I’ve been wanting to make this thread a while now, and now I’ve finally gotten around to making it. Big thanks to @blainebrossart1 for contributing to this list, primarily the game modes section, character balance changes and proof reading.
This thread is aimed to address the general gripes that PvP players have to our experience which may still be able to be resolved. There are a myriad of changes Blaine and myself could present that we would like to see being implemented, but have been wanting to keep this short to focus on the essentials. We’re aware that close to all support is gone as this point, and most changes are far fetched. But we’ve tried to stick to simplistic and numerical solutions which shouldn’t require any formal updates or substantial reworks (probably barring one). But as far fetched as these may be, so were the great marketplace changes which were introduced a few weeks ago.
One can always dream, right?
The Public PvP Queue
Please Note - These changes primarily concern the “Quick Match” queue due to there consistently being players on the receiving end of the aspects of what will be discussed under each point to a harsher degree. All challenges and lore challenges can still be completed in private matches against bots and in bots battles.
-
Remove Echelon
Echelon is probably the most notorious map in the game. And for good reasons. It has worse geometry than most maps and minions spontaneously attacks the double thralls (at which point they will interfere with the players). The latter may even cause minions to be stalled in lane until the doubles are cleared, which will result in the team which has the advantage to have an abnormally large wave of regular minions alongside the doubles themselves. But as we’re sure most of us know, the biggest reason why it’s widely resented is because of the ability to cheese both sentries by the choke point between the middle of the map and the first sentry.
If you get pushed back to your sentry, you can do a perfect job of defending against waves of minions, thralls and pushes alike, only for an opposing ranged character of any sort to get sentry damage. The team who has the push in their favour don’t have to push into enemy territory to get that damage. This becomes considerably worse if the enemy team kills your first sentry, and which point they can get sentry damage (and by extension killing it) from the same choke point. The 2nd choke point, between the 1st and 2nd sentry, has the same issues as the previously discussed choke point has.
Overgrowth and Monuments are, in our opinions, both great maps. But Echelon takes the weaknesses of both of them, the potential stalemates of Overgrowth and the ability to cheese the sentry of Monuments, and merges them together into a map which can’t provide enjoyable nor particularly fair matches.
-
Remove Face-Off
Face-Off is sadly a flawed game mode at its core. As cool of a concept as it may’ve been, we don’t think it’s healthy to have it in the queue. It encourages death balling to an unprecedented degree and may have the most severe snowballing out of any game modes. Beyond that, it also lacks incentive to actually turn in the masks. Teams who are in the lead have a routine tendency to abstain from turning in masks to proceed to farm their opponents at some capacity. It can be rough in any game mode to have substantial differences in player skill or team compositions’ power levels between the teams, but Face-Off takes those to the extreme.
-
Always present one map from each game mode (Incursion, Meltdown, Capture)
At this point, this should be the standard. A substantial portion of the games being created in matchmaking end up not going through because someone dodged due to the game mode. The vast majority wants Incursion for most, if not all games, so seeing no Incursion options to be voted for tends to lead to a higher frequency of dodges. Dodges will still happen, but it’d hopefully happen to a lesser extent if more players could be happy with the selection of maps which you could vote for.
Game Modes
Meltdown
This is the only game mode we’d like to see changes for. Ideally, we’d like for the original Meltdown to be returned. Though we’re relatively certain that’d require a proper update, which means that’s off the table. The finale did nothing to benefit the game mode. It didn’t attract Incursion players, and it alienated Meltdown players. It just solidified a win for the already winning team, and made it more difficult to make a comeback.
Putting that aside, these are the changes we’d like to see;
-
Revert the cost increase to Elite bots (800 -> 600)
As good as the change may’ve initially looked on paper, to increase the cost from 600 shards to 800 in order to reduce prevalent spam, it became counter productive. The increased cost of Elite bots solidified the winning team’s lead due to their map control which would net them more shards whilst simultaneously depriving the enemy of said shards. This creates a substantial gap in economy between the teams, which the losing team quite literally cannot afford since their economy wouldn’t be able to keep up with the winning team. Reducing the cost to the old value would mitigate this issue to some extent, making it easier to pull back.
- Reduce the exp gains from minions
I remember being confused and pretty excited when they increased the exp gains from minions in Meltdown. I never thought it needed it, hence my confusion. But I was also happy since you could to the later levels quicker and more reliably. But, as with the last point, a well intended change has ended up being bad for the game mode. It’s enough to miss out on the first two waves, or even sharing them with too many teammates for that matter, for it to be detrimental. You can get to level 3 by the 2nd wave while others have struggled, still being at level 1. From there it typically snowballs rather substantially as the level advantage for the winning team increases while the losing team struggles to level up adequately. Reducing the exp gains would even out the leveling across the teams and help prevent severe snowballing.
- Increase the health of Elite bots and Ultra bots
As of now, Elite Bots feels more like assassins than tanks. They’re generally not terribly difficult to take down as an adequate damage centric character, but they shred anyone who it decides to target. So increasing the health, in tandem with the following couple of changes, would be a part of an attempt to try and make them more as game changing juggernauts which requires team coordination as opposed to the spammable assassins they currently are.
For the Ultra bots, it’s to emphasise the pushes you tend to get towards the end of the Finale as well as counteracting the upcoming suggestion to reduce the level advantage.
- Decrease the Elite Bots’ and Ultra Bots’ damage
Same reasoning as above. Same applies for the Ultra bots in terms of their damage output.
- Increase the cooldown of Elite Bots to 75 seconds
This would be to prevent them from being spammed with virtually every wave. And this change should also make it easier for the losing team to pull back as they won’t have to worry about dealing with elite bots every single wave. Having the cooldown at 75 seconds should mean that you’d have one at roughly every third wave.
