Acorn and Imp - Balance Discussion

use chomper and super brains.

@chogath_playerDespite Robo Call giving you invincibility and Explosive Escape having a huge radius, I think Z-mech isn't that good besides Missile Madness. The primary does terrible damage. Bionic Bash is unusable in most situations. Z-mech feels nothing like GW2 z-mech, which was actually feared and still had Robo Stomp/Bionic Bash. There's no reason to play smart with Z-mech, you can just run in, do a little damage and then not get punished most of the time. Now the only reason to use Z-mech is to cheese plants by abusing Robo Call, stall capture points, and use Explosive Escape.
I can understand why z-mech can be annoying. It has a lot of cheesy abilities. Besides Robo Call's on-demand invincibility and Explosive Escape, it doesn't seem Imp gets punished enough when his Mech is taken down to 0 HP. Even though Imps ejection from a destroyed Mech is pretty well telegraphed, its still hard to predict and punish Imp when he gets out.

@SockReverieI agree with your thoughts on Z-mech. Z-mech is too weak where it shouldn't be, yet is powerful in all the wrong places, and is just broken.

Imp has a lot of versatility as he can call the Mech in when he's surrounded by enemies. Normally, I like to call my Mech in when there are many enemies near me, and then explosive escape and make a run for it. Or I just use it when I get to low health. Being able to do this and become invincible gives Imp quite an unfair advantage, and when not in Mech, he's small and hard to hit. But his primary weapons do fairly low damage.

Acorn has high mobility and the ability to transform to Oak nearly whenever he wants and use extra abilities (he has to be careful when and where he transforms however). Acorn also hits high damage with his primary and can use a Sap Trap, as well as having access to plenty of health (Hardened).

I think both of these characters are very good, but may need to be balanced a little bit, because not all the characters have access to these sorts of effects.

For Acorn, hardened needs to be nerfed or replaced with something else (likely nerfed). The whole point of playing as the Acorn is that he's tiny and can dash out of trouble but has low health to compensate. Currently with hardened, Acorn has more health than Sunflower, Cactus, or Rose and they're all much easier to hit. I can live with your proposal @SockReverie to make it 25 instead of 50 as that at least means that they are equal to many of the lower health plants on the team. I have a far easier time hitting jump spamming Nightcaps than bunny hopping Acorns without resorting to your mention of spamming attacks or relying on AoE.

For hitboxes, I real feel the hit box should match the character's base appearance as closely as possible. Paladins uses cylindrical hitboxes and while it works it has some odd results as you shoot the air around a character but hit that hitbox and damage them. It feels weird and can be frustrating when you thought they missed.

Oak and station need to be balanced against each other better. Except for Super Sap Trap, which can be detonated almost instantly, Oak is inferior to Space Station in pretty much every way. Space Station has no activation time (as opposed to the Acorn's yodel period), a stacked station is a bear to take town with huge health and shields, there's the guided torpedoes to worry about, and while crater maker has been nerfed and isn't that hard to avoid if you're aware of their location it can still be nasty. Conversely, Oak is almost worse than being an Acorn in PvP (in PvE the AI can hit you no matter how much you dodge), the Acorn riders are fun to play but don't add as much as station riders do, that period where you can be vanquished while changing into an Oak compared to pretty much instant station inflation, less mobile as you can't double jump and don't hover (both are large targets and not exactly mobile but Station does have some advantages here), and while it's not easy between target size and inherent damage reduction you can snipe Acorns out of the Oak whereas the cadets form a single large health pool. I actually like that they are different and not just carbon copies, but they need more balancing between them.

One thing stations do that I don't think they should is that it shouldn't regenerate health. None of the machines should regenerate health as players do but should need to be healed instead. This was a key factor for mechs in GW2. This could be a secondary balancing factor between Oak, which is alive and therefore does regenerate, and the machine based space station.

As for Imp, the biggest problems I have are with the mech. The Bionic Bash attack is another example of melee attacks in BfN not always registering properly and it feels rather lackluster when you use it. The AoE for explosive escape is just too large right now and needs to be shrunk. I feel the main issue with his primary is that it overheats so rapidly, making you have to push it and be unable to attack, or be conservative and not contribute as much to the team as I feel you should. If they adjusted other factors they could remove that missile madness while dying effect which I'm not even sure is what they were going for. Mechs, being large targets and not exactly mobile, are prime focus targets so may need a survivability buff as well.

I really think one of the costs for these 'big man' modes is that you should be vanquished with it if you don't leave it before the final damage is scored. Right now Imp survives which feels weird after GW2. I've seen a lot of Acorns and Cadets go down with their ships as it were, but too often it feels like they are able to escape very easily.