What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
I'm not disputing that, of course it was intentional, doesn't however change the fact that it's **** to pull that off just so you can sell counters if people want to be able to enjoy BGs. I never buy pre-release bundles however I'm pretty much forced to do so with Shathra if I don't want to get wiped out again and again next meta with rich get richer.
You say they're not dumb enough yet DLL already quite literally said there will never be a Galan Peni situation where a defender becomes completely irrelevant due to a hard counter.
i'm not pretending to like serpent. i don't. i'm not prepared to fight him in bgs because i'm not great at deck making and drafting, so i ban him. do i wish he was toned down? yeah, but when was the last time a defender existed in the game with no good counters? let's count.
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
I've seen a few new points being discussed and what @ESF tests, it raised some really concern regarding these new Defensive champions, as well as Kabam "new" business and design strategy.
1) @ESF 's Testing - What perfectly demonstrated the main concern of these new Defenders (for me these include, Serpent, Enchantress and even Bulleyes). these champions Defensive abilities are turn up to the very top (with Serpent being over the top) that any additional Node added to them either through AW, BG or Questing, will/could make them a roadblock.
While Enchantress (and to a lesser extent Bulleyes) can normally be counter with some level of skills, they can easily become "unwinnable" with the additional of Nodes, and many other shown/explained the various reason why Serpent is already "unwinnable" with his kits alone.
This lead to the second point:-
2) There will be counter - Of we all know Kabam business strategy, "Create Challenges and Sell the Solution" and to be fair it worked well for the last 10 years (I just think that the balance is lost, which a dangerous thing).
Yes, there will be counter, the problem is, Kabam (and really for the health of the game) would not want to create an Attacker that is too strong and unbalance. However (this someone else that point it out, and it is very good point, so I take no credit for it), for an Attacker to counter all of these abilities themselves will be too strong as an Attackers. So what Kabam have done in recently is creating a champion with all the ability to counter the Problem Defender, but extremely weak on damage output, Iron Heart, NTW and Patriot are perfect example of this.
So what we end up with is "hard" counter that is too slow or soft counter that doesn't work with any additional Node.
This is lead to third point:-
3) Kabam is creating problem for themselves - I have listen to DLL stream, and in there he explain why certain champions have not been consider for release as 7* yet, and it isn't always about how strong they are (i.e how much damage they can do), it can also be because something about their abilities that would make it difficult to design new champions around. Essential these champions abilities create restriction, difficulty and challenges for Kabam design champions and content around. These are mostly Attackers, as in the pass we tent to have more OP Attackers.
However with these new Defensive champions, which Kabam "might" not realise yet, is that they are now creating new challenge for themselves. With champions that have too many Defensive abilities that it would be tricky for Kabam create content around them too.
These Defenders become "unwinnable", have 2 or 3 on a BG dex, sure you can ban them, what happen when we get to 4 or 5. "Hard" counter are too slow, soft counter stop working.
Is Kabam are now going to careful review and take into consideration each AW, BG or Questing Node and how it will interact with these Defenders?
Is Kabam going to stop using these Defenders in MEQs (we all seen how often, an Armour Break immune champ been place in a Node that require breaking Armour lol)?
Kabam is create a lot more work, problem for themselves with these champions.
"Create Challenges and Sell the Solution" - this is what I always say, because it should be a "Challenges", but right it starting to be "Creating a Problem and the Sold solution doesn't work".
I like many other have said, we want Kabam to do well, we want MCOC to be successful, just hopeful Kabam management team could sit down and review this.
As a community, I think I remember @Thokk150 said it best. "So as a community we shouldn't stop caring or calm down but we should instead learn how to better communicate our feelings, because us and kabam both, even though sometimes it's not easy to see it, all care about the game and its health."
The Banquet event is coming soon, please give the players, the community some reassurance, something they can start rebuild the trust in Kabam, a reason to spend their hard earn money into the game (and not just the newest, shiniest champions).
Hope everyone have a good day, now I better get back to work lol
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
I'm not disputing that, of course it was intentional, doesn't however change the fact that it's **** to pull that off just so you can sell counters if people want to be able to enjoy BGs. I never buy pre-release bundles however I'm pretty much forced to do so with Shathra if I don't want to get wiped out again and again next meta with rich get richer.
You say they're not dumb enough yet DLL already quite literally said there will never be a Galan Peni situation where a defender becomes completely irrelevant due to a hard counter.
i'm not pretending to like serpent. i don't. i'm not prepared to fight him in bgs because i'm not great at deck making and drafting, so i ban him. do i wish he was toned down? yeah, but when was the last time a defender existed in the game with no good counters? let's count.
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
All defenders in the game should have decent counters, even back in the day when Domino Thing and Korg were released there were ways to either counter them with skill alone or kits. There has never been a single defender in the game that had zero good counters, yes I know Chavez this Kushala that etc they're very slow, until we get Shathra there are no true good counters for him and that's simply not fair. Especially if you're doing it to milk future champs even further, it's messed up.
No we haven't, that's where you and the rest of the people on this thread are wrong. We have never been through this cause there has never been a defender as ridiculously broken as Serpent, even Domino on release when there were no aar immune champs wasn't as broken as this guy.
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
So… here’s the thing. To me it’s not so much the Serpent that I ultimately care about but the design direction he represents. At the base level you are right about the cycle of create a problem then sell the solution. Skill abilities and mutants that punish purify represent this pattern well enough.
Skill defenders like Korg, have this pesky ability to purify our parry stuns. There are mutants who can counter this by replacing the purified stun with a passive, NTW was recently released with only passives to address this. Players were given an option to buy the solution or if they developed the light intercepts skills to fight Korg, they are rewarded through skilled gameplay and do not need to purchase her.
