Caustic Needs Edits/Buffs
As a Caustic main myself he does need some buffs. His tacticals deploy slower than a snail crawls. And is ultimate is easily dodge-able.
Caustic is a defensive type. This can be taken a couple of ways. In Caustic's case though, this means pushing enemies off of your allies and giving them some breathing room. So just like a good defense can be made from a good offense, the vice versa is true too. It is really difficult to use caustic aggressively because: most fights take place outside of buildings, your own allies are avoiding you, his abilities activate slowly, and all of these combined usually means that if you're downed you are getting revived last. I've personally seen that happen time and time again. "Oh he's a Caustic and just saved our * with his ultimate inside this building? Let's revive him last." or "Oh its Caustic and we chased down an enemy to fight outside where I know Caustic is weak, so now he's down? Lets revive him last after we've looted."
Here are the buffs I suggest:
1) First and foremost, allies should no longer be affected by Caustic gas, period. You gotta think in a real world and as a scientist he'd be smart enough to bring masks for his "friends".
2) The second biggest thing that any Caustic player can tell you, is that his tactical needs a major deployment time fix. Decrease the time by 40% if I had to guess. I don't know that actual dead set time so I can't be accurately reasonable.
3) Again, related to his tactical mostly, but somewhat his ultimate as well. The damage of the Nox. There's a few ways to handle this. You could: A) increase the rate at which the damage pings. B) Increase the starting damage at 7. C) Increase the damage peaking point to 15. D) Some sort of modified combination of the previous.
4) Then there's his ultimate. The Nox Gas Grenade. Again, most combat takes place outside. Outside Caustic's ultimate is easily avoidable, from backing up to going around to climbing on a loot container or small boulder. Personally I dont have a problem with its spreading range, or it's duration. It's the height I have a problem with. His ultimate should climb higher. Take 30-50% of what it's volume currently is and add that to it. It should climb two people high.
5) Next we circle back around to his tactical. Lets say you have a small building loaded with Caustic's traps and blocking doors so enemies can't get in. All the enemies do is simply crack the door and close it. Trap activated and the enemy waits it out. Comes in or around. Kills you. Enemy tosses grenade in activates all traps, waits it out. Comes in or around. And kills you. The sensitivity of the Traps needs fixed. So that enemies can't just crack a door, close it, is unaffected waits it out, kills you. If that's too complicated to adjust then, the cooldown time on getting new traps needs decreased. Try from 25 seconds to 18. On top of needing to be able to store 4 traps, and deploy 8.
And just for extra credit: Why does Caustics traps disappear immediately upon death? Canisters, the gas, all of it. Just gone. Gas canisters that would have saved your allies when you died, gone. Gas from a nox bomb that would've killed enemies after your death, because you damaged them so much? GONE. But Wattson's traps sure stay on the field. Octane's "traps" sure stay on the field.
