Profile of Hannibal

This is a topic Ihave been thinking about for a while now.

I have been a member of this forum for about a year now after being a silent reader for another one and half. So overall my overall memory of the forums and general discussion topics datee back to about the end of 2017.
This was a time where CoH2 was basically still full of exploitable units and mechanics, at all times at least one of the factions was next to unplayable because it was horrendously underpowered, every new update fixed an issue but created another and balance was more and more transitioning to the community.

You don't have to stretch you imagination too far to guess how discussions looked like back then. "Axis Op!", "Allies OP", "XYZ UP!" etc pp. Of course there have also been 'vivid' discussions how to fix these units and what would be the best approach to that. Every day was a new topic, a new thread popping up. Obviously not all of these discussions were constructive (by far not), but usually the laid out issues were quite clear.
Looking through the forums now I have to say it has become quite (for the lack of a better word) boring. Some people complain about lack of polish and missing text strings, the M20 might be under used, the price of the first cache could go down by 50 MP, Comets might be slightly too reliable, the Raketenwerfer does weird little dances when repositioning. Just like it did for the last 5 years. Now I don't want to discredit any of the OP's or topics they want to discuss, they are all valid points when it comes to opening a discussion. The last big outcry we had have been that sections are too strong and Tigers were nerfed too much. The first has settled down and disappeared into nothingness after players took the time to actually play the game instead of just watching Twitch only, while the latter has become a rather specialized discussion about certain stats that many are not able or willing to follow.

But in general I have got the feeling that topics have shifted quite drastically to more minor parts of the whole machine, while neither CoH2 nor the community here on .org has taken a significant hit from what I can tell. Is that shift bad? No, not at all.
I think it tells us more about how far this game has come thanks to mostly the balance team though. At the moment, all factions are playable, there is no clear unit or combination that roflstomps everything across half the map, no 5x maxim or 4x JLI spam builds, and meanwhile also no heavy-only meta anymore. Katitof and Vipper still get into fights regularly, this hasn't changed.

This game is still far from perfect, some units like the SU76 lack their niche, SOV mid game is a bit dull, the Jackson somehow lacks a real weakness,there are missing and outdated text strings, some mechanics or abilities are badly communicated and many more. The biggest I can think of right now if that the Elefant and ISU are a bit too much of a no brainer in team games. And of course some faction have design issues, but fixing them is beyond what the community is capable/allowed to do by Relic.

So, considerung all of this, I have been wondering: what do you think are CoH2's big (gameplay) issues at the moment? Because to be honest, I cannot think of any that would come close to 2018s and also early 2019s problems. Most things have been solved, every faction has a variety of different strats and commanders to chose from, the game is still good fun, nothing is brokenly OP. Everything that we would change at the moment would just add something additional to the game.

Or am I just a little blind in that regard?

Then hide my posts if a simple “no” isn’t enough. Also put a minimum word count in the guidelines because right now nothing is forcing me to write more than a simple, on topic, “no”.

Or you can stop moderating based on nonsense.

Apparently asking for a reason behind someone's opinion nowadays is considered too much to ask for. Welp, times have changed...

Cool.

When you guys will start deleting all the "balance" threads with the sole argument being "I lost a game to unit X" then that always end up being 10 page circle jerks of other people who have lost a game to unit X without any further explanations, arguments or replays to discuss?

I can assure you that the moderations team spends a lot of time on invising petty comments as you will usually see with your two-digit notification bar.


Now to OPs post before this goe sback and forth with nonesense posts from all of us:
Most of the suggestions will bring back old problems (like 6 men flamers) and need lots of rework in other aspects. The Penal suggestion for example would probably cause a complete vet rework and maybe even base stats.
Others ideas like the caches: I am not sure if this is worth the effort of implementing (if possible) and afterwards bug fixing for an unknown benefit. Caches at the moment are too expensive for 1v1, but too cheap for latge team modes. That's their main issue. And judging from my game experience I did not get the feeling that getting decently defended cut offs is too easy.
I would agree though that the Achilles ciuld use a rework. It is not a bad unit for its price, but I just don't think it has an interesting role in the British lineup.

No thank you, random internet person, I’d rather voice my disagreement without writing a 10K word essay explaining why.

