Razzledazzle
New member
I am concerned with the recent route that the balancing and reworking of characters has gone recently. For some reason, it feels like most heroes are having their skill floors and ceilings reduced. This is especially odd when a lot of the characters in this game are mechanically very simple and easy to play.
For example, Haze is the most basic shot your gun character that is an easy on ramp for people from the FPS genre. That is an incredible way to get people into your game that would otherwise be intimidated to play something unlike anything they've ever tried before. However, with the recent change, she has been reduced down to an ult bot. Get max ult, unstoppable, ricochet, and just press ult. There's no reason to play her like a stealth assassin pick hero. Her entire hero fantasy is being ignored. And the only way to stop this build is through one of the most miserable items in the game, Metal Skin. As the hero stands currently, her skill floor and ceiling are right on top of each other. All you need to do is not be too useless to feed the enemy team until you can press 4 on repeat.
Another character that was changed was McGinnis. Before March, she had two or three builds. You could go pure gun, even though it wasn't great, you could play her as a support, which was pretty good, or you could play as her a spirit turret build, which most people don't want to do because it's kind of boring. In response, her gun was nerfed, killing the gun build. Her turrets now focused more on dealing damage instead of debuffing, nerfing the support play style and buffing something no one wants to play. Altered her heal in a way that makes it a lot harder to use during team fights, weakening the support play style. The wall was changed to get rid of the stamina drain and stun to play into the turrets. Lastly, her ult was heavily buffed. With gun and support brought down, people made a new build, not focusing on the turrets, but the ultimate, because players want agency when they play games. This made people realize McGinnis ult was actually already incredibly strong, and as a result it was nerfed to be weaker than pre-March. She then received some small, compensatory buffs to her three other abilities. However, her gun is still weaker than before March, her 2 is weaker than pre-March. Her turrets were buffed, and her wall was changed to focus on turrets, but no one wants to playu a turret bot. She ios now one of the least picked heroes with one of the worst win rates.
If you are deadset on turrets needing to be an ability, maybe you can give her some kind of an Alt-cast for the turrets that makes them do different things. The original cast can be the regular turret that does damage (lame), the alt cast could potentially have an aura around it that supports nearby allied units, with attack speed or movement speed that goes through them. Another possible route that could be more interesting is changing them to drones instead. You can choose to self-cast the drone or attach to a teammate. It follows the target around, providing attacks that debuff the enemy in some way, while providing some type of a buff to the person it is following. Obviously, make it so it can be damaged and destroyed, and it will probably need to have some kind of a time lag with its movement so it isn't impossible to hit while a Celeste is doing 360s around the map. Not sure if this should be a charged ability, kind of depends on how strong they are and how easy they are to kill. This could provide a much more active play style to McGinnis and give her more agency with how to build her, either focusing on damage with the drone, debuffs, or support of your teammates. It also plays a bit better into her military industrial complex position with Fairfax.
I think really what I'm trying to say is that there abilities and characters in the game that are becoming incredibly one note and one dimensional. Having abilities that only ever get used in one specific way are dull and tend to result in people not wanting to play those characters. I am personally a big fan of Overwatch, and they tend to do a great job of making abilities dynamic. Something can be used offensively, defensively, or for movement. Making split second decisions on when and how to use something adds a lot of depth to the gameplay of these heroes and gets people to want to keep on playing them. Another character that doesn't get picked much and struggles to win is Grey Talon.
Spirit Snare is a bit confusing as an ability since it doesn't scale its damage, and gives bullet shred when upgraded. It can be shot with charged shot, but if you're building spirit, why would I spend a charged shot to shoot the trap instead of doing 1k damage? The curse is nice, but it seems counterintuitive. Especially since this character is being purported as a spirit scaler since the ult gives flat spirit when you kill with it. To maximize the trap value, it feels like you're better off going into gun. With the cooldown reduction on trap, it lines up perfectly with charged shots cooldown. So, you chuck a trap, pop it with charged shot, use your rain of arrows, and do lots of gun damage to the shreded and cursed target. But now putting points into charged shot doesn't make a lot of sense, since we're building gun, not spirit, so the extra charges and scaling are going to go unused. The ult still has some utility with the stun, and eventual execute on max ult, but we're now getting spirit power when we aren't building into spirit damage. These anti-synergies make the character pretty difficult to build around. Maybe the community has it wrong and we should be building him as a gun hero, focusing early on the two and the three, then transitioning mid/late into spirit if we get free spirit from ult executes? I'll give it a try and see if I can figure something out, but he feels like a character that needs more items than there are slots to use effectively.
