Issues With Drones and Snipers

Question

Drones, I hate em. I know this issue has been brought up a few times, but I haven't really seen it talked about a lot recently, and I'm not so sure the devs plan on nerfing them. They are basically another character within an already extremely powerful character. Airstrikes are absolutely broken right now, ESPECIALLY the parrot's. It takes like a second to activate and is at like a 10 second cool down. It instantly devastates groups of plants. This thing is the bane of your existence if you hang out with your team a lot, quite literally just a free bunch of kills. Their hit boxes are also so extremely small. This is a problem when aiming is still so uncomfortable right now. A major issue I have with drones is that they are a 0 risk ability, that shouldn't exist at all. Every single ability in the game no matter when you use it has some risk to it, except drones. You can just sit back in your spawn completely safe from all danger while your extremely lethal drone gets all the kills for you. The cooldowns are also another issue. Way too short. You can use a drone and then have it be off cooldown once it gets destroyed! And while the drone is raining in EXP from all the vanquishes it is most definitely getting, lets say you get lucky and happen to shoot it down, well congratulations you get 50 EXP... 🤨

Snipers themselves are also... weird I would say. I'm not going to go on and say they are the most broken thing in the game, but they are... very powerful right now. Erasing you before you can even react, I understand it might be my fault for not... seeing them, but its rather unfun just getting obliterated seemingly out of nowhere. Good luck reviving with them lurking around too, heh. I guess it just seems strange for most of the other characters to take a relatively long time to vanquish someone, when snipers can just delete you in a second. They are able to keep such a distance to the point where they can only really be killed by another faster sniper. And deadbeard's barrel is something I've also grown to hate more, its... hitbox seems funky to me. Might just be lag, but I swear sometimes I am very far away from it and die instantly, and other times I'm right on it and seemingly face tank it without getting a scratch. I understand this may be just me... and all that , but I really don't enjoy fighting snipers right now. If a team ends up having multiple snipers, things get unfun... quickly, but again my main issue here is the drones.

These problems have lead to some... rather unpleasant experiences. There have been multiple games now were I messed with a sniper and they have just targeted me ruthlessly with their drones for the rest of the game.

toastedsarnie · Answer

@brady3176 Agree! I remember adding to someone's post a while back, saying you needed a better chance of seeing & hearing the drones, but can't remember whose, sorry! You have little chance of evasive action simply because most of the time you don't know they're there & they deal huge damage.
And snipers taking out characters (especially with low or lower health) is too easy - even if it takes more than one shot, you can't see them or where the shot's coming from to try & escape it 9 times out of 10. You can't easily see them in the distance - they're not given away by the glare of a charged future shot for example. There aren't elemental shots, so you don't see the effect on others of a fire shot for another example. If there's any kind of sound effect from their weapon (or the drone), they're either too far away or it gets lost in all the other closer effects.
The maps are not full of wide open spaces like Great White North where one team's snipers can see the other's & it becomes a more fair (& more skilled) sniper vs sniper battle. Not fun.

gammax6 · Answer

I have&nbsp;3&nbsp;5&nbsp;options for that:Drones should have cooldowns as long as the Imp's Mech. But you can reduce that by dealing damage. In this case, the drone would have a slightly bit more HP.Cooldown stays the same, but the explosion damage of all drones is reduced to 50 ~ 70 damage at max. The ability should be used as a "finisher" rather than a OHKO ability.Improving audio/visual effects. Once the drones are activated, you should be able to hear that activation no matter where you are. If those explosion abilities are ready, then the drones would glow and start pulsing.&nbsp;Once the drone is destroyed, the sniper should be exposed for 5 ~ 10 seconds.Both Snipers SHOULD NOT be able to use drones from "Out of Bounds" locations for the other team. What I mean is, you can just spawn as Deadbeard, and from your spawn location, you activate the drone... But no one can reach you or shoot you because you are in a safe-zone that will show "Out of Bounds" to the plants. All Sniper players should ONLY be able to deploy their drones in a zone where the enemy can reach them and shoot them at close range. That's because, some clever players might see the drone in the sky, seize the chance to vanquish those players while they're in drone mode, which is a risk that those players must take. (I LOVE doing that, but I can't do it when they're in their spawn locations).I mentioned something in a Chomper post... "It is too mind taxing keeping your eye everywhere in this game." and the drones add more oil to the fire. Can't just keep looking at all directions. Especially with poor audio effects, you can barely see/hear them.Every time I die suddenly out of nowhere... I shout out "OF COURSE EGGSPLOSION" and most of the time... it's the case. An annoying cheap ability that has zero risk maximum reward.

brady3176 · Answer

@arit0824 Yeah I know the lag is bad. My problem with snipers themselves though is that when they keep such a distance it feels quite impossible to kill them without being a sniper yourself. I still think their extremely high damage output from their primary weapon.... doesn't really fit with everyone else. Again, takes much longer as most other characters, while snipers can just erase you safely from half way across the map. Lag also doesn't help here too, I will clearly be behind cover and still somehow get head shotted and die instantly.

iron_guard8 · Answer

The cooldowns are weird on the drones. I like that when setting up in TT for example, the cooldown doesn't start so you can't start with a drone swarm like we often had in the GW games. But on subsequent cooldowns, they seem to come back much faster. I would agree that they should likely make the cooldown a bit longer.

The drones are a bit slow though and can't seem to fly as high, I've both seen and have myself shot them down with almost every character thanks to that.

The garlic drones really rock around when firing the big strike, making it hard to hit with at times. The parrot's eggsplosion hits HARD and doesn't cover as large an area but also doesn't throw your aim off. I'd like that massive shudder when using the garlic drone's strike ability to be fixed.

On a sidenote, in GW2 you could press 'E' on the keyboard to detonate it early if you need to move or just get rid of it, that doesn't seem to be the case here. Can you detonate the drones early in BfN? If not, we really need that back.

arit0824 · Answer

The garlic drone isn’t much of a problem I don’t think. Due to weird servers, it’s difficult to fire the explosion and make it have some effect. The parrot’s eggsplosion, yes that’s a bit overpowered. Snipers aren’t that hard to counter, and it’s easier to see them ready to snipe and exactly where they snipe. Most snipers in other games kill instantly with a headshot, but not for the snipers in this game. It’s a bit disappointing to finally get a good headshot on the PS4 with the weird servers and find out they aren’t dead and immediately hide.

Maybe the drone’s cooldown should be increased, but unless they make some kind of flying character, I like the drones being present. I do agree that they should only have a drone out when they leave the out of bounds zone.

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Issues With Drones and Snipers

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