Kabam, here is an opportunity. The community has looked at your direction here, it’s not good. You are digging a grave, are you going to jump in and cover yourself up or are you going to read the warning signs. I look at the paths and struggle to think of the small amount of counters, I then remember I need to throw flow or siphon on top and I toss my phone in disgust. This is not a good change and will not solve your war problem. Read the signs
Sorry I am Not interested anymore Alliance war, Just left ally and i am fine without alliance war. It no More fun to me. Its takes My whole day to finish 100% That i do not have anymore.
Note : I am not new Player in mcoc , its 5 years I am with Mcoc and played with Various Master Bracket Alliances.
Demon , Zdoom , EXDO Etc ...
Sorry for mention That ,Before you click Disagree button ,
Do you guys Calculated How Much Energy you need to fully explorer the map per Player ?
Where is stress less ?
Won't be an issue. It just looks bigger. War will still take the same amount of time for Attack either way.
Do you actually play this game?
I doubt it.
Absolutely. You think Tanking is isolated to top Tiers? Hate to break it to you, but Alliances have been doing it below as well. It's been a tactic long enough that word has spread in spades. The lower guys do what the larger guys have been doing. We encounter at least a few in the off-season. 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.
as far as tanking goes i dunno what tier you are in, but.
there is no reason for an alliance to tank in lower tiers there is nothing to gain really. some alliance just use the off season to have more fun, not intentionally tanking but to have fun and try stupid defenses like all groots and stuff like that. maybe there is some tanking but i fail to see how any alliance at say t10 would in anyway benefit from it. wars are easy down there you really wanna be pushing to climb at that point. but, whatever.
i can say at t6 an off season loss will only lose you like 6 WR so even if you lost every off season war you would still be in T6. the only potential benefit is to drop low into t6 to avoid climbing into t5 during season but even then the amount of war rating you can lose will be negated after only a few wins in season. so you really can't tank at that level anymore thats for sure.
There were literally 100s of feedback in the general game issues thread regarding some of the overtly specific and BS nodes in act 6 and 7. You claimed to have understood our feedback but put similar BS nodes in AW now? How do I do ebb and flow against super tricky defenders some of whom I can't parry reliably or activate some form of their toolkit when knocked down. You are also only giving me 6 secs to do ONLY 40% of my damage and then revert back to intercepting/heavy. This is not even taking into consideration the whole aspect of defense tactics. Idk how this is considered fun and enjoyable. The only positive thing from this is the better matchmaking. I'll pass on war, thanks Kabam!
Kabam don’t watch all of this video if you don’t want, fast forward to 16:40. If you like you can even mute the sound but I suggest you don’t. The anguish visually expressed here, the exasperation, the just plain shock and disappointment, a lot of your players are feeling this after this announcement. The fact that the road map to the road map came out 1 day prior makes it so much worse. We all said for a day, well maybe they understand. Then this.
The new map layout actually looks like it will make wars even more stressfull!!!!
Minibosses on nodes 22 and 23 are now back to back instead of side by side, meaning more coordination needed because both minis will need to be down in order to proceed to section 2. Then there is another mini on each path right after, meaning another mini needs to be down before you can proceed to your path in sec2. Combine that additional roadblock with assignments restrictions that the new nodes are bringing, and timezone differences, this new map sneaks in another layer of nuisance that goes completely against what the players want and what kabam said in their roadmap that they would fix.
Unless there is something else in the works, like energy timer reduction or some kind of new portals we are not seeing here, this is one of the most hypocrite things kabam has ever done.
So here's my take on the ten new war node buffs. *Two* make sense to me. *One* is questionable. The rest suck.
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.
This is, without question, the best post I’ve ever seen on this forum.
I thought that as part of the book 2 beta, one of the main learnings they highlighted was they will get rid of the "hope you like intercepting" or you die part. Then they introduce ebb and flow intercept. They also said in earlier war iterations that they learned hidden nodes weren't what they wanted. Now...more hidden nodes. They said they want to move away from "have this specific counter or be punished". Then they purposely do things like stick poison and incinerate together where you only have a few specific counters (iceman, redhulk, mephisto, bwcv), or else you can only hit for half the time, which is asking for a time out. This is a big step backwards in many respects.
