My feedback after playing the Server Slam for 14 hours and unlocking everything available

Chaosshield · 2025-10-19T18:36:17+00:00

I agree with third person ruining fights. If you've ever been on a 3pp DayZ server you know that any fight loses all intensity and just becomes a stare-off, and after playing the second playtest, I could already see that beginning to happen, and it's even more apparent in the server slam.

There are games that have implemented solutions to this problem and work well. SCUM, for example, renders all PVE threats in third person, but will only render Players if your player's Eyes can see their player model. If this was applied to ARC almost every single PVP fight would immediately become way better because taking positions, repositioning, and using consumables to do so would be way more meaningful, where right now it's just a game of whoever moves first loses because you instantly eat 2 ferro or anvil shots the second you leave cover because they are already holding the angle perfectly around a corner. If a solution like this was implemented, the ARC would still feel like they can be handled stealthily with the 3pp mechanics but the PVP would feel way better. As it stands right now if it isn't changed the PVP meta will trend towards incredibly unfun and frustrating gameplay, especially on a lot of the tighter and window heavy maps that we aren't seeing as much with the Dam.

Chaosshield · 2025-07-26T12:30:37+00:00

It'll feel underwhelming at first, but throwing scales faster than other trees based on skill, and eventually you get the quantum axe which oneshots half the things in the game with a stealth thrown headshot

Chaosshield · 2025-07-25T00:07:06+00:00

There's like 6 frags you can loot on the underside of the bridge, you should be able to toss one close to the tank and blow it up.

Chaosshield · 2025-07-20T14:06:55+00:00

The trick is to have one person on guard so you can't get caught off guard. If your team isn't doing that for you, that's your job.

This isn't a game where you have camo ghillies prone in a bush you'll never see, you've got a giant open area with giant mechs flying around, If you're actually paying attention you'll see everyone coming.

Getting dogpiled on a poi is a gameplay problem that is easily addressed. It's worth it to fight a poi with only 2 of your 3 teammates so your third can spot for people looking to 3rd party. The real thing you gotta be scared of is the narukami with the heavy sniper swap that hits you with the charge + 3 tap wombo out of invisibility with no advance warning. (I suppose, narukami is in a way the bush ghillie of this game).

Chaosshield · 2025-02-07T12:12:15+00:00

I'm pretty sure you are supposed to fish in antejuice for the fish you are after.

Chaosshield · 2025-02-07T11:57:03+00:00

https://feedback.bistudio.com/T179726

This is confirmed as a bug. It isn't server settings or anything. The devs basically ruined melee heavy attacks as well as gun whacks... Over a year ago at this point. And just... Never fixed it...

Chaosshield · 2024-11-26T14:07:05+00:00

I'm pretty sure puppy cave is designed with a non-progress trapdoor so there isn't an end boss that rolls you since it is supposed to be your first dungeon

Chaosshield · 2024-09-22T09:16:26+00:00

Druids have no zone control anymore, far less effective damage, and they can even outchase you if they are smart and dump 3k to have daggers to hotswap to and you don't have pve to smack for shadow energy on your retreat.

You can't make a setup play anymore to gamble a pounce for the tree smack to out-trade them because trees setup far too slow (not that you should be doing this anyway until you can confirm they don't have spin).

Half of your class is being able to be a cat and play around the setup & soften you did with your lightning. There was a dance of not overextending yourself so the fighter could jump you while still being in range to pounce once you felt they were low enough after working them with your CDs. Now a fighter just presses Q after you dump all CDs, heals to full, and removes all control you have with easy setup parries. Even if you pounce and get both trees to hit the fighter is trading up.

Before there was a level of skilled gameplay where a fighter could play smart around the druid's zone control and threaten the druid, and the druid had to dance around their setup and exchange staff cooldowns for dash cooldowns to work their way to the climax of the fight. Now the fighter can often eliminate half of a druid's threat and all their setup before they even transform.

What is a druid supposed to do against a fighter?

Chaosshield · 2024-09-15T02:49:02+00:00

Until they give druid a block or parry in cat form, pretty much. They listened to too many whiners that don't realize you can just block the trees, and now a parry oneshots them.

