The absolute absence of any response on a thread like this really is something else. I’m baffled that nobody is even willing to put out a statement on this. Not agreement necessarily but just a statement.
In past instances we at least got that much respect and acknowledgement.
Right? Like at least come here and tell us something. But nah, they just ignore it
It really speaks to complete apathy in relation to player feedback. Miike was by no means perfect. But both he and Jax, who he mentored, cared enough to give us the hard, unpopular truth, even if he took it too far at times.
And they’d were far more transparent than I realized in hindsight, because they’d always let us know if something was being discussed too. Now it’s straight big brother ghosting read only.
In my last bg match I left an r4 serpent go unbanned, and it was funny to watch my opponent speedrun picking him then placing him on round 1 even after I drafted wiger. People so obviously wait and pray for serpent to pop up in their draft if he’s not banned, then celebrate soon as they see him. Who cares that I ended up drafting a counter they just place him anyway lol. It was his mistake and I ended up winning, but many other times that’s not the case.
This is exactly the type of brain dead strategy that serpent brings to the game mode. No thinking required, just pray that serpent shows up in the draft and place him immediately. No other champ in the game does that, maybe bullseye on release but that changed quickly. I still fail to see how this is supposedly “healthy” for the game.
I always do it lmao.
If I get to draft serpent and opponent doesn't, All I do is concentrate on winning the first match, Since the second match is autoWin for me 95% of the times.
Yea that’s pretty much how it is. I at least understand it from your pov since you have him at r3 and decently sigged. But for someone to do that over an r4 6*?💀 I couldn’t help but laugh inside a little bit.
It’s not like there’s never champs who are instant round wins, my r3 domino is a guaranteed win if they don’t draft a counter. But that last part is important. If they draft a a red skull or guardian suddenly I have to think twice about my original strategy. If someone drafts a serpent counter I don’t have to care.
r4 6* still launches a sp3, and most of the times you still won't survive. r4 6* serpent with a counter is as difficult (or easy) as 7* r3 domino with a counter 😤. He is truly broken in bg defense.
In my last bg match I left an r4 serpent go unbanned, and it was funny to watch my opponent speedrun picking him then placing him on round 1 even after I drafted wiger. People so obviously wait and pray for serpent to pop up in their draft if he’s not banned, then celebrate soon as they see him. Who cares that I ended up drafting a counter they just place him anyway lol. It was his mistake and I ended up winning, but many other times that’s not the case.
This is exactly the type of brain dead strategy that serpent brings to the game mode. No thinking required, just pray that serpent shows up in the draft and place him immediately. No other champ in the game does that, maybe bullseye on release but that changed quickly. I still fail to see how this is supposedly “healthy” for the game.
I always do it lmao.
If I get to draft serpent and opponent doesn't, All I do is concentrate on winning the first match, Since the second match is autoWin for me 95% of the times.
Yea that’s pretty much how it is. I at least understand it from your pov since you have him at r3 and decently sigged. But for someone to do that over an r4 6*?💀 I couldn’t help but laugh inside a little bit.
It’s not like there’s never champs who are instant round wins, my r3 domino is a guaranteed win if they don’t draft a counter. But that last part is important. If they draft a a red skull or guardian suddenly I have to think twice about my original strategy. If someone drafts a serpent counter I don’t have to care.
r4 6* still launches a sp3, and most of the times you still won't survive. r4 6* serpent with a counter is as difficult (or easy) as 7* r3 domino with a counter 😤. He is truly broken in bg defense.
The only reason I didn’t eat an sp3 against an r4 was because I got nice ai that threw a special during death immunity. If I didn’t get that I was cooked since I fat fingered my relic earlier lol. So dumb to have to rely on the ai to determine a win or a loss.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
And just like that, I suddenly get the Crashed hype. W response.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
I think this stance is fundamentally flawed. You have top players and a lot of others who regularly finish very highly in BG and other aspects of the game telling you that the champ is broken and his so called counters are in short supply and take loads of time to finish, resulting in a pretty much guaranteed loss
To quote Slayer, data isn’t god. If the team looking at the data and saying oh serpent looks fine when he’s not, and people who actually play the game far more know that, it’s a pretty big problem. This isn’t another bullseye or photon situation, Serpent is genuinely unbalanced.
You shouted out Luke (congrats on the dupe by the way) but he still takes a long time to kill serpent, and so does every other existing champ in the game. If the solution is just “ban him” that’s not good. And it’s not like he’s skill based in the slightest.
