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No Prefix Remove/nerf scout class?

Discussion in 'Annihilation' started by JamesKreck, Nov 21, 2020.

No Prefix - Remove/nerf scout class?
  1. JamesKreck Regular Member

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    11,456xp
    The scout class is ridiculous.

    Every game of Ani it's my primary cause of death, since there's no real combat disadvantage from the ridiculous bonus of the grapple. It makes it impossible to retreat from someone with this class, as well, which makes early-game iron miners nearly helpless against them.

    Gameplay is FAR more interesting without this class, since often the way a nexus is attacked is by a single scout appearing and out-speeding everybody in the base into the nexus, rather than having more planned and slow multi-player attacks.

    Limits on this class are FAR overdue: they should get maybe a permanent weakness debuff, or a cooldown on the grapple, to promote a more team-oriented game.

    This is a great gamemode and I genuinely feel like scouts are the primary cause of rage-quitting and frustration.

  2. JonnyDvE Jr. Developer

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    2,426,906xp
    Ever gotten splashed by an invis with poison 2 and then sucked by succubus? Thats way worse in my opinion.

    Scout got many nerfs over the year, and I think its in a good state right now it still has its uses, but its not so overpowered that a scout in equal gear can kill you no matter what class you are. I think the impression of Scout beeing this super OP class stems from the fact that more experienced and skillful players tend to choose it, as the benefits of the grapple outweigh the downsides of not having a good active PvP ability for them. Scout is a class that is punishing you heavily for beiing out of postion as you cant outrun him, but you can always beat him in hand to hand combat if you got the same or better gear.
    To adress the points you mentioned: Block of the mine, so the scout cant get in.
    Defend the nexus by standing close to it, if you complain scout can get passed so can any assasin.
    Scouts dont end games, as its useless in a rush situation.
    Tobi472 and RipJorn like this.
  3. Savkid Regular Member

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    907xp
    I can't believe people still complain about scout , it has already been nerfed 1000 times and has many counters : slowness bard box , flame bow , fire swords etc. "They should get a cooldown on the grapple" thats already the case , its litteraly been nerfed alot and i don't see any reason to break the class more . As for minerushing just like jonny said block off ur iron mine and create iron armor when u go gold/ get lvls . If u die as a iron to a leather , well....... "Scout is mainly used for nexus rushing" dont know if ur playing anni on a different server or something but scout is not used for nexus rushing , neither is it good for it lol. People use : thor , succubus , rift , farmer etc to rush Not scout , only the runner might use it .

    You used to have: speed whilst having iron & dia , no Cd on grapple , slowness and fire didnt do anything , grapple under water , this version was broken , but right its just a average class lol. A Class thats actually broken is swapper . You can be leather all game and kill dias in mid with broken swapper traps , kill dias whilst they are rushing duo to broken traps or chain swapping , its ridiculous. Yet u complain about scout..... rofl.
  4. Tobi472 Platinum

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    1,650,597xp
    lets give them perma weakness 1 . Thats minus 0.5 attack damage gg
  5. Barobax Regular Member

    XP:
    478,906xp
    I know Scout was designed as a mobility class but honestly, its just a class for trolling. Most people use scout to hit and run, or to rush to enemy base to mess up their teleporters, or to pogo along the edge with near invulnerability. If it had just a permanent speed boost, it would still be one of the best classes and if it had just a grapple, it would still be one of the best classes but it has both so it's so ridiculously overpowered compared to all other classes. There really is no reason to play others classes unless you need to use a very niche ability like Enchanter, Rifter, or Teleporter. Why use Ninja to sneak around when you can just outrun all your enemies? Why use Warrior, Vamp, or Berserker for combat when you can just use your superior mobility to hit and run to slowly whittle your enemies hp? Why use Dasher when you can grapple all around an enemy base without block restriction? Why use Acrobat when you can just grapple to reduce fall damage?

