Cavalier EQ: The good, the bad, and the constructive criticism
(This all comes from a Thronebreaker's perspective.)
Having now fully explored the Cavalier EQ, I thought I should do a write-up with feedback on it. It was very much a mixed bag, albeit one that unfortunately leaned more towards the negative than the positive. This post became a lot longer than I initially thought it be but I can't really give a tl;dr for it all. Maybe that I liked the cross-fights and that I suggest that Kabam - should they choose to continue with tag-based Cavalier content - go with the Variant tags so that Cavalier players at least level up champions who'll be useful somewhere.
We'll Start With the Good.
* Cross-Fights
I really liked them. It felt like a great evolution of the EQ formula. Instead of having to ramp up from scratch every single fight, you could now carry over your progress (or part of it, at least) into future fights. When it worked, it worked really well and made the fights really fun.
Being able to use those charges in the boss fights was also a treat. I still mostly used other champions for those fights but I still appreciated the option. One thing that has annoyed me ever so slightly in previous EQs is that the champs you bring to clear the lanes often can't be used against the boss, who usually require a very different type of champion. That was still the case here for the most part, but going in with 10 cross-fight charges made the lane clearers a lot more viable than they usually are.
* Quest 1.1
I really liked this quest. It challenged you to intercept aggressively but wasn't unnecessarily complex (we'll come to those quests...). It benefitted from a combination of a lot of really good champions and fun nodes.
* Quest 2.2
This was another quest I really liked. I think there is room for improvement since the reliance on ending with a medium attack screwed over several Avengers who rely on a different playstyle (such as Beardo and Hulkbuster's parry-heavy, or Black Panther's combo-canceling backdrafts), but for the most part, I really enjoyed the system itself. It allowed me to control the fight with the power drain, while simultaneously feeling stressed thanks to the opponent's power gain. It was a really, really fun back-and-forth.
* Quest 3.2
The last quest I really enjoyed. Blasting through with Cosmic Ghost Rider and Magik was a lot of fun. Like both 1.1. and 2.2, this quest benefitted from a similar combination of fun nodes and viable champions among the required tags. It also rewarded being able to dex the opponent's special attack, which is a valuable skill to have/acquire.
Now Onto the Bad.
* The Tag System
This one puzzles me. The class-based system works because it pushes you to rank up a well-rounded roster spread out over all of the classes in order to get access to their various abilities, but there is no inherent benefit to keeping a well-rounded roster based on the various Organization tags in the game. If I don't rank up Rocket Raccoon, Groot or Drax, I'm not missing out on something important in the same way that I would if I didn't rank up an armor-breaking Cosmic or debuff-heavy Science champion. If the tag system was removed, I doubt anyone would truly notice except for in the Variants. If the class system was removed, however, the whole game would fall apart. They fill two very different needs when it comes to differentiating champions, with the tag system being largely irrelevant with regards to who you should focus on.
This makes them a very poor reason to focus on those champions for future rank-ups. In the class-based system (and the previous nodes alongside them), you were incentivized to rank up champions with specific sets of utilities if you were lacking in them, and Cavalier difficulty therefore helped players build their roster in a way that would, in turn, help them progress in the game. However, I feel like this is an element that is sorely lacking in this month's EQ. What possible use could I have of a Guardian of the Galaxy, Thunderbolt or Defender? They have the occasional good champion but are largely irrelevant groupings. Furthermore, they don't have a consistent set of abilities that were utilized in the EQ (like the above-mentioned armor-breaking Cosmic champions, for example), so the nodes instead gave them the abilities needed to counter the other nodes.
This brings me to the next point.
* The Brute-Force Approach
All quests followed a pretty basic formula: something happens unless you do this one specific thing (let's say bleed), and you have to bring in a team of mostly suboptimal champions and have them do something complicated in order to place a bleed to counter the main node - or you can just bring in another champion altogether that just has easy access to bleeds in their base kits and therefore more or less shuts down the whole node in its entirety without all of the fuss.
The most egregious example of this was 3.1 (which I'll cover separately a bit further down) where I just couldn't be bothered with bringing in a team of unranked semi-decent champions and instead opted for a team of heavy bleeders. This was a problem in about half of the quests in this EQ. Each Summoner's mileage may vary but I doubt that many Cavalier players have a roster extensive enough to not run into this problem whatsoever. Even as a Thronebreaker, I don't.
