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Revenant Discussion Thread

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8 months ago
USrankcooolcat1239 : I was specing this live, and pulling my hair out: SE actually SCOUTED the enemy rev, had planes, and didn't make any plans to counter the rev. They half built a razor in their base, and nothing else until after two commanders were killed. What's more, the commanders kept pushing out, with no support units that could even help deal with a rev. They got 100% exactly what they deserved for ignoring the coming threat.
+2 / -0
Even a quite substantially nerfed Revenant is going to win a game in which the opposing team scouts it at 0:35, the Revenant is seen on radar a ways off, and yet it still manages to find a near-completely unsupported engineer com at 2:15.
+2 / -0
8 months ago
Thought I'd come and kick this thread: Revenant firing at a terraform spire to double as a catapult is, imo, an exploit that should be patched.
+1 / -0
finaly we have proof:

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1949725?

warning.. this is a joke.. i edited the cost of revinants. replay lasts 39 seconds
+0 / -0
And bouncing the rev missiles off the ground gives revs the range of merlins ....

https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1949970
+0 / -0

8 months ago
Should be noted that the following nerfs were implemented for next patch:

quote:

• Speed 135 -> 130. This makes it more vulnerable to raiders, give a little more warning and time under turrets, slows down the rush slightly, and makes it cost a bit more to switch between fronts. A big part of Revenant seems to be its ability to suddenly create a 2v1 situation.
• Damage 220 -> 210. Revenant was buffed over a year ago, so why did it show up in the past few months? It previously did 3960 damage in two shots, so that it 3-shot factories, but this is enough damage to 2-shot an Engineer comm, even with self-regen. It might be that Revenant only became meta since the rise in engineer popularity. This change prevents two Revenants from killing Engineer in one shot by themselves.
• Reload 9 -> 10, to make it worse when caught out by raiders. Revenant rushes on comms etc seem to rarely shoot on cooldown, so it isn't as large change as it looks.
+2 / -0
8 months ago
Rev shares some of the same space as Nimbus. If rev is nerfed, maybe lower AOE, to separate it from nimbus?
+1 / -0
8 months ago
nimbus is constant pressure with ranged standoff weapon.. revenant is almost a skirmisher with hit and run burst at point blank.. they do share aoe but they have many other major differences imho
+0 / -0
8 months ago
I'm not certain that there needs to be big nerfs (gunships are already so borderline anyway), but I'll say again: Shooting terraform spire to be long range arty is an exploit that should be patched.
+1 / -0
8 months ago
I have long complained about it Kerr, its absurd how you can turn rev into an almost unkillable area arty that just shuts down an entire lane
+1 / -0
TheFlyingFortress
If we fix this we might aswell fix claymore anti gravity barrels.
+0 / -0
8 months ago
has anybody noticed that revs can get caught by placeholders? looks like a good counter imo
+1 / -0

8 months ago
quote:
Shooting terraform spire to be long range arty is an exploit that should be patched.


This, like snitch-launcher, were already talked about a while ago. They are results of the physics of this game, thus no exploits, thus they will not be patched. (BTW if you look for weird stuff look at how flamethrowers go through terrain...)
+0 / -0
I think that Newton ramps are a lot closer to being an "intended mechanic" than Revenant spires. Other means of making units shoot beyond their intended range have been nerfed in the past (if memory serves, this happened to at least Gauss and Duck). I don't personally have a strong opinion on Revenant spire because I haven't really been impressed by it in the games where I have seen it, and for that matter I haven't seen it very often.

I expect there are plenty of weird "exploits" that aren't actually good but are possible in ZK and I'm not sure that hunting for them all is a good use of dev time. But seeing a few games in which Revenant spire was impactful and important could shift my opinion on this particular case.

(Sight unseen, my feeling as to appropriate counterplay against a Revenant spire is "just make Artemis". I feel like Artemis is at worst a reasonable investment in any large game, which are the only kind of games I expect Revenant spire is at all viable in.)
+2 / -0

8 months ago
No need to downvote me, it was not my decision.
+0 / -0
I don't like the way "exploit" is being used. To me, an exploit means something that is not allowed. It means some sort of penalty should be applied to the the people that do it. Revenant spire is not an exploit, plain and simple, because there is no penalty for doing it. I really don't want people to start thinking there is some secret list of exploits that people should be stigmatised for using. It will cause conflict and stifle creativity.

My thoughts on this area align with Sirlin's post on banning things. Exploits need to be clearly defined and the entire community needs to be informed about them. Enforcement of exploits is a mess even in the best circumstances, so I put great value on Zero-K's exploit-free nature. It is extremely rare that Zero-K has any banned exploits, to the point where I can only recall a single case around Placeholders that lasted for three days before a patch.

The bar for banning an exploit is also quite high. See the "Warranted" section in the post. That said, we can patch the game so we have more options than what Sirlin talks about. But that doesn't mean I consider myself to be patching exploits.

quote:
This, like snitch-launcher, were already talked about a while ago. They are results of the physics of this game, thus no exploits, thus they will not be patched.

All of this is to say that the above is incorrect. Something doesn't have to be an exploit to be patched, and a patch doesn't imply that something was considered an exploit. I'm belabouring this point because I don't want people docking social points from anyone who was doing something before it was patched out. Well, I suppose that is already happening anyway, I just don't want anyone who cries "That's an exploit" at others to feel emboldened by the tactic in question being patched out later. And it isn't this thread that's a problem, I'm more thinking about ingame chat.

