Vort Armor and how it has become USELESS and utterly unreliable!

[Tuki]

Since the overhaul of the vortigaunt faction and the implementation of the energy bar, armor has become a sort of double edged sword. The more armor you had the more energy you USED. But you were still able to put out some decent damage and be able to do a few things before being forced to meditate and stay still for about a minute or so until you regain it back. But the other day i got on and found this:

(Keep an eye out on the top left where the vortessence energy bar is.)
Small note: All of this was recorded with a character that has 50 vortessence (The higher vortessence you have, the less energy you consume with each ability and the more damage you do with beams)

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Spoiler: Attachments

Antlion armor:


Trenchcoat / Kevlar:


No armor:

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It was not like this before, and i'm not even sure when it was changed but it is BAD, really bad. And the fact that using antlion makes your energy bar go to half with a SINGLE BEAM. Is stupid, i understand they may have wanted to make vortigaunts more "Support"-like, but this is just outrageous and a really bad way of handling it. I truly feel it is TOO MUCH, no one minded it before the debuff but now it's basically entirely unreliable to use armor, and for a mere 50 HP it is not worth it at all and those items won't be used anymore by no one.

Mind you that, to regain the same bar of energy that you use in two beams (With the armor) takes around a minute give or take of standing still with the /entermeditation command. So what use will we give it now? Before it was used during engagements just to tank a few mere points of HP more while doing some damage, healing and giving support. But now it's basically impossible to really do something, if you have the antlion armor on you, you can't even do Channel energy (The healing swep) onto someone because it consumes MORE than what you HAVE.

It is basically turning three items that had actual good use before into something that's HORRIBLE, and does not even work in PVE unless you decide to go punching people with melee.


Solution? —

Bring back the old values that were in place or lower the current debuff to something more manageable for vort players or find a way to make armor reliable.

 

[JustWats]

As it stands, the armor system penalizes anyone wearing Kevlar that will need to use it when in danger. This is represented in the new fatigue system. Your typical Kevlar blocks all munitions the same, regardless of how it is utilized between varying AP amounts, protective materials, and what caliber is combatting it. It is fundamentally already a flawed system when you consider that OTA armor blocks the same damage that a 9mm would for a .357 or Pulse round. The only difference is the amount of armor penetration statistics that get shot from the gun (1911 vs .45 USP shooting penetrating high-class and low-class armor despite being relatively the same caliber/gun). This system flows backward logically.
Regardless of the semantics of the Armor system. You cannot fundamentally ignore that without it, you are going to get rinsed by the current PvP/weapon system, see attached:

Spoiler: Attachment

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With armor, containment units can kill a Vortigaunt in a time-to-kill of less than one second over 11 bullets while they can only walk during a timed cast. The entire Vortigaunt SWEP animation takes longer than this time to even cast.

On the Dev server, the Vortessence drainage is the default value for armor or no armor. On main, someone with SuperAdmin has changed the settings to nerf them. As you can see in Tuki's original post, the armor drain roughly takes out half your resources from the time that you can get killed in one second.

In the current guidance for deployments of OTA, you're usually going to be fighting multiples of 6 or less, which means the lethality against a Vortigaunt is only worse.

If you manage to kill one out of the six OTA, you will be dead anyway since you cannot fight back without resources. There is no way a Vortigaunt can support a fight whether it's healing, vort beams, vort shields, when their resources are drained from a system that shouldn't affect them.

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This nerf was implemented since Vortigaunts do not have the new Fatigue system applied to them during S2K, so this was probably the next thing to reduce their ability. Vortigaunts biologically have a pretty strong endurance level, and their biological limitations do not affect the Vortessence.

This system needs to be changed. Fatigue needs to be implemented for Vortigaunts, the armor system should not drain a resource that does not make sense to impact.

Free Vortigaunts are supposed to be comparable to what OTA brings to a fight. People are failing to understand that without armor, in this new system, you are allowing yourself to take full damage from a gun, and the TTK drastically decreases.

Spoiler: Damage Numbers used to roughly demonstrate TTK

Target w/ 200 HP (Dmg per Bullet for HP=33; roughly 6 bullets.)
Target w/ 200 HP + 50 Armor (Damage per Bullet for armor=21; roughly 10 bullets)
Enemy w/ 100 HP + 75 Armor (Damage per Bullet for armor=21; roughly 6 bullets)

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The time to kill between OTA and Vorts is pretty equal as far as armor to no armor when you shoot at a dummy target, although these two factions don't do gunfights against each other. It's a casting weapon against a projectile weapon that does 750 RPM. This means every half second an OTA can kill a vortigaunt that is not armored, and every second an OTA can kill an armored vort. Where a Vort needs to do around two casts of about a 1.5s beam to kill a containment unit. The SWEP already balances the time to kill.

• When you look at it from this point of view, unarmored Vortigaunts have to be in combat six times longer than an OTA does to kill. Where an armored Vort cuts that time in half to 3 times as long. The only discrepency with an armored Vortigaunt is that you are now drastically reducing the ability to continue defending yourselves or supporting a fight so you have an opportunity to get your second shot off and last more than half of a magazine from an OTA SMG.
  
  DPS for Vorts - 38 HP per second. 14.5 AP per second.
  DPS for Containment Units - 412HP per second. 288.75 AP per second.
  
