Counters, bans, pick modes, roles, team comps, and how they're collectively causing a problem... This is going to be a long discussion

(jkteamlead) #42

I always enjoy reading your topics. Thanks for raising the point about picking,bans, etc.

  1. I think the game is too new and fresh right now and there are a lot of things that will be discovered about PvP. Basically players need more practise to understand what they should ban (if they need)

  2. Picks and bans should never be used in open/public games. Only ranked playing with voice.

  3. RIght now i think that with wise character pick (good combination of skills) you can try to play against any comp. And you can definitely pick and change lines according to which character is playing against you to be more effective.

  4. I think during the first phase of ranked pvp matches a lot of people would try to push lines with tank healer comps (montana miko etc) because this may be comperatively easy way to stay on the line or push the line. So I would think about gang squad and at least 2 stuns in each comp to initiate a kill on enemy healer.

(Riotofsoul) #43

How would you guys feel if you could pick substitute characters? After both teams pick all of their characters you are shown all of them. Then you enter a second character select. These would be characters you could swap in later at a shard cost. This character select phase would not be blind to your teammates; they see who you intend to pick. Aside from helping counter, it also gives you a second chance to right your team comp.

I don’t know how experience and the helix should be factored in. Maybe make it so that your sub receives 50% as much experience as your primary character gained before switching. So if you level your primary to 10 then your sub will be level 5 on swapping. This could bring about a new meta of picking an early monster for your primary and a character that requires helix levels to be worth anything as your sub.

I’d like this a deal more than bans.

(Insanity Engine) #44

I agree with most of your points, but this bit is a little incorrect. [quote=“Gnusnas, post:42, topic:1375071”]
And you can definitely pick and change lines according to which character is playing against you to be more effective.
[/quote]

With the lanes so close together, there’s no real “Lane composition” here. It’s more or less just people grouping left, grouping right, or grouping somewhere else. And travel time between lanes is so short that you can effectively respond to almost anything relatively quickly, even if you’re at the other horizontal end of the map. There isn’t much need to change lanes comp on the fly when the game is so fluid anyways, you’re never really just gunna stay in a lane unless you’re actively doing something there.

It’s not a terrible idea, but again you have to consider roster size. You’re basically asking that 10 characters be picked per side, in a game with 25 characters. Granted, both sides can each pick the same character, but these numbers are still just a tad silly when the game is 5v5. Also when playing the game correctly, shards are already an issue, so this sounds more like something that would give the winning team a way to win harder (Which I’m not necessarily against, but unlike legendary items this has no downside), or would be potentially useless if you actually impose some sort of experience penalty to the second character.

If we get some sort of competitive mode in the game, I could see a version of your idea coming into play though, with blind pick. Each team picks 5 characters, one for each player, and then 2 reserve characters. After everyone loads in (And can see eachother’s teams) anyone can swap their characters with the reserve or with eachother during that pregame bit in the ship, then the reserve characters would basically no longer exist. This could also be a better point in the game to pick your loadout, because now you have more information to base it on.

With that all said, with counters being too broad, I feel like obvious reserve characters to have would be benedict and kelvin/galilea. I mean, why wouldn’t you? This comes around to the same issue I presented with bans, in this game they would be a bandaid on a bigger issue. The same handful of characters would get banned every match because of how much of the roster they have a distinct advantage over.

I have had some other thoughts though, which is… if another character other than gally had wound, and if that one dude was right about kelvin’s chomp doing damage based on kelvin’s max health, not the target*… then competitive could exist fairly healthily just by disallowing benedict (Not the game disallowing his use, but the community disallowing it). It makes me really sad because I don’t want to see benedict changed, but I also don’t think he could exist in competitive, he would stale the game. He’s just too polarizing, and exists in a niche that doesn’t exist for any other character. “Hard counters these, countered by these”

RIP Burdman.

*(Edit: Just checked footage of someone playing kelvin to read his skill, it’s based on the enemy’s max health.)

(lokohryu@gmail.com) #45

The problem for me is that the game is just too new to really discuss this without copious amounts of theorycrafting, and this game doesn’t lend itself well to guesswork in my opinion. While Galilea and Kelvin have a huge advantage with stuns they are still melee centric and provide nothing to a team fight if they aren’t point blank, which makes them mediocre meatshields at best against a team that can keep a bit of distance. I can’t really comment on Benedict as I didn’t play him, and never had trouble dealing with him even as a melee Battleborn. His advantage against melee gets overshadowed by the fact that no competitive team composition will include 4 or 5 melee Battleborn (more power to the team that tries this though).

