Its ridiculous that a Hydra shares a spawn with a Ravager.
Yes, this has already been said a lot, namely on Highpower where you have Wasps in the air and instead of a Hydra that can counter them, your team gets the Ravager. Great. Just what we need.
But now we have Deadlock and Breaker where we have Ghosts that have become much more prevalent. Now, I do enjoy the added influx of Ghosts, I like the bump the vehicle gameplay has gotten in general when it comes to the tweaks and fixes, but at least give us a more reliable means to counter them.
Having played a Stockpile game on Deadlock, my team had the Ravager spawn which was just excellent, especially when the other team managed to acquire two Ghosts and were just dominating the latter half of the match by keeping us pinned down at our base while their team made off with the Power Seeds.
Eventually I managed to grab a Ghost…only to get pelted by Hydra fire from the other team cause they have the Hydra.
It’s ridiculous, always been ridiculous, and its managed to get worse.
If the Ravager is to share a spawn with anything, it should be the Pulse Carbine. Makes a lot more sense to me.
As far as I’m aware, it doesn’t appear so. I just know that my team had the Ravager spawn and while I’d need to go to Theater to confirm if it was a spawn, the enemy team did have a Hydra in their possession.
Yeah, I just came out of a match where the enemy team had three wasps at one point and we had nothing in our base to help flush them out and spawn camp us.
I finally got a shock riffle to stall them and make them easy to deal with. But at that point we had lost 2/3 strong hold points just because a good deal of our team was trying to deal with the wasps.
Sometimes the Hydra will spawn to the side of bases, rather then on top of them. I think on dead lock both weapons always spawn on both sides of the map. Not for sure though.
Finally got home and reviewed the game myself and…you seem to be right. Both my team and the enemy team had mirrored weapon spawns with Ravagers being set at the base of the Shade Turrets with Hydras further down the hills, with my team having the - in my opinion - side that has it more out of the way, hence why I didn’t see it. Checked and both teams also had Commando spawns near the Warthogs and Battle Rifles further off to the side. So…yeah, I’ll admit that was my bad
No worries, now you know where to find one the next time you need it.
Anyways, i don’t really take issue with different weapons “sharing” the same weapon rack, but I would much prefer the weapon spawns to be consistent from match to match. The idea that weapons are grouped into similar categories is totally counter to the goal 343 has to make each weapon have a unique roll.
Weapon Racks and randomized Rack spawns per match is never gonna be a good thing. Especially when the sandbox starts to get more and more crowded with additions, you can’t expect to have every map randomize weapon every match.
They are also totally ignoring Map - Weapon balance.
Here’s an example:
Deadlock and Highpower are Open Air maps. They have plenty of Airspace which makes Aerial vehicles very oppressive against ground units who are more exposed. This is when you must give each base Hydras in order to counter this. But say if both bases and forward bases only have Ravagers, then rip, it’s just gonna be a Wasp multikill festival.
Another example: Breaker.
Breaker is a map with a “canyon” like main battleground with flanking left and rights. In addition to this, both sides of the map have high points and man cannons to access these highpoints. So why does the game have an overabundance of Snipers? It’s just gonna artificially extend the match or create a “no man’s land” down the middle. This also forces too much infantry “crowd” to the left and right flanking lanes due to Sniper suppression.
343 needs to understand that as you design your maps, you also need to design and plan weapon spawns which make sense. You don’t randomly, for example, put a Battle Rifle in a forward position base. By the time both teams meet, the BR is significantly beaten by AR fire at that range. When you design a map which focuses on sieges with vehicles, you don’t randomly have an abundance of Frags instead of Plasmas.
So for example for Highpower:
Map has alot of verticle terrain
Map has LoS breaks in the middle of the map but no major LoS breaks or structures for each side of the map specifically
Has Mancannon access to the middle Highpoint of the map
I would be more inclined to put more Rocks or Debris along the lower points of the map, and perhaps put a Battle Rifle at these rock formations. For forward bases or outposts, a Needler or Sentinel Beam would be just nice there, along with a Bulldog or Heatwave. Each base needs to have a Hydra to counter the enemy Wasp. Stalker Rifle can be placed at the Wasp spawns instead of randomly spawning Shocks, because Shock rifle as a game-start spawn pickup will take away from challenging the Highpoint for the Power Sniper that spawns there.