But I guess he’s staying as is. Bad decision to alienate people like that imo but I guess we just have to wait until you guys make good counters
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
W response, I don't think crashed could have said it any better.. well, except for the Luke cage part ofc, my duped luke will stay at R1 lvl 1
Well we got an answer. Not the one I wanted but it’s also the answer I 100% knew we were gonna get. Regardless, I appreciate the response Crashed.
I just hope that the balance team has read enough of what’s going on here to understand what I consider to be many valid perspectives on the situation. I personally wasn’t complaining in this thread and others to try to get the team to reverse the decision because I knew fully well it wasn’t gonna happen. I was doing so in the hopes that the balancing team would see our points and not do something like this in the future. Serpent defines the meta to an IMO unhealthy extent in bgs and, while he won’t destroy the mode because he’ll have counters released eventually (Shathra looks like the start of that), I don’t think it can be the standard method of making good defenders going forward. If we don’t have another situation like this again, well that’s the victory I was looking for.
No matter what we do kabam decision was final sucks that we can’t change it cause he really does need a nerf especially since skill isn’t rewarded against him
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
I think this stance is fundamentally flawed. You have top players and a lot of others who regularly finish very highly in BG and other aspects of the game telling you that the champ is broken and his so called counters are in short supply and take loads of time to finish, resulting in a pretty much guaranteed loss
To quote Slayer, data isn’t god. If the team looking at the data and saying oh serpent looks fine when he’s not, and people who actually play the game far more know that, it’s a pretty big problem. This isn’t another bullseye or photon situation, Serpent is genuinely unbalanced.
You shouted out Luke (congrats on the dupe by the way) but he still takes a long time to kill serpent, and so does every other existing champ in the game. If the solution is just “ban him” that’s not good. And it’s not like he’s skill based in the slightest.
But I guess he’s staying as is. Bad decision to alienate people like that imo but I guess we just have to wait until you guys make good counters
No way im ranking up my Luke cage for serpent lol, he will be too slow outside this victory track meta..
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
We do appreciate the reply even if it’s not the answer we were hoping for.
I’m not mentioning these because I expect you to create some sort of change, I understand that’s not your call. This mostly serves as a summary for the 26 pages of info posted here. From what I’ve seen, the community’s main annoyances with him are:
1: against serpent you have very little control of what’s actually going on in the fight, you pretty much have to play according to the ai’s wishes. Obviously every fight is controlled by the ai to an extent, but serpent leaves very little room for error. As BG showed in one of his recent streams, you get to play so little against serpent because half of the match is baiting specials. Bad ai only furthers this. It’s far too easy to be caught in a loop of just being able to do a few hits then having to sit back and bait another special. Fighting him is almost more of a movie than an interactive game.
2: serpent leaves almost no room for skill expression. When onslaught came out I was terrible against him, but then I learned his sp1 dex, then sp2 dex, then eventually sp1 punish, and he became manageable for me as a player by improving my skills. After how long serpent has been out the only thing I’ve learned is to hold my relic for death immunity. Then the extend meta came along and temporarily threw that strategy out the window lol. I understand that some defenders are pure rpg asks. But if that’s the case then there needs to be a plethora of counters available. Serpent has maybe 5 counters who can take him in a meta score and due to his 125% DI ability accuracy, some of them don’t even work all the time. He doesn’t even stop there though, even if you draft a counter you are still near guaranteed to take longer than 50-55s. He stalls better than my r3 sassy while having 25 other defensive mechanics.
3: Due to how many different mechanics he has, so many different nodes can make an area of his kit completely unbearable. I think everyone can admit to this one as it’s been demonstrated repeatedly. Any unblockable meta makes serpent beyond unfair. Anything that messes with buff duration does the same. Anything that affects block penetration will do the same. As will enhanced power gain, or health gain, and I’m sure there’s others. Even if you declare serpent’s base kit as balanced, half the time that's not even the kit you’re fighting. He becomes so easily enhanced that he’s made an instant ban in a lot of metas, far more than any other champ.
Even with serpent left unchanged, I think these are things that should be kept in mind when designing or balancing any future defenders. Serpent has removed a lot of strategy and replaced it with rng in a competitive game mode. I think it’s best if the team stays away from that type of design. for the health of the game. Thanks.
Well we got an answer. Not the one I wanted but it’s also the answer I 100% knew we were gonna get. Regardless, I appreciate the response Crashed.
I just hope that the balance team has read enough of what’s going on here to understand what I consider to be many valid perspectives on the situation. I personally wasn’t complaining in this thread and others to try to get the team to reverse the decision because I knew fully well it wasn’t gonna happen. I was doing so in the hopes that the balancing team would see our points and not do something like this in the future. Serpent defines the meta to an IMO unhealthy extent in bgs and, while he won’t destroy the mode because he’ll have counters released eventually (Shathra looks like the start of that), I don’t think it can be the standard method of making good defenders going forward. If we don’t have another situation like this again, well that’s the victory I was looking for.
