wonder why there isn’t an outcry to nerf any of them. Which is what I assume with most of your comments and others that want to nerf the medic to the ground like they did with berserker. Listen, I don’t care about your insults, they mean nothing, these posts basically mean nothing as well, you can type out your 12 page essay that I will skim through barely and respond too because that’s how little respect I even have for your pretentious douche baggish responses.
 
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You could have settled for "TL;DR", that would have worked just as fine.

Claiming a medic is "fine as is" when it's arguably the most versatile and prone to survive is not knowing how to play the class. But I guess it's easier to label my rant as boring bull**** than to recognize some basic game design rules?


Claiming my guy Onion is pretentious when you write an entire paragraph to explain why you're so damn good at KF2 is pure eye-candy. In case you didn't get it already, Onion mostly (or only?) plays HoE at a high level, and have a good grasp at what good game design is about (those are always long posts, but should you be interested, try to find some of his earlier comments... They are goldmines, I learned a lot through them myself)

"I've probably played this game before you knew it existed" is kind of a weird thing to say. I could say the same about TF2 : I played the game upon its very release. But guess what? I was ten years old back then ! And I had a pretty lengthy break in-between, where I played other games... Am I allowed to say I've been playing the game for fifteen years? I guess I could... But I probably didn't know how to play the game well at all. Meanwhile, many players joined the game when it turned free-to-play, maybe as "early" as five years ago at best. And they're insanely more knowledgeable about the game that I'll ever be. Time itself doesn't mean much... I could play souls-like for YEARS and still fail miserably if I don't take the time to learn and understand why I keep getting my ass kicked. You can master a game in a matter of weeks if you're dedicated, just like you can play for ten years and still be a scrub if you just persist in playing wrong.

Not every perk is deserving of a nerf? I never heard anyone asking for a gunslinger, SWAT, Commando, Support or Sharpshooter nerfs. But it is true that we're seeing a bit too much power in the hands of the remaining perks. We've already talked about the medic and zerk at length, but I can give you a quick summary why I think the remaining three could get back to the drawing board for some tweaking :

-The Survivalist is meant to be the jack-of-all-trades, master of none perk. It's very idea is to offer a very versatile option that struggles to be as good in any role compared to dedicated perks. He should be slightly better at healing than most perks... But not better than the medic. It should be able to tackle big zeds, but not as well as the demo or sharp. As it currently resides though, the perk is quite stupidly tanky. And its own weaponry is pretty damn solid, despite having no real overarching theme about it (except maybe... "sci-fi weapons" ?)

-Both the Firebug and Demo are just too good at dealing with everything these days. It doesn't just come from their skills (which are mostly fine the way they are), but from their arsenal. They got far too many weapons tailored for any role. The demo is meant to be a pure glass cannon, probably even more so than the sharpshooter. It was meant to be very bad at dealing with trash zeds, and defending itself... meaning he had to have a proper team to back him up, in exchange for pure raw power against the biggest threats which are Scrakes and Fleshpounds. As it stands, the demo can definitely take care of itself and still be able to melt everything that comes to him. The firebug is meant to be a crowd control class and a formidable trash cleaner. Yet similarly, it is now capable to hold a whole zone on its own. The ground fire is just so nasty (and now works with EVERY weapon!) that you can just fire in a corridor and watch a pile of bodies slowly increasing in front of you. Even husks aren't the annoyance they used to be : most weapons can deal with them without problem.

You CAN and SHOULD have limitations to your class. Otherwise... What's the point of having them? Sure, being CRUSHED by difficulty is not a fun way to play. But walking through everything the game throws at you ain't very fun either. And that's something that a lot of players, regardless of the game, still struggle to see... What's fun if a game NEVER challenges you? If you never feel threatened? You should be able to overcome everything the game throws at you... but ONLY with the right tools or mechanics. There's something insanely satisfying with overcoming the impossible. Otherwise, Souls-like games wouldn't be as popular as they are right now.

As far having conversations without insults... Funny that you mention that. Because I never felt like I had any conversation with you ever since you joined the forum. Granted, you didn't insult us. But you've done nothing but dismiss our arguments because "we don't know what we're talking about". If you want to have a conversation, at least try to come up with real counter-arguments that show us why we're wrong. And not come up with a praise about your skills, or a mockery of ours.


Well... Yes? Nobody said that a medic couldn't be played wrong. The closest thing I've said in regards to that was that "even a mediocre medic will rarely get some flak from its team", but I should have added "a mediocre medic that TRIES".

Of course if you go battle medic, your team will surely have an harder time surviving, and you won't contribute much to the team effort at all. Again, a dead medic is totally useless, hence why you should always stick to your team and try to focus on their AND YOUR survival. Not your score.

But as such, the class should be designed in such a way that going battle medic should never cross the mind of a player in the first place. Either beginner or veteran. And that's where KF2 fails, because the class is indeed so tanky, so versatile, so able to fend zeds on its own that going battle medic is somewhat viable. If you try to do so in TF2, you're in for a bad time : almost every class has a better damage output than you do. That's not the case in KF2, and as we mentioned numerous times, it clearly shows when the last survivor is almost always a medic.
And I don’t recall saying you don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’ve made plenty of points on why the medic class is fine. You are dismissing my arguments as well, which is fine, I have no issue saying I’m dismissing yours because that’s exactly what I’m doing. To me, it’s whiny baby non sense. When someone adds “I don’t like that medic can solo the game,” that tells me they have a problem with the game, not the class. They don’t want another class to be viable in situations where their favorite class isn’t. In my honest opinion, movement speed is the main reason on why any class can solo a boss on any difficulty. Without it, you’re basically screwed. Yes the medic can heal itself and apply buffs, but when running so, the syringe is really the only advantage they have, which means they now have to spend a lot more time trying to kill the boss as opposed to say swat or gunslinger which are squished, but can take down the boss MUCH faster than the medic. It’s a trade off with the classes, you want to nerf one’s main strength? Than need the others why not? This is the point I will bring up every time because it’s what makes sense. I can’t stand when people say “This class is only meant to be this way becuase I said so” like dude you didn’t make this game, you have no involvement with the creation process of it. They make the classes the way they are, and a majority of the player base thinks they’re fine, as do I. Until the few whiny babies start crying because their favorite class isn’t at the top of the leader board every game.

You can write another 15 pages that I’m not going to read but skim through. This conversation is pointless, yea I am dismissing your argument.
 
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Oh and btw I didn’t lock your skills, mine were mocked. So yes pretentious douche bag was my response to it. I don’t care if you write 8 pages of your opinions, I’ve seen so many people on YT talking about how what they did to Zerk was just uncalled for and mainly due to people who don’t play the perk at all complaining about it. It’s like you complaining about someone else’s job that you don’t do. You know Pathfinder on YT? I can imagine he’s better than all of us at this game, and has a lot more hours into it, and even that guy says “Yeah it’s playable still, but it’s not really fun anymore.” The Hemoclobber argument is just dumb because you’re saying oh well you have ONE weapon that helps! I shouldn’t have to be handicapped to one weapon. Movement speed? If you use it you’re playing with fire because your armor isn’t even worth buying for that class since it’s gone within the first 20 seconds of a round first off, and you better be good at running away because the class is just a liability that is useless. Especially at lower levels. It used to be fun, but people who don’t even use it, just complained about it and ruined the game for countless others. If you were to see that happen to your favorite classes, you’d be salty as well. There’s just a toxic player base on this game. And all your points you tried to make about me, look in the mirror. Yes I decided to insult you guys back, and not try to hide it behind some bs clever crap. The point is, I responded to what was said to me, and this is my opinion as well as many others. The only people who seem to like the nerf are those who don’t even use the class. It’s sad and pathetic. Then try to say “Oh it’s still good here’s why.” But it’s not, it’s a liability and not fun when so many other classes are much more useful and fun now, which is sad because that was one of the funnest classes in the actual game. But the God almighty “I’m so much better and cooler cause I play Sharp Shooter.” Pretentious douche bags, just like to ruin the game for others. Isn’t it ironic, someone running around just having fun, ruins the game for you but wasn’t really trying, yet it really didn’t effect you much at all, but you guys go out of your way to purposely ruin it for them and effect them in a much larger way. Can you say, douche bag? Cmon say it with me “Douuuccchhheee baaaagggg.”
 
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Well, as derailed as this train already is, I guess we might as well finish running it off the tracks.

You can write another 15 pages that I’m not going to read but skim through. This conversation is pointless, yea I am dismissing your argument.
these posts basically mean nothing as well, you can type out your 12 page essay that I will skim through barely and respond too because that’s how little respect I even have for your pretentious douche baggish responses.
I'm not really expecting good faith discussion given responses like the above, despite the volume of text you've output. But what the heck, I'll respond anyway; other people who are reading but not responding might get something out of this.

if you think nerfing the medics main abilities is justified, then need all the other classes as well.
Medic can still heal just fine. Nothing about that was touched. Even the Healthrower's absurd heal potential wasn't touched. Just the part where you can take 4x the punishment most other perks could before the game can finally tell you "that's it, you've officially gotten hit too much to allow you to continue." Maybe once in a while burst damage will actually kill a Medic. If the main strength of the Medic was supposed to be the party sponge, that would be another matter, but the game already has 3 other perks who can do that (one dedicated, two off-tanks). The Medic should be able to keep the team alive in exchange for the team keeping the Medic alive, which Medic can absolutely still do.

I can tell you now I am good at this game
...
In fact I have the platinum for this game in PS.
Okay, and that's not for nothing, but leaving aside that this game has arguably the most ridiculous aim assist I've ever seen in a first-person shooter...

"Platting" this game leaves a lot to be interpreted. "I earned the vast majority of achievements with solo Kaboomstick Demo/Locust Survivalist/Zerk/Right-Side Combat Medic" tells a very different story from "I earned all plats in 6P HoE games by playing Commando/SWAT/Sharpshooter." Both are equally platinum where the trophy system is concerned but communicate completely different things on how much technical skill and knowledge one has, especially given that this game has gotten overall much easier over the years depending on how you approach it, which is the opposite of how games should develop; as the game ages players will (should) improve and they'll need more of a challenge to stick around.

