YMMV / Dirty Bomb

• Abridged Arena Array:
  • Inverted with Dome. Most players hate it because of how large it is, with a lot of space wasted because players will almost always take the shortest route to the objective.
  • Inverted with Execution mode as it turns the objective-based team play into a sort of death match and the mercs' abilities weren't really designed for this game mode.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Arty really the soldier Sawbonez gave that kidney transplant to? Is Arty's focus on work because he wants to pay Sawbonez back or continue treatment? Why are they mostly featured in media and free rotations with each other (and Sawbonez is the only Medic Arty will personally thank during heals and revives)?
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Your teammates have the option to help you up. This is usually fine when the coast is clear, but it can also lead to the both of you dying and winding up with a longer spawn time.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Thunder. Either he's a perfectly fine mercenary who edges over the strong side because of the well-deserved buffs, or a completely broken and OP merc with an ability that leads to a frustrating death.
  • Turtle is either a fine purely defensive engineer that offers variety amongst his aggressive peers, or his shield's incredible utility forces it to be targeted, considerably slowing the game down.
  • Javelin is either the most OP merc in the game currently, because her rocket launcher deals high area of effect damage and explodes on impact, or a middling fire support character that doesn't deserve another nerf.
  • Some players believe that Guardian's amazing stats, weaponry, counter to explosive spam make her a great merc. Others say that she's nicheless as she lacks the team-sustain abilities of the medics and the raw killing power and tankiness of the assualts, giving her zero niche in a five-man team.
  • One of the reasons why Proxy is hated is because she can shoot her mines, causing them to prematurely detonate. Some think it's a cheap tactic and should be removed, while others think that it's the only thing that lets her keep up with the other engineers in higher level play.
  • Sparks has received several nerfs to counteract the incredible utility of ranged revives, including lowering the damage of her machine-pistols, lowering the damage and range of her REVIVR (for both damage and healing), and changing the amount of health she receives from small health packs. Some believe that the nerfs were overkill and she isn't able to properly defend herself like every other merc in the game, while others believe that ranged revives are fundamentally broken, so she would remain powerful no matter what.
  • Snipers in general are this because of their punishing nature. Some hate them that their lack of counterplay at range makes them incredibly frustrating to fight and their OHKO nature goes against the game's typically high TTK. Others hate them because there are ninety horrible snipers for one decent sniper, and that new players are unable to provide the same utility as snipers than when playing as other classes. Others still believe that snipers are fine and that their high skill floor should be rewarded.
• Better Off Sold: Once you reach a certain level, lead, iron and possibly bronze become nothing but trade-up fodder.
• Broken Base: Execution is one. A lot of older players dislike it because the abilities feel out of place and it puts more emphasis on getting kills rather than completing objectives while others enjoy it just fine. Majority though will still begrudgingly play execution to receive the daily bonus. Ironically, its removal caused another outcry.
• Character Select Forcing: In any mission with an EV, it's almost essential for the defenders to have some form of air support; while the EV DOES take damage from small arms fire, it's such a low amount compared to air support that the attackers will have a massive advantage. The attackers, meanwhile, make absolutely nil for progress if the don't have an engineer-type merc to counter the air support.
  • Additionally, low level play is plagued with the absence of medics, which ends up with either a loss or many a player severely underskilled in anything but Aura, the starting medic.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Competitive games will always have Fragger and Sawbonez in their line up. This is followed by a single fire support, usually Skyhammer because of his versatility. The next two slots are between an engineer (Bushwhacker or Fletcher and only during C4 based missions or EV repair), a secondary medic (Sparks or Aura, depending on the team), Red Eye (because of his ability to lock down points with little effort) or Thunder as a secondary assault.
  • With the first generation of loadout cards, there was always one card that rises above the rest, making everything else worthless. Sparks is a particularly egregious example because her 383 Companion Agent boasted top-tier weapons and perks. Come the second generation of loadout cards, this doesn't seem to matter anymore as the cards are more or less balanced.
  • Some mercs have access to augments that are almost required due to the advantages they give. Rhino needs Nitros, Fletcher and Bush both need Lock-on and Sparks needs Quick Charge.
