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Why these Advanced Warfare perks have to go
Professionals are calling for MLG to ban perks from tournaments, but what’s so bad about them?
Everyone has that Call of Duty perk they get caught out by. In Modern Warfare, it was Martyrdom, that sneaky grenade that pops off the pin upon its owner's death. Of course, it only worked once. After you clocked who had it equipped you simply remembered to avoid them until the grenade had exploded. But the horror perks in Advanced Warfare are proving too much to handle for some players and pros alike.
Since the game dropped into our laps two months ago, the Call of Duty community has been up in arms about two perks in particular – the EXO-suit abilities Stim and Cloak. As might be expected from add-ons that give you higher health and the ability to completely disappear from view, they're contentious picks in a competitive scenario. Pro player and MLG 4v4 runner-up Chris 'Parasite' Duarte has made his feelings on the perks indisputable in the past week, in response to MLG's...well, lack of response to requests to change their ruleset.
"Stim has no place in a competitive rule set, mainly because it has no counter at all," Duarte wrote in the private competitive Advanced Warfare forum. "There is no downside to using it either. Using Stim does not slow you down. Stim does not make you slower due to the ability of the exo suit and dashing. Stim also does not make your shots weaker."
This lack of trade-off is a big failure in terms of balance. The only way that having extra health is counteracted is by occupying a perk slot which could hold another advantage. But almost every other one of those advantages has a counter ability, a perk that negates its usefulness. Just how far that usefulness extends into unfair advantage depends on the circumstances of the match, but at pro level the scale doesn't need much more than a nudge to tip the balance.
Playing group, or qualifier stages over the internet means one team ends up as the host, giving them slight ping advantages useful for improving reaction time. Add on top of that the ability to have more health in a 1v1 encounter and it all adds up. "Counter arguments would say that it is only active for a few seconds before it exhausts," Duarte continues. "However, in competitive CoD, those few seconds could mean an extra kill, a few extra points on the hill, and the difference between getting away with a flag or satellite in uplink. These are a few reasons why we believe it has no place in the rule set."
A cloaked enemy (left) behind a barrier against a white background is hard to spot until decloaked (right).
While Stim's advantage could be limited by some well-placed headshots in a fair firefight, Cloak's effect on the game is far more insidious. Cloak, as it suggests, allows you to conceal yourself from sight for "a short duration". That duration is 10-seconds, or until you try to fire. It doesn't make you completely invisible, however the visual effect is difficult to spot when a target isn't moving, and almost impossible to spot against light backdrops.
"Cloak, unlike Stim, has a few items that can counter it," Duarte explained. "However these counters are not potent enough to make a difference." One of these counters, Threat Grenades, are also considered ban-worthy, but even as a counter to Cloak they aren't over-powered enough to raise too many eyebrows. Threat Grenades reveal the outline and location of players on the other side of walls, or, if they are cloaked, in the blast radius. However, the reveal lasts only a second, after which (if there is still time on the Cloak's cooldown) the enemy will go back to being almost invisible, allowing them to slip away.
But throwing a Threat Grenade means you've already spotted something shimmering in the corridor with you, and that's not where Cloakers like to hide. As you can see from the image Parasite captured above, Cloakers hide with the bare minimum of their body showing and against white backgrounds, allowing them to line-up easy snipes as you come towards them.
"Even if you do manage to spot players in these positions," Duarte says, "the split-second it takes you to realise that it is an enemy could be the difference between a clutch kill or a player sneaking around your spawn. If those reasons are not enough, Cloak also slows down the pace of the game and makes the game dull for the spectator."
Parasite regards the style of play Cloaking takes as "unskilled" and in a competition, where the barrier for entry is world-class skill, perhaps he has a point. But is it just a different play style, or do Cloak users need to disappear? Let us know if you think Cloak or Stim still have a place in the competitive scene, or if you're just as annoyed as the pros.
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