Hi all, I just wanna repost a thread I just made over on reddit with some suggestions to fix some of the balance issues people are concerned with. Link to the original thread if anyone wants upvote it for attention or whatever - https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/co...egarding_gear/

I've seen a lot of discussion regarding gear balance and revenge mode but I feel like no one has quite hit the nail on the head in regards to what exactly should be done about it so I thought I'd speak up and hopefully give Ubi a few suggestions that I believe would resolve a lot of the issues people bring up.

1. Revenge mode is obviously an important tool in fights against multiple enemies and so getting it quickly in those cases is ok, however as many people have noted the whole thing becomes kind of silly in 1v1. My suggestion here is to allow revenge to build exactly as is, but only let you activate it when you're outnumbered. This would allow you to defend against suprise ganks towards the end of a 1v1 quickly and keep the spirit of revenge mode, without turning 1v1's in to a **** show of who's got the best gear. I'd also like to emphasize the word Outnumbered - I'm surprised more people haven't complained about this but currently if I see someone 4v1 against my teammate and try to peel one of them off it can still give my opponent revenge mode which seems like an obvious oversight and totally against the spirit of what revenge mode is supposed to be.

I've seen a number of people arguing that revenge mode is fine 1v1 and that people should be punished for being blocked so I'd like to take a second to address this argument. To put it simply all fighting games at their core are about balancing your attack and defense to beat your opponent - if all you're doing is blocking then you're only good at half the game. If all you're doing is spamming attacks then you're only good at half the game. You already get a great reward for blocking, which is not taking damage. The game also provides you the mechanics to punish poor aggressive players in the form of parries and dodge attacks. Revenge mode isn't necessary. I've also seen suggestions that it's ok 1v1 because you can just run away, which is technically true on paper. However doing this isn't much fun for either player and so isn't a smart way to balance your game.

2. Revenge mode attack with high gear levels is obviously too powerful. Against 1v4 it's probably about acceptable but 1v2 it's practically two free kills as soon as you pop it. My proposal would be to have base damage of revenge mode be influenced by how imbalanced the fight is. So for example 1v2 you'd get maybe a 15% attack and defense modifier and 1v4 you'd get something significantly higher. You could still keep the revenge based gear stats in place but have them work in conjunction with the base modifiers to give gear a much lower impact overall. This would both fix the problem of revenge being too strong whilst also having the side effect of making revenge mode less obsolete for players with low gear score.

3. This suggestion might be a little more controversial but I believe full, or significantly higher friendly fire damage should be implemented. While my suggestions above would alleviate a lot of the problems with revenge mode the problem would remain that everyone would still gear for it because ganking and 4 man gang bangs are so prevalent, making all other gear choices just as obsolete as they are now. Even with revenge mode as powerful as it currently is it's done little to discourage this kind of play. As most of us have been on both sides of the fence on this one I'm sure most people understand that full 4v1 gang bangs simply aren't very fun for anyone involved - everyone spamming attacks, you're hitting each other, getting blocked, having your guardbreak bounce off the poor dude you're trying to gank. Most of the players involved in these situations spend most of their time without much control of their character and that's not especially satisfying in a fighting game. High damage friendly fire would mean ganking would be less mindless and while 2v1's wouldn't be too hard it should heavily discourage messy 4v1's. In addition I think this change would help solidify a couple of underused characters as go to picks for gankers - stuff like shugoki's backbreaker and unblockables, lawbringers impale and spear flip and the shield users knock downs would become invaluable and could change up the 4v4 meta to be more about precision ganks than spammy ganks. I'd even go so far as to maybe have some of these abilities such as knock downs drain an opponents revenge meter to really deliver the message that these characters are designed with ganking in mind. Perhaps peacekeepers poison could slow revenge gain since Ubi seem to want to position her as a ganker.

Finally, and I know this has been said a lot, but please for the love of God Ubisoft have us pick a character before matchmaking and give us seperate skill ratings for each. Being in what seems to be a fairly high skill bracket on my main, trying to learn new characters against skilled 108 geared folks is beyond painful. Even trying to learn in bot matches has become a lesson in frustration as even the bots seem to abuse revenge mode gear which is kind of insane.

It'd be nice to see Ubisoft pick up on some of these ideas, I think they're in the right ball park in terms of the direction the game should be going but at the very least hopefully I can inspire a bit of discussion. The core of the game is really great and I'd like nothing more than for Ubi to tweak it a little bit and create something that can stand the test of time.

P.S. Whoever thought revenge gain on injury was a good idea - shame on you!