The top choices for changing the game for me would be :: 1. A complete overhaul of the damage/hp/armor/toughness system more based on TT RPG which is a base 10 system much closer to our base 100 system. to be more inline with WH40K properties have toughness and armor "flat block damage" with armor being more LP efficient but pennable and convert all present "health and armor" into just the health pool of 300 therefore all damage sticks and streaks are arder solo but with more damage blocking in the game less damage is received on average. 2. a complete overhaul of the LP efficiency of all items instead of a "diminishing returns on diminishing returns" i would instead reward people with greater efficiency(slightly) for investing a lot in a statistic example :: the more you spend on armor or toughness or damage the more LP efficient it becomes. 3. a complete overhaul to Jumping melee classes making air slam a great move again and linking their offensive power to their fuel so they don't have as much staying power(spending fuel charge gives them a momentum melee buff) ... reward them more for effective play like snaring or stunning with the air slam and slowing or snaring with successfully landed melee hits(not clangs) and remove most of their mobility from quick attack and make quick attack capable while moving, make fierce attack more mobile while charging but no skating when releasing. reduce the effectiveness or ease of wing clipping to be more in line with the SH. so the end result is them being the most powerful melee in the game in the opening seconds of their engagement (while they have fuel to burn) but as soon as the fuel is gone they should be weaker than the other melee's, a little more durable and capable of keeping melee once its started but much harder to create the melee opportunity maybe a slight buff to durability. 4. a complete overhaul of ground pounders, the GA/CGA/TAC/CTAC/DA/Shoota all seem too sub optimal all these classes are based on taking and holding ground each should be tougher than they are and have a very "hold the line" vibe. I don't like the GA's present shield situation as it can be entirely too powerful or completely useless dependent on glitches, and situational matchups .... i think the shield is much better implemented with no cooldown or limit for how long it can be held up but instead of blocking all damage it should instead provide a lot of armor from the front arc which could conceivably block all damage from some types of weapons but higher pen items like plasma will ping through for some damage even with the shield up and guns like the las cannon would still one shot you as thier pen is too high. these classes also need more flush and cover deny options such as shotgun,frag grenade launchers, fire selectors, better melee weapons on the non melee to choose from with higher clang tiers since they are forced into CqC and most by fluff have access to better melee weapons as sergeants up to and including chainswords, chainaxes(chaos), and power swords, quite possibly like the apothacary force them to drop thier bolter/shuriken cat/shoota if they choose to equip this way. 5. I would put in more fluff relevant items to diversify the sub factions and classes such as all dark angels carrying a sword instead of a knife (even the devastator), frost blades for SW as a possible load out, Scorpions claw, etc. im sure there is a list a mile long of great ideas here. 6. I would completely overhaul the gear slots so that wargear one was related to the "role" within the class you wish to take on possible roles being :: scout, melee damage dealer, ranged damage dealer, tank, support :: scout type items would deal with stamina movement speed and mobility, most of the others are fairly well understood from an mmrpg standpoint. make each class capable of accessing at least 3 of these loadout options and base the LP costs around being able to completely maximize 2 aspects if you completely 100% neglect the third. so you could be a melee damage dealer/tank but you would have terrible mobility, or you could be a mobile ranged damage dealer but no TTL if shot at type system. Wargear 2 would be relegated to secondary role and the trinket slots would be tweak to catch slot 2 up to slot 1 or to invest in the third strategy of that class to have a more "balanced loadout" 7. i would implement a "Tag" system that is clairvoyant to the player to handle things like "poison" "Fire" etc. and include some tags they presently don't have such as "siege", "accurate/assassin" allowing base damages on items to be normalized and have tiers of the tags that are defined to the user so they know exactly how much the debuff is a factor in the weapons damage, and allow the tags to let weapons in certain circumstances shine while not making them OP in other situations ... example :: the stalker bolter can have normal bolt round damage but the "Accurate 3" tag means that a lined up scoped shot that has been rested on a target for a certain amount of time gets a large damage bonus so it can "snipe" without it making its regular non sniper damage any better. 8. i would make it possible to mount vehicles with the E key and if you have an anti vehicle weapon usable in that close to be able to use it on the vehicle and while mounted to the vehicle you are inside its fire arc. this way the eldar vehicles can still be really fast and agile but aware infantry trying their darndest to damage or avoid the tank can. and tanks would in general need gunners more than they do now. 9. i would tone down melta damage vs tanks and i would replace the melta entirely with a closer to SM variant, it could still use the burn mechanics so the damage isn't instant but the burn stacks should be delivered much more like a shotgun or much quicker beam and have overheat be a serious issue so that if dodged the melta user is in trouble to find space and time to vent heat like a plasma weapon before refiring. 10. i would make the plasma cannon do the same damage it does now on a direct hit but i would probably double the aoe size and reduce the damage to more like 100-150 with a light stun on the area of effect more matching its use in DOW 2 as a "crowd control" weapon. 11. I would replace dbash with a skill that works like a successful dark souls "parry and reposte" all rolled into one, essentially shorten how long dbash is effective by a lot however if dbash lands both the dbasher and dbashee are in "IFrames" and neither can be harmed by outside sources the one who successfully dbashed delivers a "critical hit" to the one who got dbashed and then based on class the dbasher either maintains close space and his melee snare/slow or if a ranged class successfully dbashes they generate space from their attacker and nearby attackers either by pushing them back or escaping themselves ,... in both cases the melee stun/slow, if they were under any is removed and they have a chance to try to escape or they have the moments the space generated to dps before the melee re-engages. 12. i would increase the distance up and forward and the rate at which space is traveled by the jump pack classes SB/JPA/RAP there are some maps you cant even go from floor level to 2nd story reliably and you should be able to go from ground to roof on most buildings in a single charge and/or catch up to people running from you without the assistance of spamming quick attack(since i would remove its ability to skate). 13. i would remove all other stuns not specifically mentioned from melee weapons including the Ork heavy trait .... stuns should be reserved for hard to land or time consuming to set up attacks, and shouldnt be something spammable in melee. the orks instead would need a replacement for their present heavy trait maybe have heavy trait give them enhanced durability and force, or possibly a better snare/slow to make it harder to get out of melee with them once engaged. 14. i would implement a better chat / ping system that allowed squads to share pings or at least split squads into smaller kill teams since due to map size generally speaking an entire squad cant hang out in one place as its too many people not out on the map engaging the enemy 5 is a much more appropriate number to have defending a point or attacking together and those 5 should each have the option of enjoying banner buffs without costing them q pings and communication options ....
