Last week we found out that one of the main characters from Battlefield 4's single-player campaign, Irish (Kimble Graves), will be a playable "Specialist" in Battlefield 2042. This was a big surprise and I think a good surprise to many BF4 fans. We learned via the BF 2042 website that Irish is the "leader of one of the groups of No-Pats."
Irish's "Class" is Engineer, his "Specialty" is Fortification System, and his "Trait" is Veteran. The Fortification System allows him to put down a DCS Deployable Cover, which is a small protective barrier of bulletproof glass, and the APS-36 Shootdown Sentinel, which eliminates incoming explosive projectiles (that includes grenades, rockets, etc), within proximity.
Now the main topic I wanted to bring up in this blog post is Irish's Trait, Veteran. This trait allows Irish to "always spawn with a small amount of body armor that can be replenished whenever he collects dropped ammo packs from defeated foes." Does this sound like it may be just slightly over-powered to anyone else? In the image in the upper right of this article you can see the armor (blue bar) above his health. This screenshot is from Battlefield's Twitter.
After seeing BFV's Firestorm and Call of Duty Warzone use armor plates in their "Battle Royale modes" I wondered if that would become a new "norm" for the regular multiplayer experience in future games. Well in Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War there is an "Armor" scorestreak that reduces incoming bullet damage and now we see that one of BF 2042's Specialists is going to have something similar.
So what do you think? Will the Irish Specialist become meta to use because of the extra damage they can take? Will DICE balance this right or just make it weak so it's not op? Will we see a lot of Irish Specialists on the battlefield? I guess we'll have to wait to test this either in the open beta or when the game is released. Let me know your thoughts.
The information about Irish and the below image were found on this Battlefield Briefing: The World of 2042 blog post (posted on August 12, 2021).
