ZK test version discussion

I believe it would be for the better to have a topic here, than discussing in the lobby or under the battles section.

First off, can we have a link to the planned changes, or a short summary of the more important ones?

I also think it is past time for a specific test version discussion. The Returning Observation thread has somewhat deteriorated in content and I still think the balance discussion was a bit of a hijack by GoogleFrog though I've certainly found most of the changes interesting.

On that subject, pyro no longer dominates almost all lower weight raiders. Lack of retreat range means more disengagement chance for those poor bandits and glaives.

I don't like the fact it's now much harder to swarm a comm with raiders due to lower DPS. While I'm broadly on the side of the debate that more response time is generally a good thing, that kind of gambit shouldn't be made prohibitively expensive.

Making repairs cost metal doesn't seem to accomplish much in a world where most HP changes were reverted - they just make it more inconvenient to repair heavies. Sure it's frustrating to see a strider walk away from a near miss, but avoiding a potentially fatal mistake shouldn't be punished. In many cases sacrifices were already made to make that escape possible - be that spending lesser units to distract or losses elsewhere due to attention focussed on urgent extrication.

I like radar on comms, but I preferred the evolution of the idea that recons keep jump but don't gain radar while other comms gain radar. A clear cut decision at the start between intelligence gathering and mobility won't fix commanders by itself but it gives a clear reason to pick a chassis besides recon beyond trollcomming.

Perhaps all commanders should have a free intel module, but of different kind? Recon gets jump, Support radar, the other two something yet different.

I'll my notes from the other thread.

quote: - I don't think mexes and cons have become too survivable most of the time, but it does feel a bit more different. - Raider fights look much less stupid aesthetically with no retreat bonus - Don't notice much difference with repair, but then i was playing zerg cloaky and everything felt tempo-expendable anyway. People seem to be repairing commanders, which seems stupid (cheaper to morph yourself an autorepair!). - I don't think this will change FFA that much because for some reason Athena still exists. - Jump is still absurd, and in parts has become absurder. Pyros have less stopping power vs Glaive, but Moderators have as much as they ever did, and much more survivability. I imagine same case for Scalpel. - Price buff has not made Constable less absurd. If anything, lower DPS on raiders means the slowgun is even stronger. You think you can kill a con with 2 scorchers? Think again. - Ripper feels marginally less bad, but is ruined by its turret speed now being too slow to compensate for buffed body turnrate. - Aside from that, reduced jank from vehicles bumping into everything cuz turnradius is great - Scorchers don't feel like a good way to kill commanders anymore. You need like 8. - Kodachi just won't die. The increased survival time gives it enough opportunity to escape pretty much anything, because they are faster than everything. Additional health means additional space, which reliably lets them reach the limit of a chasing enemy's range before dying. Their damage being alpha aoe, they also haven't lost that much of it in practice.

edit: moved to https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/29689?postID=213535