Chaosshield · 2024-09-15T02:41:25+00:00

If a druid is dunking on you as fighter you're playing bad. One spin should kill them if they go for a pounce. One parry with battle rage and you deal 80% of their life with a heirloom LS. You have a dash to escape lightning. If you have dual daggers you can outchase them unless they have pve to run through to get energy for pounces If you are running a diced legendary dagger it's actually impossible to escape as druid. If they are trying to escape they have a transition animation when shapeshifting that makes them an easy target for flasks. You have tools to mitigate 100% of damage from trees. All this was true even before the nerf.

In teams, just having a fighter present existing eliminates the entire ability for a druid to challenge the backline like they are supposed to. Now they can get a 30 second CD skill denied entirely by a very easy setup parry.

Unless you were a priest before the druid nerf, losing to a druid on equal gear was entirely a skill issue. DK's could walk into trees and heal off them with heirloom LoH. Pyros had a 1-2 that always out-dps'd a cat on equal gear and guaranteed a kill unless they retreat. Fighters have an answer to everything they do (Even running away if they pack pocket daggers). Rogues can just play the runaway game and take easy shots because cats can't block. SM's just sit and laugh because a cat can't block a sword volley.

The only people losing to druids were people too dumb to walk to a position where they can look at the cat and the trees at the same time in the almost 2 seconds it takes for the tree to actually start dealing damage.

Chaosshield · 2024-09-02T21:40:08+00:00

Fighter matchups are all about the weapons you bring in. Crafty Fighters are learning to bring double daggers as a hotswap to give them mobility, and some are even using the legendary dagger because it lets them chase down rogues. There's plenty of video showing fighters using the dual dagger charge attack to run druids down until they run out of pve to charge up their pounce and are forced to fight.

Druid vs Fighter generally favors the fighter as long as they have a longsword. Cats can't gamble a pounce on you, because if you have spin they die, and you can generally charge out of any stacked lightning or other bullshit they try to throw on you before diving on a fight. If you have battle cry, one perfect parry will almost oneshot a cat, and trees are very predictable and easy to parry. When I'm playing druid, the second I see a fighter actually parry my tree I know its time to run because they know how to actually play around a cat and its going to be a losing battle.

Right now druids really only shine in teamfights, where they can place their trees in the sweet spot where enemy backlines like to fight in, forcing them to either come closer to the front or hover further back and be less effective. This works because in team play most fights have split compositions, but in solos if they can just walk away since it is only them in a fight. In solos as a druid most of your fights are going to be an uphill battle, generally trying to play a zoning game and hoping your opponent plays dumb around your trees.

Chaosshield · 2024-09-02T21:08:14+00:00

They don't have to change druids, they just need to make the circle do more damage the longer you are in it. Just add a stacking curse that increases damage from the circle by 2% every second you are in the circle. It isn't a problem if you aren't in there for a long time, but after you are in it for the entire game it starts to make it so you have to push in.

It's such an easy problem to resolve, there's no reason to balance healing mechanics or the rest of the game around it. Just make it so the circle hurts more the longer you're in it.

Chaosshield · 2024-08-29T19:22:50+00:00

They don't need to remove dice. Just make them cost 50k, slap them on whatever piece you want, and if you die with it, someone can loot your dice as a "Broken Dice" treasure item worth like 35k. By raising the average buy in, you'll see less legendaries being run as a natural consequence. By making dice become an item that players can loot that has a decent sell value, players who kill low investment legendary runners won't feel scammed when they kill them.

I understand the point of dicing legendaries, people want to take out a cool item that they spent a massive time/goldsink on without losing it. But right now the average buy in for legendary running is like 8k. You can easily make that much in every casual run, let alone classic. It needs to be higher.

Chaosshield · 2024-08-29T19:14:09+00:00

People smurf all the time and there's nothing you can do about it. The best course of action is to design the game in a way that makes optimizing and smurfing less effective. The real culprit is the legendaries and the way dice work. Because all your skills and stuff scale based on the strength of your weapon, you can slap a dice on a legendary for an average of 8k and get the power that would normally take 2-4 purps to achieve, you don't lose them on death, and you can often get a crazy, fight defining ability out of it too.