Serpent’s kit as pointed out, repeatedly, lacks this type of interaction entirely. There is no reward for performing any skill based abilities as part of his kit. You are forced to bring a counter to his abilities, which are numerous and well designed to support each other, or you have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the fight. And even if you win the fight, you probably still lost the round.
The kit almost feels coercive, like it creates a buy more counters or lose vibe. You can’t use skills for this challenge, counters only. It almost trivially turns BGs matches into RNG deck interactions.
I think it’s toxic to the long term health of the game, as I enjoy it, to have defenders that trivialize skill like this. This game has always been interesting because it ask players to have a good mixture of knowledge, skills, roster and applying that mix to its problems. If one of these things is short, then strength in another area can help solve the problem as there are multiple pathways open to solve it.
The Serpent’s design only leaves a few very narrow pathways to beating him… and skill is trivialized to the point of barely relevant. You have to has a roster counter and knowledge of how to use it, if you don’t… we’ll see above. Ultimately at this point, he’s an N of 1, and I view this thread as my approach to provide feedback that ideally ends up with Kabam revisiting this decision but hopefully keeps him as an N of 1. Because if he’s the only defender designed like this, then it’s controllable through bans. If it continues though, and we get more champs like this, then it’s going to create a situation where BGs become purely about deck RNG and it will kill the mode in the long run.
You are spot on @Fryday . The last few bg metas made serpent go nuts.
That passive fury on specials + start with one bar of power - Serpent can throw big specials and cannot be nuked by 95% of champs thanks to death immunity.
Archaos - crush/unblockable with his undexable specials.
Extend - Should I have to say? Lol.
Power snack VT meta - Makes it easy for him to reach sp3.
Regen on block gc meta - Makes it almost unkillable
Crit me with your best shot (next bg meta) - Good luck with his crit resistance and crit damage resistance.
Serpent, photon and bullseye can easily be made headache defenders by combining a few normal nodes.
I bet serpent is unkillable in force of will + extend combo, both nodes are extremely common.
Also any defenders who can only be countered by AAR is a poor design, just because nodes like force of will are pretty common
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
We must persevere until the mods see this thread.
They've seen the Thread.
You're not a forum guardian, stop acting like one.
I'm not. The Thread has been up for 7 days. Anyone visiting the Forum in the last week has seen the Thread. Considering it's their job, that's an obvious conclusion.
Based on the fact that forums don’t even get banners on the raids situation and are getting the news from other people screenshotting Discord, this may be a bolder conclusion than you think.
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
We must persevere until the mods see this thread.
They've seen the Thread.
There's no evidence that they have seen this thread, no replies or responses from mods, etc.
There's no evidence a lot of stuff gets reviewed. But it will have been - by a moderator.
There are still some moderators around; but moderators will be checking for stuff that breaks forum rules, and then moving on.
Keeping us happy isn't their job; and providing information to Kabam may not be their job, either. It may literally be above their pay grade.
That's the role of community managers; and the new ones just aren't up to it, yet.
It remains to be seen if they ever will be - the limited evidence available suggests that it isn't a very high priority for them...
If keeping us happy isn't their job then why should we just suck it up and move on? If they have the right to not care enough to even say something then we have a right to continue complaining as much as we want on this thread. Fair trade lol.
Yep, go for it.
I agree with the majority of what you're saying; and I support the ongoing discussion.
My point was to differentiate between basic forum moderators (who almost certainly have noticed a thread 20 pages long, but whose job isn't to keep us happy) from the community managers (whose job is, at least partially, to keep us happy)
The thread is getting read; both by moderators and forum Guardians.
I just don't know if it's being read by the right people.
And if it is getting read by the right people, they clearly don't know how to respond 🤷♂️😟.
I miss the days where we knew if they were engaging in a conversation or not. And where we got yellow banners for issues. That’s it. I find the current communication approach on the forums is to read only.
I wouldn't wanna be in the mods' place right now. They didn't decide on serpent's rebalancing but are left to deal with it's fallout. And while I trust the devs know what they are doing and probably already have more serpent answers in the pipeline, it's frustrating for the players who don't have much else to go on other than "He is working as intended and hits our design goals".
Eventually, Serpent will probably stabilize but he surely hasn't as of yet, unlike what the balancing post claims.
You are spot on @Fryday . The last few bg metas made serpent go nuts.
That passive fury on specials + start with one bar of power - Serpent can throw big specials and cannot be nuked by 95% of champs thanks to death immunity.
Archaos - crush/unblockable with his undexable specials.
Extend - Should I have to say? Lol.
Power snack VT meta - Makes it easy for him to reach sp3.
Regen on block gc meta - Makes it almost unkillable
Crit me with your best shot (next bg meta) - Good luck with his crit resistance and crit damage resistance.
Serpent, photon and bullseye can easily be made headache defenders by combining a few normal nodes.
I bet serpent is unkillable in force of will + extend combo, both nodes are extremely common.
Also any defenders who can only be countered by AAR is a poor design, just because nodes like force of will are pretty common
The main issue isn't the critical resistance itself, which is 15%. The real problem lies with the critical penetration resistance. If u want an intuitive idea on this look at Man-thing, critical hits does no bonus damage because he has 100% critical penetration resistance( he has 0 critical resistance though but that would not matter), I know its not written on his kit explicitly but its what essentially means...Critical hits typically bypass 80% of the armor rating, but if you have 60% resistance to this(which serpent has in BGs due to his 3 dread charges), it changes things. If this resistance is a flat value, it means only 20% of your armor will be ignored instead of the usual 80%. If it's multiplicative, then 32% of your armor would be bypassed...Things are not looking great in either of the scenario...
