I just assumed Jack’s primary intended role was for the Forge, not that it makes him any more interesting to play as. Different views, I guess. I certainly see far less players cover a perma beam healing role with Jack than they do the Forge.
And if the Healing Speed skill isn’t affecting the healing beam, what skill is it then that causes it to either heal a player extremely slowly or very quickly? I don’t recall all of the ones he’s got.
It’s 100% his main role.
He’s our bastion, the COG bastion lol.
I know most don’t do it, but some players even at low reups have it figured out, I was with a reup 6 jack the other day that outplayed 99.9% of jacks I have ever played with!!!
He followed me in stealth, beamed me before I went down when it seemed necesary, forged in between, and dove out to revive me if we were seperated. I was able to run around as kait and make mince meat of that run due to him!!!
It works even better camping in base/a strong position than running around.
Kait/jack were designed to run around the field together from a developer standpoint imo.
The way I look at horde, and well, most games, is as a puzzle where the pieces all fit together (Assuming it is a well built/balanced game), and in gears 5 the pieces fit together just… oh so flushly… I am very impressed with their balancing work. So you see why Im at such odds with opinions otherwise yes?
There is no card that controls the speed of the beams heal. It is a base speed that doesn’t change.
People have misinterpreted the healing rate card to be a healing beam speed card, when instead it is jacks self regen speed. It even shows jack glowing on the card 
If only they all thought that. Kait with a Jack permabeaming her is so much more fun to play. If it’s not the skill that affects the healing rate, is it a perk Jack has? Because I could swear some
Jacks on Incon or Master took ages for me to go back to full health, other times it took barely a second for the omen to disappear completely. I never checked those Jack perks out properly when I did his Assists medal in Operation 1 but believe he has a repair speed perk or something in that direction? It might explain why the beam sometimes seems to heal slower, other times much faster, if it was intended to work for both forts and humans, or it’s glitched. Hijack can turn him into a true Bastion though, by “borrowing” one from the Swarm. Or a killing machine if you snag a Mulcher Scion or DR-1 Oppressor.
Unfortunately, the puzzle that is to be assembled here has problems with the first hurdle of any online game/shooter, randoms, which for the most part inexplicably seem to have lost their ability to adapt to changes and try learning new things, of which there were at least a couple during Gears 4. You could tell when people had a clue of what they were doing and how things worked well together on the higher difficulties because the run would likely go perfectly smoothly, bar some incidents that may not have been possible to avoid(such as a single frag or Boomshot causing a wipe because it just landed when you were all close enough together to be caught in the blast, which is very unlucky but can happen). Hardly seeing much of that in 5 where players either abandoned Horde or everyone somehow forgot everything from Gears 4s highest difficulties and only build very basic, simple bases, sometimes forget to provide or upgrade lockers for the team, etc. Would almost certainly be a more enjoyable experience if people learned(or didn’t forget) how to survive matches without a JD, use the fortifications in their current form most effectively, you name it. But I guess everyone’s just there for an easy match that is more a grind than anything. Sometimes I wonder why people play if all they do is grind. If it’s not fun, why do you grind to begin with?
And how does JD fit into it all? I have not identified any useful synergies there, other than that Jack’s healing beam basically helps any player do better. He is pretty much a standalone who can do everything as soon as a locker is built and upgraded. Seeming more like a “crutch”, so to speak, for the less great players or there for those who only care to have an easy match.
It’s the Health Regeneration Penalty that makes it look like Jack healing someone slower.
Jack’s Repair Speed is for Fortifications.
JD can be standalone character for the first couple waves where Locker not needed. When Claw Drones appear on Wave 7+, JD + Jack healing beam him is very helpful for JD to stand out in open and keep the pressure on enemies. No one-shot down by Claw Drones.
Fear not, I have the explanation. You see since the beginning of gears 5 There has been one game-breaking difficulty-nullifying bug after another. In order- Permanent ults, Red barrier glitch, infinite money dupe, and now baird bleeding barriers currently.
