Ugh too true. I played Feral horde in 4 recently and was surprised that I almost got frag tagged. They moved fast and pushed up to rush you a lot and now in 5 they have the least lethal but most annoying grenade, don’t even have the boltoks like they did in 4, and are just so stupid. There’s no difference between the normal grenadier or elites movements besides the flashbang throwing. They all move like they’re stuck in sludge.
I just wanted to mention that TC’s approach to balance is worse in Versus than it is in PvE, TC apparently thinks Gears should play like CoD or Halo, with that being said I will address the typical PvE “balancing” argument.
The vast majority of games do balancing tweaks, yes even in PvE. The reason? Because having 1 strategy that gives you an easy or “free” win isn’t fun long term. Marcus is a great example of something so good its awful. Imagine you are new to the game right, you for whatever reason wanted to play as Marcus, the sad thing about this class/character is that it basically just encourages you to be stupid/bad at the game. Aiming, reloading, even basic stuff like dodging are all irrelevant because the class is so broken that it just encourages you to be awful at the game. Its fun for brief periods of time but if either play as Marcus or even have them on your team you’re going to get extremely bored after a few games.
To give another example of something that was stupid OP in Gears PvE the Silverback ala Gears 3 is another perfect example, pretty much meant every match would play exactly the same, the difficulty with giving players options (fortifications, cards, perks, etc.) is that if you fail as a developer to make them equal then you’ve really not given them anything as players are basically ham-fisted into making certain choices.
On a larger note the topic of “balance” is really quite small compared to larger topics like difficulty or fun or depth, so you can create a game that is perfectly balanced and it still be trash. Gears of War 3’s loadouts were very well balanced, doesn’t mean it was fun lol.
thank you for agreeing with me 
I’m not arguing no balancing has to be done, but if I’m the only person using say, Kait’s or Lizzie’s class in a match, I don’t want to get the short end of the stick because some guy on the other side of the world can use 5 of that class in a match.
What you are saying doesn’t make any sense though. Most classes are pretty well balanced and even with 5 of them wouldn’t make too much difference. There are going to be a few exploits come to fruition as a result of allowing duplicates, but zero reason why it couldn’t be balanced.
I take issue with duplicates more because I think the idea is counterproductive, like they create a wide variety of classes so allowing duplicates just defeats the purpose.
When there are statements made of “rebalancing classes to allow duplicates”, that is EXTREMELY vague and does not exclude the possibility of unjustified and unnecessary mass nerfings. So forgive me for being skeptical until I actually see it.
A little flawed.
1). You say improving AI is hard. It’s also kind of their job. AI was better in 4 for sure. I’ve also seen a bit take over a social match for a few minutes as well. Not sure what triggers this behavior. The programming to wipe you out is already there.
I imagine it’s a bit of movement adjustment, accuracy, and aggressiveness.
2). Then you go on to complain about how bad AI can be. Obviously if that’s the perception of many, there’s work to be done. No one wants to fight mindless drones marching in a line.
3). It’s just something I wanted to float. I hate mindless nerfs. Normally a TC nerf ends up making the character weaker in many ways instead of addressing an issue with tactile precision. And Grace is still useless several weeks later after her “fix”.
Yeah but that’s not the only thing they do. They haven’t even been able to fix the bastions yet, what makes you so sure they could do any sort of substantial improvements without it just causing more exploits/bugs?
@Omen_LP theory of outsourcing ruining Gears 5 is a good reason.
Better AI isn’t going to fix this Clayton exploit for example, there is no AI “fix” that magically solves damage immunity. Like you bring up what if enemies had better means of dealing with specific classes like Marcus or JD and etc. Well that sounds cool in theory but obviously it would be much more difficult to do in practice, like surely the AI would have to be different for Horde or Escape right? What if you have duplicates? What if that player simply isn’t using some of the cards that you suggest? That’s a lot of extra work for very little reward is what I’m getting at. Gears 4 had five classes and didn’t have Escape and didn’t have Ultimates or Perks and so on while Gears 5 does, so if they were to seriously add extra lines of code for each specific card combination or setup it would take ages.
That’s the point of a nerf though, are you implying the solution to Marcus is to make him MORE powerful?
If you want my two cents on it I don’t think TC do “mindless” nerfs, on the contrary their buffs are awful. Like if I was a developer I would’ve removed Marcus from the game entirely, you can’t fix a poorly designed class.
TC sorta screwed themselves over by making classes that are designed for both Escape/Horde, if they had made them with one or the exclusively in mind would’ve been much better.
I have no idea what this means.
That’s because English isn’t my first or second language. I’m sorry that I decided to learn English as a third language in this world at the age of 12, I didn’t think people were so aggressive about how literature and communication would be so important coming from just the mouth.