Please remove all hidden nodes. Scattering them across the map doesn’t work because not everyone uses the scouter mastery. And masterys are too expensive to reset
It's difficult to comprehend how the Devs think these changes (matchmaking aside) are a good idea.
I'm sure this wasn't the thought process but it looks like you've listened to almost zero feedback and taken a view of how to make war more oppressive than the current iteration. Dumfounded.
I would like to mention that we have ghost as a poison + incinerate immune too unless someone as her hard counter is sitting there it should be possible
and the intercept or die part was about the act6 high values because of which intercepting was necessary while I also do think 90% reduction is very less (its like that caustic temper node right? yup kinda) anyway I wanna wait and see what defense tactics are coming out and what the attack tactics will be
if we have a attack tactic that can kill after one intercept for sure with a fury o high it might not be too bad but lets see
Yep, ghost is certainly an option, but there are plenty of champs ghost can't really deal with, and more come out all the time.
I think you have the right idea for the intercept node. You pretty much need someone who can intercept and then do crazy damage in 6 secs. Corvus S2, Havok S3 type of deal.
So here's my take on the ten new war node buffs. *Two* make sense to me. *One* is questionable. The rest suck.
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.
Kabam please take a look at this because this is well said and very much constructive, i know we haven't tested the new nodes or map as yet but just from looking at things now I'M less interested in doing wars at a competitive level seem too stressful and these new Nodes give me no Hope, hidden Nodes should be eliminated all together, now i see why we got these AW/AQ deals
The fact we now get rewarded for certain nodes is GREAT, main issue is the timings with ebb and flow, 6 seconds is not long enough. One of the knock down ones has heavy hitter, which means come on placement will be champs you cant parry easily, like havok imiw nova mordo, to in order to deal with ebb and flow you will have to reparry (already a hard skill for some) in the case of the first three champs i mentioned, use heavy or specials, and then within 6 seconds do another reparry or intercept and deal as much damage. In 6 second with them getting back up from the knock you will nearly always be only able to get in one 5 combo before protection is back, and will have to repeat this 8 times or so which is not fun at all, if however you increased the timer to a minimum of 12 and preferably 15 seconds this would become more manageable and we as summoners would be able to enjoy the 40% fury alot more, ebb and flow intercept similarly and increase in precision timer would but by less maybe like 9 second due to when you knock the opponent down it taking 1-2 second to recover and even have a chance at getting an a opening and could be longer due to specials or passive A, but with an intercept you get an opening as you are mid combo, so naturally the timer for knockdown should be longer none the less. To complain about making us intercept is unfair as it is a key late game skill, they just need to tweak the timers lengths of the "rewards" for completing the task and it will make it more balanced. I honestly have no idea how 6 second could be seen as fair, against a vanilla champ like cap marvel classic yeah but people will always placed champs on the hardest, but with a havok on ebb and flow knock down and heavy hitter a 6 second timer would be ridiculous and as you would be doing max 5 hit combo every 6 second timer and thats if your lucky. Currently i am assuming the hits that knock the defender down, e.g last hit of heavy or special and the hit that intercepts are under the protection, if this inst the case and those hits do normal damage then 10 seconds fury for knock down and 8 second for precision would for intercept would be fair in my opinion. Also tenacity intercept, come on that is gonna be rhino heaven as slow are gonna keep failing to apply. A great direction but still stuff to learn, maybe i am wrong and if so apologise, but i do not believe you will have tested 6 second fury and precision timers with ebb and flow knock down heavy hitter with havok and ebb and flow intercept tenacity with rhino with the team. If 10 members of your team who play at a plat 4 or above level can pull of the solo of those two with reliability then fair but i would argue you to test amongst your self with the HARDEST placement, and CCP if needs be especially when it comes to war as i fear this is something often forgotten as otherwise these nodes wouldn't be as they currently are. Hope someone from kabam reads this and understand my points and maybe when the map come out i will be proven wrong but with the current descriptions and node i fear i wont be and it will be as utterly draining as it seems, you guys are nearly getting there and sounds like many great things to come but taking some time to truly think about the worse possible scenario and testing it is what we all need from you guys.
if we have a attack tactic that can kill after one intercept for sure with a fury o high it might not be too bad but lets see
Even if this was an attack tactic (which there’s absolutely no way it will be), why is there the week delay between announcements? Releasing that info a week apart is just going to cause a week of immense frustration for players and further the gap between players and kabam.
