I haven't really weighed in on the SPW controversy

But, what I'll say is that I'm not sure how Kabam didn't understand she would be a potent defender or that it wasn't intended.. it's one heck of a defensive kit she has there lol.. I mean, it's not even that they added a completely defensive mechanic named Fumble.. it's that they also added an sp1 bias when it's active! 😂 That last is where I'm just like.. whut? How can we say she wasn't intended to be a difficult defender?

Almost all competitive players know how powerful an sp1 bias can be on defense.. there are a few notorious 5/5 defenders who have it (I know Enchantress has it actually written as spw does, but idk about Dark Phoenix, but she still seems to have it to a point lol)

Listen, I'm not saying she's over tuned, under tuner or properly tuned.. I'm just saying it shouldn't have come as a surprise when she begin to perform so well on defense. That's the issue with more and more defensive abilities being added to kits.. they're called node sets:)

Comments

Herbal_Taxman

i agree. Should’ve been obvious to them after five minutes of testing that she would be a two-way monster.

I figure either a) they’re testing process is completely broken, b) there are some longstanding turf wars / power struggles between the designers and the “balance team”, or c) they have really poor centralized planning and after she was released someone said “hey guys, remember all this new stuff/champs/modes we’re working on? She’s going to chew it up…”

ItsClobberinTime

To add to the fumble and the sp1 bias part, it's also the fact that evade chance is relatively high and even if you react on time to that sp1 and block it you're still cooked cause every damn thing gets inflicted through block (that should've been a purely offensive ability and we wouldn't be facing this current situation).

What baffles me even more however is that they're really deciding to remove the smallest most insignificant part of his defensive kit instead of removing any of the actual problematic abilities she has on defense. Removing her ensnare isn't going to magically take her from a 4.5 down a 3.5, it might take her down to 4 but not lower than that. The sp1 bias alone means you never want to do full five hit combos while she's at one bar and below two so that ensnare is practically useless on defense 90% of the time because you're going to be baiting heavies most of the time. Sure she might fail your evade counter passives debuffs and effects every once in a while but so far it's such a rare occurrence I don't even think it's that big of a deal, it's literally only happened once to me and it's because I didn't use Red Guardian properly.