Now, every class in Gen has a strength and weakness.

Earth has a wide array of weapons, and some awesome armor. But he's slow as the tank that he is.

Doom moves fast and hits hard in close to mid range. But he can't take a hit, and in open areas is practically fodder.

Slipgate.. I honestly don't know what to classify Slipgate as. He's the most powerful thing ever created by id software, and the Wirehead boys have been spending most of Gen's development on toning various aspects of all the classes down in order to balance it out, much to the screaming of former, and still current, QW players.

Strogg.. is not quite earth. His weapons are more specialized and he moves a tad faster while losing some of the ability to sustain damage that Earth enjoys.

Arena is the most rounded class of them all, with the exception of the Q3 BFG, and it is THIS class which the balance has to revolve around. Generations has strayed from it's intent if the Arena class is significantly changed.


Now, make no mistake, Doom is my favorite class. But I'm also aware that balance is a major part of the game. Every time there's a change suggested for Slipgate, there's screaming from the QW players. While the "It's not like the original!" has SOME small merit. Keep in mind that doom ran almost 65 mph and that ssg would do almost 400 damage if you were lucky. He also walked on water, couldn't jump, duck, or aim up/down.

Getting to the point of this post. During the first run of the new CTF mappack, it started out bad and got worse. For me at least.

The first thing I ran into, was myself, as doom, versus a good doomer, and two good slipgaters. Even under the best of circumstances, I'd be screwed. But what  was made glaringly obvious, to me, is that the grapple kills ctf.. The second you toss in a grapple, every class is now on even footing in terms of mobility. This wouldn't be a problem in a single-class environment. But in this instance, you have two slipgaters who can now move faster than doom. Toss in red armor, the autodoc, and those delightfully evil rocketlaunchers, and the doomer is screwed. Doom's strength is in his speed, and if you take that away from him, he's crippled. Horribly. Doom's speed, in some respects, makes up for the fact that his weapons are horrible for fast long-range damage. Yes the pistol, shotgun, and gat can all hit at a distance, but for what? 15 damage per bullet?

Contrasting the other classes, Earth's rifle and single gat can dish out more than enough damage most of the time. Slipgate's rockets are faster than a grappling player, and arena/strogg have railguns.

Maybe it's because I like doom, but I think grappling hooks break gen's balance. And when I brought this up in the IRC channel, all that happened was me getting slapped down with "that's the way it's been since the beginning," and "so choose another class" or "so then don't play ctf."

First off, the grapple was introduced in CTF for Quake, a single-class environment where every player, stat for stat, is on even terms.

Second, if a class is irrevocably screwed, that's a balance issue. Play slipgate on a map without the RL GL or shaft. Just try it.

Third, I happen to like a balanced game of CTF. If you're going to tell me to quit if I don't like it, maybe you should switch places for a bit since it's obviously MY fault the gameplay isn't enjoyable.

In a ctf game, without the grappling hook, doom is a viable class. With the grappling hook, doom has a massive handicap. Doom, in a CTF environment, is built for flagrunning. But the second you toss the grappling hook in, you have a class that can't take a hit, and doesn't really move faster than anyone else, with a complement of weapons that are nigh-worthless for fast damage at mid to long range.

Unfortunately, the only real solution to this would be either class-based grapples, or no grapples at all. Neither of which are particularly popular.

So in the end, I'll just have to wait around for the forum games, because grapple-based ctf just doesn't work in my opinion.

 - a 3v1 situation should almost ALWAYS kill you, regardless of what class you are.


 - Doom's strength isn't just in his speed, but in his fast firepower as well. He can instantly create a path of devastation by just picking up a few shells (that single-barrel SG can kill in two hits. Seriously.) Also, you're not taking into consideration that his Chaingun is pinpoint accurate at ANY range if you use it properly (which is kinda disturbing to me, but hey it makes for interesting gameplay). In effect, if one can track their opponent well enough, they can snipe them with a chaingun. Slap a quad on that CG and you've easily got the most overall devastating weapon in Generations (IMO).


