Thread: RK 43 7 May 2021, 10:46 AM
The Rak trading actual combat ability for the ability to retreat isn't a good thing for the rak I hope you guys realize. AT Guns shouldn't have to be in positions to retreat in the first place. Retreating your Rak(s) means you don't have AT Guns on the field for the next however many seconds it takes for them to run to base and return meaning your opponent just brings his vehicles up supported by his AT Guns and overpowers you. Rak has retreat out of necessity not out of desire. OKW would be ecstatic about the ability to trade retreat for 60 range because it could do it's job better.
That being said, the Rak is fine and doesn't need to be changed, it's still the worst AT gun of the bunch since it can't zone the same area other At Guns can, but it's perfectly usable ever since they buffed it's range from (40? 45?) to 50 and the retreat adds a little extra unique dynamic that allows it to be a little more aggressive to make up for the poorer coverage.
The Rak range got buffed from 50 to 55. So at atm it is "missing" 5 meters of range while having a 10° larger firing cone compared to the PaK40.
It has slightly lower penetration at both vet0 and vet3 that does not matter when facing stock Allied tanks (except for Churchill and Comet). And even against heavier armor you lose about 5% pen chance at most. ROF is same to slightly worse at vet.
The current mechanics force it to be slightly more aggressive (with retreat allowing this aggression) than other ATGs, which fits OKWs play style. I also would not say that the Rak has less field presence. If you lose 1-2 models as UKF/USF/OST on your PaK, depending on the map size you're in for a long trip home. The Rak can at least shorten the way home. And depending on your tech choice, OKW (together with USF) has the easiest time for forward reinforcements, since parts of those are integrated into the main teching system without the need to shell out additional resources. |
Its not either too many without or forced commander picks, its both. I hold my commander pick specifically to ensure arty as allies. Because no artillery, players must hold their picks.
Thats why Axis players really hate SPGs, even though they are in only 1 commander per faction. They end up required. Calliope is in only 2 commanders, but in every 4v4 game with USF for the same reason. It massively stagnates commander pick rates.
Turns out this applies to Axis as well. SHTDs solve Axis's single biggest issue: heavy tank destroyers shutting down Axis armor. Jadgtiger and Elephant shut down heavy tank destroyers. Breakthrough and Jaegar Armor are both top picks for this reason. ISU-152 spam was a direct response to this by sniping units from under the SHTD protection envelope without any response.
For some reason, all of these commanders are also some of the best designed and heavily loaded ones in CoH. USF Infantry currently has the only consistent howitzer kill off-map in USF, on a commander with the best anti-howitzer unit in the game, the Priest. JA has self-spotting and a cheesy off-map AT. Breakthrough has Sector Assault and its HE barrage, letting it hammer infantry while still maintaining its AT envelope.
A fix generally is make the commanders that DON'T have these mandatory tools strong enough to compensate (heavy tank meta, new Rifle company) or make these dominating doctrines straight weaker (as discussed). We are seeing this now with the nerfs to ISU-152 so SHTDs can snipe it, removal of howitzer control from JA and ISU doctrines, removal of spotting scopes from JA. Someone mentioned nerfing Sector Assault on Breakthrough, and I would add nerfing HE barrage on the Jadgtiger. This would make paradigm breaking commanders dramatically weaker, as it should.
The other necessary fix is to give proper shock indirect to the factions that don't have it. All tools for all factions. Calliope and Land Mattress would be made non-doc and adjusted for proper shock artillery statistics. USF had the Pack Howi and Scott for that job previously, but the change to focus on barraging means they can't consistently punish infantry blobs just team weapons, so they need actual shock arty. UKF has had issues literally since release.
Big +1 to this.
I assume we have to go with option #1, since Balance team repeatedly confirmed that Relic does not allow any large scale faction reworks to, for example, give UKF and USF non-doc artillery for the late game. |
I disagree. You can deduce a state of balance from the pick rates of the five factions. You cannot conclude UKF is the least played faction only because of the paywall/DLC. UKF, plain and simply put, just suck plain and are a bad faction. That's why they're the least picked. They suck. That's it. They're not fun to play with. They are bad. UKF is not even fun to play against. Even in tournaments, the pick ratio of a faction (out of five) shows the perceived game faction balance of that set of players. UFK disappears quickly from any recent tournaments. Tournament, or public play, people will pick the faction they consider to have the best chances to win with. There are people in this forum who confirmed that they are picking and learning different factions just because they're the current meta. And UKF is the fart of the current meta.
post edited to emphasise some phrasing.
The tournament setting is quite different. The vast majority/all players there have bought all DLCs, so they have the choice which one they play and will pick the on that gives them the best chances (which can also be also backfire for tournament statistics. The best players contribute most games and his choice of faction might also not reflect what is objectively the strongest, but what he personally feels most comfortable with. This has also been confirmed by top players). However, I doubt that we can say the same of a top 100 to top 200 player. They might have all DLCs, they might have some, they might only have the base game.
