What if the crazy buff was purposeful? To get people to play the character, get used to them, and like them after the nerf? His usage is anecdotally up. So maybe this was their plan? Completely crackpot, but there are definitely more Benedict than before.
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The Elpis landing was staged in a Pandoran warehouse…
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[quote=“epicender584, post:1, topic:1545387, full:true”]Completely crackpot, but there are definitely more Benedict than before.
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Not really. It’s actually a pretty good way to tweak the meta, and I know it’s been used when introducing new classes/characters in other games to get a healthy population that can compete with the existing classes. Novelty isn’t so much an issue in BB because there isn’t much progression needed to bring a character back to “full”, but there’s definitely a need to tweak the meta to get useful balance information.
Pretty sure @gRANT_ or someone else on the balance team has admitted that they nerf some gear lower than they consider the balance point to be in order to push it out of the meta and see what else the community shifts to adopt while the item is basically worthless (it also lets them see if they were too optimistic with the balance number since, if it still sees a lot of play at the lower value, it needed to be lower).
The same could easily apply to characters (and I’m pretty sure they’ve done it here). I’m pretty sure that the extreme set of Alani nerfs was meant to drastically reduce the number of Alani players (since she was pretty much always picked for every game on both sides, and multiple people often wanted to play her) and that the follow up buffs were a somewhat planned tweaking. The number of tweak waves means that they were still zeroing in on where they wanted her to be, but I think that there was at least some part of it influenced by trying to manipulate the meta by “overcorrecting” before getting to actual intended performance levels.
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Absolutely. You have to remember that humans are creatures of habit and need some pretty drastic changes to break those habits. If Benedict’s buffs weren’t this drastic he’d still be considered bad despite empirical evidence of the contrary, and the reverse is true for Alani.
The best example I can give is from SMITE (as I’m most familiar with that game). Ravana and Nox were considered absolutely horrible at their release, and it required both a rekit and a buff to literal brokenness to get them to even be considered. And even then it took weeks for people to realize they were broken af (especially Ravana. He dominated the meta for months afterwards).
So over-buffing/-nerfing characters is actually necessary for people to change their perspective on said characters.
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Wouldn’t have said this any other way mate, this is great.