Balancing ratchet

Manthro

Ok devs, we get it... Ratchet will never return to what he was, but...

You went a wee bit too far. After reading suggestions from sane players and coming up with a few ideas of my own, here are some suggestions on what to do in order to put him on par with other bots:

1) he needs power gain back. Maybe not the same level he had before, but he NEEDS it. Plenty of other bots have insane power gain, power flow, power leak (BC, SW, PROWL, SS, etc.) There is zero reason not to give it back to Rat where it is available above 50% health.

2) swapping the functions L1 and L2 is a good idea, or at least give ratchet a modest power flow/gain following an L1.

3) if nothing in option 2 is desirable, give him some kind of damage mitigation after L1 for a short time (armor buff, shield, defensive buff for each melee hit landed after... Whatever)

4) add a modest regen/heal ability on L3. not as powerful as L2, but it will at least allow players to charge up to an L3 without having to short change themselves on an L2 just to survive while giving up the damage from an L3.

I think a combination of at least two of the suggestions above (if not all of them.. he IS A TECH BOT AFTER ALL! where is his tech?!) would restore some trust in the community.


Players, feel free to add any other suggestions, but let's keep this thread free of flaming.. there's plenty of other threads to do that.. i've unleashed in a few of them already

Davien

Yea he's not even considered a tech after all these nerf changes. Give him a shield similar to that of mirage will definitely help. And heal needs to trigger in his other skills too such as L1 and L3. Or give more hp heal in his L2.

Davien

Energy gain is definitely a must even above 50% hp else he's really slow in gaining power.

Manthro

Perhaps grant him power flow/gain or steal for the duration of any type of shock damage.

Southernslam

The best idea I've heard is to restore his diagnostic above 50% but let him heal a % of lost health rather than base health. This way he's still healing, but it will be harder to keep full health and he'll still have power gain which is essential for his lack of attack power. I used him in the first round of AM and he is now garbage. He'll be riding the bench from now on until he is adjusted.

tekkn1kal

This is all I've been asking for since the nerf. We all knew he needed to be nerfed. They need to do like they did with Thor in mcoc... Instead of making him a useless character just because he was someone you could exploit, he needs to be re-tooled to be nearly what he was, just not so exploitable.

Even just giving power gain back to him over 50% would be enough to bring him back on par with others... But it would be a lot more fun if you guys could look in to other avenues to make him more fun at the same time.

We want Ratchet to be a good bot... He doesn't need to be a god tier bot, we just want him to be fun to use and as effective other same level bots, which he most certainly is not currently.

CandKane

I like changing self-diagnosis to base on lost health instead of total health, then bringing it back to like 80% health or something if you don't want his health bar to stay full. He's also the only tech bot without a shield ability of some sort, making emergency repair trigger more often would help with that.
He's still an okay bot, but it's very hard now to survive against demos when he should have an advantage.

Manthro

Another idea is to forget all that... Since he's a medic, give him an interesting skill along the lines of willpower, but for power gain as a passive.

***When ratchet takes any DoT effect, he has x% chance to purify the effect, converting what the damage would be (divided by 2) into power gain.

Davien

Devs shouldn't have set the heal at 50%... instead they should just reduce his overall heal tick / heal per second by 50%.. everyone will be off much happier if so.

Do u know how easy it is to get one shotted below 50% hp by other bot's skills? Devs should have considered this before the change.

Mutantdoc

OK I've used him for the last 2 AM at level 18. Ratchet can still manage to reach Megatron with 1/2 health by playing very carefully and using his level 2 specials only. However he is way underpowered and trying to take on a mini boss with half health is asking for a KO. It's frustrating as his level 1 does nothing. Worse still his level 1 and 2 specials are always dodged by the AI. Please give his power gain back or at least improve his damage output. Make Ratchet great again... or at least not so crappy

Manthro

Ok... Lets hit reset again...

I appreciate the enthusiasm guys, but if your only input is to restore some or all of Ratchets original abilities to pre nerf, it's NOT GONNA HAPPEN.

not even self diagnostics at 50% Regen is acceptable, it can still be exploited far too easily.

New skills or completely retooled skills are what we should be looking at. Give the devs new ideas to work with, and we might get something done in the future

MaxBebop

I would like to see a mirage type special on ratchet, his current sp2 effect should be bumped down to sp1 and restore 7% of lost health instead of 14%, now sp2 if it connects, ratchet should get an HP drain effect that restores HP per punch landed during the time allotted by his sp2 effect, it would get canceled if hit by the opponent, it should also offer a slight boost to power gain per hit landed to compensate for the power gain loss from SD. They should also add a slight damage mitigation to self diagnostics while it's active, to give a better fighting chance when getting near a KO.

Manthro

Just an observation.. I was reading Grimlocks Sig ability, and it feels like this is an ability that would suit Ratchet near perfect. Purifying debuffs and converting them into a melee or power gain or Regen bonus is exactly the type of skill a medic should have.

I hope ratchet is eventually given something like this to balance him out.