Aim mode replacement #16557
Aim mode replacement #16557
Conversation
tgstation-server
added
the
Balance
Lumipharon
added
Removal
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Can guns that didn’t have aimmode shoulder fire? |
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does this mean if someone is in front of me, i fire past them |
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Based |
Yes.
Also yes. They have to be directly adjacent (i.e any of the 8 tiles around you) so doing it on the move would be some kinda impressive feat of coordination. |
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I've been asking for this, for the longest time now. This game (and CM, by extension) was not really designed with aim mode in mind. It tore balance a new one, and ever since then, we've felt its effects, which Lumi has accurately explained in his original post. I genuinely think we'd be better off without this, and that it is very much worth considering, if not outright implementing. I believe it would be a step in the right direction, and worth the subsequent balance changes it would require. |
This is something that I really, really, really want to see return to the game, as the back-and-forth when each team is evenly matched skill-wise is when the game is at it's best, imo. However, I don't think this change is really going to bring this back. I do think that aim mode has slowly but surely made the game worse, and this change is very interesting, but I feel as though something else will be needed to get this aspect of the gameplay back--like maybe this change in conjunction with some kind of defense buff for marines. (i guess you said that though tbh) Very interested to see how this plays out though. Should get a scheduled test time set up on discord for it. |
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I might actually have incentive as SL to lead flank manuevers |
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This sounds like it would kill all mounted weapons that aren't the HSG honestly.
And to be honest this alone defo won't be bringing that back. You still want to deathball with or without the aim mode because of how hard xenos fuck smaller groups of marines and how even without the aimmode, support of 40 marines is still better then just being a group of 5, even if you can't shoot past them, it's still more guns to get through for a xeno to guarantee a kill while providing more marines that can potentially save you from getting round removed. No matter what the deathball is gonna stay till smaller squads are both given some space to be viable at all and not throwing free kills at xenos and some objectives and activities that would encourage smaller squads to form instead of forming a singular ungaball to go from one disk to the other. |
I agree with the MG-27 specifically. Using it is a lot riskier and has some amount of downside compared to the other machine guns, and also marines get a limited amount of them, so it keeping aim mode and being able to spam when its set up as it's niche would be fair imo. |
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IMO this change would be complimented by a reduction in the nukewar xeno mult. If we wanna discourage blobbing on the marines' side, we want to break up xeno numbers as well.
Do all guns (eg. RR) that didn't have aimmode shoulder fire? |
Yea i'm not sure how much this would make sense to allow it to happen for stuff like shotguns, will this completely nerf causing friendly fire via shuffling marines who try to shotgun you since the marine they will mistakenly shoot at will be next to them? |
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tank chaingun friendly fire will be absolute peakage |
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This is a fascinating change and I've avoided commenting about it cause I'm still thinking about it, but a few things would probably have to happen to make this walanced, such as cades being stronger, xenos being reduced in number/stats, and a lot of tweaks to certain guns that were balanced around the idea of blobs. I know you've already stated that changes will have to be made to make this work, I've just been brainstorming on what this could do. I like it a lot because it encourages good positioning and removes one of the more disliked marine aspects while not fully removing playstyles or nerfing marines outright, and I'm very interested to see what a TM of this looks like. One issue I see with it right now to be honest are that keeping within one tile of a marine you want to shoot past while moving could be very hard, but that might not be an issue at all tbh, just something I need to adjust to. |
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Doesn't this make the mech and tank/apc FF magnets:? They were given the ability to be IFF'ed due to being massive front-line vehicles that block movement. This especially fucks with the tank, considering it has to be in the front to avoid blowing up other marines, but this change makes it so now it acts as wall againt your teammates gunfire. |
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testing the principal |
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Badly needed, will have the knock-on effect of probably requiring rebalancing of weapons and xeno stats since they're all built around aim mode existing. |
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Based, Speedmerge.
Engineering structures are too weak, i used to primarily play engineer until everything i made disintegrated as fast as a hivelords maze to PC engineers. Because metal isn't as plentiful as plasma i ceased my actions in that area. It's the strongest draw for me to go vali(besides schizophrenia), as the living flesh of a H Armor valitard is stronger than anything less than a heavy Reinforced wall.