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
I'm not disputing that, of course it was intentional, doesn't however change the fact that it's **** to pull that off just so you can sell counters if people want to be able to enjoy BGs. I never buy pre-release bundles however I'm pretty much forced to do so with Shathra if I don't want to get wiped out again and again next meta with rich get richer.
You say they're not dumb enough yet DLL already quite literally said there will never be a Galan Peni situation where a defender becomes completely irrelevant due to a hard counter.
i'm not pretending to like serpent. i don't. i'm not prepared to fight him in bgs because i'm not great at deck making and drafting, so i ban him. do i wish he was toned down? yeah, but when was the last time a defender existed in the game with no good counters? let's count.
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
There isn’t a single champion who upheaves competitive play in such a way as Serpent though. He is an auto win because there’s simply nobody that can take him down competitively. With every other defender there have been options available to do it. Chavez is okay assuming you have AI cooperation. Kushala is still slow and doesn’t really deal with any of his threats, just slow burns him. And I know people just say “ban him” but that’s not healthy either. I’m just worried how this will snowball. First it was Bullseye, then Serpent. Enchantress is somewhat manageable but what’s next? What happens when 2 champs have to be auto banned. Then 3 just because their abilities are so punishing you can’t deal with it until they release some counter god knows when? Serpent has like 25 defensive abilities. It’s absolutely insane.
If you don't match a Serpent, of equal rarity, you're losing in GC against a similarly skilled player. I've done a 60 second 100% against an r3 Serpent. I've seen perfect Tigra takedowns lose fairly often too.
Serpent shouldn't be countering the mystic class. Class relationships and masteries should not be messed with. His kit is so rigged that everyone has forgotten his special attacks being undexable from the start 😂
So do you want them to change Magneto too?
Magneto was and should be the only exception given the nature of his powers. Serpent has ABSOLUTELY no reasonable explanation of him being able bypass the ENTIRE MYSTIC CLASS. This all started with mystic defenders slowly becoming nullify immune, then it went on to fateseal then stagger we let it slide because alot of people on here were defending kabam and explaining how cosmic defenders need It or else any mystic would be able to take them out easily. It wasn't that big of a deal because tigra started gaining popularity for her neutralize which was our escape from big cosmic mystic countering threats. We let it slide but now SERPENT is able to BYPASS EVERY MYSTIC ABILITY and kabam has now introduced a science champion who has UNCLEANSABLE debuffs, this could only be the beginning of more skill countering science champions. If the community does not start stating their disapproval on these things, it will only continue just like the photon undexable specials which we let slide because she was a well rounded champion and 2023 champions were mostly HITS and now we have serpent. Photon started the willpower mastery tampering, now we had onslaught as if his special attacks weren't hard enough to dex and the UNAVOIDABLE neuroshock damage you took by making one mistake weren't enough, he also punishes you for PARRYING(which is a mastery itself and a skill we all learnt) which now shuts of willpower as well in the process). We then had bullseye who also punished you for DEXING with the instant bleeds(thank GOD it got removed), then dust who shuts off WILLPOWER AS WELL and now serpent. This has got to stop please...
So they shouldn't introduce any new challenges within Champion kits for the duration of the game? I think that's called Candy Crush.
See, it’s this kind of Straw Man that actually hurts legitimate, honest and fair criticism.
Nobody is talking about “the duration of the game.” We’re talking a specific kit with a specific set of mechanics.
He gave specific examples of what game design can turn into when various accepted rules of the game being played start being disregarded — anything can be coded into the game to make it challenging, but that doesn’t make it fair.
You mentioned Magneto, whose status as a character/kit that is effective against Metal is simply an outlier even in the lore — the character itself is one that Sentinels have never really had an answer for. It’s the CHARACTER, not the KIT.
In this case, the kit is specifically designed with multiple carveouts meant to disregard class traits. That is not even remotely the same
The KITs are based on the CHARACTERs. They're one and the same. They're also two completely different things as one is a comic book story the other is a video game. Can't have it both ways and you also can't just make em interchangeable with each other. That's not how it works.
What are you saying? I am totally confused. It’s a video game that primarily uses comic book characters, and the rules for the vast, vast, vast majority of those characters comes from the lore of the comics.
But the game has clearly established rules — you can’t have the game tout its “RPG Elements” when anyone who has ever played an RPG knows that the character encounters are ALWAYS based on rules.
Everyone understands that the Class Wheel and the traits are the rules of THIS GAME. We also understand that means in this game, yeah, Black Cat can actually beat the Hulk with a whole bunch of Bleeds.
No one came in here and said, “You know, I am really uncomfortable with Black Cat soloing Overseers armed with a Cosmic Cube. Nerf that kit.”
Because we do get that it’s a game, and if a Skill kit is tough on a Science kit, I get it. We all get it. Purify and cleanse and bleed and etc., all day long.
How, exactly, is Serpent adhering to the rules of the game, as a Cosmic character with overall immunity to Fate Seal, specific immunities of Stagger and Nullify only to serve a specific mechanic, and enhanced resistance to Neutralize?
In every RPG game I've ever played, no "RPG rule' was ever absolute. There was never a Rock Always Beats Scissors rule. There were always exceptions to those rules. More importantly, even calling them exceptions implies the rules were absolute but with carve out exceptions. That was not generally the case. Rather, the rules dictated how things worked in general, as a kind of baseline, but with a lot of room for more complexity, and different rules and effects interacted in different, sometimes complex ways.
