Power Shift feels broken in Season 3

This is a big rant about my experience playing Power Shift over the last couple of months. It's almost the only game mode I play, and I do really enjoy it, but the further we get into Season 3, the more broken it feels:

Mediums are too OP

• 5 mediums is the meta and is super hard to beat. Even with the APS nerf, 3 APS or 3 turrets is devastatingly difficult to beat, plus healing, defib, and AK basically make a team of mediums on the platform an invulnerable terminator machine. Once a team of mediums takes over the platform, they're almost impossible to displace, and that's the crux of this issue.

• The gadgets that medium get are way too OP for Power Shift. They have the majority of the gadgets that benefit the team the most, including defib, healing beam, turret, aps, glitch mine, zipline, and bounce pad. The only useful thing heavy gets now is barricade, and maybe proximity sensor. RPG doesn't benefit the team nor the player because it gets destroyed by APS like 75% of the time.

Map Balance Issues

• Some of the maps are (intentionally?) unbalanced. There's maps where one team has way more elevation over most of the platform's path, giving them an advantage for clearing it. Some of the spawns are also pretty terrible (especially sys$horizon), where the players spawn behind the platform, so they have to chase it, putting them at an even bigger disadvantage. It's just not fun.

• There's some parts of maps (again especially sys$horizon) where there's not enough paths to get elevation, which makes counterattacking needlessly difficult. In one direction on that map, it's almost impossible to turn it around once you've made it past the first third of your side.

Weapon Balance + LH1 rant

• The weapon balance is getting progressively worse (maybe). AK is so good that it makes little sense to choose anything else as a medium. Nerfing throwing knives and lewis gun? It makes AK comparatively better. Contributing to the weapon balance issues are that damage falloff is too weak, eg. you can laser headshots with the M11 at quite a distance and destroy someone.

• The LH1 iron sights aren't aligned properly with where the bullets go when your player is moving, and the excessive sway makes it way worse than it used to be. It's really difficult to hit someone with it while you're mid-air, and it didn't use to be, and that is contributing to why nobody uses it anymore.

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As we've gotten further into Season 3 and players have learned how the weapons and maps are balanced and how to optimize for that, the games are getting less fun, less dynamic (less platform turnover), and the chances of getting completely steamrolled by a team using the medium meta is increasing.

I think the core design challenge that Embark faces is designing classes and gadgets that work well in all gamemodes. The loadouts and gadgets do not feel like they're designed or balanced for Power Shift. I find it impressive that the game is as balanced as it is across all the gamemodes, but it's not a given that it can be properly balanced. I think Embark should consider restricting certain gadgets based on the game mode or making them behave slightly differently in Power Shift. /rant