Developer Diary: Future Balance Changes

[Qbicle 116]

Source:

https://armoredwarfare.com/en/news/general/developer-diary-future-balance-changes

 

Quote

With the first half of May almost over, we’d like to once again tell you more about Armored Warfare’s future. While we are working on a lot of new content (some of which might come as a surprise to you), we’re not quite ready yet to reveal a roadmap for the months and years to come. It’ll happen, but only when we are certain with our plans in order not to make promises we’d then fail to make good on.

With that being said, what we can tell you about is the future approach to balance and the ideas that we are considering or already implementing.

Right now, the situation of the game balance is follows:

• The game is dominated by autocannon and guided missile gameplay with extremely high DPM vehicles being the most useful and played across all modes
• Especially the balance in PvE is only about sheer firepower, no other characteristics really matter
• Autocannon rate of fire is in some instances way too high and we’d like to make autocannon shells deal more damage but fire slower (the proverbial sweet spot currently lies between 300 and 400 RPM in our mind)
• Main Battle Tanks as a class have been marginalized due to the sheer amount of methods that can bypass their biggest advantage (thick armor)
• Active Protection Systems as a mechanic are not keeping up with the amount of missiles currently available in the game
• Overall TTK (time-to-kill, ergo the time it takes to destroy any vehicle) is extremely low, especially on high Tiers, which makes the gameplay unappealing as even the smallest mistakes are immediately punished
• Reconnaissance gameplay is non-existent due to the creep of various spotting measures (this issue is partially being addressed by giving dedicated scout vehicles the Reconnaissance Missiles in the Force Recon update, but spotting in PvE is entirely irrelevant)

Secondary issues include the poor state of Self-Propelled Guns (which were once again left behind the other damage dealer platforms), Tank Destroyers with guns and several other matters.

In the near future, we will be taking steps to address these issues, starting immediately after the release of the Force Recon Battle Path. Initially, we’ll be nerfing the firepower (mostly autocannons) of the following vehicles:

• VN20 (significantly – this mostly concerns the second turret, not the stock one)
• T-15 Armata
• T-15 Kinzhal
• Gepard
• Namer
• Derivatsiya
• BMPT series (especially BMPT Mod.2017)

And several other vehicles that noticeably overperform when it comes to their damage per match.

But that’s just a band-aid, so to say. Next, we want to address the Main Battle Tank situation by taking the following steps:

First, we need to improve the survivability of the entire class. What that means is moving away from slight differences in millimeters and more towards absolutes. In our vision, Main Battle Tanks should have their frontal armor impenetrable by autocannons (across the board) and partially by guided missiles. Large caliber cannons will be able to penetrate it when firing at (smaller) weakspots.

Autocannons will no longer be possible to snipe with (we will also significantly reduce their accuracy) and will serve as close-to-medium range weapons effective against Main Battle Tank sides and rear areas.

We want to improve this reliability even further by looking into:

• Removing most non-penetration damage (colloquially known as “chip damage”), especially from guided missile non-penetrations
• Reducing partial penetration damage
• Significantly reducing module damage to Main Battle Tanks in order for them not to be easily crippled
• Overhaul of the soft-kill APS mechanic (it has to be useful in PvE as well) as well as the hard-kill APS mechanic (it has to be able to cope with the increased number of missiles and features such as twin missile launches that didn’t exist when the mechanic was first conceived)
• Reliability of smoke and its interaction with guided missiles

Other changes we have planned include:

• Making Self-Propelled Guns relevant (possibly by returning the non-direct fire mode as an option, but that issue is still hotly debated amongst us)
• Making relatively obscure vehicles such as gun TDs relevant again
• Introducing brand-new gameplay in future vehicles (and yes, we are planning to add more progression tanks too)

That is all of course only a small portion of the whole plan we have for the game and is tied well into the new content we mentioned earlier. We’ll be able to share more as we finalize these concepts and, until then, we’d like to ask for your patience.

Ultimately, we do understand your feedback and the feelings that things haven’t been going as well as we’d have wanted but we’re nowhere near done. It took a good while to get the whole thing back on track but we’re confident we’ll be able to turn things around.

 

• The current form of Autocannon Warfare meta started in late 2021, with an article saying that giving limited autocannons clips like it was pre-0.19 to "rein in out-of-control SPAAGs like XM247" after low tier rebalance but it wasn't a popular solution, and so they change it to overheat system first used by the M48 GAU-8, among other changes like increased penetration. The problem exasperated with the introduction of legendary vehicles, and particularly how the crates that lead to getting them are earned (i.e. getting top place). As a result, overperforming tier 8-10 vehicles see even greater use in numbers (with those mentioned in article being the most common culprits, but there are more out there), and negativity around this meta and imbalance soared. SS said on official Discord that autocannon will get rebalanced last October (before the introduction of legendary vehicles), but this is the first time the issue is mentioned on the official website.
• When asked if all vehicles with autocannons will eventually affected by the autocannon changes or just those that are overperforming, SS replied that it would be all of them, but some may get buffed on other parameters if they need them
• Guided missiles' non-penetration damage was introduced in 0.33. It has been controversial from the start but the devs at the time claimed it was working intended to counter hulldown invulnerability.