I have no issue that a degree of balancing was required, but the changes that have gone through show a very significant lack of understanding with regard to the use of the spy tree....its echoed by threads of angry ma's and gunmen crying for nerfs but I am astounded and disillusioned the devs have bowed to such pressure...there are competent Ma's and Gunmen who will pwn most spys proving a wide gamunt of nerfs was not necessary and indeed there is a good case to describe the tree as seriously underpowered when looking at the IS vs damage.
The biggest issue is not with spys but with IL....for people in IL a defence buff needs to be aplied or else, in anything other than a duel, IL=deathsentence and will be avoided in typical pvp like the plague...the game should encourage IL and to do that when players are in IL a defence buff should be applied to lessen the instances of hits from outside until it is played through to a logical end.....that would provide the most significant balance between all trees because its the ranged Vs Close combat where the most significant discrepancies appear... instead nerf after nerf is hitting the (principally) non IL trees spy and Hacker which can only end when those trees are rendered inffective accross the board.
Equally concerning here is the freedom with which multiple nerfs have been applied in a single patch with no attempt to take a measured view of the impact.....we have two abilities clearly overpowered/overeffective in neurodart and paralysing throw...it was their overpower that has been compensating for other inadequecies in the tree (I know cus I dont use either to any great degree).... applying nerfs in stages and reviewing the effect is the sensible approach and again its a real let down from the devs that they threw so much at us in one go.
CR2's design is such that you should always be vulnerable to at least one kind of the main damages....whining players have bitched about hacker to the verge of its extinction, they are doing the same with spy...the whole design of CR2 will be undermined yet nerfs continue to be applied!
The spy is the only class that cant debuff its own type of damage....complete justification for Findweakness to apply a more substantial buff than other classes....and yet it has been levelled obviously any balance is now violently shifted in a negative direction for spy's.....absolutely crazy!
Spy is designed to use and rely on abilities like neurodart and sideroll escape....yet these are so high in the tree every build is using them hence they are buffing builds designed to manage without them.....to inject balance the side roll escape is nerfed, bringing parity to every tree except the one the ability was designed for which now has no toughness buff, no range to keep it out of trouble and hence is all but crippled. It is the position of these abilities that was the only fault not their effectiveness....
A catalogue of badly realised nerfs and knee jerk reactions, but sadly a case of history repeating when the only build that could stand against a hacker was mkt what happened .... a whole range of DR clothing hit the game.
I'm disillusioned by the fact that this tree seems hated both from without and within, for the first time since I got the game I dont feel like even logging in 