(Insanity Engine) #46

Though you are right the game is too new to make any hard decisions, it’s still worthwhile, I feel, to examine and discuss possible issues, as long as they are sufficiently explained. Obviously no rash decision should be made simply based on what I or anyone else feel, and I’m mostly looking for people to combat my admitted theorycrafting with theorycrafting of their own. At the very least this provides a platform for when the game comes out and we can get more information, and see if stuff like this is truly valid.

The major point here is more counters and roles, and how they complicate things. A lot of people have made decent arguements, and my faith in my proposed team has diminished slightly. However the way counters are set up is still less than ideal because of roles, roster size, and so on. A change to counters to be less broad would warrent a different form of picking…etc. It’s a mess, at least how I see it.

Maps are small and the only real big open areas are on incursion. Even then there’s plenty of geometry for you to juke around and surprise people, so I don’t see melees having as much of a natural disadvantage simply because of their damage range. Plus galilea’s stun is ranged, and kelvin’s gives him a large speed boost, allowing them both to more easily close distance.

Player skill is also a big thing here and not everyone was on the same level during the beta, not even remotely. And ranked matchmaking seemed iffy at best. You can only assume how effective a character is assuming maximum aptitude, or even a situation of two players at even skill. Experience is key in determining this, but I feel like the sentiment that you never felt threatened by a proposed situation in practice can’t always be used to determine the validity of a theory. I am not saying your experience isn’t worth nothing, but it’s more than possible that during our limited time to play the game the few times we saw one of the characters who weren’t played in practically every match (Marquis, Miko, Rath, Oscar mike), the person(s) we were playing against weren’t able to properly represent the power of the character.

If you give benedict to someone like Corrsk, who is clearly a very skilled player, your experience against the character would be vastly different than if you gave it to one of my friends who didn’t play the game much, and weren’t very good. It’s why balance can be very hard to determine, and even when you have plenty of information it can sometimes be left up to theorycrafting to say how much better one thing is than another.

Your concern is more than valid, but sometimes guesswork is worth the time and effort.

(jkteamlead) #47

To be more correct: my statement about switching lines was based only on beta experience, ofc during competetive games the playstyle would feel different. However i was talking about situations when its not effective to stay 1 on 1 with certain characters as it has a bad match up for you. For eg. Shayne vs Benedict (in public games) I dont like this match up 1v1 and would rather be in the other place where i can make more pressure.

Actually i am not sure right now whether close lines and grouping right and left will make the game more exciting or it will destroy some fun of solo line pushing. Team fights are excellent accents in every battle but taking solo clearing out of the game would not be cool. I mean situation when you travel between lines only with all your team, then dying players group together and continue the battle and its 100% the whole team vs the whole team at some point on the map.

(Insanity Engine) #48

I actually feel like shayne can deal decently well with benedict, but eh.

What I meant wasn’t that people always move as 5, but that it’s easy to adjust on the fly. If I’m in right lane, and something is happening left lane, I can be there really quickly. The team will inevitably split at points, but grouping is really fast and really easy, so the lanes barely exist. People can still stay in a lane by themselves and clear it out, some characters do this really well like oscar mike and thorn. However minion spawns are kind of slow, so when the minions are dead you need to go find something else to do.

This game is a whole lot more fighting than other mobas, and that’s fine. People like that.

(Bitter? Better? What's the difference?!) #49

well said, as players we should work with and get a feel to our characters strengths and weaknesses and utilize them for whatever challenge we come across, for that’s what truly makes us badasses =)

(YourVillain) #50

I’m pretty new to mobas so I may be completely talking out of my ass BUT I am a very experienced fighting game player. I guess I’m kinda looking at this game through this lense. This game is so full of characters with such a wide variety of abilities I think it will be very difficult to come up with the perfect group (at least any time soon).

If you are talking about one on one match ups, yea. There may be some imbalance but it’s SUPPOSED to be a team game. If I I have character that doesn’t match up well I expect my team to fill in the gaps. There are so many characters that there are counters people haven’t even thought of.

Its way too early to call the meta- marques, gali, Benedict, Kelvin, ambra/miko.

Like I said I’m not moba player but I can think several hypothetical counters using multiple characters. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t think its game over yet.

(Insanity Engine) #51

Well… I’m a dedicated fighting game and moba player.

I’m not entirely saying that the meta is dead on arrival, but I think the concepts paint a picture of a bigger problem. The team I presented, like any team in a moba full of counters, requires the players to coordinate well and rotate as needed. With maps being small, rotating is easy and awareness is easy to gain. We won’t see just randoms grabbing this team, but I could easily see an organized team facerolling with it.

It is cool seeing another fighting game player around these parts though, not something I really expected to see.