Astray

Well, they have rolled out another big update as of late and this one is pretty damn good... if you're oriented towards packing firepower over melee.

The clear promise was to make the Heavy unit the backbone of their respective side. With this came some revisions to beam weapons, knockdown and various solid munitions (mostly machine guns).

Knockdown is probably the biggest so I'll go ahead and start with that. The old system, a knockdown was only achievable via melee or getting hit out of the air by a sniper rifle, high strength rocket or melee. You'd fall flat and just eat whatever someone swung or shot at you. You'd either recover to your feet or just die.

Now, every weapon has a down point added to it. Each hit takes away from a new gauge. The gauge has two stages, stagger and knockdown. Stagger basically stops you in the middle of whatever you're doing, kills a bit of boost gauge and just generally inconveniences you. Not a death sentence but definitely a problem when you're in mid-flight. A knockdown or KD on the other hand, causes your unit to stagger greatly (2-3 seconds of idle frame as you get back on both feet), depletes a heavy bit of boost gauge and interrupts all actions. Very, very, very and I'm talking all but the tankiest or luckiest people get away from that.

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Beam weapons deal some pretty hefty damage now. Their explosion based damage has been boosted and they now hit far harder than all but the most broken solid weapons. They also have a significant boost to 'Down Gauge' damage when compared to solid fully auto weapons. For example, a 'regular' beam rifle will deal 178 down point damage per shot while a fully auto gatling gun will hit 58 per shot. The trade off obviously being shots fired...

Or one would think. The biggest thing I dislike is being downed or outright murdered by a guy using a beam weapon. But... it's fair. Sometimes annoying but fair. In the Gundam universe, beam weapons are the end all be all. Meant to give the machines battleship level status in the arms department.

Melee units now pack some form of back up weapon instead of just using the ol' swords and axes setup seen for a thousand years. Still viable, but now that beams can outdamage your HP before you get close can prove problematic.