Shotgun heroes such as Panzer now suck in battle. They barely hit the targets, or making just a small amount of damage. All the investment made to Panzer went down the drain. Used to be a good damage dealer, now she is useless. Making changes just for the sake of making them is a recepy for disaster. If it aint broke, dont fix it.
She’s still good.
She is best against frontline enemies but those fragile enegry ones in the mid and back are still going down by her shotgun.
The issue more is you spend more points purchasing the rare skin for the common skin. For some its more of a ‘Why should I try getting that skin if I already have the common.’ What would be nice is if for rare skins you can customize different colors so everyone would still be on bonus stats 
She out damaged every hero, even the best bio dps would lose to panzer 1v1, and she’s still very strong now…
I want in PvP or gunlet envolve halo and pazer or ifrit… Please
She is ok, but the latest change was not needed. Panzer has been on the decline for months now with nerf after nerf. They should have had these nerfs when she was first released to bring her in line. Instead the devs let her go unchecked in God mode for a month before really starting to touch her. Then they did small nerfs almost every month until she was reasonable balanced. That was a month or two ago. I think they have gone too far now and she is turning into the next Matador/Gammond.
Meanwhile Mauler/Halo/Ifrit has taken center stage. Rather than react and fix it they have done nothing. We still have the same issue as six months ago. That is one super strong meta with a bunch of crappy heroes. Now we just have Dog, Panzer, and Ronin who are decent, along with Halo/Mauler running the show. Mauler and Halo need to be addressed and we still need a lot more damage heroes to be viable.
I probably missed it, but does anyone else see that clydes 50% crit on gold shrank to 5%? Clyde doesn’t deserve ANY nerfs, hes already rarely used in high level play.
oof.
That’s peculiar!
I just saw it, I also don’t understand why this is done
@Deathleech That’s what you get when you and one more player has been complaining about Panzer in most of your posts over a period of several months. Panzer has not been able to kill Nightingale nor Flatline, both tiny energy heroes with heal, with her initial 20 bullets for months now in a 80k+ game. That is due to the spread of bullets and the nerf of damage to barricades. Suddenly she is to weak for your gameplay (and power level) and now you start to complain again, next thing you do is start to call for nerf on other decent heroes…
My view is that Panzer should not been nerfed that many times, and she would have a perfect opposition with the Mauler/Halo combo which have emerged. This way all could choose strategy DPS Mech (Panzer), DPS Bio Mauler/Halo or DPS Energy Ronin which each would have an advantage or disadvantage depending on who you meet. Now Mech DPS is poor, Bio DPS is very good and Energy DPS is pretty good. Stop nerfing good heroes and rather continue to buff weaker heroes as has been done lately.
Panzer is now as good as dead, unless you are happy with her ability to shoot frontline heroes. Happy days?
For what it’s worth, this is an AWFUL way to balance a game. It’s just rock-paper-scissors at that point. Some teams will naturally have some advantages over others, that’s obvious. But designing balance such that there are only three viable composition styles and each one has a hard counter and a hard win condition? That’s when the game dies. A game is not balanced well if the outcome is essentially decided by what type of team you’ve decided to run. Too many games fall into this trap because they’re afraid to nerf strong content and buff weak content. It’s how we’ve arrived where are now.
Panzer NEEDED a hard nerf. To argue otherwise is simply fallacious. Did she need a nerf as much as she got? Depends who you ask. Her usage rate is still unusually high, indicating that she’s still a strong option. Panzer is not “good as dead” - that’s a melodramatic and exaggerated knee-jerk response.
This whole idea of “Don’t nerf heroes, buff weak heroes” is so silly to me and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how game balance works. Every change is unavoidably net-zero. Let’s say for the sake of example that we buff every hero to the level that Mauler is at. What happened to Mauler? Nothing changed, sure, but in reality, he’s received a HUGE nerf because his viability has plummeted relative to the “zero-point” of the balance landscape.
Now let’s take the hypothetical “perfect balance” situation I just described and let’s “nerf” EVERY hero by cutting their power in half. What happens to gameplay? Literally nothing. Balance is net-zero.
To drive this point home - let’s imagine a situation where 50% of the heroes are very (and equally) strong. The other 50% are very (and equally) weak. You can now choose to either nerf the strong ones or buff the weak ones, but it makes no functional difference. The end result is that every hero will sit at the zero-point. Gameplay will be identical.
Buffing all the weak heroes or nerfing all the good ones makes zero difference - the gameplay result is the exact same. Stop thinking in terms of absolute values and instead understand that all that matters is how strong the viability of a hero is relatively to the rest.
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I disagree @Papa_Marsh, I think a lot still use Panzer as they have invested much in her and thus have not invested much in other improved heroes. In the current PvP event only 1 of the top10 players are using Panzer and he/she is min/maxing 10star plat4 with down to 7 star plat heroes. (In the previous PvP event none of the top25 used Panzer, yes she was not a bonus hero but still…)
My point with every team has an advantage/disadvantage was to cover the claim that there is no way to counter certain heroes/combos. With 66 heroes it should be versatile opponents and you can’t always have an advantage with your pre selected team.
When it comes to nerfing vs buffing the issue is for me related to heroes a lot of players have invested time/money/gold into might almost become unusable, if all players had all 66 heroes at the same level I would fully agree it is a net-zero balance but that mainly favor the beta players with 1 year more gameplay and all heroes close to max rather than the majority of the community.
