Toby's ult is kinda lacking

Battleborn Rogue
#3

It’s not just his Ult that’s lacking.

That’s just one of the problems.

Right now, basically everything is lacking. He’s a really cool (thematically) hero with an absolutely terrible kit and the worst Ultimate in the game. Honestly, he’s probably the worst character in the game, period.

  • His character model is so wide that both of his weapons have an incredible number of terrain collision issues with what “seem” like clear shots. Anywhere that isn’t wide open (to give yourself some cover) is likely to be a myriad of issues because of the hitboxes of your projectiles and the terrain.
  • His shield is destroyed far too quickly by long-ranged enemies, making him very vulnerable to counter-sniper fire.
  • He can’t escape worth a squat without taking his level 4 helix “Sorry, I Broke Your Wrists” (stun mine). You have to turn tail and flee because the distance traveled with his boosters back-strafing combined with his enormous hitbox means terrain collision for days.
  • His “headshot” is directly center of mass, making it extremely easy for enemies to murder him.

They had a great idea and from a lore perspective he’s a hilarious character. But he’s just so badly designed and implemented. I’ve been playing him as exclusively as possible during double-XP weekend, and it basically boils down to the reality that he has great games against bad players, but he’s a sitting duck to anyone decent.

He has losing matchups against nearly every other Battleborn in a 1v1, which is okay, except for the fact that he doesn’t have enough territory control ability or sturdiness to stand off at range and gain an advantage.

More than any other hero, he needs a complete overhaul.

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#4

I played Toby for 1 match for my first time last night… vs a team that wasn’t really any good and in a decent party. I expected the result because I’ve never once died to a Toby and rarely seen him on the field after the first few days.

His kit is so laughable I will surely never play him again. His rail gun does half the damage thorns bow does at half the travel speed and 800 times the warning to the enemy that a bullet is coming at them. Since it’s giant and shines like the sun.
And worry not because it’ll take two of the fully charged shots to break a standard shield.

But the odd’s of breaking that shield when the time from them seeing the first charge to the impact of the second is hilariously long. GL

That shield is about useless… don’t get many shots out before someone pops it… and then him, because he doesn’t have much hp.

I really wonder how he can be territorial when he is the one running if you get within range.

It’s almost hilariously appauling.

And that big red mine is good for about half a second before people avoid the red floating mine… which has the smallest range of any continuous aoe on the game?

Its so conflicting to be laughing and remembering nightmares from that game at the same time.

#5

About the only thing Toby is really good at right now is wave-clearing. On Meltdown I can nuke a wave solo in seconds with him, assuming I don’t get picked off by Marquis 3-shotting me in the time it takes his chunky robo-butt to try and move out of the way without hitting terrain.

#6

The shield also gets penetrated by most specials that Toby needs protection from - Ghalt’s hooks, Shayne’s fetch, every other character’s charge.

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#7

I really don’t like his Ult, but other than that, I think Toby is fine.

Between him and Thorn, I earned unkillable.

For the most part I play him as a sniper and sit back from choke points. He can apply considerable pressure to a push or against a push.

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#8

I definitely think @omophorus has the right of it.

I mean, I love Toby, and he can be fun to play. He’s just terrible compared to all other Battleborn in just about every conceivable way. Which is a pity because I like playing as him, he’s fun, but he’s also completely useless. So there’s always a feeling of guilt at the back of my mind whenever I bring him along.

It’s not that I keep dying or anything, either. It just feels like I’m sort of there. I don’t contribute enything. If they made him tankier and gave his mine an ability to really draw in the enemies he might be more viable, but I can think of lots of scenarios like that which might make him more viable.

Right now, he isn’t. He’s the weakest character I’ve played. Still love 'im, though.

#9

Can we mod toby to work like the guardian enemies in the story missions that only take direct damage to their core. In this case toby only takes direct damage if shot directly himself and shrugs off hits to berg?

Well that could be potentially game breaking if they ramp up his skill kit but still.

#10

Glad I’m not the only one feeling guilty of picking Toby. Same feels, I love him but he just can’t succeed I. One on one’s or if a sniper ever keeps a tab on him. A good game will be: Setup shop, get some good Minion and assisting damage, shield pops, boost back three times, get shield back, repeat. This is best case for Toby, and gets old quick.

#11

I fought a Toby on a premade with Oscar Mike, orendi, alani.

They would set up aoes and Toby would launch a mine behind us. The physics were really weird… I would get bounced around and forced to stay in the aoe area, I assume the mine was doing that. It was a pretty neat tactic and could easily wipe a team.

Luckily my team looked sucky so I picked boldur, and that was that.

