Serious Balance Fixes Needed- Acid

The Jormangandr and all acid weapons suck. They are so bad it’s insane. For those who don’t know acid damage works completely different from poison and fire. You’d think it would peel off armor and then health with regards to how much is concentrated on a specific limb. Instead it does a mere 10 damage per limb affected by acid. I suspect this is a giant programming mistake: they intended it to work like poison but they put the value for the rate of decrease instead.

During BBs, they were just putting a number (5 for instance). It was misleading because in fact it meant 5 turns and the acid damage is 10 whatever you do.

Now they have changed to write the amount of acid that will burn the armor but it is still 10 per turn (per body part).

The problem is …the enemy stays dangerous during the whole process.
Poison is stronger but … the same.
Virus is … so … can’t even find an appropriate word. Each bullet applies 1 to Pandas that have 10s of will points.
Fire … I have to investigate more but when a firebug managed to hit me it wasn’t that bad.

That’s where they could have looked how “Long War 2” deals with some effect and find ways to make them more useful. Something like:

  • Daze: only 1AP (already the case), prevents use of WP so you auto lose any mind-control since you can’t spend WP (can we have a grenade that dazes ?)
  • Poison: lowered aim, have only 3 AP (so you can heal and move)
  • Fire: can’t shoot you’re spending your time removing the fire, only 2 AP, but you can melee (oh yes, melee is 2 AP so no you can’t)
  • Virus: makes your abilities cost 1WP more per “virus”. You get hit by 6 bullets with virus, dash suddenly costs 10WP.
  • Acid: each AP spent (rounded up) applies acid damage (10 per body part) - so it accelerates the process.

Any ideas are welcome.

3 Likes

I think acid should do less damage with each turn. Because it’s a chemical reaction, so each turn there’s less acid to have an effect. Even the acid from Alien runs out of steam eventually…

Is probably a combustible reagent like napalm, it must burn up, with peak damage done on the first turn and decline thereafter unless it’s on something that’s combustible. Should it cause grenades and other explosive munitions to detonate if not dealt with?

Poison should, probably, be cumulative either if neurotoxin or necrotic, you’d normally expect the effects to continue until either treated or death. Virus similarly.

3 Likes

Acid is effectively useless.

I was testing the Jormangadr cannon and smacked an Arthron with it (dealt ~600 acid?), then left it. 3-4 turns later, it’s still there with most of its HP. This is beyond pathetic for a late game heavy weapon with 3AP to fire. Burning can be effective, in large part because if you can get a choke point, the AI will try to move through it and suffer high damage. Poison can be useful-ish. It’s better than acid, damage goes straight into the HP pool.

The obvious advantage of acid is the shred effect - but you have so many better ways to shred: explosives, the Harrower, various armour break abilities.

Yeah… Practically EVERY SINGLE WEAPON TYPE that does damage over time is completely worthless in this game… Enemies can kill you in single turn if they have a chance to do it… so using weapon that needs multiple turns to do something is just total waste of time and resources…

I’ve used poison arrows against worm Chirons which are annoying but not deadly enough to be a priotity target. Seeing them suffer 120+ DOT ticks was nice. :space_invader:

yes, but thats the point - these weapons are semi-useable against enemies that are no direct danger to you… while completely useless against enemies that can kill you instantly (and as game progresses, practically every single enemy can kill you in single turn)

Have anyone tried combining acid with fire? I know armor protects from fire in PP and acid eats armor away… Something like acid and fire grenades being thrown at the same group of enemies?

I completely ignore Viral, Poison, and Acid damage. All I use are pure damage, and piercing/shred weapons. Nothing really survives long enough for anything else to work. If you do enough damage to something and it starts bleeding, that alone will do more damage than anything else until you get another round to shoot at it. The only other damage type I use is Shock, but so few weapons have that it’s not even really worth mentioning.

Lowering Will? Pointless. Again, most things don’t survive more than 1-2 turns after I shoot them the first time. Burning armor? Shred works better, and faster. Poison damage to HP? Again, Bleeding or just straight up murdering works much faster. Dazing and Paralysis are fairly useful, but again, on so few weapons that it’s hardly worth mentioning.

With endgame, you can’t one shot anyone (except with specific OP builds). So you need to find ways to temporarily delay some Pandorans so they don’t kill you once it’s their turn.
Currently, the only way I found was to have Athena rifles on everyone (even without proficiency) and go crazy paralysis. One shot is already enough to hamper Arthrons & Tritons. You can finish them later or extract mutagen.

