1.2 is gonna bring a lot of changes. And I think that in 1.2 developers have made changes that span afar from balance changes, although all the work done yet were labelled as game balancing. In comparison to 0.9, 1.0 and subsequently 1.1 it feels like a different game, as the gameplay now became really unjustifiably dependant on camping for aliens and play of master players for human, who score like half of team frags as now a lone skilled human player can confront the whole opposing alien team.
What I see here is a misconception towards the original idea of tremulous, where humans score kills through teamwork and sophisticated tactics, with aliens do the same through rough outnumbering and individual combat. There are few points which I found to be disturbing in this aspect in upcoming 1.2: 1. Just genocidal super-mega luci cannon; 2. pulse rifle changes; 3 Improved human mobility; 4. chaingun RoF; 5. Rant weakness; 6. The fact that other weapons/classes were left unadjusted.
1. Current power (after the fourth stage) of luci cannon makes it possible for a skilled player just to go to alien base alone, destroy or heavily damage it and whack everything on its way here. Alien base is to weak against it; one luciball is totally enough to kill any alien defence structure and its even worse when the map doesn't give any opportunity other than just to stack all defence around one place. A good luci shooter is virtually invincible, unless there like 2 rants confronting in the open field with 1 rant inevitably dying in case of human wearing suit. In all other scenarios, the probability of human luci user dying is like 1 in 100.
As I understand, originally luci was devised as a futuristic alternative for real world's grenade launchers/recoilless cannons/RPGs that takes a lot to prepare a shot, but inflicts brings a tremendous amount of destruction in a single shot. What we have now is human players shooting it all around almost like handgun. A most basic solution that I can see here is to make luci to charge longer and eat a lot of energy to do make a blast comparable to grenade. Also, it would be nice to have recoil knocking the gunner back if he shoot while standing.
2. Pulse rifle now feels like a different gun than it was in 1.0. As I can remember, PR in its original concept was designed after Q3's plasmagun. A gun with moderate damage, but high rate of fire that depletes its ammunition rapidly. But now it feels almost like a real world's machine gun from some kind of combat simulator or MG42 from like DoD.
3. Humans are too mobile in 1.2. Stamina was reduced to a state that game simply does not depend on it any more. Humans sprint straight to alien base without brakes, strafe around goon and rants like mad rats outspeeding dretches. I personally now adopted to 1.2 style strafes and take almost no damage unless there are really a lot of aliens. I found it a misconception. Humans weren't originally devised to be so superhumanly fast like in Q3.
4. Chaingun RoF is too small for multi barrel weapon now. It was way slow in 1.1 and now even smaller. First, it feels totally unrealistic. And secondly, its current rate of fire allows it to fire for almost 1 minute continuously.
My suggestion here is to revert it back to ~1000-1200 rps, but keep damage the same as of machine gun. So it would still be an efficient weapon, but will deplete ammo in case of too much of suppressive fire.
5. Rant is really weak now. It could have been a justified change to either lower rant's damage, or either lower its hp, or make human weapons more powerful, but having all of the above inflicted altogether just screws the original gameplay.
6. Finally, it's strange to see so much of attention given to big guns, leaving other aspects of game in cold. What I can advise here for developers is to devote 1.2 for bug fixing/package maintenance and to leave big changes for something like 2.0. It will make the game feel more complete, solid and much less amateurish. The problem with 1.2 now is that it adds too much of gameplay changes, while adding nothing new into the game.