Kabam continues to say they want to work on communication with the player base, this is not the way to do it.
Well, I am a guy who is always against kabam money grabbing ideas and come on the forum only for negative feedback.
But the aw is not a single player content. You are fighting against other alliances. Ofc there should be difficult nodes. If everybody goes 100% and 0 kills , how would you make the difference?
This is not on Kabam. This is on people who are spending like crazy. You want to win everytime? Pay.
Sure that tactics sucks and hard/impossible to compensate only with skill. But those tricky nodes are supposed to see who is smarter on placement and skillful and organized in attack.
Well, I am a guy who is always against kabam money grabbing ideas and come on the forum only for negative feedback.
But the aw is not a single player content. You are fighting against other alliances. Ofc there should be difficult nodes. If everybody goes 100% and 0 kills , how would you make the difference?
This is not on Kabam. This is on people who are spending like crazy. You want to win everytime? Pay.
Sure that tactics sucks and hard/impossible to compensate only with skill. But those tricky nodes are supposed to see who is smarter on placement and skillful and organized in attack.
Did you read their roadmap? Or what the player base has been saying about war? War is supposed to be competitive. Not flat out item-throwing contest. People who pay, pay for champs and to get through regular content. That's up to them. Doesn't mean that Kabam can throw whatever garbage they want as nodes and you blame the paying players.
Comments
there is no reason for an alliance to tank in lower tiers there is nothing to gain really.
some alliance just use the off season to have more fun, not intentionally tanking but to have fun and try stupid defenses like all groots and stuff like that.
maybe there is some tanking but i fail to see how any alliance at say t10 would in anyway benefit from it. wars are easy down there you really wanna be pushing to climb at that point.
but, whatever.
i can say at t6 an off season loss will only lose you like 6 WR so even if you lost every off season war you would still be in T6.
the only potential benefit is to drop low into t6 to avoid climbing into t5 during season but even then the amount of war rating you can lose will be negated after only a few wins in season. so you really can't tank at that level anymore thats for sure.
Kabam don’t watch all of this video if you don’t want, fast forward to 16:40. If you like you can even mute the sound but I suggest you don’t. The anguish visually expressed here, the exasperation, the just plain shock and disappointment, a lot of your players are feeling this after this announcement. The fact that the road map to the road map came out 1 day prior makes it so much worse. We all said for a day, well maybe they understand. Then this.
I am done commenting said my piece
Minibosses on nodes 22 and 23 are now back to back instead of side by side, meaning more coordination needed because both minis will need to be down in order to proceed to section 2. Then there is another mini on each path right after, meaning another mini needs to be down before you can proceed to your path in sec2. Combine that additional roadblock with assignments restrictions that the new nodes are bringing, and timezone differences, this new map sneaks in another layer of nuisance that goes completely against what the players want and what kabam said in their roadmap that they would fix.
Unless there is something else in the works, like energy timer reduction or some kind of new portals we are not seeing here, this is one of the most hypocrite things kabam has ever done.
This Continuous handicap will send me to AQ only; thus improving my game life as I was hoping for anyway.
See....u solved the Problem through chaos 🤦🏻♂️
Quest Rebalance – Evaluating timers, energy, and node design options to reduce stress
Yet here we are with a “brand new AW” that completely ignores 2 of the 3 points.
Everyone was massively optimistic after reading the roadmap but the first thing released after it is a complete fail.
I'm sure this wasn't the thought process but it looks like you've listened to almost zero feedback and taken a view of how to make war more oppressive than the current iteration. Dumfounded.
I think you have the right idea for the intercept node. You pretty much need someone who can intercept and then do crazy damage in 6 secs. Corvus S2, Havok S3 type of deal.
Kabam continues to say they want to work on communication with the player base, this is not the way to do it.
But the aw is not a single player content. You are fighting against other alliances. Ofc there should be difficult nodes. If everybody goes 100% and 0 kills , how would you make the difference?
This is not on Kabam. This is on people who are spending like crazy. You want to win everytime? Pay.
Sure that tactics sucks and hard/impossible to compensate only with skill. But those tricky nodes are supposed to see who is smarter on placement and skillful and organized in attack.