Suggestions and criticism

Hello, thank you for taking the time to read this post.
First, I'd like to say that I've very pleased with RoR, and have enjoyed it since I purchased it last week. Since then, there have been a few things I noticed that I believe should bet tweaked, reworked, or changed. In no particular order:

1. When the Mercenary dies, his sprite changes to the Miner. I don't think this is working as intended.

2. The text on the Huntress achievement to beat a "Legendary Wisp" should be changed to "Ancient Wisp". It might've been obvious to
everyone else, but I've seen a couple people become confused by the text, and I know I was initially when I had first read it.

3. The following achievements need to be either rebalanced or reworked:
a)Miner: Reach level 10 without getting hurt more then once - I've attempted to do this a dozen times before trying to cheese it by just grinding the first stage. Even then, it's tediously rage-inducing. You're literally one mistake from failing the challenge. One run I jumped to avoid a jellyfish only to land on one, taking a hit of damage, and then landing taking fall damage. I was at level 8. This is unreasonably hard.
b)Commando: Activate the 3rd teleporter without being hurt once - The previous achievement doesn't even hold a candle to how ridiculously difficult this achievement is and it is quite simply nigh impossible unless you're on co-op, and even then, I'd imagine, it's still ridiculously hard. At least the Miner has a semi-second chance.
Compared to other class equivalent achievements, such as Bandit: Reset your cooldowns 15 times consecutively, the difficulty is extremely skewed. Even if you do have difficulty pulling it off, you can try again easily without scraping the entire run.
These achievements either should be toned down significantly or scraped and replaced with something that's not reliant on a perfect run.

4. The Sniper is a bit too underpowered and I think his Snipe skill needs some fixing up. I think the perfect reload bar should be at the end of the bar to make it easier to time in the heat of battle. I also think there should be more pay off for a perfect reload as the extra damage Snipe does with it hardly is worth the effort as opposed to the speed of simply reloading and firing again as quickly as possible.

5. The Enforcer should be able to automatically pick up his shield without cooldown and without delay when accidentally clicking on Protect and Serve.

Those are my thoughts. Thanks again for reading.

 

Hey and hi! It's nice to see polite, formal and well-thought criticism, but a lot of these issues have already been brought up and I think have been reported in the Bug Reports thread (where stuff like this really needs to go).

Like...

I can't tell you how many threads exist suggesting that the Sniper be buffed up to play on-par with other characters (one of them is MINE). It really seems as though they added him to the game with the sole intent that he should accompany a party and make bossfights easier, without trying him in single player to iron out his details...

Y'know what? I thought about this too and forgot to suggest it somehow. That IS annoying how he has to WAIT to cancel his own skill. I mean, really... with all of the nuisances ALREADY revolving around Protect and Serve, you can't even cancel it until you wait a bit? That's just another straw on a camel's already-broken back...

 

Hi, and thanks for your response.
My apologies, I didn't see a bug forum so the closest thing I saw was the suggestions. Now I see there's a bug reporting thread, my bad.

Unfortunately, I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with you--the Sniper just doesn't feel up to par with other characters in a single player setting. I understand that when it comes to balancing the classes, it's never going to be perfect, some characters are going to rise to the top because of various factors, many of them probably unseen, but Sniper is the one class that only seems viable when nearly all the attention is off of you, and that's just simply not going to happen unless you're playing co-op, and that's a bad thing. It makes the Sniper a very restrictive pick.

Pretty much. The penalty of a miss-timed skill should be the cooldown as it is with all the other characters. Locking you down in place until the skill cools down is a death sentence.

 

About the sniper, I think the bonus for a perfect reload should not be modified because it not only apply on the frist skill but on the second one too. And I think the second skill buffed with the 4th + the perfect reload buffed itself should be really OP (in fact it is already a bit)

Don't forget that each character got different situational advantages. And in sniper's ones, he is really powerful. If you find that the sniper is badly designed because he cant go far alone, think about HAN-D.

 

Han-D has it far better. FAR. Dude can facetank the whole game and only really suffers at the final boss, and that's just if you didn't manage to grab something to boost your regen, like Leeching Seed or a few Sprouting Eggs.

 

It not only depends about the character, but also the players and possible synergies between them. The fact is that I can go farther with the sniper than HAN-D.

2 differents point of vue. And it is not necessary that one MUST win against the other one.

(PS : your color dont make the reading of your messages comfortable)

 

Really the Sniper suffers from extreme specialization: he's designed around the one-shot-one-kill, and you're right, if you set yourself up in a nice perch where enemies and missiles can't get to you, and you have a clean, unblocked, shot at a boss, you can shoot it dead fairly easily with that combo. How often is that going to happen? How often are you not going to be running from monsters and missiles? How often will a boss simply be content with you just sitting there aiming?

It's a special circumstance on top of a special circumstance: the one instance a Sniper can really shine, and it's hardly going to happen. You don't have time to just sit there and do a full Steady Aim. You don't have time to fuddle around with getting a perfect reload--especially considering the gauge is in the middle of the bar as opposed to the end guaranteeing that you'll need extra focus on that and away from the incoming horde to nail it, and if the boss just barely exits the screen your Spotter is hovering around a Snow Golem instead of where it needs to go, and then it's cooling down for 10 precious seconds while you try to set yourself up again for your attempt.