#12

That’s a mutation on Toby’s Mine.

#13

Toby himself, is actually rather strong when you get the hang of using him. He is complex, but falls short because of his ultimate.

His ult was at some point much better and then got turned WAAAAAAY down. There are alpha/beta descriptions of his ult actually anchoring him to the ground to do massive damage… which means it was changed at some point. My guess was the damage got nerfed, the range got nerfed, and he gained some mobility back.

His ult either needs a massive upgrade, or it needs to not stop him from using his shield/mine/primary while it’s up.

#14

Currently Toby’s strengths can only really be utilized in PvE. His character model design forces him to try being a sniper in PvP due to center mass crit box that is larger than most characters and his large size causing excessive amounts of terrain collision limiting what mobility he has. Having an ult that might as well not even exist to most people is really just icing on the cake. Lets also not forget the alignment issues of his railgun and mine because the first person prospective doesn’t really accurately portray clean shots when near terrain causing frequent projectile collision and that his deployable shield does not scale per level as far as I can tell.

#15

Toby’s strengths include:

  1. Running away from fights as a territorial character using boosters.
  2. Rail gun shots so long as no one bothers to attack him.
  3. Good at killing small creeps

His weaknesses are basically everything else. Low health, low shield, crap shield ability even at low levels and it gets worse from then on out, mine is misaligned and has serious collision issues, fat body with large easy to hit crit box effectively halving his already mediocre to bad health pool, ultimate that makes him WORSE than before he activates it, relying on shield to actually do damage, without shield players can actively sidestep his attacks like it’s some kind of cruel joke, Mutations that aren’t as good as the stuff he already had (proc on death mutation? really? GBX is laughing at this character), weak early game and mediocre late game unless you just sit back and hammer with the shield up.

Where are the patch notes? This character has been OBVIOUSLY like this since release, and talked about on the forums since day 1. They’ve done balancing passes on a dozen characters and not once even mentioned him except in a video on the battleborn youtube that shows the guy “blowing guys up with a giant laser death beam” and almost gets himself killed to an NPC for activating it.

STOP RELEASING NEW CHARACTERS!

There are a bunch that are underpowered and unused atm. The luchadore, atticus, toby, and WF at least are all so below average that they are barely ever in a game! Why are you guys spending time releasing one character for people to use when you should be making all characters viable choices and not come with an audible “Sorry guys but I really want to play this guy, haven’t played him in a week” at the character selection screen.

At least hotfix toby’s health pool to compensate for the fact his crit area is as big as a third of the character’s in the game. I mean, some character’s get away with mostly misses and maybe some bodyshots while tobby in the same situation gets almost 100% hit and some crit shots. Why is his health so low? You could throw him some HP until he gets a legit upgrade then take it back in the hotfixes.

#16

Toby’s kit is geared around controlling an area. Hence the territorial tag. Problem is while he can do this currently in PvE with few issues he can’t even attempt doing this in PvP because of the issues with his character model. The way the concepts of his kit fit together remind me of bruiser type characters in MOBA’s that would force their way into an area then dig in and claim that zone until they either decide to leave or the enemy team forces them out. Which is something he can do quite easily in PvE because AI is too stupid to exploit his character model issues.

Boosters isn’t a viable escape mechanism. The only real use for them currently is to either get someplace a couple seconds sooner, prevent yourself from getting punted off a ledge, or jump across a slightly wider than normal gap. Generally you are better off taking the helix to get 30% DR when all boost charges are expended.

Increasing his HP I don’t really see as a solution either. It seems like trying to stop a leaking water pipe with a band aid.

Given the apparent issues in gameplay resulting from the character model itself I think a better option would be to first adjust the size of toby’s crit zone to just be his head because I seem to get crits on him if I hit any part of toby that isn’t actually his mech Berg. Then either code his overall hit box to behaive similar to the golem/sentinel enemies so that direct attacks need to hit toby and not berg to deal damage or atleast cut a large amount of damage on hits to Berg.

#17

mmmhhh what ? I’m a master of Attikus, Kelvin and El dragon and I wreck every other battleborn with them :joy:
underpowered ?!! haha ! so you never see them ? so they are weak ? that’s doesn’t work like that

#18

The only character in battleborn that could be considered underpowered is toby. WF is anti melee anjd does a good job at it. (he could maybe use a little up tuning) el dragon and attikus are great characters. I personally don’t like dragon because i’m not a skirmisher unless it’s orendi, and i love attikus, he wrecks if you play him right.

Attikus’ only problems are A: he’s labeled as easy and B: he counts as a defender, even though he’s basically the same category as Shayne and Aurox.

