Analysis of “win conditions”
Epsilon3
Member Posts: 1,138 ★★★
So I’ve been rethinking the structure of the game’s mechanics lately. After the TKO challenge of 10 second stun or 300 hits it got me wondering about a champion to champion win condition
Now I use the term loosely as usually it refers to card games like MtG, Yu-Gi-Oh, or even certain board games depending how serious you get 😅
Now the only TRUE win condition is to get the enemy to 0-HP. That’s a universal law of the contest until a champion is designed that they can win in a different manner.
However, the way this happens is vastly different per champion and the results speak for themselves.
“Heavy specialists” or champions that specialize in prioritizing their heavy attacks are one of the more interesting varieties I’ve found. Examples are currently 4-fold with 3 standard examples and an upset.
Quake, Hyperion, Archangel, Iron Man Infinity War.
Quake is special. She’s someone who’s win condition is prioritizing a unique combo mechanic using only her heavy attack charge animation and the parry mastery.
Archangel and Hyperion are relatively close enough to compare. Hyperion gains tremendous attack through prioritizing his heavy attack above all else. Archangel in comparison has a dual-role Heavy-Shield combo whose win condition is placing debuffs through “irregular game play”. Simply put using them “normally” is not enough tontruly play them.
The “upset” as stated earlier is IMIW. As his win condition is relatively standard while using him. The interesting part about him is that he places a “challenge” on he player that acts as a win condition. At a certain point he becomes nigh-untouchable. At this point your win condition is to almost exclusively use heavy attacks (or Hiemdall, Proxy, Venom…) while his own win condition is his auto block feature, passive power gain, and yadda-yadda you know he’s a pain.
I’ve tried looking into other “win conditions” but aside from “REALLY HIGH ATTACK/DoT” or “PLAY GOOD NORMALLY” I’ve found only 2 others.
Attrition: a select few champions have “win conditions” related to simply not dying themselves. King Groot, Blade (who is also a Damage/DoT condition), and Wolverine/X23 (both also DoT) are, in theory at least, fundamentally immortal. They win by being unable to be killed by a component player skilled at using them.
Lastly there’s a new trend I’ve been seeing grow as of late. COMBOS
Proxy (who by herself has numerous mini-win-conditions through missions), Star Lord, Gwenpool (mixed with DoT), and Ægon who functionally is eerily similar to Star Lord.
Lastly there’s also defensive win conditions that typically are either challenge conditions placed on the attacker (Spiders jumping off the wall, wasp being tiny, DoT upon contact or interaction) that usually are negated or eased by a counter.
But there’s a myriad of champions that are, in essence, nigh-unusable or seemingly universally undesirable as their win conditions are too similar to others with better/easier requirements to meet said conditions.
Example:
Classic Black Panther is a decent bleeder. Yet compare his win condition (bleed damage) to say Venom or Gwenpool. At the root theyvall heavily rely on bleed damage. However, Venom is also a hard counter to certain defender challenges (Spiders) and has boosts to make his win condition easier, while Gwenpool has her side-mission through her combo meter which if kept allows her to severely ignore a lot of challenges herself. And then Wolverine who again bleed damage but also as a “War of Attrition” conditional winner
With those 3 you nigh-completely obsolete Black Panther Classic.
Even further you have X-Force Deadpool who only has bleed damage as a possible condition to assist his winning however he’s magnitudes less efficient than Classic Black Panther who we’ve already discussed as being at best a substitute for 3 far better users of the same Bleed-Condition through Challenge-Negation, Combo-Mission to continual weaken challenges, and War of Attrition condition.
Why am I bothering to think about any of this? Because I believe that “rethinking” how we interpret the game could allow a more constructive view into why we feel specific champions are imperially worse than others and help us express our reasoning with the dev team.
Now I use the term loosely as usually it refers to card games like MtG, Yu-Gi-Oh, or even certain board games depending how serious you get 😅
Now the only TRUE win condition is to get the enemy to 0-HP. That’s a universal law of the contest until a champion is designed that they can win in a different manner.
However, the way this happens is vastly different per champion and the results speak for themselves.
“Heavy specialists” or champions that specialize in prioritizing their heavy attacks are one of the more interesting varieties I’ve found. Examples are currently 4-fold with 3 standard examples and an upset.
Quake, Hyperion, Archangel, Iron Man Infinity War.
Quake is special. She’s someone who’s win condition is prioritizing a unique combo mechanic using only her heavy attack charge animation and the parry mastery.
Archangel and Hyperion are relatively close enough to compare. Hyperion gains tremendous attack through prioritizing his heavy attack above all else. Archangel in comparison has a dual-role Heavy-Shield combo whose win condition is placing debuffs through “irregular game play”. Simply put using them “normally” is not enough tontruly play them.
The “upset” as stated earlier is IMIW. As his win condition is relatively standard while using him. The interesting part about him is that he places a “challenge” on he player that acts as a win condition. At a certain point he becomes nigh-untouchable. At this point your win condition is to almost exclusively use heavy attacks (or Hiemdall, Proxy, Venom…) while his own win condition is his auto block feature, passive power gain, and yadda-yadda you know he’s a pain.
I’ve tried looking into other “win conditions” but aside from “REALLY HIGH ATTACK/DoT” or “PLAY GOOD NORMALLY” I’ve found only 2 others.
Attrition: a select few champions have “win conditions” related to simply not dying themselves. King Groot, Blade (who is also a Damage/DoT condition), and Wolverine/X23 (both also DoT) are, in theory at least, fundamentally immortal. They win by being unable to be killed by a component player skilled at using them.
Lastly there’s a new trend I’ve been seeing grow as of late. COMBOS
Proxy (who by herself has numerous mini-win-conditions through missions), Star Lord, Gwenpool (mixed with DoT), and Ægon who functionally is eerily similar to Star Lord.
Lastly there’s also defensive win conditions that typically are either challenge conditions placed on the attacker (Spiders jumping off the wall, wasp being tiny, DoT upon contact or interaction) that usually are negated or eased by a counter.
But there’s a myriad of champions that are, in essence, nigh-unusable or seemingly universally undesirable as their win conditions are too similar to others with better/easier requirements to meet said conditions.
Example:
Classic Black Panther is a decent bleeder. Yet compare his win condition (bleed damage) to say Venom or Gwenpool. At the root theyvall heavily rely on bleed damage. However, Venom is also a hard counter to certain defender challenges (Spiders) and has boosts to make his win condition easier, while Gwenpool has her side-mission through her combo meter which if kept allows her to severely ignore a lot of challenges herself. And then Wolverine who again bleed damage but also as a “War of Attrition” conditional winner
With those 3 you nigh-completely obsolete Black Panther Classic.
Even further you have X-Force Deadpool who only has bleed damage as a possible condition to assist his winning however he’s magnitudes less efficient than Classic Black Panther who we’ve already discussed as being at best a substitute for 3 far better users of the same Bleed-Condition through Challenge-Negation, Combo-Mission to continual weaken challenges, and War of Attrition condition.
Why am I bothering to think about any of this? Because I believe that “rethinking” how we interpret the game could allow a more constructive view into why we feel specific champions are imperially worse than others and help us express our reasoning with the dev team.
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