Anyway, on Revenant spire, I think the tactic is way more dumb than powerful. Take a look at this game: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1942953
I didn't go through in great detail, but there were a lot of Revenant spires that did barely anything. The missiles are deceptively sparse. They killed Fleas and a few Slings almost died after a while, but most damage was repaired relatively quickly. At some density there will be an effect, but it mostly seemed to be psychological screening. The thing that shifted my opinion of its power the most was seeing three Revenants keep a few shields on low power, early in the SE.

Perhaps the shield drain was effective, but otherwise I think we're far outside the realm of balance. So is it just too annoying, with how it spams noises and explosions? Probably, yes. Revenant is loud because its shots are generally important. They should draw attention in a way that saturation artillery should not. Still, I feel like blocking Revenant spire will make ZK slightly worse.

We haven't really heard from the people doing the Revenant spires, and what do the silent majority of onlookers think? I suspect it is a fad that will pass when Revenant has a nerf. Then the special tactics-enjoyers will go experiment with something else. I don't really want to hit them with the door on the way out as it sends the wrong message about experimentation. I'd feel a lot better if the practitioners of this would pop in to say that they've had their fun but would like a nerf so they can move onto something else.

Here is a bit of a relevant thread from a while ago: https://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/205529#205529

I generally don't want to remove creative stuff unless it is necessary.

On top of this, I feel like ZK gets slightly worse because there is no nice way (that I have found or heard proposed) to block Revenant spire. Making the missiles drop down earlier doesn't work, it just increases the spread at the cost of a bit of range, which probably even brings it into the realm of viable (a few Revenants can do decent damage vs a HLT from just beyond range with 2s flight time). Burnblow, ie having the missile blow up rather than fall down, works, but feels worse in general play. Having the missiles all explode mid-air in Revenant vs. air battles results in a burst of colour and sound, when no game-mechanical thing actually happened. It breaks the link between visuals and game impact. This isn't a huge problem, but I don't think Revenant spire is a huge problem, so small issues matter.

There is also a limit to what can be done, since Revenant has cylindrical range. Make the missiles run out or explode too early, and people start reporting inconsistent Revenant behaviour when steep cliffs are involved.

I predict that I'm going to implement some sort of burnblow solution, unless I hear a better idea. This is mostly off the demonstrated effectiveness of Revenant vs. area shields, but the sound spam and incidental damage contributes too. Units should generally be able to fire in whatever ways are useful, and shooting at shields from range seems sufficiently useful.
+2 / -0
Hello,

The development team is currently working on the balance of Revenant.
Therefore, I did a few test runs with a toned-down version of the unit.
We would like to share these first tests with you to get your opinion.
Are the changes going in the right direction? Is the new version of the unit too weak?
Please have a look at a few replays and share your opinion with us.

Replays of the test-games

https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950914
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950908
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950904
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950886
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950897
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950876
https://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1950870



I concentrated on two things during the tests.
1. how easy it is to deal massive damage and survive in the early stages.
2. how good the unit becomes when you have a larger number of them.
Which aspects do you think need also be tested?

Please note that I have only carried out tests against the AI so far.
+1 / -0
What about focusing rev more on its high alpha single strike mission profile?
reduce the missile count down to ~2, but increase damage?

this also makes it more vulnerable to raiders, reduces rev spire aoe, and maybe helps raptors a bit :D
+0 / -0

8 months ago
Never felt spire hitting was an issue; the sound is annoying, yes.
+3 / -0

8 months ago
quote:
All of this is to say that the above is incorrect. Something doesn't have to be an exploit to be patched, and a patch doesn't imply that something was considered an exploit.


I am aware of this, I just didn`t feel like making a longer post. It is even arguable if an "exploit" is per se something bad. I think that needs to be decided case to case.

quote:
I think that Newton ramps are a lot closer to being an "intended mechanic" than Revenant spires. Other means of making units shoot beyond their intended range have been nerfed in the past (if memory serves, this happened to at least Gauss and Duck). I don't personally have a strong opinion on Revenant spire because I haven't really been impressed by it in the games where I have seen it, and for that matter I haven't seen it very often.


I don`t find rev-spires very problematic. Gauss, Kodachi and Duck are quite accurate weapons. The only things that can be made to shoot past their range right now (at least to my knowledge) by shooting the edge of some hightened terrain are things with multiple projectiles and spread, aka Revenant, Dante and Merlin. No spread simply means that you cannot do it because all projectiles get blocked by the terrain. With spreading, edge-shooting means you forfeit damage in three ways: 1. You loose some projectiles to the terrain 2. Your projectiles spread out a LOT more. None of the named three units can do meaningful damage with only a single projectile hitting. 3. You are not targeting anything in specific, so things like merlins homing do not apply. Revenant in particular is already astronomically worse if you fire it at something at the edge of revs range than if you hover directly over it.
I am actually glad when an enemy does rev-spires, because that means I know where the revs are and that they are not doing anything where they are actually good at. The sound is annoying, but I am not sure how to fix that beyond the ability to individually modify priotrity etc. locally, and that would probably require a UI that noone wants to look at that is not used to mixing-consoles...
+0 / -0
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