@Gamer That wasnt aimed at you, I just couldnt be asked to go back and find the comment before since I'm at work.
@Grub what are you on about? Theres a mastery which tells you what class. In lower tiers I believe you can see the PI of the champions. You use to be able to feed the tier, class and PI into a bot and it'd tell you who it was most the time. Higher tiers you cant see that so you cant guess.
If you want to run that setup then its up to you, I've never used it personally, very few people I know actually use that mastery. The AW before that had a lot more blind nodes - I get why people don't like not knowing what they're fighting. But if its a choice between blind on an easy node, or a visible on a hard node.. I know what I'd chose.
Nodes dont seem too bad, yes theres a few annoying match ups. A lot will be helped if theres no timer - which will likely be taken away or made stupidly long to stop the Corvus time out trick.
We need to give kabam a chance to actually implement everything. If something doesnt work, we say - they try fix it. Look at the Aegis fights last season, they were overpowered, they nerfed them.
Before trying to lynch them, we need to let them try and fix it. I'm not saying forgive the past. I'm saying let them try and sort the game out without being screamed at every step of the way. We've hardly heard anything yet. Lets see what they say as it comes out. Try things out and then, if you want to scream, scream - I'll probably be screaming with everyone too.
Anyone in my old alliance will tell you how much I HATE alliance war, I want to give it a chance.
Since I’m played with u for arund 6 mouch u didn’t hates AW u just didn’t like the stress it com with and all that’s oh u dies u dumb and all that’s with wasn’t great either ikow Ikow u. Stil jelly of that rank3 covus u hav
I hate what it does to people. I loved AW for ages, but hitting Magik on Path 6 with Flow on AoN was just hell on earth, throw in little snide comments after you grinded hard to get the units to revive.. and its just not worth it.. I couldnt have asked for better rewards from abyss tho you deserve better ones tho
Well those tier5 cc tech wil eventually be handy for ghost warlock ect
Ok here is the constructive criticism @Kabam Miike . We asked for war to be toned down so the strain on 30 players wouldn’t be as big. No more unfair flow with heavy aegis intercept or 200 percent power gain with flow or The middle nodes with flow and imiw where you can only beat it with an rare invulnerability boost. We asked you to make war easier and less taxing snd more enjoyable. We simply ask where you guys came up with this and we get radio silence from all you. Do you honestly think this new map and nodes along with what I expect to still be flow on defense tactics that more people will play high level war again. It doesn’t look that way @Kabam Miike
This new war map has nothing to do with the feedback. They are paying lip service with the flowery road map and pressing forward with pre planned changes.
What gets old is we don’t even have to play the map, we can read the nodes listed and instantly warn them what will happen. They won’t listen, they will push this out regardless and it will blow up in their face. Maybe this time they pause and change before they step in it, but I doubt it.
My question is what's going to stop Tanking and manipulating War Rating off-season? It's not just Tiers 1-5 that do it.
Not addressing the tanking issue, rather whether a new alliance formed by Summoners (all level 60 for illustration purpose) should not start with zero war rating or not placed at the lowest tiers.
My largest concern is that War Rating no longer becomes a way to reflect actual ability based on Wins and Losses when the system is manipulated. Tanking so they can gain a boost of Wins when Seasons start is one way. Another is when Allies leave their Shells and go mid-way down for "staycation". There are Allies on the other end of that who have to come up against Champs much stronger than they have, and the system just becomes a yo-yo monopoly. Before Seasons, if you were to ask me what the gauge was, I'd say War Rating. As long as off-season can be used to manipulate Seasons, it's no longer a reliable gauge, or one that can be trusted. I get that many people want that to be the factor in Matchmaking, but unless other measures are in place to combat this, I do not support letting people take advantage of the system just to make them satisfied.
Easy. Nothing about the new war is any different than the old war. It's more of the same. And where AW was one of the biggest issues for the community, I would have expected some mention of how Kabam views any of this as an improvement.
More nodes that require specific counters. More nodes to counter Quake. More nodes where we deal reduced damage. Back to more hidden nodes requiring wasted mastery points. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the "Attacker Tactics" sufficiently counter any of this BS (especially once the Defense Tactics are announced). I can only guess that Kabam is counting on the rewards being the enticement to continue dealing with this horrible game mode. I had high hopes after the blog post yesterday, this one brought me back down to wanting to retire.