  The majority of this issue lies in the fact that the crit system allows you to spew out several projectiles in a second that do double or triple damage to armor, and then to HP. Where as Vorts cannot do critical damage whatsoever. Especially with how the new rewrite is for Vort SWEP damage to armor, you can see their SWEP does damage to armor and damage to health in the same usage.
  
  

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  TLDR: It doesn't make sense biologically to reduce Vortessence based off armor, all it does is penalize Vortigaunts in every way, and ruin any ability to support fighters or defend themselves.
  
  Main points:

1. Vortigaunts cannot compete against armored targets because it drastically increases time-to-kill and armoring themselves nerfs them.
2. Armor items do not biologically make sense and shouldn't be impacting Vortessence resources.
3. The beam SWEPs already arbitrarily orchestrate balancing on vorts by locking cast times, and forcing DPS to be fixed at a locked TTK. Nerfing them additionally by limiting resources is like forcing OTA to only have one magazine each sweep.
   

 

[George]

vortbeam became as useful as slapping someone with a napkin, a highly limited napkin at that

Fix this shit neeeeeeeeeeeeeow

 

[MazuzaM]

I remember when a skilled vort could kill 3 OTAs alone... Now 1 OTA alone can kill 3 vorts

 

[Asimo1234]

The higher vortessence you have, the less energy you consume with each ability

Vortessence level has absolutely NOTHING to do with the amount of vortal energy required per ability.

The math for the VE usage per Armor Point (AP) is a little wonky because the slider that it is tied to in the config is absolutely wacc.
It is a slider that goes from 1 to 100.
At 1 the math comes down to 1% extra per AP.
At 2 the math comes down to 2% extra per AP.
At 15 (Current setting) the math comes down to 15% extra per AP.
Which means that when earing the antlion plate (50 AP) the math is 15% * 50 = 750% extra VE usage. So the vortbeam that normally takes 5 VE goes to 5 * (1 + 7.5) = 42.5 VE.

Now let's just run the math for fun at the maximum setting of the slider. 100.
With antlion plate: 100% * 50 = 5000% extra. Which comes down to 5 * (1 + 50) = 255 vortal energy. Aka two and a half bars. Meanwhile the default setting of the bar is a maximum of 100 vortal energy.

Someone fucked with the slider and now armor is completely useless for vorts.

Now you can argue armor isn't as important for vorts with the whole 200 HP thing, but ever since M!NT fixed armor penetration, armor now generally reduces incoming damage across the board. Take the MP5 for example with its 55% armor penetration.
What this means is that, when hitting armor, 45% of the damage is lost. This comes down to roughly an armor vest with 50 points or armor, eating up the amount of bullets that would have done 100 damages against regular HP.

This means that an unarmored vort and a CP now share roughly the same health pool when facing an MP5.
And with the current setting, the vort can shoot only 2 beams when wearing armor before it is out of energy. And since you need AT LEAST 2 beams to down someone, if the vort misses one beam, a 1v1 against a CP is going to be one swift PK for vortikind.

I can't speak on how shitty the limb system is for vortbeams, but considering you physically cannot aim the vortbeam for shit, ???

Anyways I am a combine main so fuck the frog faction cope n seethe in your nerfs haehaehaehae
Another epic OSI win.

 

[Tuki]

Vortessence level has absolutely NOTHING to do with the amount of vortal energy required per ability.

The math for the VE usage per Armor Point (AP) is a little wonky because the slider that it is tied to in the config is absolutely wacc.
It is a slider that goes from 1 to 100.
At 1 the math comes down to 1% extra per AP.
At 2 the math comes down to 2% extra per AP.
At 15 (Current setting) the math comes down to 15% extra per AP.
Which means that when earing the antlion plate (50 AP) the math is 15% * 50 = 750% extra VE usage. So the vortbeam that normally takes 5 VE goes to 5 * (1 + 7.5) = 42.5 VE.

Now let's just run the math for fun at the maximum setting of the slider. 100.
With antlion plate: 100% * 50 = 5000% extra. Which comes down to 5 * (1 + 50) = 255 vortal energy. Aka two and a half bars. Meanwhile the default setting of the bar is a maximum of 100 vortal energy.

Someone fucked with the slider and now armor is completely useless for vorts.

Now you can argue armor isn't as important for vorts with the whole 200 HP thing, but ever since M!NT fixed armor penetration, armor now generally reduces incoming damage across the board. Take the MP5 for example with its 55% armor penetration.
What this means is that, when hitting armor, 45% of the damage is lost. This comes down to roughly an armor vest with 50 points or armor, eating up the amount of bullets that would have done 100 damages against regular HP.

This means that an unarmored vort and a CP now share roughly the same health pool when facing an MP5.
And with the current setting, the vort can shoot only 2 beams when wearing armor before it is out of energy. And since you need AT LEAST 2 beams to down someone, if the vort misses one beam, a 1v1 against a CP is going to be one swift PK for vortikind.

I can't speak on how shitty the limb system is for vortbeams, but considering you physically cannot aim the vortbeam for shit, ???

Anyways I am a combine main so fuck the frog faction cope n seethe in your nerfs haehaehaehae
Another epic OSI win.

All i ask tbh is for a fix. As far as i was aware your vortessence level, the higher it was, the less energy you used... But one way or another we just need to find some way to fix it.

 

[Astro]

Addressed.