AWKWARD ZOMBIE

The reason you are enjoying it is because they focused on making the game fun rather than "realistic". And I have to say, the skiing mechanic is so daisies fun it is worth playing it just because of that mechanic.

I have to agree with everything you have said though. The heavy classes require a lot more power because of their weight, yet they receive the least amount of it. It makes them very slow and cumbersome to use in the open.

I finally unlocked the Technician class, and I'm finally learning the ropes of how to lead my shots with the automatic weapons.

Also, Ganelon, the majority of my deaths I can attribute to spinfusors, not automatic weapons. And the flags are placed outside because, IMO, they wanted to avoid turtling, and also because they wanted to make it so that masterful skiiers get rewarded by being able to grab a flag while going 160. The heavy classes are wearing heavy armor, so that should make them less mobile; the trade-off for powerful weapons and armor is lack of mobilit, therefore less energy to jetpack around. The Infiltrator is primarily a stealth attack class; it uses guerilla tactics indoors, uncloaking only when necessary, leaving you wondering where the hell they went. The tech's repair gun is because they are specifically designed, as a class, to keep the base in tip top shape. I hafta agree with all your other points, though (if I left any out.)

Spinfusors and grenade launchers of all descriptions are effective indoor weapons. Outdoors, they can only be used reliably against targets on the ground. This would be fine were it not for the fact that automatic guns are always equally capable of hitting you regardless of whether or not you're airborne, thus leading to situations where you're playing a class without one and waiting for your opponent to finally land while he continues to shoot at you regardless of what you're doing.

Tribes 1 had several maps with flags placed completely inside the bases. Those maps that had them outdoors still kept them protected with roofed structures, to limit the angles at which an approaching enemy could enter from. Look at Drydock, where the flag is bodaciously out in the open and can be taken from any direction, and tell me how you're supposed to mount an effective defense against that. Now, tell me how you're supposed to do it with enemy Juggernauts bombarding the flag stand from the cliff overlooking both bases. Flag defense is something that players should be capable of applying skill to, just like flag running.

The heavy classes gain nothing but a disproportionate amount of health for their mobility. bodaciously nothing. The Doombringer's Chaingun has a spin-up time, does less damage over time than the Technician's SMG, and its projectiles travel slower. The Brute's Heavy Spinfusor does the most damage of its type, but its firing rate is slower than the Soldier's and it has no difference in the number of shots required to kill anything, meaning that its damage over time is far worse both on paper and in practice. His "finisher" weapon is a shotgun with about a third of the range that the Soldier's pistol, and he has no capacity to close distances. The Juggernaut doesn't even have a finisher weapon - just a mortar which can't be used in close quarters unless he's indoors (and the damage on it is pathetic compared to the previous games) and another Spinfusor - only this one actually does less damage than the Soldier's for no apparent reason. Funny enough, the Brute is considered the most balanced heavy class solely because it possesses the ludicrously overpowered Fractal grenade, which only works indoors.

The Infiltrator will die in a direct hit from any Spinfusor, even the Pathfinder's. Unlike the Pathfinder, the Infiltrator cannot abuse a light's mobility as it is confined to indoor environments where explosive damage is nearly unavoidable. They don't even get a skill that improves run speed despite spending the most time on the ground. Did you know that if an Infiltrator tosses a sticky grenade onto a medium (like a Technician) and that medium runs towards the Infiltrator, the explosive will leave the medium alive but kill the Infiltrator? Did you know that more than two of these grenades are required to kill a heavy on base defense, and that heavy can simply shoot his feet and kill an Infiltrator without even knowing where he is? The faint graphical effect that overwrites the Infiltrator's model when he cloaks may not be visible when you aren't expecting it, but if he fails to kill you, it becomes very easy to track from his last known location, especially when explosive damage removes his cloak as if he just attacked.

I see. Yeah, a lot of your points do make more sense now.

It's really regrettable because these are the classes I'm drawn to. I can play Soldier with the best of them, but I'd rather be an Infiltrator or Brute and it just sucks to keep fighting against the game itself to succeed at the job I want to use them for. I've got a lot of passion for the Tribes series and it'd be nice if the class system Hi-Rez is pushing for doesn't turn out to be a point against their game. That's certainly what it's looking like right now, though I understand there's supposed to be some big patch coming soon.