Toby however, actually has a plethora of problems because the entire creation of him down to the bone is counter intuitive, large sniper, long range slow bullets, big body, low health/big crit spot.shield dependent, weak shield. cute penguin, rugged death machine.

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#19

I’ve seen them, a lot, just never seen el dragon or attikus go over 0.5kdr or make any real impact on the game before. I’ve seen an attikus that did okay, in a full 5 man premade, but he was mostly just there while the rest of everyone destroyed our team.

Kelvin is absolutely fine, just underrepresented. A blast to play, I never understood why he’s never around. Atty and el dragon might have some killer mutations that make them better, but I doubt many people stick around to find out. WF is whiskey foxtrot, who is pretty meh. He’s playable meh because he’s ranged, but there’s nothing really good about him and what’s worse is he’s straight boring in design (not something I’d say for pretty much any other character) as he just starts out throwing shrapnel at stuff when he feels like burning the CD and trying to stick people with nades while tapping people with the burst rifle… and that’s pretty much how it is all the way through, no matter what you spec him he’s just kinda that and then at some point gets the ability to shoot his gun faster for a bit. Even oscar mike has a neat set of tools letting him change from pusher to area denial to assassin.

#20

El dragon in En fuego => dragon splash => they are stunned, you just need to finish them (I have the legenday gear for him, + 25% damages for his 2 abilities

Attikus: "Tenacity"Repeated melee damage to the same target within 2 seconds stacks bonus damage up to 5 times. Up to +60% Damage
"Swift Strikes"Increases Attikus’ attack speed. +20% Attack Speed
Take gear for his melee damage and attack speed
Attikus is hard to roll, but hard to stop ! :wink:

For Foxtrot I begin yesterday with him, the napalm strike (helix) x3 looks cool, I think there is a thing to do with him, I use the shrapnel to push enemies from the cliff :joy: but I understand all what you said about him ! :+1:

#21

Here is step by step of what happens when you activate his ult. -

  • First, it takes a sec or two to charge the laser. Which can be completely devastating considering you are immediately slowed during while the whole ultimate is active. So, already you have been slowed for 1 or 2 seconds while unable to do ‘any’ damage. This is okay if you use this from a range, but if you are flanked or in the open, you are screwed.
  • Second, your skills are disabled, which makes a lot of sense because you are using a skill that just takes a long time to complete, but by the time you’re level 5 both of your skills are largely defensive. Your arc mines slow/pull/stun enemies so that you or your allies have an easier time hitting or running away from the enemy. Also, your force field blocks a decent chunk of damage from hitting you (excluding exceptions). Neither of which you can use while using your ult.
  • On top of that, those boosters that help you boost your large clunky hitbox around the battlefield are currently charging that all important laser. With impaired movement and no longer access to your only tool for evasion, you might as well be immobile.
  • Now, lets talk about the laser itself. Now with all of these repercussions for even activating the ultimate you would be expecting some sort of benefit from this laser. To launch a powerful beam of ultimate Armageddon at the expense of being vulnerable. Well the laser just feels like I'm spitting spit balls at the back of enemy battleborn's heads. Sure, it can "do" damage but it so insignificant than what it leads it up to be. Multiple times I have seen opponents completely unphased at the fact that I was currently disintegrating them with a giant laser and either came up to me and just meleed me to death, or just continuously shoot at me and tank the damage (even though most of the time, they weren't a tank). By the way, the laser does do any repulsion, Dot, or anything besides the minuscule amount of damage per second to say "hey, I have a giant death beam. Get out of my line of sight or I will kill you." It even does a large amount of total damage. It is just that it is spanned over such a long duration that it can't scare people or do enough damage before they either just hide or run away. All in all, it's a large disappointment for a menacing weapon of mass destruction from a heavily armed mech-suit engineered by a supposed engineering genius.
  • This ult slows you, disable all of your defenses, disable your only means of evasion, makes you a ginormous target, and all for a laser that is similar to a watergun filled with urine. It sinks and only makes your opponent annoyed. I feel like the game itself punishes you for even using the ult.
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#22

Well, you see, there is something called a skill gap. A character that is labeled as complex or advanced is supposed to have a skill gap. The only probleem is the two most skill gapped characters (sorry for the improper terms) are labeled as easy (just learned that dragon is too) I myself have gone almost 2.0 with attikus the first time I played him. As for el dragon? I’ve seen good dragons do more damage than anything else, come up to a WF (heh, me) and almost instantaneously kill said WF. He’s stronge but weak, the ultimate glass cannon if you will, and takes a lot of skill to sneak attack people well.