Don’t get me wrong I LIKE this format of AQ. It’s a fun break from regular AQ (which I barely do) and Raids (which can prove quite a fun monthly challenge). But I think it’s FAR from complete and really needs some tweaks to polish it out.
Firstly why are some fights absolute gimmies, Star Lord, Diablo, Cap Marvel Classic, and others can be rather tricky, Knull, Rhino, Jean, Dust, Ikaris, especially in a longer form without an ideal counter, some of these fights can become roadblocks if you’re not careful.
Secondly, the health pool seems to be a very middling level, it’s not really enough to build up big combos on Aegon, or ramp up to full charges on Sentry within a couple fights, but it’s just big enough to make taking a fight like Jean or invisible woman, with a shield mechanic, quite difficult without high levels of ramp.
As an anecdotal evidence of this I was doing some fights with a 10 charge sentry in the 40 second range, Diablo went down in 38 if I recall correctly. Others took over 2 minutes to get down whilst managing in fight mechanics and sentries own damage loop.
Furthermore the champion pool seems to be missing quite a few big names. Captain Britain for example is one of the best ramp up champs in the game right now, and I know many summoners already using her to tackle the abyss of legends #hero challenge, but she’s just missing from the pool. Both king groot variants are there though, for all 5 people who still use those guys. Winter soldier? Hawkeye? Dragon Man? Be honest kabam, when are these champions actually being used?
Finally for me the randomness of the paths rarely provides a “unique and engaging challenge” for summoners to “problem solve” but instead creates very uneven “easy” and “hard” paths with node combinations creating some truly horrifying paths, with only 2 champions available on the team some paths can become real monsters to try and handle.
That being said there’s only really a couple changes I would make to the game mode.
1. Just open up the champ pool a little bit, give summoners more choices when picking and dear god if you want to introduce new meta defenders to the game mode please give us their attacking counters on offense!
2. Remove the randomness from the paths, have 4 short paths and 4 long paths.
The short path fights have much higher health pools but contain more simple defenders, so summoners are incentivised to ramp up champs like Aegon, Northstar, Guardian, Prof X, She Hulk(s) etc which may not necessarily have cross fight ramp up but will outshine the majority of other champions in long haul matchups
The Long path fights have lower health pools, either the current health pools or slightly lower, and incentivise cross fight ramp up champions like Sentry, Stryfe, Cull, Purgatory, SFSL etc
I think the game mode has potential, but is currently confused. Summoners don’t really “have” to engage with the ramp up element of the quest, they can blitz through with a R4/5 DThanos who “ramps” in about 30 seconds, or use someone like absorbing man who maybe has a ramp up mechanic? (I’m not really sure what he’s doing here but hey ho). Randomness in paths does very little but create annoyance for the last people joining the BG, and makes BG planning semi-redundant. Meanwhile real ramp up champions are struggling to shine and show off their true potential because of strangely tuned health pools.
Truly kabam I hope you keep developing this mode and take some of these ideas forward, it’s such a great chance to explore a section of champions so overlooked in the post Battlegrounds Era, and for anyone reading this (you’ve got too much free time as well) please let me know what changes you would like to see made to the mode as well.
P.S. some reward buffs would be nice, maybe just pfps or titles, something to celebrate the mode and incentivise people to do it yk
If I were kabam there are 2 main changes I would make to the mode, to keep it functioning