Dude the balance team has known the communties thoughts since forever on Serpent. They. Dont. Care.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing that could be done about their perspective. Nothing that could get a response from them. Nothing that could open any dialogue. They. Do. Not. Care. About. Our. Opinions.
Like, think about all the attempted discussions that have been going on in this forum, on youtube, on the discord, on twitter. And the ONLY time we have gotten anything in response was Crashed saying “I havent talked to the balance team but their decision is what it is shrug”.
If that doesn’t speak volumes for how little they care, I dont know what does.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
While I still don't agree with the balancing decision, it is ultimately the balance team's call. I just hope serpent-level defenders don't become the norm but the exception. Personally, I'm not a fan of such a champion that skews BG matches so much in their favour (defender or attacker). But thanks for responding Crashed. Even if it's not something most of us wanted to hear, a no-nonsense informational reply is sometimes very much needed.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
"I have been banning him", sounds about right... It is absolutely insane to me that even a Kabam employee admits the best strategy against Serpent is the ban button yet the rebalance team thinks this is perfectly fine. You guys need to get a new rebalance team then cause they're not doing their job.
No matter what we do kabam decision was final sucks that we can’t change it cause he really does need a nerf especially since skill isn’t rewarded against him
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
I think this stance is fundamentally flawed. You have top players and a lot of others who regularly finish very highly in BG and other aspects of the game telling you that the champ is broken and his so called counters are in short supply and take loads of time to finish, resulting in a pretty much guaranteed loss
To quote Slayer, data isn’t god. If the team looking at the data and saying oh serpent looks fine when he’s not, and people who actually play the game far more know that, it’s a pretty big problem. This isn’t another bullseye or photon situation, Serpent is genuinely unbalanced.
You shouted out Luke (congrats on the dupe by the way) but he still takes a long time to kill serpent, and so does every other existing champ in the game. If the solution is just “ban him” that’s not good. And it’s not like he’s skill based in the slightest.
But I guess he’s staying as is. Bad decision to alienate people like that imo but I guess we just have to wait until you guys make good counters
No way im ranking up my Luke cage for serpent lol, he will be too slow outside this victory track meta..
Recently took mine to r2, 100% agree he is way too slow and he does need awakening so he can stay aggressive and eat one sp3 at least.
Absolute 💯, W of a reply from Nemesis. I couldn’t agree more or applaud this louder. Great summation of the concerns.
@Kabam Crashed - You resolving this is appreciated, it’s a disappointing but expected outcome at this point. I hope some feedback can be provided to the team about not letting things fester in the future, as it did here. And hopefully we can keep Serpent’s design philosophy in a box that’s an N of 1. Great he accomplished the goal the team had, but it’s disingenuous to say it’s a balanced landing spot. Other defenders further devaluing this skill will really hurt the skill based elements of the Contest.
Why is this thread still going? Serpent is not getting rebalanced and that's final. Complaining will not alter the outcome. Eventually he will die down as we get better and more champs who work for him get added and discovered, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER DEFENDER before and after him. (You can disagree, but what's done is done)
Absolute 💯, W of a reply from Nemesis. I couldn’t agree more or applaud this louder. Great summation of the concerns.
@Kabam Crashed - You resolving this is appreciated, it’s a disappointing but expected outcome at this point. I hope some feedback can be provided to the team about not letting things fester in the future, as it did here. And hopefully we can keep Serpent’s design philosophy in a box that’s an N of 1. Great he accomplished the goal the team had, but it’s disingenuous to say it’s a balanced landing spot. Other defenders further devaluing this skill will really hurt the skill based elements of the Contest.
Appreciate the kind words man. While I don’t expect it I hope it’s at least acknowledged or taken note of for future champ designs. I think the concerns listed there are pretty reasonable.