Have you ever used the HMG? It's ridiculously powerful, literally melts every xeno and i've killed a king solo when it got too cocky and pushed me while i was using it alone. If you're defending flanks and setting up fallback positions you don't need aim mode and the true power of these guns gets utilized. Can you think of any time where you didn't use the MG-27 on aim mode? Doubling your firerate is nothing to sneeze at.
Small group survivability is what Vali is all about, become the main character. |
Tried the HMG, every single time a lone t3 xeno would run up if there wasn't a deathball of marines between me and them and either just kill me, leaving the HMG to the whims of the other marines who would often just, abandon it entirely because of it being a massive hussle to drag around, or it gets the acid or crusher treatment. And about the MG-27, yeah I can think of only one situation where I didn't need the aim mode to be of any use with it without getting immediately cucked by a crusher, or a boiler, or anything tier 3 and even some tier 2s in all honesty, shooting at walls to take them down. Tho not resin ones, but regular-ass walls.
Not really? |
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(i'm supposed to doomer here so insert doomer paragraph?) Either way, I'll be interested to see what exactly is proven from this I doubt its anything I won't expect. I don't think reverting to pre aim mode will suddenly make people go to squad level tactics, if anything it'll probably encourage dballing even more since spreading out thinly is discouraged since you'll get shrekt by 2 rounies in your small group of 4 wasd'ing around you. That's by design. You can't 'fix' that unless you make all the backliners properly squishy and start shooting things like droppods. Also removing IFF from all the mounted guns basically kills them in comparison to their non-mounted counterparts lel. Just remove them from play entirely since that's like... 90% of the benefit you get in exchange for being entirely static. There's a reason nobody really runs the HMG outside of specific loadouts or situations. tl;dr I think its laughable to believe that aim mode is the reason people death stack, both teams are in constant huge death stacks. The team that is slower is inheriently forced to death stack more, because they can't really run away and rely on their numbers to keep assaults up and going. |
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Based |
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Yeah no marines currently can't do jack shit. Xenos are too strong at wiping out separated marines with no effort. It is a good step, but by god it needs more changes to not be insufferable and actually end up with marines not blobbing together. |
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Having played a few rounds of this...
Yeah we need good (ATTACKING!!) objectives, and ideally more ways of marines recovering/mitigating from the loss of a wipe. I hope we get more of that in the future. But holy shit, removing aimmode has been really effective at buffing chokepoints. To get past chokepoints you now actually have to coordinate support fire or flank, whereas previously chokepoints were countered by just aimballing. This is cool, it poses a problem which marines can only solve through timing an attack or splitting up and taking more space. +1 me like |
Which boils down to spamming out OB at every single choke. Or spamming DMRs to try and at least shoot something while vali users are too busy being full cover for xenomorphs. |
Separate problem but yes, OB is one of the best tools marines have for coordinating pushes (clear announcement, reason to care, reasonable chance of success)
..this sounds fine? They are a support weapon after all |
personally think it's better just to end the round than to have more wipe recovery, best recovery from a bad wipe would be a fresh start |
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There is nothing in this PR that has any form of good will behind it and it's sole purpose is to directly hinder a team that already has to deal with micromanaging resources (ammo, health, terrain, manpower) when so many marine players rely on a close combat build who are now made essentially useless. Marines already experienced absurd steamroll scenarios where all xenos have to do is a single flanking maneuver on their backline. Chokepoints now essentially become marine death zones. Even with aim mode, chokes were already a nightmare to push into since xenos can simply take cover behind walls and retaliate with either defiler or boiler gas. Friendly fire incidents were already a major factor for marine losses, specially against melee, shotgun, laser and smg users. MG-60 and MG-42 players now block an entire hallway from panic firing since they can also no longer aim. MG-42 has been pretty much rendered useless. Maneuvering around a firing line also takes precious time that a xeno can use to scurry away, where said xeno wouldn't have pushed into that position if it was under threat of aim mode fire. There are dozens of scenarios where marines without aim mode would have a massive disadvantage against xenos and there's even more scenarios where the heavy use of aim mode also didn't make a difference for marine victory. Lastly, there's no data presented, that I know of, that shows why this change was even necessary in the first place. |
