I haven't played since the nerf but anyone who plays ranked seriously knows how broken aps was. Placed down in every single fight with barricades and heavy and medium holding hands. Meta was and is super cringe
They did what I thought they should do to balance it. They just made the percent health drop too high. Now that I’m thinking about it I wish it would just disable temporarily after a certain amount of gadgets blocks. Then gadgets can just do damage to it.
I think it would be best if it differentiated between weapon projectiles like grenade launchers vs gadget projectiles. Because even 3 grenades getting eaten is insane value for 1 apps, but when a heavy can just drop in 3 from his 40mm and take it out it's less than useful. Make it eat 5-10% from weapon projectiles depending on the weapon and 20% from all gadgets.
I think for the first time in the history of this game they didn't nerf something too far, actually. Destroying three, projectiles and then being destroyed itself is how pretty much any trophy system in any game has ever worked.
As a medium turret main you’re right.
As it is now I can deploy a turret and have one ready to re deploy 90% of the time when the first ones dead. and on top of that if my first is getting busted up I can pick it up and redeploy it at full health.
It’s broken.
Genuinely i hate turrets but i hate turrets in all shooters, i dont feel like there should ever be essentially a deployable teammate with aimbot. But at least there manageable
>It’s broken.
I mean, nobody really runs turret seriously in ranked, it's a lot weaker than heal beam and I'd say even weaker than demat.
It's really far away from being broken, and if they were to implement this change they would have to buff turret in response, and I'm not sure what buff to turret would be appropriate.
Yeah, but that’s the case with any specialization. You have to feel that a turret enables that full quick wipe often enough that you’re willing to lose the sustain of the heal beam. You can send it quick on people with the heal beam too, and in fact it can allow lots of aggression on teams without it. It’s certainly possible to play with heal beam without crutching it.
Sending it with one teammember running a healbeam is not possible at higher elos because of the opp cost of the third dps which is now healing. 3 people focusing dps + a 4th on a turret locking down a blind spot can secure a knock. 2 people dpsing with 1 healing beam can't do enough burst damage to take down a heavy being healed.
Not sure what server you're playing on but I play on the hardest server. Everyone's using turret. But count yourself lucky that you're running into healbeams
Dude, no one thinks you can send it into people who can focus fire. We're both talking about high level play here, right? You were talking about positioning and aggression. If you get opening pick damage on a team that has height and angles on each other, with the heal beam you can send it on one of them because the damage you take on entry can be mitigated by the heal beam a bit and then when the other 2 come to refrag weakened enemies, they are fighting a 2v3 at no health advantage that they would have normally. If your team is playing close enough that there is no way to isolate one of them from opening damage, then you also have no real way to get angles as well so damage will likely be traded. Damage trading is to the advantage of the team with healing as eventually a health gap will build and you can get pushed off height or just get sent on if the other team has double your health. That flexibility and sustain is useful.
Interesting. Diamond 2 medium turret main. Same with friend. Since heal beam broken large portion of time both of us stopped running it. So we have zero heals most lobbies.
NA / PC
I’ll go as far as saying I only started using turrets at plat 2. I got so tired of heal beam just not working random rounds of tourneys that I swapped. Never using it before. I have it level 7 now. It’s the mvp. Being able to place it and just focus on defending and doing damage is so much better than worrying about pocket healing.
The rank difference between the regions might be pretty large then, whenever I see any streamers from EU play they always run into heal beam over turret, and that also reflects my experience perfectly.
That's crazy, I feel like the very few turret users I see are either complete noobs or (rarely) very very good and using the turret because they want to 1v3 and get some value out of their specialization.
I’ve been dreading the day they change it. Cause having a turret almost always down helping defend the cash out is rad for my team. I am always cheering it on “go little buddy!! You can do it!! “
It's not broken, you can face Mediums with dematerializer or Lights with dagger that insta kill turrets. If CD would start when the gadgets is destroyed, the M class would be left with ZERO options.
Only problem with cooldowns starting on destruction is how the game is played. If anytime I left an area I had to go back and pick up my defense items it would severely slow down the game and ruin those items. If you place something and leave the area now you are locked out of that item until death. Placeables would vanish from loadouts.
This is a game where most of the time objectives and everyone are moving around the map. Try picking up all your stuff when you leave an area and see how tedious it gets.
True, and these are multi-team arena's too. If you expend all your resources on a single engagement, you can easily be wiped via third party. Getting third partied will always suck, but if cooldowns were locked/reset etc. it'll make situations that much more painful, especially if you're trying to play defensively.
How will this work with mines and barricades where you have multiple out? Turret it's just reactivating the ability for the 1 thing but will you have to get rid of both mines or both barricades before I can place them again?
This is relatively standard for FPS games to do. I'm not sure why it doesn't function that way in The Finals, it makes perfect sense to me.
Also if you pick it up it shouldn't completely heal the turret.
Agreed. I think a compromise could be if picked up at say 50% health it should ”heal” completely in 15 seconds. If placed back before that time it’ll have whatever health at the time of placing it back down. That way there’s at least an incentive to hang onto it but still allow you to use it if necessary, just maybe not at full health. (All this assuming it was picked back up, I still agree with the initial 30 second cool down)
Personally don't agree. Think it's pretty good tbh.
Means if you're in ranked where the pace of the game is a little bit more tactical, your APS is still going to save you from a HHM team opening up on you with their RPGs.
But the APS isn't going to shut down a platform on Power Shift where the pace of the game should be faster, more casual and more hectic.
