To answer the question of what makes a support weapon a support weapon.
It is a weapon that assists your teammates in doing better.
The Jotun would not qualify as it does not really assist teammates.
A kapcan would qualify as it holds the opponent in place, allowing the teammates an easy kill.
Mines could be but were rarely used as support weapons.
The Jokobo is not really a support weapon, but it can be used to corral enemies as they tend to avoid the small damage the get from the “mines”
I forget the name of the machine laser, but it would also be a support weapon as the heating effect it produces is greater than the damage it does. However, that is rarely used as a support weapon, unless you are considering supporting your own weapons support.
Fire support in the military is not the same as support in games. Support in games is making your team function better, not killing everything around them for them.
For the incinerator, the 50% reduction in damage output and the 75% reduction in heating creates a greater than 50% reduction in damage output by the weapon. For a nerf of around 60%, you would have expected that the incinerator was dominating the field. It was not. At best, it helped the team dominate. Without teamplay, it was not very effective. Now it will not be effective with team play either and is even less effective solo. Heck, I am surprised they did not lower its durability as well. I mean, if you want to remove the weapon from gameplay, just remove it.
dude what are you going on about? the jotun freezes opponents making their parts brittle making them take more damage, on top of this it also slows the enemy down and has an aoe effect that acts the same as the incinerator. maybe not as powerful but if your land it on your opponent when they are maces deep in someones backside then it can make a difference. if the jotun isnt a support weapon then the incinerator isnt a support weapon either. seriously your reasons for them being support weapons vs not being support weapons are stupid, im sorry but they are. the jotun is as much of a support weapon as the incinerators are and the jotun is more functional as a weapon then the incinerator.
Not sure about hovers. I know people have complained about them, but I was never able to build one that did not feel fragile to me. So, as I have not really played as that unit, I am not really qualified to say how it sits in comparison to others.
I have played some that owned me most often, like JVPriests crossbow hover that can be extremely dangerous. But the majority I have seen have been fragile and easy to kill. I think if I was able to take them or not was likely mostly impacted by their awareness of the battlefield, but I rarely use MG SG or cannons (except when needing to complete a quest).
Where did you get that from? Can you post a link?
From everything I saw, it does not increase damage, though I have seen claims that it reduces resistance. This could increase damage, if they had a resistance to that type of damage or if it can go negative, but I doubt the later is the case. If that is the case, some times is not reliable enough to be support.
The AOE does not act the same as the incinerator. One slows the other heats. Heating increases damage up to an additional 130%.
“your reasons for them being support weapons vs not being support weapons are stupid, im sorry but they are. the jotun is as much of a support weapon as the incinerators are and the jotun is more functional as a weapon then the incinerator”
Dude, you really need to learn how not to be toxic. Your assumptions and guesses are not facts, as much as you seem to think they are.
You think it is stupid to say that a support class in gaming helps the other classes to be more effective? Instead you feel that the power of the weapon to stand on its own is a better reason for it to be support? Maybe you just typed it oddly and this is not your thought processes.
As far as if you consider it support, go for it. It will not impact anyone else. Just as me not believing it to be a support weapon, but rather a main weapon based on its damage and how well it helps your teammates to kill someone. If you want a real world test. Have two cars attack one car. On the first pass have one incinerator and one mg car attack it. Then on the other have the cold weapon and an mg attack it. See how many times out of ten each car gets the kill. If either is higher than 50%, it really isnt a support weapon.
so your reason that the jotun isnt a support weapon is because its not an incinerator? because it doesnt heat parts and make opponents take a huge amount more damage?
support is support weather you see it that way or not. yes it lowers resistances and ive seen that in the mad chase brawl. use a jotun there and an acari and the damage numbers get insane. someone used an incinerator and i was hitting maybe 7 - 8k damage at the most with an acari. someone used a jotun and i was hitting a max of 40k+ with the acari. you cannot tell me that isnt a significant difference. the jotun does its job and it does it just fine.
im not being toxic, im being nicer then other people in this forum would be. trust me i could say alot worse but im not. i think your views on a weapon being support vs not being support is very flawed. the jotun IS a support weapon regardless what you think. yes it doesnt do as good of a job as the incinerator but it has its perks and it has its own style of play and abilities. does that make it a bad weapon? no. because its entirely based on how you use the weapon.