So here's my take on the ten new war node buffs. *Two* make sense to me. *One* is questionable. The rest suck.
The two that make sense to me: Strike Counter - Fury and Buff Imbalance - Weakness. Strike Counter - Fury has a skill component (balancing attack charges) and a reasonable penalty if you mess up - defender gets fury passives until you reset the counters. Compare this to Strike Counter - Combat Power Rate. This is like SC-F except if you mess up the charges your combat power rate goes down. Combat power rate is the rate at which you gain power when you attack. Which you need to use specials. If you somehow find yourself with no charges and also no power, you're out of luck unless you have some other way to gain power. This isn't an inescapable problem, but it seems without intrinsic power gain the fight could reach degenerate states. And maybe the final numbers will make this not as bad as it seems. But it is still, from an overarching design perspective, something I wouldn't want to do.
Buff Imbalance - Weakness has a tactical element to it. As it is a debuff, it is something you could use to heal from with Willpower. And Weakness doesn't reduce your ability to throw specials, so you can get out of the weakness debuff. This means the attacker has significant theoretical control over this node's effects, and can attempt to manipulate them to their advantage. On the surface, this is a more balanced punishment/reward node.
Steady Buildup -X does have some pros and cons to it. But they both hinge on the attacker purifying debuffs, which is only rarely something a player can use skill to do (Ghost, for example). Most of the time, this is an ability thing, which means these nodes mandate specific champions more than they mandate more tactical or skillful play. They aren't horrible, but they aren't especially good additions either.
Both Ebb and Flow nodes reduce damage by 90% when their conditions aren't met. in my opinion, this is numbers theater. Alliance war fights are timed. Reducing damage by 90% means you're almost certainly going to time out, so whether the node reduces damage by 90% or 100%, the net result is going to be the same most of the time: a loss. You pretty much have to satisfy the conditions. And unlike the original Aegis node that probably inspired these, you have to keep doing the thing over and over and over and over again. Ebb and Flow - intercept is kind of like Aegis intercept, except you have to be able to do it repeatedly, and it will be inflicted on lower tier alliances now. I suspect the 90% was a way to "counter-balance" the need to reapply every six seconds, and justify applying it to lower tier alliance maps. If so, the whole idea is wrong. The node is harder, but being used lower, and that's an overall increase in pain being inflicted for no obvious reason.
Buff Imbalance - Power Gain suffers from a similar problem as Strike Counter - Combat Power Gain. The "punishment" is to drain your power, and you can end the punishment by using a special attack. This is a gotcha node: screw up, and you're permanently screwed.
Window of Opportunity - Stun, as I said, might as well be called "Intercept or Die." For 12 seconds at a time you can't stun the defender at all, or you'll be stunned for four seconds. Four seconds is a very long time in AW. Twelve seconds is also a very long time in AW, given fights are 180 seconds long. I think if you can't intercept here, you're much more likely to time out if you're cautious or die if you're aggressive.
Hazard Shift - Incinerate/Poison is the one I think is questionable. I guess you can go in there with Iceman or Red Hulk, or Mephisto if you ranked him up, and just ignore the node. Or you can use a strong AAR champ. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the devs picked those two debuffs because of the very low overlap between them, forcing players to either come up with one of the few double counters, or just lose half the time in the fight. Which again, is an attempt to leverage the clock directly.
In my opinion, the devs should *never* be directly and blatantly leveraging the clock. The clock exists to prevent all sorts of exploits and other problems, so we accept the clock as a compromise. But when the devs say "haha you can't finish in three minutes because I slowed the entire fight down" that's not competition. GG devs you beat me. But wasn't the other alliance supposed to beat me?
So two yes, one eh, and seven I'll pass.
I'm in an alliance that gives up five losses at the start of every season with two battlegroups to give weaker players full participation, then wins six or seven of the rest with one battlegroup. And even that half-hearted effort now has us in tier 7, within striking distance of landing in Hard maps, because as I see it war has devolved into a handful of alliances fighting for real, and the rest of the world not even trying because it is not worth it, and they probably don't even want to win too often, lest they become victims of the next iteration of "make war even more interesting." And this seems to just be more of the same: let's make war even more interesting, because players are just falling asleep bored while fighting in alliance war.
