Godslayer Balance Essay

[Haste]

I randomly began writing some incoherent thoughts on this. Quick disclaimer: I'm keeping up with this thread, and I don't want this post to come across as dismissing players' criticisms, as that's very much not the intent.

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On Snubs:

The notion that fighters have somehow changed to cater more to veterans, in my opinion, is incompatible with reality. Almost every major change we've made to the class was done explicitly to close the gap:

- Standardized, vanilla-sized shield hitboxes to help weaker aimers get through shields so they can chip away at hull.
- Several passes on missiles designed to encourage their use, reduce the degree to which they are stigmatized, and generally integrate them properly into the snub landscape.
- Loads of individual ship balance passes. The reality is that outliers in power level are usually found by the best players, and then also exploited by the best players. A more even playing field benefits the average player more than the ace.
- Near removal of Nanobots and Shield Batteries dropping on death, which was a mechanic exclusively used by aces punching down to refill their supplies and fight ridiculous odds -- or at the very least to abuse the fact that Jimmy The Newbie came to help his friends and instead accidentally ended up helping Wesker -- on the enemy "team".
- Most recently, the changes to Class 1 fighter guns, normalizing 800+ m/s velocity guns. I have seen many players with weaker aim literally double their effective outgoing DPS by using them. Their hybrid nature also benefits players that hit less, as getting through shields is often a challenge for them, while aces can trivially deshield without a single dedicated anti-shield weapon.
- And yes, the removal of various types of instakill loadouts, whether they're SNACs or Mini Razor shotguns that could one-tap ships up to a certain armor threshold. Of course, aces were intimately familiar with these thresholds, while that fresh-faced LN ID fighter might not have realized that the Guardian's 11,000 was in fact well below it (while the Lynx' 12,400 was not).

The notion that weaker players could snatch a win from the jaws of defeat using things like SNACs is, to me, a seemingly very severe case of nostalgia glasses. For many years, I myself wouldn't lose shields in the vast majority of fights I took. Shield hitboxes were miniscule, strafe forces were absurd, and microscopic, insanely responsive ships were available if you knew where to look for them. In the rare case that anyone managed to deshield me, the odds of them also landing a SNAC on a small, barely-functional hitbox moving extremely evasively rounded down to zero percent. Instead, I remember cases where the SNAC allowed me or other bomber abusers to take on a literal dozen players at once, and by refilling my regens over and over, come out victorious. I wouldn't describe that as a friendlier PvP environment for the casual player.

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On Capital Ships:

I'm very surprised to hear claims of increased keyboard-fu being a necessity for Battleships, of all things. I still have most of my old Battleship keybinds as they occupy a part of the keyboard I don't really use: I have five keys dedicated to firing weapons 1-5 manually. You absolutely needed six weapon groups as you needed to dedicate several groups to various kinds of blindfire, including a completely empty group for blindfire without convergence. Nowadays, I can both make do with one less weapon group and those manual fire keys are just entirely obsolete and are instead replaced by an infinitely more intuitive "toggle snap" key. Add to that a key to toggle shields, and if you're really sweaty, a set of subtargeting keys. In theory you could make do with one (or none, if you mostly participate in fleet fights), but let's say you want two to really minmax. You're still down net keys. Top it all off with a manual reload key -- the most luxury of luxuries, in my opinion -- and you've almost arrived back where we were ten years ago. Except for toggle reticle snap, all of these are also more optional than those blindfire keys ever were. You'd literally never drop the shields of anything smaller than a Bismarck without them, back then. By comparison, you get small incremental gains to your efficacy from mastering each of these mechanics now, and if you don't find yourself getting into duels often you can make do without half of them (or more).

Similarly, we deliberately moved away from STS in Gunboats, Cruisers and Battlecruisers because of the carpal-tunnel-inducing nature of the mechanic. That, and the fact that you could fairly easily macro it without anyone ever finding out, getting a massive advantage for automating a chunk of the game. I personally swapped four keys out that I used to strafe with for two that I use to roll -- and in many fights in many capital ship classes I don't really bother to use them. So, sure, we've added keys that can potentially increase your effectiveness in combat, but we've also removed some highly APM-intensive button mashing to make up for it.

I have to just assume that players who claim there are so many more keybinds required these days chose to use neither STS nor blindfire. But then that means they were heavily gimping themselves. How exactly is that different from playing today's Discovery with half of the newly-added keybinds not bound -- except for the fact that you're probably losing less power doing that nowadays? Not blindfiring in the low-mass-high-response capital ship era or not STSing in an era where that casually doubled your ability to dodge fire was a huge loss.

In my opinion, all of the mechanics we added create a nice gradual curve to climb when it comes to skill expression, as each only really adds a small, incremental advantage once mastered. That's always been the goal we set out with, and I feel like it's one we achieved.

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In my experience since 5.0 released (I've probably been in three (?) fleet fights ever since) anything above a 3v3, maybe a 4v4, gets so complicated with how many things you need to keep in mind that at this point it's just better to not bother with it.

In my humble (and quite possibly wrong) opinion, the fact that it's virtually impossible to keep up with all the mechanics in a fleet fight is a triumph of the system, as it simply means that you can ignore the vast majority of micro mechanics and focus entirely on good positional and tactical play, only choosing to subtarget in the most niche of situations. The advantage of crazy-high-APM, absolutely optimal play in fleet fights compared to simply not doing so is very small, in my opinion, and unless you're doing a line of coke or something I don't think it's worth the loss in focus elsewhere.

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I do agree, wholeheartedly, with the notion that some of the more explosive moments of old Discovery -- no matter how rare they were in reality -- lent themselves better to "Youtube Highlight Reels", and I also understand that that's something people miss. I'm all for suggestions on how to add some of it back. I just don't think instakilling SNACs are the way -- largely because I genuinely don't know how to balance such a weapon in modern-day Discovery with much, much higher hitrates in snub land, mostly by virtue of upscales and actually functional hitboxes. Any stats even remotely similar to the old ones would result in five-second fights at high skill levels -- especially, of course, punching down.

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As for support roles: fire away with suggestions. It's something I'm definitely interested in implementing, and if we somehow managed to make support tools much less skill-testing than conventional weapons, that'd be even better.

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