Take the all time classic MMORPG class rule of Tank, DPS, Heal. Even there, most games evolved those classes so that tanks could sometimes do significant damage, healers could sometimes tank, DPS could sometimes offer support. The idea that those roles should be black and white and absolute, and bending them hurt the games because they weakened those roles and made teaming redundant is an argument I participated in literally hundreds of times. Most of the time the absolutists were ultimately on the losing side of that argument, because absolute rules like that are ultimately more stifling than beneficial.
There was never really a time in MCOC where Mystic > Cosmic was an absolute rule. In the old days, class identity was so weak that there was no way to enforce the rule. There was just class advantage and that was it. These days class identities are more complex than just the class definitions, and because they are more complex, interactions between champions follow more complex rules than just the class identity relationships. Class relationships are more general rules of thumb, but with a ton of divergences.
And not only is there no rule prohibiting exceptions to class relationships, there's actually a very good reason for the rule to be explicitly broken. My recollection is that Kabam did mention this somewhere, but I can't think of where. Regardless, the reason why class relationships cannot be absolute is because in an era where the game has movedd to more RPG-like game mechanics and difficulty design, absolute class relationships hurt the primary reason why kabam is doing RPG-like design in the first place: roster checks. They want content to challenge players' rosters. They want content where the counter to this is that, and possessing the best counters offers significant advantages. This has to be tempered, of course, you don't want most content to be too restrictive, but it also doesn't make sense for counters to be so ubiquitous that everyone always has the best counters all the time available. That makes the whole enterprise meaningless.
Basically, if Mystic always beats Cosmic, and Cosmic always beats Tech, and so on, then that means you can't make a Cosmic defender that particularly challenges anyone's roster, because all Mystics would work. So you want design room to make champs that rely on specific mechanics that are not completely widespread. Mechanics strongly associated with class identity are, by definition, very widespread. Average defenders can be reasonably taken down by an entire class of champion. But deliberately hard defenders require a more restrictive set of counters.
“Always” is working really hard here — I am not saying every Mystic character needs to be able to beat every Cosmic character.
Guillotine doesn’t have Neutralize or Stagger. Absorbing Man doesn’t have Fate Seal. So on and so forth. So yeah, I actually am pretty aware that not only is it obvious Mystic doesn’t always beat or is the best use-case against Cosmic, in this specific use case, it is obvious that every single Mystic wouldn’t have the tools to beat Serpent.
Which is the point.
Nobody, including me, is begging for a catch-all for an entire class to beat a 5/5 defender.
What I am saying is that it’s absolutely ridiculous to have that kit have plenty of Cosmic strengths but specific carveouts for multiple Cosmic weaknesses — you can’t truly believe four carveouts for this specific kit is “fair.”
I feel like I am taking crazy pills with this conversation — they literally carved out the exceptions because these are the rules. No one is saying “Hey! Why can’t Iron Fist beat the Serpent?! He’s Mystic!!!”
To be honest, the reason why I mostly stayed out of this conversation until it had time to work itself out is precisely for this reason. You claim Serpent is "breaking the rules." When I make reasonable assumptions about what those rules even are, you're quick to nit pick them.
So you tell me: by what design justification do you claim there is a rule that says Cosmic champs should always be vulnerable to fate seal, stagger, and nullify? How do you justify this statement: "how, exactly, is Serpent adhering to the rules of the game, as a Cosmic character with overall immunity to Fate Seal, specific immunities of Stagger and Nullify only to serve a specific mechanic, and enhanced resistance to Neutralize? What rule is he breaking? Because I'm not going to give you the benefit of the doubt, if the fact you aren't actually making a complete argument is something you're going to treat as a strength and not a weakness.
Serpent is breaking no explicit game design rule I'm aware of, and no explicit rule you've stated, and I will now assume that if you don't articulate one, it is because you don't actually know of one and are hoping no one notices.
And by the way, when you say "Everyone understands that the Class Wheel and the traits are the rules of THIS GAME" what exactly do you mean by that. Because apparently not everyone understands that. Either you don't, or I don't.
Interesting line of attack because it opens you up to the absurd. Can you find a rule that states explicitly that a champion cannot randomly rotate between the defensive kits of enchantress, serpent, photon and bullseye chosen at the moment you enter the fight? Furthermore, on this ground alone that it isn’t “explicitly stated” you would you say that the existence of such a character is wholly justified? Is there a rule anywhere saying, explicitly, that a champion should have a single counter even able to solo the champion within the allotted time of a BG round? What about not even being able to take 50% of their health? 25%? Even if there is some post somewhere saying they want champions to be soloable within a BG round, is there anything saying you should be able to do it while not losing 90% of your health in the process? I can keep dreaming up stupid things which aren’t explicitly stated but the entire community and (im almost sure) the design team wouldnt agree with but the point is made.
Pretending there arent some aspects of consistency expected across the experience regardless of whether those aspects are stated or not is a ridiculous position. Moreover, serpent was meant to be fought with mystics, thats an obvious inference considering they built a tool into his kit that limits the interaction other classes can have with his abilities. They then systematically pruned him of every weakness which allows mystics to deal with cosmics in the first place.
Human Torch actually looks like a decent option (though he takes a lot of block damage). Now if only he was a 7*
Negative can kill an r3 photon in 20 seconds this meta. Silk could take attuma during sugar pill. Serpent is a defender every meta. If he only works now he isnt a counter
Human Torch actually looks like a decent option (though he takes a lot of block damage). Now if only he was a 7*
Negative can kill an r3 photon in 20 seconds this meta. Silk could take attuma during sugar pill. Serpent is a defender every meta. If he only works now he isnt a counter
The actual person who made this vid is capping hard, not to mention judging from his reply to one of the guy's comment, dude doesn't even know that Sui- masteries gives you 60% damage boost
Eh I’m the minority here but I think not nerfing him is fine. He’s harder for sure with certain nodes but he’s far from an insurmountable opponent still lol
Eh I’m the minority here but I think not nerfing him is fine. He’s harder for sure with certain nodes but he’s far from an insurmountable opponent still lol
Wait until Serpent starts coming to quests. Wait until we have to fight a Serpent with extend, rich get richer, and Lazarus. Then see how much fun you have. And one custom made node just for Serpent that prevents his power from being manipulated in any way.