I wouldn't mind seeing these nodes in a Variant quest. But the problem with these nodes in Alliance War is not that they aren't creative enough or interesting enough. It is that they are designed to push people to fail, so that they have some new challenge to climb. I want that in solo optional content. I don't want that in alliance war.
I don't know why this is so hard to convey. I want an interesting job. But if you show up to my office and pour Coca Cola into my laptop and throw half the notes on my desk into the shredder 15 minutes before I'm supposed to do some critical work, I'm not going to enjoy that. Because you just increased my chances of publicly and spectacularly failing my company and my customer. I want challenges, but I don't want artificial challenges and I don't want crazy challenges when other people are counting on me. I've had those happen occasionally: they make you grow old, and are to be prevented at all costs.
The alliance war designers should ask themselves how much challenge they want when they are closing in on deadlines and the merge window is closing and their work has already been publicly announced and the rest of the company is counting on them. And then give me that. This is not that.
And this is just the new nodes. Hidden mini bosses all over the place, when we've established that hidden nodes eliminate counterplay? This was *settled* two iterations of war ago. Hidden nodes eliminate counterplay. Kabam conceded the point, so seeing all those hidden nodes sends the message they would rather have chaos and random punishment than counterplay.
I pulled back from doing competitive wars a while back, as the only way I could respond to what i saw as unreasonable issues with war. I'm now wondering if the day is approaching when participation on *any* level will be intolerable, because war isn't about beating the other alliance, it is about beating the war designer. And I'm just not good enough to beat them.
@DNA3000 very well written. I fully agree. As some others pointed out, this is just like the book 2 beta all over again. Honestly has sucked out all the enthusiasm from yesterday's roadmap prelude.
I think with Aegis intercept against Nova, sometimes depending on how defensive Nova plays, it's not uncommon for it to take over a minute to get those 3 intercept charges off. Now with ebb and flow intercept, you pretty much have to do that the whole fight to do any meaningful damage...all while dealing with him gaining power from dashing, having autoblock, and nerfing true strike, unblockables...etc. all within a 3 min time. Good luck...I would love to see the developers play this and show how it's reasonable.
@DNA3000 very well written. I fully agree. As some others pointed out, this is just like the book 2 beta all over again. Honestly has sucked out all the enthusiasm from yesterday's roadmap prelude.
I'm hoping this was the last iteration of war prior to Kabam reevaluating their roadmap, and that future iterations won't necessarily go in the same direction. But also, Alliance War is one part of the game. I'm still hopeful that other parts of the game will continue to improve. I just think that Kabam's very definition of "improve" isn't compatible with me when it comes to war. Its like if you go to a restaurant and you try a dish that is too spicy, and when they ask if you like it you say "no, I don't care for it" and so they try to improve it by adding more spice, because they like spice and simply assume so do you. And when you say no, its too spicy, they assume you mean there's too much of one particular spice, and so they swap out the habaneros for ghost peppers.
It is so ingrained that mild is awful, so anyone who complains about the spice level must in fact be asking for a different kind of spice, they cannot possibly be asking for it to be less flaming hot. They won't even acknowledge that "less spicy" is a thing. Maybe if we add even more spice it will numb the customer's taste buds enough to enjoy the dish!
At some point, you just have to stick to the french fries. And hope they don't start seasoning them.
Matchmaking Updates The Grandmaster wants to ensure that his tournament stays as competitive as possible. To do so, he is updating the parameters of Matchmaking. Matchmaking will now emphasize your Alliance's War Rating above all else. This will ensure that Alliances vying for the crown will be competing against other top Alliances.
This will be a big adjustment for a lot of Alliances. Currently, many Alliances are either have an inflated War Rating or a Deflated War rating due to the current system. To expedite the process of Alliances finding their "true" War Rating, we will be reducing every Alliance's War Rating by 50%. This will affect every Alliance in-game and will accelerate the rate at which Alliance's find their true position faster because of the concentrated War Ratings of all Alliances. The Change to Matchmaking and the War Rating reduction will occur on July 8th.
What's Next? There's still so much to reveal about Season 19 and beyond. Next week, we'll cover: - Reward Changes - Defense Tactics and Attack Tactics - Alliance War Solo Events
Remember, Alliance Wars Season 19 Starts on July 7th, and there will be no war starting on July 5th!
Stay tuned for more information on everything else about Season 19!
So... for example... my alliance has 22m rating could face more >30m alliance rating if our aw rating closer each other ?
