Critical: Fitting Penalties

While customization is easily one of the best aspects of Dust 514, there are too many instances where classes are not operating as intended and its hurting gameplay. We have zero issue with a Heavy Sniper, Heavy or Scout Shotgunner as the pros and cons balance out with both. But when suits are comparable in speed to the scout, have close to the protection of the Heavy or exceed the assault in attacking power without any real sacrifice, something is amiss. Bad math has allowed many of these issues to crop up and smart players are doing what they always do: Taking advantage of loopholes in gameplay. This week we saw one of the best suggestions we've ever seen aimed at curbing some of the balance issues that plague Dust gameplay: Fitting Penalties.




The person was Cosgar of ParagonX and the place was the Dust Forums. His suggestion regarding making scouts more relevant? CPU/PG fitting reduction on all biotics and EWAR, and most important of all- Cloaking. Here's the wonderful thread on the forums http://tinyurl.com/km83wfw where there is great discussion regarding helping the class with its function, but also leveling out the pros & cons. While we dont agree with giving any class but logis more than one equipment slot the rest of his suggestion is almost a necessity. The idea is simple: Each suit has a specialty, and staying within that specialty yields you benefits. While you can go outside that specialty there are penalties for doing so. While there wouldnt be an issue with an Assault adding armor plates, stacking them would be different. Looking carefully at the classes we decided that stacking modules within their specialty allowed them a fitting reduction, meaning its easier for them to fit certain modules, while the stacking penalty is a fitting increase. The suit roles are as follows.

Heavy - Dmg mods/protection
Assault - Dmg mods/weapons
Scout - Biotics/E.warfare/Cloak
Logi - Equipment

We've left the actual CPU & PG fitting percentage increases up to CCP, as they are better than math than us [sometimes] but a 20% increase sounds about fair. CPU and PG do a great job dictating what modules a suit can be fitted with and as a result provide less of a hard cap and instead will realistically limit what can or cant be done. While it still puzzles us why the logi isnt the second fastest suit in the game [fix this CCP, it has the 2nd lowest health and needs to be mobile] it simply cant be the 'everyman' anymore than assault suits can have comparable health to heavies. We hope to see these changes make it in before long.

As always, we'll continue to attempt to help promote and publish ideas that help establish, enhance and grow the Dust 514 community as much as we can. Have any ideas that need sharing? Would you like to join our staff as a writer? Be sure to contact us at magww@live.com