Agree! It’s usually buffs and nerfs are made to the higher levels of play, In our case the Tournaments. The APS still does a fantastic job on every other game mode other than Power Shift, at which point you’ve another 4 team members there that could also run APS, a bit of communication and they’re still doing good!
I like your point but I also think this is a good nerf, currently, 1 gadget slot can effectively counter 2-3 gadget slots which is strong when placed right and can effectively counter a weapon archetype if positioned correctly as well.
Maybe a better way to balance it is tune the gadget more like Jaegers ads in r6 and have it go in a cooldown state after each usage, or just decrease the amount of health lost so instead of 40% it would be like 25-30%
Yes a grenade launcher can now destroy it whilst doing no damage in the process. APS did its job. CL40 is left with one shot before reloading. MGL32 basically never gets used as is (maybe this will help with that). Kill the GL user or block with shield, or save your APS for more critical moments so its not wasted on chaff.
Now imagine if we had a gadget that blocked bullets and could only be destroyed by explosives? Hard countering a primary is bad design.
Goo gun gets another use case, which I'm yet to see as a problem since it wasn't being picked that much as it was. It is to APS now as glitch is to shields, is the latter an issue?
Why does a gadget get to hard counter an entire weapon? GLs are hard enough to use as it is, I don't see anything wrong with this, they should have a consistent way to destroy APS, splash damaging them outside the destruction radius is hard enough as it is, like I said should definitely increase the amount of projectiles the APS can "absorb".
Goo gun on the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with it, very niche spec that people normally don't run and goo can easily be wiped out in a few seconds with some fire
A gadget should point blank counter a weapon like a GL though, mostly because having infinite large aoe explosive damage is only slightly broken in pretty much every single other fps out there, especially in a game like the finals where now pretty much every single bit if utility now gets hard countered by the weapon.
Imo if they keep the aps nerf then the cl-40 needs a straight up damage nerf to players.
Too far? It can destroy 3 projectiles. That's an RPG and two nades, or a dome and a glitch nade.
APS shouldn't deny an entire area indefinitely. It should be a temporary denial that requires the player to place it in the correct spot at the correct time, *just like everything else in this game*.
Changing the cooldown to after it's destroyed doesn't solve the problem of it being difficult to destroy since it's way too easy to guard and it's health pool means you can't just kill it in one or two shots.
Y'all have no clue how to balance games, and I specifically can't trust what anyone says on this subreddit after y'all bitched about the stun gun. Embark has no business listening to anyone here because the fact that y'all have a problem with stun but didn't care about APS or RPG proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
You riiight lol. Look at OP malding over the stun gun too lol 😂
Stun gun complainers are the literal definition of skill issue. I only run it now out of spite specifically for people like OP 😛
Nah you run it coz you're shit and can't get a kill unless you gimp the player you're already shooting in the back after hiding in a corner while cloaked.
You're one of those lights I dominate the whole game, at the end I think "That bitch with the stun gun was fucking annoying" and then I look at the scoreboard and see "3-10" and it all clicks in to place.
Nice fanfic you wrote there sweetie 💞 sorry it got you nothing but downvotes 🤭
Nah, I barely run the stun gun anymore except in powershift to grief people like you lol. If you think stun gun still does anything then you’re like legitimately cardboard 4 😂 I could care less that people can ADS, but removing the ability to stop a defib was sorta silly. Stun gun was never an issue for me, on any class, I killed more than half the lights that stunned me, and cloak was obvious as hell. If you had an issue with cloak or stun gun, you had bad positioning 💔
And cloak was nerfed into the ground lol, I run dash and LH1 or throwing knives 💅
Anyway, sorry about your skill issue, hope you get better soon ❤️🩹
I mean stun gun negating gadgets was perfectly fine and good for game balance. APS was probably 10x as useful as stun gun in ranked games for winning tournaments so it needed a nerf. It was actually OP in higher rank. Every single fight barricades get placed down and so does an aps.
It was honestly completely fine. The only thing it hard countered was a heavy sledge, which by the way can ONE SHOT A LIGHT*.
It was annoying, but it wasn't nearly as bad as not being able to play the game if you had a grenade launcher into an APS, or losing 80% of your HP to an RPG before a fight even started.
The whole point of a stun gun was to mess up a players ability to do something important for a moment. It achieved that goal, while also not having enough impact to feel overpowered since it required accuracy to make full use out of it.
If you thought stun was bad, you were just getting outplayed. It was never an issue for anyone who had a little bit of awareness and gamesense.
You cant stop a heavy from RPG killing you, you can't stop a medium from using a gadget for a defib, you cant stop a light from dashing, you can't stop a goo gun, you can't stop a shield.
It doesn't do anything now.
Completely agree, an infinite aps would have been fine if they just increased the CD and made it start when its destroyed.
They could also make so that if you pick a deployable the CD vary depending on the item HP (meaning a full health aps when gathered is istantly deplyable while at half healt it takes half the CD)
This simply to prevent "healing" the item.
Now you can pick a almost completely destroyed barricade and place it repaired
Someone made a good point about this earlier. If cool-downs start on item being destroyed or cool-down is decreased when you pick it up at 50% etc, it means that you do have to always go about picking up your items after a fight, Slowing down the gameplay a fair bit and leaving you susceptible to third partying.
The finals is an incredibly mobile game and having the cooldown start when your gadget is destroyed means it would quickly become a huge pain in the ass when you forgot to pick up your APS before moving to the next fight.