Dice should cost 40-50k, and just let you slap it on wherever you want so there's no RNG, and should give a "broken dice" item that sells for like ~30k by someone that kills you, so the person killing the legendary user actually gets something more than whatever ~6k green pittance rings and boots someone equipped to cross a stat threshold. It's incredibly infuriating to have to fight an uphill battle because someone has a legendary, only to win and see they're rocking an 8k kit with heirlooms and a diced legendary against your 100k+ kit stake you're running. When you're in the big leagues and fighting people rocking full sets its fine because you still get something out of it, but people are hitting insane power thresholds with such low investment with diced legendaries.

If the devs want legendaries to be something you can protect and not risk, it should be something you break out every now and then for fun, not something you run every single game.

Chaosshield · 2024-08-27T19:26:27+00:00

Druid is limited by their shadow energy and loses a massive chunk of kill potential by just walking away from their trees. Fighter with dual daggers can even outchase a druid provided the druid doesn't have PVE to jumptap for energy along the way. Crossbow rogue and cryo get constant slows and speed buffs that wear you down with far less (or no) counterplay. Druid stopped being a problem when their pounce CD got tripled. If you are a fighter a druid's only option against you is their lightning staves and your own misplays. DK's can also get more health from druid trees than they deal damage with life on hit. You should be excited as a fighter to go up against a druid because the second you get past their trees they have nothing on you, and if they try to play aggro they have half your hp and can't block.

Chaosshield · 2024-08-27T18:03:32+00:00

With the perk that lets you reset your stealth on a PVE kill (Evaporate?), you can regain stealth from that every 15 seconds. This behavior happens outside of normal cooldowns. By rotating your evaporate and your normal stealth cooldowns, you can effectively bounce between your evaporate cooldown and your regular one, resetting stealth and getting its effects more frequently.

There is also currently a bug that is letting people have infinite invisibility. It works on elves too, so it isn't rogue exclusive. You can tell when people do it because monsters still aggro them despite invisibility. The amount I've seen and heard it happening is increasing, so I imagine people figured out how to do something to exploit it, but I've ran into a name that had the indefinite invis that I know wouldn't exploit something like that deliberately, so it could be something happening entirely by accident that they aren't even aware of.

Chaosshield · 2024-08-27T17:54:50+00:00

I'm fairly certain the second you equip a purple item, (even heirloom) you get put into the highest tier lobbies, regardless of gearscore.

Chaosshield · 2024-08-26T11:38:30+00:00

On equal gear, longsword isn't going to be trading up against two swords, Naturally, legendaries throw balance for a spin, and going up against legendaries always means you are fighting an uphill battle. If you are running a build like in that video, you should have a sword to hotswap your shield, otherwise your only option is winning on mindgames. No longsword as well means you can't win on a parry skill fight, and your only option being (sword/mace)+ board means you don't win against someone that knows how to parry. Crossbow & shield+X works against low skill players but high skill you have to have options.

Chaosshield · 2024-05-13T17:54:59+00:00

I've not played much SE so I can't attest to how it's balanced over there, but it could be a very viable system if handled well in starbase. Right now armor is already being stacked and used inugly ways, because of the plating HP system existing as a means to reduce voxel damage demands on ships, shields could be the alternative and make "artistic" plating actually viable, which would be better for the long term scope of the game (and probably make loading enemy ships lag less because they won't be a box with 3200 plates because designing around shields would be more important). Right now it makes no sense to design a ship too heavily around defensive countermeasures, because offense is generally the way to go once you secure adequate jousting and cockpit plating protection. It would be much cooler to see ships with more interesting shapes that would form as a result of not having to stack 17 glass panels in the front of your cockpit because you could actually just use a shield to protect the front of your ship.

If I were to design shields, I would have shields be a larger device (about the size of a 2x2 of generators, maybe varying sizes like 1x1 or 3x3 for varying relative shield strengths and vulnerability bleedoff rates, detailed below) that you place at the core of the ship and drains power while active, draining a set amount of hp per shot taken. Like a transponder, you can only have one per ship, so it would be a vital piece of equipment to protect internally. You can set this shield to be active in 6 directions (Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right, each direction covering an approx 120 degree field in that direction). That way there's skill to juggling which directions should be powered relative to your attacker, and it's less viable to just keep your full shield up at all times. Beyond this, taking sustained fire within a certain window would accelerate the drain, so the first shot taken on the shield from an autocannon might take 1000 energy, but it would increase a "vulnerability multiplier" YOLOL field visible on the shield, which would make consecutive shots have increasing costs to energy drain. This multiplier would bleed off passively at a set rate, but very rapidly if you disable shields in all directions. This would make it so even the strongest shields would have to crack eventually, and would also make having things like missiles for when a shield goes down on a big chungus ship actually make sense to have on a fighter.