Then... isn't it same with very old one aw matchmaking ? and the conclusion will be : High alliance rating will present in Top tier AW ?
So here's my take on the ten new war node buffs. *Two* make sense to me. *One* is questionable. The rest suck.
The two that make sense to me: Strike Counter - Fury and Buff Imbalance - Weakness. Strike Counter - Fury has a skill component (balancing attack charges) and a reasonable penalty if you mess up - defender gets fury passives until you reset the counters. Compare this to Strike Counter - Combat Power Rate. This is like SC-F except if you mess up the charges your combat power rate goes down. Combat power rate is the rate at which you gain power when you attack. Which you need to use specials. If you somehow find yourself with no charges and also no power, you're out of luck unless you have some other way to gain power. This isn't an inescapable problem, but it seems without intrinsic power gain the fight could reach degenerate states. And maybe the final numbers will make this not as bad as it seems. But it is still, from an overarching design perspective, something I wouldn't want to do.
Buff Imbalance - Weakness has a tactical element to it. As it is a debuff, it is something you could use to heal from with Willpower. And Weakness doesn't reduce your ability to throw specials, so you can get out of the weakness debuff. This means the attacker has significant theoretical control over this node's effects, and can attempt to manipulate them to their advantage. On the surface, this is a more balanced punishment/reward node.
Steady Buildup -X does have some pros and cons to it. But they both hinge on the attacker purifying debuffs, which is only rarely something a player can use skill to do (Ghost, for example). Most of the time, this is an ability thing, which means these nodes mandate specific champions more than they mandate more tactical or skillful play. They aren't horrible, but they aren't especially good additions either.
Both Ebb and Flow nodes reduce damage by 90% when their conditions aren't met. in my opinion, this is numbers theater. Alliance war fights are timed. Reducing damage by 90% means you're almost certainly going to time out, so whether the node reduces damage by 90% or 100%, the net result is going to be the same most of the time: a loss. You pretty much have to satisfy the conditions. And unlike the original Aegis node that probably inspired these, you have to keep doing the thing over and over and over and over again. Ebb and Flow - intercept is kind of like Aegis intercept, except you have to be able to do it repeatedly, and it will be inflicted on lower tier alliances now. I suspect the 90% was a way to "counter-balance" the need to reapply every six seconds, and justify applying it to lower tier alliance maps. If so, the whole idea is wrong. The node is harder, but being used lower, and that's an overall increase in pain being inflicted for no obvious reason.
Buff Imbalance - Power Gain suffers from a similar problem as Strike Counter - Combat Power Gain. The "punishment" is to drain your power, and you can end the punishment by using a special attack. This is a gotcha node: screw up, and you're permanently screwed.
Window of Opportunity - Stun, as I said, might as well be called "Intercept or Die." For 12 seconds at a time you can't stun the defender at all, or you'll be stunned for four seconds. Four seconds is a very long time in AW. Twelve seconds is also a very long time in AW, given fights are 180 seconds long. I think if you can't intercept here, you're much more likely to time out if you're cautious or die if you're aggressive.
Hazard Shift - Incinerate/Poison is the one I think is questionable. I guess you can go in there with Iceman or Red Hulk, or Mephisto if you ranked him up, and just ignore the node. Or you can use a strong AAR champ. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the devs picked those two debuffs because of the very low overlap between them, forcing players to either come up with one of the few double counters, or just lose half the time in the fight. Which again, is an attempt to leverage the clock directly.
In my opinion, the devs should *never* be directly and blatantly leveraging the clock. The clock exists to prevent all sorts of exploits and other problems, so we accept the clock as a compromise. But when the devs say "haha you can't finish in three minutes because I slowed the entire fight down" that's not competition. GG devs you beat me. But wasn't the other alliance supposed to beat me?
So two yes, one eh, and seven I'll pass.
I'm in an alliance that gives up five losses at the start of every season with two battlegroups to give weaker players full participation, then wins six or seven of the rest with one battlegroup. And even that half-hearted effort now has us in tier 7, within striking distance of landing in Hard maps, because as I see it war has devolved into a handful of alliances fighting for real, and the rest of the world not even trying because it is not worth it, and they probably don't even want to win too often, lest they become victims of the next iteration of "make war even more interesting." And this seems to just be more of the same: let's make war even more interesting, because players are just falling asleep bored while fighting in alliance war.