Human Torch actually looks like a decent option (though he takes a lot of block damage). Now if only he was a 7*
Negative can kill an r3 photon in 20 seconds this meta. Silk could take attuma during sugar pill. Serpent is a defender every meta. If he only works now he isnt a counter
Brian Grant did a great stream on this that I finally got to watch, where he reacted to Lagacy’s rant on Serpent and he really does a great job further articulating the pain points in the design on top of this thread (as did Lags in his rant).
BG said something that I thought was great. Serpent has as much going on as a chapter endboss with no nodes going on. If this kit was in story mode and we only saw it there or in boss rushes with some additional nodes the. I don’t think anybody would care. We’d probably even celebrate it. But as soon as you add battlegrounds nodes even a single node can boost him to tiers others just don’t get to enjoy.
- Vital Strikes - free regen every special, because he wasn’t tanky enough. Better dex those specials, oh wait you can’t 😜
- Rich get Richer, well really anymore that gives him more power - When 3 sources of power gain and passive AI that prioritizes sp3 isn’t enough, here’s more power. Draft Chavez, Wigra Wiccan, or Sympreme or die. And yes it’s a reasonable expectation of balance to require you to roster 4 champs, hope none of them get banned and give you a 30ish% chance to actually draft one. Oh and if you draft one, chances are you’ll lose anyways regardless of how perfectly you play provided your opponent is equally skilled and doesn’t mess up.
-Random Unblockable and Crushed effects - make sure you Dex that special! Oh wait, you still can’t
And then the other take BG had that I think is fully on point, is how is fighting a character that can gain half a bar of power or more during his special animations even that fun to fight? You really only get minuscule windows to actually fight him before you are back to baiting and blocking specials. Outside of all the balance discussions, he’s simply just this weird blend of stressful and boring to fight because of this.
Eh I’m the minority here but I think not nerfing him is fine. He’s harder for sure with certain nodes but he’s far from an insurmountable opponent still lol
Wait until Serpent starts coming to quests. Wait until we have to fight a Serpent with extend, rich get richer, and Lazarus. Then see how much fun you have. And one custom made node just for Serpent that prevents his power from being manipulated in any way.
Healblock or fate seal nodes, well he’s immune so all the risk is on you, where he doesn’t care…. The list of nonsense here really does get beyond silly. Could you imagine the chaos he’d cause as an incursions defender??? 🤣
Eh I’m the minority here but I think not nerfing him is fine. He’s harder for sure with certain nodes but he’s far from an insurmountable opponent still lol
I think a lot of the people who say he’s strong but not too strong have their standards for what’s “too strong” lower than they should be. Being able to have a clean fight against serpent doesn’t make him fair. In fact a big problem is that you can have a perfectly clean fight but it still took 70s so you lost because it was so slow. His absolute best counters like Chavez take 55s on a good fight in a neutral meta, that’s literally more of a stall than rank 3 sassy, and that’s when using one of his best counters.
In an average fight with a decent counter, it’s closer to finishing in 80-90s with 85% health which is about 46k points. In less competitive tiers of bgs you can get away with 46k points as a win most of the time. But once you reach gc, and as you climb the ranks that score becomes less and less likely to get a win. It could still have been a clean fight, but you simply didn’t have enough damage to take him down and his pierce made you eat block damage. Nothing you can do about it.
When we use the term unbalanced, we’re comparing serpent to other defenders and seeing how he’s very far above them. It’s not inherently the level of difficulty that’s the issue, it’s the fact that his level of difficulty is much higher than everyone else’s that he stands out among the crowd. (And obviously that you can’t work around his kit using skill, it’s either draft a counter or lose.) If kabam decides that the overall difficulty of bgs is too low, then the solution is not to release a broken defender who is a cut above the rest, it’s to increase the difficulty of the nodes so that many champs are made more difficult. Notice how tame most of the metas have been since serpent’s release? And the ones that weren’t made him quite clearly broken as if he wasn’t bad enough already.
He’s bad for the game in his current state, both from a competitive and design standpoint. If you don’t play bgs completely (and that’s fine you don’t have to) then you won’t feel the full effect of serpent in competitive play. He’s hurt the mode quite a bit.
Human Torch actually looks like a decent option (though he takes a lot of block damage). Now if only he was a 7*
Negative can kill an r3 photon in 20 seconds this meta. Silk could take attuma during sugar pill. Serpent is a defender every meta. If he only works now he isnt a counter
Brian Grant did a great stream on this that I finally got to watch, where he reacted to Lagacy’s rant on Serpent and he really does a great job further articulating the pain points in the design on top of this thread (as did Lags in his rant).
BG said something that I thought was great. Serpent has as much going on as a chapter endboss with no nodes going on. If this kit was in story mode and we only saw it there or in boss rushes with some additional nodes the. I don’t think anybody would care. We’d probably even celebrate it. But as soon as you add battlegrounds nodes even a single node can boost him to tiers others just don’t get to enjoy.