Why is this thread still going? Serpent is not getting rebalanced and that's final. Complaining will not alter the outcome. Eventually he will die down as we get better and more champs who work for him get added and discovered, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER DEFENDER before and after him. (You can disagree, but what's done is done)
Bruh Crashed just responded and a few people replied to him. If you come back in another week and this thread is still active then fine you have a point. But geez it’s been barely over an hour since crashed’s response
Why is this thread still going? Serpent is not getting rebalanced and that's final. Complaining will not alter the outcome. Eventually he will die down as we get better and more champs who work for him get added and discovered, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER DEFENDER before and after him. (You can disagree, but what's done is done)
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
"I have been banning him", sounds about right... It is absolutely insane to me that even a Kabam employee admits the best strategy against Serpent is the ban button yet the rebalance team thinks this is perfectly fine. You guys need to get a new rebalance team then cause they're not doing their job.
serpent is that champ that will get picked all the time, had a bg match today saw a r4 serpent and thought maybe the rng wouldn't give them the serpent.
of course they got it and i had no counters cause the only mystic champ that managed to show up my entire draft was mangog. serpent is such a fun and interactive champion.
r3 gorr not being able to do **** against him is just fun
Why is this thread still going? Serpent is not getting rebalanced and that's final. Complaining will not alter the outcome. Eventually he will die down as we get better and more champs who work for him get added and discovered, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER DEFENDER before and after him. (You can disagree, but what's done is done)
That's literally what this thread is about, we disagree with their decision, and we disagree with the things Crashed just said. We appreciate the reply but we still disagree, we are free to keep this thread up for as long as we want to or until they close it because we want to make sure this bs doesn't happen ever again. I'm sure they'll think twice next time they design a 6/5 defender after all this backlash.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
"I have been banning him", sounds about right... It is absolutely insane to me that even a Kabam employee admits the best strategy against Serpent is the ban button yet the rebalance team thinks this is perfectly fine. You guys need to get a new rebalance team then cause they're not doing their job.
serpent is that champ that will get picked all the time, had a bg match today saw a r4 serpent and thought maybe the rng wouldn't give them the serpent.
of course they got it and i had no counters cause the only mystic champ that managed to show up my entire draft was mangog. serpent is such a fun and interactive champion.
r3 gorr not being able to do **** against him is just fun
Same here, my luck is so bad whenever I don't ban Serpent, I have two counters in my deck at the moment and one of them is banned 80% of the time.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
"I have been banning him", sounds about right... It is absolutely insane to me that even a Kabam employee admits the best strategy against Serpent is the ban button yet the rebalance team thinks this is perfectly fine. You guys need to get a new rebalance team then cause they're not doing their job.
Sometimes I really sympathize with the content design team. They've been putting in a tremendous amount of effort recently, constantly delivering new features and improvements. Yet, all that work feel diminished when the balance team’s decisions lead to riot and frustrations within the community.
I don't have time to read all 26 pages of this thread but I read a lot of it and since you tagged me I will say what I know. The thread's title answers its own question, Serpent really isn't getting rebalanced.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
"I have been banning him", sounds about right... It is absolutely insane to me that even a Kabam employee admits the best strategy against Serpent is the ban button yet the rebalance team thinks this is perfectly fine. You guys need to get a new rebalance team then cause they're not doing their job.
Sometimes I really sympathize with the content design team. They've been putting in a tremendous amount of effort recently, constantly delivering new features and improvements. Yet, all that work feel diminished when the balance team’s decisions lead to riot and frustrations within the community.
True, a lot of attackers this year like Ironheart and Destroyer had so much potential but the balancing team just failed to do what it's supposed to do. Serpent is the most controversial annoying one for sure but leaving Ironheart and Destroyer like that was also a crime in my opinion.
Comments
And they’d were far more transparent than I realized in hindsight, because they’d always let us know if something was being discussed too. Now it’s straight big brother ghosting read only.
I had no idea whether or not he would be rebalanced until I read the forum post. I could have asked our balance team but I didn't bother. Why? Because I was agnostic to the results. If they had said he was too strong and needed to be rebalanced, I would have trusted them. They concluded he is having the meta impact that was intended, and I trust them.
So for me now it's about getting better fighting him and strategizing in Battlegrounds based on the meta (either ban him or include enough counters that I can deal with him). Right now I have been banning him but I just duped my Luke yesterday so I might start leaving him open to see if it gives me an advantage.
I don't really think there is anything else for me to say. The balance post is the team's official position.
To quote Slayer, data isn’t god. If the team looking at the data and saying oh serpent looks fine when he’s not, and people who actually play the game far more know that, it’s a pretty big problem. This isn’t another bullseye or photon situation, Serpent is genuinely unbalanced.
You shouted out Luke (congrats on the dupe by the way) but he still takes a long time to kill serpent, and so does every other existing champ in the game. If the solution is just “ban him” that’s not good. And it’s not like he’s skill based in the slightest.