My ■■■■■■■ bad.
Tactile precision?
My definition would say an action thoughtfully worked out to solve a particular problem with the absolute least amount of impact to any other aspect of game play.
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Seeing all of these escape lobbies titled “Clay Glitch” makes me not even want to play escape. Such ■■■■■■■■.
Well with me you have a person who’s not interested in exploiting glitches at your hands, for the better or for the worse.
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I put up a lobby titled “Need Duplicate Clayton? Try Beginner Mode!” and the number of people who entered it as Clayton, waited a while and then left, was incredible. It’s like people just read the first bit and thought “Duplicate Clayton?! Woohoo!” So not only are they frauds, but also illiterate.
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Oh 
If it didn’t have any actual impact it wouldn’t be worth doing now would it?
So in short (which also works for everything you said previously) TC does huge impact changes with very little effort involved, the way most devs operate sadly 
When devs see an imbalance in their game whether it be from a time constraint or a headache point of view, they always approach it like “how can I fix or alleviate this issue with as little effort as possible” not “ok let me spend a few months creating data tables and carefully evaluating feedback to come up with best solution”
It’s about 1 year since launch and yet they still haven’t made up their minds in terms of balancing, could you imagine how long it would’ve taken doing things the way you suggest? 
TC haven’t been anywhere near awful when it comes to balancing, they probably base some of their choices on metrics like pick rate/winrate and go from there, I’m pleasantly surprised with them more often than not. That being said if you liked how it was back in the GOW2/3 days where Epic never touched Horde after release unless it was exploits then oh well, TC is a lot more invested/interested in Horde than Epic were.
Can you specify a few nerfs they did right?
The only character that was nerfed in any real way was JD, yet he’s still an amazing character, they do far more buffs than nerfs.
As much as I would like to talk about the mythical PvE update they were going to do I don’t feel confident they’ll even stick with what they previously planned, I 100% expect Marcus nerfs though, the question is how and why.
Edit: The only other character I really expect to face significant nerfs would maybe be Keegan, but that’s just because the Salvo is weird and is the only gun in Gears history with no cooldown.
Edit #2 they are probably going to buff enemies or add extra modifiers before they go around giving out nerfs like candy, and no it won’t be AI specific.
@Bleeding_Pepper With this coming out, I’m a lot less interested in completing that score run I’d been going on about. I could live with the cog tag glitch because you had to be capable of staying alive for that at least. But this. This requires you to do nothing but walk through the hive and kill at your leisure as far as I can tell. It’s pathetic.
But in all honesty, I legitimately believe only the doofiest of the doofy cheat in games. If they were intelligent, their brains would be able to learn how to play a video game pretty well.
@AmicableWall421 If you were ever to pull out any bugs/cheats etc, I’d block you lol.
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No risk there with me unless all people in the lobby actually agree to doing it because something feels too ridiculous(like The Blight or The Line when they first released in Op 2 and the grenade duplication glitch still worked - got no fond memories of those hives and now they’re pitifully easy even when you just play normally, albeit with the more powerful characters).
I’m about that ‘legit’ completion. Feels cheap to do it using exploits or cheesy methods so I basically never resort to those outside of what I like to call extreme/exceptional circumstances(and then I usually later like to go back to it to do it without those things). Nor do I really need them.
There’s no risk of me using actual cheats though. I play Gears on my console. Plus I’m too lazy or not creative/bothered enough to weed out those sorts of things that I wouldn’t use. So if you saw me do it, chances are very likely it wouldn’t actually be me playing.
Good to know you’ll throw me out with the wind if I ever happen to accidentally uncover a glitch, though. (Obviously joking, but be lenient sometimes.)
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I might be wrong, but I suspect the people who really truly benefit from this kind of glitch/exploit/cheat, are the ones who probably wouldn’t really know how to do an effective score run. They’d get top 5% and in that region, or they’re motivated purely by mastering this Hive to get that Escape TOD medal. Using this method for a score run would still require people to kill the enemy, do it quickly, and using certain ways to maximise score, as well as stay ahead of the venom to grab the last 3 COG tags. And with two Clayton’s their offensive capability will be limited. They’d survive, but I think alot of these people won’t be able to get enough points - maybe if they had a very good Fahz notching up lots of headshot kills, but even then I think it’s too much. Three Clayton’s would make their score suffer even more.
I’d be interested to see how the next Hive pans out. One of the mutators will be “extra Sires”, and I doubt 2-3 Clayton’s will be an optimal choice for this Hive.
If there’s nothing that flies, no Matriarch or other big boss and they have a Cole/Lahni, I’d bet you they could get through there fairly easily.