Couple that with the fact that the path of least resistance is to merely run engi-jack-jd-kait-extra at the dead end of several maps with little to no build variety- the ENTIRE playerbase has had the option since launch to opt out of improvement, while still clearing the hardest difficulty.
That is exactly why the player-base is inept, and it is exactly why I challenged myself, so I would not fall prey to the effects.
This too is an answer I can provide.
Ego. It gives them something to grind that they can throw in the ego bank. It’s a tiny endorphin drip they crave, even at the expense of enduring an unenjoyable activity. I have seen this time and again.
Yes I see what he means now, when the omen won’t clear up from jacks heals.
Seems to happen mostly when you go extremely low/full omen.
Other times it will clear right up, but if critically wounded it would seem it takes time for the omen to dissipate.
Where the torque is concerned…a headshot should be a kill on any difficulty…played insane last night with @jmelia123 @The_Bozzmeister…i was jd …played only with torque n boom after 1st few wvs…made the game more balanced (not carpet bombing the map…everyone enjoyed the game with plenty contributed by all…I’d say the least tc could do …is balance up characters n loadouts ect🙄
Never heard of this one. Must not have been common if it ever existed in Gears 5. Do know one such exploit was there in Gears 4 for about a week in June or July. TC was very quick to patch that out, which I didn’t really complain about.
I guess I’m just different or got over this long ago because I cannot find joy or reward in a task that is a chore. In Gears 4, when I eventually reached Wings 5 which must’ve been well over 80-100 million XP, with various I barely felt rewarded because it took far too long to get there regardless of what I would do, and I spent a fair bit just doing regular matches while around those reups. Excessive grinds of un-fun activities are more likely to drive me off from a game no matter how good the reward at their end, which is something that has driven me away from games over the course of my existing life a few times. So I do not really understand those people. I just want to play for fun but nearly everyone is always just grinding. Sometimes it makes me want to pull my hairs out(I wouldn’t, fyi).
When I play JD I try not to have a locker full of nothing but GLs for that reason. It’s boring for everyone else. If were not struggling to kill my locker may have 2 GLs and either boomshots or torquebows.
Right, the scout pickup energy from dead scout doubling it one…so you’d get up to a few million energy on wave 1, and then spam sentries all game… worked… boring, but a quick way to level up characters…
I remember that bug. Only in my case instead of sentries a soldier class spammed the hammer strike.
ah you didn’t miss much. Basically it was a gun dupe from trading weapons where an extra was created on the ground.
Got fixed after a week or so. For a while there everyone elected to merely camp the dead ends when there was no game breaking bug to rely on. Hopefully you can see though how everyone has simply had the option not to improve, so why would they right? Why deviate from the most effective tactic and all… (if all you care about is exp, I mean, I understand you don’t play for that reason)
STILL working through that reply btw. I’ll get there man
Oh, that. I never heard anyone mention it in Horde or Escape so I’d assumed it was not going to create any issues there. Certainly didn’t run into anybody using it and at that, the complaints about it mainly came from Versus with multiple players using it to get several Dropshot, Breaker Maces, etc., so it was somewhat more of an issue for those players, not that I am into PvP.
On that note, I don’t think anyone from TC has yet acknowledged the matter where you can infinitely duplicate any type of grenade with Keegan or JD if they have the skill to hold multiple explosives/grenades beyond the base capacity of 2 in the MP PvE modes, nor have I seen it mentioned in any type of patch notes, and I’m 100% certain it was not intended for players to be able to freely duplicate grenades to have them as much as is possible. Certainly find it a little stupid when a Keegan in Escape wants you to pick up frags(or other grenades) so he can have 7 when you only picked up two and repeat certain steps to basically generate infinite grenades. Or quits when you refuse to use the blatantly obvious exploit. Like, seriously. Why would they give players a way to effectively have infinite grenades of any type in a mode that is meant to be about managing your ammo more carefully?