But I guess he’s staying as is. Bad decision to alienate people like that imo but I guess we just have to wait until you guys make good counters
I just hope that the balance team has read enough of what’s going on here to understand what I consider to be many valid perspectives on the situation. I personally wasn’t complaining in this thread and others to try to get the team to reverse the decision because I knew fully well it wasn’t gonna happen. I was doing so in the hopes that the balancing team would see our points and not do something like this in the future. Serpent defines the meta to an IMO unhealthy extent in bgs and, while he won’t destroy the mode because he’ll have counters released eventually (Shathra looks like the start of that), I don’t think it can be the standard method of making good defenders going forward. If we don’t have another situation like this again, well that’s the victory I was looking for.
I’m not mentioning these because I expect you to create some sort of change, I understand that’s not your call. This mostly serves as a summary for the 26 pages of info posted here. From what I’ve seen, the community’s main annoyances with him are:
1: against serpent you have very little control of what’s actually going on in the fight, you pretty much have to play according to the ai’s wishes. Obviously every fight is controlled by the ai to an extent, but serpent leaves very little room for error. As BG showed in one of his recent streams, you get to play so little against serpent because half of the match is baiting specials. Bad ai only furthers this. It’s far too easy to be caught in a loop of just being able to do a few hits then having to sit back and bait another special. Fighting him is almost more of a movie than an interactive game.
2: serpent leaves almost no room for skill expression. When onslaught came out I was terrible against him, but then I learned his sp1 dex, then sp2 dex, then eventually sp1 punish, and he became manageable for me as a player by improving my skills. After how long serpent has been out the only thing I’ve learned is to hold my relic for death immunity. Then the extend meta came along and temporarily threw that strategy out the window lol. I understand that some defenders are pure rpg asks. But if that’s the case then there needs to be a plethora of counters available. Serpent has maybe 5 counters who can take him in a meta score and due to his 125% DI ability accuracy, some of them don’t even work all the time. He doesn’t even stop there though, even if you draft a counter you are still near guaranteed to take longer than 50-55s. He stalls better than my r3 sassy while having 25 other defensive mechanics.
3: Due to how many different mechanics he has, so many different nodes can make an area of his kit completely unbearable. I think everyone can admit to this one as it’s been demonstrated repeatedly. Any unblockable meta makes serpent beyond unfair. Anything that messes with buff duration does the same. Anything that affects block penetration will do the same. As will enhanced power gain, or health gain, and I’m sure there’s others. Even if you declare serpent’s base kit as balanced, half the time that's not even the kit you’re fighting. He becomes so easily enhanced that he’s made an instant ban in a lot of metas, far more than any other champ.
Even with serpent left unchanged, I think these are things that should be kept in mind when designing or balancing any future defenders. Serpent has removed a lot of strategy and replaced it with rng in a competitive game mode. I think it’s best if the team stays away from that type of design. for the health of the game. Thanks.
M Dude the balance team has known the communties thoughts since forever on Serpent. They. Dont. Care.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing that could be done about their perspective. Nothing that could get a response from them. Nothing that could open any dialogue. They. Do. Not. Care. About. Our. Opinions.
Like, think about all the attempted discussions that have been going on in this forum, on youtube, on the discord, on twitter. And the ONLY time we have gotten anything in response was Crashed saying “I havent talked to the balance team but their decision is what it is shrug”.
If that doesn’t speak volumes for how little they care, I dont know what does.
Everyone r3 their Serpents ASAP when you finally get him and awaken him until, as Syndrome says, "no one's special". Or in this case, at an advantage.
Then you're just left to 'draft RNG' which, honestly, is just bad practice.
You guys need to get a new rebalance team then cause they're not doing their job.
Nemesis. I couldn’t agree more or applaud this louder. Great summation of the concerns.
@Kabam Crashed - You resolving this is appreciated, it’s a disappointing but expected outcome at this point. I hope some feedback can be provided to the team about not letting things fester in the future, as it did here. And hopefully we can keep Serpent’s design philosophy in a box that’s an N of 1. Great he accomplished the goal the team had, but it’s disingenuous to say it’s a balanced landing spot. Other defenders further devaluing this skill will really hurt the skill based elements of the Contest.
Serpent is not getting rebalanced and that's final.
Complaining will not alter the outcome.
Eventually he will die down as we get better and more champs who work for him get added and discovered, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER DEFENDER before and after him.
(You can disagree, but what's done is done)
I wish they let us spend $400 to get a garanteed shathra, but I think she will be a better counter.
of course they got it and i had no counters cause the only mystic champ that managed to show up my entire draft was mangog. serpent is such a fun and interactive champion.
r3 gorr not being able to do **** against him is just fun
I'm sure they'll think twice next time they design a 6/5 defender after all this backlash.