- Vital Strikes - free regen every special, because he wasn’t tanky enough. Better dex those specials, oh wait you can’t 😜
- Rich get Richer, well really anymore that gives him more power - When 3 sources of power gain and passive AI that prioritizes sp3 isn’t enough, here’s more power. Draft Chavez, Wigra Wiccan, or Sympreme or die. And yes it’s a reasonable expectation of balance to require you to roster 4 champs, hope none of them get banned and give you a 30ish% chance to actually draft one. Oh and if you draft one, chances are you’ll lose anyways regardless of how perfectly you play provided your opponent is equally skilled and doesn’t mess up.
-Random Unblockable and Crushed effects - make sure you Dex that special! Oh wait, you still can’t
And then the other take BG had that I think is fully on point, is how is fighting a character that can gain half a bar of power or more during his special animations even that fun to fight? You really only get minuscule windows to actually fight him before you are back to baiting and blocking specials. Outside of all the balance discussions, he’s simply just this weird blend of stressful and boring to fight because of this.
And I think BG described him perfectly, a champion with a boss designed kit.
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
I'm not disputing that, of course it was intentional, doesn't however change the fact that it's **** to pull that off just so you can sell counters if people want to be able to enjoy BGs. I never buy pre-release bundles however I'm pretty much forced to do so with Shathra if I don't want to get wiped out again and again next meta with rich get richer.
You say they're not dumb enough yet DLL already quite literally said there will never be a Galan Peni situation where a defender becomes completely irrelevant due to a hard counter.
i'm not pretending to like serpent. i don't. i'm not prepared to fight him in bgs because i'm not great at deck making and drafting, so i ban him. do i wish he was toned down? yeah, but when was the last time a defender existed in the game with no good counters? let's count.
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
All defenders in the game should have decent counters, even back in the day when Domino Thing and Korg were released there were ways to either counter them with skill alone or kits. There has never been a single defender in the game that had zero good counters, yes I know Chavez this Kushala that etc they're very slow, until we get Shathra there are no true good counters for him and that's simply not fair. Especially if you're doing it to milk future champs even further, it's messed up.
No we haven't, that's where you and the rest of the people on this thread are wrong. We have never been through this cause there has never been a defender as ridiculously broken as Serpent, even Domino on release when there were no aar immune champs wasn't as broken as this guy.
When they were released, there were very few counters to them. I remember when Iceman was released and everyone was shaking. Things change.
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
I'm not disputing that, of course it was intentional, doesn't however change the fact that it's **** to pull that off just so you can sell counters if people want to be able to enjoy BGs. I never buy pre-release bundles however I'm pretty much forced to do so with Shathra if I don't want to get wiped out again and again next meta with rich get richer.
You say they're not dumb enough yet DLL already quite literally said there will never be a Galan Peni situation where a defender becomes completely irrelevant due to a hard counter.
i'm not pretending to like serpent. i don't. i'm not prepared to fight him in bgs because i'm not great at deck making and drafting, so i ban him. do i wish he was toned down? yeah, but when was the last time a defender existed in the game with no good counters? let's count.
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
All defenders in the game should have decent counters, even back in the day when Domino Thing and Korg were released there were ways to either counter them with skill alone or kits. There has never been a single defender in the game that had zero good counters, yes I know Chavez this Kushala that etc they're very slow, until we get Shathra there are no true good counters for him and that's simply not fair. Especially if you're doing it to milk future champs even further, it's messed up.
No we haven't, that's where you and the rest of the people on this thread are wrong. We have never been through this cause there has never been a defender as ridiculously broken as Serpent, even Domino on release when there were no aar immune champs wasn't as broken as this guy.
When they were released, there were very few counters to them. I remember when Iceman was released and everyone was shaking. Things change.
Iceman wasn’t a threat due to his damage was only 25% nothing major but serpent is way more powerful than simple 25% damage which 25% is only major in bgs by the time bgs came out iceman wasn’t a threat
What's crazy about all this arguing is that they probably won't change him still and just wait till we all forget and move on lol
bro everything will be ok.
y'all acting like some evil villain snuck his way into the company to mess with us lol. solutions will come.
But they are completely ignoring the thread lmao he's right.
they don't owe us anything lol
"yeah hi guys he's a hard defender and as usual we'll have solutions ok thanks bye"
Where in this whole thread did anyone claim they owe us anything?
when you say they're ignoring the thread that implies that we should get a response.
i'm a player like everyone else and his kit is OP so i agree with almost everything said here, but it's not the end of the world.
we know how the game works:
problem ---> solution
so unless we think they're going to skip the other half of this game (which they'd be insane to do), it's going to work out fine.
No it doesn't, it implies we want a response and they can either give us one or not, and people can either be frustrated due to this (us) or not care about it cause you just take whatever they give you (you).
Also I don't know why you continue to use that argument when I've said like ten times on this same thread already, DLL pretty much confirmed there will be no hard counters, those days are long gone. The best we will get is something similar to Shathra but that's it.
no matter how garbage serpent looks right now, i am 99.99% positive that their decision not to nerf him is deliberate, intentional, planned, well thought out, and well reasoned.
our "frustrations" will be soothed in the future and they won't let us drown. they are not dumb enough to leave us without a life preserver. help is coming.
I'm not disputing that, of course it was intentional, doesn't however change the fact that it's **** to pull that off just so you can sell counters if people want to be able to enjoy BGs. I never buy pre-release bundles however I'm pretty much forced to do so with Shathra if I don't want to get wiped out again and again next meta with rich get richer.
You say they're not dumb enough yet DLL already quite literally said there will never be a Galan Peni situation where a defender becomes completely irrelevant due to a hard counter.
i'm not pretending to like serpent. i don't. i'm not prepared to fight him in bgs because i'm not great at deck making and drafting, so i ban him. do i wish he was toned down? yeah, but when was the last time a defender existed in the game with no good counters? let's count.