  • Aura is the go-to medic on defense because of the consistent healing her station provides without necessitating her to actively pocket players. She becomes mandatory on Underground and certain sections of Bridge because of the close-quarters nature of those areas.
  • A lot of experienced players tend to bring Kira on Chapel because she is the best choice for clearing the area behind the rock of the last point.
• Demonic Spiders
  • Proxy, and Aura to a lesser extent, are this because they are fast, with access to powerful shotguns which can kill most classes in two hits.
  • Virtually any mercenary that appears on the free rotation. Here's a list of common effects.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Coaly is this, ever since he's appeared in their What the Dickens? update. Fast-forward one year and now he's appeared in promotional art as a spider and has a skullsplitter/frozen version of himself.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Bushwanker: a Bushwacker on the enemy team who gets very creative (and annoying) with the locations where he places his turrets.
  • A common nickname for Vassili is "Vaseline."
  • Another name for the Katana is the "Weeb Stick." Some call the Cricket Bat the "Spanking Paddle".
  • The objective canisters are called milk jugs.
• Fanon: Phoenix having red hair. While there isn't any official art without his helmet, concept art shows he has red hair under his helmet and artists refer to that.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Between his release and nearly immediate Nerf, Phantom was the merc of choice to any player that likes to go 1v8, due to his Refractive Armor being able to absorb huge amount of damage on top of camouflage it offers.
  • Vassili used to be one when headshot insta-gibs were permitted. This meant that a skilled sniper (or hacker) can decimate an entire team in seconds. Hell, in comp or 6v6, they could do so with a single clip. Luckily, this was changed.
  • Fletcher was one because, with his powerful sticky bombs, he was a faux-assault class with the utility of being an engineer. His damage output was nerfed, keeping him strong but bearable.
  • Despite multiple nerfs to most aspects of her character, Sparks is still considered one because of the potency of ranged revives. A talented player is capable of keeping their entire team alive before the enemy could put them down until the next spawn wave.
• Goddamned Bats: Servers will fill up with one of three mercs of every new rotation. Vassili and Phantom are of note because new players tend to flock to these characters and ignore the others on rotation.
• Heartwarming Moments: In early May, 2017, a talented sniper by the name of Kim Loe lost her battle against cancer and the devs mentioned her in one of their weekly updates and linked one of her gameplay montages. With the release of Vault, the devs included a little shrine of her in the map.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Sparks is considered badly overpowerd because her REVIVR rifle is pinpoint accurate, doubles as a sniper rifle, and revives teammates. This is countered by her having the least health in the game, but she's usually found in the back lines.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Proxy and Kira perform well in the chaos of public servers but lose out in coordinated settings because of their low health.
  • Phantom used to be considered too weak because he was fast, tanky, perfectly invisible and could kill almost all mercs with two swings of his katana. Since then, he was nerfed to the ground and now people hate him for being useless. His speed and health have been decreased, his visibility was raised and his cloak now emits a constant hum.
  • Aimee is less popular than the other snipers because her lower health puts her at an extreme disadvantage during duels. She's often run by more experienced players who know how to mitigate her weaknesses.
• Memetic Loser: Vassili is considered this because he has lines indicating that his loneliness and having a minimum-wage prior to becoming a mercenary sniper. Doesn't help that most players who migrate towards him tend to be at the bottom of the scoreboard.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • #anyonebutvassili. ^note During the Rogue En Vogue event, the most popular merc in each week's free rotation is selected as that week's Prime Suspect. Since Vassili is very popular among newer players, everyone expects to see a strong showing in his favor during the week he's available, and the community jokingly rallied to try to prevent him from becoming the Prime Suspect.
  • 2% ^note Prior to the Unlock and load event, Thunder was considered one of the bottom tier mercs because his default weapon is a high spread weapon that deals abysmal damage and his health wasn't enough to compensate for his hitbox and speed, despite having the second largest health pool. The developers addressed that issue on the February 24, 2016 patch by reducing his hit box by a whopping 2%. This happened again to Rhino, but with less backlash.
  • Some mercs have favorite foods based on explosives. Proxy has pancakes/pizzas, Nader likes eggs, Fragger likes pineapples and Fletcher likes meatballs.
