I’ve been following an interesting discussion on the forum, you can see the whole thing here: Best-race-for-an-AT-(opinons-and-reasoning-please).
Two posts of note are here:
41 shifta
EZ mode
I’d love to debate this with BB-604, but of course I was banned for posting quite a long time ago for “trolling” (see: posting a graph of our terrible content delays), and again later for trying to help on the hacking situation. Such is life.
Anyway, back to the point. BB is wrong in my opinion, but he is actually explaining his point unlike the idiot cheerleader who appears to be following his posts. He believes AT is now a pointless class, and that they should buff and “try to stay out of the way” of the rest of the party. He says they’re also fairly useless because individual players are now so strong.
I’ll explain why I think this is wrong. An Acrotecher makes the party stronger – regardless of the fact that all missions are now easy for maxed out characters, adding an Acrotecher will nearly always make the runs even easier or quicker. The best example of this was put forward by Yoshi, the results of the Hoodrich Zeta Star event.
For those of you who don’t follow all this, back in the days of race events (and I think those days are long gone now since too many people have left), Flawless Victory and +J4J+ met a number of times. The races were always close, for example Flawless Victory won GGC2 by a couple of seconds or so if memory serves. On this occasion, the gap was unexpectedly large. The reason? Classes.
They took 3 Master classes in, we took 2x GM and an AT in. In that race, AT had more than enough melee power for the few areas that needed it, while at the same time significantly boosting the damage output of the gunners. People forget that buff items give you 15% while Shifta 41+ gives 27%. That’s a total boost of 24% to the overall gunner power while also making the AT stronger.
Whether you TA or not, PSU is about repetition and luck. The faster you can do a mission, the more boxes you will see, the fewer healing items you will use and so on. Thus it follows that running missions faster is always desirable, and the fact is that a party with an AT on ‘real’ missions nearly always has an edge because making strong classes much stronger is often better than having more strong classes. This has always been the case, although the AT role has changed. You need to focus on damage instead of support, your support role is done as soon as you’re carrying some Sol Atomisers and have thrown out the buffs. Stop healing people or using that awful party heal extra style, get Revenge Blaster and Avenge, and show BB-604 (and people who share his opinion) what you can do.
As for the suggestion that the game is too easy to need Acrotechers now – kind of undermines the whole argument, if the game is ridiculously easy (which it is), then it doesn’t much matter what you play anyway as long as you play it well and enjoy it.