• Increases to bow, throwing weapon and poison damage These were planned since the weapon balance, and are mostly fine after subsequent tweaks. It can be hard to tell, but bows in particular are high skill weapons, so their level of strength isn't that inappropriate, especially after their damage reduction. Poison arrows are actually pretty well-considered. Some throwing weapons aren't even, but this is relatively unimportant.
  
• Joker changes Short version is Jokers are much more powerful than they used to be, especially in terms of survivability. This is somewhat imbalanced because of how they interact with enemies, but would not be a big deal were it not for:
  
• Domination changes Almost all domination elements were removed, such that now the game basically guarantees domination if the enemy is below 100% health. This is dumb and exploitable as all heck, and should be reversed. Domination should not be so reliable, except in specific stealth situations where it no longer works. Its previous management worked much better.
  
• Fire changes The Flamethrower now always lights enemies on fire and does a massively increased DoT, making the choice of ammo trivial- Rare gives you more ammo, so it's the only thing to pick. This is a problem, but not a particularly big deal.
  
• Bulldozer changes very limited stun methods, running. These are fine. They introduce qualitative changes that make burning down bulldozers difficult, but still possible. Bulldozers are a reasonable threat that now fulfill their intended gameplay purpose.
  
• Medic We all know how this guy works at this point. He's not a big game-changer, so for the purpose of a beta/difficulty rebalance I'd say don't change them right now.
  
  
• Difficulty Normalization
  This is the big one. For some reason, OVK decided the right thing to do was to use flat multipliers across all enemies and conditions between difficulties. This produces all sorts of interaction effects between different enemy classes, and coupled with other flattening changes means gameplay is simultaneously more homogenous and less functional. While these changes are really noticeable at the extremes, they also have negative effects on all difficulties. I'll get into the details, but the short version is this needs to be reversed almost in its entirety. This really needs to be reversed. It may have been fast to implement, but it's really harmed the game. The details:
  
  
• Linearized spawn limits It used to be that the max number of units increased nonlinearly as the number of players increased- in part to reflect the synergy that more players provide. This was undone and a flat multiplier (1xcap for 1 player, 4x for 4 players) was applied, to frankly ludicrous effect. At the full end of absurdity, this leads to a 84 spawncap with 4 players on OD. This breaks on all systems, regardless of CPU power, because it also causes general pathing problems. The pathing and spawning problems are the only thing that makes loud OD heists beatable- players are actually encountering fewer enemies on OD than on lower difficulties, because many of them become stationary, move slowly, or never spawn at all. The difficulty and possibility of OD comes down to which 10 enemies are actually firing, and where/how the rest of the enemies are malfunctioning. This should be almost fully reversed- ~45 spawncap on DW was already causing problems, and there's really no need to increase it for higher difficulties. This needs to be removed- it completely breaks the game.
  
• Linearized Spawn Pools This is the number of enemies that spawn over the course of an assault wave. It was similarly made linear per player, and increased. This is not a significant issue- it makes assaults longer, but does not harm gameplay in the same way as other changes.
  
• Simplified Spawns It appears that all beat cops and FBI units have been wiped from assault spawns, now only appearing when scripted to in particular levels. All upper difficulties now have the same narrow set of units, all of the same "color set". Additionally, special units do not spawn in combination with other units, only on their own, potentially with medics. Dozers and tasers, for example, only appear in pairs. Cloakers only spawn alone. This appears to have been done partially to facilitate a dynamic medic spawn setup which causes medics to spawn often with other groups, but the net effect is that enemy units are homogenous and isolated from each other. It is rare to get interesting combinations of enemies or special units that vary gameplay. The harder hitting, weaker FBI units are no longer present to act as priority targets. This needs to be undone. It interacts poorly with other changes, below.
  
• Special Spawn caps There can now be only 2 cloakers. Coupled with the problems of hiding cloaker behaviors, this means you will never see cloakers on some maps, and they are generally way too infrequent. OD has an 8 shield limit, which is absurd when they're spawning in groups of four, especially in contrast to other special units. Both of these cap values need to be adjusted, and the cloaker hiding spawn need to be decoupled from the general cloaker cap.
  
• Changed Tactics Spawngroups have assigned behaviors. It's hard to speak to them in detail because the spawn limit and pathing problems mean they're hard to witness (they might also be a contributing factor in the above problems), but one effect is that only a couple spawngroups can use flashbangs or smoke grenades. While it's true there was a spamming problem before, this cuts too far in the other direction. On all difficulties, these items are now too rare.
  
• Flat health and headshot multipliers Enemies now have a base health rate that is multiplied by a flat value per difficulty. This hits its apotheosis at OD, where enemies have 9x the health they have on normal. It means many OD enemies have too much health (gangsters and other scripted heist enemies are bizzare to fight), and is the cause of the most common bullet sponge problems. Headshot multipliers are also flattened and, bizarrely, reduced on the top difficulties. Many commentators have talked about adjusting these flat multipliers. I disagree. They need to not exist. Enemies fulfill different roles, and flat multipliers are going to make them lose those roles between difficulties. While some flat adjustment could work, especially for enemies like SWAT that play a homogenous role, these multipliers are going to have to be less divergent between difficulties, and a lot of per-difficulty or per unit health values should be set instead. Beat cops should not be taking full clips. (neither should alerted gangsters in stealth, but stealth is a whole separate kettle of fish).
  
• Enemy damage and accuracy I've posted on this before, so I'll keep it brief. Enemies, especially with automatic weapons, should not do too much damage per hit. Their accuracy, and damage, should decrease over distance. This was also a problem on DW, but it's turned up to 11 on OD, specifically because of the basic SWAT, which are an absurd threat far more dangerous than any of the special units. These units need to be nerfed.
  

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Nov 10, 2016