Units you find Disgusting

It came to my mind that i harbour harsh feelings for some units in current ZK. Not that they are particularly overpowered or underpowered.

But they meet a pair of certain criteria that makes my skin crawl each time i see them:

1) Unpleasant and unrewarding to fight with. It's just hard to use them and feel efficient while doing so. They break my flow, and being a flow junkie is the only reason i play the game, really.

2) Unpleasant and unrewarding to fight against. Much as it feels bad using them because of whatever ugly qualities they have, these particular units also project the feeling of despair and irritation each time i have to fight them, because of some particular properties making any action against them just as unrewarding as an action taken with them.

My list goes as follows:
1: OPanther
The current state of the panther with its "heavy antiheavy antiraider raider" makes me want to cringe. They're monotonously effective against most everything, but they also deal only a little real damage. They cause fights to stagnate and at the same time you cannot afford to not use them. They one-hit stun most units, and two-hit stun the rest, causing unpleasant stutter-step movement for all involved. And if they fight each other? Ugh.

2: Halberd
While somewhat reasonable when used with fight command, Halberd quickly becomes frustrating for both parties when you reach the skill levels where you can holdfire and aim individually. Virtually unstoppable by the defenders, in curled mode it is a fast-moving brick that you just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. This gets tiring very fast, and it's not like it's any big deal once you kill one. And for halberd users? You have to hold fire and be shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, controlling each shot, maybe killing some things but not fighting. Halberd feels like a dull brick that is all about not fighting. Except unlike a very similar dirtbag, you have to babysit them much more cause they supposedly can fight and you should fire shots sometimes if you want to use them.

The only time i feel efficient when fighting Halberds is when i manage to snatch them with Dominatrix - and oh i know how many of you dislike that one.

They do have a redeeming quality of enabling hilarious penetrating overwater raids in late game, streaming past heavy defenses and ignoring bomber fire to kill juicy eco, but that's about it, every other use of them is disgusting to play with or against.

3: Shipyard
Remember or those organic and physical unit classes based on no contrived special damages, as enshrined in ZK design goals? Shipyard makes ships that go in water and piss this water on those design goals and fight in a medium that seems to be a separate game called Sea ZK, and that game seems to be built from nothing else but targeting hardcounters where you need unit A to kill unit B, because nothing else is even capable of attacking unit B.

It's really not as disgusting as the first two nominations (that's why it's #3), but the targeting hardcounter structure has some local optima that quickly degenerate into disgusting monocultures. Doesn't help that even if you don't settle for optimal unit selection (which is snake spam), there is absolutely no weapon diversity underwater.

Adding insult to injury, ships are required to be op by design because their domain-specific units are required to be able to whack any unit deployed by other factories entering the naval realm (since their other weapons simply cannot attack other domains)

What do you think? Do you find those units disgusting or nice? Or maybe you find other units disgusting?

fully agree, though you seem to have forgotten the Dominatrix..

If I had to pick three they would be wolverine, halberd and dirtbag. For me, all of them are unfun/frustrating to play against, all of them are unfun/frustrating to use.

quote: heavy antiheavy antiraider raider

lmao
Add that to their description

fighting against funnyweb or additionally with fully equipped shieldball.

the drohnes decloak anything and the strong shiled block the rest of its counters mostly.

the issues with funnyweb and shieldball is already in discussion. just wanted this to leave here ;)

i demand at least to give the funnyweb drohnes LOS of zero!

Derailgun engage: Those drones are same as commander's though. This would also mean comm drones become blind.

quote: Decloak tests the presence of units, not the presence of LOS.

Both, actually. Decloak conditions out of enemy sight will not trigger decloak; stray tremor shots blindly hitting scythe will damage it, but won't betray it.

Funnelweb is likely to watch out for its drones, so it matters precious nothing.

The drones could fly higher but then they'd be a bit harder to hit with ground (they could probably do with less range, actually).

Panther seems weaker to me than before, [ISP]Lauri felt the same way. Probably need more games though, I can see them maybe being worse in team games.

Halberd dies pretty badly to raiders, particularly Scorcher cuts them to bits. I can see how it's harder to use raiders in team games. Perhaps a 'If I take damage, I close' micro-state for Halberds would help with the auto-micro issue. That's a decent rule if all you want to do is raid eco and means if you roll up to an LLT with several of them, only the one being shot closes, etc.

I'm really surprised so many people are having trouble with Halberds. Is this since their projectile speed buff? Did it make that much of a difference?

Assessment of sea prettymuch correct.

quote: I'm really surprised so many people are having trouble with Halberds. Is this since their projectile speed buff? Did it make that much of a difference?

I can't say for others, for me, when fighting against halberds, it's the sum of two things:
1) they don't want to fight and actively evade
2) they take forever to die, and they require stupendous amount of firepower to stop

Between those, they require a lot of focus to kill if enemy microes them, for very little reward.

Except that glaives don't jink halberds for some reason. The second you stop watching, he kills them at point blank.