There are quite a few CD players who haven't platted the game because they skipped over the old map achievements where you had to beat all the easier difficulties as a point of pride.

I’ve probably played this game before you even knew it existed.
If that's the route we're taking, well, I learned it existed during the time I was playing KF1, and I've been playing it since the literal first days of Early Access when there were only 4 perks and the skill trees were completely screwball.

I probably don't even have as many hours played as some of the people still posting on this forum, but the vast majority of those hours have been in HoE and Controlled Difficulty servers (with of course Suicidal taking the 3rd most crown) because the CD servers I can actually semi-regularly play on forcibly discourage players with annoying perks in favor of precision stacks.

I was responding to his comment that assumed I’m an inexperienced player because I disagree with the idea that the medic needs to be needed.
I was responding in kind to your assertion that Berserker is useless above Hard, and that Medic's nerfs were lumping it in by association with Berserker (as being useless above Hard, that is). There is concrete evidence in both visual, textual, and other forms that the above assertion is complete nonsense unless you're inexperienced enough with Berserker that you can't play it well above Hard.

Such is often the case with posters who drop by to hyperfocus on one thing and then never post on anything again. A good example would be the numerous one-time posters who suddenly came out of the woodwork when Berserker got nerfed from "unkillable" to "actual risk/reward", and of course there will now be Medic players who do likewise. There's frequently an overlap of both because the playerbases for Medic and Berserker players tend to be on very similar Venn diagrams.

Everyone wants all these classes to be nerfed and it’s ridiculous.
I don't want all the classes to be nerfed because some of them are fine for the core loop that the game was originally built around. Some are a little bent even if they're not broken, some are too good for how easy they are to play, some are actually skill-indexed...some perks themselves aren't broken but their weapons certainly are problematic.

Tying into that "platinum" thing from earlier: This game's difficulties and such are so all over the place that the perks themselves are their own difficulties. Solo mode is almost always easier due to the reduced everything from the Zeds' side. The chaos perks and chaotic weaponry in general are much, much easier to win with overall than the precision perks and headshot-based weaponry, which is the main problem with this game on the whole that I have been working to bring to light (and hopefully address) in my various longposts.

Berserker and Medic were the biggest outliers because their design (and especially interactions with each other) were effectively allowing bad players to skip the primary difficulty curves in this game, which is not good design. Firebug and Demo in their current states are also very, very effective for the effort required to play them and do in fact need to be looked at; that being said, Demo and Firebug also actually die when they take hits and are slow, so they can't get away with some of the shenanigans that the two former perks can.

What you’re doing is nerfing things to the ground until they’re not useful or fun to play.
Medic, again, is still exactly as good at healing other players as before, so: define "fun." This is a common complaint I see in video games when a distinctly broken thing gets nerfed, and nobody can exactly tell me what their definition of "fun" is when it comes to games like these.

Back 4 Blood went through this when the devs introduced a hilariously overpowered ability called "Expired T5" that singlehandedly broke the game so hard everyone and their mother started running it because it meant you didn't have to aim, or prioritize targets, or really do anything normally associated with a first-person shooter. So every single lobby had at least two people on the hardest difficulties running only this unless you stuck with a premade group that went on an honor system of "don't use it." Once the inevitable nerf happened, people came on the forums for the first time ever to say that the game was unplayable and such as, and that skilled players don't know how to have fun, and so forth, etc.
The ones who weren't complaining were the ones who had already been practicing the harder difficulties, memorizing general breakpoints, and training their aim and mechanical skills. Some of us have fun by pushing our skills to the limit on the game and don't particularly enjoy find it fun when things that break the learning and skill indexing are introduced, especially when those things are extremely easy while being extremely effective. On the hard difficulties.

(Also melee is even more busted in B4B than it is in this game but we'll just sideline that for the moment)

I recommend a harder game mode, instead of nerfing everything.
TWI did sort of do that, except aside from having it locked it down to a weekly so you only see it once every blue moon (there are currently 20 weeklies on rotation, seriously!)...

That difficulty was a complete mess at the start and wasn't really any harder for Zerkwall/spam teams, although it sure did take a dump on precision teams. As it turns out, while faster-moving trash is cool and fun, spawning literally every Fleshpound raged takes agency away from kit-dependent precision players while making absolutely no difference in the usual "wall of fire and explosives" strategy that most people use to clear the game. Yes, it technically made the game "harder," but in the worst way possible. I'm pretty sure they gave up patching it after the one time they bothered, sort of like the versus mode. It was certainly more reasonable once they took away the "Oops! All Raged Fleshpounds" aspect of it, but then they didn't give the Zeds any benefits to counteract that, so in the end it didn't really wind up that much harder than a standard HoE game. Maybe taking some more hints from CD players would've helped?

And that's not even considering the other side to the "just make a harder difficulty" coin: power creep and the consequences of it. This was something that Payday 2 ran off with and the end result was that the game had to have numerous rebalances and up to four additional difficulties with additional modifiers in them since the game released, because Overkill Studios couldn't stop releasing broken nonsense, and in the end the game ended up being a broken mess if you actually cared about playing the game for a challenge. (Of course the game is going to get easier when you allow four players at a time to revive each other across the map through walls and have spurts of infinite-ammo miniguns and rocket launchers when the game was originally based around L4D's "stick together" and "headshots are best" principles; who would've guessed?)

When you buff players unreasonably and start buffing Zeds unreasonably to match, you have power creep. You know what's much easier? Nerfing outliers. Ideally you shouldn't introduce outliers in the first place because that sets expectations that players will be getting a flatly easier game, but when you don't do anything about them after the fact, you get a game like current-day KF2 where half the perks are playing on the equivalent of an honor system and the rest of them are playing Borderlands where you race to see who can kill the most things with the most broken weapons and nobody really dies.

And you can't just buff those perks to match because you completely alienate the skilled players who already understand how to use the precision perks if you do that, because then there's no challenge left to the game at that point, so why bother? Even TWI themselves understand that issue. Players shouldn't have to balance the game for devs, let alone have to create their own servers where they can actually remove annoying nonsense and focus on honing their skills; that's an unreasonable expectation to put on the players and just encourages introducing more broken nonsense on the basis of "oh well the tryhard players will just ban it anyway."

Now, given that TWI has been supporting and advertising Tamari's CD tournament--which is really odd, but good nonetheless--that may change in some form or fashion.

I’d also say the reason you never see people asking for needs on those classes is because those are the most popular classes. I’d say classes that are damage based with guns are the most popular classes in any shooting game. No wonder why there isn’t an outcry to nerf any of them.
In all my time playing this game, the vast majority of players in Suicidal and HoE difficulties are picking Medic/Zerk/Firebug/Demo/Survivalist. Roughly in that order of popularity.

That's a hard fact to sell without actual numbers from server owners, but that's certainly my 4-digit hours worth of antecdata. Probably because those are much easier to win with on higher difficulties compared to Commando, SWAT, Sharpshooter, and Gunslinger (although you tend to see Gunslinger on very kite-heavy maps because it's much more forgiving in those settings), because they're far more forgiving of bad play and allow players to do extremely well by spamming at the enemies while almost entirely ignoring the headshot mechanics that distinguish bad players from good ones. That, and for a very long time, Berserker and Medic got new toys basically nonstop on top of being already extremely easy to win with since their major buffs in the Incinerate n Detonate update.

And on the nerf bit, although this is getting decidedly even more off-topic...
I never heard anyone asking for a gunslinger, SWAT, Commando, Support or Sharpshooter nerfs.
(Quick point of order: Gunslinger should absolutely have something on the chopping block, but nobody really discusses that outside of the Discord. It has too much keeping it on top when mastered right now, but since it's a perk you have to hit headshots with, most people aren't going to get nearly that good with it.

The last time TWI actually tried to nerf Gunslinger was back when they removed reload cancelling and slowed down Gunslinger's reloads, and they wound up just flatly reverting everything from that patch because of how unpopular the removal of reload cancelling was because it affected absolutely every perk. They have an odd habit of doing that for some reason, like just tossing out the entire thing instead of keeping some good ideas.)

Gunslinger remains largely untouched to this day, though it could absolutely use either longer reloads or a runspeed nerf. That's another topic for another thread, which is one I've been mulling over. The rest of those perks? Most people are too bad at this game to play Commando or Sharpshooter even remotely well; Support is not easy but is arguably more forgiving than those to a degree, and SWAT is not what I'd call easy but definitely surged in popularity after the sprint speed update; in the game's current state it's easier to win with compared to Commando but harder to surpass Commando's skill ceiling (shock of shocks, SWAT also has more tankiness and speed compared to Commando, so of course it's more popular with the broader playerbase).

Sharpshooter is, in my 4-digit hours of experience, the most unpopular perk in general pub play. Sharpshooter buffs are/were one of the most common requests but most people have terrible ideas on how to buff it because it usually involves "make it run faster, let M99 instakill anything regardless of your build, and make it do universal extra damage instead of headshot damage", which is to say "make the entire perk easier rather than neuter the rest of the perks back down to a reasonable level"), and rather than buff the perk's base kit, TWI have been giving it increasingly suspect weapons.
The Storm Cannon in its current incarnation has been flatly banned on many CD servers because it turns stacking Marksman Sharpshooters from a joke team idea into legitimately one of the strongest team comps you can muster if everyone's aim is decent, but the vast majority of players don't have the aim to even bother with it because you have to headshot for the benefits to begin with. And this is the post-nerf version, mind you, where it doesn't inflict micro-stuns with every single shot anymore on top of having AoE blasts with every headshot.

Support needing buffs is a fairly common refrain because most people insist that Support is bad in early waves, which I firmly believe is nonsense; Support is only "bad" once you consider higher-end CD cycles and that's just an artifact of shotguns being what they are in this game. Support is a high-risk-high-reward generalist when mastered with only a couple of bad weapons, which is fine.