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
All defenders in the game should have decent counters, even back in the day when Domino Thing and Korg were released there were ways to either counter them with skill alone or kits. There has never been a single defender in the game that had zero good counters, yes I know Chavez this Kushala that etc they're very slow, until we get Shathra there are no true good counters for him and that's simply not fair. Especially if you're doing it to milk future champs even further, it's messed up.
No we haven't, that's where you and the rest of the people on this thread are wrong. We have never been through this cause there has never been a defender as ridiculously broken as Serpent, even Domino on release when there were no aar immune champs wasn't as broken as this guy.
When they were released, there were very few counters to them. I remember when Iceman was released and everyone was shaking. Things change.
Iceman wasn’t a threat due to his damage was only 25% nothing major but serpent is way more powerful than simple 25% damage which 25% is only major in bgs by the time bgs came out iceman wasn’t a threat
Yes, but the game has changes since then. There are a lot more Champs and counters now. At the time, the reactions were pretty much still the same. Anything that people felt was too much has become not challenging at all.
Comments
while there might not be another hulking/peni situation in the future, there will be GOOD counters and this serpent problem won't be as big as it is now. patience, we've been through this so many times and the game's still here and we're still here.
1) @ESF 's Testing - What perfectly demonstrated the main concern of these new Defenders (for me these include, Serpent, Enchantress and even Bulleyes). these champions Defensive abilities are turn up to the very top (with Serpent being over the top) that any additional Node added to them either through AW, BG or Questing, will/could make them a roadblock.
While Enchantress (and to a lesser extent Bulleyes) can normally be counter with some level of skills, they can easily become "unwinnable" with the additional of Nodes, and many other shown/explained the various reason why Serpent is already "unwinnable" with his kits alone.
This lead to the second point:-
2) There will be counter - Of we all know Kabam business strategy, "Create Challenges and Sell the Solution" and to be fair it worked well for the last 10 years (I just think that the balance is lost, which a dangerous thing).
Yes, there will be counter, the problem is, Kabam (and really for the health of the game) would not want to create an Attacker that is too strong and unbalance. However (this someone else that point it out, and it is very good point, so I take no credit for it), for an Attacker to counter all of these abilities themselves will be too strong as an Attackers. So what Kabam have done in recently is creating a champion with all the ability to counter the Problem Defender, but extremely weak on damage output, Iron Heart, NTW and Patriot are perfect example of this.
So what we end up with is "hard" counter that is too slow or soft counter that doesn't work with any additional Node.
This is lead to third point:-
3) Kabam is creating problem for themselves - I have listen to DLL stream, and in there he explain why certain champions have not been consider for release as 7* yet, and it isn't always about how strong they are (i.e how much damage they can do), it can also be because something about their abilities that would make it difficult to design new champions around. Essential these champions abilities create restriction, difficulty and challenges for Kabam design champions and content around. These are mostly Attackers, as in the pass we tent to have more OP Attackers.
However with these new Defensive champions, which Kabam "might" not realise yet, is that they are now creating new challenge for themselves. With champions that have too many Defensive abilities that it would be tricky for Kabam create content around them too.
Here is an example of this concern already Enchantress in AW - of course no respond from Kabam yet, and next AW is when the season start.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/374828/excuse-me-kabam-how-are-we-supposed-to-defeat-enchantress-on-these-aw-nodes/p3
These Defenders become "unwinnable", have 2 or 3 on a BG dex, sure you can ban them, what happen when we get to 4 or 5. "Hard" counter are too slow, soft counter stop working.
Is Kabam are now going to careful review and take into consideration each AW, BG or Questing Node and how it will interact with these Defenders?
Is Kabam going to stop using these Defenders in MEQs (we all seen how often, an Armour Break immune champ been place in a Node that require breaking Armour lol)?
Kabam is create a lot more work, problem for themselves with these champions.
"Create Challenges and Sell the Solution" - this is what I always say, because it should be a "Challenges", but right it starting to be "Creating a Problem and the Sold solution doesn't work".
I like many other have said, we want Kabam to do well, we want MCOC to be successful, just hopeful Kabam management team could sit down and review this.
As a community, I think I remember @Thokk150 said it best.
"So as a community we shouldn't stop caring or calm down but we should instead learn how to better communicate our feelings, because us and kabam both, even though sometimes it's not easy to see it, all care about the game and its health."
The Banquet event is coming soon, please give the players, the community some reassurance, something they can start rebuild the trust in Kabam, a reason to spend their hard earn money into the game (and not just the newest, shiniest champions).
Hope everyone have a good day, now I better get back to work lol
No we haven't, that's where you and the rest of the people on this thread are wrong. We have never been through this cause there has never been a defender as ridiculously broken as Serpent, even Domino on release when there were no aar immune champs wasn't as broken as this guy.
Skill defenders like Korg, have this pesky ability to purify our parry stuns. There are mutants who can counter this by replacing the purified stun with a passive, NTW was recently released with only passives to address this. Players were given an option to buy the solution or if they developed the light intercepts skills to fight Korg, they are rewarded through skilled gameplay and do not need to purchase her.
Serpent’s kit as pointed out, repeatedly, lacks this type of interaction entirely. There is no reward for performing any skill based abilities as part of his kit. You are forced to bring a counter to his abilities, which are numerous and well designed to support each other, or you have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the fight. And even if you win the fight, you probably still lost the round.
The kit almost feels coercive, like it creates a buy more counters or lose vibe. You can’t use skills for this challenge, counters only. It almost trivially turns BGs matches into RNG deck interactions.