    There are so many easy ways to nerf Scout like reducing damage, health, or removing either the speed or grapple. Conversely there are ways to buff the lesser used classes to bring them in similar power to Scout, for example I think Ninja should have a passive ability where his nameplate is grayed out at all times (similar to how it appears while sneaking) to all enemies.
    Murgatron and JamesKreck like this.
  6. Tobi472 Platinum

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    1,650,597xp
    Speed 1 makes it one of the best classes?
    24 minutes speed 1 cost 10 gold. 10 gold to become one of the best classes?
    Bard gives everyone in range speed 1. One class promtoes every class to be on of the best?
    Tinkerer gives everyone everywhere speed one. One class so your whole team is one of the best classes?

    Near invulnerabilty as in someone placing a bard box and u fall into the void?

    By your logic scout with iron gear is not one of the best classes and not op bc it only has the grapple.

    WTF LMAO how can you call enchanter, tp and rift niche? Those classes are used every game for longer than scout, break game mechanics and generate way more value.

    Why should you use dasher? Bc there are many situiatons / maps in which a dash is 10 times better than a grapple.

    As long your enemy isnt totally bad you are not able to hit and run as a scout on a single player. This is not a thing in a game in which you have to get close to hit someone. If you get hit you can hit aswell.

    If you nerf scout now it will be trash! Scout is only good if you have okish gear. While having op gear you wont go scout bc its way better to be dasher or arcobat with speed 1 or 2. Even for rushing scout is the worst out of the 3 mobility classes.

    Warrior vamp and Berserker are the worst of the worst pvp classes rn. The best one is thor rn. And a thor leather should always win a leather 1v1 vs a scout.

    3 reasons for your post: 1. Your a troll
    2. Your a not one of the better players.
    3. Your a new player.

    If 3 is fitting you than just keep in mind that scout is used by vets and those players would probly still kill you with other classes.
  7. Barobax Regular Member

    XP:
    478,906xp
    Scout is the only one of those classes that requires 0 resources to have a permanent speed boost regardless of location. You are making a bad faith argument because Bard's never play Speed, they are better off with Regen or Slowness.

    Again, another bad faith argument when your idea to counter a broken mechanic is to switch off whatever class you are currently playing to go Immobilizer or Bard? So I'd be required to rush back to my base, enter the portal, switch to one of said classes, then return to where the enemy is pogoing?

    No, if you had read what I wrote correctly then you would see that I wrote "if it had just a grapple, it would still be one of the best classes". This makes me suspect that you wrote what you wrote without a firm grasp of what I had wrote.

    Again, you did not read what I wrote correctly. Those classes are niche because they can do things that other classes cannot do. No other class can possibly get an enchantment level boost, no other class can transport teammates like teleporter or rift walker so you have to play these classes if you want those abilities. Compare that to Acrobat who has his acro jump which can be mimicked by Scout or Dasher and fall damage immunity which can be mimicked by the boots you can get with a boss buff so that class is not considered niche because you can do similar things with other classes or mechanics.

    The only possible situations I can think of are in which a competent dasher can outmaneuver a competent scout is in the water or maybe to dash between sky blocks where the grapple cant reach. The scout has shorter cooldowns than dasher, no block restrictions (a competent builder can easily negate a dasher with red brick blocks but cant against a scout due to their pogo ability), and scouts can still manuever around an enemies base including the no-build zone which a dasher cannot. If you can think of other plausible situations or maps where more players are using dasher over scout than I'm eager to hear it.

    Scout is obviously OP based on usage stats. Even in phase 5, you can see many teammates using scout even though they are fully geared because the grapple just outclasses every other mobility class by far. A thor leather would obviously win a battle to the death against the scout but scouts rarely battle to the death because of how easy they can flee. Compare that to a class like spy who can't flee while in battle. If you are a spy and get hit, you pretty much have to kill or be killed, scouts can just run.

    It's obvious by my post history that I'm more coherent than the average poster so its not #1 and I've had a Shotbow account for years so it's not #3 but I am one of the few regulars who doesn't use an autoclicker so you're right, its #2.
    Murgatron likes this.
  8. Tobi472 Platinum

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    1,650,597xp

    I will just reply to the numbers I edited in.

    1. I dont really think its a bad faith argument. Its a matter of facts that bard and tinkerer are able to give the team a speed 1 or even speed 2 buff. Just bc ppl dont use/ you dont see it use doesnt give you the right to trashtalk my point.