Commando is mostly fine but the FAL shouldn't be as good as it is; currently it suffers from having really bad skill tree alternatives because why would you not take high cap mags and extra damage. That extra damage turns it from being a trash specialist into a good-except-for-Fleshpounds generalist and it leaves a lot of room for skill ceiling growth on the player's part.


Point of order #2: TWI already nerfed those perks with the armored Rioters and EDARs. That was literally the whole point of that update.

You know Pathfinder on YT? I can imagine he’s better than all of us at this game
Pathfinder's aim is alright but I would take any of his opinions on meta stuff with heavy grains of salt. Fun thing to note, though: he was that guy who started the "Berserker can win by camping in a corner" thing on one of his old videos, so there's that.
 
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You know Pathfinder on YT? I can imagine he’s better than all of us at this game
Haha! No.

That's the #1 problem with this conversation. Not only you lack enough self reflection to read your own messages before posting to check them for internal consistency and overall validity, you don't know how to properly measure the overall knowledge and skill of others. I hope at least you agree that the ones who know about the game more and are more skilled about it are at a better position to have a good judgement on how balanced the game is.
 
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Haha! No.

That's the #1 problem with this conversation. Not only you lack enough self reflection to read your own messages before posting to check them for internal consistency and overall validity, you don't know how to properly measure the overall knowledge and skill of others. I hope at least you agree that the ones who know about the game more and are more skilled about it are at a better position to have a good judgement on how balanced the game is.
Listen Mr. Big Head, you assume I’m not good at this game first off. That’s fine, because you have no idea whether i am or not. And about inconsistency, what about your comment? I literally said a guy who’s a pro at this game, die hard since the game has been released, probably the number one content creator for this game, agreed. And so what, I don’t proof read for some typos? You get my points, and I do have a good judgement on how balanced the game is, in what world do you think your judgement trumps mine?
 
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Well, as derailed as this train already is, I guess we might as well finish running it off the tracks.



I'm not really expecting good faith discussion given responses like the above, despite the volume of text you've output. But what the heck, I'll respond anyway; other people who are reading but not responding might get something out of this.


Medic can still heal just fine. Nothing about that was touched. Even the Healthrower's absurd heal potential wasn't touched. Just the part where you can take 4x the punishment most other perks could before the game can finally tell you "that's it, you've officially gotten hit too much to allow you to continue." Maybe once in a while burst damage will actually kill a Medic. If the main strength of the Medic was supposed to be the party sponge, that would be another matter, but the game already has 3 other perks who can do that (one dedicated, two off-tanks). The Medic should be able to keep the team alive in exchange for the team keeping the Medic alive, which Medic can absolutely still do.


Okay, and that's not for nothing, but leaving aside that this game has arguably the most ridiculous aim assist I've ever seen in a first-person shooter...

"Platting" this game leaves a lot to be interpreted. "I earned the vast majority of achievements with solo Kaboomstick Demo/Locust Survivalist/Zerk/Right-Side Combat Medic" tells a very different story from "I earned all plats in 6P HoE games by playing Commando/SWAT/Sharpshooter." Both are equally platinum where the trophy system is concerned but communicate completely different things on how much technical skill and knowledge one has, especially given that this game has gotten overall much easier over the years depending on how you approach it, which is the opposite of how games should develop; as the game ages players will (should) improve and they'll need more of a challenge to stick around.

There are quite a few CD players who haven't platted the game because they skipped over the old map achievements where you had to beat all the easier difficulties as a point of pride.


If that's the route we're taking, well, I learned it existed during the time I was playing KF1, and I've been playing it since the literal first days of Early Access when there were only 4 perks and the skill trees were completely screwball.

I probably don't even have as many hours played as some of the people still posting on this forum, but the vast majority of those hours have been in HoE and Controlled Difficulty servers (with of course Suicidal taking the 3rd most crown) because the CD servers I can actually semi-regularly play on forcibly discourage players with annoying perks in favor of precision stacks.


I was responding in kind to your assertion that Berserker is useless above Hard, and that Medic's nerfs were lumping it in by association with Berserker (as being useless above Hard, that is). There is concrete evidence in both visual, textual, and other forms that the above assertion is complete nonsense unless you're inexperienced enough with Berserker that you can't play it well above Hard.

Such is often the case with posters who drop by to hyperfocus on one thing and then never post on anything again. A good example would be the numerous one-time posters who suddenly came out of the woodwork when Berserker got nerfed from "unkillable" to "actual risk/reward", and of course there will now be Medic players who do likewise. There's frequently an overlap of both because the playerbases for Medic and Berserker players tend to be on very similar Venn diagrams.


I don't want all the classes to be nerfed because some of them are fine for the core loop that the game was originally built around. Some are a little bent even if they're not broken, some are too good for how easy they are to play, some are actually skill-indexed...some perks themselves aren't broken but their weapons certainly are problematic.

Tying into that "platinum" thing from earlier: This game's difficulties and such are so all over the place that the perks themselves are their own difficulties. Solo mode is almost always easier due to the reduced everything from the Zeds' side. The chaos perks and chaotic weaponry in general are much, much easier to win with overall than the precision perks and headshot-based weaponry, which is the main problem with this game on the whole that I have been working to bring to light (and hopefully address) in my various longposts.

Berserker and Medic were the biggest outliers because their design (and especially interactions with each other) were effectively allowing bad players to skip the primary difficulty curves in this game, which is not good design. Firebug and Demo in their current states are also very, very effective for the effort required to play them and do in fact need to be looked at; that being said, Demo and Firebug also actually die when they take hits and are slow, so they can't get away with some of the shenanigans that the two former perks can.


Medic, again, is still exactly as good at healing other players as before, so: define "fun." This is a common complaint I see in video games when a distinctly broken thing gets nerfed, and nobody can exactly tell me what their definition of "fun" is when it comes to games like these.

Back 4 Blood went through this when the devs introduced a hilariously overpowered ability called "Expired T5" that singlehandedly broke the game so hard everyone and their mother started running it because it meant you didn't have to aim, or prioritize targets, or really do anything normally associated with a first-person shooter. So every single lobby had at least two people on the hardest difficulties running only this unless you stuck with a premade group that went on an honor system of "don't use it." Once the inevitable nerf happened, people came on the forums for the first time ever to say that the game was unplayable and such as, and that skilled players don't know how to have fun, and so forth, etc.
The ones who weren't complaining were the ones who had already been practicing the harder difficulties, memorizing general breakpoints, and training their aim and mechanical skills. Some of us have fun by pushing our skills to the limit on the game and don't particularly enjoy find it fun when things that break the learning and skill indexing are introduced, especially when those things are extremely easy while being extremely effective. On the hard difficulties.

(Also melee is even more busted in B4B than it is in this game but we'll just sideline that for the moment)


TWI did sort of do that, except aside from having it locked it down to a weekly so you only see it once every blue moon (there are currently 20 weeklies on rotation, seriously!)...

That difficulty was a complete mess at the start and wasn't really any harder for Zerkwall/spam teams, although it sure did take a dump on precision teams. As it turns out, while faster-moving trash is cool and fun, spawning literally every Fleshpound raged takes agency away from kit-dependent precision players while making absolutely no difference in the usual "wall of fire and explosives" strategy that most people use to clear the game. Yes, it technically made the game "harder," but in the worst way possible. I'm pretty sure they gave up patching it after the one time they bothered, sort of like the versus mode. It was certainly more reasonable once they took away the "Oops! All Raged Fleshpounds" aspect of it, but then they didn't give the Zeds any benefits to counteract that, so in the end it didn't really wind up that much harder than a standard HoE game. Maybe taking some more hints from CD players would've helped?

And that's not even considering the other side to the "just make a harder difficulty" coin: power creep and the consequences of it. This was something that Payday 2 ran off with and the end result was that the game had to have numerous rebalances and up to four additional difficulties with additional modifiers in them since the game released, because Overkill Studios couldn't stop releasing broken nonsense, and in the end the game ended up being a broken mess if you actually cared about playing the game for a challenge. (Of course the game is going to get easier when you allow four players at a time to revive each other across the map through walls and have spurts of infinite-ammo miniguns and rocket launchers when the game was originally based around L4D's "stick together" and "headshots are best" principles; who would've guessed?)

When you buff players unreasonably and start buffing Zeds unreasonably to match, you have power creep. You know what's much easier? Nerfing outliers. Ideally you shouldn't introduce outliers in the first place because that sets expectations that players will be getting a flatly easier game, but when you don't do anything about them after the fact, you get a game like current-day KF2 where half the perks are playing on the equivalent of an honor system and the rest of them are playing Borderlands where you race to see who can kill the most things with the most broken weapons and nobody really dies.

And you can't just buff those perks to match because you completely alienate the skilled players who already understand how to use the precision perks if you do that, because then there's no challenge left to the game at that point, so why bother? Even TWI themselves understand that issue. Players shouldn't have to balance the game for devs, let alone have to create their own servers where they can actually remove annoying nonsense and focus on honing their skills; that's an unreasonable expectation to put on the players and just encourages introducing more broken nonsense on the basis of "oh well the tryhard players will just ban it anyway."

Now, given that TWI has been supporting and advertising Tamari's CD tournament--which is really odd, but good nonetheless--that may change in some form or fashion.


In all my time playing this game, the vast majority of players in Suicidal and HoE difficulties are picking Medic/Zerk/Firebug/Demo/Survivalist. Roughly in that order of popularity.

That's a hard fact to sell without actual numbers from server owners, but that's certainly my 4-digit hours worth of antecdata. Probably because those are much easier to win with on higher difficulties compared to Commando, SWAT, Sharpshooter, and Gunslinger (although you tend to see Gunslinger on very kite-heavy maps because it's much more forgiving in those settings), because they're far more forgiving of bad play and allow players to do extremely well by spamming at the enemies while almost entirely ignoring the headshot mechanics that distinguish bad players from good ones. That, and for a very long time, Berserker and Medic got new toys basically nonstop on top of being already extremely easy to win with since their major buffs in the Incinerate n Detonate update.