I wouldn't mind seeing these nodes in a Variant quest. But the problem with these nodes in Alliance War is not that they aren't creative enough or interesting enough. It is that they are designed to push people to fail, so that they have some new challenge to climb. I want that in solo optional content. I don't want that in alliance war.
I don't know why this is so hard to convey. I want an interesting job. But if you show up to my office and pour Coca Cola into my laptop and throw half the notes on my desk into the shredder 15 minutes before I'm supposed to do some critical work, I'm not going to enjoy that. Because you just increased my chances of publicly and spectacularly failing my company and my customer. I want challenges, but I don't want artificial challenges and I don't want crazy challenges when other people are counting on me. I've had those happen occasionally: they make you grow old, and are to be prevented at all costs.
The alliance war designers should ask themselves how much challenge they want when they are closing in on deadlines and the merge window is closing and their work has already been publicly announced and the rest of the company is counting on them. And then give me that. This is not that.
And this is just the new nodes. Hidden mini bosses all over the place, when we've established that hidden nodes eliminate counterplay? This was *settled* two iterations of war ago. Hidden nodes eliminate counterplay. Kabam conceded the point, so seeing all those hidden nodes sends the message they would rather have chaos and random punishment than counterplay.
I pulled back from doing competitive wars a while back, as the only way I could respond to what i saw as unreasonable issues with war. I'm now wondering if the day is approaching when participation on *any* level will be intolerable, because war isn't about beating the other alliance, it is about beating the war designer. And I'm just not good enough to beat them.
I don't normally like reading longer posts as it's normally just people whining but everything you wrote is completely accurate and well written. These new wars are still looking like I'll stay away from as it doesn't sound like it'll be worth the headaches it causes
You know...if you go up to top where the War update story description is and replace "Grandmaster" with "Accounting Dept." and "Gamesmaster" with "Marketing Dept"
Matchmaking Updates The Grandmaster wants to ensure that his tournament stays as competitive as possible. To do so, he is updating the parameters of Matchmaking. Matchmaking will now emphasize your Alliance's War Rating above all else. This will ensure that Alliances vying for the crown will be competing against other top Alliances.
This will be a big adjustment for a lot of Alliances. Currently, many Alliances are either have an inflated War Rating or a Deflated War rating due to the current system. To expedite the process of Alliances finding their "true" War Rating, we will be reducing every Alliance's War Rating by 50%. This will affect every Alliance in-game and will accelerate the rate at which Alliance's find their true position faster because of the concentrated War Ratings of all Alliances. The Change to Matchmaking and the War Rating reduction will occur on July 8th.
What's Next? There's still so much to reveal about Season 19 and beyond. Next week, we'll cover: - Reward Changes - Defense Tactics and Attack Tactics - Alliance War Solo Events
Remember, Alliance Wars Season 19 Starts on July 7th, and there will be no war starting on July 5th!
Stay tuned for more information on everything else about Season 19!
So... for example... my alliance has 22m rating could face more >30m alliance rating if our aw rating closer each other ?
Then... isn't it same with very old one aw matchmaking ? and the conclusion will be : High alliance rating will present in Top tier AW ?
Please enlighten...
I've mentioned this in another post.. There is always going to be an exploit. Alliance rating, they'll sell champs, or have 1 dummy BG with low level accounts, 2 with insanely high. Alliance rating isnt always representative of skill or commitment to war either.
Prestige, pits those who have focused on prestige for AQ against those who have naturally acquired it. My old alliance, we were facing up against R3 6* defenders constantly, because we'd pushed prestige, we couldn't physically reduce it so had to deal with it.
War rating, can be manipulated, however, not in off season. So it means they have to lose repeatedly at the start of the season in order to win later on - essentially placing them back where they were at the start - its counter intuitive.
Tiers work great, until you have an alliance which was doing a little too well, pushed slightly above their level - or comes across a semi retired alliance which can dump a load of higher level champs in defence, then do an itemless war or boss rush, and you're stuck with hard defenders.
There is no simple fix for matchmaking.
It can still be manipulated outside of Tiers 1-5. That's the problem I outlined.
Sorry I am Not interested anymore Alliance war, Just left ally and i am fine without alliance war. It no More fun to me. Its takes My whole day to finish 100% That i do not have anymore.
