Why do I suck so badly?

Battleborn Battleborn Competitive Multiplayer Discussion
#37

I’m sorry to hear you’re struggling so much, but I can tell you it’s extremely familiar to me. But the feeling wasn’t in Battleborn, it was in SMITE, which leads me to a question that hasn’t been asked before:

Do you have prior MOBA experience?

Based on your answers so far and your struggle, I’m assuming you don’t (please correct me if I assume wrongly), and that is part of the struggle. MOBAs are really complex monsters to try and get a grip on, and it takes a lot of time to get even remotely comfortable with the mechanics. BB is even harder than most ‘true’ MOBAs in that it combines the complexity of character synergy, leveling, builds and need for awareness of that genre with the breakneck pace of shooters. It’s an intensely interesting but hard to grasp combination of genres without prior experience in one of those.

How to fix this is just time, practice and working on one thing at a time. Don’t try to work on your map awareness, positioning, skill usage, cooldown management and objective control all at once. Pick one, work on that and let the rest be for now. Like others suggested before me, Oscar Mike is a really friendly character to learn the intricacies with, as he is extremely flexible and easy to use.

Another, slightly more out of the box idea, is getting some MOBA experience somewhere else. I’d recommend SMITE for this, as it’s pretty forgiving in it’s early levels and has various game modes to practice different things in. The pace is a lot slower and the 3rd person camera makes it a lot more recognizable than isometric games like League or Heroes of the Storm.

While I’m no pro at the game, I’m more than willing to run practice and coaching matches with you to try and narrow down the things you need to work on first. It’d be a shame to give up due to a roadblock like this, that’s definitely manageable with some help. Steam name is GreyAethelwulf.

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#38

Hey, thanks for your reply! I indeed have MOBA experience, I played LoL for a reeeeeally long time and stopped because I was raging at myself too hard. Then I tried SMITE, played for a long time as well, right until Poseidon came out, I remember, and quit for the same reason. At the time of writing this post, I was close to quitting BB for the same reason - yeah, there’s a pattern. That’s why I said I was the one with the problem, not the game.

I added you on Steam, hope we can get some games in together. (Tobster is my steam name)

#39

One thing I recommend if you run him through some training jack, is the strafing game. I ran a few friends through map memory, and knowing how to back up and not get HUNG UP on terrain, while still being able to shoot effectively, so they could decide on their own when and how to fight or retreat. From what I’m hearing, it sounds a lot like positioning issues and escaping a trap after it’s sprung. Start him off with the big models(Monty, ISIC, Toby etc.) so he can feel how things can go sour fast if you get jammed up. :slight_smile:

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#40

That was the plan :wink: Thanks for the heads up though! Much appreciated.

#41

I’d like to run through that bit of training. PSN Bnegative. I’ll bring my Attikus!

#42

I’m on PC, but there’s actually a project to help players all around! Check out this thread and hit up the PS4 teachers Battle School - An Idea To Help New Players

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#43

Stick at it with Caldarius you will soon get the hang of using him and when you do he can be a great hero to use. Personal he is my favourite and the one I win most often using.

#44

Hate to see this. I will say that I don’t do PvP unless I have my strong PvP players. I always tell them to order me around if I’m being an idiot.

A couple things they’ve taught me:

  1. Don’t go out and pick a fight one-on-one with other players. Stick with your crew, concentrate fire.
  2. Don’t go out too far, you can engage someone, but fall back to trick them into coming into range of the rest of your team.
  3. As others have said, grab those shards and build what you can!
  4. Learn where your supply stations are and get them built. When you are losing a fight - RUN TO THE SUPPLY STATION AND HEAL UP! Don’t try to get the last hit in, when it starts going south, retreat to your supply station, tell your teammates you are getting attacked, and let them help out.
  5. My team stresses how team composition means everything. Get some guys to play with who can help you pick a toon that fits with the team they have.

These are pretty basic tips. I’m no pro, but they have made me win far more than I lose these days. Keep playing!

I’m on #PS4. Please feel free to add me (PSNID = iStRaD).

2 Likes
#45

It’s useless, since the matchmaking changed back, all I’ve been up against are premade 100s who communicate and stomp us into the ground. Been tearing my hair out trying as Orendi, but I can’t go against this, and I very rarely have someone that I can invite to play with me.

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#46

Don’t queue up without your crew.

I also simulate the PvP matches in private to learn the maps. Maybe this would be a better use of your time when waiting for a full party to queue with.

Have you considered joining a Battleborn community? I’m in a couple on PS4 and they’ve been invaluable to finding helpful, like minded players on the platform I’m on.

EDIT TO SAY: I want to encourage you to keep running with those teams that “don’t need you.” That’s how I’ve learned. Yes, they didn’t need me at first, but after a while, I started to get into their rhythm and figure out how to help out. It takes time with your group. I never solo queue for this very reason.

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#47

Man, I wish I had a crew. I wouldn’t know where to find a community, I literally just googled ‘battleborn pc community’ and the only community-like thing to pop up was reddit.

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#48

Try the discord that is linked here: Unofficial Battleborn Discord server is live

All my PC communities use Discord. I’m surprised someone from it hasn’t hit you up in this thread already. I don’t have Battleborn on PC, but would be glad to play there if the Devs would make it cross buy, just to help the PC community out. I just got it on PS4 cause I have some gamer friends there already.

Discord is easy to install and free, its like a replacement for kik and teamspeak. Very versatile.

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#49

Hmu on Steam if you’re looking for a crew! :slight_smile: I can play every now and again.

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#50

Thanks. I’ve played another game using Discord, but it was on the site only. I’ll definitely give it a try.

Sooooo many Hmus on Steam :smiley: Maybe PM me a link to your profile? Or just look for mine, Steam handle’s Tobster and I’ve got a pic of like an orange galaxy-type thing.