And on the nerf bit, although this is getting decidedly even more off-topic...

(Quick point of order: Gunslinger should absolutely have something on the chopping block, but nobody really discusses that outside of the Discord. It has too much keeping it on top when mastered right now, but since it's a perk you have to hit headshots with, most people aren't going to get nearly that good with it.

The last time TWI actually tried to nerf Gunslinger was back when they removed reload cancelling and slowed down Gunslinger's reloads, and they wound up just flatly reverting everything from that patch because of how unpopular the removal of reload cancelling was because it affected absolutely every perk. They have an odd habit of doing that for some reason, like just tossing out the entire thing instead of keeping some good ideas.)

Gunslinger remains largely untouched to this day, though it could absolutely use either longer reloads or a runspeed nerf. That's another topic for another thread, which is one I've been mulling over. The rest of those perks? Most people are too bad at this game to play Commando or Sharpshooter even remotely well; Support is not easy but is arguably more forgiving than those to a degree, and SWAT is not what I'd call easy but definitely surged in popularity after the sprint speed update; in the game's current state it's easier to win with compared to Commando but harder to surpass Commando's skill ceiling (shock of shocks, SWAT also has more tankiness and speed compared to Commando, so of course it's more popular with the broader playerbase).

Sharpshooter is, in my 4-digit hours of experience, the most unpopular perk in general pub play. Sharpshooter buffs are/were one of the most common requests but most people have terrible ideas on how to buff it because it usually involves "make it run faster, let M99 instakill anything regardless of your build, and make it do universal extra damage instead of headshot damage", which is to say "make the entire perk easier rather than neuter the rest of the perks back down to a reasonable level"), and rather than buff the perk's base kit, TWI have been giving it increasingly suspect weapons.
The Storm Cannon in its current incarnation has been flatly banned on many CD servers because it turns stacking Marksman Sharpshooters from a joke team idea into legitimately one of the strongest team comps you can muster if everyone's aim is decent, but the vast majority of players don't have the aim to even bother with it because you have to headshot for the benefits to begin with. And this is the post-nerf version, mind you, where it doesn't inflict micro-stuns with every single shot anymore on top of having AoE blasts with every headshot.

Support needing buffs is a fairly common refrain because most people insist that Support is bad in early waves, which I firmly believe is nonsense; Support is only "bad" once you consider higher-end CD cycles and that's just an artifact of shotguns being what they are in this game. Support is a high-risk-high-reward generalist when mastered with only a couple of bad weapons, which is fine.

Commando is mostly fine but the FAL shouldn't be as good as it is; currently it suffers from having really bad skill tree alternatives because why would you not take high cap mags and extra damage. That extra damage turns it from being a trash specialist into a good-except-for-Fleshpounds generalist and it leaves a lot of room for skill ceiling growth on the player's part.


Point of order #2: TWI already nerfed those perks with the armored Rioters and EDARs. That was literally the whole point of that update.


Pathfinder's aim is alright but I would take any of his opinions on meta stuff with heavy grains of salt. Fun thing to note, though: he was that guy who started the "Berserker can win by camping in a corner" thing on one of his old videos, so there's that.
Which is fine, the class was strong yes, it didn’t need a nerf, now it’s just uniseable in most scenarios. It was needed too hard, a small nerf would’ve been fine, but they nerfed it the ground dude. It’s literally the 1st class you can pick, it’s unique to any other class, and it was arguably the funnest class. That is my point, this is a video game, not just meant for people who take it the apex of seriousness to say their judgements trump all. Y’all are like little mini tyrants it’s sad.
 
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Everything is based around, “Well if you play this game for a living and master it, it’s actually good.” Which is such a non sense argument, 95 percent of the players who play this game will never even TRY to be that good, and this is your frame of what the game should be based on? That again is a tyrannical bs argument that screams “I don’t care about anyone but me.” People need to get over themselves, it’s like y’all want to fine tune the game to your specifications as if you created it and own it.
 
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Well, as derailed as this train already is, I guess we might as well finish running it off the tracks.



I'm not really expecting good faith discussion given responses like the above, despite the volume of text you've output. But what the heck, I'll respond anyway; other people who are reading but not responding might get something out of this.


Medic can still heal just fine. Nothing about that was touched. Even the Healthrower's absurd heal potential wasn't touched. Just the part where you can take 4x the punishment most other perks could before the game can finally tell you "that's it, you've officially gotten hit too much to allow you to continue." Maybe once in a while burst damage will actually kill a Medic. If the main strength of the Medic was supposed to be the party sponge, that would be another matter, but the game already has 3 other perks who can do that (one dedicated, two off-tanks). The Medic should be able to keep the team alive in exchange for the team keeping the Medic alive, which Medic can absolutely still do.


Okay, and that's not for nothing, but leaving aside that this game has arguably the most ridiculous aim assist I've ever seen in a first-person shooter...

"Platting" this game leaves a lot to be interpreted. "I earned the vast majority of achievements with solo Kaboomstick Demo/Locust Survivalist/Zerk/Right-Side Combat Medic" tells a very different story from "I earned all plats in 6P HoE games by playing Commando/SWAT/Sharpshooter." Both are equally platinum where the trophy system is concerned but communicate completely different things on how much technical skill and knowledge one has, especially given that this game has gotten overall much easier over the years depending on how you approach it, which is the opposite of how games should develop; as the game ages players will (should) improve and they'll need more of a challenge to stick around.

There are quite a few CD players who haven't platted the game because they skipped over the old map achievements where you had to beat all the easier difficulties as a point of pride.


If that's the route we're taking, well, I learned it existed during the time I was playing KF1, and I've been playing it since the literal first days of Early Access when there were only 4 perks and the skill trees were completely screwball.

I probably don't even have as many hours played as some of the people still posting on this forum, but the vast majority of those hours have been in HoE and Controlled Difficulty servers (with of course Suicidal taking the 3rd most crown) because the CD servers I can actually semi-regularly play on forcibly discourage players with annoying perks in favor of precision stacks.


I was responding in kind to your assertion that Berserker is useless above Hard, and that Medic's nerfs were lumping it in by association with Berserker (as being useless above Hard, that is). There is concrete evidence in both visual, textual, and other forms that the above assertion is complete nonsense unless you're inexperienced enough with Berserker that you can't play it well above Hard.

Such is often the case with posters who drop by to hyperfocus on one thing and then never post on anything again. A good example would be the numerous one-time posters who suddenly came out of the woodwork when Berserker got nerfed from "unkillable" to "actual risk/reward", and of course there will now be Medic players who do likewise. There's frequently an overlap of both because the playerbases for Medic and Berserker players tend to be on very similar Venn diagrams.


I don't want all the classes to be nerfed because some of them are fine for the core loop that the game was originally built around. Some are a little bent even if they're not broken, some are too good for how easy they are to play, some are actually skill-indexed...some perks themselves aren't broken but their weapons certainly are problematic.

Tying into that "platinum" thing from earlier: This game's difficulties and such are so all over the place that the perks themselves are their own difficulties. Solo mode is almost always easier due to the reduced everything from the Zeds' side. The chaos perks and chaotic weaponry in general are much, much easier to win with overall than the precision perks and headshot-based weaponry, which is the main problem with this game on the whole that I have been working to bring to light (and hopefully address) in my various longposts.

Berserker and Medic were the biggest outliers because their design (and especially interactions with each other) were effectively allowing bad players to skip the primary difficulty curves in this game, which is not good design. Firebug and Demo in their current states are also very, very effective for the effort required to play them and do in fact need to be looked at; that being said, Demo and Firebug also actually die when they take hits and are slow, so they can't get away with some of the shenanigans that the two former perks can.


Medic, again, is still exactly as good at healing other players as before, so: define "fun." This is a common complaint I see in video games when a distinctly broken thing gets nerfed, and nobody can exactly tell me what their definition of "fun" is when it comes to games like these.

Back 4 Blood went through this when the devs introduced a hilariously overpowered ability called "Expired T5" that singlehandedly broke the game so hard everyone and their mother started running it because it meant you didn't have to aim, or prioritize targets, or really do anything normally associated with a first-person shooter. So every single lobby had at least two people on the hardest difficulties running only this unless you stuck with a premade group that went on an honor system of "don't use it." Once the inevitable nerf happened, people came on the forums for the first time ever to say that the game was unplayable and such as, and that skilled players don't know how to have fun, and so forth, etc.
The ones who weren't complaining were the ones who had already been practicing the harder difficulties, memorizing general breakpoints, and training their aim and mechanical skills. Some of us have fun by pushing our skills to the limit on the game and don't particularly enjoy find it fun when things that break the learning and skill indexing are introduced, especially when those things are extremely easy while being extremely effective. On the hard difficulties.

(Also melee is even more busted in B4B than it is in this game but we'll just sideline that for the moment)


TWI did sort of do that, except aside from having it locked it down to a weekly so you only see it once every blue moon (there are currently 20 weeklies on rotation, seriously!)...

That difficulty was a complete mess at the start and wasn't really any harder for Zerkwall/spam teams, although it sure did take a dump on precision teams. As it turns out, while faster-moving trash is cool and fun, spawning literally every Fleshpound raged takes agency away from kit-dependent precision players while making absolutely no difference in the usual "wall of fire and explosives" strategy that most people use to clear the game. Yes, it technically made the game "harder," but in the worst way possible. I'm pretty sure they gave up patching it after the one time they bothered, sort of like the versus mode. It was certainly more reasonable once they took away the "Oops! All Raged Fleshpounds" aspect of it, but then they didn't give the Zeds any benefits to counteract that, so in the end it didn't really wind up that much harder than a standard HoE game. Maybe taking some more hints from CD players would've helped?

