Frosi

I did also mention that in my post but the minor far nerf to its bloom is nothing compared to the massive N-tec buff.

That is exactly the issue I was describing in my post, since the N-tec was buffed to 2.0 Modifier cap from 2.4 there is no more reason to use the FAR. Thats why balancing weapons is a community effort, we are the ones playing the guns (or in some cases not playing them) and realizing their varying strengths and weaknesses, we are the ones that should voice our opinions on what is too strong, too weak or in the perfect place. LO is listening to the community a lot, especially in regards to weapons so any opinion, any feedback and any voice will certainly be acknowledged. One thing I am commonly seeing right now is the fact that people share their discontent about something when a patch happens that doesn't address it rather than sharing said discontent after having experienced it enough to have a set opinion about it. A good example here is the OCA being too strong or the PMG being too weak which has seen a huge surge in feedback after the patch notes for todays patch went up and people noticed that they aren't being addressed. The sooner opinions and feedback come in the sooner LO can react and makes changes accordingly, this Weapon balance process will continue and WE, the community are the ones that can help shape it.

The Bullshark does not get the reduction in sprint delay because the change is aimed to help the versions of the OBIR with a bolt timer. The Bullshark doesn't have a bolt timer and can therefore cancel its sprint delay by swapping to your secondary so it doesn't need a reduction.

Alright so, the N-tec is a tough one, its the most played weapon in the game and any changes to it will come with backlash, whether that's from the people that play the N-tec religiously or those that are tired of seeing no other AR's that are in the game being used. While I was personally very happy with how the AR diversity played out during the 2.4 Modifier Cap N-tec era I can agree that it could've seemed like it was too much of a nerf because it basically eliminated any sort of kill potential in full auto beyond 10m, however, this gave a lot of breathing room to other AR's that were better in CQC but came with the tradeoff of being worse at those longer distances or not having as much multi-kill potential due to a lower mag size, sometimes both. During this time, you would see a lot of N-tecs, ATAC's and FAR's with the occasional STAR thrown in aswell which was quite a refreshing thing to see and made the gameplay feel a lot less 'samey'. This is an extremely good point and is exactly why I personally feel like even the 2.4 Modifier cap wasn't as bad as people made it out to be, it wasn't useless in CQC but rather required more skill and a different approach that wasn't holding mouse 1 anywhere within 15-20 meters. The N-tec was still extremely good and was still the most used AR in the game but players often felt a little too stubborn to adapt to the new best way to play CQC with the N-tec. When the N-tec got a 50% revert to its initial nerf back a month ago (Modifier Cap 2.4 > 2.0) it once again became the clear choice to use which made other AR's became obsolete again. I am not going to ignore the fact that the FAR had a minor nerf to its max bloom which combined with the N-tec buff made them once again come a lot closer to what they used to be or the fact that for some reason all AR's had their jumping accuracy nerfed when some of them were meant to be better at CQC compared to the N-tec which is designed to be the Mid range AR, therefore having a worse jumping accuracy made sense. Both of those things definitely play a part but I personally think neither the FAR nerf or N-tec buff should've happened. One more thing to note is that weapon balance will never be final, things are never going to be perfectly balanced and that's why its an ongoing effort, however, in this situation, there is not a lot of room for any buffs to the STAR / FAR to make them viable compared to the N-tec without making them feel like too similar to the N-tec itself. I've personally brainstormed a bunch of ideas and couldn't come up with more than a hand full of minor things that wouldn't change the entire feel of the gun or made them too close to be like any of the other AR's. If you have any ideas there please quote me and throw them my way. (Brainstorming is always a good thing!) No one is trying to destroy your favorite gun in the game but sometimes buffs and nerfs need to happen to give more guns in the game some breathing room, APB has so many guns in the game but only a small amount of them sees regular use, diversity is a good thing and sometimes that comes through nerfs to things that overshadow other weapons just to give those weapons a little more breathing room to exist.

It was never supposed to be increased in the first place, it was accidentally increased in the Dev Gungame patch and has now been brought back to its INTENDED value.

Not necessarily no, I think this idea of Kevlar players being free kills stems more from the fact that Kevlar is a "noob trap" right now more than anything else, if you've ever seen an actual good if not top player play around Kevlar it is quite disgusting. There are many things in APB that can fill out the weak spots that come with Kevlar and especially on defense or if played around a car Kevlar becomes absurdly strong but again, there's very few players that can actually show you how strong it is because generally seen CA is the better option for MOST scenarios.

