quote: Health 740 -> 440

Perhaps the most crippling nerf a unit has ever received in the history of Zero-K.

How do we expect people to ever want to build this when a chainsaw can kill a Magpie (beyond) at range due to tracking? There is no reason to build this unit anymore, and I expect anyone who does build it now will be repeatedly flamed for doing so. It just seems like a awful noob trap created on purpose.

quote: Missile starts slow then accelerates.

It seems like with micro, you can pretty much dodge most things provided your unit is fast enough, but at the same time Magpies will die to pretty much anything now on the way in, so it's far less useful to build them whatsoever. I do not clearly understand why both defining aspects of the unit needed to be guttered in the same patch... why not nerf one and see how it goes?

And:

quote: Speed 252 -> 234

Not only will you die in under 3 seconds to a majority of AA, but you also can't gap close. How are we expected to use this unit?


It's hard to see this as anything other than an emergency fix to get people to shut up complaining about a unit that wasn't very good in the first place and that carried most of its reputation from people yapping about it 24/7. There were other designs on the table before and at the time of this nerf (even from mods, and while I am vehemently opposed to modded content entering the main game, it would have been better in this case), so I don't really know why we didn't spend time on a actual fix here.

It seems like from the date of initial testing (changes pushed to test branch) there was barely a week of testing, and while some breakpoint testing was done in that time frame, I would hardly argue a week of on and off test branch in TAW is appropriate for a unit that needs a redesign (and had options on the table).

Can't say this is a great patch. Just kill the unit if you don't want it in the game, especially since most lead developers publicly express the sentiment they want it gone and they think it's a silly idea.


EDIT: Ordinarily, I would say that I would give this some time to see how it performs in TAW - but in this case the changes are so egregiously overboard that based on numbers alone I can already tell this is too much. Please revert.

The goal of these changes is to push the weakness to AA and make it better against flex-AA. Range does this, and health doesn't do a whole lot against groups of units such as Moderator or Ogre. There is also not much space between the shortest range dedicated AA and the longest range flex AA. All up, I am much more worried about giving it too much range than too little health. A range buff of 110 is quite dramatic. The reduced speed gives it more time at the edge of dedicated AA.

I wouldn't bet on these numbers being good, but I still want to probe the edge of the space to see what is there.

their own attempts at attacking something seems to involve driving into death by their bad turn rate, not utilizing their angle fire tolerance, ofc they'll likely not hit their targets either. So one has to do drive-bys and set to fire at will it feels like