I got around to taking my incin out. I got mixed results between the matches the ones I did well in and the ones that I did not the common factor was how the enemy was grouped. In the matches I didn’t do well it was often lots of single random targets with a mix of direct hits and slight misses - Explosion radius could be increased to try to compensate for slight misses and heating rate should probably have been tried at 10% rather than 5% to still allow for a bit more area denial effect. I’d probably just tweak it some more till it feels a bit more natural again rather than walk back all the changes.
Some improvements to the aim indicator I still think would help too. Outline the trajectory lines and puddle circle in the crosshair color so that you can see which portion is which. Rather than have it just be all white.
Another balance show . IMHO Solely due to those that haven’t the skills enough to adjust & adapt to formable weapon systems. Or even craft one. So those of us whom have them have Will now suffer due to salty tears again trashing our investments we all worked for. Tweak this tweak that… The never ending tone of appeasement continues.
Did you read the dev comments on why they nerfed it.
Comment: This weapon is too effective for a support weapon due to extremely fast parts heating over a large area. The changes are to increase the importance of direct hits, while reducing its efficiency as a support weapon for allies. The change to the angle of firing will make shooting forward easier.
They basically said it was too easy to use and just did too well. This is potentially a result of them handing out so many upgraded versions in events in combination with adding them to dailies. More people using them would easily reflect in the current balance methodology.
I never in my years of playing saw another person get MVP with this weapon. I got it regularly, but that required me to be busy the entire match. When I got MVP with this weapon, it was almost always 6 assists (sometimes a kill or two).
As I played that as my main vehicle, I played it a lot. So, I have to wonder how they came to that conclusion. Did they just look at raw numbers (meaning damage per match) or did they do it correctly and remove the top and bottom 1% before comparing? In the first method, you are not getting a true picture, but rather a picture of how well the best players use it and how horrible the worst players use it. In the later method, it would give a more accurate picture of the power of the weapon. If the number of people that used it was low, the effect of the top 1% would be outsized.
As for what makes a support a support. If your car helps a teammate do as much or more damage than you could do with a direct damage weapon, you are support. If you are helping less than that, you are not support, you are a hindrance.
It’s not that difficult to get an MVP, even with this weapon as it was never bad on dmg. (Mudnbeer might have caps of his.) This was especially true if you were lucky and could hit a group of targets at the same time. I would agree with you though that it is a quick assist monster. Often my lowest scoring games with it were from other players targeting the puddles quickly.
All I know is that they use their version of the PVP logs. I don’t know if they are factoring in heli pvp or not currently. I know they were skipping all the other modes via past dev chats. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were not skipping the top and bottom 1% as in other polls they use to skip questions to rule out non-player opinions. I think that’s a safe assumption that they could have bad practices but that might have been fixed too as they did improve on their use of polling.
Outside of my own dmg going down the teams still do well with them in play. I still think it’s a viable support weapon with the nerfs but aim now does matter a lot more if you want your own dmg to be high. The effect of area denial is lower too but that’s only bad from one perspective. I wouldn’t mind if they buffed that area dmg against rubber wheels a little, it would be realistic to an extent.
Just from a personal experience standpoint…several months ago I starting using incinerators on a copter build in PVE, and I never got so many MVPs. I’m talking an average of 4 out of 5 battles, I got MVP. My score was often double the second highest player. After the nerf, now I might get 1 out of 5 MVPs if I’m lucky.
I’ve also been using an incinerator build for leviathan invasions for about the last 7-8 months. While I never got MVP there, I racked up an impressive share of the damage, especially if I had a team that knew how to pin the levi so my fire puddles could work him over. I rarely had to use more than the two spawns they give you. Since the nerf, on the average I need at least 3 spawns per battle (using crafted repair kits), and I’m always the bottom scorer with the least damage inflicted. I used to be able to carry the team if they had lightweight builds…now I barely can carry myself.
show . IMHO Solely due to those that haven’t the skills enough to adjust & adapt to formable weapon systems. Or even craft one. So those of us whom have them have Will now suffer due to salty tears again trashing our investments we all worked for. Tweak this tweak that… The never ending tone of appeasement continues.