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#51

Bubby. GET. OFF. ORENDI!!! :slight_smile: Despite her tiny size, that character is VERY nuanced in gameplay. She can hit like a tanker truck, but she is very fragile and hard to trade as. If you’re really that focused on learning Orendi, take Alani instead. She doesn’t have Orendi’s escape mechanisms, and she is lower in damage. But she also has a good self heal, and can secondary heal with Riptide, giving her a lot more survivability. Her key skill, Geyser, works much like Orendi’s SFP in that it’s a delayed, ground-effecting blast that only hurts if your enemy’s over it when it procs. But, it’ll give you practice in laying down, without being your biggest kill skill.

Optionally, there is a build that spams SFP’s like crazy(I think it’s SFP, SFP, Nullify, SFP, SFP again :slight_smile: ) What you may lack in precision, you could learn in volume. With that build, even an innacurate Orendi, could be dangerous.

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#52

When I play her I run that exact encore build XD The spam is absolutely insane and scares the hell out of people. Especially when you hit level 10, then it’s just stupid: SFP, SFP, Nullify, SFP SFP, Paradigm Shift, SFP, SFP. If you’ve invested in CDR and took the Nullify CDR option in the helix you can actually add another Nullify SFP, SFP after that.

You can absolutely carpet bomb an area over the span of 15 seconds or so, all the while jumping about. HOWEVER, this is mostly a scare tactic and you’re scratching your ass after that until your skills come off cooldown. But that’s Orendi for ya.

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#53

Dude, reddit has promise. r/BattlebornLFT for instance. Not the BEST solution, but as a PC player I take what I can get.

Also, watch Twitch streamers and see if one on your platform has room to bring you in. You might be surprised just how welcoming and helpful our streamers can be.

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#54

Hiya,

Just a quick public service announcement cause it’s clearly needed.

@Khas has given you some pretty good advice but a grave error was made when he/she said:

The avoid red text is the real problem in the quote but I’ll get back to that in a second.

Blues and purple are great but not always the best choice. Ignore white and green gear at your peril. For example, Capture/Outback is normally the shortest match/map in the game, then combine the fact that there are soooo few shards on that map, this means that your blue and purple gear will never get activated before the match is over. Now take some white and flawed green gear into Capture and you won’t have an activation problem. The other thing about white gear is it can make you very effective early game. For example, Alani is a good candidate for flawed “attack speed”/“max health” gear because her attack speed is just so horrid until she gets to lvl 3.

Now, about that red text. Red text gear is called flawed gear and carries a negative stat, which is probably why you have been advised to avoid it. But here is the thing, it’s A LOT cheaper to activate than it’s non flawed counterpart and because not all Battleborn are the same it’s equally effective and thus a vastly more efficient way to spec a loadout. For example, let’s say you are creating a loadout for a melee character such as Attikus. None of Attikus’ skills or attacks are affected by recoil or reload speed so using flawed gear that penalizes reload or recoil has no negative effect on Attikus. So you get the same positive stat boost(s) as the non flawed version of a piece of gear but at a significantly lower activation cost.

3 Likes
#55

Gonna disagree, but only because it is specifically a new player problem:

Green gear effects, are VERY situational, and very diverse in makeup. Most of the secondary effects are based on temp conditions("…after taking shield damage" “…after surviving for 180 seconds”) I advocate for blues and purples, in particular purples, mostly because their effect last longer and are more focused. Something that grants you two effects the entire game, is far more valuable than something that grants one permanent effect, and a temporary one provided you fill in a condition first. And while Blue gear items may have temp effects, most of those will correspond to what that kind of gear does in game. It’s not always perfect, but it’s easier to see and feel in game, how X and Y add up to give you Z benefit when the numbers are a constant.

Capture games are an exception to this rule mostly because, as you said, there are precious few shards in that game. Largely, I don’t both trying to build gear in those games, because they won’t go on long enough to make the effort worth the result. I’d rather put shards in that short gametime, to things that slow down and delay my enemy, more than help me over the long term. And accelerators and turrets don’t just hinder my opponents, they grant me XP for building them.

As a new player however, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with gear choices, so I offered advice that was simple, and easily expanded upon as bubreg gets better. He’ll eventually find his groove with items, and start to evaluate things more on his terms. If he wants to go for more speedy builds that finish early or more expensive ones later on, I think he’ll find his own way.

As far as the Red text; until you have seven or eight gear set slots unlocked, you can’t really dedicate them to specific things. Most will be changing and adjusting gear each time they play, for different effects. They may rotate through three and four different versions of a DPS build, till they decide how they want to run one. It’s HORRIBLY easy(I speak from personal experience of course :slight_smile: ) to forget that red text actually DOES affect you if you say pick characters that have a shield, or reload their weapons. :slight_smile: So, until bubby had a good grasp on the gear, I suggested him leaving those things alone. Red items aren’t bad, and I know people who swear by zero cost gear sets to get that early jump. But those are finely tuned sets, and it’s easy to go out of their profile and get hit with some big problems IN game. :slight_smile:

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#56

I got you. But my response was in response to your specific advice to not keep red text gear. I made that mistake when I 1st started playing Battleborn and by the time I got my head fully wrapped around the game I realized that I had rid myself of some really awesome pieces of gear that would have been sooo much more effective for the non gun based and Eldrid characters that I started mastering later on. I just don’t want @bubreg88 and others to make that mistake by following that part of your advice.

To summarize, my advice is this, even if you are new to Battleborn and have not yet gotten your head wrapped around how gear works in the game and/or how to effectively use gear, don’t automatically sell/delete red text gear because they are an uber effective tool when used appropriately and when you finally get your head wrapped around gear you’ll be happy you didn’t.