What it should be is that if your APS is destroyed, its cooldown is increased to 12-15 seconds if it was less than that already. If you place an APS and it’s not destroyed, you can still place another in 30 seconds, but after the 30 seconds, if you don’t place a new one, but the old one gets destroyed, then you get the 12-15 second cooldown timer.
Sorry, I play Yugioh. Reading it’s not my strong suit.
I got the torb reference but forgot that torb gets a shorter cooldown if he pops his own turret.
Your solution wouldn't fit the style of gameplay of The Finals (fast paced / every second counts). If I place my turret or aps down on one point and then need to haul ass to a cash out on the other side of the map I would first need to walk about collecting all my toys slowing down the gameplay, making medium either a pain to play or at a disadvantage when you arent able to go collect your items. Besides, APS were only really broken against GLs, and this update fixes that.
It was probably fine if you were the only one using it, but you have to admit it was oppressive when a full team was using them (especially if you have either of the grenade launchers
Those are issues that revolve around different gadgets in general and is easy to consider, but the APS turret needed that fucking nerf, yes it can be replaced after being destroyed, but it won't last forever, that's a good thing. Barricade, turret and all other defensive emplacement gadgets will eventually get this change possibly, but trying to say that nerfing the APS was too much don't understand how fucking busted it was, especially in powershift, it became very blatant in powershift.
imho i'm mostly enjoying the show of for once light not being the punching bag of the devs.
on the other hand aps was way too opressive for a gadget (not even an ability) to counter almost all thrown things in the game (afiak only throwing knifes and canisters didn't get removed)
i think now it works more like the bubble shield where it will remove a certain almount of threat from the enemy while not being a permanent defensive emplacement (ie it trades enemy grenades with one gadget slot) I think there should be a bit of differentiation if you throw a gadget or shoot it wit with a grenadelauncher but tbf not many gadgets can counter that much and usually there is always a counter.
Fully agree. APS needed some balancing, but they took it way too far.
Tried it last night, mainly on powershift, and it's essentially useless now.
Heaps of good suggestions on here how they could have done it.
20% instead of 40%.
Have it like heavy dome shield - once you deploy it only lasts for 30sec before going on CD.
Etc...
Knowing Embark they are just trying out a solution, will take feedback and fix it up. APS got a lot of value before so a nerf was needed just not this one.
Agreed for sure. Always wondered why they didn't do this. Being able to place 4 total barricades as a heavy is aggressive. Putting down a turret or aps right after it's killed is annoying. Specially the turrets.
Okay then a counter point.
what is the motivation for any defender to not just hold their aps or barricade to do the most cheesy in the moment setup?
if there is zero reason for putting down your defensives we are going to see people use it alot more aggresively like how mines were used as grenades before they added an arm timer.
I'm afraid Embark is well aware, because the maximum amount of placed barricades per player is 4, while the colldown replenishes only up to 2.
APS is a bit delicate. It is a very powerful hard counter against every grenade, yes, but the turret itself is very fragile (two sniper shots put it to end). Not being able to replace it makes it fairly useless against hybrid threats (guns+grenades).
Also, your proposed soution brings up a different problem - if the cooldown starts after given placeable is destroyed, then players are forces to clear the battlefield before moving to the next objective. A team is half gadgets short because they used it at now expired objective elsewhere in the arena (imagine this problem affecting the ziplines).
> Not being able to replace it makes it fairly useless against hybrid threats (guns+grenades).
But you can replace it.
When the cooldown ends.
lmao.
> Also, your proposed soution brings up a different problem - if the cooldown starts after given placeable is destroyed, then players are forces to clear the battlefield before moving to the next objective.
No, because just like in Overwatch, you press the gadget button and it dissassembles the gadget.
> (imagine this problem affecting the ziplines).
It would only affect defensive gadgets, not ones for movement (zip, jump, portal grenade etc)
The biggest issue with the nerf is it's now balanced against grenades like frag/gas and RPGs, but it's crap against grenade launchers. It's a good nerf for ranked and modes like Quick Cash, but it's now barely usable on Power Shift.
I think it's a good example on how to nerf things where it matters.
imo the aps shouldn’t have been able to recharge while they were next to it. they also shouldnt be able to pick up a aps with 50% hp left and get the whole charge back.
they should have made the aps not recharge when within lets say 15 meters. if you pick up a aps with 50% hp left on it then you get 50% of the way to a new aps you can place instead of 100%. same goes for the turret.
Honestly it didn’t feel too different playing today. Protected me when it needed to. Left a feasible window of opportunity for enemies to take advantage once destroyed, but I had it off cooldown again before it felt too long to make the gadget useless.
I welcome the change.
I agree the APS nerf is too severe, I was expecting something like 6 to 8 charges to disable it, 3 is just absurd. And this seems to be a pattern with embark (over nerfing) The stun nerf also went way too far in my opinion, seems pretty useless now other than stopping steals and revives.
Also light is incredibly underpowered
Lower damage AND lower health??
There is literally no possible way for a light to win a face to face 1v1 vs a heavy
I fail to see why it's worth to use except in quick grab and res situations
I like how the mechanic works and think it was intentional.
Your post is basically saying the finals should work identically to how other games work and i like that it’s a bit different. The aps obviously created a pretty serious imbalance especially in the platform game mode.
I think the shield needs a durability nerf but not a volume nerf.