 - That'd be one boring map my friend (unless it was designed for rail instagib)
 - Balance of the classes is majorly dependant on the maps being played. I'll make a rough estimate: 35% of winning a map is dependant on your class for that particular map. 45% of winning a map lies in your overall skill as a player. 15% of winning a map is knowing the map's layout and strategic points. The remaining 5% is pure luck
 - Go ahead and playtest this theory as much as you like. Q1 gets slammed all over the place in maps like Iron Yard, where there are a lot of open spaces and long hallways to get picked off from, and the item pickup areas are ambushes waiting to happen. Earth gets smashed in smaller maps where he can't manuver and get armor, like Simply Dead. Doom struggles in any map without a megahealth (unless there are a lot of +5 health pickups lying around, like qfraggel).


 - Doom is not a good flag-running class. Like you said, he's got speed and power, but he cannot take the hits to keep the flag in his poesession all the way to his team's base (regardless of if there's grappling hooks enabled). Doom is better off assisting/pursuing flag runners and softening up the enemy's defense with suicide attacks.

All of these technicals aside, I agree with Angst that the grappling hook in CTF sucks. Currently, it adds the same manuverability boost to all classes, which make the Slipgater and Earth ultra-powerful, while not doing much for the other 3 classes. However if the grapples' speeds were to be balanced out, then I'd say throw 'em in if you like. The grapple is just another manuverability feature of the game, somewhat like rocket jumping is. All it does is make the game faster (IMO), which on some CTF maps is a welcome addition. (Don't forget that the CTF maps played in the forum games have been Q3 CTF maps - not designed for grappling hook usage, which makes the map funky when the hook does get tossed in)

In short, balance it out and bring it on! It's part of CTF's roots

[off topic]
Ah yes, I nearly forgot about the other reason I never play CTF really.. the grapple ..
[/off topic]

carry on :]

Pho: I know he's a good runner and has firepower to boot, but he's got good at the whole 'flag extraction' thing, which involves getting down and dirty while being the main target in a place where the enemy spawns. The Q1 and Q3 guys are very manuverable and can dogfight for longer than a doomer, which makes them ideal for getting the flag, delaying the foe and getting it at least a few units outside of the enemy's base. This is where Doom comes into play, who's been picking off enemies pursuing the flag carrier while not taking many hits (because afterall, he's not as important as stopping the guy with the flag, right?) finishes off the pursuers with a few SCUD missles, picks up the flag and takes it home from middleground.

...at least, that's one ideal strategy I've thought of

mecha: I'm not going to quote all of that, so I'll just go over it quickly

I'm not griping about the grapple itself, I'm griping about how an across-the-board speed for the grappling hook kills the doom class. Why play a fast but physically weak class if you can be an absolute powerhouse tank and move just as fast?
Good grappler + any class > good grappler + doom. Someone prove me wrong on this, please.

Doom's speed is on the ground, toss in a grapple, and all he has is the most powerful shotgun, and a weapon, that YES is accurate at long distances, and YES over time is better than the railgun.

But keep in mind that the majority of ctf maps have these funny "corner" things you can duck around before said doomer can get enough shots off to do more than scratch the paint from an earth player's armor. Providing the grapple is enabled.

Don't get me wrong, the grapple WAS balanced in Quake, but it was balanced because your most powerful all-around weapon (rockets, if you didn't know) flew FASTER than the hook.
My point is simple, in an environment where everyone can move faster than him, doom is gimped just as much as a slipgater without explosives or the shaft.

A lightning/explosive-less map is still playable with any other class, but that DOESN'T mean I'm going to tell a slipgater to play another class because slipgate sucks under those circumstances. I'm all in favor of rounding out slippy's weapons load.
(But that's another topic)

I like the idea of variable grapple-speeds per class, if it's done well (and I've got faith in Pho), then my complaint is fixed, that simple.