And that's not even considering the other side to the "just make a harder difficulty" coin: power creep and the consequences of it. This was something that Payday 2 ran off with and the end result was that the game had to have numerous rebalances and up to four additional difficulties with additional modifiers in them since the game released, because Overkill Studios couldn't stop releasing broken nonsense, and in the end the game ended up being a broken mess if you actually cared about playing the game for a challenge. (Of course the game is going to get easier when you allow four players at a time to revive each other across the map through walls and have spurts of infinite-ammo miniguns and rocket launchers when the game was originally based around L4D's "stick together" and "headshots are best" principles; who would've guessed?)

When you buff players unreasonably and start buffing Zeds unreasonably to match, you have power creep. You know what's much easier? Nerfing outliers. Ideally you shouldn't introduce outliers in the first place because that sets expectations that players will be getting a flatly easier game, but when you don't do anything about them after the fact, you get a game like current-day KF2 where half the perks are playing on the equivalent of an honor system and the rest of them are playing Borderlands where you race to see who can kill the most things with the most broken weapons and nobody really dies.

And you can't just buff those perks to match because you completely alienate the skilled players who already understand how to use the precision perks if you do that, because then there's no challenge left to the game at that point, so why bother? Even TWI themselves understand that issue. Players shouldn't have to balance the game for devs, let alone have to create their own servers where they can actually remove annoying nonsense and focus on honing their skills; that's an unreasonable expectation to put on the players and just encourages introducing more broken nonsense on the basis of "oh well the tryhard players will just ban it anyway."

Now, given that TWI has been supporting and advertising Tamari's CD tournament--which is really odd, but good nonetheless--that may change in some form or fashion.


In all my time playing this game, the vast majority of players in Suicidal and HoE difficulties are picking Medic/Zerk/Firebug/Demo/Survivalist. Roughly in that order of popularity.

That's a hard fact to sell without actual numbers from server owners, but that's certainly my 4-digit hours worth of antecdata. Probably because those are much easier to win with on higher difficulties compared to Commando, SWAT, Sharpshooter, and Gunslinger (although you tend to see Gunslinger on very kite-heavy maps because it's much more forgiving in those settings), because they're far more forgiving of bad play and allow players to do extremely well by spamming at the enemies while almost entirely ignoring the headshot mechanics that distinguish bad players from good ones. That, and for a very long time, Berserker and Medic got new toys basically nonstop on top of being already extremely easy to win with since their major buffs in the Incinerate n Detonate update.

And on the nerf bit, although this is getting decidedly even more off-topic...

(Quick point of order: Gunslinger should absolutely have something on the chopping block, but nobody really discusses that outside of the Discord. It has too much keeping it on top when mastered right now, but since it's a perk you have to hit headshots with, most people aren't going to get nearly that good with it.

The last time TWI actually tried to nerf Gunslinger was back when they removed reload cancelling and slowed down Gunslinger's reloads, and they wound up just flatly reverting everything from that patch because of how unpopular the removal of reload cancelling was because it affected absolutely every perk. They have an odd habit of doing that for some reason, like just tossing out the entire thing instead of keeping some good ideas.)

Gunslinger remains largely untouched to this day, though it could absolutely use either longer reloads or a runspeed nerf. That's another topic for another thread, which is one I've been mulling over. The rest of those perks? Most people are too bad at this game to play Commando or Sharpshooter even remotely well; Support is not easy but is arguably more forgiving than those to a degree, and SWAT is not what I'd call easy but definitely surged in popularity after the sprint speed update; in the game's current state it's easier to win with compared to Commando but harder to surpass Commando's skill ceiling (shock of shocks, SWAT also has more tankiness and speed compared to Commando, so of course it's more popular with the broader playerbase).

Sharpshooter is, in my 4-digit hours of experience, the most unpopular perk in general pub play. Sharpshooter buffs are/were one of the most common requests but most people have terrible ideas on how to buff it because it usually involves "make it run faster, let M99 instakill anything regardless of your build, and make it do universal extra damage instead of headshot damage", which is to say "make the entire perk easier rather than neuter the rest of the perks back down to a reasonable level"), and rather than buff the perk's base kit, TWI have been giving it increasingly suspect weapons.
The Storm Cannon in its current incarnation has been flatly banned on many CD servers because it turns stacking Marksman Sharpshooters from a joke team idea into legitimately one of the strongest team comps you can muster if everyone's aim is decent, but the vast majority of players don't have the aim to even bother with it because you have to headshot for the benefits to begin with. And this is the post-nerf version, mind you, where it doesn't inflict micro-stuns with every single shot anymore on top of having AoE blasts with every headshot.

Support needing buffs is a fairly common refrain because most people insist that Support is bad in early waves, which I firmly believe is nonsense; Support is only "bad" once you consider higher-end CD cycles and that's just an artifact of shotguns being what they are in this game. Support is a high-risk-high-reward generalist when mastered with only a couple of bad weapons, which is fine.

Commando is mostly fine but the FAL shouldn't be as good as it is; currently it suffers from having really bad skill tree alternatives because why would you not take high cap mags and extra damage. That extra damage turns it from being a trash specialist into a good-except-for-Fleshpounds generalist and it leaves a lot of room for skill ceiling growth on the player's part.


Point of order #2: TWI already nerfed those perks with the armored Rioters and EDARs. That was literally the whole point of that update.


Pathfinder's aim is alright but I would take any of his opinions on meta stuff with heavy grains of salt. Fun thing to note, though: he was that guy who started the "Berserker can win by camping in a corner" thing on one of his old videos, so there's that.
This game is not that important to me to sit there and read all of this. It just isn’t, and as far as good conversation, it’s not what I’m looking for. I made my points, which many people agree with besides the 1 percent of salty try hards.
 
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Well, as derailed as this train already is, I guess we might as well finish running it off the tracks.



I'm not really expecting good faith discussion given responses like the above, despite the volume of text you've output. But what the heck, I'll respond anyway; other people who are reading but not responding might get something out of this.


Medic can still heal just fine. Nothing about that was touched. Even the Healthrower's absurd heal potential wasn't touched. Just the part where you can take 4x the punishment most other perks could before the game can finally tell you "that's it, you've officially gotten hit too much to allow you to continue." Maybe once in a while burst damage will actually kill a Medic. If the main strength of the Medic was supposed to be the party sponge, that would be another matter, but the game already has 3 other perks who can do that (one dedicated, two off-tanks). The Medic should be able to keep the team alive in exchange for the team keeping the Medic alive, which Medic can absolutely still do.


Okay, and that's not for nothing, but leaving aside that this game has arguably the most ridiculous aim assist I've ever seen in a first-person shooter...

"Platting" this game leaves a lot to be interpreted. "I earned the vast majority of achievements with solo Kaboomstick Demo/Locust Survivalist/Zerk/Right-Side Combat Medic" tells a very different story from "I earned all plats in 6P HoE games by playing Commando/SWAT/Sharpshooter." Both are equally platinum where the trophy system is concerned but communicate completely different things on how much technical skill and knowledge one has, especially given that this game has gotten overall much easier over the years depending on how you approach it, which is the opposite of how games should develop; as the game ages players will (should) improve and they'll need more of a challenge to stick around.

There are quite a few CD players who haven't platted the game because they skipped over the old map achievements where you had to beat all the easier difficulties as a point of pride.


If that's the route we're taking, well, I learned it existed during the time I was playing KF1, and I've been playing it since the literal first days of Early Access when there were only 4 perks and the skill trees were completely screwball.

I probably don't even have as many hours played as some of the people still posting on this forum, but the vast majority of those hours have been in HoE and Controlled Difficulty servers (with of course Suicidal taking the 3rd most crown) because the CD servers I can actually semi-regularly play on forcibly discourage players with annoying perks in favor of precision stacks.


I was responding in kind to your assertion that Berserker is useless above Hard, and that Medic's nerfs were lumping it in by association with Berserker (as being useless above Hard, that is). There is concrete evidence in both visual, textual, and other forms that the above assertion is complete nonsense unless you're inexperienced enough with Berserker that you can't play it well above Hard.

Such is often the case with posters who drop by to hyperfocus on one thing and then never post on anything again. A good example would be the numerous one-time posters who suddenly came out of the woodwork when Berserker got nerfed from "unkillable" to "actual risk/reward", and of course there will now be Medic players who do likewise. There's frequently an overlap of both because the playerbases for Medic and Berserker players tend to be on very similar Venn diagrams.


I don't want all the classes to be nerfed because some of them are fine for the core loop that the game was originally built around. Some are a little bent even if they're not broken, some are too good for how easy they are to play, some are actually skill-indexed...some perks themselves aren't broken but their weapons certainly are problematic.

Tying into that "platinum" thing from earlier: This game's difficulties and such are so all over the place that the perks themselves are their own difficulties. Solo mode is almost always easier due to the reduced everything from the Zeds' side. The chaos perks and chaotic weaponry in general are much, much easier to win with overall than the precision perks and headshot-based weaponry, which is the main problem with this game on the whole that I have been working to bring to light (and hopefully address) in my various longposts.

Berserker and Medic were the biggest outliers because their design (and especially interactions with each other) were effectively allowing bad players to skip the primary difficulty curves in this game, which is not good design. Firebug and Demo in their current states are also very, very effective for the effort required to play them and do in fact need to be looked at; that being said, Demo and Firebug also actually die when they take hits and are slow, so they can't get away with some of the shenanigans that the two former perks can.


Medic, again, is still exactly as good at healing other players as before, so: define "fun." This is a common complaint I see in video games when a distinctly broken thing gets nerfed, and nobody can exactly tell me what their definition of "fun" is when it comes to games like these.

Back 4 Blood went through this when the devs introduced a hilariously overpowered ability called "Expired T5" that singlehandedly broke the game so hard everyone and their mother started running it because it meant you didn't have to aim, or prioritize targets, or really do anything normally associated with a first-person shooter. So every single lobby had at least two people on the hardest difficulties running only this unless you stuck with a premade group that went on an honor system of "don't use it." Once the inevitable nerf happened, people came on the forums for the first time ever to say that the game was unplayable and such as, and that skilled players don't know how to have fun, and so forth, etc.
The ones who weren't complaining were the ones who had already been practicing the harder difficulties, memorizing general breakpoints, and training their aim and mechanical skills. Some of us have fun by pushing our skills to the limit on the game and don't particularly enjoy find it fun when things that break the learning and skill indexing are introduced, especially when those things are extremely easy while being extremely effective. On the hard difficulties.

