Please nerf the Tau gun slightly, so that it’s not possible to instakill a person with 100 health with it.
Yes I understand it’s been like this since hl1. But to join a server where a player knows how to handle it properly, just kills all the fun of playing on the server.
The PRO player can just wreck new/mediocre players. Especially when you’re playing on servers with a low population.
K thx bai 
Bumeplibump, any response?
Crossfire Update 0.2.0 - Known Issues list
KNOWN ISSUES:
Tau is overpowered
https://steamcommunity.com/app/362890/discussions/0/458604254420036097/
We’re considering options for a Tau nerf. It’s a delicate balance - the weapon needs to be deliciously powerful but we agree right now it’s just a tad too strong in the hands of a skilled player.
We’ll probably adjust the charge curves. Personally I think a big nerf to it would be to make it so that the charged shot only does decent damage if you hold it for the max duration. Right now I think the shot strength and the charge amount (as a %age of 100) scale linearly, so if you charge it 50%, it does 50% damage. Because the charged shot does like…200 damage, you only need that much. One idea I have is to make it so that if you charge for say…75%, it still does only…25% of its max damage. And then only hits its peak at 100% charge for 100% damage. Would mean you need to think more about which firemode to use (let’s face it, the primary firemode is really not that useful), and using the charged shot becomes a bit more skilled.
From my experiences in MP, the worst Tau overpoweredness comes from players very quickly chaining together charged shots and 1 shotting people. We’d like to keep the ability to chain together shots, but we’ll make it a bit harder to do by requiring players to FULLY charge, instead of half charge it like they do now. This is just one idea I’m thinking of.
Okay here’s an update for you. I just dug into some of the Tau code with Mark and we rebalanced the Tau’s charged damage curves a bit. This will be deployed with the ST Update. We also found a bug in the Tau code which was likely overpowering it a little. These two changes together should reduce the Tau’s effectiveness overall, though it will still remain very powerful.
Firstly, The Tau was using a function called overcharge bias to dictate its curves. Before, the bias value adjusted the smoothness of the charge curves. We adjusted the code for bias so it now instead dictates the mid point (50% damage) of the charge. We also changed the bias from 0.9 to 0.85 to compensate. For reference, here are graphs of the respective damage values:
Tau Damage Curves - Before (Old)
[attach=4754,none,2582][/attach]
Tau Damage Curves After (New)
[attach=4753,none,2344][/attach]
The idea being, you now have to fully charge a shot for it to be useful. You can no longer keep chaining together half charged Tau shots in quick succession to get 100 damage (enough to kill an unshielded player, or instantly kill even a shielded player with a headshot). This is what made the Tau so brutal in the hands of a skilled player. You’ll still basically instagib people with a full charged shot (that’s the weapon’s core design, really), but you do have to fully charge it now to be effective.
The other thing we fixed is that the charge code was not using a normalised value. This meant the 0 - 1 in code wasn’t as an amount of the Tau’s overall charge time, but instead was just 0 - 1 seconds. Considering the Tau’s overall charge time in MP is 1.25 seconds, this meant the Tau was reaching 100% charge 0.25 seconds faster than it was meant to. Seems small, but can make a big difference in practise.
I also increased the Tau jump velocity from 500 to 650. This means that not fully charged shots can still sometimes be useful for something - jumping. Plus the Tau jump felt a bit weak anyway.
Hopefully this will make the Tau much more balanced and fun in MP. If it continues to be overpowered post-patch, I might reduce the charged damage slightly (say, from 200 to 175 or 150). We’ll see, let’s see how this current set of changes plays out.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