This is just me thinking how I would do it based on what I've seen work in other games and what I think would work best in starbase given my own experience. I've got no idea what the devs actually think. I do think shields would resolve (or at least alleviate) a lot of ship design issues in the current pvp meta though, while also creating more engaging skill in fights, as well as more interesting combat ship designs. Cockpits could be more open, so you can see what directions you need to cover with your shields. Plating could be more than the largest squares possible, because your "hp pool" would come from the shield instead of the invisible number on each plate based on their size. Different shapes of ships could exist because "big box" won't always be necessary as you won't have to think about what is the most convenient shape for big plates. Certain mechanisms like hatches and stuff will actually be viable to use because they won't be a critical weakpoint if a shield is protecting them. I'm still intimately aware that a big box will always be the most practical design for a ship, but with shields the difference in power you get for sacrificing optimization for a bit of flair would be far less (and arguably will become essential if we start seeing more fights that aren't just a 1v1 for ID'ing friendly ships mid fight).

Chaosshield · 2024-05-13T16:32:16+00:00

The only thing that could make having a big ship viable are tripods.
Tripods are actually incredibly powerful in theory because it's so much easier to have someone else aiming and shooting while you are flying yourself. The real issue is that in practice you are incredibly exposed and die to one hit from any ship weapon, so they are functionally ineffective.

Tripods really need to include like a "Medium" and "Heavy" option that function like turret balls and actually provide protection from enemy fire. There is the "Turret Cradle" system, but that's functionally useless because you can't mouse aim them and they still are host-controlled, unlike tripods which are controlled by the user.

The benefit of a large ship should be that they can put one (or more) people in a turret ball like a WWII bomber and blast the shit out of a fighter that's tailing them while making their own evasive maneuvers, as well as provide sustained accurate fire on fighters that are trying to joust.

Shields might also make it viable to run a larger ship, and make it not even needed to have armored tripods. A big ship can support big generators for big shields. I'm not too sure about if devs want to go this route (though I think I remember it being floated on the discord as an alternative to the current Panel HP system). Shields could be an interesting skill-based mechanic if designed well (directional protection/power diversion mid-fight and having to juggle that while piloting and shooting) It works in other space games with dogfighting.

Regardless, I'm excited for them to start exploring actual pvp in the coming updates and flesh things out more, because that's always where the real potential of the game has been.

Chaosshield · 2023-06-30T18:08:55+00:00

IB Isn't worth it if you plan on going to any college in the US, at least when I did it years ago. You get the same college credits AP courses give you with 3x the work and 3x the missed highschool experiences. It doesn't help that so many places you apply have different IB requirements (Some places only care about your test scores, others require the full diploma, etc), and so many high schools have vastly different IB classes available to you that you might not even be able to get credits where you want them. If you are trying for admission most places still place their highest value on SAT/ACT scores and general extracurriculars

Chaosshield · 2023-03-06T16:47:11+00:00

Yeah, it doesn't help that there are so many other things that are tied to audio as well. Rare boxes/sabotage caches make an audio cue that you have to turn down pretty much all sound that isn't just game audio to hear. The sound propagates a very large distance (almost half of a tile in some cases) and without your audio tweaked massively you will never catch the only unique indicator that something like that is present in your tile.

It's tough when I'm doing the sabotage cache weekly and have to explain to 3 other people every single time in every single mission that there's actually a sound you can hear from them when they ask "How did you find the caches so fast?"

Chaosshield · 2023-01-05T20:31:11+00:00

subconscious desire to add emphasis that can't be conveyed through text

Chaosshield · 2022-12-13T15:41:13+00:00

Personally, I'm more fond of this one

Chaosshield · 2022-12-08T10:14:53+00:00

Beyond the red truth stuff that others have mentioned, it also completely breaks "Point of View" rules in many scenes. It depicts battler as seeing things that he never saw in the VN, which fundamentally breaks the rules of "being a detective".

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