Fortress’s damage output is higher than dogface’s un-buffed damage, but no one uses dogface for his normal dps. His burst damage with one or both buffs is far, far, far superior to fortress with both of his buffs. Otherwise you would run into 4 healers + fortress in pvp all the time, and you don’t.
I believe someone mentioned this, but Salvatore does not have a shotgun. He does spend a lot of time reloading though. His DPS is poor. Yes, he does not die immediately; rather, he stands around doing next to nothing for as long as you like. That’s not a role. It’s a waste of a spot on your team.
Kunoichi can even do great damage against heavily armored foes if they are subject to honorless - but not nearly as much as dogface. Her full offense, though, doesn’t fix her terrible accuracy, doesn’t improve her poor armor penetration, and doesn’t increase her DPS by 30% the way it does the DPS against her. She can’t hit anything in the back row and she can’t damage anything in the front row except for a few seconds at a time, unless supported by other heroes inflicting status effects.
Again, these are spots that could have had dogface, panzer, flatline, mandrake, or healers. I’m not saying these heroes are not good for anything (except salvatore), but that a team with them is at a severe disadvantage against the PvP teams we all see so regularly. “Okay but not as good for anything as dogface” is not a real role.
Maven is great - at raids. Her DPS is indeed stellar. However, she needs support to hit with her bronze and silver skills, and a good healer or two can still outpace her damage, unlike dogface or panzer.
I never said that he is as good as Dogface, but with his Buffs his damage he does decent damage and if you let him attack a Bio hero the Bio heroe doesn´t stand a chance.
He is not on a level with Dogface, but far from beeing useless. His only problem is the same all energy heroes have and this is Panzer.
Salvatore has no Shotgun, you are right, I messed that up. But anyway his damage is okay and if you gor for a Mech hero with him he will do good.
Not as good as dogface or panzer = not useful in general in PvP. That was my whole point. That’s what underlies the lack of diversity in PvP currently and undermines the concept of roles. Sure, once you are out of dogface and panzer hearts, you might replace them with one of those other DPS, but you can’t configure a team without dogface or panzer so that it will reliably defeat the 2-4 heal/shield + 0-2 emergency defense + dogface/panzer that we are all getting sick of seeing.
I don’t see small quantitative changes making this any better. It doesn’t matter how much healers can heal, that is the entire point of burst damage, finishing an enemy before they have a chance to recover. In order to make other DPS competitive, the damage difference outside of that burst has to be enormous. As a general rule, in absence of healing, all other things equal, a DPS should always win against burst damage. Every last time. So whatever HHG does, they need to satisfy that litmus test, or PvP will continue to degenerate.
Another solution would be to add skills that completely foil burst damage and make dogface and panzer useless. It could be on a new hero or modify an existing hero (someone currently very useless, like baron) skill. It has to put a hard limit on the amount of damage that can be sustained in a short period. For example, a hit exceeding some threshold damage causes an impenetrable shield for a few seconds. It would need to be a full party skill, or a passive self-buff on a hero with a revive. Just having that character exist would force us to reconsider relying so heavily on dogface and panzer.
I’m not following about ifrit. His platinum, at worst, forces dogface to kill everyone twice. He’s pretty good at killing them the first time, so it’s not that problematic. Showstopper does inflict disorientation, so a random proportion of his shots will miss, but that affects all characters equally. It doesn’t make other DPS any more useful.
There are some teams out there that can beat the meta teams without using Dogface or Panzer. Just get creative.
Introducing a counter hero against Dog and Panzer instead of adjusting them sounds like a great idea. No one will figure out a team to use Panzer and him. Another mandatory hero is something I’m really looking forward to.
I honestly don’t have that much trouble with Dogface since his bullets are easy to avoid by rolling. Panzer is only overly dangerous in the first 30 seconds. Afterwards she is on a normal damage dealer level, but she should be adjusted to make these 30 seconds less dangerous for energy heroes.
Fixing the armor problems will lead to more variety in damage dealers. Since the bio damage dealers do better damage afterwards the Panzer problem could be solved by this, because you could kill her faster or at least make her role to survive. This would make her damage output go down to a normal level within the first 30 seconds if you play it right.
It seems like no one is talking about the other side of the equation.
(The equation I’m talking about is “This Hero = This Point Value”)
Raising Dog’s point value by 20% or more would help to balance him. Panzer’s point value could be pumped up by a somewhat lesser amount.