You’ll make it to the end of that reply eventually. I did warn everyone it’d be long. Oh, and as a fun fact, I spent about two hours typing it up(with various smaller distractions coming up in between).
Right! That or the mortars…
Yeah, the Horde Scions and Drone didn’t know about the forums so they couldn’t complain, but the Versus players did and did 
But seriously, a team filled with people holding 5 Dropshots or 5 Boomshots or 5 Longshots, etc just shut down koth/tdm games … It literally stopped/killed the match…
I’ve finished reading the reply. I have many thoughts, and an appeal to you to make. I want to do justice to your reply, so it may take a couple days to write that up
No worries. I’ve had patience thus far. So I can wait a little longer.
I was going to make a long reply to your long reply, but I think we’ve communicated most of what we think with peripheral conversations, so I’ll reply to only a couple of things in it.
In response to all engineer related comments in your long reply-
I too felt a slack off from using engineer, and figuring everything out, at first.
I got back into it, getting over my dislike of del. Just push through the aversion man, I know del is a drag, but, hey, he gets the job done. Base building in my opinion has been improved in 5, from both 3 and 4. I didn’t play 4 but I did keep an eye on it from afar, and I’m much more impressed with horde base building in 5. I think it takes more thought, calculation, money management, teamwork, and learning.
I think the lack of teamwork is holding you back the most. Try to organize your own games if you can. I know you mentioned personal issues with this, and I can relate, but I still think the higher requirement of coordination between teammates in higher difficulties in horde 4.0 is a good thing for the game and player-base skill level even if it negatively affects socially averse individuals.
I still disagree on the spread of damage and weapon balance. I like how it is. The big weapons SHOULD be the BIG weapons. Period, although I agree torque/boom/dropshot feel weak, you would be surprised how effective they are on any character if you just spammed them in the proper types of bases where you aren’t having to do the entire enemies health bar in damage to kill them (Barriers, sentries)
As for angling on walls, let me tell you a short story-
I grew up in fps online games playing games that favor this type of mechanic.
My first battleground online was a game called rainbow six vegas.
In RB6V1 we had a similar function in the game where if you hugged walls and only slightly popped out, part of the character on other screens would not show through the wall.
It was a severely over-used mechanic, but we loved it. We called it “shouldering” and those who got exceedingly good at it ruled the game. I was one of those, racking up over 400 1v1 wins against any who would take my challenge, with a mere 7 losses over the same career of 6 years.
I moved to modern warfare 2 as that game breathed its last breaths, where my friends and I developed a similar use of that system, and finally on to gears 3 where it was blatantly the same as in RB6V1.
I see nothing wrong with this, and its just another skill to develope.
All in all man I think you have lost your taste for the direction gears pve is going in. Theres nothing wrong with it, but others including myself don’t mind the evolution, and I’m quite happy with the balance as it stands, if not a little upset they won’t pay more attention to our side of the games content…
As for kestrel- You need people to be ready and coordinate, attack the vents, with heavies. The vents will cause the kestral to stagger, spread out, take turns tanking the aggro from cover, use good cover. Don’t camp the dead ends where you’re usually fish in a barrel.
