Ever since the change was made to make Scouts much slower while carrying a carcass, Professional Scouts has become completely obsolete at a competitive level. I forewarned of this a long time ago in this thread. (And if I can be allowed a moment to toot my own horn just a little bit, I also suggested a cost increase for Scouts, and I guess the devs were thinking the same thing because they enacted such a change later on.)
The way I see it, there’s no point having a technology which no one uses, so how can we make Professional Scouts relevant again? The easiest thing to do would be to change the cost; keep reducing the price bit-by-bit until people start paying attention to it.
But that’s kinda boring. Bear in mind that Scouts have had several nerfs since the speed change was introduced: they are more expensive, take longer to create, and regenerate health slower than they did in the old days of the Professional Scouts meta. As such, I think we should revert the speed nerf and see how it goes. The risk with this is we’ll go back to the days of people divebombing under TCs to steal carcasses. So that leads to my second idea to go alongside it: we could make it so that you can’t yoink a carcass which is currently being gathered from.
What do you think?
Any other ideas to make Professional Scouts viable at a competitive level again?
High level Rus players still use Pro scouts occasionally.
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That would be a terrible idea. I think reducing pro scouts cost and ressearch speed would do more than enough. Otherwise ppl would just use it to sit on their bases forever while stealing other people stuff and map control wouldn’t be so rewarded as it is now
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I think it’s good to have the option of countering pro scouts with spears or archers. Reversing the speed nerf would take that away.
Taking that away might just pull us back towards pro scout naked fc meta with all of the food under the TC. I’d prefer balancing of pro scouts to be useful in a more map control centric gameplay.
Ideally, it should be viable to take map control early to take your opponents deer, but in the current meta it just does not seem to be worth it. Even in matchups like Abbasid, in which it should be easy enough to steal some deer, we usually see boar plays instead of pro scouts.
Idk what would be the best approach to enable this, but a cost reduction and maybe research time reduction seems like it would be helpful.
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It’s because it was double nerfed. Their speed was decreased AND the tech cost was increased.
They should just adjust the tech cost.
Make it a dark age tech, yes! Reduce the cost by 125g. This way you can go all out turtle at the start of the game and delay your age up or start yoinking deer in transition to feudal instead of researching wheelbarrow. Assuming you have the apm, at the 4min mark you could have your single/double scout bringing back your 2nd hunt. The counter play that early wpuld be to use your own scout to kill the slower moving slower regen scouts, then the counter to the counter would be starting barracks and have 1 or 2 spears walk along side your slow scouts.
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Do they use it in competitive play? I watch all the Road to Wololo casts, and I can’t even remember the last time I saw it.
Isn’t that the entire point of the technology? By your logic we should just remove it from the game. I’m not saying that isn’t a valid position to hold; if that’s how you feel that’s fair enough. But it isn’t a counter argument to reverting the movement speed nerf.
The thing is, because of the other nerfs to scouts, there’s more time and opportunity to get archers and spearmen in position to deny Professional Scouts. And of course there’s always horsemen.
My gut feeling right now is that if the devs were to take the cost reduction route, they’d have to make it borderline free to encourage elite players to use it. Maybe that’s fine but I dunno, it kinda doesn’t sit well with me. In that case it’d probably just be easier to remove the technology and make it a default functionality for all scouts.
When was the cost increased? I don’t recall that ever happening.