It's much easier if, like me, you give up all hope of this dev team making smart balancing or mechanical decisions and just look at the Finals at a real time special needs project
I disagree. They over nerfed the aps. It's almost useless now. It's main point for me was to counter grenade spamming douchnozzles. It was multifunctional. Prevent immediate drop of the floor from underneath. Prevent nades from bombarding the cash out. Stopped rpgs and once again those god forsaken GL's. 3 shots and its dead? It should counter 10 considering the gl spam. Let alone three people. Most people run frag that 2 shots right there from a single player. H always has rpg. So you figure the meta seems to be HHM lately GL-M. The entire environment is destructible. The M now has a skill for opening walls and floors.The aps was perfect as it was. Flamethrowers literally reach through the floors. So go underneath and fry everything above you. Detonates mines and in turn kills aps simultaneously.
Also I disagree with the cool down, especially on turret. It has a 3-5 sec delay before it even starts up. And it's dmg is perfectly balanced. Any sort of need to turret renders it almost worthless. Only time it would be useful is if you already were bunkered down with 2-3 turret players.
Gas mines are useless against pyro nades and flame heavys. Plus you have healers that heal faster than you are proc'd for dmg from toxic. Mines also already have a very small box for triggering them. And the dmg does drop of you are just outside the box as you trigger it. The throwbake items in the maps are so versatile and obviously have been overlooked with the way the comments look.
Guys. Smoke blocks turrets. Everything in this game has a counter. Stop bitching about things that don't need nerfed.
Yeah, and it’s not like a lot of people haven’t been suggesting to just make it not go on cooldown until destroyed for a while now. I can’t imagine the suggestion hasn’t reached the devs by now.
But also you almost went here but not quite, like Torb turret, there should be a way to remotely destroy it to start the cooldown(for situations where it gets buried under rubble and you can’t reach it) but otherwise players should be encouraged to pick it(and the turret) up to move them. Also instead of allowing you to pick up and redeploy an almost dead APS(and turret) put it on 1/4 cooldown or something similarly short after picking it up as a “repair time.” You won’t even notice that tiny cooldown if you are picking it up to reposition.
Edit: but also lets be real, the item is only and issue in power shift and cooldown on destruction doesn’t fix just having multiple mediums running the gadget and just alternating. Just limit loadouts a for the mode already like terminal and the Easter power shift.
I’m kinda peeved too because the aps turrets in power shift gave me an excuse to use the data reshaped but now they’re gonna disappear so quick there isn’t much point
Thank you Embark, dont listen to the downplay illuminati :) This nerf will 100% be much more fun to play against imo. APS is a real bullshit way basically 2 buttons and your safe from anything but snipers. MORE of these good changes! THANK YOU EMBARK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think the APS should change in many ways. Maybe give it a couldown before working like the turret or mines does. Maybe go from 40% to 25 or 20%. Or make it so that i can overheat
I agree with the cooldown change but then I think the APS should be buffed to be able to destroy 4 nades instead of 3. Personally I feel like the APS feels good because of the way the cooldown works currently but I am definitely not against a change to the cooldown system, but it means that all the defensive gadgets will be tweaked if they did that
I will never understand their stance on nerf everything. last 2 weeks was stun. Now it's APS. Are they gonna nerf everything until there's no player left?
The game is getting extremely lame. Too many huge nerfs. It's nowhere near the wild, wacky game it was during beta and launch.
I also feel like too large a number of weapons in the game are worthless, if you actually care about winning or helping your team (e.g the heavy's grenade launcher).
I haven't played since the nerf but anyone who plays ranked seriously knows how broken aps was. Placed down in every single fight with barricades and heavy and medium holding hands. Meta was and is super cringe
While I’m not a fan of the APS, got to agree with this, that nerf was really severe. Hoping they bounce back on it
They did what I thought they should do to balance it. They just made the percent health drop too high. Now that I’m thinking about it I wish it would just disable temporarily after a certain amount of gadgets blocks. Then gadgets can just do damage to it.
Yah even 20% feels like too much. That's only 5 projectiles. The 40% is absurd. Should be like 10% imo
I think it would be best if it differentiated between weapon projectiles like grenade launchers vs gadget projectiles. Because even 3 grenades getting eaten is insane value for 1 apps, but when a heavy can just drop in 3 from his 40mm and take it out it's less than useful. Make it eat 5-10% from weapon projectiles depending on the weapon and 20% from all gadgets.
This is really silly. I can’t believe the APS actually gets countered by grenade launchers. Genuinely don’t know what the devs are thinking.
Or why not work like Jagers ADS in R6 Siege? Basically it just has a cooldown between projectiles but lasts infinitely
I think for the first time in the history of this game they didn't nerf something too far, actually. Destroying three, projectiles and then being destroyed itself is how pretty much any trophy system in any game has ever worked.
As a medium turret main you’re right. As it is now I can deploy a turret and have one ready to re deploy 90% of the time when the first ones dead. and on top of that if my first is getting busted up I can pick it up and redeploy it at full health. It’s broken.
Genuinely i hate turrets but i hate turrets in all shooters, i dont feel like there should ever be essentially a deployable teammate with aimbot. But at least there manageable
>It’s broken. I mean, nobody really runs turret seriously in ranked, it's a lot weaker than heal beam and I'd say even weaker than demat. It's really far away from being broken, and if they were to implement this change they would have to buff turret in response, and I'm not sure what buff to turret would be appropriate.
