Ok i spent most of today playing 1.2 beta on the official US server. I did my fair share of bitching, I'll admit. I like a lot of the things that have been done to 1.2 and I'm not here to bash it as a whole but a few things seem like they could use some extra tweaks.
Firstly the pulse rifle. The old pulse rifle was hard to use, it took a lot of skill. You had to lead your target a lot, and it was primarily used by total noobs, people who were really good at predicting aliens, and people who were out to kill bases. The new pulse rifle is... very overpowered. I consider myself to be of moderate skill level or on the lower end of the clan skill level and was a decently skilled 1.1 player. The idea for faster traveling "beams" is very good. The incresed fire rate... i'm not so sure about. The thing is that it's very much more powerful than it was before, and it's extremely easy to use and well... I'm not sure i like how powerful it is at the moment. Something about it needs to be nerfed. Either damage, fire rate or take the speed the projectiles go down to the old speed. Almost any random noob can go out and spam some prifle and get enough kills to get a new one when they die, especially with FF off.
The lucifer cannon... I like the concepts behind the changes but something is off, it seems like it's too easy to hit things with it. The only thing I've noticed is much better is that it can't just be spammed, and it's slightly less effective against dretches. I'd also like the self-damage and FF damage to be higher... discourage randomly shooting one's own feet to take care of dretches. As always... if FF is off you sit back with a luci and spam a group of team members being attacked you'll get enough creds to go buy yourself a new one when you die.
Friendly fire. I cannot stress how unfair it is that the humans can go in blindly shooting the crap out of a crowd of their own with anything from a luci to a flamer to grenade or prifle and not ever worry about hitting a teammate. This encourages randomly pulling the trigger and never worrying about what you're shooting because you'll eventually hit something that's alien. It's very stressful to be a dretch trying to get a few headbites on that shotty human and be killed when he's shot in the back by his teamate with a luci. You unfortunately become toast, and the human just struck by nuclear splooge laughs at your corpse and walks away from it. As aliens, it's still easy to bite your human munching buddy if you're close to them but you don't have the advantage (minus goons... sorta) of sitting back and spray'n'pray into the crowd. Please consider turning FF ON for the official servers.
Goon spines. I love the new area of effect on goon spines, it's a great idea. They're much more useful than they were before, but the pushback on the mini-spines is ridiculous. I think that an adjustment is due on those, as I was at one point hit by one... and tossed into the ceiling of ATCS in the human base and took falling damage... that's a bit much if you ask me.
Basi grab... it's a great improvement on the basilisk grab mechanic, but maybe a bit too great. Although the lowered health would compensate for this, the fact that regen is increased sort of brings it back out of balance.
I love the nerfs to tyrant, and the improvements to charge and the new crush. but am having a bit of trouble adjusting to the... angle i'm looking from? It makes sense but is hard to get used to.
Advanced Marauder zap seems almost too much of an improvement against bases on smaller levels where they're forced to be tightly packed. Not sure what else has been done to them but... somehow i magically got much better with mara in general in 1.2
Thank you everyone who dared to read that, and to the devs for their hard work.
