Flow global node in War [Merged Threads]

This node needs a nerf before next season.
For everyone that doesnt know what it does:

We play T2 in P1 and let me tell you when the enemy has Siphon we are happy.

There are champs with that flow tactic that are beyond broken:

Magik
IMIW
Dormamu
Gulli 2099
Heimdal
Mr Sinister
Mojo
Mordo
Punisher 2099
Warlock

First of they write its a powergain BUFF with every crit. You can disable it while stunned.

So I thought okay 2 counterplays for that doesnt sound too bad. You can stun them (ofc not on stunimmune nodes which are 7 or 8 and its tricky vs IMIW)

2nd counter play: nullify them right? Since its a buff? Wrong they are passives.

And when we open a bug post about it. Oh lets change the description. It stays passive. Like what?

https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/1150673#Comment_1150673

That global node is too strong.
You have like 5 counters in the game vs that:

Ghost/hood (tank SP3, GL if they play passive tho/ like waiting your phase and use SP3 after/ happend to me 3 times)

Quake

Crossbones (debatable if he is good enough vs R5s in Tier 3 or higher)

Gulli2099

Cap IW with parry heavy and hope not too many crits

Some more champs can work but it depends a lot on RNG:

magik (hope you got to SP2 before they SP3 so hope you dont crit and they throw their SPs)

Iceman can work to some point with RNG as well (hope you dont crit)

Void hope for petrifies

Luke Cage hope for exhaustions

Please change this node. It sucks the fun out of high tier wars.

Comments

A l p h a

TL:DR I dont recall it being able to stack above 3 in any tier, only difference being 35% per stack in t4 and 5 and 45% in tier 3 or above... at 3 stacks that's 135% power in 15 seconds... so 4 bars of power every 15 seconds... now lets say you get 3 crits straight away, congrats you now have an opponent that will gain 3 bars in around 11 seconds unless you can stun them, not even factoring in things like mystic dispersion and other factors (200% power gain/ 50% enhanced power effects etc)

I used to enjoy seeing people bring unique attackers to war... i myself used to bring elsa and wasp, both of these champs are totally unusable on flow due to high crit chance and no power control! All you've done is make this node passable on stun immune... thats it!

If this node must stay, it should only stack once... or at the very least needs a big reduction to the % per stack... maybe 15% and 20% instead of 35% and 45% ... its ridiculous and HEAVILY limits the champs you can use in attack phase... and if you don't have them... you're out of luck!

I feel the whole defence tactic idea itself needs a rework... why not have nodes that make fights more challenging without limiting the counters....

Opponents gain 50% damage during special attacks
Opponents gains 50% passive fury when either champ is in the corner
Opponents gain 20% armor everytime they're stunned but an intercept removes all stacks

Just a bit of constructive feedback! This change to flow affects barely nothing!

KeepinItReal

The Flow/#Control tactic is so ridiculous most of our allies want to take Season 18 off,...accumulate revives, potions, boosts & hope to God they can buy Vision, pull a 5 or 6* Guilly99, Ghost +Hood or 5* Quake, Magik (then master how to play Ghost or Quake). Thought D.Tactics were meant to make AW more fun, switch attackers & defenders up & add AWD Placement strategy? Not hate seeing 1-2 Douche Tactics. If we see Flow Global, we start the AW frustrated. Yup, unless changed,....we'll just chill in S18.

Kabam Miike

This makes significantly more Champions able to deal with this node. While Stun may no longer be able to end the Power Gain, every Champion is capable of a well timed Block, and Stun/Debuff immune nodes will no longer be a hard stop.

Champions with Power Control or no Critical Hits will always be the best choice though. That is the intention of this tactic.

Worknprogress

You can't block let alone well timed block an opponent sitting in the corner blocking until it gets to sp3. Its still completely reliant on AI behavior which given the track record isn't exactly promising.

Carmel1

Still too hard vs Stun/debuff immune nodes when you are trying to intercept specials and counter with full combos.
With the need to “well timed block” you force us to take blocking damage which is high vs the mini-bosses / boss.