Adding effects on each of those status would give them value. Currently they have close to none.

2 Likes

Have to agree acid needs a rework. I tried the Jormangandr cannon today, though i only gave it two shots. First shot hit one body part of achiron and applied 10 acid damage. Next turn i fired it on the same target and it applied 500 acid damage… though of course didn’t actually do any damage since it ticks on the enemies turn and has to melt through all the armor first…

On paper that was a heck of a shot, 500 damage? But that’d take it 50 turns to actually do the damage. Pretty bad sadly. Scrapped the weapon and went back to the basic Hel Cannon on that heavy.

Maybe they can rework it a bit so it applies full damage to the armor on the initial hit (like shred), then the following turn starts eating away at armor or hitpoints if armor is gone.

1 Like

Would if help if this acid cannon did something else as well as apply acid to the targer?
Like apply garanteed shock status? Or the amount of pure damage compared to Hel cannon?

Perhaps a guaranteed panic on the target regardless of their will value rather than shock? Being drenched in acid all over should cause some kind of reaction, at least i think i’d panic if i were drenched in it. Though even just regular shock value would beat the currentl nothing that the acid cannon really does, assuming of course you don’t ignore that chiron for 50 turns so the acid can do its work…

Perhaps it could function as an acid bomb, rather than hitting one target on a few limbs it splashes in a large radius, eroding nearby buildings, maybe explosive barrels, and other nearby aliens get a taste of it… like if you’d thrown a grenade it does splash damage… the acid just bursts on impact like that.

you can always kill enemy in single turn, even in late game… Because you can concentrate fire from more soldiers against it… Things like Scylla needs to die in first turn otherwise they will kill your soldiers with single hit… you cant take a chance letting them be… therefore any type of weapon that doesnt deal direct damage, is useless…

Acid would be better if it also shredded the armor with the hit… If let say it shredded 10 points of armor, then it would be worth taking Jormungander (or whatever its called) gun because you would be able to take all armor down with single burst…

I think that for Jormungandr, what I proposed would already be quite nice.

Moving would accelerate the acid damage a lot and make them really vulnerable very quickly. You shoot a Scylla from afar (it’s such a big target) and apply acid on lots of body parts and each time Scylla moves or does something 10 armor less per AP … or HP once no more armor.

1 Like

I agree most of the time it is possible to kill ennemy in a single turn by concentarated fire. But it is always better to mutillate multilpe ennemies than kill a single one. Late game the ennemies are so deadly that it is rare that you can let an ennemy live a few turns. And once it happens you have to use a skill that reduce its movement or the ennemy is nearly dead. You gain one or two shots at most.

Virus canmake ennemy panick multiple turn if the virus damage is above half of the will. This way you can forget an ennemy a few turn and concentrate on others. But You need to have killed multiple ennemies first or let the virus damage to act. This means the ennemy has to survive multiple turns (activated or not)

Acid is good as it is now. The problem is the fact damage overtime need ways to let ennemies lives safely. That should not be always possible . But right now it is nearly never possible and when possible you don’t gain much in comparison of killing it.

I think it can be solved by adding some utility to the acid weapons or acid status:

  • Add other types of damage to the acid weapons (sort of like Hel II cannon has 180 damage, 10 armour shred, 240 shock)
  • Or/and make acid cannon an AoE weapon similar to flamethrower (2 AP to use, huge area of effect creating a pool of acid. Units crossing that pool get “Acid” damage applied)
  • Make units with “acid” effect applied loose accuracy or unable to use some abilities
2 Likes

yea right now acid is useless, because of that 10 damage per turn limit, thats way tooooo slooow even at the beginning of game
i would be happy if acid worked same as poison, but with a little difference,
first it should eat up armor and subtract armor from acid amount, and then it should works just like regular poison doing full damage per tick and losing 10
and you could limit its damage with a limb hitpoints, once limb that acid was applied on is destroyed then acid is gone, so that acid would not make poison obsolete, because poison doesnt stick to the limb but to whole body

1 Like

It is 10 armor or damage per body part. With acid you don’t want 200 on a single body part but 50 on 4. With multiple body part use you will have multiple time 10 damage or shreding. More spread with the weapon is better.

I’ve used the feedback tool to make a feature request for each DoT, following my first post in this Thread.

1 Like