LogFAQs > #972600159

Item #3: Changes to the overall Low Tier Mercenary ability design

The above was the carrot. This is the stick. Starting in the upcoming weeks, we will start rebalancing most (but not all) low tier mercenaries to make their abilities either less available, less reliable, or both.

We saw what you saw, players, we felt what you felt, and we got the message loud and clear. No one is excited to see Leon Kennedy become Arms Chopper Guy (TM), or Vivi Ornitier become Your Motherfucking Life Ends In Five Minutes Kid (TM). Some of this comes down to altering abilities to be less universally applicable, but a lot of this is just that there's no incentive to resort to your more specific abilities when something works in most or all cases and can be used week after week.

One of our greatest successes this Test Run was rehabilitating Mario from being a joke merc to a meaningful battle threat, and Mario also just so happened to be a mercenary who received an avant premiere preview of how we want low tier ability hax to work. By default Mario's Cappy capture is powerful but random. You can't control who it's going to hit, only that it WILL hit someone. Thus, you can yolo it every week, but barring obscene luck, the results will not be similarly powerful week in week out. This helps make the capture more arguable, and prevents it from getting stale. On top of that, there's an option to make it reliably potent...but it comes at the cost of not using Cappy next week (or any other ability Mario may have at his disposal, for that matter -- thanks to JC for suggesting this change way back when, it was a good one).

Fatigue hurts. It gives players pause. it's a good pain to inflict on you guys to make you think about whether you'd rather overkill a match or leave some room for the other guy to win in exchange for less vulnerability down the line. We'll be using it, as well as low amounts of Recharge (Recharge 1 usually, maybe Recharge 2) more liberally, as well as introducing more 'called shot' requirements into abilities that are otherwise too reliable. Zagreus is a perfect example of this latter case, even though he's not a low tier mercenary. You'll see the finalized changes soon, but we plan to make his Nectar ability available by default out the gate...and make it so that THERE IS NO ESCAPE only works on targets Zag has gifted nectar to at least once (all credit for this idea goes to Eddv, who suggested this phenomenal balance change to us in private). THERE IS NO ESCAPE still remains super powerful, but now it relies on your ability to politic, wheel and deal to get it off successfully by default, instead of just being a braindead 'throw it out, #YOLO' move. In turn, we can then change Zag's possession upgrade from an obscene winmore into being able to use THERE IS NO ESCAPE on a non-Nectared target for Recharge 2 (perhaps 3, even), allowing it to function as a panic button at the significant cost of not having it available in future weeks.

The bottom line is: We want you to dig deep to make less powerful abilities work sometimes. We want you to have more than one viable ability strategy. We want you to think and plot to get your wins instead of just unloading your easy hax every week. We want you to be powerful, still! But we want players to have an incentive to run a multilayered game, and we believe nerfing the availability of Low Tier mercenaries' ability hax or its potency is a way to make this more possible by balancing out the power of each battle tier more properly (as if this is done, suddenly lowbie ability hax is comparable in availability to high tier mercenary battle presence -- so there's more reason to diversify your team instead of just investing in low super heavily to win without fighting). We are confident we can thread this needle, and make a more fun, exciting, and strategic Mercenaries without having to add more complexity this way. And we count on you, our lovely players and voters, to help us achieve that dream and spot mistakes we might make and help us do better. Together, we'll build a new, better game. Onwards and upwards, my comrades!

Item #4: Overall balance changes and fixes

This one is very straightforward. We want to tweak characters that are too good, buff up mercs that are too weak, and get every mercenary closer to parity with each other. This is technically not a systemic change, but consider this a preview of the tweaks we'll start implementing in the coming weeks alongside the larger rules changes.

Item #5: Clarification on revivals

Revives are good! We love that they are! But we're going to add a little clarification on how they work to the topic template. This change is being implemented immediately for topic templates in the wiki, as follows:

-Mercenaries are considered 'downed' when defeated, unable to be roused except through a revival technique. A revival technique cannot affect a mercenary whose physical body has been completely destroyed and will not relocate them away from danger (ex. falling off of the terrain, being impaled, falling in lava), unless it would naturally do so in its own universe.

This is just clarification on how far revives can go. Want to argue your team of badass bosses can deal with revivers? Sure, just convince the voters that dead enemies are becoming chunky salsa. You have a license for it now.

Item #6: More changes?!

This is not an official change, but rather a statement of intent. We are going to consider tweaks to the EXP system in particular! Players love EXP, we love EXP, and there may or may not be too little of it to go around. We may adjust it mid-game past a certain elimination cycle's conclusion to allow teams to power up faster. We may award more EXP for fulfilling certain conditions. We may implement no changes! We're going to take a good long look at this and have a think about where to go from here. This is Mercenaries 5: there are no sacred cows nor sacrosanct rules. We want the best game possible, and we'll examine and reevaluate everything to get there. Do not expect you'll ever be able to cap out on all your upgrades, though -- we're not interested in that. EXP allocation should still be a carefully planned affair, it should just not feel like you're drowning in cool shit to buy and can get none of it.

And that is all for now, my dear leaders! I'll see you next time once the TP rules are finalized and we start implementing targeted balance changes. May the goddess of victory smile upon you!