Also skip the personal stuff, that niche is already filled here.

This forum is meant for discussions. If you don't want to discuss a topic, don't write or just go to the steam forums.

i think what hes saying is having a little bit of extra armour on 1 tank over another doesn't make much difference ingame as the chance to pen only changes a little bit, so small its really insignificant. Ther are more important values that make more of a difference like health, accuracy etc.

Look at the panther, it had its armour nerfed and vet 0 health increased and it was a considered a survivability buff for the panther. People need to stop with this myth that allied tanks don't have well armoured tanks. One other reason as to why heavily armoured tanks on allies makes so much more of a difference when on axis, is because axis simply dont have 60 range high pen TD's so they tend to struggle more vs tanks like churchills compared to when allies have to go VS a KT.

And srsly OP, REKETEN IS THE WORST AT GUN IN THE GAME AND MAN WANTS TO NERF IT. srsly OP list for me in order which u think is the best to worst AT gun : (6 pounder, reken, USF m1, PAK, and zis)

EDIT: I wrote this post in two parts due to being busy and did not see achpawels response in between.


This might be, I still disagree with that.

However, OP suggests a nerf, yes, but he does not say that the unit was overpowered. He just said it's a little too hard to kill with infantry.

Performance wise the Raketenwerfer is very good. Decent reload speed, 180 far penetration, decent arch. The only thing that is frustrating is the projectile colliding with walls more often than other AT guns. But stat wise, the unit is absolutely fine and pens everything that the Allies can field with 100% chance. The only vehicles where the Raketenwerfer becomes unreliable are doctrinal units. Currently your the most important trade-off to the standard layout of AT guns is the fifth man and the ability to retreat vs a missing shield and 5 meter range. And adding that the Raketenwerfer is also cheaper, I don't see a point why the unit is bad.

And more to achpawels post:
It obviously depends on the matchup. Against Allied TDs or ATGs in general the extra bit of armor for most units like mediums will not help you at all. Against other mediums however this is a huge difference, and mediums are usually around for the whole match.
I also do not agree that is were a "myth" that Allies have less armor, although I would phrase it differently: Axis vehicles have overall better chances to bounce shells from vehicles of the same class. That's why Axis vehicles are usually more expensive.
What we have to work around though is still the remnants of the initial CoH2 design: Axis were always supposed to get heavy armor out way more frequently than Allies, that's why OKW has a non-doc KT and OST has so many options to get a Tiger, plus the Panther that is still highly armored, but was even heavier back in the time.
This lead to Allies absolutely needing high pen TDs to survive, but since there is usually only one heavy TD unit per faction and Allied mediums are less reliable against Axis mediums than the other way around, Allied TDs get overloaded and suddenly (need to) perform well against everything. This in turn lowered the effective value of Axis mediums again.

However, achpawel said that even if a unit bounces shots somewhat reliably (I'll just assume 10-20% bounce rate, especially considering he responded to a post that had 25% as an example), it would not matter.
Now I don't know which game modes he is talking about. If he talks about 4v4 only where it is fine that you jump from LVs straight to heavy TDs and heavy tanks, then he might be right at least on the armor point and every armor below the heavy TDs far penetration is basically the same. But as long as medium tanks are played regularly, which I assume from his post, this is just not the case. Even a 10% bounce chance lowers your chance of being killed in a 4 shot volley by about a third and halves it for 6 shot vehicles like the Panther.
If range and accuracy were the most important things, I think we'd see way more JPIVs from OKW, since this unit is also able to reliably penetrate almost all Allied stock armor.

I did not read every comment, but i have to say i use it often in teamgames also on big 4vs4 maps and i had never problem with it.

It sounds for me just for a L2P issue. Maybe go in custom and try it out, how it works.

The issue is not that it bugs out or worked inconsistently, but that this is another of the many examples in CoH2 where a single ability functions differently from all other similar abilities for actually no apparent reason.
And for someone playing casually this can be a big drawback because there is simply no time to figure out the quirks of each ability.

If possible, it would be better if it worked like the same two-click process of those recon-smoke commander ability. If this creates balance issues, then at least it should be clearly stated that the planes come from the base (or is it? I can't remember that is would be like this, but I have not played with forward majors often recently).