KnightZero

Do you even play the game? Or higher tier war where the tactics are used? Try to block on counter tactics and see your health just go down. And even if you can, just watch the AI turtle once the get the power gain and just stand in the corner. You guys have literally no idea what you're talking about. The developers themselves don't know how many stacks are there of power gain, and have changed it to what it was before. That's the funniest thing I've seen in the game for a while.
This tactic has only one intention and that is to splurge cash. Either on potions or on crystals to get the needed champs.

Amadeo01

So since it must be a well timed block and stun doesn't stop flow anymore, I guess that toggle unblockable nodes are going to be real fun times

PirateJon

@Kabam Miike it was already max 3 stacks at all tiers. Reduce to 1 stack and lower %. Otherwise everyone is forced to use quake.

Kabam Miike

Yeah, looks like I was looking at unused Nodes. This is still going to be where we keep it for now though. We will adjust again if we need to in the future.

jammybstrd

I run cap iw and quake in war, so I've been largely unaffected by this tactic. However, I have watched my alliance mates who do not have the ability to quake or do not have her struggle all season. As an officer, every war has felt like a slog. The mini boss island always results in a pile up, even the ones that can be stunned because control champions are placed everywhere.

How is gaining 4 bars of power in 15 seconds something to work around? Many opponents do not have the tendency to dash right back in and get parried, and the well timed block thing means the only champion I can use at low health is quake. On top of this you have eliminated doom and wasp users ability to shut off flow mid combo, so yeah, nice going.

Because I am the only member of my bg with the counters I am being forced to take 10-11 fights every war, and I dont know how much longer I can keep it up. If I play bad, then we have pile ups on the mini boss island and people throw items and units at the screen to finish. The second to last war was one of these times and having a maintenance in the last hour cost us the war and wasted a lot of people's resources, which we did not even receive compensation for.

This season has been an absolute burnout, we reformed our former p2 ally that disbanded in s9, expecting war to be as fun as it was back then but have since been plagued by flow. People shouldn't have to rank very specific champions that they may even hate using for war.

War is an absolute garbage pile at the moment, and the 'nerf' you have put out is so out of touch with community feedback that I now vehemently believe you guys at kabam do not play your own game.

McCloud33

@Kabam Miike with all do respect, this is a very small change to a tactic that is too OP. There are still nodes like kinetic transference or counter tactics where you don't want to parry.

I'm sure your data will show that nearly every bg in every alliance is using flow every war. The point of def tactics was to allow alliances to choose a tactic that suits their defense. Not choose their defense to fit the over powered tactic.

I know it's probably too late to change this, but some suggestions if you can or decide to in the future...
-Reduce flow from 45%/35% to 30%/20%
-make it so that every bg had to use a different tactic or
-make it so that you can only use a tactic once per week

Those last two will help ensure that all the tactics are actually being used and that every war isn't the same for a while season.

WHOz_R4GE

Kabam the point of Defensive Tactics according to “you” was to make AW Dynamic. Meaning we don’t get the same AW over and over. All this change does is ensure Season 18 will be Flow 12/12 AWS for every alliance tier 5 and above. You might as well remove the other tactics to save the officers the trouble.

KeepinItReal

Mike, pulling let's say even 1-10 out of 170+ Flow counters is completely RNG based. Can buy Vision if reasonably offered again. Plus some just haven't mastered or don't like attacking w/these counters.
Most our allies are F2Play & some simply don't have any solid counters. So really sucks for them bc they struggle, gotta use items, get KO'd, others get frustrated, they feel bad & most have shared they want to take AW S18 off.
Is this worth it for 1 D.Tactic. Uall have ALL the data on AWDefense champs, win %, etc by showing us when u openly disclosed or justified Re-Balancing. So u obviously prefer the items/units/$ spent over the fun, enjoyment & comraderie of allies in their alliance. Uall have been really alienating alot of veteran & F2Players recently. I'm sure 20% of whales create 80% of ur revenue. But if that 20% has nobody to compete against or just 80% doesn't play AWs,...ur gonna lose even more revenue from that game mode. It's just smart business to find a middle ground with MCOCommunity that keeps this game worth sticking around for. Appreciate all the time, effort, energy you/game team put into replying/dealing w/disgruntled customers to evolve in order continually keep us playing. Thank You.

