DICE Team
@mitcharf wrote:Dozer and Irish are the subjects of today’s discussion, as we feel they need some improvements to ensure they provide similar gameplay experience as others within their class. We’ve observed that both are underutilized Specialists within their respective classes, and we’re hoping these improvements will help towards rectifying that.I am not against the Irish nerfs. I'm at least open to seeing how they work in practice. But I'm confused about how nerfing him is supposed to help him from being underutilized.
I think we are all just as confused by this.
DICE seems to make most of their balancing decisions on telemetry data. My fear is that after DICE makes the Irish changes, a bunch of people try it out, only to eventually realize it's been severely nerfed (cooldown time is over 100% uptime). DICE interprets this temporary spike in Irish use as "success". But over several weeks, as people realize how much less effective Irish is, they eventually stop using him and the numbers go back down.
Or maybe DICE is assuming if they make the sentinel half as effective (it's actually worse), then more people will have to use him in order to get the same result. I don't think it will end up playing out this way. BF2042 playerbase is mostly self-serving.
The weirdest part to me is that nobody who authored or reviewed the announcement considered how confusing this would come across. I know that Dice are talented developers trying to do their best to make this game as good as possible within the constraints that they have (time, people, budget, corporate direction from EA, etc), even though I sometimes disagree with their choices. 10 reasonable people can have 10 very different ideas of what should be changed and how.
I have been frustrated by decisions Dice has made in the past and I'm sure I will be again, but usually when I disagree it isn't something like this where their explanation seems to contradict the accompanying changes. It's as it they'd said "Our player data has shown that the TOR tank is overpowered and kills vehicles too easily. We want it to be less dominant in vehicle combat. Therefore we're doubling the damage it deals and reducing its reload time."
