Players should only ever skip the Down State if they receive enough damage in a single/combined attack to not only empty their HP but also empty their Down HP(AKA Instant Death). Things like a Lascannon shot to the head should cause ID even on a full Armor/HP target, while a chest shot should just be a Down. If artificial suppression absolutely must exist, it should as no more than screen blur and/or flinch with absolutely no bearing at all on weapon accuracy. Screen blur makes it harder for the player to see, while flinch makes it harder for the player to aim, requiring the player to have good/get better eyesight and/or be more skilled in order to continue landing shots against their enemies. In Dead Island, when you get low on Stamina things in the distance blur out, limiting your effective vision to maybe 20 or 30-meters. In Battlefield 1, suppression causes the edges of the screen to become blurred, producing a sort of tunnel vision effect. Either one of those or possibly even a combination could be viable, such as initial suppression is gradual loss of far sight with loss of peripherals building as suppression increases, if it has a more gradual accumulation of course. This is the proper choice if we want a proper WH40K game. Which is Bastion, too weak or too strong? Or is it that people say both, indicating he is actually balanced? The Heavy Bolter should be compared to the Bolter. It is the Heavy version of it.
As much as i like the idea of "real" suppression in terms of just dealing alot of damage... Let´s see how good that works. The autocannon actually does that. Don´t see anyone going into cover. They just die and start a thread about how Chaos is OP. (the autocannon is overtuned so don´t start that here)
If people say both it is actually balanced? Oh boy so old sorc was balanced? Autocannon is balanced? You get both opinions about everything. No exceptions.
I wasn't really thinking suppression should do a lot of damage, just lay on a lot of fire, consistently. That doesn't necessarily mean it does damage, just keeps people stuck between a rock and a hard place. I think Suppression should work like that, and as such, it should force players to re-route or wait for help.
@Poked, that was basically suppression last Friday when the patch first dropped. It was impossible to do anything meaningful when the Heavy Bolter (HB) was firing at you. I could control whole lanes of a map and gave my allies easy kills. Multiple times I had people trapped in corners. They couldn't get out, they couldn't return fire, and I couldn't kill them, so they were stuck until someone else came along and killed one of us. The downside is that with those high suppression effects, it took a lot of the control out of the player's hand. It forced people to be in groups, but not bunched up and mutually supportive (lest the HB suppress the whole pack). A single effective HB could bring a whole battle to a halt. Yes, tactics. Yes, flank the HB. Noted, but the devs didn't think it valid, so they cut the suppression to more of a tickle than a kick to the chin. The screen blur was the suppression system before the patch. It was widely ridiculed as more of an annoyance than anything else. Good players could still return effective fire through it, and the HB didn't have the power to stop them before they could kill the HB. The natural progression would be to add more blurriness, and more aim degradation, but it gets to a point where the player is looking at a grey screen with no crosshairs to reference where they are pointing. I think the current system is the better option. It just needs balance and fine tuning to get it to a point where it is effective without being over powering.
Blizzard's stance on Bastion is that he doesn't need a nerf and players just needed to "learn to counter."
No apologies needed @Poked . I myself have not been playing much, and I am always fearful that I am going to run my mouth and someone will call me out on something that has changed. Your ideas align pretty good with what the HB folks are discussing in the Forj's Heavy Bolter Feedback thread, which is a dumping ground for HB discussion. Balancing suppression and damage has been a huge topic since last Friday. Perhaps you can stop by, read up, and offer your perspective?
And their thread is given little regard, especially once its found out they're a bad player that just stays out in the open trying to fight an autocannon 1v1. If an equal number of players say it is OP as say it is UP then it likely is balanced as some people get the intended performance out of it, while a small group finds it useless and an equal sized group finds it priceless. That fire you are laying on should be able to deal a lot of damage, if the shots are hitting targets. People should want to keep cover between them and a powerful weapon like the HB so that it cannot damage them faster than they can damage its user, provided they are using something like the Bolter. If you come across a HB, you take cover and wait for allied assistance, use some sort of tactic/strategy other than trying to out-shoot the HB, prove you are the superior combatant by out-shooting the HB or end up getting shot Down. Makes perfect sense because just as I see really awesome players rack up kills one after another with him I see bad players get killed time and time again as him, while the average gamer is able to do a decent job of both killing and surviving.
