**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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Way back in the Season 3 announcement it was stated "100% exploration should be a rare instance". Is this still the goal @Kabam Miike ?
What gets old is we don’t even have to play the map, we can read the nodes listed and instantly warn them what will happen. They won’t listen, they will push this out regardless and it will blow up in their face. Maybe this time they pause and change before they step in it, but I doubt it.
Easy. Nothing about the new war is any different than the old war. It's more of the same. And where AW was one of the biggest issues for the community, I would have expected some mention of how Kabam views any of this as an improvement.
More nodes that require specific counters. More nodes to counter Quake. More nodes where we deal reduced damage. Back to more hidden nodes requiring wasted mastery points. I cannot imagine a scenario in which the "Attacker Tactics" sufficiently counter any of this BS (especially once the Defense Tactics are announced). I can only guess that Kabam is counting on the rewards being the enticement to continue dealing with this horrible game mode. I had high hopes after the blog post yesterday, this one brought me back down to wanting to retire.
The two that make sense to me: Strike Counter - Fury and Buff Imbalance - Weakness. Strike Counter - Fury has a skill component (balancing attack charges) and a reasonable penalty if you mess up - defender gets fury passives until you reset the counters. Compare this to Strike Counter - Combat Power Rate. This is like SC-F except if you mess up the charges your combat power rate goes down. Combat power rate is the rate at which you gain power when you attack. Which you need to use specials. If you somehow find yourself with no charges and also no power, you're out of luck unless you have some other way to gain power. This isn't an inescapable problem, but it seems without intrinsic power gain the fight could reach degenerate states. And maybe the final numbers will make this not as bad as it seems. But it is still, from an overarching design perspective, something I wouldn't want to do.
Buff Imbalance - Weakness has a tactical element to it. As it is a debuff, it is something you could use to heal from with Willpower. And Weakness doesn't reduce your ability to throw specials, so you can get out of the weakness debuff. This means the attacker has significant theoretical control over this node's effects, and can attempt to manipulate them to their advantage. On the surface, this is a more balanced punishment/reward node.
Steady Buildup -X does have some pros and cons to it. But they both hinge on the attacker purifying debuffs, which is only rarely something a player can use skill to do (Ghost, for example). Most of the time, this is an ability thing, which means these nodes mandate specific champions more than they mandate more tactical or skillful play. They aren't horrible, but they aren't especially good additions either.
Both Ebb and Flow nodes reduce damage by 90% when their conditions aren't met. in my opinion, this is numbers theater. Alliance war fights are timed. Reducing damage by 90% means you're almost certainly going to time out, so whether the node reduces damage by 90% or 100%, the net result is going to be the same most of the time: a loss. You pretty much have to satisfy the conditions. And unlike the original Aegis node that probably inspired these, you have to keep doing the thing over and over and over and over again. Ebb and Flow - intercept is kind of like Aegis intercept, except you have to be able to do it repeatedly, and it will be inflicted on lower tier alliances now. I suspect the 90% was a way to "counter-balance" the need to reapply every six seconds, and justify applying it to lower tier alliance maps. If so, the whole idea is wrong. The node is harder, but being used lower, and that's an overall increase in pain being inflicted for no obvious reason.
Buff Imbalance - Power Gain suffers from a similar problem as Strike Counter - Combat Power Gain. The "punishment" is to drain your power, and you can end the punishment by using a special attack. This is a gotcha node: screw up, and you're permanently screwed.
Window of Opportunity - Stun, as I said, might as well be called "Intercept or Die." For 12 seconds at a time you can't stun the defender at all, or you'll be stunned for four seconds. Four seconds is a very long time in AW. Twelve seconds is also a very long time in AW, given fights are 180 seconds long. I think if you can't intercept here, you're much more likely to time out if you're cautious or die if you're aggressive.
Hazard Shift - Incinerate/Poison is the one I think is questionable. I guess you can go in there with Iceman or Red Hulk, or Mephisto if you ranked him up, and just ignore the node. Or you can use a strong AAR champ. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the devs picked those two debuffs because of the very low overlap between them, forcing players to either come up with one of the few double counters, or just lose half the time in the fight. Which again, is an attempt to leverage the clock directly.
In my opinion, the devs should *never* be directly and blatantly leveraging the clock. The clock exists to prevent all sorts of exploits and other problems, so we accept the clock as a compromise. But when the devs say "haha you can't finish in three minutes because I slowed the entire fight down" that's not competition. GG devs you beat me. But wasn't the other alliance supposed to beat me?
So two yes, one eh, and seven I'll pass.
I'm in an alliance that gives up five losses at the start of every season with two battlegroups to give weaker players full participation, then wins six or seven of the rest with one battlegroup. And even that half-hearted effort now has us in tier 7, within striking distance of landing in Hard maps, because as I see it war has devolved into a handful of alliances fighting for real, and the rest of the world not even trying because it is not worth it, and they probably don't even want to win too often, lest they become victims of the next iteration of "make war even more interesting." And this seems to just be more of the same: let's make war even more interesting, because players are just falling asleep bored while fighting in alliance war.
I wouldn't mind seeing these nodes in a Variant quest. But the problem with these nodes in Alliance War is not that they aren't creative enough or interesting enough. It is that they are designed to push people to fail, so that they have some new challenge to climb. I want that in solo optional content. I don't want that in alliance war.
I don't know why this is so hard to convey. I want an interesting job. But if you show up to my office and pour Coca Cola into my laptop and throw half the notes on my desk into the shredder 15 minutes before I'm supposed to do some critical work, I'm not going to enjoy that. Because you just increased my chances of publicly and spectacularly failing my company and my customer. I want challenges, but I don't want artificial challenges and I don't want crazy challenges when other people are counting on me. I've had those happen occasionally: they make you grow old, and are to be prevented at all costs.
The alliance war designers should ask themselves how much challenge they want when they are closing in on deadlines and the merge window is closing and their work has already been publicly announced and the rest of the company is counting on them. And then give me that. This is not that.
And this is just the new nodes. Hidden mini bosses all over the place, when we've established that hidden nodes eliminate counterplay? This was *settled* two iterations of war ago. Hidden nodes eliminate counterplay. Kabam conceded the point, so seeing all those hidden nodes sends the message they would rather have chaos and random punishment than counterplay.
I pulled back from doing competitive wars a while back, as the only way I could respond to what i saw as unreasonable issues with war. I'm now wondering if the day is approaching when participation on *any* level will be intolerable, because war isn't about beating the other alliance, it is about beating the war designer. And I'm just not good enough to beat them.
It is so ingrained that mild is awful, so anyone who complains about the spice level must in fact be asking for a different kind of spice, they cannot possibly be asking for it to be less flaming hot. They won't even acknowledge that "less spicy" is a thing. Maybe if we add even more spice it will numb the customer's taste buds enough to enjoy the dish!
At some point, you just have to stick to the french fries. And hope they don't start seasoning them.
Then... isn't it same with very old one aw matchmaking ?
and the conclusion will be : High alliance rating will present in Top tier AW ?
Please enlighten...
Also, "It's going to happen anyway." is about as much of a justification as it gets. One that has never been valid in my books. Breaking the system to appease larger Allies who have no issues steamrolling whoever they want "cause hard knocks and stuff" is not a better system. That's not the least bit fair to anyone, regardless of who believes people don't deserve to compete higher up. A viable solution would prevent either problem. Not trade one for the other.