- Reduce the level advantage of Ultra bots
In the current Finale, it only takes a level advantage of 4 for it to almost feel impossible to make a comeback. Even with a level advantage of 2, you can start attacking the enemy bot before they even touch yours, yet yours goes down before the enemy’s despite having similar damage output. While the advantage should be kept, it has a tendency to make relatively good matches a lot more one sided than they were in the first round.
- Initiate Sudden Death immediately upon entering the Finale
What’s meant by this is essentially that the team who lost the 1st round will get a V.0 bot right off the bat instead of nothing. Most Finales end before they can even begin simply because the winning team can devote all their attention and skills to killing and harassing the players killing the ultra bots since they have nothing else to focus on themselves. This, like the other changes, should make it easier for the losing team to hold their own and come back.
The changes to Elite Bots would inevitably affect Incursion, though I don’t think they’d negatively alter any dynamic there.
Character Balance
-
Revert the skill damage scaling introduced in the fall update
This change nerfed a significant portion of the cast, a lot of which who didn’t need them such as Attikus, Rath and Toby. Meanwhile, a few characters got buffs, the most notably being Orendi, who didn’t need that either. Rath’s ultimate may be close to the most useless ultimate in the game now due to its lackluster damage and high cooldown, while Toby got virtually his entire kit severely nerfed.
-
Increase Kid Ultra’s damage by 10%
There are numerous changes we’d like to see for Kid Ultra, but the core changes would all require fundamental changes to his mechanics and helixes, so none of those are worth mentioning here. He’s generally considered as the most lackluster healer due to his drones effectively being worse sunspots and otherwise lack of utility. His main selling points as it stands are his ultimate and damage amp drones, the latter of which is only ever in gimmicky comps. He, much like Miko and Reyna, tends to struggle with leveling. Increasing his damage should make it easier for him to level and get to his mid-late game quicker and more reliably so he can get his redeeming qualities sooner.
-
Revert Oscar Mike’s 18% primary weapon damage increase
This feels like the Benedict buffs a while back. A substantial buff to an already good character which put him over the edge to being way too strong. He lacks counter play, has a fantastic ultimate, got a cloak during which he can have a 30% movement speed increase and his high sustained damage is unconditional as opposed to someone like Whiskey’s. Adding all those factors together for one character simply makes him too strong. For comparison, Thorn’s counter play is limited, she has a fantastic ultimate, and is quite agile, but she lacks sustained damage now after the nerf to her primary attack. She’s borderline OP, but her lack of sustained damage is why Oscar Mike is more bizarre at the moment.
-
Increase the duration of Pendles’ slow on Injection by 2 seconds and the mutation at level 4 by 1 second
–OR–
-
Remove Pendles’ speed penalty when uncloaked
Pendles is undoubtedly on the weaker end of the spectrum of the meta, and could use some love. The goal of either of these changes would be to increase his ability to stick to his target. It’s too easy to shake him off, and introducing either of these changes should make him more viable. If anything, we know the former actually worked. When he accidentally got those exact buffs a while back, he saw more play and performed better as well.
-
Reduce Rath’s ultimate cooldown
This only applies if the skill damage scaling isn’t reverted. See Blaine’s thread;
A Request From A Long Time Rath Main -
Add a damage penalty to Orendi’s Nhilism
Ideally, Nhilism would just be replaced with something else completely. But there’s no way of that happening as I assume the process of creating a new helix would be content, which isn’t supported anymore. So it wouldn’t help to suggest a replacement. Not even sure whether or not this suggestions is doable within their current framework since they’d have to add a factor onto the skill. Even they could, it’d streamline it next to Instant Gratification, but it’d be in the best interest of balance to do so if possible if Nhilism is to stay.
-
Reduce the area of effect of Montana’s “ Lumberjack Blast”
This is to reduce the prevalence of getting struck, and by extension stunned, through world objects such as walls, stairs, pillars etc. Again, not sure how the helix is coded. As mundane as it may seem to “just reduce the radius”, there may obviously be other factors which may make it difficult to do.
Gear
-
Disable or nerf Poor M-Pulse Controller
There are a few legendaries which can make certain characters stronger than they ever ought to be, but the M-Pulse Controller is probably the most universal legendary which may give a significant advantage to anyone using it. One of the issues which it indirectly brings up besides the sheer damage is the rate of which it increases your leveling thanks to the explosions ensuring exp or more of it from the minions. Ideally, the two nerfs would be for the radius of the explosion to be substantially reduced while also having the explosion proc on your own kills (and not assists). Unless those could come into effect, I’d like for it to be disabled.
Bug Fixes
-
Rare gear removing secondary effects of other gear with the same secondary archetypes
This glitch bascially nullifies any full stacking build. To use a concrete example; If you use an Epic Jennerit Max Health, an Epic Jennerit Health Regen and a Rare Eldrid Attack Damage, you’ll get all of the attack damage buffs (9.10% + 3x5.46%) for the first 3 seconds of taking health damage. However, when that the Eldrid’s conditional effect has worn off, it’ll remove the secondary stats from the Jennerit gear permanently, leaving you with 9.10% attack damage with just 5.46% when taking health damage. The Jennerit have, stats-wise, become standard commons.
-
El Dragòn’s ability to use En Fuego during Clothesline
To be perfectly honest, how this hasn’t been fixed yet is quite strange considering how game breaking it is.
-
Mellka’s ability to register two kills for one
I’m not going to spread how this glitch works since it’s one of the worst, but it’s a thing and it ought to be fixed.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