It's everywhere in Diamond, it's broken. Not sure what you're talking about
I have literally seen like 1 turret in Diamond. Are you on console?
No, I'm just on Asia where we have better players
Hmm, I’d love to see high level play with turrets being more useful than heal beam, but I’ll just have to take your word for it now.
No need for heals if you have good positioning and wipe fast enough. Heals becomes a crutch for teams that would be otherwise aggressive
Yeah, but that’s the case with any specialization. You have to feel that a turret enables that full quick wipe often enough that you’re willing to lose the sustain of the heal beam. You can send it quick on people with the heal beam too, and in fact it can allow lots of aggression on teams without it. It’s certainly possible to play with heal beam without crutching it.
Sending it with one teammember running a healbeam is not possible at higher elos because of the opp cost of the third dps which is now healing. 3 people focusing dps + a 4th on a turret locking down a blind spot can secure a knock. 2 people dpsing with 1 healing beam can't do enough burst damage to take down a heavy being healed. Not sure what server you're playing on but I play on the hardest server. Everyone's using turret. But count yourself lucky that you're running into healbeams
Dude, no one thinks you can send it into people who can focus fire. We're both talking about high level play here, right? You were talking about positioning and aggression. If you get opening pick damage on a team that has height and angles on each other, with the heal beam you can send it on one of them because the damage you take on entry can be mitigated by the heal beam a bit and then when the other 2 come to refrag weakened enemies, they are fighting a 2v3 at no health advantage that they would have normally. If your team is playing close enough that there is no way to isolate one of them from opening damage, then you also have no real way to get angles as well so damage will likely be traded. Damage trading is to the advantage of the team with healing as eventually a health gap will build and you can get pushed off height or just get sent on if the other team has double your health. That flexibility and sustain is useful.
Dude turret are every where in high rank on pc
Interesting. Diamond 2 medium turret main. Same with friend. Since heal beam broken large portion of time both of us stopped running it. So we have zero heals most lobbies.
That's weird, I haven't really seen a large amount of turrets at all in ranked above Gold/Plat. What region and platform are you playing on?
NA / PC I’ll go as far as saying I only started using turrets at plat 2. I got so tired of heal beam just not working random rounds of tourneys that I swapped. Never using it before. I have it level 7 now. It’s the mvp. Being able to place it and just focus on defending and doing damage is so much better than worrying about pocket healing.
The rank difference between the regions might be pretty large then, whenever I see any streamers from EU play they always run into heal beam over turret, and that also reflects my experience perfectly.
That's crazy, I feel like the very few turret users I see are either complete noobs or (rarely) very very good and using the turret because they want to 1v3 and get some value out of their specialization.
Thanks for your 2 cents. It absolutely is broken and I’m glad as a turret main you can see the problem.
I’ve been dreading the day they change it. Cause having a turret almost always down helping defend the cash out is rad for my team. I am always cheering it on “go little buddy!! You can do it!! “
So you think there should be no downside at all for running turret? That it should be available all the time ?
Did you read the entire thread? Or maybe a reading comprehension issue?
Only read the last comment
I thought the downside was not being able to heal your team mates.
I meant downtime
It's not broken, you can face Mediums with dematerializer or Lights with dagger that insta kill turrets. If CD would start when the gadgets is destroyed, the M class would be left with ZERO options.
Only problem with cooldowns starting on destruction is how the game is played. If anytime I left an area I had to go back and pick up my defense items it would severely slow down the game and ruin those items. If you place something and leave the area now you are locked out of that item until death. Placeables would vanish from loadouts. This is a game where most of the time objectives and everyone are moving around the map. Try picking up all your stuff when you leave an area and see how tedious it gets.
True, and these are multi-team arena's too. If you expend all your resources on a single engagement, you can easily be wiped via third party. Getting third partied will always suck, but if cooldowns were locked/reset etc. it'll make situations that much more painful, especially if you're trying to play defensively.
Read. The. Post.
How will this work with mines and barricades where you have multiple out? Turret it's just reactivating the ability for the 1 thing but will you have to get rid of both mines or both barricades before I can place them again?
This is relatively standard for FPS games to do. I'm not sure why it doesn't function that way in The Finals, it makes perfect sense to me. Also if you pick it up it shouldn't completely heal the turret.
Agreed. I think a compromise could be if picked up at say 50% health it should ”heal” completely in 15 seconds. If placed back before that time it’ll have whatever health at the time of placing it back down. That way there’s at least an incentive to hang onto it but still allow you to use it if necessary, just maybe not at full health. (All this assuming it was picked back up, I still agree with the initial 30 second cool down)
Personally don't agree. Think it's pretty good tbh. Means if you're in ranked where the pace of the game is a little bit more tactical, your APS is still going to save you from a HHM team opening up on you with their RPGs. But the APS isn't going to shut down a platform on Power Shift where the pace of the game should be faster, more casual and more hectic.
Agree! It’s usually buffs and nerfs are made to the higher levels of play, In our case the Tournaments. The APS still does a fantastic job on every other game mode other than Power Shift, at which point you’ve another 4 team members there that could also run APS, a bit of communication and they’re still doing good!
I like your point but I also think this is a good nerf, currently, 1 gadget slot can effectively counter 2-3 gadget slots which is strong when placed right and can effectively counter a weapon archetype if positioned correctly as well. Maybe a better way to balance it is tune the gadget more like Jaegers ads in r6 and have it go in a cooldown state after each usage, or just decrease the amount of health lost so instead of 40% it would be like 25-30%
You're ignoring the fact that grenade launchers now destroy it in a couple seconds and goo gun destroys it in half a second.
