Jump Jet Balance

I am new. I only have a poorly developed opinion on balance.

Jump Jet seems bad as a stand-alone faction, relying on Pyro as a robust general-purpose raider that falls off mid and late-game. Most of its units seem niche, overly so, to the point where they are not practical even as a faction to dabble in.

Most notable these are: The Puppy, The Moderator, and The Placeholder

-The Puppy-
This unit seems to want to be effective at reclaiming wreckackage and attacking single large units with overwhelming burst.

In practice its range seems too slow, and its speed and health insufficient to do its job. Its value seems entirely limited to its 'build power', which is unfortunately restricted in only building one bad unit - the puppy.

I would like to see its range increased and its damage lowered to normalize it, maybe with a bit more health as well. If this proves too effective, decreasing its accuracy seems to be a better solution than decreasing its range. As it stands it has been shown to be too difficult to get into range and too unrewarding once it has. This all has the side-effect of giving JJ low-weight anti-air as well, even if it is had.

As a comparison, look at how much it costs in relation to the damage it does now, even under optimal circumstances. It is very rarely cost effective, even if you assume it consuming wreckage. You could instead be reclaiming that wreckage with a constructor and getting something good.


-The Moderator-
As it stands now, the unit seems reliant on an unintuitive and practically exploitative relationship between slow damage and shields. With the existence of the Freak and the Placeholder, this is more lackluster than ever.

Jump Jet would rather like a more functional skirmisher. Well-micro'd pyros and firewalkers serve as effective riot units, but the need for situational long range is real. Personally, I would increase the weight of moderator, and increase the maximum ability of the slow to around 75% - a proper crippling number. I feel JJ is the heavy-weight bot faction and this should be embraced, and I feel their unique positional mechanics should be renforced, but it is important to actually have this unit able to cripple something. If this is realistic, knockback might be useful (so few things have it), disarm, or murder.


-The Placeholder-
I want to like this thing. I really do. As it stands, it is too unreliable, too clumsy, and too expensive for its effect. If it were to remain as it is, I would recommend a slight range boost.

Instead, I would like to see the effect creating a physical barrier across the ground, creating a zone that simply stuck units in their current location, or creating a status effect that prevents movement. Gravity wells are cool, but they are just too unpredictable without some measure of additional consistency (longer duration, longer range, higher arch, etc).


Anyway, this is my view on the factory. I am interested to hear the opinions of others.

The placeholder really needs to be on holdfire for it to be used effectively. I think you are meant to use it in combination with pyros to torch the units that get clustered by it. There has been talk about changing the moderator for a while now but nothing was done to it. The puppy is a weird unit overall. It is devastating when used well in the right situation, but those situations are quite rare. Generally the jumpjet fac is very strange and should be played on maps where you can take full advantage of jumping units.

... I think a high-weight skirmisher would be sufficiently exciting to be worthy of the jumpjet/specialist fac. Now, personally I'd rather re-jigger the units around and play with a real heavy scale skirmisher using the Firewalker model, but the simplest approach would be to just give the Moderator a plasma cannon and 500 cost or something (I guess you could give it a disruptor, but we've already got a disruptor-skirmsiher in the Buoy).

GoogleFrog

What do you mean? It seems like a skirmisher with a good low-velocity projectile would have obvious synergy with the Slowfreak and the Placeholder, as well as picking off sluggish units like the Zeus.

quote: Flipstip So moving domi to jumpfac might improve balance?

What about giving moderator the domi weapon? That would be very good vs. Zeus. And moderators are usefull again.

On the subject of moderators.

Watching games with them, I feel much of their weakness in the need to micro them for them to be remotely effective.

Currently, there is no way to conduct attack micro effectively while kiting. The units simply dont respond to it optimally. Meanwhile, moderators often have no effect after the first shot to units. They must be very strongly micro'd to be useful.

It may be possible to fix them with just better AI, if people dont want them changed.


Likewise, I have been looking at the placeholder, and still feel it just needs a strict buff.

Failer We have a unit that disables movement. It's called the placeholder.

The factpry desperately needs a Zeus counter, but my designs for a skirmisher were not 'spammable', they were explicitly non-spammable such as a unit that relies on a non-stacking DoT to do a large amount of its damage.

Puppy makes cost against metal extractors almost all raiders: Glaives, Scorchers, Bandits. It does NOT make cost on the sub-50 cost scouts (Dart, Flea) though, and won't make cost if the enemy kills any of the puppies before they launch (Which the longer range Bandit and Scorcher can do). You can also attack gronud with the puppy, making it immune to all damage and quickly closing range. It can do this 3 times before it dies. This way, you can close range with units it outranges, even leap into LLT's, dodge defender projectiles, etc. This, like everything in the factory, is incredibly micro intensive.

If you lowered it's damage by even 2%, it would no longer 1-shot metal extractors, and thus would go from trading 1-1 with a 25m gain to trading 2-1 with a 25 metal loss.

The Puppy makes cost against ANY raider that does not kill it before it launches. In a situation where they are running at eachother, this is basically all raiders. In early game 1v1, you can totally use Puppy as a conventional raider unit.

Every other raider is effective against metal extractors, yes. Which is why the Puppy, which is a raider, also needs to be effective vs metal extractors. In fact that's why the unit was added, players could naked-expand vs Pyro because it's too expensive and it's coverage is too small. The Puppy prevents that.

Jumpies should skrim for their crim.

B227809 2 on Quicksilver 1.1