What does stacking bring to ut duel?

nvz: YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO GET FULL STACK IN DUEL WHILE PICKING UP SHIELD BELT. NEVER. NEVER EVER EVER IN AN ARENA SHOOTER.

Why not. Seems fine if the whole system is designed that way. See CPMA and Quakeworld, they work fine. Problem with ut is the player with belt gets full stack, control of it and probably control of jacket, especially if they have recently killed the other player. If they other player has died or taken damage they get.. pads? Or they get to contest jacket/belt with no stack. If they want more stack they have to get the helmet. In essence they have to do more work for much less and spend more time. It is ass about. In addition allowing the out of control player to get the pads (currently) is generally ok because they are a small, one time only boost – you can still oneshot or almost one shot the player wearing them.

nvz: With that being said, I can still gain an armor stack by collecting 2 thighpads and a helmet, accumulating to 80 armor points.

UT3 stacking worked that way? Maybe just your wording makes it sound that way.

Anyway – I like the stacking idea but dislike the values, or dislike the values in traditional ut “only include one pickup of an armor per map”. For several reasons.

1) If stacking same items was allowed the pads instantly become more important to the out of control player, meaning the in control player can shift them into a pickup cycle easily. This means the out of control player has.. helmet. Not reasonable. Even average QL players will run mega + 2 armors easily. In control players will be able to run belt/jacket/pads. The outcome is possibly worse than the current setup – out of control has a helmet to stack on. 40 armor per ~minute from two helmet pickups? Even keeping the current values in ut4 duel and enabling stacking has the same problem – in control adds pads as an important item to deny, denies it and out of control is left with virtually nothing at all.

Adding a +health pickup outside of vials would possibly alleviate this to a degree as it would probably be more “important” than pads.

2) Because of ut strong weapon damage the small armor values suggested alone (20/30) offer marginal protection. This means that two pickups are required to be “combat ready” compared to current (single pad pickup) if you do not want to play “get weapon +attack” style of game. Where as the belt or jacket offer plenty enough to survive one shotting. A further nerf to out of control play.

3) Ties into 2. 80 armor for two spawns (30+20, 30) is paltry for the amount of time spent.

The values themselves are relatively unimportant to the armor system. The better way to look at is how long both players take to stack, how survivable players are, how the armors can be controlled and what each player can do at different points in time.

Simply enabling stacking will help to a degree.


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