(Also melee is even more busted in B4B than it is in this game but we'll just sideline that for the moment)


TWI did sort of do that, except aside from having it locked it down to a weekly so you only see it once every blue moon (there are currently 20 weeklies on rotation, seriously!)...

That difficulty was a complete mess at the start and wasn't really any harder for Zerkwall/spam teams, although it sure did take a dump on precision teams. As it turns out, while faster-moving trash is cool and fun, spawning literally every Fleshpound raged takes agency away from kit-dependent precision players while making absolutely no difference in the usual "wall of fire and explosives" strategy that most people use to clear the game. Yes, it technically made the game "harder," but in the worst way possible. I'm pretty sure they gave up patching it after the one time they bothered, sort of like the versus mode. It was certainly more reasonable once they took away the "Oops! All Raged Fleshpounds" aspect of it, but then they didn't give the Zeds any benefits to counteract that, so in the end it didn't really wind up that much harder than a standard HoE game. Maybe taking some more hints from CD players would've helped?

And that's not even considering the other side to the "just make a harder difficulty" coin: power creep and the consequences of it. This was something that Payday 2 ran off with and the end result was that the game had to have numerous rebalances and up to four additional difficulties with additional modifiers in them since the game released, because Overkill Studios couldn't stop releasing broken nonsense, and in the end the game ended up being a broken mess if you actually cared about playing the game for a challenge. (Of course the game is going to get easier when you allow four players at a time to revive each other across the map through walls and have spurts of infinite-ammo miniguns and rocket launchers when the game was originally based around L4D's "stick together" and "headshots are best" principles; who would've guessed?)

When you buff players unreasonably and start buffing Zeds unreasonably to match, you have power creep. You know what's much easier? Nerfing outliers. Ideally you shouldn't introduce outliers in the first place because that sets expectations that players will be getting a flatly easier game, but when you don't do anything about them after the fact, you get a game like current-day KF2 where half the perks are playing on the equivalent of an honor system and the rest of them are playing Borderlands where you race to see who can kill the most things with the most broken weapons and nobody really dies.

And you can't just buff those perks to match because you completely alienate the skilled players who already understand how to use the precision perks if you do that, because then there's no challenge left to the game at that point, so why bother? Even TWI themselves understand that issue. Players shouldn't have to balance the game for devs, let alone have to create their own servers where they can actually remove annoying nonsense and focus on honing their skills; that's an unreasonable expectation to put on the players and just encourages introducing more broken nonsense on the basis of "oh well the tryhard players will just ban it anyway."

Now, given that TWI has been supporting and advertising Tamari's CD tournament--which is really odd, but good nonetheless--that may change in some form or fashion.


In all my time playing this game, the vast majority of players in Suicidal and HoE difficulties are picking Medic/Zerk/Firebug/Demo/Survivalist. Roughly in that order of popularity.

That's a hard fact to sell without actual numbers from server owners, but that's certainly my 4-digit hours worth of antecdata. Probably because those are much easier to win with on higher difficulties compared to Commando, SWAT, Sharpshooter, and Gunslinger (although you tend to see Gunslinger on very kite-heavy maps because it's much more forgiving in those settings), because they're far more forgiving of bad play and allow players to do extremely well by spamming at the enemies while almost entirely ignoring the headshot mechanics that distinguish bad players from good ones. That, and for a very long time, Berserker and Medic got new toys basically nonstop on top of being already extremely easy to win with since their major buffs in the Incinerate n Detonate update.

And on the nerf bit, although this is getting decidedly even more off-topic...

(Quick point of order: Gunslinger should absolutely have something on the chopping block, but nobody really discusses that outside of the Discord. It has too much keeping it on top when mastered right now, but since it's a perk you have to hit headshots with, most people aren't going to get nearly that good with it.

The last time TWI actually tried to nerf Gunslinger was back when they removed reload cancelling and slowed down Gunslinger's reloads, and they wound up just flatly reverting everything from that patch because of how unpopular the removal of reload cancelling was because it affected absolutely every perk. They have an odd habit of doing that for some reason, like just tossing out the entire thing instead of keeping some good ideas.)

Gunslinger remains largely untouched to this day, though it could absolutely use either longer reloads or a runspeed nerf. That's another topic for another thread, which is one I've been mulling over. The rest of those perks? Most people are too bad at this game to play Commando or Sharpshooter even remotely well; Support is not easy but is arguably more forgiving than those to a degree, and SWAT is not what I'd call easy but definitely surged in popularity after the sprint speed update; in the game's current state it's easier to win with compared to Commando but harder to surpass Commando's skill ceiling (shock of shocks, SWAT also has more tankiness and speed compared to Commando, so of course it's more popular with the broader playerbase).

Sharpshooter is, in my 4-digit hours of experience, the most unpopular perk in general pub play. Sharpshooter buffs are/were one of the most common requests but most people have terrible ideas on how to buff it because it usually involves "make it run faster, let M99 instakill anything regardless of your build, and make it do universal extra damage instead of headshot damage", which is to say "make the entire perk easier rather than neuter the rest of the perks back down to a reasonable level"), and rather than buff the perk's base kit, TWI have been giving it increasingly suspect weapons.
The Storm Cannon in its current incarnation has been flatly banned on many CD servers because it turns stacking Marksman Sharpshooters from a joke team idea into legitimately one of the strongest team comps you can muster if everyone's aim is decent, but the vast majority of players don't have the aim to even bother with it because you have to headshot for the benefits to begin with. And this is the post-nerf version, mind you, where it doesn't inflict micro-stuns with every single shot anymore on top of having AoE blasts with every headshot.

Support needing buffs is a fairly common refrain because most people insist that Support is bad in early waves, which I firmly believe is nonsense; Support is only "bad" once you consider higher-end CD cycles and that's just an artifact of shotguns being what they are in this game. Support is a high-risk-high-reward generalist when mastered with only a couple of bad weapons, which is fine.

Commando is mostly fine but the FAL shouldn't be as good as it is; currently it suffers from having really bad skill tree alternatives because why would you not take high cap mags and extra damage. That extra damage turns it from being a trash specialist into a good-except-for-Fleshpounds generalist and it leaves a lot of room for skill ceiling growth on the player's part.


Point of order #2: TWI already nerfed those perks with the armored Rioters and EDARs. That was literally the whole point of that update.


Pathfinder's aim is alright but I would take any of his opinions on meta stuff with heavy grains of salt. Fun thing to note, though: he was that guy who started the "Berserker can win by camping in a corner" thing on one of his old videos, so there's that.
I’ve been insulted by 3 of the 4 people who’ve even commented on this post. Good conversation? Give me a break, this is a 7 year old video game that 20 people go out of the way to ruin for the few 1000 people who still play it. It’s annoying dude.
 
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Listen Mr. Big Head, you assume I’m not good at this game first off. That’s fine, because you have no idea whether i am or not.

Medic nerfs were warranted and long overdue. This is something I expect someone who's good in this game to understand. If I see one doesn't, I assume they aren't good. They haven't spent enough time playing and reflecting on their play and team play interactions to have a good judgment on the balance. There's a chance I'm wrong. In which case, a good argument can be presented showing that. Such as, a thought experiment, comparing a team play with a tanky medic and stronger zerk to a team play when they are less so, or real world data from the games. We don't have that, so a thought experiment is the next best thing. But I don't see such arguments from you. To the contrary, arguments for strong medic nerfs sound convincing because they match my game experience.

They don't match yours? My assumption is you just lack experience. I have 5K hours in this game. Most of it is HoE games and HoE+/CD games. I see the problems outlined in this post all the time. Hundreds, if not thousands times. So, naturally, I agree that they are problems and indeed they need to be addressed.

You don't agree, fine. But do you have good arguments against it barring "medic and zerk should be tough because I like when I play medic and don't die when everyone else around does? You don't. You have enough experience to have a good judgment? Hilariously, as arguments supposed to prove your experience you bring up your console gaming experience (without even understanding how flawed such an argument is at assessing one's skill) and bring up PathFinder's opinion on a zerk (without understanding how flawed this argument is). Well, my conclusion is you don't have experience either.

Which is fine, not everyone is skilled at everything. You may be skilled in other games or even better real world stuff. You probably equally get annoyed by noobs having superficial opinions about things you are an expert in. Well, I'm in this exact situation right now with you. You just haven't played enough all perks in this game in all possible scenarios and thought about it, yet, insist on your opinions, while arguing with tryhards.

Instead, you should've toned down your arrogance a bit and learned the wisdom we are trying to share with you. But you just now resorted to saying you aren't reading what we say. Well, maybe you should get back to playing this game instead and get back to this conversation after putting 5K hours into "Hell on Earth" and harder games?

I literally said a guy who’s a pro at this game, die hard since the game has been released, probably the number one content creator for this game, agreed.

You can start with providing an exact quote. I agree that PathFinder is a good player, however:

1) He's not #1 gameplay content creator in this game, he's a distant #2. #1 is Fat Cat.
2) Most of his videos are solo play of regular "Hell on Earth". He seems to be satisfied with it and doesn't go into "harder than Hell on Earth" almost ever. What does it say about his skill? Well, he's probably behind a lot of us here. Not only it matters for difficulty of the game play, it matters because team play, which is the most popular way to play this game, involves more complex dynamics between the perks and one should be able to show they understand them by engaging in appropriate team play. There are no such videos on his channel.
3) Even with all that, he's still a good enough player to have a good feeling on perk strengths and weaknesses. I doubt he ever would claim that zerk pre-nerf or medic pre-nerf were on par with other perks from the survivability standpoint. So, provide a quote or it didn't happen.

in what world do you think your judgement trumps mine?