Adding an additional second in a game like APB where guns kill in under a second on average could slow down gameplay some more, on paper I don't think adding an extra second would be a huge change but at the same time I don't think it would be a good thing for the game either. To an extend the reality is that Clotting Agent has always been the go to and as such was the game balanced around it so you wouldn't want to change something people are accustomed to just so other things that they might not enjoy as much are more viable. I think Fragile could stay the same as it does right now but retaining the Clotting Agent 2 regen speed that would be baseline. Because most guns will require 1 less shot to kill on a Fragile player, having that faster regen doesn't sound like something that would be too strong.

With the way things are currently absolutely not. If you like it or not the game has been balanced around Clotting Agent for many years, even prior to LO taking over, if Kevlar were to become Meta the way things are right now it would throw all this balance out of the window and make the game even slower. APB's movement is fantastic, any downside to movement speed will put you at a disadvantage in many scenarios. Kevlar also has recieved a somewhat direct buff with the buff to Med Spray, having instant regen that twice as fast syngerizes really well and it is on a low cooldown on top of that. I think in an ideal world Clotting agent and base regen should be looked at in a way that doesn't change how the regen speeds etc work currently. What I mean with this is to take the route of making CA2 (Currently the fastest regen in the game) the BASE regen, this is to primarily help out new players. On top of that Clotting Agent 3 simply turns into "Clotting Agent", this would mean that a lot of math would have to be done to keep CA3's regen speeds the same as it is now due to the base regen being the equivalent to CA2 now. This work however would free up a lot of potential buffs to underused green mods to not necessarily make them become meta but put them in a more healthy spot compared to Clotting Agent. APB is a fast paced game and the base regen is incredibly slow and I think this is where the primary issues with Kevlar / Fragile / Flak Jacket lies, however, lets say CA2 regen speed was the baseline, this would obviously be too much, however, this way they could apply multiple changes to Kevlar for example without having to almost remove the downside of Kevlar which is the movement speed. Here's an example of what I mean. Currently Kevlar 3 gives you the following stats: +30% Player Health (1300) -20% Sprint Speed -20% Run Speed With CA2 being the baseline you not only help the new player experience but also open yourself up to giving Kevlar a slight buff by adjusting its regen time to be somewhere around CA1 right now. (Theoretical nerf because CA2 is baseline but having the fastest regen in the game on top of 30% health would be broken.) So a buffed Kevlar could look like this: +30% Player Health (1300) -12% Sprint Speed -12% Run Speed ~Regen Values: Clotting Agent 2 > Clotting Agent 1 This is technically already possible but my approach would tackle a few issues all at once, namely balance issues with Green mods, New Player Experience and Item Bloat. There's a lot in this approach that would have to be thought through such as the math behind the whole thing and what to do with other mods but balancing the underused green mods is not an easy task and one would have to be extremely careful with what exactly is done because on paper mods like Kevlar being strong or possibly too strong could quickly end up as a terrible feeling for actual gameplay mainly because of weapon balance but also gameplay flow, muscle memory and game sense being thrown out of the window, however, if executed well the way all levels of Clotting Agent behave the exact same way and other green mods could have a slightly increased regen.

You might feel this way but the PMG was the clear choice for anyone that valued performance, now instead of one SMG doing everything they were split up into 3 main archetypes (OCA / SD OCA / PMG) that all do different things and have different strengths and weaknesses. This was a nerf to JG Snubbing which achieved a .1 ttk which was absolutely broken if played properly, the snub is a bad gun but that was aknowledged plenty of times throughout the past weeks. Manic meta is HS3 / Mob Sling and no red mod, give that a shot and you'll have much much better results. The gun still effectively reaches 25-30 meters in full auto with laserbeam accuracy (better than the OCA Whisper) The equip time change was to put it in line with the RSA in terms of equip time but this has been a common complaint so I think something should be done here. Just because the RSA got 3 MINOR nerfs and 1 absolutely MAJOR buff doesn't mean it was nerfed. In our playtests the RSA with just the buff was completely insane and effortlessly outshot guns especially if cover was involved. I'll go into the changes here some more since the RSA being nerfed is an extremely common complaint which shows that some people haven't tried the gun or played it prior to the changes. I'll start with the big one: Delay before bloom begins to recover: 0.5 -> 0.3 (Buff) This makes it so the RSA can be fired at its maximum fire rate something that was not possible without having absolutely terrible accuracy prior to this patch which made it much closer to a 2.2-2.5 TTK. This patch allowed it to kill any players within 70 meters in 1.7 seconds which combined with its ability to shoot perfectly accurate on the move allowed it to easily take fights with Rifles provided the RSA user had cover. Now to the nerfs: Fire interval: 0.85 -> 0.9 (Nerf) Like mentioned above with the Bloom Recovery buff the RSA was able to kill players much much faster than it could previously so this was done to nerf its TTK to 1.8 (from 1.7) which is still much faster than previously on Live but solidified it more as a secondary weapon. Accuracy while walking: 1.2 -> 1.75 (Nerf) This makes it so it loses a slight bit more accuracy while in marksman ship mode, this was done to keep it more stationary on range to and weaken its strength of "corner popping" making it so it requires better positioning and leaning if you want to do so. Accuracy while running (not sprint): 2 -> 2.5 (Nerf) This means that its accuracy on the move in hipfire is a good bit worse, this was done because at some point during playtesting we started to run JG / RSA as a setup which enabled another form of quickswitch as opening the fight with the RSA in hipfire due to its godly hipfire accuracy enabled a 1 shot by the JG. If executed perfectly this resulted in a ttk thats around .49-.55 which is a good bit faster than using the JG regularly. Hopefully this clears some things up and keep the feedback coming