Higher difficulties? More density, higher health/damage. Despite common complaints it is not one shot down. It could be. I wouldn’t mind a hell mode. Maybe a no fortifications option. I’ve already done 1 of those on master. It was extremely difficult, but we got it done with smart use of jack’s beam, an infinite resource of damage absorption
Haven’t got a lot to say to the response as a whole besides this bit…
And I do agree. It already felt this way in Gears 4. TC basically gave players one “bug” update that really just added Level 6 to skills and a few new ones for the five classes, and various tweaks to balancing all of which stopped in December and left Sentries in somewhat of an OP state(Shocks would one shot kill Juvies and Trackers at Level 2/3/4 and fire extremely quickly, almost turning them into murdering tools instead of support), and MGs… well, they were always capable of shredding almost anything on their own so the so-called rebalancing didn’t do much to them. Outside of that Horde pretty much always got the shaft during 4s dev time and I’m starting to see a similar pattern develop with 5 where the Versus fanbase(to put it politely rather than how I actually would describe them) complains the most and gets the most attention instead of every mode getting equal amounts of it. There’s a playerbase for Horde that would/will stick around and potentially pay for things in the game or future titles if it just didn’t constantly keep getting the shaft because the Versus crowd cries out the loudest about “Muh movement! Gnasher needs buffs(not always)! Lancer needs nerfs! Melee is OP!”… of course, that’s greatly oversimplifying it but sometimes it feels like that’s all you see and what TC mainly listens to.
Excluding that Horde/PvE may require more time to develop things for, there should be more attention to it. I was not expecting much for PvE in TU4 and even those very low expectations weren’t met. We didn’t even get a new event playlist. Or notices as to where the 25 or permanent shorter variant stands, or if there are still any plans on making a “classic” variant closer to 2 or 3. Which is something I would certainly play a bit. Heck, if they just did something like 4s Horde I’d even be on that.
Of course, I still got Escape, but there, it’s usually not a mode I would play for hours per day like Horde. Maybe one or two if there’s a good hive or matches around(Clock or Surge runs in Custom rarely interest me).
I’d be willing to figure out how to engineer in Gears 5. But I just can’t get over my dislikes on the hero system not letting me play whoever I want however I want. I don’t care on it too much in Escape, though I currently mainly stick to Mac, Keegan and Lizzie in that mode, because it’s shorter and easier to work around the hero restrictions(which, I might add, I feel work much better for that mode than Horde), and there were only the Hivebusters initially available and they were from a comic so I didn’t have much of a pre-formed idea on whether I liked these or not. And at least for Mac and Keegan, I’m ok with ‘em. Lahni… well, let’s just say, charging into melee combat all of the time isn’t exactly my preferred way of dispatching enemies.
Still, I’ll probably be around for Gears 6 and see where they take the Horde. Although the story is what I mostly get games for I have recently gotten into the multiplayer aspects of them, mostly PvE and very little PvP, so there’s no harm done in checking them out if available. Gears is still a special/unique thing to me. Wasn’t just going to drop it like that. If they have done away with the hero stuff or just include an option for players who aren’t interested in it if it is kept in by then, even better. I’m clearly not alone in my feelings towards the new Horde. This is just an assumption but I have the impression that the hero stuff not being wanted by at least some part of the playerbase and the launch issues drove quite a few of them off and never made them look back. I’ve gotten to a point where I just don’t feel excited to get into a Horde match any longer at all, from the whole match searching process to how it will almost certainly play out, just doesn’t work for me. So yeah… waiting for an alternative, if one ever comes. Might just bring a few players back at least.
Oh, and…
I do know that being hit by a Claw or Hammerburst is not a one shot down, they do require multiple hits. But it’s like, 2-3 shots from a Hammerburst, which fires a burst of 6 shots in Gears 5, seemingly, while the Claw takes two and only rarely one shot downs, and both are extremely accurate and getting hit by them behind cover is not a rare thing even if you blind fire, in particular because there’s so many low covers around the maps which do not fully cover you if you do anything besides holding completely still. You go down so fast that it isn’t really much of a challenge or “fun”, you basically don’t get shot or you’re very liable to go down. Getting one hit downed by a Sniper rifle or Markza may be annoying but it’s much easier to avoid than a Hammerburst or Claw so that is fine for me. But the rifles having such low times to down is just absurd when most characters don’t have the damage output to get rid of an enemy extremely quickly like JD or Kait do. Hence why I usually prefer to keep More Lethal off… and another reason why I’m not a big fan of Master or Incon with it.