That's unreasonable.
Tack on everything else that's hindering the Sniper:
-Low Chance to proc items due to low fire-rate. This is a critical disadvantage.
-Backflip is just a clunky version of the Commando's tactical dive. You have the face the direction opposite of where you want to go, on the very class who doesn't need any more clunkiness.
-Snipe, in of itself, doesn't do a whole lot of damage, even with a perfect reload, which isn't bad in of itself until you consider...
-The Sniper is the only class to have only 2 attacks. He has a defensive maneuver and a quirk, but only 2 attacks. Considering how Snipe is nonviable, you're relegated to Steady Aim as your source for single-target and AoE damage, and Steady Aim really wasn't designed for crowd damage either considering how it doesn't pierce all that well.
-What this means is that it takes the Sniper a lot of time to clear a map, even when he has found the teleporter, which means the difficulty curve is ramping up a lot faster for the Sniper, the one class who really doesn't need any more disadvantages.
-Also, any mobs that are in a hard to shoot at, tight-knit area takes even more time to clear out for the Sniper, exacerbating the aforementioned problem.

I'll tell you what, I'd gladly take a nerf on the Sniper's perfect reload, spotter, fully-charged Steady Aim combo if he had answers to the problems above.

No they don't. No they don't at all.
There's nothing "situational" about the raw power of the Huntress and the Engineer. They rofl-stomp this game when put in the hands of a good player. Any disadvantage they might have is a pittance compared to the sheer magnitude of destruction they can wreak, all from long range to boot too. Don't even have to get up close and personal with the monsters.
Nothing situational about the Commando. He's just a decent all-round good character.
The Enforcer is a bit more quirky, but still able to deal with crowds and single targets fairly well.
The Acrid is the quirkiest of the melee classes, but his quirk actually works while the Sniper's don't.
Out of the straight-forward melee classes, the Miner has his issues, but he's still alright, the Mercenary makes up for the shortcomings of being relatively close up and personal with invincibility frames that actually synergize themselves a lot better than the Miner's do, at least IMO, and HAN-D, while definitely bleh, is still far more viable than the Sniper. FORCED REASSEMBLY could use some tweak. I'm not sure what, but it could use something.

Maybe the Sniper is powerful when played on co-op when all your friends can take all the agro away from you. I get the impression that's exactly where the Commando's and the Miner's don't take damage achievements were designed from, but that's a terrible design decision. The classes shouldn't be balanced as to only be viable during co-op, they should have viability in single-player too.

The Bandit is essentially what the Sniper wants to be: focused on single target damage, but with enough options to not get stomped by a crowd.

 

The man above me (Criticism) has nailed it down flat.
There is a specific situation that I call "The Jar of Ants". A jar of ants has all the following features.

1. A crowd of monsters in a short space they cannot escape.
2. No safe locations nearby for a Sniper to shoot at the crowd from. He must jump into the crowd to shoot them.

The Jar of Ants is the Sniper's Kryptonite, and Superman would count his blessings that Kryptonite doesn't kill him as fast as the Jar of Ants kills a Sniper that tries to fight in it.

The reason I said Han-D survives better is because, unlike the Sniper, he can DEAL with a Jar of Ants. EVERY OTHER CHARACTER has innate abilities that help them survive and mow through a Jar of Ants. But the Sniper does not. The Sniper has to shoot his enemies from a distance because he has to sit still and make himself vulnerable in order to shoot. In a Jar of Ants, Sniper can't make that distance. In a Jar of Ants, Sniper just dies.

If you're better at playing Sniper than you are at playing Han-D, then congratulations. I like this, because Sniper IS my favorite character, but at the same time it does NOT mean that Sniper doesn't have a glaring flaw, and it certainly doesn't mean Han-D is a worse character, it just means you can't play Han-D very well (Sorry if that sounded rude, I couldn't think of a NICE way to say it...).

(PS. The spirit of Halloween is always with me, so I always type in Orange on black forums.)

 

Criticism, I think that is the best way I've ever seen the sniper's shortcomings explained.

I've beaten the game with every character I've unlocked so far at least once on Rainstorm, some several times, a few on Monsoon. (Commando, Enforcer, HAN-D, Huntress, Acrid, Bandit, and Engineer.)
Except the Sniper. No matter what items I get, I can't make it past levels 2-3 on Rainstorm. His crowd control is absolutely atrocious, especially in the "Jar of Ants" scenario described above.

He definitely needs something, anything to help him. I don't care how minor, just anything to help him deal with enemies on ledges, or the "Jar of Ants" as I shall now refer to it.

 

That... that was me...

 

Yes, the Jar of Ants was you. I was using both you and Crits' posts, as they both provided different examples of the Sniper's shortcomings, to explain why I have such trouble with him specifically.
I mentioned Criticism by name because he did not have a post directly above me.

 

Ah okay. Just makin' sure!

Anyways, I wouldn't say Sniper's crowd control is BAD. If he has a nice wide area to run around in and spam Steady Aim, he can take care of crowds pretty well. He definitely needs a bit more AOE (Piercing on his shots) but he isn't TOO slow about it...

 

just wow...it fits perfectly

 

Give him a drone for each time he uses FR, or give him a drone for each mob he hits with FR.
Maybe increase his drone capacity a bit too. This would allow HAN-D to take on Providence with some more ease.

Pls do give Reciful credit for this idea