  • Not happening ^note In response to whether or not certain issues are being addressed, the community manager replied that the removal of aimpunch (which is universally loathed by the player base) and the fixing of the EV's hitbox was "not happening."
• Moe: A lot of people would consider Kira one.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Kira's "Aw, yeah!" taunt.
  • While the game has a lot of issues, one thing the fans agree on is the game's top-knotch voice acting.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • While Phantom has always gotten flak for not having a niche, an intelligent Phantom who understands his kit is a nightmare to deal with. It's horrendous hearing his cloaks whirr, but never knowing where he's going to strike from. Especially when your in a small space like the generator room in Underground.
  • Getting spotted. It becomes a mad dash to find and destroy whatever's doing it.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Arty used to be considered a weaker version of Skyhammer because he lacked automatic weapons and had a debatedly weaker ability. With buffs to his artillery strike (increasing the radius, lowering the cooldown, adding two of them, reducing targeting time, etc.) as well as buffing the burst rifles and the Dreiss AR, he is considered by some to be a better version of Skyhammer because of his spammy ability (useful for taking down the EV) and precision elimination.
  • Fletcher was considered useless on his release because he had roughly the same stats as Bushwhacker but with worse primaries and buggy sticky bombs. It was only when everyone figured how to best play him effectively (flanker focusing on sticks rather than tanky soldier relying on guns) did the community actually do a 180, bringing him back to the scrappy heap for the opposite reason: he was practically an assault class with the bonus of having engineer perks. It wasn't until the Unlock and Load update were the fans satisfied with him as they nerfed his splash radius and his damage.
  • When Red Eye was first released, people complained about his awful weapon choice (particularly his awkward to use default) along with the fact that the smokes weren't particularly effective and more often than not blinded your team instead. By buffing his semiautomatic rifle and his abilities (also by learning how to play him) he is now considered one of the strongest mercenaries.
  • Regarding weapons, the Grandeur SR used to be terrible. Its sights were off, its spread was insane and its fire rate was meh. A few well-deserved buffs later, it became one of the most potent weapons.
  • All Bomb Squad used to do was make Proxy's mines glow brighter. It has since been changed to display a marker for every single deployable, simultaneously making assault classes, engineers and recons easier to deal with.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Headshot instagibs were this because of how fast and how frequent a skilled Vassili can pull them off. They were removed entirely because of how greatly they affected the competitive scene.
  • Aimpunch, which is how much flinching your character receives upon being hit. This basically means that it is much more difficult for somebody who has been shot first to take care of their opponent, who already had the advantage of shooting first.
  • The free-rotation isn't particularly liked by the community. While you can try out three mercs for free every two weeks, so does everyone else. Prepare to be greeted by a deluge of a single class. This is worse whenever a recon is on the rotation. This has been somewhat mitigated because rotations only last a week, but the complaint still stands.
  • The Double Time augment is this for a lot of players because it removes reload cancelling, which can effectively shave your reload time in half. This would be fine on shotgun mercs like Proxy and Aura, but it makes a lot of cards unusable for rifle-wielding mercs like Red Eye and Skyhammer.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Dreiss AR is this. Its current iteration requires a lot of trigger discipline, which is often pushed aside in favor of automatic weapons.
  • The Stilnotto Stiletto knife deals 35 damage on a quick swipe, but 85 damage on a heavy strike. This doesn't justify using it over the more balanced Beckhill combat knife.
  • The Fel-IX sniper rifle. While it is capable of one-shotting everyone bar Rhino, it's firing rate is incredibly slow, to the extent that it isn't capable of double tapping mercs before they are revived by medics.
  • A lot of players hate shotguns because they tend to kill really quickly without requiring the same amount of skill as automatics.
  • Burst rifles used to be hated for the unparalleled long-ranged burst damage, but a recoil nerf made them particularly unreliable as weapons.
  • The Hoigat .224 has very high spread and very low damage. This is supposed to be balanced by a high magazine capacity and rate of fire, but it doesn't make the pistol any less useless.