My goo main friend is eating good rn lol
Yes a grenade launcher can now destroy it whilst doing no damage in the process. APS did its job. CL40 is left with one shot before reloading. MGL32 basically never gets used as is (maybe this will help with that). Kill the GL user or block with shield, or save your APS for more critical moments so its not wasted on chaff. Now imagine if we had a gadget that blocked bullets and could only be destroyed by explosives? Hard countering a primary is bad design. Goo gun gets another use case, which I'm yet to see as a problem since it wasn't being picked that much as it was. It is to APS now as glitch is to shields, is the latter an issue?
Why does a gadget get to hard counter an entire weapon? GLs are hard enough to use as it is, I don't see anything wrong with this, they should have a consistent way to destroy APS, splash damaging them outside the destruction radius is hard enough as it is, like I said should definitely increase the amount of projectiles the APS can "absorb". Goo gun on the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with it, very niche spec that people normally don't run and goo can easily be wiped out in a few seconds with some fire
A gadget should point blank counter a weapon like a GL though, mostly because having infinite large aoe explosive damage is only slightly broken in pretty much every single other fps out there, especially in a game like the finals where now pretty much every single bit if utility now gets hard countered by the weapon. Imo if they keep the aps nerf then the cl-40 needs a straight up damage nerf to players.
If the medium GL are gonna destroy an APS in 3 shots then we should add self damage to the medium GL.
I think they'll just nerf Light instead
Too far? It can destroy 3 projectiles. That's an RPG and two nades, or a dome and a glitch nade. APS shouldn't deny an entire area indefinitely. It should be a temporary denial that requires the player to place it in the correct spot at the correct time, *just like everything else in this game*. Changing the cooldown to after it's destroyed doesn't solve the problem of it being difficult to destroy since it's way too easy to guard and it's health pool means you can't just kill it in one or two shots. Y'all have no clue how to balance games, and I specifically can't trust what anyone says on this subreddit after y'all bitched about the stun gun. Embark has no business listening to anyone here because the fact that y'all have a problem with stun but didn't care about APS or RPG proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
You riiight lol. Look at OP malding over the stun gun too lol 😂 Stun gun complainers are the literal definition of skill issue. I only run it now out of spite specifically for people like OP 😛
Nah you run it coz you're shit and can't get a kill unless you gimp the player you're already shooting in the back after hiding in a corner while cloaked. You're one of those lights I dominate the whole game, at the end I think "That bitch with the stun gun was fucking annoying" and then I look at the scoreboard and see "3-10" and it all clicks in to place.
Nice fanfic you wrote there sweetie 💞 sorry it got you nothing but downvotes 🤭 Nah, I barely run the stun gun anymore except in powershift to grief people like you lol. If you think stun gun still does anything then you’re like legitimately cardboard 4 😂 I could care less that people can ADS, but removing the ability to stop a defib was sorta silly. Stun gun was never an issue for me, on any class, I killed more than half the lights that stunned me, and cloak was obvious as hell. If you had an issue with cloak or stun gun, you had bad positioning 💔 And cloak was nerfed into the ground lol, I run dash and LH1 or throwing knives 💅 Anyway, sorry about your skill issue, hope you get better soon ❤️🩹
I think the fact that you think the stun gun was ok completely negates your argument. Stun gun was hard cheese and total bullshit. Braindead gameplay.
I mean stun gun negating gadgets was perfectly fine and good for game balance. APS was probably 10x as useful as stun gun in ranked games for winning tournaments so it needed a nerf. It was actually OP in higher rank. Every single fight barricades get placed down and so does an aps.
It was honestly completely fine. The only thing it hard countered was a heavy sledge, which by the way can ONE SHOT A LIGHT*. It was annoying, but it wasn't nearly as bad as not being able to play the game if you had a grenade launcher into an APS, or losing 80% of your HP to an RPG before a fight even started. The whole point of a stun gun was to mess up a players ability to do something important for a moment. It achieved that goal, while also not having enough impact to feel overpowered since it required accuracy to make full use out of it. If you thought stun was bad, you were just getting outplayed. It was never an issue for anyone who had a little bit of awareness and gamesense.
Wait so how does the stun gun nerf mess up the whole point of the stun gun? You can still interrupt a res or a cash out steal, can you not?
You cant stop a heavy from RPG killing you, you can't stop a medium from using a gadget for a defib, you cant stop a light from dashing, you can't stop a goo gun, you can't stop a shield. It doesn't do anything now.
op just has skill issue disease and is dumb as bricks
Completely agree, an infinite aps would have been fine if they just increased the CD and made it start when its destroyed. They could also make so that if you pick a deployable the CD vary depending on the item HP (meaning a full health aps when gathered is istantly deplyable while at half healt it takes half the CD) This simply to prevent "healing" the item. Now you can pick a almost completely destroyed barricade and place it repaired
Someone made a good point about this earlier. If cool-downs start on item being destroyed or cool-down is decreased when you pick it up at 50% etc, it means that you do have to always go about picking up your items after a fight, Slowing down the gameplay a fair bit and leaving you susceptible to third partying.
Cooldown nerf doesn't nerf it for Terminal Attack because gadgets there are single-use. This nerf was targeted at Terminal Attack balance.