I have 5K hours in this game. About 600 hours in regular HoE and the rest is harder than HoE. This alone puts me in about top 20-30 players worldwide. I've been analyzing this game a lot, including various quantified analysis, both solo and multiplayer. I know all the damage and health pools numbers off the top of my head. I'm an active modder of this game and probably in top 20 people in the whole world who know this game's code the most.

I find the arguments presented in this thread convincing and matching my game experience. They are valid problems. I find your arguments mostly empty and irrelevant. It's absolutely natural to have it this way, do you think that an opinion on a game balance of a person who spent, say, 1K hours matches the opinion of someone with 100 hours in its depth and validity?

Again, I'm not here to just shove my opinions down your throat. But the general principle is yes, those who engaged in some activity and reflected on it more are in a better position to have a better understanding of this activity. Do you disagree with this notion? If not, I bet there are activities where you are much more experienced than me, not to mention that putting 5K hours into a game is a very dubious achievement and maybe I should be ashamed of myself because of doing it instead of something more productive. And in these activities, in which you are more experienced, I bet you would also dismiss my opinions, if I had the audacity to express them, and would find my arguments ridiculous.

If you disagree with some of us -- it's fine. Show your skill, show your good knowledge of the game, prove that I'm wrong in something and then yes, I may reconsider the position I was previously holding. But you can't just come in and demand that something is done because it represents opinions of "95% of the players". First off, I doubt that it does represent, second, not all players are equal.

Consider, say, a baseball as a game example. A lot of people play it. But the rules of it typically get changed only based on opinions of top players, for one and people who carefully analyzed the game by crunching numbers and suggest that based on quantified evidence we should move in this direction. Have you presented any of that? No.
 
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Medic nerfs were warranted and long overdue. This is something I expect someone who's good in this game to understand. If I see one doesn't, I assume they aren't good. They haven't spent enough time playing and reflecting on their play and team play interactions to have a good judgment on the balance. There's a chance I'm wrong. In which case, a good argument can be presented showing that. Such as, a thought experiment, comparing a team play with a tanky medic and stronger zerk to a team play when they are less so, or real world data from the games. We don't have that, so a thought experiment is the next best thing. But I don't see such arguments from you. To the contrary, arguments for strong medic nerfs sound convincing because they match my game experience.

They don't match yours? My assumption is you just lack experience. I have 5K hours in this game. Most of it is HoE games and HoE+/CD games. I see the problems outlined in this post all the time. Hundreds, if not thousands times. So, naturally, I agree that they are problems and indeed they need to be addressed.

You don't agree, fine. But do you have good arguments against it barring "medic and zerk should be tough because I like when I play medic and don't die when everyone else around does? You don't. You have enough experience to have a good judgment? Hilariously, as arguments supposed to prove your experience you bring up your console gaming experience (without even understanding how flawed such an argument is at assessing one's skill) and bring up PathFinder's opinion on a zerk (without understanding how flawed this argument is). Well, my conclusion is you don't have experience either.

Which is fine, not everyone is skilled at everything. You may be skilled in other games or even better real world stuff. You probably equally get annoyed by noobs having superficial opinions about things you are an expert in. Well, I'm in this exact situation right now with you. You just haven't played enough all perks in this game in all possible scenarios and thought about it, yet, insist on your opinions, while arguing with tryhards.

Instead, you should've toned down your arrogance a bit and learned the wisdom we are trying to share with you. But you just now resorted to saying you aren't reading what we say. Well, maybe you should get back to playing this game instead and get back to this conversation after putting 5K hours into "Hell on Earth" and harder games?



You can start with providing an exact quote. I agree that PathFinder is a good player, however:

1) He's not #1 gameplay content creator in this game, he's a distant #2. #1 is Fat Cat.
2) Most of his videos are solo play of regular "Hell on Earth". He seems to be satisfied with it and doesn't go into "harder than Hell on Earth" almost ever. What does it say about his skill? Well, he's probably behind a lot of us here. Not only it matters for difficulty of the game play, it matters because team play, which is the most popular way to play this game, involves more complex dynamics between the perks and one should be able to show they understand them by engaging in appropriate team play. There are no such videos on his channel.
3) Even with all that, he's still a good enough player to have a good feeling on perk strengths and weaknesses. I doubt he ever would claim that zerk pre-nerf or medic pre-nerf were on par with other perks from the survivability standpoint. So, provide a quote or it didn't happen.



I have 5K hours in this game. About 600 hours in regular HoE and the rest is harder than HoE. This alone puts me in about top 20-30 players worldwide. I've been analyzing this game a lot, including various quantified analysis, both solo and multiplayer. I know all the damage and health pools numbers off the top of my head. I'm an active modder of this game and probably in top 20 people in the whole world who know this game's code the most.

I find the arguments presented in this thread convincing and matching my game experience. They are valid problems. I find your arguments mostly empty and irrelevant. It's absolutely natural to have it this way, do you think that an opinion on a game balance of a person who spent, say, 1K hours matches the opinion of someone with 100 hours in its depth and validity?

Again, I'm not here to just shove my opinions down your throat. But the general principle is yes, those who engaged in some activity and reflected on it more are in a better position to have a better understanding of this activity. Do you disagree with this notion? If not, I bet there are activities where you are much more experienced than me, not to mention that putting 5K hours into a game is a very dubious achievement and maybe I should be ashamed of myself because of doing it instead of something more productive. And in these activities, in which you are more experienced, I bet you would also dismiss my opinions, if I had the audacity to express them, and would find my arguments ridiculous.

If you disagree with some of us -- it's fine. Show your skill, show your good knowledge of the game, prove that I'm wrong in something and then yes, I may reconsider the position I was previously holding. But you can't just come in and demand that something is done because it represents opinions of "95% of the players". First off, I doubt that it does represent, second, not all players are equal.

Consider, say, a baseball as a game example. A lot of people play it. But the rules of it typically get changed only based on opinions of top players, for one and people who carefully analyzed the game by crunching numbers and suggest that based on quantified evidence we should move in this direction. Have you presented any of that? No.
All you did was say you’ve played the game a lot. Dude idc if you’re a 20 year bet, or a 5 year bet. A vet is a vet, I have my opinions which are agreed upon by many people. Just because you’ve sunk your entire life into the game, doesn’t make your opinion correct. There have been people who have spent their entire lives researching and promoting their ideas, all for it to come crashing down when they’ve been proven wrong time and time again. I stick but what I say, and I do not care that you spent the last 6 years playing this game non stop, it doesn’t make your opinion more valid, also with the assumption of how many hours j have played this game. There’s also the fact that just because someone has more time in it, doesn’t make them better at the game, nor does it make their analyzing skills of the game better.
 
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Medic nerfs were warranted and long overdue. This is something I expect someone who's good in this game to understand. If I see one doesn't, I assume they aren't good. They haven't spent enough time playing and reflecting on their play and team play interactions to have a good judgment on the balance. There's a chance I'm wrong. In which case, a good argument can be presented showing that. Such as, a thought experiment, comparing a team play with a tanky medic and stronger zerk to a team play when they are less so, or real world data from the games. We don't have that, so a thought experiment is the next best thing. But I don't see such arguments from you. To the contrary, arguments for strong medic nerfs sound convincing because they match my game experience.

They don't match yours? My assumption is you just lack experience. I have 5K hours in this game. Most of it is HoE games and HoE+/CD games. I see the problems outlined in this post all the time. Hundreds, if not thousands times. So, naturally, I agree that they are problems and indeed they need to be addressed.

You don't agree, fine. But do you have good arguments against it barring "medic and zerk should be tough because I like when I play medic and don't die when everyone else around does? You don't. You have enough experience to have a good judgment? Hilariously, as arguments supposed to prove your experience you bring up your console gaming experience (without even understanding how flawed such an argument is at assessing one's skill) and bring up PathFinder's opinion on a zerk (without understanding how flawed this argument is). Well, my conclusion is you don't have experience either.

Which is fine, not everyone is skilled at everything. You may be skilled in other games or even better real world stuff. You probably equally get annoyed by noobs having superficial opinions about things you are an expert in. Well, I'm in this exact situation right now with you. You just haven't played enough all perks in this game in all possible scenarios and thought about it, yet, insist on your opinions, while arguing with tryhards.

Instead, you should've toned down your arrogance a bit and learned the wisdom we are trying to share with you. But you just now resorted to saying you aren't reading what we say. Well, maybe you should get back to playing this game instead and get back to this conversation after putting 5K hours into "Hell on Earth" and harder games?



You can start with providing an exact quote. I agree that PathFinder is a good player, however:

1) He's not #1 gameplay content creator in this game, he's a distant #2. #1 is Fat Cat.
2) Most of his videos are solo play of regular "Hell on Earth". He seems to be satisfied with it and doesn't go into "harder than Hell on Earth" almost ever. What does it say about his skill? Well, he's probably behind a lot of us here. Not only it matters for difficulty of the game play, it matters because team play, which is the most popular way to play this game, involves more complex dynamics between the perks and one should be able to show they understand them by engaging in appropriate team play. There are no such videos on his channel.
3) Even with all that, he's still a good enough player to have a good feeling on perk strengths and weaknesses. I doubt he ever would claim that zerk pre-nerf or medic pre-nerf were on par with other perks from the survivability standpoint. So, provide a quote or it didn't happen.



I have 5K hours in this game. About 600 hours in regular HoE and the rest is harder than HoE. This alone puts me in about top 20-30 players worldwide. I've been analyzing this game a lot, including various quantified analysis, both solo and multiplayer. I know all the damage and health pools numbers off the top of my head. I'm an active modder of this game and probably in top 20 people in the whole world who know this game's code the most.

I find the arguments presented in this thread convincing and matching my game experience. They are valid problems. I find your arguments mostly empty and irrelevant. It's absolutely natural to have it this way, do you think that an opinion on a game balance of a person who spent, say, 1K hours matches the opinion of someone with 100 hours in its depth and validity?