Note : I am not new Player in mcoc , its 5 years I am with Mcoc and played with Various Master Bracket Alliances.
Demon , Zdoom , EXDO Etc ...
Sorry for mention That ,Before you click Disagree button ,
Do you guys Calculated How Much Energy you need to fully explorer the map per Player ?
Where is stress less ?
Won't be an issue. It just looks bigger. War will still take the same amount of time for Attack either way.
Do you actually play this game?
I doubt it.
Absolutely. You think Tanking is isolated to top Tiers? Hate to break it to you, but Alliances have been doing it below as well. It's been a tactic long enough that word has spread in spades. The lower guys do what the larger guys have been doing. We encounter at least a few in the off-season. Also, "It's going to happen anyway." is about as much of a justification as it gets. One that has never been valid in my books. Breaking the system to appease larger Allies who have no issues steamrolling whoever they want "cause hard knocks and stuff" is not a better system. That's not the least bit fair to anyone, regardless of who believes people don't deserve to compete higher up. A viable solution would prevent either problem. Not trade one for the other.
It's this twisted sense of fairness being fair as long as someone else is on the short end, that really grinds my gears. Fairness is fairness. Not vindictiveness towards Allies that are weaker.
Comments
Way back in the Season 3 announcement it was stated "100% exploration should be a rare instance". Is this still the goal @Kabam Miike ?
What gets old is we don’t even have to play the map, we can read the nodes listed and instantly warn them what will happen. They won’t listen, they will push this out regardless and it will blow up in their face. Maybe this time they pause and change before they step in it, but I doubt it.
Easy. Nothing about the new war is any different than the old war. It's more of the same. And where AW was one of the biggest issues for the community, I would have expected some mention of how Kabam views any of this as an improvement.
More nodes that require specific counters. More nodes to counter Quake. More nodes where we deal reduced damage. Back to more hidden nodes requiring wasted mastery points. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the "Attacker Tactics" sufficiently counter any of this BS (especially once the Defense Tactics are announced). I can only guess that Kabam is counting on the rewards being the enticement to continue dealing with this horrible game mode. I had high hopes after the blog post yesterday, this one brought me back down to wanting to retire.
The two that make sense to me: Strike Counter - Fury and Buff Imbalance - Weakness. Strike Counter - Fury has a skill component (balancing attack charges) and a reasonable penalty if you mess up - defender gets fury passives until you reset the counters. Compare this to Strike Counter - Combat Power Rate. This is like SC-F except if you mess up the charges your combat power rate goes down. Combat power rate is the rate at which you gain power when you attack. Which you need to use specials. If you somehow find yourself with no charges and also no power, you're out of luck unless you have some other way to gain power. This isn't an inescapable problem, but it seems without intrinsic power gain the fight could reach degenerate states. And maybe the final numbers will make this not as bad as it seems. But it is still, from an overarching design perspective, something I wouldn't want to do.
Buff Imbalance - Weakness has a tactical element to it. As it is a debuff, it is something you could use to heal from with Willpower. And Weakness doesn't reduce your ability to throw specials, so you can get out of the weakness debuff. This means the attacker has significant theoretical control over this node's effects, and can attempt to manipulate them to their advantage. On the surface, this is a more balanced punishment/reward node.
Steady Buildup -X does have some pros and cons to it. But they both hinge on the attacker purifying debuffs, which is only rarely something a player can use skill to do (Ghost, for example). Most of the time, this is an ability thing, which means these nodes mandate specific champions more than they mandate more tactical or skillful play. They aren't horrible, but they aren't especially good additions either.
Both Ebb and Flow nodes reduce damage by 90% when their conditions aren't met. in my opinion, this is numbers theater. Alliance war fights are timed. Reducing damage by 90% means you're almost certainly going to time out, so whether the node reduces damage by 90% or 100%, the net result is going to be the same most of the time: a loss. You pretty much have to satisfy the conditions. And unlike the original Aegis node that probably inspired these, you have to keep doing the thing over and over and over and over again. Ebb and Flow - intercept is kind of like Aegis intercept, except you have to be able to do it repeatedly, and it will be inflicted on lower tier alliances now. I suspect the 90% was a way to "counter-balance" the need to reapply every six seconds, and justify applying it to lower tier alliance maps. If so, the whole idea is wrong. The node is harder, but being used lower, and that's an overall increase in pain being inflicted for no obvious reason.