At the other end, there are several “why would you ever use them in PVP?!” heroes that could stand a point value cut—ones which point-for-point currently have a flaw in their damage (Matador), hit points (Maven), or both (Callidus).
This would accomplish some of the needed rebalancing organically, without changing a single stat.
As an aside, watching Matador/Callidus with a FULL-SIZED MACHINEGUN ON FULL AUTO doing less damage than a shotgun or a rifle hurts my soul.
But the points are calculated by the stats so you would have to change the stats for the better to raise the points. And I think we all agree that the stats are already good enough.
I am sure others have as well, but I have brought this up several times. I like to use Nightingale as an example. My 9* Gale is 200-300 power less than my 8* heroes (all skills maxed). She is 2k~ power less than other 9*. So not only is she a great healer in her own right, she givers your team an overall lower score than other heroes.
If they just increased the power of all the current meta heroes by a few thousand, I agree it would help things. Having a Panzer/Nightingale/Ifrit/Flatline/Matador team that cost 5-8k more points than an equal star/rank team of “lesser” heroes would help balance things out.
Of course I think a number of other heroes still need work. Maven needs a 10-15% hp increase, her silence needs to travel way faster so it can hit more, and her AoE should either slow or stun targets (30% chance to stun for 2 seconds every tick) caught in it.
Clyde needs a 20-30% hp buff and make his skills less all or nothing luck reliant. Make the luck give extra damage, not if a skill will land or not.
Odachi, Hecklar, Sapphyr, and Kunoichi just need 20-30% more hp each. I think changing the armor to a percent reduction, along with an hp increase would dramatically make these heroes viable.
you’re right, but the problems after that is the Formula of the heroes power
that number doesn’t manually written i guess, so if we want to increase gale/panzer/dogface power that mean some their stats gonna increase (i know for sure that i don’t need buffed panzer)
so i’m agreeing with @WalleWu and @IceKobold, the formula need to change or tweak first
A grenade launcher in name. It actually works just like a rifle. He should have an AoE attack, just like gold Galante.
I remember when I unlocked him and saw his weapon was tagged as special. Made me think he would have an unique weapon. Maybe arcing projectiles, or sticky/timed grenades. Something hard to use but with high reward if used correctly.
I felt disappointed when I noticed the special tag meant nothing special.
I don’t quite get it… virtually none of the things that were written in this Role Warfare: Role Specialisation note has applied to the October patch?
All we have gotten are the changes to Clyde, Gammond, Galante and Sapphyr but the main thing seems to be the Bronze Skill Cooldown improvements.
Where are:
I am confused because this note was written with a big view and in the context of the entire community focusing on the question of giving players more DPS options - there were countless threads on this.
I must confess that on my part I had big expectations because this note seemed to be aiming squarely in the direction that the community was going, that the game needed DPS options and the Role Specialisation Update slated for October would deal with this in a direct and concrete way.
As a reminder, and as stated multiple times in the main topic.
Role Warfare is not a singular Update. Role Warfare, including Hero Specialization, will be an ongoing focus that will take multiple Updates to fully realize.
But while you guys have given yourselves and indefinite timeline for balancing PVP, players do not have indefinite patience for playing the same stale, broken PVP meta for months on end. It’s been 2 months since the last role warfare and it’s an idea that would take 10 minutes to hash out on an excel spreadsheet with fire-rates in Column A and bronze cooldown in Column B.
It’s not like each of these updates was even close to fixing the underlying issues with PVP either. In the first role warfare update you had the stated objective of nerfing passive healing and making damage stickier… and then you guys proceed to buff Nightingale’s Plat, the best passive heal in the game, and nerf other innocuous passives like Kunoichi’s plat. That sort of decision making does not inspire confidence. I’ve been stating since July that Panzer’s shotgun would be “meta-defining” until it was nerfed and 3 months later we’re still playing in a meta where every PVP hero choice is governed by the law of “Will an enemy Panzer kill this person in the first 10 seconds?”
You guys have had 2 role warfare updates and both have failed to budge the metagame, so for people like me and @Sing who have tried to stick it out - it’s not really sufficient to say “maybe wait another 2 months so we can buff silver cooldowns on high ROF heroes by 10%”. There are massive underlying forces that have created this metagame, it’s not going to be broken up by a broad stat-shift every couple months, but we have seen NOTHING from HHG that shows a willingness to make the kind of big changes necessary.