I think something that can be done to help a bit more with the 1 and 2 anti-synergizing is to give his 1 something to use for other than damage. If you build spirit, the 2 can be used for mobility, which is decent enough. Since Talon is putting a lot of power into these shots, maybe they could give him self knockback, similar to Shiv's right click, either permanently or as an alt-cast. If you're trying to jump over a gap, you can shoot straight down for a psuedo extra jump, or shoot it into the wall in tandem with a wall jump to go a long distance, maybe we can do some interesting tech by rain of arrowing as you charge shot to super jump. This gives him more survivability and self peel options, and introduces some nuance to the ability. Maybe the tier 2 upgrade can give additional self knock back to give a reason to put points there if building more into gun. For the snare, I think there is a lot of playmaking possibilities in its current iteration, but due to most people building spirit, the opportunity cost of using the charged shot to pop it is a bit high. Maybe shooting the trap with charged shot could provide some portion of charged shots damage in the AOE? Probably needs to only be like 30% at most because it could get a little crazy, but adding this to the tier 2 upgrade gives both the spirit and gun route a reason to upgrade into it. Also, the hit detection while standing on the ground is a little funky. If you shoot directly at the trap with charged shot, it misses, to hit it you need to aim above it, which is counter intuitive and can cause you to waste two abilities. The ult always has utility regardless of build path, but a large portion of its identity is giving flat spirirt. Maybe rain of arrows could scale off of the spirit in a way that helps gun and not the spirit build, but also not too much cause then it could get a little crazy? Maybe as an upgrade, your rain of arrows shots can pop the spirit snare, and enemies cursed by the snare grant you bullet lifesteal that scales off of your spirirt power? This makes the skill attractive for both the spirit and gun paths, because now the spirit build doesn't need to use a charged shot to pop the snare early, but they don't benefit from the bullet lifesteal and they do not get the AOE damage application of the charged shot on the snare. For the gun build, they can choose to pop the snare in a smaller area for increased bullet lifesteal, potentially useful in a 1v1, or keep using charged shots to pop it for the AOE crowd control. These changes could make the character more dynamic and adds a lot more synergy and options for how to build him.
This game is incredible, it has complex systems with the item shop, macro elements of a MOBA, with the mechanical requirements of a modern shooter with a novel movement system. It is a difficult and intimidating game for people, but reducing these characters down to one dimension to attempt to appeal to a casual audience is going to cause the people that love this game for its depth to become frustrated. There are very dedicated and knowledgable people in this community that already make build guides and youtube videos to help those that struggle with the complexity. If all the other systems didn't scare someone away from playing the game, the character's themselves being complex should not be a tough sell to people. Just please try and avoid turning characters into ult bots because it makes the characters very unfun to play into and play as. Without nuance the games will become very frustrating and cause a game that is very difficult to get into in the first place lose its dedicated player base. I personally nearly quit after my first week of playing the game because it was so frustarting not understanding what I was doing. I stuck with it because I knew this game was incredible with its depth. Now, I still love the game, but there are certain interactions that just feel so cheesy and miserable to go into, that have very little skill expression involved, that it makes me feel like I shouldn't queue up because it is a coin toss of who gets the cornier character.
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For example, Haze is the most basic shot your gun character that is an easy on ramp for people from the FPS genre. That is an incredible way to get people into your game that would otherwise be intimidated to play something unlike anything they've ever tried before. However, with the recent change, she has been reduced down to an ult bot. Get max ult, unstoppable, ricochet, and just press ult. There's no reason to play her like a stealth assassin pick hero. Her entire hero fantasy is being ignored. And the only way to stop this build is through one of the most miserable items in the game, Metal Skin. As the hero stands currently, her skill floor and ceiling are right on top of each other. All you need to do is not be too useless to feed the enemy team until you can press 4 on repeat.
