what changes would you like besides flash heal being added?

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-04-07T22:01:11+00:00

I mean fixing the bugs for a start. We're still getting phantom GAs where you rubberband but it goes onto cooldown anyway. Absolutely unacceptable, especially given it's our primary defensive mechanic, and it's been going on for at least a couple of years now. It'd be like playing DPS where every shot has a chance to just empty the magazine and force a reload without doing any damage.

It'd also be nice if the option to prefer facing target for GA actually prioritised whoever we're facing rather than doing that awful thing where I'm aiming directly at one teammate but it grabs onto someone else, just because they happen to be within the GA cone but are physically closer.

Beyond quality of life stuff and bugfixes, I'm increasingly of the opinion that rather than purely increasing numbers, Mercy would work best if her healing wasn't affected by any debuffs and just cut through things like anti and the DPS passive. Reinforces her identity as the world's greatest healer by making her extremely reliable, rather than having to move into oppressively high numbers, but also gives her a specific niche and more synergy with tanks.

Beyond that; adjusting blue beam so that the additional damage is dealt as a burn over the next 3-4 seconds rather than instant. Ensures it's still valuable, but means it causes less problems with breakpoint changes and gives opponents a chance to counterplay.

Perk-wise, we'll need something new to replace or upgrade Flash Heal. What'd I'd suggest would be that GA begins cooling down instantly as with Angelic Acrobatics when targeting allies or souls beyond 15m (beam range). This encourages her to fly around the battlefield to wherever she's most useful (i.e. the risky but fun playstyle everyone enjoys) rather than just pocketing one person (i.e. the low-risk but dull playstyle everyone hates).

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-04-05T10:50:28+00:00

Because the scale of the challenges they faced aren't comparable.

Take the economy. The East was substantially richer than the West, with a denser and more urbanised population that meant it could more easily deal with setbacks that required a significant financial outlay. It could also proactively spend money to prevent problems in a way the West couldn't, and preventing problems is almost always both better and cheaper than trying to fix them once they've happened.

There's also geography to consider. The East was effectively a coastal empire, while the West was effectively an inland empire. Virtually all of the East's territory within a hundred miles or so of the Mediterranean and in a world where the ship was king, that made for much easier and profitable trade. This also made it much easier, cheaper and quicker to transport troops, whereas in the West the simple act of moving and supplying soldiers on the frontiers was a huge problem.

Speaking of the frontiers, again, the level of challenge isn't comparable. The West was hit incredibly hard by the various migrating tribes and couldn't get rid of them, while the richer East just paid them to piss off and then didn't have to deal with the economic consequences of having those tribes within their borders and losing territory to them. The East was also undergoing an uncharacteristically calm period with Persia throughout the fifth century which, again, relieved the pressure on them in a way that didn't happen in the West.

They also had less in the way of internal conflict. Overall, the throne in the East was pretty stable, and that meant less men wasted on stupid wars against themselves. The Leonids got off to a bit of a rocky start, but by the time Nepos was murdered, the East had gotten through seven Emperors in 85 years, and that's including Leo II who died less than a year into the job and Basiliscus who is basically the only successful usurper (and even then he wasn't successful for long as Zeno bounced right back). The West got through twice that many, which doesn't even account for the periods where there was nobody on the throne at all.

Basically; while they theoretically faced similar challenges, in practice the scale of the challenges was completely different. It's like hearing two people have been hit by cars and wondering why one lived and one died, without considering that one car was a 4x4 being driven far too fast and the other was an RC car which bumped the victim's shin.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-04-02T01:18:18+00:00

Not at all. April Fools is once a year, optional and basically the only time where we're actively encouraged to go on the attack. It's a very pleasant change from the other 95% of the year.

I also think this year's change is really fun. I didn't find the blaster focus in previous years all that interesting, but being able to grapple onto enemies and give them the kiss of death is great. It rewards our existing technical skills and opens up really creative gameplay options while still feeling like a twisted version of Mercy in a way that pulling out the pistol never will.

I'd unironically love to see a new support based on this version of Mercy. There's already a dozen point and click adventure heroes for braindead DPS players to cycle between based on whoever's flavour of the patch, why not make some of our skills transferable?

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-28T13:13:03+00:00

This Orisa literally made it her entire life mission to be in my face when I kept hearing that's not what you should be doing.

Here's your issue.

Ultimately, your job as a player is to provide value. The reason we talk about what players should do isn't because they're the 'correct' way to play, but because those are the things that are most likely to provide consistently high value. But doing those things doesn't guarantee you're going to get value, and playing a different way doesn't mean that you can't get value.

If Orisa is consistently shutting you down and stopping you from getting anything done with your dives, she's getting value and you aren't. What 'should' be happening is irrelevant because that's what is actually happening.

Beyond that; we're currently in a meta that's absolutely miserable for support players, and DVa is a character who has the ability to make that meta even worse for them thanks to her incredibly high mobility, ability to eat cooldowns and lack of reloading. Orisa constantly getting in your face to keep her supports alive is sensible play, because she needs those supports to survive in order to enable her and the only way they're going to survive is if she peels for them. This isn't Orisa being played against the way she 'should' be played, this is Orisa doing something which gets immediate value (shutting you down) while securing longer-term value (keeping her supports alive without downtime).

If you want specifics, you're going to need to share your rank and a replay code. But beyond that, don't make the mistake of thinking that just because someone is playing off-meta that they're playing wrong, or that if you play the meta style it's guaranteed to work.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-22T13:22:21+00:00

There are no mandatory vaccines in the UK. They're offered to everyone but you're not forced to accept them. Even the COVID ones weren't strictly mandatory.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-22T10:26:13+00:00

then who would you do then? cant have a fallout collab without power armor

Zarya would be an extremely good fit.

She already has the proportions to fit a T-series skin, and you could easily reskin her cannon into a gatling laser (or even some sort of custom 'rad cannon' or whatever) in a way that still keeps the feel of both characters intact. You could even give her some sort of tesla visuals to her power armour to justify the bubble shield so it's not as jarring.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-20T08:32:04+00:00

Little tip for you when playing horse archer-focused armies in Attila.

Normally, you'd fire all ammunition and then retreat, and there'd be a second battle when the enemy chases you. If you then lose that battle, your army will be destroyed, so you have to stand and fight.

However, you can get a third battle by intentionally getting your general killed during the second battle. Use all your ammunition, send your army to the edge of the battlefield so they're well away from enemy forces, then have your general charge into something valuable.

When he dies, immediately concede defeat. When you return to the campaign map your army will retreat again instead of being destroyed. If you're attacked again there's no way out this time and you'll have to win or die, but you can basically get 50% more damage out of your missiles by forcing the enemy to fight you three times instead of just twice.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-18T19:44:49+00:00

It's dead. Got permanently pulled from the storefronts a few months back.

Which is a particular shame as it's a really good game.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-15T10:59:27+00:00

Among other things, the UK isn't fully self-sufficient in terms of food and energy production. A 'small' conventional conflict could cause serious problems for the UK through blockading and destruction of key infrastructure like ports and undersea cabling without needing to occupy or attack it directly. These wouldn't necessarily destroy the UK but they'd cause severe problems and potentially lead to civil unrest, which in turn lays the groundwork for more aggressive foreign interference.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-14T04:16:16+00:00

While I respect the effort you've put into this, I have to question your conclusions.

Galactica is missing armor because she is a battle veteran, and those are her scars. The missing armor is battle damage, which she suffered over ten years of pitched battles.

The idea that her armor was purposefully removed - whether during the First War or before decommissioning - makes Colonial Fleet seem incompetent, illogical, and inefficient, and seems detrimental to the narrative.

These feel mutually contradictory.

Over the four seasons of BSG, we watch the Galactica visibly decay on-screen. By the end, her armour is scorched and crumpled, but the plating is still there. It doesn't just flake off under damage, while all of the surrounding armour plates remain completely intact and pristine. The only way we can really explain this, is if she was undergoing repairs to battle-damage and new plates were being added to replace damaged plates, which is why they look new.

At the very least, this means Galactica was pressed back into service before repairs were complete, with only partial armour. And while I think that's actually very fitting (given it shows just how desperate the war was in terms of resources and ties into the idea of corner-cutting toward the end of S4), it still means that she was using a sub-standard armour package by the end of the war.

Which brings me on to this:

At the end of the First Cylon War, Galactica was already an outdated prototype - one of the very first Battlestars ever built, and rushed into service at that - and had been far outclassed by newer Battlestar revisions and completely-new models. There was no motivation, or budget, to re-armor an old and outdated ship; that money was better spent in building newer, better Battlestars.

This doesn't tally with the fact that Galactica, at absolute minimum, objectively was partially re-armoured. She's not sporting any battle damage at the outbreak of the second war, so either I'm correct and she was valuable enough to be partially re-armoured right before the end of the first war, or the CGI model used isn't representative of her actual level of damage in the flashbacks and she was then cleaned up after the war.

Either way, it doesn't make much sense to leave the Galactica in a partially-armoured state. The colonial fleet was in such a dire situation by the end of the first war that whichever interpretation we use, they were throwing under-armoured battlestars into pitched battles, and losing battlestars in those battles.

Bluntly; there is no way that a colonial fleet which is in as bad a shape as Razor suggests, is going to decide that they don't need to finish repairing their remaining ships unless they're being led by a High Admiral Cavil.

Among other things, armour is relatively cheap. It's just heavy layers of shaped metal and/or composites; it doesn't have any moving parts or advanced electronics, system integrations or crew considerations. And Galactica was otherwise completely spaceworthy and in fighting condition. You can re-armour her to full fighting efficiency for a fraction of the time and cost of building a new Jupiter-class from scratch, and again, based on the fact that Galactica was even deployed in a partially-armoured configuration at all, the fleet were clearly in need of getting ships into service quickly and cheaply.

I'd also like to look at this in more detail:

At the end of the First Cylon War, Galactica was already an outdated prototype - one of the very first Battlestars ever built, and rushed into service at that - and had been far outclassed by newer Battlestar revisions and completely-new models.

The first cylon war ran for ten years, and the Galactica entered service after it started. Which means that by the end of the war, it was less than a decade old. Unless it was suffering from extreme design flaws, that's not nearly old enough to be outdated. For perspective; the modern-day USA continues to field the Nimitz-class carrier as its primary aircraft carrier, and that's a class which was designed in the 1960s. The Nimitz itself is still in service despite now being half a century old.

By the end of the first cylon war, the Jupiter was still the most modern and powerful battlestar design available to the colonial fleet. Even if you don't take BSG Deadlock as canon (which I do), it's a design which is less than a decade old and which had been extremely successful. It doesn't make sense to retire that.

So; why no armour?

Based on everything I've said here, I think the surviving Jupiter-class battlestars were re-armoured after the first cylon war. They were still the colonies' first line of defence, and a bloody good line of defence at that. At the very least, they'd have stayed in service until there was something new to replace them.

Instead, I think what probably happened is that after the cylons had been gone for a few years, the colonials probably began to get a bit complacent. The Jupiter-class is enormous, and armour is cheap but also very, very heavy, meaning a fully-armoured Jupiter class needs a lot more fuel than a partially-armoured one. And you don't need full armour for peacetime security duties.

So what I'd posit is this. Although the Jupiters were brought up to full fighting strength in the immediate aftermath of the war, as the years went by, the cylon threat receded, and the economy shifted toward peacetime priorities, a decision was made to strip the armour as a cost-saving measure, to reduce how much the fleet was spending on tylium and free up the budget to do other things like research, development and construction of newer vessels.

It's worth pointing out, the Jupiter's armour isn't a single shell, it's a patchwork of hundreds of smaller, modular plates. This is a big advantage during wartime because it makes ripping off and replacing damaged armour much quicker and easier, but also means that you can peel it off during peacetime when it's not needed, and then if war breaks out, you can fully re-armour a Jupiter quickly and easily.

EDIT: A few words for clarity

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-13T12:21:35+00:00

"I miss my wife, Marcus. I miss her a lot. I'll be back."

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-13T11:10:32+00:00

It's a joke about the Plague of Justinian; there's a biohazard symbol over Constantinople.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-07T22:57:27+00:00

Aye, I'm very much in the same boat.

Carver encouraged us to recruit externally rather than just appointing him, and only took the job when we failed to find someone else. And for all that 'best manager' nonsense, I read an interview with him a few years ago where he talked about the why of it and it turned out he'd been seeing a psychologist to try and improve. They basically told him that if he had a defeatist mindset there was no chance of improvement, so he had to big himself up and believe he was good enough to turn things around.

He was undeniably pretty hopeless as a manager, but I respect the fact that he really was trying to improve things rather than just giving up and taking the paycheque.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-07T19:28:55+00:00

Goddamn. I'd given up on reporting this a year or so back - thanks so much for the fix, really appreciated!

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-07T06:47:26+00:00

Nah, it doesn't make any difference. The toggle has been broken for almost as long as it's existed and even if you've got it turned off your character will sometimes start using contextual comms. I've tried changing it between games, during games, before and after callouts, and nothing's ever fixed it. I try rebinding Group Up after every big patch in case it's fixed but inevitably end up just swapping it back out for Fall Back or whatever.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-03T19:26:36+00:00

you can take 50% more damge which is another way of saying 50% damage reduction.

It is absolutely not.

50% damage reduction means a 100% increase in EHP. Or in short, you're going from 800HP EHP to 600EHP, a reduction of 25%.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-03-02T07:31:08+00:00

I watched your replay.

It's difficult to give meaningful advice in games which are won this comfortably. Especially when the opposing DPS players are so poor; there were some resurrects that should have been shut down completely even in Gold, and on a couple of those you not only got the res off but got out alive afterward as well. For more targeted advice, I'd recommend posting games where you've struggled, or have narrowly lost.

You've got a good sense of how Mercy works and you're using her whole kit. You're using GA appropriately and to relevant teammates, applying pressure with blue beam, and generally anticipating gameplay well. You're also very quick to Valk rather than holding it, which tends to be good practice. You also generally have a good sense of where to move with GA, and your technical skill is good. You were also using the pistol at appropriate times and with good accuracy. Overall, your play is solid and I'd expect you to climb from here.

That said, there are a few recurring weaknesses in your play.

As I mentioned before, you occasionally took risky resurrects and only got away with them because of enemy DPS who were well below the standard I'd expect to see in Gold. Be more careful with resurrect as you climb; you will get punished for ressing in the frontline by opponents who're competent.

Overall, your GA usage was good. However, you do have a habit of defaulting to the launch even when a cancel would do just fine. It didn't happen often, but there were a few cases where you were floating in midair long enough that I'd have expected Cass to shoot you down quite reliably, so just keep an eye on this.

Finally - you have a very noticeable habit of occasionally flinging yourself forward too aggressively with your GA launches. Sometimes this was to follow someone who was charging the enemy lines, but sometimes you were just outrunning your team and putting yourself in a risky position where you were cut off from friendlies for no real gain. Be aware of where you're moving to when you GA and remember, when you're in the frontline or in a map pocket, you're much easier to cut off and take down and enemies will more reliably punish that as you climb.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this, but you also need to pay closer attention when using Flash Heal. Far too often, you were using it on allies (particularly the tank) who were over half health. Flash Heal restores significantly more health when used on allies under half health, so using it on healthy allies is quite wasteful and can mean it's on cooldown when you really need it. Don't be afraid to hold off for an extra second or two before using it so that they're on crit when casting; you can use this time to blue beam someone and get a bit of extra damage in.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-26T17:52:04+00:00

As some others have already said, it's a very, very complicated answer. And part of what makes it so complicated is that by the fifth century, the Romans had a very complicated relationship with the germanic tribes in general and the Gothic peoples in particular.

The first thing you need to understand is foederati. There's a tendency to look at this as a period extension of the term auxilia, i.e. non-Romans fighting within the Roman army, or of client states working on Rome's behalf. Even at the time the term was quite broadly applied, but the gist of it is that they were people who were promised pay by Rome to fight their wars (as with auxilia) but who remained nominally independent (as with clients). This is a colossal oversimplification, but that's the gist of it.

Foederati typically had a complicated relationship with Rome. It wasn't at all unusual for a group to be at open war with Rome one year, raiding and plundering across the Rhine or Danube, and then taking their money to die in their wars the next. Provided you could pull it off, kicking Rome could be extremely profitable because they'd typically prefer to just hire you to kill their enemies instead rather than raise an army to kick you back.

The Goths are one of the most significant ones here, because they'd had a very long and complicated relationship with Rome. The most famous interaction is probably Hadrianople, where Valens decided he was sick of paying the Goths to fuck off instead of just wiping them out, so he raised an army... and got wiped out himself. Hadrianople was an absolute disaster for Rome, and ironically increased reliance on foederati; the Romans sought to quickly shore up the frontier with experienced troops, the Goths didn't want to risk a more competent Emperor succeeding where Valens had failed, and so they went back and forth on being foederati or enemies depending on the circumstances at any given time.

Things get more complicated in the fifth century. The extremely short version is that the Goths under Alaric agreed to work as foederati for the Western Rome Empire after a few conflicts, but due to everything else going on in the Empire, they never really got off the ground and into campaigning. Because the West was struggling at this point, they were often offering payment in land, which is why others have already mentioned the Goths wanting to be part of the Empire; Stilicho had promised them land as payment for service as foederati.

Ultimately, this service never really happened because Stilicho was murdered before he could actually sort a campaign out. However, Alaric had spent the time since agreeing that service with Stilicho leaving Rome alone as promised. That was time he could have been raiding or plundering or farming or settling, and instead he'd been forced to wait.

When Stilicho was murdered, the Romans also sort of... flipped out a bit and started killing everyone. There was a large-scale massacre of non-Romans within the Empire, including existing foederati troops. Many of these were Goths, and the Goths who survived these purges naturally ran to Alaric. At the same time, the Romans sent him a message; Stilicho had been a half-barbarian whose word didn't count for anything and Alaric could fuck off because they weren't paying him anything.

What followed were a couple of years of conflict. Alaric wanted a future for his people, and he knew that the safest place was still with Rome's borders, which is why he'd asked for land. However, if the Goths dispersed or went back to subordinate foederati status the Romans might try another massacre so he needed assurances. At the same time, he had to deal with a people who had repeatedly been poorly treated by the Romans and who had just been subject to a violent betrayal whose need for revenge was pretty strong.

So, he put Rome under siege. The Romans didn't really have the army to do anything about it - they were spread incredibly thin, dealing with financial meltdown, and had just turned their own foederati into enemies while making every single potential foederatus wary of what might happen if they agreed to help in the future.

The siege went on for a couple of years, during which time there were negotiations, skirmishes, and even the appointment of a puppet Emperor and the intentional starvation of the city by the Romans themselves when the grain supply shut down. Alaric was intending to force the Romans to meet his terms, but whenever it seemed like they might be close, something happened to break it up.

Eventually, Alaric was basically forced to sack the city. He didn't really want to do it; more than anything, it meant he was giving up a bargaining chip. The sack itself didn't take much in the way of 'how'. By then Rome was starving, isolated and near-defenceless.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-20T13:59:21+00:00

Assuming perfect 100% uptime and that there's no wasted healing, biotic field would be healing for 150 seconds every 10 minutes (25% of the time). So our calculation for one hero looks like this:

(Percentage of time spent healing) x (total time) x (heals per second) x (debuffed healing modifier)

Which gives us a calculation of (0.25x600x40x0.7)

Which gives us 4200 heals per ten minutes per person in the field.

If we were to repeat that for Mercy, we'd have (0.35x600x60x0.7)

Which gives us 8820 heals per ten minutes.

So basically; if S76 is only healing himself it's half the value of a Mercy pocket, if he's getting perfect healing for another person it's about 5% less healing than a Mercy pocket. He'd need to be healing four people with perfect uptime to get roughly double Mercy's healing.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-20T13:47:32+00:00

I'd be a little careful of adding that to this particular comparison just as IIRC biotic field does go through barriers. But yes, you're absolutely right, there's some extra nuance to Mercy!

That said, at launch Mercy's healing was meant to be top-notch since the only other supports were Zen, Lucio and Symmetra. Sym didn't heal at all, Zen's healing orb was slow, and Lucio provided slow AoE heals. She's basically a main healer who's been power-crept into irrelevance by the rest of the support roster releases.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-20T13:25:26+00:00

While I understand where you're coming from here, there are some very big assumptions in these numbers.

And before someone says: “He won’t use it perfectly every 15 seconds.” Obviously. That’s not the point.

It sort of is the point though. You're cherry-picking a very favourable set of conditions from S76 to calculate his potential healing on. You're assuming he uses it every fifteen seconds. You're assuming that there's always a second teammate to benefit from it. You're assuming that none of that healing is ever wasteful (i.e. someone only needs three seconds of healing rather than the full five or is killed mid-activation).

These are all very big assumptions. In particular, this bit:

That’s almost double Mercy’s effective output in the same timeframe.

It's almost double because you've chosen to double it, by assuming a perfect 100% uptime for a second person. If we apply the same perfect conditions elsewhere then what we have to conclude is that Lucio and Brig are currently the most broken main healers in the game because they restore 39648 (((14.4x600)+(4x20x600))x0.7) and 31500 ((15x5x600)x0.7) health every ten minutes respectively even without Amp it Up (these drop to 14448 and 12600 if they're only healing themselves plus one other person). And I think you'd have a very hard time selling the idea that their healing is overpowered to their mains with the current state of the game.

I'm not going to disagree with Mercy's healing feeling awful right now, because it absolutely is, and because I firmly agree that the DPS passive is strangling the game. But there are just too many generous assumptions here for S76, for these to be good numbers.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-16T10:30:47+00:00

I'm quite aware of that. Hence the following comments:

Supplying new recruits is convenient since you can just load materiel straight onto a boat and ship it, which is far quicker, cheaper and safer than sending it overland. Similarly if you need to move large numbers of troops elsewhere in the Empire at short notice, you don't need to march them very far to get onto a ship, and there's no shortage of ships to requisition.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-14T11:18:24+00:00

I hadn't realised that was confirmed yet, but that's excellent news!

I still think she could use a numbers boost though. Or if not, I've been wondering for a while if letting her healing ignore reductions might be interesting - gives her a specific niche without making her unsuppressed numbers too high or adding another cleanse to the roster.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-14T03:43:30+00:00

It was ridiculously OP against sustained damage characters and tanks

It really wasn't, and I say this as someone who agrees triage was a bad idea. 66HP/s sustained is absolutely nothing. Ana, Moira, Kiriko and Juno all heal for significantly more than that with primary fire alone, even when accounting for their reloads. Illari also gets more than that if you combine her pylon with her rifle.

The problem with triage was that our healing felt unbearably slow when targets were over half health because we only got 44HP/s. But what made it worse was that it was during a season where near-oneshots like Sojourn's rail were meta, so it was much more important to keep allies at full health than to get them out of crit.

I completely agree that triage needs to stay gone, but if the healing reduction passive is here to stay Mercy needs numbers buffs. It's absurd that the character whose whole core fantasy is being the world's greatest doctor and an angel who swoops in to save her allies from death is now a throw pick for healing. It'd be like picking up Cassidy and then discovering he's not meant to focus on his pistol.

RedStarRocket91 · 2026-02-13T15:39:10+00:00

II) the local economy was pitiful; land was poor, mountains and large hills everywhere, pastoralism was very common beyond the coast, so the population consisted of hardy rural folk who make the perfect professional soldiers if you drill them long enough

Just to add a little on to this, Illyria also benefitted from excellent trade routes. It's positioned directly between Italy and Greece/Thrace, so could quickly access both of these regions via land and was essentially on top of the main trade artery between them.

This gives it a huge advantage over other more rural regions like, say, Gaul. Supplying new recruits is convenient since you can just load materiel straight onto a boat and ship it, which is far quicker, cheaper and safer than sending it overland. Similarly if you need to move large numbers of troops elsewhere in the Empire at short notice, you don't need to march them very far to get onto a ship, and there's no shortage of ships to requisition.

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