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As the game evolves, it is inevitable for defenders to posess more complicated defensive mechanics and therefore ask for different combinations of abilites which in turn would lead to them sometimes requiring more specific counters. Defenders will always limit your champion pool, the question is more about how restrictive Kabam should allow them to be. Even Mantis can be a restrictive defender; if she is placed down last round and your remaining 3 champions are Silk, Photon and Spider-Ham you probably won't get that fight done anyhow. Nobody complains about her defensive capabilities though as this doesn't happen that often.

However, I agree that some recent releases have gone too far regarding this restrictiveness. Many of the latest defenders have major flaws in their design and Kabam's ignorance towards this problem only did further damage as eventually attackers also began to show such flaws. Take a look at Spiral for example, how many meta matchups is she great for? I could count 3-4 at most but everyone knows that there's no reason to draft her over literally any other champion unless your opponent has Serpent. But why was a champion released with such a specific purpose? Why is countering this one single defender such a big deal?

The problem with Serpent is that he is not that difficult actually, skill requirement to fight him is rather low. Korg takes more skill as you need to be proficient at light intercepting and special dexing but Serpent requires none of those, he doesn't test your skill more than an Iron Fist. For %99 of the champions, fight is more about special baiting than trading blows. If that is what makes him difficult then you could claim that Hyperion is even harder to fight. There are many things that make him a dangerous defender but so little counterplay to those at the same time. About 10-15 champions out of 250+ can finish a fight against Serpent in bgs which is a ridiculously low amount if you ask me, not to mention how AI reliant most of them will be. The remaining 240+ probably won't take him down in 2 minutes, some won't even make it out alive. This champion is the prime example of over-restrictiveness and is so overtuned that a separate champion is designed just to answer every single absurd mechanic he has.

Overall, I believe that Serpent has paved the way for an incredibly problematic design philosophy and Kabam's champion release strategy will only make things worse. Adjustments should be made and concerns of the playerbase should be heard. Skill aspect of bgs should always be preserved.


Also, for the curious, here are some abilities that Serpent counters/punishes:

-coldsnap
-bleed
-indestructible
-unblockable
-miss
-evade
-dexterity
-stun on specials
-armor
-nullify
-fateseal
-stagger
-power lock
-special lock
-heal block
-instant damaging effects
-critical penetration
-critical rate
-power drain
-power burn
-perfect block
-block proficiency
-ability accuracy reduction
-buff immunity
-dodging back during a special
-ability power rate reduction against non-mystic
-physical and energy damage
-blocking
-unstoppable

I may have missed some but these are what I could find just by reading his kit.

First off, sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be detailed, and I think it’s worth a read. I know that Kabam is aware of this issue as they have an update coming eventually for relics, but there’s still some issues to be addressed. I don’t think just simply adding more relics is going to fix said problem. Here’s why:

As you have probably noticed a lot of champions prefer to have the same relic on them to utilize their full potential. For example, Silk prefers the hulk relic as does hulk. This doesn’t seem like a big issue as there are 4 rarities of each relic. However, if you want to use those champs in the same quest, you’re now either forced to A., swap out the relics before each fight if the quest allows such or B., choose which champ gets the higher rarity relic. Now, this may not look like a problem as a ranked up relic can effectively help out a good bit, but the next problem is how dang expensive they are to rank up…so you’ve probably portioned off your relic rank up materials to your higher rarities and not so much the lower rarities. Now, to throw one more problem in the mix, let’s say you want to use that same hulk relic on Titania or Spiderman in a niche matchup. Well, theyre already bound to hulk and silk in this scenario. So not only are you forced to make a decision on which rarity relic benefits the most from being on which champ but now you’re forced to choose between a set number of rarities and there’s only 4 rarities to put on 10 champs that need that relic. There’s really no effective and streamlined way for relic swaps right now and it’s very time consuming. I’d love to be able to bind a relic to a champ and leave it there, or even bind a relic to multiple champs that it benefits - but this second idea probably wouldn’t work because you have people that have invested in 3 and 4 and 5 star relics and who would want to bind those three when you could just bind the 6 star to all. Also, after opening hundreds of relic crystals, I still don’t have some of the lower rarity relics, which thins out my options that much more. A valiant player should be able to open a couple of each rarity (3 and 4 star) relic crystals a week. I max them out every week in the BGs store. All this to say, there is a deficit problem with relics and rarity and availability right now with the champs that prefer said relics - a lot of my spidey 2099 relics go unbound as well as my wolverine relics. There’s already a lot to remember about which goes where and when you have to unbind them and re bind them to another champ in another quest every time bc there aren’t enough variants or rarities, everything becomes pretty confusing and time consuming. This is less of a rant/complaint and more of trying to figure out a solution to an in game problem I feel like most of the community deals with/would agree on.