Again, I'm not here to just shove my opinions down your throat. But the general principle is yes, those who engaged in some activity and reflected on it more are in a better position to have a better understanding of this activity. Do you disagree with this notion? If not, I bet there are activities where you are much more experienced than me, not to mention that putting 5K hours into a game is a very dubious achievement and maybe I should be ashamed of myself because of doing it instead of something more productive. And in these activities, in which you are more experienced, I bet you would also dismiss my opinions, if I had the audacity to express them, and would find my arguments ridiculous.

If you disagree with some of us -- it's fine. Show your skill, show your good knowledge of the game, prove that I'm wrong in something and then yes, I may reconsider the position I was previously holding. But you can't just come in and demand that something is done because it represents opinions of "95% of the players". First off, I doubt that it does represent, second, not all players are equal.

Consider, say, a baseball as a game example. A lot of people play it. But the rules of it typically get changed only based on opinions of top players, for one and people who carefully analyzed the game by crunching numbers and suggest that based on quantified evidence we should move in this direction. Have you presented any of that? No.
And again, this game is not based upon your ideas or skill level. There are so many people that play this game, these nerds ruin it for the worse. If you’re going to campaign for anything, campaign for harder difficulties. The cry babies have already ruined the Berserker class, and now it’s on to the medic, which is probably going to nerfed again and again and again until the likes of you decide that it’s okay. Listen dude, I don’t give 2 shits who you are, you play the game, you didn’t make it. Your opinion is no more valid than mine or anyone else’s based on the fact that it’s a video game. It’s meant for entertainment, not for you to stroke yourself.
 
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And again, this game is not based upon your ideas or skill level.

Why? I brought up a baseball example. A well-known, established and successful game. Rather deep, learning it takes years and thousands of hours. The rules for which change over time, remaining sort of the same at the core. How do the rules change is determined by top players, by pros. And this is how it should be, as it is better for the game life if pros are in charge of its balance.

There are so many people that play this game, these nerds ruin it for the worse.

They don't. They are, instead, the guardians of the game balance. Game balance is something that allows the game to be deep and played for a longer time, as compared to unbalanced games, which are exhausted quickly and have low player retention.

A berserker is just 10% of the game experience perk-wise and I don't see how the game balance should revolve around this one perk. A combat medic set up is even less than 10%, it maybe was more enjoyable to play for a certain type of people who like to screw the team over, but this is a team game and balance decisions have to regard highly how any balance change impacts the team play. The combat medic situation ruined the game for many team players and this medic nerf was absolutely warranted.

If you’re going to campaign for anything, campaign for harder difficulties.

I am and been doing it for years. Moreover, I've developed my own difficulty already on some of my modded servers according to this vision. But calling for medic nerfs and calling for harder difficulties aren't mutually exclusive, so I do both.

Listen dude, I don’t give 2 shits who you are, you play the game, you didn’t make it. Your opinion is no more valid than mine or anyone else’s based on the fact that it’s a video game. It’s meant for entertainment, not for you to stroke yourself.

No. My opinion matters more than yours, because I'm more experienced in this game and can be considered an expert. I understand well the balance between the perks, their strengths and weaknesses and how do they interplay with each other. This is important for anyone who plans to stay with this game for a lot of time. And this is how it should be as most knowledgeable about any subject are likelier to make better decisions about this something. Again, wasting 5K hours on just 1 game is a dubious achievement and if you are an expert in anything you should understand that this something you are an expert in is better off if experts are in charge of its destiny, not laymen.

To the contrary, opinion of players who play just 1 or 2 perks out of all 10 matters less, as they aren't in positino to weigh in on the peculiarities of the interplay between the perks, because they just haven't played all of them for long enough to have a good grasp on the team play balance.

Good that your brought up the entertainment. Because entertainment relies on the balance, there's no long term entertainment and no subsequent retention if the balance requirement is not met. Improperly balanced games are known as "broken" and players, once found ways to abuse said imbalances, get quickly fed up and move on to other games. A well balanced beauties are rare, but they exist, and players spend thousands of hours and potentially hundreds of dollars on them to both the game developer studio and playerbase satisfaction.

Our efforts to nerf the medic strive to achieve the goal of BETTER entertainment of this game overall, which includes and necessarily relies on the inter-perk game balance. After the medic nerfs this game is MORE balanced and is, therefore, a better game than it was, in this particular regard.
 
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Why? I brought up a baseball example. A well-known, established and successful game. Rather deep, learning it takes years and thousands of hours. The rules for which change over time, remaining sort of the same at the core. How do the rules change is determined by top players, by pros. And this is how it should be, as it is better for the game life if pros are in charge of its balance.



They don't. They are, instead, the guardians of the game balance. Game balance is something that allows the game to be deep and played for a longer time, as compared to unbalanced games, which are exhausted quickly and have low player retention.

A berserker is just 10% of the game experience perk-wise and I don't see how the game balance should revolve around this one perk. A combat medic set up is even less than 10%, it maybe was more enjoyable to play for a certain type of people who like to screw the team over, but this is a team game and balance decisions have to regard highly how any balance change impacts the team play. The combat medic situation ruined the game for many team players and this medic nerf was absolutely warranted.



I am and been doing it for years. Moreover, I've developed my own difficulty already on some of my modded servers according to this vision. But calling for medic nerfs and calling for harder difficulties aren't mutually exclusive, so I do both.



No. My opinion matters more than yours, because I'm more experienced in this game and can be considered an expert. I understand well the balance between the perks, their strengths and weaknesses and how do they interplay with each other. This is important for anyone who plans to stay with this game for a lot of time. And this is how it should be as most knowledgeable about any subject are likelier to make better decisions about this something. Again, wasting 5K hours on just 1 game is a dubious achievement and if you are an expert in anything you should understand that this something you are an expert in is better off if experts are in charge of its destiny, not laymen.

To the contrary, opinion of players who play just 1 or 2 perks out of all 10 matters less, as they aren't in positino to weigh in on the peculiarities of the interplay between the perks, because they just haven't played all of them for long enough to have a good grasp on the team play balance.

Good that your brought up the entertainment. Because entertainment relies on the balance, there's no long term entertainment and no subsequent retention if the balance requirement is not met. Improperly balanced games are known as "broken" and players, once found ways to abuse said imbalances, get quickly fed up and move on to other games. A well balanced beauties are rare, but they exist, and players spend thousands of hours and potentially hundreds of dollars on them to both the game developer studio and playerbase satisfaction.

Our efforts to nerf the medic strive to achieve the goal of BETTER entertainment of this game overall, which includes and necessarily relies on the inter-perk game balance. After the medic nerfs this game is MORE balanced and is, therefore, a better game than it was, in this particular regard.
Your opinion is your opinion, you ain’t God dude and it matters nothing in the grand scheme of everything. Your personal outlook on the game doesn’t speak for the rest of us. You guys got what you wanted, now you’ll see less and less people playing medic because it’s a chore just to stay alive on top of having the weakest weapons in the game besides the grenades which also have been nerfed along with the heal thrower. And you can have more time on a game, it doesn’t make your observations and opinions more important. I could be twice as good and more knowledgeable in half the time for all you know. This is reality.
 
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So far my experience with the medic nerf is most players aren’t picking the class anymore and choose survivalist instead. Healthrower is garbage now. Medic (like I’ve said) really needed the extra tankiness to stay alive since they have no really good weapons. There is the hemogoblin which is good but very niche and basically useless in crowds. I see that medics more often now need to run for dear life because having to focus on healing others even more now makes it so they can’t really defend themselves. These standards im seeing are made as if everyone on the team is incredible at that game, which is not the case in most cases. I could see a nerf, but what they did was too much. Same for Berserker.
 
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So far my experience with the medic nerf is most players aren’t picking the class anymore and choose survivalist instead. Healthrower is garbage now. Medic (like I’ve said) really needed the extra tankiness to stay alive since they have no really good weapons. There is the hemogoblin which is good but very niche and basically useless in crowds. I see that medics more often now need to run for dear life because having to focus on healing others even more now makes it so they can’t really defend themselves. These standards im seeing are made as if everyone on the team is incredible at that game, which is not the case in most cases. I could see a nerf, but what they did was too much. Same for Berserker.
Medic is still a top pick and still has significantly more survivability than basically every other perk. As long as you can avoid getting sandwiched between multiple big zeds or eating several fleshpound crits in 2 seconds you can't be killed. Healthrower is still the meta HEALING weapon, being able to also kill trash as well as the flamethrower was just ridiculous.

I think you are missing an important aspect of this whole discussion. Medics survivability should come directly from their teammates, the nature of perk interactions is supposed to be symbiotic. Sharpshooter relies on commando to protect them from trash, commando relies on sharpshooter to protect them from big zeds, medic relies on EVERYONE to keep them safe. A team that can't fulfill their roles and protect their medic deserves to fail. The answer here is better team play, not give the healing class broken survivability.

Now I know that this game has suffered much power creep throughout the years and the defined roles have been blurred quite a bit but the principles still remain and it's what makes this game so blissful to play at higher levels. This is what I believe the "thousands of hours vets" are hoping to preserve.
 
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Your opinion is your opinion, you ain’t God dude and it matters nothing in the grand scheme of everything.

Are you denying the notion that someone with more experience, in general, everything else being equal, is in a better position to make a better judgment on balance from the game appeal perspective? You are basically trying to deny the value of expertise here. In everything. Like, a chess granmaster, according to you, has no ground to claim that he has a better understanding of the chess game than a chess novice.

Your personal outlook on the game doesn’t speak for the rest of us.

Good job hiding behind the "rest of us". How about that -- your opinion on medic balance is just your poorly informed opinion and doesn't speak for the rest of us. How's that?

You guys got what you wanted, now you’ll see less and less people playing medic because it’s a chore just to stay alive on top of having the weakest weapons in the game besides the grenades which also have been nerfed along with the heal thrower.

You'll definitely see less selfish and combat medics in games and THAT'S A GOOD THING. Works as intended. It's not medic's job to have or use better weapons. You want better DPS? Play DPS perks. Medics are supposed to be played to heal and buff the team, that's their main purpose, everything else is an afterthought.
 
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