1. more players 2. less salt 3. super size of balance (BTW I dont plan on eating the players...or do I?!? Whahahaha!)
I would say as a programmer their biggest mistake was not seperating and compartmentalizing assets and mechanics from each other ..... their code is very "Married" if you understand the term .... so every change causes a massive spider web of resultant changes and unintentional side effects. for instance .... if they code a chainsword that poisons they presently have to raw code a sword, give it base stats, then write special code within that weapons file to give it its poison tic, and apply rate etc. when they could in fact have used a more object oriented approach and had a "Chainsword" object, a "Poison"1-3 object and instead just created an item by saying its a chainsword with poison 2. and later on down the road if something is unbalanced about it they can look to see "what" is causing it ... is the poison too strong ? are chainswords in general too strong ? is it a specific faction that is getting better results out of said chainsword likely related to some different object. right now they have to browse that glossary of the chainsword they created and change it and get it to recompile .... where as if its "unmarried" they can address the issue directly like for instance burning choppa, Abadons grace, RoF, could all have been fixed instantly in a hotfix if there was a "burning" 1-3 set of objects as opposed to having to break into each item and manually adjust it .... because most likely the burning on Abadons and ROF at least and possibly the burny choppa were all the same they could have had that burning trait isolated as its own object and when they saw all burning items were broken adjusted one line in the burning file and fix all three .... nowhere is this more apparent than the present melee system as its a flustercluck that depends on EVERYTHING in the game. changing ranged damage can effect it, changing movement speed can effect it, changing EHP/mitigation values can effect it, literally almost anything will have an impact on melees power so every time they make even the smallest tweaks to it melees power spirals out of control and in unintended ways. even in regards to things that shouldn't be directly associated with melee, and since animation speeds are drastically different between factions and recover speeds, some changes will affect different factions vastly different than others. for example a flat damage boost to power swords will most likely boost eldar the most as they have a slightly faster attack animation.1s and a faster recovery time by a good bit, thier dps will go up faster than the others from a flat damage increase to power swords. in the same token a flat rof increase to all rifle class weapons would increase the marines and orks more since their projectiles do more damage a piece than the eldar, the eldar already rely on rof to do their damage so what would be a rof increase of like 30% to the marines would only be a rof increase of say 15% to the eldar.
With UE4 you can actually have multiple "children" for each type of item, player and effect. This way if you want to change all of them slightly you can modify the parent or if you want to modify a certain child you can do it directly.... of course once a specific section of the child is modified it no longer takes commands from the parent unless you go to a certain command (it's been years since I worked on UE4 so I forget the section) to allow them to be changed again. UE4 has a lot of power and abilities that I don't see being used and I can only assume that they do that on purpose for some reason.... like color change is as simple as a mask layer that would allow players full customization with a simple slider.... no need for new models or anything. The ultramarine shoulder colors is a prime example of that, it's not like they added multiple models or textures because its just a simple color overlay.
sounds simpler to do what i was saying than in C++ where you need linked libraries, and good old linked lists and null pointers and stuff ..... sounds like the code was almost specifically built for object oriented strategies..... there are times i wish i kept my programming knowledge and skills modern and relevant but it is a LOT of work for something i don't particularly enjoy anymore .....
It's not C++ ...well they may have done it in C++ but a lot of us just used the blueprint method which made things super simple. You can "link"/"marry"/"group" any object/effect and alter one specifically or all at once.
im aware, i was stating thats where i got my teeth sharp "back in the day" ... not what the devs had. i have 0 experience with UE4 but all modern programming has the potential to use object oriented programming from a theoretical angle .... Its always more work to go that route but the pay off at the end of the day is much better for re-engineering .... unless your project is so small its unnecessary to even get as large as object oriented programming (like pong).
Ah, gotcha... Well staying on subject I would like to add : ThirdParty Tools (open source) once it's released... errr... um, I mean done! ... oh wait .... well eventually when things are more balanced and there's less salt on the table.
