Good foundation with alarming balance issues!#446
Hey, Im veteran gamer with decades of experience of game launches! Trend I have noticed in past few years is that multiplayer strategy games are extremely unforgiving with balance issues and slow patch rate, resulting in often fatal bleedout of players. Im here to deliver feedback from first weekend of the issues that I think will most likely cripple the multiplayer very quickly if left unchecked.
Currently units like Blindsider, Gauntlet and Drummer create an environment where they can snowball to victory as fast as 3 turns. These units have extremely high cost/effective ratio and enforce a low cost meta where ur opponent simply loses if he doesent keep hes entire roster under 4 cost, as rolling any high cost units will most likely get u killed immediately vs units like these.
Leader balance is showing issues especially with combination of Astra and low cost units dominating the battlefield, her ability to deploy units even faster and waking them up immediately makes sure that the low cost meta is abused to maximum. Outside of that shes the only leader that is “immune” to assist as they dont really offer anything against her natural playstyle that have similar effects as denying melee range initiations or arming the mines against their user.
Theres too much RNG, while its fun to have some randomization to spice things up and offer variation, we have too many stacking layers, stripping the game off any serious competition. Randomizing starting crew with no normalization means that u can roll starting pool only of the highest cost units, even if 7 of ur units are 2 or lower cost u can just lose by rolling all the remaining 3 together, again enforcing the low cost meta. Assist are fully randomized for each player and sometimes the pools are just unfair and 1 player ends with serious advantages. Crits are too powerful random results especially when combined with some of the hard hitters, seeing 2 cost units slapping 8’s and instakilling high cost units is a bit too rough, especially because u just failed to kill him by missing 2*90% shots in row. And dont get me started with orbital strike crits or that plink critting 3x in row. Lastly even the first and second turn has massive difference especially because how strong snowball effect certain units have atm. So when we have 4 fully randomized stacking layers it becomes quite often that one loses because of only RNG.
Fully broken units like Broken Vengeance need immediate hotfixing in all points of the live service, currently its in so bad condition that it makes 1 of the 3 heroes nearly unplayable and something like this is a terrible sign for the longetivity.
PS. after 20 hours I ended up losing 3 or 4 matches total, stating this so everyone understands this is not a salt rant :)
Care to ellaborate on certin units like Broken Vengeance?
Dunno how broken vengeance is busted… He’s good but there are 4-5 minis that are significantly better than him.
Astra is miles ahead of the other two captains. Basically the “blue mage” character if we can make a MtG analogy.
Agree that crits are bad. Especially on ship assists
Oh yeah I agree Astra is crazy strong esp compared to the other Captains.
Ship Assists crits need to go for sure.
For those that ask for BV explanation. Especially when combined with Astra immediately waking him up, he can instantly do 12 damage on Exilor (whatever the melee guys name is) on the round he is played, giving no reaction chance. This if if neither crits or there are no other buffs. Combined with buffs from other units or assist, this can result in instakill on unit spawn. Meaning in theory Exilor cant ever approach Astra in case shes holding BV. Also anykind of melee range interaction with BV seems way over the top, he outduels most melee units in game as they fight to the death and also seems to have additional bugs related to getting poisoned. But again most these problems come from Astra being busted in the first place.
I don’t think the balance is that bad, I had a similiar win% but I wouldn’t chock that up to BV all by himself.
I agree with your example though.
Exilior would definitely hurt if Astra had BV at start.
Maybe make Exilior’s shield stronger in some way.
Maybe last longer or block more damage.
Yep tried mixing up some, doing more tactically flashy and cool decks but they are a bit more volatile towards bad RNG, 10hours winstreak with this rush stuff and then maybe 70% winrate with more creative decks trying to mix it up.. Its just much harder to get stable games if ur deck is less rushy as assist and opening rolls/turn orders become such an RNGstacking fest :/
Sure there is no competitive matchmaking but still going from 100W/5L ratio to something like 70% is kinda meh. Ofc when ppl learn more ur not gonna hit 95%+ winrates anymore because of how heavy luck factor there is, especially if things get metalocked to the point that u get mirror deck matches mostly…
But I still cant help but to consider this kind of rates to be very alarming to balance, despite of the extremely high skill difference on the test. I think fundamentally a lot of the issues get multipled by the Astras waking ability as it just doesent fit into strategy game that well for being completely unpredictable and unreactable. I personally hope it gets redesigned to something else.