I think it’s toxic to the long term health of the game, as I enjoy it, to have defenders that trivialize skill like this. This game has always been interesting because it ask players to have a good mixture of knowledge, skills, roster and applying that mix to its problems. If one of these things is short, then strength in another area can help solve the problem as there are multiple pathways open to solve it.
The Serpent’s design only leaves a few very narrow pathways to beating him… and skill is trivialized to the point of barely relevant. You have to has a roster counter and knowledge of how to use it, if you don’t… we’ll see above. Ultimately at this point, he’s an N of 1, and I view this thread as my approach to provide feedback that ideally ends up with Kabam revisiting this decision but hopefully keeps him as an N of 1. Because if he’s the only defender designed like this, then it’s controllable through bans. If it continues though, and we get more champs like this, then it’s going to create a situation where BGs become purely about deck RNG and it will kill the mode in the long run.
That passive fury on specials + start with one bar of power - Serpent can throw big specials and cannot be nuked by 95% of champs thanks to death immunity.
Archaos - crush/unblockable with his undexable specials.
Extend - Should I have to say? Lol.
Power snack VT meta - Makes it easy for him to reach sp3.
Regen on block gc meta - Makes it almost unkillable
Crit me with your best shot (next bg meta) - Good luck with his crit resistance and crit damage resistance.
Serpent, photon and bullseye can easily be made headache defenders by combining a few normal nodes.
I bet serpent is unkillable in force of will + extend combo, both nodes are extremely common.
Also any defenders who can only be countered by AAR is a poor design, just because nodes like force of will are pretty common
Eventually, Serpent will probably stabilize but he surely hasn't as of yet, unlike what the balancing post claims.
wait ...
whose getting a major rework again
yeah cyclops
Interesting line of attack because it opens you up to the absurd. Can you find a rule that states explicitly that a champion cannot randomly rotate between the defensive kits of enchantress, serpent, photon and bullseye chosen at the moment you enter the fight? Furthermore, on this ground alone that it isn’t “explicitly stated” you would you say that the existence of such a character is wholly justified? Is there a rule anywhere saying, explicitly, that a champion should have a single counter even able to solo the champion within the allotted time of a BG round? What about not even being able to take 50% of their health? 25%? Even if there is some post somewhere saying they want champions to be soloable within a BG round, is there anything saying you should be able to do it while not losing 90% of your health in the process? I can keep dreaming up stupid things which aren’t explicitly stated but the entire community and (im almost sure) the design team wouldnt agree with but the point is made.
Pretending there arent some aspects of consistency expected across the experience regardless of whether those aspects are stated or not is a ridiculous position. Moreover, serpent was meant to be fought with mystics, thats an obvious inference considering they built a tool into his kit that limits the interaction other classes can have with his abilities. They then systematically pruned him of every weakness which allows mystics to deal with cosmics in the first place.
Negative can kill an r3 photon in 20 seconds this meta. Silk could take attuma during sugar pill. Serpent is a defender every meta. If he only works now he isnt a counter
BG said something that I thought was great. Serpent has as much going on as a chapter endboss with no nodes going on. If this kit was in story mode and we only saw it there or in boss rushes with some additional nodes the. I don’t think anybody would care. We’d probably even celebrate it. But as soon as you add battlegrounds nodes even a single node can boost him to tiers others just don’t get to enjoy.
- Vital Strikes - free regen every special, because he wasn’t tanky enough. Better dex those specials, oh wait you can’t 😜
- Rich get Richer, well really anymore that gives him more power - When 3 sources of power gain and passive AI that prioritizes sp3 isn’t enough, here’s more power. Draft Chavez, Wigra Wiccan, or Sympreme or die. And yes it’s a reasonable expectation of balance to require you to roster 4 champs, hope none of them get banned and give you a 30ish% chance to actually draft one. Oh and if you draft one, chances are you’ll lose anyways regardless of how perfectly you play provided your opponent is equally skilled and doesn’t mess up.
-Random Unblockable and Crushed effects - make sure you Dex that special! Oh wait, you still can’t
And then the other take BG had that I think is fully on point, is how is fighting a character that can gain half a bar of power or more during his special animations even that fun to fight? You really only get minuscule windows to actually fight him before you are back to baiting and blocking specials. Outside of all the balance discussions, he’s simply just this weird blend of stressful and boring to fight because of this.
Here? Discord? YouTube? Twitter? Instagram? Telegram? Or whatever social media they use to conduct those goofy voting on,
Kabam? Hello?
In an average fight with a decent counter, it’s closer to finishing in 80-90s with 85% health which is about 46k points. In less competitive tiers of bgs you can get away with 46k points as a win most of the time. But once you reach gc, and as you climb the ranks that score becomes less and less likely to get a win. It could still have been a clean fight, but you simply didn’t have enough damage to take him down and his pierce made you eat block damage. Nothing you can do about it.
When we use the term unbalanced, we’re comparing serpent to other defenders and seeing how he’s very far above them. It’s not inherently the level of difficulty that’s the issue, it’s the fact that his level of difficulty is much higher than everyone else’s that he stands out among the crowd. (And obviously that you can’t work around his kit using skill, it’s either draft a counter or lose.) If kabam decides that the overall difficulty of bgs is too low, then the solution is not to release a broken defender who is a cut above the rest, it’s to increase the difficulty of the nodes so that many champs are made more difficult. Notice how tame most of the metas have been since serpent’s release? And the ones that weren’t made him quite clearly broken as if he wasn’t bad enough already.
He’s bad for the game in his current state, both from a competitive and design standpoint. If you don’t play bgs completely (and that’s fine you don’t have to) then you won’t feel the full effect of serpent in competitive play. He’s hurt the mode quite a bit.
If Kabam closes it, it'll be big mess.