The support tree. Lets not beat around the bush. It kinda sucks.
Here’s how to fix that.
1: Make it so that you can actually see things in tech-view.
I’m not saying ‘Make it exactly like IR view’, but… uh. Do that. It’s the best view-mode by far. NV is a pure slab of green covering your entire scope making it impossible to see anything and X-ray vision can’t see more than ten feet on front of you.
Have the background/terrain be washed out and greyscale/covered in a grid if you like, but make the enemies pop out in bright colours like Infa-red, and make them visible through terrain.
The marking vision mode isn’t useful if you have to keep swapping back to IR to actually find the targets that you want to mark.
You don’t need to be able to see them all the way through the other side of a house, but a tree or a bit of shrubbery shouldn’t be able to block my view of an enemy.
Which brings me onto point two.
2: Make them actually able to mark things.
Marking currently doesn’t really work. A bit of grass between you and the target and even if the target is correctly highlighted and centred in your scope, it still won’t let you press that mark-button.
You need to be standing in an open field with a 100% unobstructed view of the target. This is not useful.
If they’re that clearly visible, they wouldn’t NEED marking.
3: Make marking last longer.
15 seconds is a joke. It takes about three seconds to put your binoculars away and get your gun back out. If you want to mark multiple enemies they’ll be wearing off within seconds of you starting shooting.
30-seconds should be the first level, not the last one. What purpose does having it wear off at all even serve?
With two skill points in this, it should last a full minute at bare minimum.
4: The skill-tree that gives you tech-view/marking should be the same skill tree that improves your tech-view and gives you distance/difficulty numbers.
Come on, this is common sense people.
Combine the entire hacking tree into the support tree if you like. God knows that ‘throw accuracy’ and ‘Last man standing’ aren’t very useful.
(as an aside, grenades should be thrown where the crosshair is aimed, not ten feet above it. ‘Accuracy’ as a stat doesn’t actually help when your throw is complete jank. Maybe have this perk add a visible grenade arc showing where it’s going to go instead?)
Oh, and the capstone perk in this tree, Commander?
Double-use field radios isn’t really very useful. Not when it has to compete against some of the other capstone perks. Field Radios are so commonly found on radio-beacons that i’m having to chuck them in my storage box constantly because they’re weighing me down.
If it doubled the number of uses on ammo-boxes and paramedic kits too, it’d be more tempting. Or, again, just combine this skill-tree with the hacking skill-tree.
TLDR:
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Make the vision-mode better. We can’t see anything with Tech-view mode on.
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Make it actually be able to mark things instead of just not doing that, whenever there’s a bush or tiny bit of shrubbery in the way.
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Make it last long enough to actually be useful in a fight. Potentially have the capstone perk make marks permanent/until end of combat?
You have to remember that every single perk in this tree is having to compete directly against things like “More health.” “Run faster” “Improved carry-weight” “Can open locked doors” “Can hack enemy robots.” “Gain 100% more ammo when looting” “Just outright do more damage” for our skillpoints.
You understand? Some of these skills are really useful, and some of them give you a terrible vision mode that lets you (maybe) tag the enemies that you can’t see to put a red outline around them for 15 seconds.
I could buy both marking skills and provide no actual real benefit to myself because it doesn’t work properly and when it does work properly it still gives only an extremely situational benefit, or I could reload any gun in the game 30% faster forever.
Both of those perks cost the same two skill-points to max out.