    2. Bard is overall a very strong class. Same for immobilizer. For ppl to play alone its not as common to take these supportive classes but you should consider them as good picks and counters.

    3. You said its one of the best classes if one is active. Both makes it op. Just the fact that you dont want to understand my point, you basicially saying its not op, makes you look really stupid.

    4. Than your definition of niche is just wrong. You cant call a class niche which is beeing played for the first 15 minutes of the game by everyone who is gearing. Same for a class which is used everytime to contest mid or a class which is used evrytime for rushing. A niche pick in other video games is a pick which is most of the time not the best to pick but has a rare potential to be strong.
    Thats only true if you consider gearing, contesting mid and rushing a rarely good strategy.

    5. Lets take a look on which class is used in cws for the one who is ming diamonds. Oh ahhh big surprise if they choose to go mobility its 95% dasher. How can that be??? Even in pub games on coastal there are serval clans who only take dasher to mid. ON COASTAL. It is basially a free out of jail card every 15 to 20 seconds. And the only counter for swapper traps. Why is scout worse here than dasher? Bc the grapple is unreliable in mid of coastal and the counter of bard box would make you become a civ. Dasher is never faster than a scout but if you have a team playung with you you will reach your team faster as with scout which enough.

    6. Warning bad faith arument: Buy enderpearls in the late game if you lack mobility. Most ppl are just playing around, farming kills and for that scout is the best bc you dont need to invest into making pots. Will scouts win you the game probly not. I am pretty sure that leather scouts especially in the early phases fight till death I have no idea why you think they are not. Spy has an active ability called flee. If you not managing to escape with an ability called flee you will never escape.

    7. I can understand that you as a normal player consider scout one of the best classes. For my point of view this is simply not ture. There are classes in the game which add 10 times more broking game mechanics to the game and scout is one of the lowest problems we have rn.

    Just look at gapples, swapper, voiding, riftwalker and you get the idea.
  9. NecronBrinis Regular Member

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    8,038xp
    The one trend I see in this thread is this one little comparison: frequency vs. strength. Some strats are very strong but you don't see them becoming extremely pervasive. On the other hand, there are strats that you simply can't not see every. Single. GAME.

    Jonny brought up an instance of the former. There's a good couple of strats that are very strong and can easily wipe a player -- this spans from voiding to glass tank gapple to swap traps to invis ambushes to immo -- and these are rather quick and annoying. But OP brought out one of the latter, if not the only one at the moment.

    Scouts are EVERYWHERE. You can't go a full 2 minutes with out seeing (SCO) get a kill in the chat (30 seconds if you push it), no matter the team. A friend of mine has a lot of pvp experience and continues to complain about scout every game he dies to one (I do concede that his experience is in 1.8, not 1.12, and that he has relatively few classes unlocked). You can walk outside your base's perims for one minute and chances are the scout grapple effect will be panned somewhere in your game audio, indicating one is flopping across the anni landscape without much of a care.

    Now onto the many, many points that Tobi has made in his heated debate with Barobax's poorly structured arguments (sorry, they're just not that effective). A nerf to scout can be made in several ways, and we can't really pin a single trait onto scout as its core strength. I call myself a casual player who can't get a good chunk of xp per game because:

    a. Pvp is my weakness
    b. I only yearn to learn support-based strats (that's my only interest atm, point 1 shows why I don't do defense or offense)
    c. My team is often filled randoms who don't perform well because a) they're new or b) they don't acknowledge the one meta they have to adapt to atm

    There's a number of ways we could amend for scout's strength. However, choosing one is difficult.

    On a whole new note, Tobi's last point on his recent post gave me some decent ideas for some slight changes to Anni that could shift the meta, whether or not scout is the main focus (these could be poorly structured but please do provide alternatives instead of only shitting on them).

    I. Gapples
    These give a lot of power to full diamond gear, let alone they know how to pvp. Their power level doesn't even have to be considered with a single class, they have a massive potency for detrimental rushes. A nerf here would be the overall removal of gapple crafting, whether the recipe is removed or access to apples is upended (give farmer something new, maybe?).