  • The Ulu can be termed the melee version of the Hoigat as it deals the least damage of any of the melees (couldn't even OHKO the 80 health mercs), has abysmal range, has the longest light damage window start (12 times that of the Beckhill) and longest heavy damage window start (twice that of the Beckhill). Its only upside is its RPM, which doesn't come close to compensating for its other faults.
  • Some weapons, which are generally considered fine are loathed on particular mercenaries:
    • The revolvers are pretty standard for heavy characters like Fragger and Skyhammer, but are considered the worst secondaries for Fletcher and Vassili because they have access to machine pistols, which are more reliable as emergency weapons.
    • The Hollunds 880 is perfectly fine on Aura and Proxy, but is looked down upon by Fletcher users, who use the more consistent Blishlok or the better-ranged Ahnuhld-12.
• Tear Jerker: While a lot of mercs have some sort of tragedy, this is usually downplayed, mixed in with some black comedy, or not particularly cared about by the mercs, Hunter's backstory is particularly tragic: His mother died when he was a child, leading his father to take care of him alone. His father was stoic because of his wife's death and the horrors of being in the army, which made him come off as cold, so Hunter did everything he could to make him proud. When he was 18, he enlisted in the army because he needed money for his ailing father and his sniping skills were all he knew. This caused the two to part on bad terms. He was presumed dead, imprisoned, and lost his arm. Upon returning back home, his father was dying in the snow, and his last words were about how he failed his son.
• That One Attack: Players particularly hate Thunder's flashbang. While it doesn't outright kill you like Fragger's normal grenades, you are blinded and stunned while awaiting imminent death, which people say is much worse.
  • Javelin's rocket launcher is this as well, particularly because of her capability to pull it out midfight and immediately win.
• That One Level:
  • Dome is considered this due to the aforementioned reasons, but Trainyard gets a lot of hate for being super biased towards the defending side.
  • Players dread having to attack on Bridge because the first objective is very difficult to complete. There are only three ways to get to the EV and two are bottlenecks while the last is right in front of the defender's spawn.
  • The final point of Dockyard is this, as there are only two paths the attackers can take to reach the objective and the defenders only need to circle around the objective to deal with the threats.
  • Castle is notorious for being the only map with a very offense-biased final point. Once attackers have gained control of the area, it's nigh-impossible to take it back.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Phantom was the paragon of overpowered characters that were simply unfun to fight against. SD responded by nerfing him to the ground. He has since been given an EMP effect, but that isn't enough to redeem him.
  • The Containment War Update introduced Execution mode, which became the default mode for players joining quick play. This was presumably done so that players from CS:GO would have less difficulty adjusting to the new game. The veterans weren't pleased to say the least, because it gave new players the wrong impression of what the game actually was, especially because abilities were designed with Stopwatch mode in mind. Thankfully, they reverted it.
  • The Lead and Iron update changed Fragger's health to 130 from 140 (which was changed from 150), in order to push him away from the meta. A lot of players find this ludicrous as he now only has a 10 health difference from Stoker and Skyhammer, who provide invaluable fire support while also having similar weaponry and smaller hitboxes.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Even though the game isn't out of beta yet, a lot of map areas have stunning views. Special mention goes to the defender's spawn on the last point of Terminal. Turning 180 degrees reveals the city's skyline.
  • Many players would be awed seeing Kira's laser beam for the first time, a giant pillar of light crossing the room, leaving scorch marks in its wake. Even more impressive is the cloud formations when staring directly at its origin.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Not a lot of people think that Turtles Obsidian Operatives skin, with the bug-eyed goggles, toblerone shaped haircut, and tacky turtleneck sweater, looks very good.
  • Similarly, Aimee's Obsidian Operatives player model has received some criticism because the hood she wears seems to be directly connected to her head.
  • Continuing the thread, Aura's Obsidian Operatives player model gives her tiny pigtails, which make her look like an over sized toddler.
  • During the Shell Shock event, players got to choose among three different prosthetic eyes for Proxy.◊ All potential replacements, however, clashed with Proxy's default earthy colour scheme and the color wouldn't even change depending on one's loadout card. This is on top of how a futuristic prosthetic messes up her more natural look.