The synergy still very much exists, it simply requires more skill and setup which results in a reasonable time to stun. 3 Shots of a CCG and then switching to a PIG still results in a faster time to stun than just using the CCG, its simply not a mechanic that results in very little player interaction anymore.

JT Prices aren't going down, don't worry.

The PIG has no reason to be at 950 Stamina damage, it allows for way too many unintended mechanics such as "Pig-Switching" that reduce its actual time to stun to .6 (Equip time of the PIG). This works with a ton of weapons in the game. The ISSR-B for example deals 170 stamina damage a shot and is extremely good in CQC, there is no pushing someone that is using that Combo as they will take you out of the game almost instantly, especially if they have cover to hide behind. Rather than adjusting all of these weapons to have less stamina damage the PIG had its reduced so it is mostly the same but don't have its primary interactions come down to cheesing it into a 1 shot stun.

Tommygun changes were planned but a solution was thought off too late to implement, test and itterate on, this was due to the complicated nature of recoil curves. This is on the table and not forgotten and will see changes in future weapon balance updates.

About the C2 in general and how it performs vs the S1-NA 'Manic'

C2 is better in CQC ttk wise but the Manic continues to be one of the very few SMG's that can reach up to crazy ranges such as 30m. As it stands on live the manic has one of the best ttk's, extreme accuracy and therefore consistency and also the ability to spray people down on 30~ meters. The PMG is considered overpowered because of its versatility, the gun is easy to play and currently does everything, with these changes to the PMG it'll have its versatility reeled in by a good amount which would leave the Manic in a state where it would essentially be a more consistent PMG thats only slightly harder to play.

Bolt timer might be the wrong word here but guns like the Strife shotgun also have this, in short, it was introduced to help with Snipers switching to secondaries immediately but was introduced to other high damage output per shot (or in this case burst) if they saw similar playstyles.

This was done many times and barely anyone was testing, even prior to LO taking over, rather than waiting many weeks on data of one itteration it is done together with the SPCT now to go through itterations within a reasonable time so balance can continue and evolve until a good set of stats is found. Yes all reskins are affected by these changes.

Because to increase a weapons power you want to have a proper baseline of whats a balanced gun, bringing down the meta guns slightly allows you to find this point of balance easier than having to experiment with underused guns. Sure you could do that if you are extremely comfortable in the fact that you can react to these changes, not to mention that shock therapy, especially if its on an armas only gun could lead to a huge shit storm that will cause a decent amount of damage even if fixed after a week. Not to mention that guns like the NFAS for example were buffed to extremes and it took the community months to catch on to that at which point, the damage will be severe for those that saw it coming.

A few simple, logical, descisions that have to be ran through every possible real scenario, weapon matchup and many other things when there's 18 other guns that were recieving major changes this patch. Rather do them in batches and focus on certain things rather than do 50 guns at once and have awful results.

Please read the literal first few sentences of the blog post, ty.

There is a lot more balancing to be done, as you can tell this week mainly focussed on meta and standardizing a few things, there is underused guns in need of some love (Snub / Cobra for example) and this will be continued to work on as said in the forward of the blogpost, here's the exact quote from Sake. "Before getting into specific details, it is important to stress that what you see here is part of an ongoing effort to dial weapons in to a healthy place. We are committed to cultivating a dynamic meta where each weapon style has a use. We've missed some weapons in the past when we've tackled this issue. It is likely you will see some weapons that aren't addressed this time around either. This is a process we will continue to iterate on, and your feedback is an important part of that process."

Selali mentioned that the tommygun changes didn't make it in because recoil curves are hard to work with and the stats for a revamped recoil took too long to implement and properly test. This is still on their radar, just not in this patch

It was always better and it got the same nerf to its equip time as the 3ps3 one so the 3ps3 one will still have the upper hand in equip time, nothing has changed in that regard.

To prevent more quickswitching due to its buffed damage.

I think Matt mentioned that these two will be added to the two new contacts in a Q&A.