Buff Imbalance - Power Gain suffers from a similar problem as Strike Counter - Combat Power Gain. The "punishment" is to drain your power, and you can end the punishment by using a special attack. This is a gotcha node: screw up, and you're permanently screwed.
Window of Opportunity - Stun, as I said, might as well be called "Intercept or Die." For 12 seconds at a time you can't stun the defender at all, or you'll be stunned for four seconds. Four seconds is a very long time in AW. Twelve seconds is also a very long time in AW, given fights are 180 seconds long. I think if you can't intercept here, you're much more likely to time out if you're cautious or die if you're aggressive.
Hazard Shift - Incinerate/Poison is the one I think is questionable. I guess you can go in there with Iceman or Red Hulk, or Mephisto if you ranked him up, and just ignore the node. Or you can use a strong AAR champ. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the devs picked those two debuffs because of the very low overlap between them, forcing players to either come up with one of the few double counters, or just lose half the time in the fight. Which again, is an attempt to leverage the clock directly.
In my opinion, the devs should *never* be directly and blatantly leveraging the clock. The clock exists to prevent all sorts of exploits and other problems, so we accept the clock as a compromise. But when the devs say "haha you can't finish in three minutes because I slowed the entire fight down" that's not competition. GG devs you beat me. But wasn't the other alliance supposed to beat me?
So two yes, one eh, and seven I'll pass.
I'm in an alliance that gives up five losses at the start of every season with two battlegroups to give weaker players full participation, then wins six or seven of the rest with one battlegroup. And even that half-hearted effort now has us in tier 7, within striking distance of landing in Hard maps, because as I see it war has devolved into a handful of alliances fighting for real, and the rest of the world not even trying because it is not worth it, and they probably don't even want to win too often, lest they become victims of the next iteration of "make war even more interesting." And this seems to just be more of the same: let's make war even more interesting, because players are just falling asleep bored while fighting in alliance war.
I wouldn't mind seeing these nodes in a Variant quest. But the problem with these nodes in Alliance War is not that they aren't creative enough or interesting enough. It is that they are designed to push people to fail, so that they have some new challenge to climb. I want that in solo optional content. I don't want that in alliance war.
I don't know why this is so hard to convey. I want an interesting job. But if you show up to my office and pour Coca Cola into my laptop and throw half the notes on my desk into the shredder 15 minutes before I'm supposed to do some critical work, I'm not going to enjoy that. Because you just increased my chances of publicly and spectacularly failing my company and my customer. I want challenges, but I don't want artificial challenges and I don't want crazy challenges when other people are counting on me. I've had those happen occasionally: they make you grow old, and are to be prevented at all costs.
The alliance war designers should ask themselves how much challenge they want when they are closing in on deadlines and the merge window is closing and their work has already been publicly announced and the rest of the company is counting on them. And then give me that. This is not that.
And this is just the new nodes. Hidden mini bosses all over the place, when we've established that hidden nodes eliminate counterplay? This was *settled* two iterations of war ago. Hidden nodes eliminate counterplay. Kabam conceded the point, so seeing all those hidden nodes sends the message they would rather have chaos and random punishment than counterplay.
I pulled back from doing competitive wars a while back, as the only way I could respond to what i saw as unreasonable issues with war. I'm now wondering if the day is approaching when participation on *any* level will be intolerable, because war isn't about beating the other alliance, it is about beating the war designer. And I'm just not good enough to beat them.
It is so ingrained that mild is awful, so anyone who complains about the spice level must in fact be asking for a different kind of spice, they cannot possibly be asking for it to be less flaming hot. They won't even acknowledge that "less spicy" is a thing. Maybe if we add even more spice it will numb the customer's taste buds enough to enjoy the dish!
At some point, you just have to stick to the french fries. And hope they don't start seasoning them.
Then... isn't it same with very old one aw matchmaking ?
and the conclusion will be : High alliance rating will present in Top tier AW ?
Please enlighten...
Also, "It's going to happen anyway." is about as much of a justification as it gets. One that has never been valid in my books. Breaking the system to appease larger Allies who have no issues steamrolling whoever they want "cause hard knocks and stuff" is not a better system. That's not the least bit fair to anyone, regardless of who believes people don't deserve to compete higher up. A viable solution would prevent either problem. Not trade one for the other.