[FF2] Balancing Issues

[Pootis bird]

The current state of Freak Fortress's balancing is heavily biased towards the red team. This bias switches favor towards the hale or blue team the fewer players are on the server. I'll try and voice my main issues with the present state of play.

The Main Issue Causing Team Bias: Knockback
-On a full server, there may be three pyros, all with the potential to airblast, 5 Force-A-Nature scouts, several demomen, soldiers, and engineers with sentries. Each of these classes has the potential to deal constant knockback against the hale. All the classes working in tangence against the boss will often melt the hale's health, and with the excessive knockback, a hale will have an issue with being able to focus any specific enemy without being knocked away. This will lead to heavy damage classes such as the heavy, spy, or otherwise to be able to escape a hale because of one of the many knockback inducing classes. A typical game will result in the entire red team camping in one area as a group, and unless a hale can effectively improve his odds by constant super jumping and goomba stomping, they will not be able to remain on the ground and kill players before being knocked away. This leads to a one style fits all way of playing the hale, rather than an eclectic gaming experience. The most reliable way to win is to pick a lunging boss or super jumping boss and do the aforementioned super jumping/strafing to quickly kill players one by one. Teleporting bosses are often not viable on a server of 32 people as they are blown away from their targets.

Potential Solutions to Knockback Issue:
-Some solutions I have to help mitigate the negative effects of knockback is to scale the amount of knockback players deal with the number of players on the server. The fewer players on the server, the greater knockback players deal, the more players on the server, the less knockback a hale receives.

-Another main issue contributing to knockback is how unbalanced the Force-A-Nature is. It provides nearly the same knockback as a pyro's airblast up-close yet it receives none on the negatives a pyro does. A force of nature has 68 bullets at the start of the round. This amount of ammo coupled with the fact that there can be 5 scouts on at once gives the red team an unfair advantage. I suggest severely lowing the amount of ammo the Force-A-Nature has, similarly to how the family business and enforcer have reduced ammo. Another suggestion could be to limit the Force-A-Nature to one shot per a reload to slow down the amount of knockback a scout can deal.

Other Suggestions:
-Dunes is a very poor map to include in the map rotation for Freak Fortress Two due to its small size. A person playing hale as little room to super jump and can be seen from all spots on the surface of the map. Knockback is especially hurtful as it has less falloff the closer the hale is to the players.

-The amount of health that a heavy can receive with the Eviction Notice and the Warriors Spirit should be reduced has with the heavy's base health of 550, the health regen on the two melee weapons gives the heavy too much sustain.

I apologize for my toxicity towards players as a result of the imbalance of gameplay. Anyone whom I may have disparaged using the Force-A-Nature; I should not allow a video game to affect my attitude towards people and I hope you forgive my harsh words; I will refrain from being toxic again.

 

[Fluquor]

Red is favored on certain maps, blue is favored on certain maps.

Overall yes red has a higher win rate, but if you're going to single rage a spy for backstabbing you or an engineer nest because they take out 5000-6000 of your health and cause issues, then you can single rage a FoN scout who is displacing you enough to cause an issue.

FoN is a skill and risk based weapon, you must get close to get knockback, if you miss, you will likely die or get hit.
Direct hit is a skill and risk based weapon, you must land "Direct" hits to deal damage, but as a bonus you will deal much more damage. If you miss, you will likely die, be forced to rocket jump away, or deal zero damage.
Ubersaw is a skill and risked based weapon, you must get close to get ubercharge, if you miss, you will likely die or get hit.

FoN seems to be more of an issue to you because you do not like being displaced outside of your own volition.

iirc hale numbers cannot be changed on the spot based on player count.

Changing the amount of max ammo isn't going to change anything unless you lower it to less than 10, then no one will use it and you are essentially asking for its removal.

 

[Bad Memes]

With all the weapons you mentioned being a skill based weapon, i see that the force a nature takes the least amount of skill out of those 3.
-The knockback is ridiculously spammable
-You dont have to be that close to the hale to still deal knockback
-You dont need to hit a full meatshot to deal knockback

im no master of server balancing, but i would like to see the force a nature toned down a bit.

 

[Zinc]

Force of Nature is pretty oppressive to go against, I would suggest reducing FON's ammo to around 36 and reducing it's knockback per pellet to about 80% it's current value. It's not an issue that it's a skill based weapon (I don't think it's high skill at all) but that you can keep any boss unable to hit you for the whole round without using rage.

 

[Fluquor]

Relativity in how much skill a certain weapon is changes from player to player.
I find direct hit far easier to use than FoN, you may not.

You can also keep any boss unable to hit you using direct hit or any rocket launcher if you land every shot and land air shots without using rage.

 

[Pyrelancer]

I agree with the suggestions made by Pootis Bird. The FoN needs rebalancing: It has low damage output when compared to other Scout primaries, and its high ammo count makes it spammy and forgiving to use. It has no merits other than to disrupt the flow of gameplay and to harass other players. The EN and WS also need to be looked at: The EN was already viable before it was given health on hit, and the WS was given too much in order to compensate for that change. I think these two weapons were more balanced as they were a few months ago.

Knockback scaling could be interesting, and I have a few ideas as to how the plugin could handle it, but coding is beyond me.

 

[Yuki]

I was toying around a little bit with the force a nature. From some limited testing on live, the new version seems to work reasonably well. I'll probably have to try it some more before I merge it in as the new force a nature.

A scaling health formula was added in semi-recently and from the week-ish of data, it seems to have evened things out at lower player counts. We'll have to see if a player-count based knockback scaling is also something I'd like to explore.