This is likely very true and I don’t disagree. However, saying that she’s “good as dead” is nonsense and hyperbole, which is what I was trying to convey.
To your second point though; I’m not sure exactly what argument you’re trying to make. I wasn’t suggesting any particular balance strategy, I was just explaining the nature of how balance works.
You’re saying to buff the weak heroes so that the strong heroes don’t get nerfed. That’s just not how it works. If you buff some heroes, then the viability of other heroes inevitably goes down, effectively “nerfing” them. Likewise, if you nerf the heroes that see higher useage/win rates, then you’re effectively buffing the weaker heroes. The end result is the same; that’s the point I’m trying to make.
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I’m pro buffs too, panzer at the start was absurd but right now I don’t think panzer needs any nerf
Out of curiosity - did you read through my last two replies? In terms of balance, it simply doesn’t make logical sense to be “pro-buff” or “pro-nerf” or anything… You either want a balanced game or not. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction - the same is true for game balance.
I know I exaggerate when I say that Panzer is as good as dead, for the majority she is not as they have not many other heroes they have build up as much and she can still do some damage, but for those aiming for the top she is. I was merely trying to make a point.
Let me try to explain my point with buffing rather than nerfing.
If we take an example where any given player has the following current setup:
- 10 heroes to 10star plat
- 10 heroes at 9 star plat
- 10 heroes at 8 star gold
- 30 heroes at 5 star silver
If one of the main 10 star players on his mostly used team is nerfed so he is not really good enough to play with anymore (e.g. Panzer) and the new buffed meta is (Mauler/Halo) and these are among his 30 heroes with 5 star silver, then suddenly all the investment he has done getting there is almost wasted and it feels like he must start all over again. It would take months to get back to a good working solution and it would far from being a balance net-zero. (takes even longer as he would loose more PvP games that he was winning trying to star up new heroes that could work)
If Panzer was not nerfed while mauler/hao was buffed this would not put him in as an disadvantaged situation, he would then start investing in halo/mauler as these heroes have become interesting while he still could use his old setup in most games. New added viable teams, more fun ^^
If another player who has played a lot longer has the following situation:
- 50 heroes to 10star plat
- 15 heroes at 9 star gold
Then player could easily swap from his old Panzer setup to halo/mauler setups (or any other setup) without it taking months to get there so for him it would be a Balance net-zero.
To be fair, If we had different hero’s working better, and I’m speaking about the hero’s you never see, unless you play someone who doesn’t know how to play or is using trash.
Hero’s like panzer wouldn’t have been such a big problem, same goes for Nightingale
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Ok, I see what you’re saying now. You and I aren’t really disagreeing, we’re kinda arguing two different topics tangentially. What you’re talking about is the freedom to choose playstyles which are viable. I absolutely agree though that a simple meta-shift hurts newer players in exactly the way you described.
I’m talking more broadly, on a larger scale of balance. Let me put it into the terms of your example and I think it will clear up what I’m trying to say.
I’m not talking about nerfing a few and buffing a few, I’m talking about a global rebalance.
Let’s say in the example you gave that you nerf EVERY hero to the level of Oro, Fischer, Rifleman, etc. I think you’d agree now that nobody is left without a viable team since EVERY hero is at the same level. The newer player that you described is still free to use a panzer team or really any team they want from their top 10-20 heroes and they can be competitive. The older player has more team comps to choose from because they have more high heroes that the newer player, but there’s nothing wrong with that. They don’t have any other advantage over the new player aside from having more options available since all options are equal in terms of viability.
Now let’s do the same, but instead buff every hero to the level of Mauler, Halo, etc. The end result is the same, right? Since every hero’s effectiveness is equal, the new player doesn’t have to face that sense of “starting all over” since their lineup is still perfectly viable. Likewise, the older player is free to use MANY different hero combinations rather than 1-2 super-strong meta teams.
My point in all of this is to say that ideally, EVERY hero would be equally viable, meaning that any progress made on any given hero would always be valuable. Whether you buff them all to the top level or nerf them all to a low level, my primary argument is that there should be a baseline for viability that every hero should be as close to as possible. Whether that baseline is high or low or in the middle or wherever - it doesn’t matter. A well-balanced game will have equal usability across the board.
What you’re saying in your replies is true, but it’s focusing on situations where small tweaks are only done to a couple heroes, only forcing a meta-shift. My argument is instead that ideally there would be NO meta team. There’s 66 heroes for goodness’ sake. They should ALL be usable.
In a perfect world yes, but that is never going to happen. I think it will be close to impossible to get the baseline for viability close to equal in one big global re-balance. I’m not against all nerf’s, but for me that should rather be the exception and buffing was most frequently used on under-performing heroes to find that baseline you mention.
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Agreed that it will never happen for Hero Hunters. There are other games that achieve damn-close to a zero-point balance landscape, but they are games whose business models prioritize long-term strategies for the game’s lifetime. Unfortunately, the HHG business model intensely focuses on the short term gains, sacrificing long-term player retention with decisions that harm the wellbeing and health of the game itself.
The sad truth is that you can simply make more money up-front if you don’t prioritize game balance and instead push resources toward flashy new content and rapid meta-shifts that encourage(require) spending to keep up.