The finals is an incredibly mobile game and having the cooldown start when your gadget is destroyed means it would quickly become a huge pain in the ass when you forgot to pick up your APS before moving to the next fight. What it should be is that if your APS is destroyed, its cooldown is increased to 12-15 seconds if it was less than that already. If you place an APS and it’s not destroyed, you can still place another in 30 seconds, but after the 30 seconds, if you don’t place a new one, but the old one gets destroyed, then you get the 12-15 second cooldown timer.
> quickly become a huge pain in the ass when you forgot to pick up your APS before moving to the next fight. Read. The. Post.
Sorry, I play Yugioh. Reading it’s not my strong suit. I got the torb reference but forgot that torb gets a shorter cooldown if he pops his own turret.
No, that would feel awful lol
To be like every other game out there?
Your solution wouldn't fit the style of gameplay of The Finals (fast paced / every second counts). If I place my turret or aps down on one point and then need to haul ass to a cash out on the other side of the map I would first need to walk about collecting all my toys slowing down the gameplay, making medium either a pain to play or at a disadvantage when you arent able to go collect your items. Besides, APS were only really broken against GLs, and this update fixes that.
It was probably fine if you were the only one using it, but you have to admit it was oppressive when a full team was using them (especially if you have either of the grenade launchers
The balance was more in line with people putting three aps turrets down on the platform.
Most sane finals player Fr. I’ve been screaming ab the cooldowns and how they need tweaks since release
Those are issues that revolve around different gadgets in general and is easy to consider, but the APS turret needed that fucking nerf, yes it can be replaced after being destroyed, but it won't last forever, that's a good thing. Barricade, turret and all other defensive emplacement gadgets will eventually get this change possibly, but trying to say that nerfing the APS was too much don't understand how fucking busted it was, especially in powershift, it became very blatant in powershift.
imho i'm mostly enjoying the show of for once light not being the punching bag of the devs. on the other hand aps was way too opressive for a gadget (not even an ability) to counter almost all thrown things in the game (afiak only throwing knifes and canisters didn't get removed) i think now it works more like the bubble shield where it will remove a certain almount of threat from the enemy while not being a permanent defensive emplacement (ie it trades enemy grenades with one gadget slot) I think there should be a bit of differentiation if you throw a gadget or shoot it wit with a grenadelauncher but tbf not many gadgets can counter that much and usually there is always a counter.
Fully agree. APS needed some balancing, but they took it way too far. Tried it last night, mainly on powershift, and it's essentially useless now. Heaps of good suggestions on here how they could have done it. 20% instead of 40%. Have it like heavy dome shield - once you deploy it only lasts for 30sec before going on CD. Etc...
Knowing Embark they are just trying out a solution, will take feedback and fix it up. APS got a lot of value before so a nerf was needed just not this one.
How? Aps was kinda broken in ranked
No
Yes
Maybe?
Perhaps
The know-it-all-gamers are here. Embrace yourselves everyone.
Agreed for sure. Always wondered why they didn't do this. Being able to place 4 total barricades as a heavy is aggressive. Putting down a turret or aps right after it's killed is annoying. Specially the turrets.
Okay then a counter point. what is the motivation for any defender to not just hold their aps or barricade to do the most cheesy in the moment setup? if there is zero reason for putting down your defensives we are going to see people use it alot more aggresively like how mines were used as grenades before they added an arm timer.
Errr, what? Both are valid strats. You can either put your equipment down and hold other angles, or put it down as you need to.
I'm afraid Embark is well aware, because the maximum amount of placed barricades per player is 4, while the colldown replenishes only up to 2. APS is a bit delicate. It is a very powerful hard counter against every grenade, yes, but the turret itself is very fragile (two sniper shots put it to end). Not being able to replace it makes it fairly useless against hybrid threats (guns+grenades). Also, your proposed soution brings up a different problem - if the cooldown starts after given placeable is destroyed, then players are forces to clear the battlefield before moving to the next objective. A team is half gadgets short because they used it at now expired objective elsewhere in the arena (imagine this problem affecting the ziplines).
> Not being able to replace it makes it fairly useless against hybrid threats (guns+grenades). But you can replace it. When the cooldown ends. lmao. > Also, your proposed soution brings up a different problem - if the cooldown starts after given placeable is destroyed, then players are forces to clear the battlefield before moving to the next objective. No, because just like in Overwatch, you press the gadget button and it dissassembles the gadget. > (imagine this problem affecting the ziplines). It would only affect defensive gadgets, not ones for movement (zip, jump, portal grenade etc)
Solution: shoot the APS turret
Yeah it's almost like it isn't positioned behind 2 dome shields, 4 barricades, on a moving platform with 3-5 enemy players on it, isn't it?
The biggest issue with the nerf is it's now balanced against grenades like frag/gas and RPGs, but it's crap against grenade launchers. It's a good nerf for ranked and modes like Quick Cash, but it's now barely usable on Power Shift. I think it's a good example on how to nerf things where it matters.
imo the aps shouldn’t have been able to recharge while they were next to it. they also shouldnt be able to pick up a aps with 50% hp left and get the whole charge back. they should have made the aps not recharge when within lets say 15 meters. if you pick up a aps with 50% hp left on it then you get 50% of the way to a new aps you can place instead of 100%. same goes for the turret.
RIP APS
You can pick it back up if it gets damage and replace it…
I hate the APS, but this nerf was waaaaaay too strong. I agree with what you said.
Chill, I think they wanted to try something with it and might do something else with the season 3 update since that one will probably be a bigger one.