When you don't have the champions that earn those cross-fight abilities, every fight becomes a seemingly neverending chore.
So how could all of this have been prevented?
* The Christmas Surprise!
I think the root of the issue is that all of these changes were sprung on people with absolutely no warning, giving us no time to prepare. Usually, these changes have happened rather slowly over the course of months with ample time to prepare but now every single node was changed at the same time, alongside the change from a class to a tag-based system.
Even worse, it was announced after Cyber Weekend where people got a lot of resources to rank up champions. Had it been announced beforehand, people could have used those resources to rank up the necessary holes in their rosters, but now at least I was left without any remaining resources left to pump into the required champions. That left a very sour taste in my mouth.
Then again, would I have changed my rank-ups if I had known? I am very happy with the rank-ups I did after CW - Diablo and King Groot - and while they did not benefit from any tags in the EQ, they've still put in a ton of work already. Meanwhile, I still don't see a practical reason to rank up any of the Thunderbolts or Defenders I have in my roster when they, for the most part, just aren't good champions. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that a lot of these tags are made up of some of the absolute worst champions in the game. There are precious few that I feel like ranking up whatsoever, and even less of them that I currently have ready in my roster.
* The Ragtag Team Selection
It's been mentioned before so I won't yap on too much about it, but the inability to easily select a team consisting of the various tags without going through them one by one was incredibly annoying. Since a lot of those champions were ones you normally didn't play and didn't have ranked up, and therefore probably weren't too familiar with in terms of abilities, it made the whole selection process overly burdensome. Like so much else of this month's EQ, it was a slog. I dislike bashing Kabam but that was such a glaring oversight that it felt like this evolution of the EQ didn't get the attention and development it deserved. There were a lot of small things that added up to that feeling, which is a shame when there were some genuinely good ideas nestled within those general flaws.
* Quest 1.2
Not the worst quest but I found the nodes a bit too unforgiving. A 4-second window to place debuffs is extremely tight and as soon as you had to bait out a special attack you ended up power-locked for a significant duration. While power-locked, you probably pushed the opponent over another bar of power and had to bait out yet another special attack, which in turn led you to become power-locked again. It led to a vicious cycle where I was power-locked for the majority of the fights and barely threw any special attacks at all. Couple that with a small number of good champions in the tag pool and it was not a very enjoyable quest.
* Quest 2.1
This one was just too complex, while additionally hampered by an ill-thought-out node design. Stunning the opponent when you evade an attack isn't a bad idea in theory but it didn't work in practice since the stun was too short for me to get back in and knock them down with a heavy attack in order to get the charges. I found much more success when I completely disregarded that aspect of the node combination and just played the quest as if everyone was fully unblockable.
* Quest 3.1
The worst quest by far. I just did not enjoy anything about it. Playing within the nodes with the preferred champions was far harder than playing outside of them with other champions. I found much more success with Nick Fury, Claire Voyant, Apocalypse and Archangel than I did with any Guardians of the Galaxy or #Mercenaries. The downside to playing without the cross-fight charges was that it was an absolute slog to get through. It often took around 150 hits to get an opponent down, and getting through just one lane quickly became incredibly tedious. Exploring the quest is probably the least fun I've had in Cavalier EQ to date.
The Way Forward
So with all of this said, what do I think can be done with the system? Well, the first thing is that the cross-fight system is really fun. I would definitely build on that because that's a great foundation. I really enjoyed bringing in a team and ramping them all up ahead of the boss fight. That was great fun in the three quests that I liked the design of.
As for the negatives, I have a fairly simple suggestion that I think could turn the irrelevancy of the tag system into a strength that really pushes Cavalier players forward. Instead of focusing on the obscure tags, focus on the tags that are relevant for completing the Variants. That way, every rank-up has a purpose for the Cavalier player who has yet to complete that content. You would push Cavalier players into a positive cycle where they rank up champions they need to complete Variants, which in turn reward them with rank-up resources to further fuel their progression.
Meanwhile, players who have already completed those Variants and already have a decent roster of champions belonging to those various tags aren't forced to rank up suboptimal champions in order to complete the EQ. Given the limited rank-up resources in the game, I really don't feel like ranking up a Drax instead of my King Groot or Iron Fist instead of Diablo.
Regarding the nodes, I think there are some that are absolutely worth keeping, some that are fun but can be tweaked to become even better, some that weren't especially fun but can be salvaged with some tweaking, and some that just aren't fun at all in their current form.