Technically speaking, what matters is also not the faction pick out of all five, but the pick rate within either the Axis or Allied side. Allies should get a 33%, Axis a 50% in a perfect setting. But we don't know if some factions, especially UKF, is even a choice for all players. UKF not scoring 33% might indeed be due to them being UP, but it might also be a reflection of them being paywalled.
That being said though, I agree that UKF is on the weak side in team games unless they pick Royal Arty regiment. I wonder how they will do after the patch, but I assume not too great. |
So, to settle this, JohnSmith means there is Absolutely more plays for both Axis faction in 4v4, which makes sense due to 2v3 factions, as all Allied plays should == all Axis plays.
What Hannibal means is the relative play ratio between factions for Axis vs Allies is problematic. OKW vs OST is about 1:1. USF or UKF vs SOV is about 70%.
The why for the ratio is trickier. DLC factions, incomplete factions, or straight weaker factions are all likely factors.
Yes, that is the logical conclusion from that. My initial point of concern was more that you cannot deduce faction balance by seeing that - when looking at a single faction - each of the two Axis factions has more absolute picks than one of the three Allied factions. It is to be expected, Axis having more picks/being most played doesn't prove they are stronger. It just means there are only two factions for Axis player's to chose from.
I agree that pick rates are really, really hard to use for balance, especially in team games. 3/5 factions are paywalled and USF and OKW are paywalled together, yet you cannot really compare those because of the existance of Brits as a third one...
But even if the sample size was higher, I don't think we could say too much from 4v4 and probably also not from 3v3 because most of the games there are random teams. Artillery is so important in these modes and USF and UKF do not have stock long range artillery. So either you have a higher chance of losing because you randomly got "too many" USF and UKF players without artillery, which scewed the win rates. Or those players are forced to pick Artillery commanders to even it out, which makes the commander pick rate scewed. |
Apparently you still didn't at all. Your point is still that there are only two factions, whereas there are five.
I would suggest we'd just leave it as it stands and agree that we're not understanding each other.
You're heavily misrepresenting what I said both initially and even clarified later on. But I agree that we'll just leave it at this point. |
Good, then I understood you correctly. My point still stands. |
I have a feeling you're completely misreading everything I say and focusing on one single sentence.
I understood "most played" as most picked, in the sense of their game count on the stats site (left graph) is higher than the one of Allied factions. That was the only thing that made sense to me since Axis and Allied games should be equal.
If that's not what you meant I'd kindly ask you to explain it to me. |
Because you told me there are only two factions. There are more than two factions. Both axis factions are the most played. I even quoted you.
Yes. In the context of you talking about OST and OKW. There are two Axis factions. Those having higher pick counts is due Axis only having two factions in contrast to three Allied ones. It has nothing to do with balance as you claimed. |
Relic defines Ost, Okw, UKF, and Usf as factions that are part of the game. There are more than two factions. Arguing about the terminology of the word faction is irrelevant schematics.
So yeah, Ost and Okw are the most played factions by far. Fact supported by stats.
I don't know what you are talking about and why you bring a terminology discussion into this.
OST and OKW are the most played factions because there are only two to pick from. Allied faction picks dilute out over three factions and are therefore less per faction. That's not an advanced concept, and that's all I said. |
Total number of players not that relevent since in order of a game to count the player must be above ranked 200 in 4vs4 with specific factions.
It is, because fewer players also means fewer good players. Top200 is probably not good enough to have a similar skill level across all factions, at least 1v1 data indicates that.
I was talking about Soviets Top200 in 4vs4 which are played as often as OKW and almost as often as Ostheer, way more than USF/UKF.
Soviets about 10.600 ranked players
OKW about 10.400 ranked players
Ostheer about 11.700 ranked players
I would assume that there shouldn't be a difference between the Top200 of this three factions. this argument can be applied partly to UKF/USF maybe which only have a ladder about 7100-7600 ranked players.
I just realized I did not refresh for the last page at some, but still: on these leaderboards I see approx 7-8k for USF and UKF, 10k Soviets and 10-11 for the Axis factions each.
It still means that Axis win rate should be slightly higher because you win against "lower skill" USF and UKF factions. This is not 1v1, as Allies you will get lower skill USF/UKF players more frequently because the pool of better players is smaller.
What are those numbers? I see 439 and 506 games for Soviets, so this is slightly below 1000 games in two month. You can't calculate how many games you really had in total, because you don't know how many Soviets were in that games that lost or won together.
The total winrate in both month at average is 41,8%
These are the number of games that were played in total. I would be careful with counting on a per faction basis in team games since this assumes that the win rates are independent of each other, which is not the case. Your sample size is the number of games in total, not the number of times of picks for a faction, because the win/loss condition is chosen on a game level and not on an individual faction level.
|