    II. Swapper
    I tested this one for a month, had some fun with it (maybe not fun for others) but soon realized how strong swap traps are. Wool is impenetrable without shears, which makes into a merely unbreakable cage if you're unprepared. Making wool unobtainable might be the fix here, but fences also provide a danger. Perhaps a swap could require a certain number of blocks height above the swapper to make it work? This could be a bitch of a coding challenge but may be some sort of option.

    III. Voiding
    There's a couple of elephant-in-the-room candidates for void usage: scout, scorpio, spider (I think, I know it had the capability at a point), and swapper. Scout uses bungee strategies to stay alive if they want to evade an enemy, where they become rather hard to hit and can easily escape danger (fuck fall damage complaints). Scorpios bait players somewhere near the edge of the map, using their hook to lasso them up and whisk them into the void. Spider use(s/d) vines to climb the side of the map almost out of sight, quite easily able to traverse the side of the map to an opposer's nexus area or elsewhere. Swappers can set up traps that will trap players right next to the void before knocking them off with some sort of knockback. My only thought about any nerf is world border. With no void to use, players will get cornered and have little to no escape instead of one way out into void. Fishing rods can't grapple world border, so bungee is gone. Scorpio can't hook anyone. Spider can't climb the walls of the map edge. Swapper can't rely on knockback (the trap instead would function like standard non-void traps). Don't think this is hard to pull off, but could be a good experiment.

    IV. Modifying Scout Accessibility
    This one will probably turn the most heads, but I think making scout more available could radically change how it's used. What if Master I was not the threshold at which Scout is unlocked? What if it were on par with another rather-good class like Alchemist? Or even earlier, maybe at the exact same threshold as Miner? How would that shake up the game-to-game meta? It might make the class painfully over-dominant and then cause its downfall, or maybe it will make it the truly most prevalent class and take play away from virtually every other class. Having an early unlock allows players to toy with it earlier, learning its usage and its counters early on instead of pending a 15,000 xp investment into the class.

    This reply to the thread might just be more trash to add to the dumpster fire, but I spent nearly a few minutes pondering over all these opinions before taking an hour to form my own on the spot. Please to consider these ideas and let me know what might be wrong!
    Murgatron likes this.
  10. JeTi_Brothers Platinum

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    215,738xp
    Scout's are everywhere, every game. If a scout is chasing you anywhere on the map there is no outrunning it and I think that is an issue. It has been said a lot of times over the years but I'll repeat it again, scout should be a mobility class rather than a pvp class. This also extend to an army of leather scouts minerushing. More oftnen than not I run into scouts that keep coming back to my emerald mine or gold mine for example and they can get there faster than I can regen back to full health. I'd say changing scout to be a mobility class is the way to go. How to achieve this? There are a few options I think (only pick 1):

    1. Give scout permanent weaknes 1 (0.5hp less per hit) to give it a downside in pvp. The speed 1 leather scouts have give them a good pvp advantage anyway, adding a downside to this evens it out. (Idea by tobi, ima steal it).
    2. Only allow to grapple vertically (e.g. height difference of 3+)
    3. Increase the scout CD to 5 seconds. Why does acrobat get a 10 second CD but scout only gets 2.5? Speed 1 and a 50% reduction in fall damage compared to no fall damage don't justify the 4x longer CD timing for acrobat compared to scout. Increasing the CD will decrease the chase / get away abilities of scout.

    For those people that keep asking my opinion on scout here it is again. Have fun with it, those are just my thoughts. I don't agree with arguments about bringing a flame bow / pyro with bow or slowness pots / bard everywhere. You can't expect that.

    That being said, I do think scout has made a lot of progress over the years and that the current scout is already far more balanced than it used to be. I do think that it could still be improved though.
    Echophon, Murgatron and KerbIsJesus like this.
  11. Barobax Regular Member

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    478,906xp
    People need to stop saying how much scout has been nerfed. Don't compare scout to how it use to be, compare it to other classes now. It's still by far the best class and more overpowered than others and if you don't believe me, look at what classes people are playing.
    Murgatron and JeTi_Brothers like this.
  12. JonnyDvE Jr. Developer

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    Thor, they are playing Thor
    Tobi472 likes this.
  13. Tobi472 Platinum

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    just as jonny said. Thor is ma bae but my true love is ninja.

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