Balance is fine, look at W\L ratio, brothers. 50\50 fluctuating here or there. It is much better than it used to be. MoN certainly functions. I can(without false modesty) perform various amazing things with it, like downing 3 shieldbros and one raptor without surprise effect, kill @ShoulderMount with sorc support and clear rooms all alone. Hell, we have provoked even more complaints about MoN today: "MoN is still too powerfull","MoN wasn't nerfed enough" and so on. I think current place of MoN is certainly playable. You can't charge plasma users without rolling, with fixed heavy bolter you need to use cover and you need to be extra-precise while dueling multiple melees since our melee hp diminished significantly. But it still works.
Yet if you force shieldbro to abandon shield he becomes cannon fodder. Pistol has next to zero utility for them. About equal - both fail without support - that much must be obvious, and for anything else i havent played enough Patch #16 yet. I guess for now this is fine, no more ultrahordes of nurglings dominating everything, and there never were any shieldbro hordes apart form PG guild runs Keyword - for now. Actually i've been expeting some anti-nerf thread to come up, but this one is somehow balanced without too much hate or tears, so lets keep this up.
there usually were no ultrahordes of nurglings in any game i've played. Also its not really in a good place considering the shield can protect the ripe posteriors of the shield bro while it's up. That radius is insane.
Then we played different games, might be related to timezones or location. Since i have nothing else to say i guess i'll remove myself from further conversation
you shouldn't feel obligated to leave, you've got a much more even temperament than a lot of LSM posters.
Selfcontrol is a nesessity for son of Sanguinius, but in truth i dont have any more valid data or assumptions to contibute to discussion, thats why im leaving for now.
Is it playable? Yes. Does it function? Kinda. The thing is what is the MoN supposed to be? Some sneaky bastard who has to look out to catch people off guard or some crazed mofo who can soak up damage and wreak havoc behind enemies lines while the rest of the team moves up? I would say the latter, but that's exactly what you can't do anymore. The MoN was fine health wise, I'll say it again. We would have the exact same world map with a more durable MoN. Hell in the late days of last patch and OP MoN LSM was dominating for the most part. It's not about taking away out favourite toy, it's about breaking a concept.
Its just no longer good value for the points we 'spend' on it, and its role of pushing is severely diminished. A good player going on streaks doesn't really prove too much. If they want to keep it at this pretty shit state that has far less function/benefits than a storm shield, they should give us half the points back to spend on better things like a warp crystal. Either that or simply give it back some of the HP difference - it needs something else to make it better at the fast push. SM get a strong slow push, great defence, and better 1v1. CSM are meant to be better at the fast close range push, but they're just not anymore. They hit it too hard.
the problem is we don't know about the concept. Like i said, you can't charge fortified positions from afar and live to tell the tale. But you can charge from cover and wreak havoc in the frontlines when you are already in melee. It would be very unfair to say that you should both being able to successfully charge from afar and wreak havoc inside. MoN was fine, but it offered no chance for survival of a tacticals without a shieldbro. And while i am all for synergies and teamwork, it is wrong for "ranged-oriented faction" to be so dependant on a melee assaults. What do we have right now? If you are in melee, tacs are still dead(if you know what to do). What has changed was: chances to get in melee diminished from 95%, which is fair. Number of melee strikes you can survive diminished, so you don't have huge advantage over raptors of equal skill.
The thing is: you're chances of survival are much smaller if a shieldbro approaches you. If you have a Bolter and you see a MoN comming up you have him almost down until he gets to you, whereas you have no chance of even scratching a shieldbro with a Bolter. I stand by my opinion, MoN was totally fine health wise. It were other things that made him OP, most of them the bugged pistol and having 60 players on a small map where he could just butcher everyone. The Shieldbro was always on par with the MoN even last patch.
