@stukapooka I love the original PvZ and got it on Steam near its launch so I hear you there too. I did play a ton of PvZ2 but it got so heavily monetized and the battle mode thing had issues and so my interest waned and I haven't played in at least a year. Heroes was actually really fun too but the support wasn't good and it too fell by the wayside.
But just in GW2 alone I have over 2700 hours played now. And while I don't hate BfN like many do, it certainly has a lot of things that hurt it; just off the top of my head there's; Engineer being made a boring class to play and frustrating to fight against on some maps, no damage attenuation with range (drop off), sprinting and jumping out of combat is too easy, healing/overhealing is too good, Ops are too limited and never finished, free roam zones are great until you 100% them, then there's almost zero reason to go back which is a waste of resources and some great visuals, sides are off-kilter as we never got a plant class to match the wizard, but there are more too. So yeah, I want a more GW type game but I don't feel that BfN has no merit at all, and some ideas should be used.
Space Cadet/Station and Acorn/Oak are great ideas but agree they make Imp feel less useful. Right now being a treetop Acorn is still a death sentence as they took the armor away and you can vanquish them just by hitting their Oak if you have any AoE! I really want to keep these new classes, but they could certainly use some reworks and balancing, and get rid of those horde characters! First time in any of the PvZ shooters I'd ask for characters to be pulled!
@Iron_Guard8I feel like torchwood would've been a far better option for a heavy tank class than either oak or citron in bfn. Because its clear they want their plant z mech but can't really get it right.
Poor engineer, he feels like the guinea pig of the og 4 as his drone was taken by deadbeard given that he became the zombies official sniper class in gw2, then he became diet peashooter in gw2 but he still had his overall job in turf remaining, but now in bfn it feels like they really don't know what to do with him is he defense? Support? Demoman? Every aspect of him feels changed because they realized that without teleporters or chomper with constant burrowing and no ranged options to counter with grenades or mines he really has no hardline purpose in the game unlike the other 3 of the gw1 cast who are clearly assault, defense, and medic support respectively easy (the other 3 also got to keep a relatively same version of their abilities while all of engimeers were changed with no alternative abilities like the proximity mine). Poor guy clearly must be going through something with all that weight he put on from gw2 to bfn. He is imo a massive fish out of water with the new system and it painfully shows imo.
Pve is great until you realize every area plays out in the same format and they're disconnected from each other, not all the missions were created equal imo, and that there is no major reward for finishing these modes outside of hats (infinity time while flawed was a great surprise for players who finished pve and rewarded them with new characters).
Oak and station seem good on paper but at the same moment the team play requires players to spam multiple of the same character much like TV head and wildflower
@stukapooka I'd be happy with Acorn/Oak being a slightly different version of the Imp/Mech and take the team play away. I do like the team idea, but it doesn't work out that well. Make the Mech like it was in GW2 where it didn't regen health since's it's a machine (although it can be healed), and make Oak able to regen as one difference between them. There's no reason they can't make a 'mech' for both teams while making them different but fun and balanced in their own ways, which is a huge point of the games in the first place!
As for the Cadet, I love her the most out of the new characters, but maybe take away the station idea entirely and replace it with the ability to call down a crater maker attack from a station in orbit like calling in an airstrike or something from other games. Then we'd only have to balance the Acorn/Oak with the Imp/Mech for the transform classes. It would certainly fix some of the ways mechs feel so meh in BfN.
I do give them credit for trying something new with the team classes, and if not for how it slammed into the Imp/Mech and pushed it aside, along with the balance issues they've given us, I do like the concepts. But as you said it's hard to make work and have needed more adjustments than almost any other character in BfN. It may be best to scrap it and move on while keeping the new characters as I love them both. I was ok with the horde characters at first, but I spent coins to max them out just so I could stop playing them. They're just not that fun and feel exactly like the filler they are. Don't bring these back in a new game!
Torchwood is pretty cool, but I love the idea of the Acorn/Oak and am happy with the Giga-Torchwood being a boss without the mini version.
If they really wanted to keep Engineer as he is in BfN, I'd say to replace the speed pad as it's not that useful anyway, separate the ammo replenishment idea from the turret and let us place an ammo crate that can be shot and has limited uses before it runs out and need to be placed again to replace the speed pad, make the turret just shoot and not refill ammo, and change the primary to not be so obnoxious to play against; it's especially bad on that first point in Turning Point. But, I'd rather go back to the GW1 or GW2 engineer or maybe use aspects of several of them. I don't feel that having a drone while the Pirate also does, really hurts anything.
The PvE zones do have the same flow, this may be why Plant Town Center is the best by a wide margin and the rest were still fun, but not as good. I'd like to see reasons to go back, more robust quests, more difference between how they flow, and other new ideas to make them more long lasting to enjoy. I do love looking for the hidden things and the puzzles in BfN.
Oh and as for Citron and All-Star. I would say to make the shields less powerful, especially Citron as multiple Citrons covering each other is the worst spawn camping I've ever seen! All-Stars can do it too, but at least they can't move the shield around once deployed so you can work around that.
@stukapooka For the Cadet, that's why I mentioned just taking the station away and give her that air strike like ability where she can call down a crater maker from orbit that does heavy damage and traces a path on the ground (not steered by the player, just an automatic line of damage) before going away to replace station inflation. I enjoy Cadet on her own just fine, and this way we could get that crater maker ability in a form similar to Butter Barrage from GW2, although instead of a big AoE, it would be a smaller AoE that would draw a line from the target point and then end after a short time.
My biggest complaint about Electric Slide and Rose for that matter, is they both have abilities that make them so annoying to fight against, and especially with the upgrade that makes them heal as well. Absolutely awful to deal with. I still find it crazy that they made Rose more annoying than she can be in GW2!
I'd be cool with teleporters coming back on TT maps. the BfN TT maps are too narrow so I can see why they were taken out, but the maps shouldn't be that narrow anyway, so fix that and make teleporters a thing again. I miss the big flank fights we had in GW and GW2, so much more fun than always being on the cart or the point.
For the PvE stuff, they reduced the types of AI mobs far too much; no back up dancers or vampire zombies as just 2 examples. They need to use a larger variety of AI enemies to spice the free roam regions up and get rid of the wildflowers and TV heads as they are annoying and actually ruin the normal dynamic of how the basic AI are supposed to work. They should also make the spawns less predictable and add more sudden events to add excitement to the regions.
