1. I don't know if the hero\elite characters will be important to the team but they will certainly be important to me cos I as a player will pay req for them. And what's the use of apothecary while I would be plain dead with normal ff in case of a troll team kill? 2. The second one is more complicated. the damage on heavy weapons as far as I know from the devs will be enough - one shot kill on most infantry targets, including friendlies. When you have a game where 60% of players will be doing melee...well the shooters will have to be carefull to the point of not shooting at all. that's my concern i voiced many times in various threads and not only I.
The thing is unless they're a warp spider, melee units don't just teleport into your face (and warp spiders are technically ranged, just really short range). Melee units have to close distance, and even if they have a gap closer such as a jump pack the gap closer itself only has so much range. The time to shoot melee units is before they are able to close. After their melee units engage yours, you want to shift fire and target the gun line that is likely supporting them (use elevation or flanking to get a clear shot). You may attempt to pick off engaged enemy melee units to give your side an advantage, just know there is a risk to doing so. It's a risk vs reward situation. In addition, once they've engaged you're going to want ranged units flanking and guarding against enemy flankers. If you can get around to the side of a skirmish line you'll often find clear lanes of fire where you can shoot and hit nothing but enemies. Aiming AoE weapons at the ground towards the back of their line can help avoid friendly fire while flanking. In addition, keep in mind that for a while after they initiate their gap closers will likely be on cooldown. This means they need to walk between targets until their gap closer recharges, which creates a window where they are vulnerable to being picked off. Terrain will often dictate specifics of an engagement. For example it's hard to flank in a hallway, while it's super-easy in a hilly field. If the game and maps are designed well we should see combat in all types of terrain, and some weapons will simply be better suited for certain terrains than others. You've just got to make sure you pick the right weapon for the right job. At the end of the day it's only war, and war never changes.
So, I don't see your point? And that's precisely the problem we might have in EC - with 40 meters of bolter effective range + 4 seconds TTK the shooting classes will have very little time to kill the closing gap assaulters\melee specialists, especially if there will be some additional terrain features (and it's almost sure there will). Thus the most effective way of scoring the kills for the ranged classes will be decreasing the distance or even shooting point blank for maximum effectiveness - and that's precisely where the FF problem may occur taking into consideration the game scale and the number of melee participants. That sounds good for a regular type of shooter not for a massive combat game like EC. There'llbe much more mess for sure. What on earth are you talking about now? Are we talking about the same game? Cool down on gap closing? -where did you read that, a source maybe? ....and because of these different types of terrain in most cases it may be the melee weapon people will have to choose due to the fact that in a dense terrain it will be hard using eg heavy bolter without killing your team mates - And this nicely brought us to the beginning of this thread and the question why ff should be at least tweaked. I don't want to see only melee fighting in EC.
I'm going to be in my own boat and say Direct weapons do no damage to team mates... But indirect ones like mortars and Artillery do...
That's a problem with TTK and effective ranges, not FF. That is a problem that is fixed by making ranged weapons more lethal at longer ranges, not by letting you use a plasma cannon as a melee weapon. If a melee player takes advantage of the terrain to keep you from shooting him until he was close, that just means you got outplayed and your team probably wasn't covering your back. Again, if you need to be point blank to use a ranged weapon in the first place, it's not a "ranged" weapon. That just means they need to be buffed. I've already addressed this multiple times. The larger the game is, the less FF interferes with gameplay and the more FF becomes critical to balance. A massive game without FF is an impossible to balance clusterfuck. A strong FF mechanic is the only way to achieve balance at this scale. When you don't have FF, then either ranged weapons are completely useless (so that melee units can wade through all the spam), or they're completely overpowered (because if they're actually capable of getting kills then spam>all). And usually the way it'll end up is they're simultaneously useless in small fights but overpowered in big fights due to the snowball effect. FF introduces an element of risk that makes it safe to buff ranged weapons to a useful level, without having to worry about them snowballing as the size of the fight grows. Since the snowball effect and the risk of FF both scale with the size of the fight, they push against each other and create balance. That's called fundamental game design. All gap closers have a cooldown of some sort to prevent them from being used as fast travel, and to make sure that when you initiate you commit (ie you don't jump-pack in, see that you landed in front of a Meganob, go "ohshit" and immediately jump-pack out). If you have a gap-closer with zero cooldown you might as well just have super-speed or perma-flight. As long as we have a variety of terrain types and good balance, you won't. Though what's funny is when you started arguing against FF you were trying to claim it would make melee impossible. If ranged weapons end up being underpowered it's not FF's fault. A ranged weapon that is balanced 1v1 will generally remain balanced in a large fight with FF. One that is OP will generally remain OP, and one that is UP will generally remain UP. But because ranged weapons scale with team size faster than melee weapons (because they can engage more targets in a short period of time), if you don't have FF then a ranged weapon that is balanced 1v1 will be OP in large groups. FF mitigates this scaling issue and helps keep all the different varieties of weapons competitive no matter how large the fight gets.
