Bruno Pereira · @insQC
22nd Oct 2017 from TwitLonger
Thoughts about quake regarding Dreamhack Denver, recent patches and the future.
First and foremost, congratulations to Raisy, Garpy and Myztro Gaming for what they've achieved at this Dreamhack! Raisy managed to finally cement his spot as a powerhouse in Quake Champions; something everyone acknowledged he deserved due to his online results, but needed a big LAN performance to go with it. Garpy repeated Vo0's QuakeCon feat, going on an absolute rampage and making the best of the opportunity he was given since he wasn't initially qualified for Denver.
Well played to Team Liquid for a dominant performance without dropping a single map to anyone. The lineup and role changes were clearly the best move! A strong and unexpected performance from Unlovables, dropping a match to Stacked in the first game and working all the way up to the Grand Finals through the lower bracket while getting their revenge vs Stacked in the process. Great job to botmode, ckap, sen and Kane.
Now that the congratulations are out of the way, I'd like to discuss how the recent patches affected the meta and what else changed and should change in the future in Quake.
The Lightning Gun:
I've seen a great deal of whine over how the lightning gun is now "broken" and "useless". I'm just going to assume everyone saying that would've preferred it not to be fixed so that we could keep having people spinning in one place and hitting 80%.
What I've seen at this event from players is that they're either 0 or 100 with patch changes, at the smallest change they treat said weapon or champion like the plague and avoid it altogether. While it is true that QC's faster rockets and very small hitboxes on squishy champions favor Anarki and RL plays, seeing players like Toxjq or K1llsen, who are some of the best LG aimers in Quake, nearly unbind the weapon and never use at all saddens me deeply. Even if the patch favors Anarki and RL plays, LG can still be abused by great aimers. Not saying results would've been that different if players weren't scared to use it, but I do believe a lot of players, mostly the European players and teams were more scared to use it than the American players.
I remember one situation specifically where in ZTN Toxjq was fighting Doom Slayer in the grenade platform and Doom decided to leg it to the RL area by using the stairs with the time shards and double jumping on them. The first rule about playing vs Doom Slayer, rockets are mostly useless vs someone who can double jump over them, so DON'T TRY TO KEEP HITTING LONG RANGE MID AIRS ON HIM. Rail would be easy 80 damage there and LG would've just not let him get away and get a frag. There were too many situations like this to mention, mostly vs Doom Slayer. I understand players avoiding LG in mid-range fights vs Anarki and Slash because the gap can be closed in under half a second due to their movement speed, but vs a Doom Slayer without berzerk? What's he going to do vs LG, double jump in mid-air? Oh, that makes it even easier for you to hit 100% on him and make the player who made that mistake pay for it.
The Lightning Gun isn't broken, it's fixed. Right now it works exactly as intended. It's not a weapon for you to use in every single situation. It's a weapon to be used at mid range. Rail Gun is the best long-range weapon, Rocket Launcher is the best for close range, and Lightning Gun is the best for mid range.
With that being said, this is a delicate balance. Quake Champions isn't Quake Live and the LG doesn't work the same, due to champions' different movement speed, their different hitboxes, LG's reduced knockback when compared to QL, and RL speed. This means that the mid-range is much harder to play on because it's very easy to close the gap. If you have a mid-range fight on an even playing field, most players with good rockets will get closer to you before you are able to get any substantial damage on them with LG, so it makes for very disciplined use of it. It's a more positional weapon than it was, that you should abuse if you position yourself in a way that you can't get overrun with one circle jump or rocket from your opponent. Specifically high ground positions, teleport/jumppad angles, and most open ground areas.
Another thing that makes LG less powerful compared to QL is the pixel-perfect hitboxes that we have right now, which make hitscan weapons like LG and RG unreliable to use against squishies. Due to these pixel-perfect hitboxes you can even see Toxjq, widely known as one of the best aimers in Arena FPS, missing a lot of jumppad rails due to shots going through legs and between arms/torso of the enemy. These hitboxes are making for awakward and potentially random scenarios but thankfully in the near future we will have static-mesh hitboxes that will hopefully make moves like going up a jumppad a tremendous mistake as it always has been in Quake.
Gauntlet:
Another thing that I believe needs to be changed soon is the Gauntlet. Right now you can have players running full speed at you and just using nothing but a starting weapon to instagib. We've seen it happen a lot of times in Sacrifice, it's becoming a real problem that a melee starting weapon is this powerful. Alongside with the hitboxes making those small fast champions who use gauntlet extremely unreliable to hit with any hitscan weapon, the Gauntlet range and damage need a change. I think even at 50 damage it would remain a problem, but it would definitely reduce the huge impact it's having right now.
When you use the Gauntlet in most Quakes you're not supposed to be killing 2, 3, or 4 guys in 2 seconds, it's because you have no other weapon you can change to and you're most likely screwed. I do enjoy Gauntlet being viable and if the only thing changed is lowering the range a bit and decreasing the damage to 50 or 60, it still remains a viable weapon, just not such a strong option to have, which it shouldn't be in the first place. It's a starting weapon, not a BFG.