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Kabam Miike

That is fair and constructive feedback! I'll make sure it's passed on to the team. We are not going to change this Node again until you guys have had time to actually experience it and we can gather data on it. But if we find it's still too punishing, we will change it again.

danielmath

Can I possibly get a rank down ticket because i have a COMPLETELY useless pile of garbage rank 3 6* known as ghost? I would rank her down in a heartbeat if i could

Deacon

i can attest to this. every matchup we had this season was Flow. smh i don't see this change doing anything really. what would help is changing the duration of the power gain from 15 seconds to 5 seconds. 10 seconds at the most. the huge problem right now is the rapid acceleration to Sp3 and there's really no hope after that. "just buy all those special 3 boosts man" .. well it shouldn't have to come to that although i'm sure that's the reason that boost has come up so often now.

still, i think reducing the duration of the gain would be fair. it still limits who you can bring but it doesn't force you into praying someone has Guilly or Crossbones.

Sman74

The decisions were made on a number of factors, including the feedback in this thread and other areas of the Community. We agreed that it's too hard to work around, and more punishing in higher tiers (the stack limit was 5 and 4 in the highest tiers).

That is fair and constructive feedback! I'll make sure it's passed on to the team. We are not going to change this Node again until you guys have had time to actually experience it and we can gather data on it. But if we find it's still too punishing, we will change it again.

Messed up the quote feature above, don’t know how to fix. My comment below:

Its not too late to reconsider. We have experienced the node plenty and all the data in this thread clearly shows no one in the player base likes this! It is and will continue to be punishing (a.k.a. NOT fun) with the proposed changes. Please not another season of this.

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jammybstrd

So first of all you guys clarified it clearly as a buff, oblivious to the fact that it wasn't, and when it came out as a passive instead of fixing it you changed the node description.

You then supposedly changed the max stacks from 5 to 3, even though anybody who has ever fought flow knows it has always capped out at 3, and the fact that you thought you changed this is an absolute joke.

Stop pretending you play this game and start listening to what comments people in the thread have made themselves.

Again and again new defence tactics have come out and been unbalanced, does the development team even test these things before they go live?

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Kabam Miike

To be clear, there is no data in this thread, but there are a lot of opinions and feedback, which we take in conjunction with Data and Playtests to make decisions.

We are going to see how this new version affects War, collect Data and more feedback, and then make more decisions on the future of Flow.

Plantesan

Can you bring to the team the idea of possibly adding a filter so alliances can choose to fight with another defense tactic team or no tactic at all? Or similar to AQ, water down the effectiveness to the tactics if you use it more than once an AW cycle.

I’m sure it’s more complex than I’m suggesting, but losing ally mates because you guys want to “challenge” us with this is infuriating. It’s flow wars now, read the room a bit longer please

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Markjv81

Another joke, collect data? Your “changes” imply that data collected showed that max stacks needed to be reduced from 5 to 3 even though 5 never existed.

Kabam Miike

That's an interesting idea. I will definitely raise that to the team (Watering down the effectiveness if used multiple times).

danielmath

But you HAVE all the data don't you? the number of stacks and the power rate, which is what flow does, are not changing and the way to stop flow is basically unchanged in almost all interactions.

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GroundedWisdom

To be the Geico guy, I think people are upset because they wanted it taken out completely, for the most part. Some had suggested limiting it to one Stack. On the other side, they've said it's still meant to provide a challenge, and they were open to changing it again if need be, so I think it's fair to wait and see how things go next Season. You can always come back and register more feedback, but I tend to agree with what I stated earlier. It's meant to provide a certain degree of challenge by limiting what you can use.