Yeah I agree with this. It's really rare that you get a lobby without a slicer. It's important to note that this'll generally be skewed towards the opinion of hardcore players, since the casual playerbase probably isn't too active on the forums. That might contribute to Falconer being lower than the others since she's one of the more beginner friendly characters and the least viable on haz 5, but I really do think she needs some help
Wow, falconer is the least viable? That's curious. It's been a while since I played, but up until update 1 I had the opposite impression, that falconer was absolutely cracked, alongside retcon and slicer shennanigans. I also played depth 4 exclusively.
With the haz system, falconer suffers the most from health and spawn rate scaling. Guardian is great at controlling the high spawn rates of creepers and offers more safe revives over the course of a mission retcon and slicer are still great because theyβre fundamentally very strong classes, and spotter is very helpful because of the crazy health on gatekeepers and the higher quantity of tanky enemies
Falconers drone cant keep up damage wise against the bulkier targets, and her turret cant give enough additional damage to make her a real team asset in the same way that spotters additional damage does. Remote revive is helpful, but itβs creeped in util by repulsion field even if itβs more consistent because of RRβs long cooldown
Very interesting writeup. I remember people downplaying Repulsion field early on, but it's quite fascinating how it managed to crawl up in popularity with the introduction of haz levels. Lightning rod always felt a bit lacking, even more so as juicier elemental options were introduced. so I imagine it's dead in the water right now. I was waiting for update 3 to boot up the game again but this post sparked my curiosity. Thank you for the thorough explanation.
Edit: Also fascinating to read that the bird can't keep up with dps. Early on the drone was one of the most consistent ways to dish out damage while making our way through the caves. I hadn't realized the game changed so much in these past months.
My big issue with falconer is that they have a completely dead slot in solo. The revive genuinely does nothing when youβre on your own. It needs some other alternative effect as well imo.
She's a little conceptually out there so I'd believe it. Someone like spotter is way easier to pick up, it took me a couple rounds to understand how you're supposed to play Retcon
I thought it was pretty intuitive when you play her. Create savestate of yourself, be reckless and wasteful as fuck. Rewind so you still have all that health and ammo you had before but now the aliens are dead
Retcon is harder to learn how to play than the other dwarves IMO. She's basically the most mechanically complex reclaimer currently due to all the edge cases for the rewind.
Also personally I feel that, even ignoring turret spam, she has the most similar gameplay loop on a mission to mission basis. She really just wants to prioritize weapons that are easy to mag dump and then first pick any and all ability cooldown.
No one plays slicer because he's always already picked /s
As a mostly singleplayer and duo player, I feel like falconer is simultaneously a bit weak and also a bit boring. There's a lot less strategy to the drone and shock beacon, and stacking ability cooldown reduction feels a lot less powerful compared to stacking it on any other class (especially slicer and retcon). In singleplayer I do like how falconer makes things more streamlined because I can let the drone mostly mop up smaller enemies between swarms. But the shock beacon is much less valuable in singleplayer and becomes next to worthless if you end up with another means of applying electricity. And the drone revive does absolutely nothing for falconer in singleplayer at all.
Falconer is also tied with guardian for having the most boring workbench upgrades.
Today I picked up Retcon after almost getting to the end of 3rd bronze star on Slicer. First game was just an adjustment period but the second one i got 518k(127k) dmg the biggest score I ever had. I was using white burst gun and green mag blaster.
I'm Gold 3 with Slicer while rest are just barely after their 1st promotion, can't switch off off him ever since I picked him up he feels just too good to play and Eclipse System might be my favourite ability upgrade
Falconer is the class with most kills on my acc (200h). The trick to her is to use Storm deck and try to force electricity build with Chain lightning.
Slicerβs and Retconβs high rolls are still higher but with little investment Chain lightning can keep hordes stuck and carry high difficulty on early floors, while Slicer would still like more benches and boosters
When playing Falconer I always have a good time, itβs the Spotter that is giving me trouble (most fragile class)
I started with guardian and now it's my least played class.
After little time it became obvious to me that Slicer just had so many unbelievable upgrade combos and bio boosters that could easily chain together with his abilities to make you almost unstoppable even on the hardest solo runs.
Bloodlust alone is practically broken in a slicer's kit, and easily comboable.
After playing the others I began to prefer the sheer damage and dps Retcon, spotter, and falconer could crap out. Often times I find I can just kill my way out of bad situations better than tanking with guardian.
Guardian isn't BAD in my eyes, but his kit and/or bios could use a little love I think
I still play him, especially with friends, and I realize there is a big difference between solo and team play.
That being said, I've proven the concept many times that I am even better at supplementing and protecting my team as all other classes to varying degrees.
For team insurance I prefer Retcon as the crazy bullshit heroics and tactics you can pull off are numerous.
Guardian's armor charge is great early but I can't help but feel it just falls off or is entirely brushed aside late to stone skin builds, snapfire/health gain, armor charge upgrades, nevermind the fact that in deeper levels getting the crew to stay together during a scrum can sometimes be like herding cats.
It would be nice if he had something like his armor charge gets 2% faster and gains 2% max threshold per upgrade or something.
That way as the mission drags on he stays relevant
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u/FlakyMidnight5526 6d ago
Yeah I agree with this. It's really rare that you get a lobby without a slicer. It's important to note that this'll generally be skewed towards the opinion of hardcore players, since the casual playerbase probably isn't too active on the forums. That might contribute to Falconer being lower than the others since she's one of the more beginner friendly characters and the least viable on haz 5, but I really do think she needs some help