Not exactly as easily, but they do have the capability via various mechanisms. There should only be a couple characters that outright blow away enemies while the rest must resort to other tactics to be as effective imo.
Precisely. I am glad for this. I want it like this.
This forced people to explore proper bases and teamwork, or abuse op things, which will happen no matter what.
It’s a good thing to be this way at the highest difficulties, because it simply means people must evolve their strategy to incorporate all the tools at their disposal more effectively.
Every enemy in sight of you should be under 4 states of effect- slowed by a barrier, slowed by stopping power from an mg, stunned by a shock, distracted by a decoy.
Failing to catch an enemy in that net should mean dire consequences late game (wave 30+) and it does now. No more running around with reckless abandon. I approve.
This certainly is not what I am asking for(although, in all fairness, a Scout in Gears 4 after the June or July Horde update with fully maxed skills running a Tank build with Health Boost, Regen Boost[both 120%], Speed Boost and Dodge and a fifth skill was able to run about the field as a mobile decoy with some planning and avoidance of enemies such as Grenadiers). Insane and Incon in Gears 4 had similarly quick times to go down and Deadeyes with their EMBARs were quick to put anyone down who wasn’t keeping their head behind a piece of cover. But you had certain damage reductions to mitigate how quickly you went down(only small arms or rapid fire weapons fire would be stopped by them after wave 30), and since damage levels for most characters and certain weapons were generally higher, you could do some things that are straight up impossible in 5.
I cannot speak much on how the balancing factor was handled - but the enemies were able to wipe you out fairly quickly and prevented reckless plays(if someone was reckless they’d go down often and just be a liability, and there was no Jack available for easy and safe revives, and those kinds of players either failed runs or just ended up quitting eventually, for the better), so setting up a base and staying within its perimeter was very much important(more so because there were a bunch of Grenadiers around during certain waves and their Boltok could one shot down from across the map, which could get annoying), and your weapons were designed to kill off enemies quickly but you were also at risk of the same being done to you at almost any point in time. Except, perhaps, a Sniper. But even with setups designed to render enemies as harmless as possible there’d still be downs on the team or threats coming in that had to be dealt with quickly.
You also didn’t have easy or clutch revive tools available such as the COG Gear Team Revive(it was a fabricator option that cost power back then, equipped as a skill, so it would not save you if everyone went down, but it did revive dead team members), Jack or Cloak for Kait. If you knew how to build bases properly and your team was competent or had at least one or two good ones and the others weren’t doing things to mess the engineer or rest of the team up, it could be easy but requiring caution and some degree of teamwork regardless.
But my point basically is that running around recklessly on the higher difficulties on Gears 4 also was not a thing unless you had a death wish or no clue how to play those difficulties. But there were more tools available to dispatch of an enemy faster, so it also was more fun in a way. I’d just prefer if the power discrepancy between the “filler” characters and JD/Kait wasn’t quite as big, if they would just either give them something to do a little more damage or improve the survivability of them, or both(besides Lizzie since her Stim is already more than good enough at covering the survivability aspect - but I wouldn’t mind something to give the Claw a bit more punch on her, or to remove its misfiring for her… surely giving that one weapon some more damage potential wouldn’t hurt? it doesn’t do that much without sustained fire on an enemy, and while you could argue this should be the case, is of limited effectiveness against bigger enemies unless you use a ton of ammo on them).
So it should perhaps still require some thought to make them work effectively, but not just making everything completely unbalanced or easy(which, while still requiring some or all team members to have a certain degree of skill and proficiency with precision weapons and a Dropshot/Torque Bow, is certainly something that could happen in Gears 4 where it became extremely easy to beat the highest diff… and there were cheesy and boring ways to kill them under the form of strikes which I hardly ever used because of that). But I don’t really know. It’s late and I’m tired so I’m just throwing some ideas coming into my head out there. Probably better if I went to sleep now, or soon.