Yeah, the big patch is apparently releasing some new classes that have different specializations. I don't remember all of them, but I hope that they change the game for the better.

Ganelon, it seems we both have very similar philosophies on how this game should be played. I have noticed the imbalances with the infiltrator many times as this is my preferred class. The sticky should kill a medium and it should do slightly more damage than half the health of the heavies so 2 of them can kill them. It makes heavies something you have to plan how to kill without having to throw 3 daisies stickies onto them.

I don't have any problems with the two projectile weapons as I often switch out the pistol for the repair gun as I work around generators a lot. Sniffing out other infiltrators and repairing the generators after I have cleared out the area. But I have noticed that the jetpack sucks. If you miss the ledge you can't recover at all. You are forced to wait for a respawn without having the chance to fix whatever you did.

If gravity is 9.81m/s^2 as the real world (which I highly doubt it is), then I don't think the jetpack has more than 10m/s^2 thrust. In the CTF icy map, falling just a few meters down the tower will make you take damage at the bottom even if you hold in the jetpack all the way. It really needs to be looked at a bit.

There is no greater feeling of hopelessness than being knocked into one of the many bottomless pits that surround most generators. You either disk jump up off a wall if you're resourceful, or give up and let gravity take you.

Woke up at noon, started my day off with a cup of coffee and Tribes Ascend. I love lazy sundays so much.

Also, let's discuss ways that fractal grenades can be balanced. A single fractal grenade should NOT be able to halve the HP of a Beowulf.

Well, a Beowulf shouldn't be able to avoid a tactical strike which costs more than the tank itself either, but that's another issue altogether.

The greatest complaint I see about Fractal grenades is their capacity to kill generators combined with the fact that they continue to function after the assaulting Brute has died. This leads to suicide rushes where the Brute uses his large health pool to get inside the generator room and throw his full supply of Fractals only to die seconds later, but leaving the generator and anyone who intends to protect it hopelessly doomed. The purpose of these grenades is supposed to be area denial - you run into the room with a Fractal going off and you get punished horribly. Significantly reducing the damage they deal to generators would go a long way towards encouraging Brutes to be concerned for their own survival.

Now, I don't find the damage to be unfair. Other grenades often hit harder than mortar shells and have no difficulty one-shotting mediums. The amount of time you need to spend near a Fractal to die to it is long enough to easily clear the room, and people have developed a healthy respect of the green disco lasers of death by now. The only lethality issue is that these lasers have an impulse for no discernible reason. I can't even begin to imagine how beams of massless radiation have the ability to push someone around, much less in the seemingly random directions that they do in-game, but they make it unnecessarily difficult to run away from the grenades themselves. If the impulse was made more consistent (always pushing away) or outright removed, Fractals wouldn't be able to trap people in and we'd see a lot more "waiting for the thing to expire" and less "dying in futility" going on.

There's also the fact that they can carry THREE OF THEM. But yeah, making the fractals to where they only inflict heavy damage to players and they don't push players around would be a good start.

I'm getting better at lining up shots with automatic weapons like the assault rifle and the SMG. It's pretty tough to lead shots on people going at 200 MPH

You can blame that on the fact that all fast traveling non-exposive weapons currently use 20% velocity inheritance while the Spinfusors, Thumper, etc. use 50%. The same skills you need to land a mid-air with a disk actually don't translate to landing direct hits with bullets, even the Nova Colt which is one of the slowest non-explosive weapons in the game.

This is expected to change, just so you know. When it does, it's only liable to affect those who use bullets while chasing. Doombringers, for example, wouldn't really care even if the inheritance was 500%, since they spend most of their time standing still.

Tribes just released a huge patch. I'm liking it so far.

I found something rather... worrisome, on Arx Novena.



Also, it sounds like Infiltrator is going to be playable now. Can't wait to see what's changed. Not too pop flyin' with how insignificant that buff to the SN7 was, but if I can have it AND a Spinfusor? Well... if nothing else, I'll have a more tolerable alternative to the useless pistol.