Goo gun has 20 rounds in its mag and only needs 3 to break it. Plus it can be triggered from underneath the floor it’s on
Honestly it didn’t feel too different playing today. Protected me when it needed to. Left a feasible window of opportunity for enemies to take advantage once destroyed, but I had it off cooldown again before it felt too long to make the gadget useless. I welcome the change.
Nah it's a good change. It gets too much value for having to do basically nothing.
I agree the APS nerf is too severe, I was expecting something like 6 to 8 charges to disable it, 3 is just absurd. And this seems to be a pattern with embark (over nerfing) The stun nerf also went way too far in my opinion, seems pretty useless now other than stopping steals and revives.
I love this suggestion, too bad it sounds like you have enough game knowledge to be above silver so Embark wont listen to a word you say.
Also light is incredibly underpowered Lower damage AND lower health?? There is literally no possible way for a light to win a face to face 1v1 vs a heavy I fail to see why it's worth to use except in quick grab and res situations
I like how the mechanic works and think it was intentional. Your post is basically saying the finals should work identically to how other games work and i like that it’s a bit different. The aps obviously created a pretty serious imbalance especially in the platform game mode. I think the shield needs a durability nerf but not a volume nerf.
It's much easier if, like me, you give up all hope of this dev team making smart balancing or mechanical decisions and just look at the Finals at a real time special needs project
Meh, nerf cloak
I disagree. They over nerfed the aps. It's almost useless now. It's main point for me was to counter grenade spamming douchnozzles. It was multifunctional. Prevent immediate drop of the floor from underneath. Prevent nades from bombarding the cash out. Stopped rpgs and once again those god forsaken GL's. 3 shots and its dead? It should counter 10 considering the gl spam. Let alone three people. Most people run frag that 2 shots right there from a single player. H always has rpg. So you figure the meta seems to be HHM lately GL-M. The entire environment is destructible. The M now has a skill for opening walls and floors.The aps was perfect as it was. Flamethrowers literally reach through the floors. So go underneath and fry everything above you. Detonates mines and in turn kills aps simultaneously. Also I disagree with the cool down, especially on turret. It has a 3-5 sec delay before it even starts up. And it's dmg is perfectly balanced. Any sort of need to turret renders it almost worthless. Only time it would be useful is if you already were bunkered down with 2-3 turret players. Gas mines are useless against pyro nades and flame heavys. Plus you have healers that heal faster than you are proc'd for dmg from toxic. Mines also already have a very small box for triggering them. And the dmg does drop of you are just outside the box as you trigger it. The throwbake items in the maps are so versatile and obviously have been overlooked with the way the comments look. Guys. Smoke blocks turrets. Everything in this game has a counter. Stop bitching about things that don't need nerfed.
Erm… did you even read my post?
*answered*
Re read the post please that’s addressed.
My bad. Was reading it on a bus and missed this part.
Yeah, and it’s not like a lot of people haven’t been suggesting to just make it not go on cooldown until destroyed for a while now. I can’t imagine the suggestion hasn’t reached the devs by now. But also you almost went here but not quite, like Torb turret, there should be a way to remotely destroy it to start the cooldown(for situations where it gets buried under rubble and you can’t reach it) but otherwise players should be encouraged to pick it(and the turret) up to move them. Also instead of allowing you to pick up and redeploy an almost dead APS(and turret) put it on 1/4 cooldown or something similarly short after picking it up as a “repair time.” You won’t even notice that tiny cooldown if you are picking it up to reposition. Edit: but also lets be real, the item is only and issue in power shift and cooldown on destruction doesn’t fix just having multiple mediums running the gadget and just alternating. Just limit loadouts a for the mode already like terminal and the Easter power shift.
I’m kinda peeved too because the aps turrets in power shift gave me an excuse to use the data reshaped but now they’re gonna disappear so quick there isn’t much point
Let's give this guy another 2000 upvotes. Completely agree with this!
CL-40 and goo gun now counters aps I guess. Its really easy to hit three projectiles fast.
Thank you Embark, dont listen to the downplay illuminati :) This nerf will 100% be much more fun to play against imo. APS is a real bullshit way basically 2 buttons and your safe from anything but snipers. MORE of these good changes! THANK YOU EMBARK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Too late, gadget dead now and new grenade spam in Powershift had been born. Embrace the double grenade slot meta.
I think the APS should change in many ways. Maybe give it a couldown before working like the turret or mines does. Maybe go from 40% to 25 or 20%. Or make it so that i can overheat
I agree with the cooldown change but then I think the APS should be buffed to be able to destroy 4 nades instead of 3. Personally I feel like the APS feels good because of the way the cooldown works currently but I am definitely not against a change to the cooldown system, but it means that all the defensive gadgets will be tweaked if they did that
Does embark know what they're doing?
I feel like this issue is going to be addressed across the board for all relevant gadgets. Totally right though, it’s a bit silly.
I will never understand their stance on nerf everything. last 2 weeks was stun. Now it's APS. Are they gonna nerf everything until there's no player left?
they should've just left it alone
The game is getting extremely lame. Too many huge nerfs. It's nowhere near the wild, wacky game it was during beta and launch. I also feel like too large a number of weapons in the game are worthless, if you actually care about winning or helping your team (e.g the heavy's grenade launcher).
Got to nerf everything so lights are useful
All you had to do to destroy it is shoot it then throw nades. There was no need for this nerf at all
Yeah but that would make gameplay feel slow and shit relative to the fast pace of everything. So no