Seems to me, there are 2 debates going on in tandem on this thread right now.
- One is about Rage Burst - in particular the Sniper/Heavy combo.
- The other is about the ease (or otherwise) of the Citadel mission.
And as usual, it seems to have degenerated into a slanging match between those who believe the game is unbalanced to the point of breaking and those who believe it is so difficult that game-breaking combos should be allowed.
From my perspective both are ‘right’, up to a point, but the message gets lost in the sniping.
Quite simply, anything that allows you to take down the biggest recurring Boss Monster in the game and end the top-tier mission in the Panda-base tree no more than 3 turns into a mission is seriously broken and flawed. I don’t care how you do it - some use S/H RB, McCarver uses my standard method of Boom Blast & a Pythagoras screen, others use Berserkers doped up on Adrenalin Rush. Doesn’t matter, it’s still broken.
But so is swamping a player with 5 Sirens hidden behind a maze of walls or acid blasting a Squad with 2 unseen Chirons or spamming the Squad with 5 invisible Tritons each with 300HP Sniper Rifles or any number of the outrageously OP Panda combos that I’ve read about and sometimes encountered. [For the record: I don’t count the Scylla’s Scream in this category - except where she is spawned so close to the squad that they have no chance to react to her. To deal with that, you have to spread out and focus on taking off her head like the Siren, and that’s an interesting tactical problem imho].
But (and excuse my troll-like capitals here, but some people don’t seem to be getting the message) YOU DON’T FIX THIS GAME BY JUST NERFING SKILLS AND IGNORING OP PANDA COMBOS AND YOU EQUALLY DON’T FIX IT BY IGNORING OP SKILL COMBOS AND NERFING THE PANDAS.
You have to do both, and most of the regular voices on these forums who constantly get labelled as ‘hardcore’ - incorrectly in my opinion - keep patiently making that point.
@Omega, @mcarver2000, @MadSkunky, I’m not trying to spoil your fun - I’m trying to improve it, by patiently explaining to the devs that until they fix the wildly OP Panda combos they keep throwing at us, desperate people are going to defend their right to 1-shot the Big Nasty from the other side of the map to their last breath. But if you can do that, the only way the Pandas stand a chance against you is by spamming you with OP combos of their own. So it turns into a classic arms race where nobody wins because it completely breaks the game.
I’m not opposed to RB. In fact I wish they’d put it back the way it was in BB5 - it was fun then: massively OP but mitigated by the fact that it could only be used at close range by an HMG-wielding Heavy who emptied his entire magazine; which meant that you had to navigate the tactical challenge of getting your Heavy into position with 3 AP & 5WP available before you could use it. In fact, RB as it stands, but limited to a Heavy with a Gatling Gun works pretty much like that , and that’s how I play it.
If a Skill requires you to solve a tactical conundrum to get it to work, then it makes the game interesting. If you can just sit back and press the ‘Kill Maguffin’ button from the other side of the map, it makes the game profoundly boring - but so does being multiply Mind Controlled by hidden Sirens/1-shotted by Return Fire/Acid Bombed by hordes of unreachable Nasties/insert your bugbear of choice here.
Unless they fix BOTH, Snapshot are ultimately going to find this game relegated to the ‘noble effort but flawed’ dustbin of gaming history, and that would be a real shame.