I'll freely admit I'm not all that great with the hook, my complaint was simply that, of all the classes, doom has nothing effective against a hooking player. (Said point didn't get off all that well because every time I bring up how doom has problems, the QW players get on my case about slippy needing to be the most powerful class. And as such, I have troubles pointing out balance issues without tearing into slipgate.)

rant
In any event, I feel I have to point out that Generations is NOT Doom, Quake, Quake 2, or RTCW. Generations is a class-based deathmatch. And because of this, there needs to be balance. Doom got slowed down and his SSG was pulled down from it's "original" values. Do you see me bitching about how it's not just like Doom? No, it was unbalanced, and was remedied.
/rant


Versus Grapple:
Earth: Mortar/Sniper/Gat
Doom: Chaingun/SG/pistol
Slipgate: Rockets/Shaft
Strogg: Railgun
Arena: Railgun

Now, with the second or so you have to fire on a fleeing grappling player, the above weapons are fairly balanced, with the exception of doom. Earth's gats aren't accurate enough, but if you can blast off a couple rounds before their grapple hits, you'll do more damage than doom UNLESS doom is point-blank.

And that's just not going to happen if said grappler is any good at it.

Did you? When?

Coulda fooled me.  In mckinley I tried to grapple out of the base and was swarmed by doom players who had no trouble killing me.

Secondly, Your basing most of this on me, Pho, and Con. I know Pho and Con have experience, but you dont really know me. I lived/breathed/was qwctf. I was in top ctf clans. I learned stuff from some of the best players at that time. So of course if you give me q1 and a grapple Im going to be a little harder because I have that experience. Majority of people have no clue on how to use grapple as I saw that night myself. So I dont think it needs a nerf necessarily. Like I told you before and as mecha pointed out, QWCTF was alot faster (the grapple used was in fact very slow), yet no one had trouble defending (unless of lack of skill/experience). Zor was one of the highest pinging people I know, yet he defended perfectly against the likes of 90 pingers and such. He would often be the ONLY one defending as well, which earned him the nickname "The Wall". Now if a HPB in a faster paced ctf game can defend alone against experienced lower pinged players, I can see no problem that you would have defending.

If you take out grapples in ctf then whats the point of ctf? Just go back to FFA DM.   :blink:

First off, had you read the post you pulled the quote from, you would have seen that I'm in favor of class-based grapples, AND I had made the point that the grapples in QW were balanced because #1 everyone moves at the same rate, and #2 Quake rockets were faster than the grapple. In gen, everyone does NOT move at the same rate, and doom has very few high-damage-per-second weapons that are effective against anything further than 5 feet away.

Now, as Phoenix has pointed out multiple times, that's going to be worked on. So my complaint there is done.

And as for Zor, I really don't care. He wasn't in the game. I was on dialup at one point, AOL specifically, and I've won q3 matches with pings in excess of 400, so it's not that I'm bad at this.

Now, had I changed to slipgate, I may have stood a chance, but I'll be frank; I hate slipgate, I always have. He's a one-gun wonder, and that annoys me.  One of the reasons I skipped playing Q1 on a regular basis was because there was no variation in gameplay. Get RL, get quad, kill things. Sometimes you grab the invis, sometimes you grab the shaft, pent, and find swimming idiots. But the fact of the matter was, Quake was boring for me. Just one seriously effective weapon, and juggle people till they're dead. Whoopdedoo.

A high-ping slipgater can still be effective because slippy's only real effective weapons require leading anyway. Again, this isn't QuakeWorld. Doom doesn't have a fast-moving rocket-launcher.


After my initial rant, I said I was in support of class-based grapples. Not removing them, not nerfing them. But balancing them.

Again, YES the q3 default grapple is slow as hell in comparison to QW, and YES as a slipgater you can still own grappling players. But as DOOM, it's a bitch to do unless, as you pointed out, there's a pack of them, and frankly, a pack of ANYTHING is going to f@#$ you up.

My point was that a solo player trying to take out a grappling player with the current across-the-board grapple speed is at a serious disadvantage if they're playing as Doom. That's a balance issue, period. And since pho's stated that the grapple rates will be based on class speed, my gripe there is done.

Just because you're a slipgate god, doesn't mean you know jack and sh@# about the other classes.