Alliance War 61: Wrath and Forbearance review from a T1 Player
After testing the forbearance/wrath tactics for a week, as a tier 1 player, I found it extremely painful, unfun and unnecessarily restrictive. Here are a few reasons why I feel like the game team has to make changes to this tactic, that will be played in the last two seasons of this year.
1) Very weak attack tactic:
Forbearance does counter the defense tactic but the conditions that have to met in order to activate the attack tactic ( knockdown). This is further exacerbated with defensive conditions from defends tactic champs that restrict this condition from being met. ( auto block from High evo, evade from spiderwoman, etc) as well as the various nodes that prevent this condition ( stun immunity, powergain, power manipulation nodes). The duration is also incredibly small, 10 seconds is not enough. Especially with the defense tactic champs able to spam debuffs making windows to keep the attack tactic on, much harder.
This tactic is also incredibly limiting compared to the previous tactic, in ways of allowing very few non tactic champs from being even used. The previous tactic didn’t have the same limitations, any champion could be used. This tactic shrinks the pool to barely double digit counters, most of which will be permabanned.
2) Addition of constrictive fights + lack of quality of attack tactic:
This tactic has some really difficult placements with no good counters in the attack tactic. Take for example, unblockable spiderwoman mini. The best options prior to this tactic, were CB and patriot. Moleman does okay, but not great. You need an unblockable counter since Swoman spams sp1s which make her unblockable.With this tactic, CB is not vable since Swoman places a huge number of debuffs, and is unstoppable the full fight. Patirot is not viable since you cant knock her down anymore after the start since she will evade the heavy and punish. So basically you are stuck with either shangChi and pray, or Moleman. Both of which arent good counters.
Another one, is poison rupture haz shift mini Jean grey. You have one reverse controls counter in the tactic, Maker. He isnt immune to anything, so you need to play around reverse controls. Forcing players to play around a tough scenario in a highly punishing game mode, without practice mode (for these scenarios) seems very counter intuitive.
These are just two examples. The attack tactic has very weak champs to counter the tactic, and along with other RPG asks of other defenders, makes this tactic very limiting and punishing. This is not even considering void, who will constantly degen you for every debuff, making him a potion heavy fight.
3) Potion issues:
Along with punishing and limiting tactics, the potion system is a joke. We are living in a 2023 potion system, with r4 7* champs. It takes 8 L5 potions to heal an r4, it is a joke how bad it is. This hasn’t seen any updates for a long time and feels forgotten. This makes this tough tactic even worse, as the punishment seems doubled.
So how can we go ahead and fix this? Here are some solutions:
1) Update the endurance tactic to 15 seconds instead of 10 and/or add a secondary mechanism to pause the attack tactic/ trigger the attack tactic. This will alleviate some issues to take care of the niche situations.
2) Update the endurance tactic to possibly cover evade and reverse controls. This may cover some tougher fights which have no good counters.
3) Add some more attack tactic champs of good quality to the pool. CB/Ironheart/Jack/Sentinel/ Silver Sable are all great counters that can be used.
4) Remove the cap for the L5 potions from the loyalty store/ make the unit deal for potions predictable/permanent addition to store. While the team is hopefully working on a potion update, this will be a stop gap measure.
All of these may not cover the top pain points, but I hope this stimulates a discussion in the team, who I know are very capable of coming up with even better solutions, or our community, which can tweak/ add on to my suggestions.