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this seems like a terrible idea without rebalancing every gun that currently exists in the game, i guess you're gonna be busy |
If the HMG isn't useless, the MG-42 isn't useless. MG-42 trades power for convenience, roughly 2/3rds the DPS for ease of use. You just have to pack sandbags and actually pick places to hold. It's the same difference between the mortar and the Howitzer. The biggest boon for MG-42 over HMG is that if you HAVE to take a spot that can be crusher charged, you can move it fast without being forced to try and push it somewhere safe, and you can in a pinch wield it in hand to spray and pray from your nest at whatever got inside. |
I dunno if it's all that fine. |
No one uses the HMG for anything but wall removal if there's no PC engies. And even then all it takes is a single crusher to ruin your hopes and dreams if you also didn't pack 4 fucking roundstart sentries to defend just you. It is fucking useless in every other scenario involving more then one marine in the area. |
Sandbags.1.mp4 |
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Put aim mode back on the martini mother fucker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
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2 tile long shoulder firing instead of 1 would be pretty cool I think |
What you didn't show is a warrior ganking you as you try and place down sandbags and then boiler forcing you off your gun while marines bilnd fire your MG |
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Finnaly , i mentioned that aim mod was a bad fix the moment it was merged... TGMC is so back... |
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Someone should also buff the mg60, they took my boy vertical grip for far too long plus mg60 spam won't be a thing anymore |
Or marines fluoride staring at you while a sentinel waltzes up to you, watch you die, watch the bean escape and only then start firing at the general direction of the escapee, taking a year to bring you to a corpsman and leaving your MG behind to get smacked by a random drone passing by to wall off where marines came from. |
About The Pull Request
This has now been approved for merge, although will be along with additional changes for overall balance
Removes aimmode from almost all weapons (barring a few snipers, and pistols, so they have some kinda muh niche).
Removes IFF from mounted/tank guns (except the HSG).
Adds 'shoulder shooting' inspired by RU. This lets you natively shoot past friendlies that are directly adjacent to you, without needing IFF.
Again, this is not intended to be merged, but if this becomes a serious option, then obviously other balance changes would be required to make this fully realised.
Why It's Good For The Game
Attempt to shift gameplay from its current highly static, blob centric gameplay, to something a bit more dynamic and interesting for both sides.
Aim mode removal
Aimmode as a mechanic actively, and specifically, encourages marines to deathball as hard as possible, for significant defensive and offensive benefits.
This isn't much of an issue at low pop, but its efficiency scales dramatically with pop, leading to highly concentrated gameplay where 95% of the marines are crammed into a small area where they can fire 20 guns at any target.
This has the indirect effect of influencing balance around this kind of gameplay, which only leads to non optimal strategies (i.e. not blobbing) being worse. - case in point, not so long ago, marines would fairly reliably be able to fallback to FOB after the front goes poorly, and be able to mount a viable defence at fob. Now days, unless you can escape via tad, if the frontline collapses its almost 100% certain everyone is just going to wipe.
Removing most IFF/aimmode means it is no longer practical for marines to mass up in this way with infinitely beneficial scaling, forcing marines to spread out more, creating more dynamic, interesting, skirmishy type gameplay.
Shoulder fire addition
The shoulder firing mechanic means you can still group up and apply psuedo aimmode, but the key difference is it can't scale with pop (you can spread your line of dudes wider if you have space, but you can't go deeper), and also requires some level of coordination, as opposed to just pressing the funny IFF button.
But yes, overall by design, marines will be encourages to spread out significantly more so they can actually apply their damage.
Xeno/overall balance
Yes this PR in isolation will almost certainly be wack. Game balance has over time been designed around the assumption that xenos have to be able to fight a big fat blob of marines without being instantly vaporised. Would some xeno stuff need nerfing, or some marines stuff need buffing? Yes, almost certainly, but again, this PR is not intended for actual merging, just for
farming salttesting the principal.Changelog
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balance: Aim mode removed from most guns
balance: Added shoulder firing - ALL guns can now shoot past ADJACENT team mates without penalty
/:cl: