Bullet soaking dinos

[ChargingParacerParacer]

They should have thought ahead like the devs of 7 Days to Die and kept adding better grades of melee oriented traps that can be just as easily destroyed by an entity but much more risky to do so. Beartraps and some easy to spot bomb traps obviously are ineffective in most situations.

[LouSpowells]

22 hours ago, metsfan92286 said:

I know this is not a new topic, but I feel once again it must be brought up.  It's just absolutely ridiculous how easy it is to soak bullets with stegos.  We just fought off a raid on our base, but in the process they managed to waste over 20,000 bullets before the stegos finally died.  A reminder on the materials to craft 20,000 heavy turret ammo:

• 10000 metal ingots
• 90000 gunpowder

After the stegos finally died, we found 85 armor saddles and around 35,000 hitpoints.  This is absolutely ridiculous.  Soaking dinos don't just need a nerf.  They need to be smashed into the ground.  I would suggest the following to fix this issue with any of the following changes:

• Saddles MUST BREAK when taking damage from turret ammo.  I would say 1 durability damage per turret shot.  Without these crazy high armor saddles, they could still soak a stupid amount of bullets, but it would go a bit quicker
• Stegos must have their resistance to bullets completely eliminated and their health reduced by at least 50%.
• Remove the ability to place C4 while on a stego (SERIOUSLY WILDCARD?!)

This woudln't make raiding bases impossible.  It would just require you to bring more stegos and backup saddles. It would also add at least SOME kind of cost to leaving a stego eating bullets in the form of your expensive saddles getting busted.  And honestly, is that such a big deal?  Why should hours and hours of farming bullets be negated in minutes by a single stego?  Why should offline base defenses be rendered completely useless by a dino that you can ride at level 20? It makes no damn sense.  

This needs to be addressed.  Thank you.

P.S. I know there are counters to this such as picking up the stegos and dragging them away and putting some turrets on "Survivor only" (of course this requires you to be online).  I'm not a scrub, I understand this game and the current PvP meta quite well.  Everyone who PvPs knows this is broken.  

It sounds to me like you're placing to much of an emphasis on protecting your base with turrets, and not enough on better base designs and more dino-defense support.

People overly rely on outdoor turrets to defend their bases when they're offline...which is only really a good practice if you're extremely fond of your outside walls and you don't want anyone to touch them. I don't bother putting more than 10 or so turrets outside my base on PvP servers anymore...just enough too keep the kids with grenades at bay. The rest of the turrets go inside the base to protect the important stuff.

Honeycomb your walls with the same kind of stegos that tanked your turrets. Stack them nut to butt in a line against the wall around your base, and build an outer wall. Put them on aggressive. Put another row of ceilings 2 floors up, line that level with stegos and wall them in too. If you've got a 6 level tall, 10x10 base, make it 8 tall and 11x11, and fill the new empty spaces with Stegos. Fill the attic with Ankys, and Dimorphodons. Anyone who breaks through your walls has to deal with those... and I can promise you don't want to fight a bunch of any of those dinos in a small room...and the harder you make it for your dinos to get out, the worse you make the life of raiders.

Make the rest of your base a honecombed maze, and put all of your turrets in a vault room that has all of your good gear, blueprints, eggs, tribemates, and other various items you don't want to lose. Add to that room a dozen or so dimos, a few dilos, and a couple arthropluras if you have the room and you're set. It's not unraidable...but it's highly inconvenient, far more so than defenses that can be thwarted by a couple generations of stegos and an hour of turret draining.

 

tl;dr - If your strategy isn't working, try new strategies. Asking the game developer to change the game so you can continue to use a losing strategy defeats the purpose of a PvP survival game.

[Rofelo]

2 hours ago, LouSpowells said:

It sounds to me like you're placing to much of an emphasis on protecting your base with turrets, and not enough on better base designs and more dino-defense support.

People overly rely on outdoor turrets to defend their bases when they're offline...which is only really a good practice if you're extremely fond of your outside walls and you don't want anyone to touch them. I don't bother putting more than 10 or so turrets outside my base on PvP servers anymore...just enough too keep the kids with grenades at bay. The rest of the turrets go inside the base to protect the important stuff.

Honeycomb your walls with the same kind of stegos that tanked your turrets. Stack them nut to butt in a line against the wall around your base, and build an outer wall. Put them on aggressive. Put another row of ceilings 2 floors up, line that level with stegos and wall them in too. If you've got a 6 level tall, 10x10 base, make it 8 tall and 11x11, and fill the new empty spaces with Stegos. Fill the attic with Ankys, and Dimorphodons. Anyone who breaks through your walls has to deal with those... and I can promise you don't want to fight a bunch of any of those dinos in a small room...and the harder you make it for your dinos to get out, the worse you make the life of raiders.

Make the rest of your base a honecombed maze, and put all of your turrets in a vault room that has all of your good gear, blueprints, eggs, tribemates, and other various items you don't want to lose. Add to that room a dozen or so dimos, a few dilos, and a couple arthropluras if you have the room and you're set. It's not unraidable...but it's highly inconvenient, far more so than defenses that can be thwarted by a couple generations of stegos and an hour of turret draining.

 

tl;dr - If your strategy isn't working, try new strategies. Asking the game developer to change the game so you can continue to use a losing strategy defeats the purpose of a PvP survival game.

Lol I would have so much fun destroying that base.

[Skiidzman]

I don't think straight nerfing the Stego is the answer.  We have all of what, 3 dinosaurs left to advance on a person's base with?

With turrets having the lovely ability to somehow automatically snipe us off any mount other then a stego, bronto or rock golem - what attack plan do you suggest?  Without soaking how exactly do you advance on a base that has 100 turrets in a 360 degree view?  You want to REMOVE the stegos ability to shield the driver from being hit.  You also talk about "giving durability" to saddles, well maybe it didn't occur to you .... BUT PEOPLE WILL MAKE 10 SADDLES and throw them on the stego.

Dig deeper scrubs, there needs to be a lot of revamps.

[EmperorFabulous]

I think you guys are giving WC too much credit for being competent and honest.
Remember when they nuked our legacy servers and promised "new and improved" servers that would prevent hacks, exploits and glitches?     How that working out?

Imagine if Wild Card was a car company that sold an SUV, whose 4-Wheel Drive option broke after you purchased it.  Instead of frantically trying to FIX it, they would say "Too bad.   We can't fix it.  Your car is now going to be a 2-Wheel Drive vehicle.  No refunds".  ...and then announce how they're adding leather seats and cool new colors.

[eddiedg]

This is also worse on Aberration. My tribe and an ally completely soaked a large base's turrets in about 20 minutes with 2 stegos. It was way easier because of the plant z's located everywhere that could easily heal the stegos in a couple seconds, which enabled us to head back and soak some more bullets moments later. 

[vormak95]

You want the solution ?

 

Remove gun turret

Remove C4

Remove bazooka

 

Raid will be more cool. They will have to use catapult and canon... not those totally overpowered broken c4 and bazooka

[Rofelo]

I still think that if normal turrets did a .1% of the targets health in damage per shot, on top of the straight damage, (.4% for heavy) that would fix the bullet soaking meta.

[metsfan92286]

11 hours ago, Skiidzman said:

I don't think straight nerfing the Stego is the answer.  We have all of what, 3 dinosaurs left to advance on a person's base with?

With turrets having the lovely ability to somehow automatically snipe us off any mount other then a stego, bronto or rock golem - what attack plan do you suggest?  Without soaking how exactly do you advance on a base that has 100 turrets in a 360 degree view?  You want to REMOVE the stegos ability to shield the driver from being hit.  You also talk about "giving durability" to saddles, well maybe it didn't occur to you .... BUT PEOPLE WILL MAKE 10 SADDLES and throw them on the stego.

Dig deeper scrubs, there needs to be a lot of revamps.

Fine, bring 10 saddles.  At least then the raid will actually cost you something.  You shouldn't get to soak 20k bullets for free.  it should cost you materials.  Bringing 10 MC stego saddles is gonna set you back quite a bit.  I'm not saying raiding bases should be impossible.  I'm just saying that its too easy to waste such an insane amount of materials basically for free with a kibble tamed stego pumped full of HP.  

Obviously Paracers and Brontos can also soak turrets, but they aren't as easy to get in and out.  Brontos are slow as hell, and the rider can be easily sniped.  Paracers have a bit more mobility but they can't be picked up and paradropped.  Also both these dinos don't have any innate reduction in bullet damage.  Once again I don't think there shouldn't be any turret soakers, I just think right now the resource cost for turrets and bullets is too high for how easy it is to soak them.

[Critter]

Just make saddles break lol. Give them durability like armor.. in the fashion that they break when they reach zero. 

[LouSpowells]

16 hours ago, Rofelo said:

Lol I would have so much fun destroying that base.

No, even if you succeeded you'd realize you lost FAR more than you'd ever gain and avoid doing it again.

[MikeLitorus]

i feel like the bullet soaking meta is much more balenced on ORP servers so that you have a chance to eat the bullet soakers with a powerful dino, or shoot them with compound and metal arrows. 

yeah the math is terrible for defence. 

no base is going to stand up to bullet eating plus explosives when your offline. 

however when players are online there is a lot they can do, and the 20 minutes the turrets are going to last is enough reaction time to figure out what to do. 

[Rofelo]

16 hours ago, MikeLitorus said:

i feel like the bullet soaking meta is much more balenced on ORP servers so that you have a chance to eat the bullet soakers with a powerful dino, or shoot them with compound and metal arrows. 

yeah the math is terrible for defence. 

no base is going to stand up to bullet eating plus explosives when your offline. 

however when players are online there is a lot they can do, and the 20 minutes the turrets are going to last is enough reaction time to figure out what to do. 

The bullet soaking game is fairly balanced when people are online. Maybe the solution is when you go offline you turrets get bonus damage against attackers based on the targets health?

[MikeLitorus]

3 hours ago, Rofelo said:

The bullet soaking game is fairly balanced when people are online. Maybe the solution is when you go offline you turrets get bonus damage against attackers based on the targets health?

something like that or ORP itself isn't a bad solution , there are a few exploits but even with bonus damage, most bases need 12% or less of the total bullets eaten to gain entry. 

So i think regular orp is still less exploitable atm. 

plus buffed turrets could be really annoying when your just trying to fly/glide around. 

[MikeLitorus]

On 1/17/2018 at 1:08 PM, Mjsechrest said:

I guess the real reason they can't get anything done is because they don't have any employees to get it done and no one wants the jobs. Right now on their website it says these jobs are currently available:

• LEAD PROGRAMMER
• SENIOR ENGINE PROGRAMMER
• SENIOR GAMEPLAY PROGRAMMER (x2)
• VFX ARTIST
• TECHNICAL ARTIST
• SENIOR ANIMATOR
• PRODUCER
• QA MANAGER
• MARKETING DIRECTOR

Guess they could really use that QA manager about now 

just to get the story straight, the company is expanding. So thats for a new office they are opening. 

[Rofelo]

On 1/19/2018 at 12:26 PM, MikeLitorus said:

something like that or ORP itself isn't a bad solution , there are a few exploits but even with bonus damage, most bases need 12% or less of the total bullets eaten to gain entry. 

So i think regular orp is still less exploitable atm. 

plus buffed turrets could be really annoying when your just trying to fly/glide around. 

Thats why you just make the turrets gain “This turret does an additional .1% damage against targets while you are offline” and .4% for heavy turrets. It wouldn’t even be an annoyance for low health flyers and players, it would just make it so if a 100,000 health bronto is soaking it does 100 more damage to it with a normal auto turret.

[CptCannabis]

On 1/17/2018 at 6:17 PM, LouSpowells said:

It sounds to me like you're placing to much of an emphasis on protecting your base with turrets, and not enough on better base designs and more dino-defense support.

People overly rely on outdoor turrets to defend their bases when they're offline...which is only really a good practice if you're extremely fond of your outside walls and you don't want anyone to touch them. I don't bother putting more than 10 or so turrets outside my base on PvP servers anymore...just enough too keep the kids with grenades at bay. The rest of the turrets go inside the base to protect the important stuff.

Honeycomb your walls with the same kind of stegos that tanked your turrets. Stack them nut to butt in a line against the wall around your base, and build an outer wall. Put them on aggressive. Put another row of ceilings 2 floors up, line that level with stegos and wall them in too. If you've got a 6 level tall, 10x10 base, make it 8 tall and 11x11, and fill the new empty spaces with Stegos. Fill the attic with Ankys, and Dimorphodons. Anyone who breaks through your walls has to deal with those... and I can promise you don't want to fight a bunch of any of those dinos in a small room...and the harder you make it for your dinos to get out, the worse you make the life of raiders.

Make the rest of your base a honecombed maze, and put all of your turrets in a vault room that has all of your good gear, blueprints, eggs, tribemates, and other various items you don't want to lose. Add to that room a dozen or so dimos, a few dilos, and a couple arthropluras if you have the room and you're set. It's not unraidable...but it's highly inconvenient, far more so than defenses that can be thwarted by a couple generations of stegos and an hour of turret draining.

 

tl;dr - If your strategy isn't working, try new strategies. Asking the game developer to change the game so you can continue to use a losing strategy defeats the purpose of a PvP survival game.

Trying to protect a base with Dinos....that's like trying to fight off a giga with a club,ive played official for the majority of my play time and all I can say is turrets are really only defense all your dinos on neutral or aggressive are going to be dragged out into a FOB or a rex rider and building a maze of a base is kinda pointless since once the raiders are inside its game over. Trying to balance pvp is a major problem that I doubt seeing wildcard trying to fix.

Wildcard just wants us to buy the dlc for their unfinished game.but what do I know I just kept track of ark since it came out on Xbox.

[LouSpowells]

2 hours ago, CptCannabis said:

Trying to protect a base with Dinos....that's like trying to fight off a giga with a club,ive played official for the majority of my play time and all I can say is turrets are really only defense all your dinos on neutral or aggressive are going to be dragged out into a FOB or a rex rider and building a maze of a base is kinda pointless since once the raiders are inside its game over. Trying to balance pvp is a major problem that I doubt seeing wildcard trying to fix.

Wildcard just wants us to buy the dlc for their unfinished game.but what do I know I just kept track of ark since it came out on Xbox.

Fine. Just keep beating your head against the wall doing the same thing then. 

[Varanus8]

I think turrets, explosives and structures need major changes.

Turrets should be transitioned to an ORP structure where they only shoot when nobody from its tribe is online but they shut off when allies are near to prevent exploits, they should also have infinite ammo and a 30 minute "activation" period before they come online.  

Explosives should not do instant damage to structures. C4 should be transitioned to a breaching charge that has a 5 minute timer to arm the explosive, it should do more damage and have a smaller blast radius basically one c4 should delete one metal door, window, hatch, frame or gate 2 for walls and ceilings and 3 or 4 for foundations, the timer should also increase for every c4 the player places so if you place 3 you have a 15 minute timer before you can detonate it. Rockets and grenades should do very little damage to structures, they should be primarily used against players and Dino's.

Structures should not be so easy to destroy but doors, gates and hatch frames should significantly easier to destroy than the rest. This would be achieved through explosive changes. 

Making all of the above changes would create a whole new aspect to raiding where attackers would have to defend there breaching charges, there is no dumb turrets getting in the way of stealth break ins or real player vs player, not being able to simply blow up what ever is in front of you with some c4 and the touch of a button, this would create a whole new close quarters fight inside of bases and make defences like narc traps viable, but most of all it would be extreamly difficult to foundation wipe a base, if the defenders lose they will only lose there loot and it would only take a couple doors to restore the base.

(also it would be a good idea to make a creature that works like an alarm if there are enemy players nearby maybe the parasaur could do this. And a stasis sleep mode for Dino's where they take much less if any damage but can't be used and their inventories are open as if they were unconscious, also needs an activation period to give protection to prevent combat sleeping.)

[CptCannabis]

7 hours ago, LouSpowells said:

Fine. Just keep beating your head against the wall doing the same thing then. 

Well its the only thing that's effective ?

Doesn't really matter since people just under map bases lol

[Yster]

2 hours ago, Varanus8 said:

Explosives should not do instant damage to structures. C4 should be transitioned to a breaching charge that has a 5 minute timer to arm the explosive, it should do more damage and have a smaller blast radius basically one c4 should delete one metal door, window, hatch, frame or gate 2 for walls and ceilings and 3 or 4 for foundations, the timer should also increase for every c4 the player places so if you place 3 you have a 15 minute timer before you can detonate it. Rockets and grenades should do very little damage to structures, they should be primarily used against players and Dino's.

That will encourage players to only raid offline.. If I need 15min to blow a single door way.. and killing dinos with explosives or rockets is a total waste of resources and time.

[Milsurp]

On 1/16/2018 at 9:18 PM, metsfan92286 said:

I know this is not a new topic, but I feel once again it must be brought up.  It's just absolutely ridiculous how easy it is to soak bullets with stegos.  We just fought off a raid on our base, but in the process they managed to waste over 20,000 bullets before the stegos finally died.  A reminder on the materials to craft 20,000 heavy turret ammo:

• 10000 metal ingots
• 90000 gunpowder

After the stegos finally died, we found 85 armor saddles and around 35,000 hitpoints.  This is absolutely ridiculous.  Soaking dinos don't just need a nerf.  They need to be smashed into the ground.  I would suggest the following to fix this issue with any of the following changes:

• Saddles MUST BREAK when taking damage from turret ammo.  I would say 1 durability damage per turret shot.  Without these crazy high armor saddles, they could still soak a stupid amount of bullets, but it would go a bit quicker
• Stegos must have their resistance to bullets completely eliminated and their health reduced by at least 50%.
• Remove the ability to place C4 while on a stego (SERIOUSLY WILDCARD?!)

This woudln't make raiding bases impossible.  It would just require you to bring more stegos and backup saddles. It would also add at least SOME kind of cost to leaving a stego eating bullets in the form of your expensive saddles getting busted.  And honestly, is that such a big deal?  Why should hours and hours of farming bullets be negated in minutes by a single stego?  Why should offline base defenses be rendered completely useless by a dino that you can ride at level 20? It makes no damn sense.  

This needs to be addressed.  Thank you.

P.S. I know there are counters to this such as picking up the stegos and dragging them away and putting some turrets on "Survivor only" (of course this requires you to be online).  I'm not a scrub, I understand this game and the current PvP meta quite well.  Everyone who PvPs knows this is broken.  

totally agree with saddle durability being implemented. Technically there's a stat but it's non-functional atm. I think it should have always been there to counter the OPness you can get up to with a high armor saddle / high level or bred tame. Ark should have realistic risks in any situation, that's part of the fun imo.

[Rofelo]

1 hour ago, Milsurp said:

totally agree with saddle durability being implemented. Technically there's a stat but it's non-functional atm. I think it should have always been there to counter the OPness you can get up to with a high armor saddle / high level or bred tame. Ark should have realistic risks in any situation, that's part of the fun imo.

I agree that it should be in use, but when a saddle “breaks” it just no longer provides armor and you can still use the saddle.

[Milsurp]

4 minutes ago, Rofelo said:

I agree that it should be in use, but when a saddle “breaks” it just no longer provides armor and you can still use the saddle.

Nah I want the rider dismounted 'cause it would be more fun. But I would also be fine with an armor slot on the dino so saddle armor can be replaced by custom dino armor. So we'd make the basic saddle and get the armor from the drops. I'd also be good with dinos not having inventories and using a slot for saddlebags instead. 

TL;DR dinos need more gear slots so we can add some variety to the game.

 

[Rofelo]

41 minutes ago, Milsurp said:

Nah I want the rider dismounted 'cause it would be more fun. But I would also be fine with an armor slot on the dino so saddle armor can be replaced by custom dino armor. So we'd make the basic saddle and get the armor from the drops. I'd also be good with dinos not having inventories and using a slot for saddlebags instead. 

TL;DR dinos need more gear slots so we can add some variety to the game.

 

The problem with that is the saddles will break super quickly because wild card. The best counter we have to aim botters are buildable saddles. Making it so the platform breaks, so the structures break, would be a huge buff to aim botters.