Another character that was changed was McGinnis. Before March, she had two or three builds. You could go pure gun, even though it wasn't great, you could play her as a support, which was pretty good, or you could play as her a spirit turret build, which most people don't want to do because it's kind of boring. In response, her gun was nerfed, killing the gun build. Her turrets now focused more on dealing damage instead of debuffing, nerfing the support play style and buffing something no one wants to play. Altered her heal in a way that makes it a lot harder to use during team fights, weakening the support play style. The wall was changed to get rid of the stamina drain and stun to play into the turrets. Lastly, her ult was heavily buffed. With gun and support brought down, people made a new build, not focusing on the turrets, but the ultimate, because players want agency when they play games. This made people realize McGinnis ult was actually already incredibly strong, and as a result it was nerfed to be weaker than pre-March. She then received some small, compensatory buffs to her three other abilities. However, her gun is still weaker than before March, her 2 is weaker than pre-March. Her turrets were buffed, and her wall was changed to focus on turrets, but no one wants to playu a turret bot. She ios now one of the least picked heroes with one of the worst win rates.
If you are deadset on turrets needing to be an ability, maybe you can give her some kind of an Alt-cast for the turrets that makes them do different things. The original cast can be the regular turret that does damage (lame), the alt cast could potentially have an aura around it that supports nearby allied units, with attack speed or movement speed that goes through them. Another possible route that could be more interesting is changing them to drones instead. You can choose to self-cast the drone or attach to a teammate. It follows the target around, providing attacks that debuff the enemy in some way, while providing some type of a buff to the person it is following. Obviously, make it so it can be damaged and destroyed, and it will probably need to have some kind of a time lag with its movement so it isn't impossible to hit while a Celeste is doing 360s around the map. Not sure if this should be a charged ability, kind of depends on how strong they are and how easy they are to kill. This could provide a much more active play style to McGinnis and give her more agency with how to build her, either focusing on damage with the drone, debuffs, or support of your teammates. It also plays a bit better into her military industrial complex position with Fairfax.
I think really what I'm trying to say is that there abilities and characters in the game that are becoming incredibly one note and one dimensional. Having abilities that only ever get used in one specific way are dull and tend to result in people not wanting to play those characters. I am personally a big fan of Overwatch, and they tend to do a great job of making abilities dynamic. Something can be used offensively, defensively, or for movement. Making split second decisions on when and how to use something adds a lot of depth to the gameplay of these heroes and gets people to want to keep on playing them. Another character that doesn't get picked much and struggles to win is Grey Talon.
Spirit Snare is a bit confusing as an ability since it doesn't scale its damage, and gives bullet shred when upgraded. It can be shot with charged shot, but if you're building spirit, why would I spend a charged shot to shoot the trap instead of doing 1k damage? The curse is nice, but it seems counterintuitive. Especially since this character is being purported as a spirit scaler since the ult gives flat spirit when you kill with it. To maximize the trap value, it feels like you're better off going into gun. With the cooldown reduction on trap, it lines up perfectly with charged shots cooldown. So, you chuck a trap, pop it with charged shot, use your rain of arrows, and do lots of gun damage to the shreded and cursed target. But now putting points into charged shot doesn't make a lot of sense, since we're building gun, not spirit, so the extra charges and scaling are going to go unused. The ult still has some utility with the stun, and eventual execute on max ult, but we're now getting spirit power when we aren't building into spirit damage. These anti-synergies make the character pretty difficult to build around. Maybe the community has it wrong and we should be building him as a gun hero, focusing early on the two and the three, then transitioning mid/late into spirit if we get free spirit from ult executes? I'll give it a try and see if I can figure something out, but he feels like a character that needs more items than there are slots to use effectively.
I think something that can be done to help a bit more with the 1 and 2 anti-synergizing is to give his 1 something to use for other than damage. If you build spirit, the 2 can be used for mobility, which is decent enough. Since Talon is putting a lot of power into these shots, maybe they could give him self knockback, similar to Shiv's right click, either permanently or as an alt-cast. If you're trying to jump over a gap, you can shoot straight down for a psuedo extra jump, or shoot it into the wall in tandem with a wall jump to go a long distance, maybe we can do some interesting tech by rain of arrowing as you charge shot to super jump. This gives him more survivability and self peel options, and introduces some nuance to the ability. Maybe the tier 2 upgrade can give additional self knock back to give a reason to put points there if building more into gun. For the snare, I think there is a lot of playmaking possibilities in its current iteration, but due to most people building spirit, the opportunity cost of using the charged shot to pop it is a bit high. Maybe shooting the trap with charged shot could provide some portion of charged shots damage in the AOE? Probably needs to only be like 30% at most because it could get a little crazy, but adding this to the tier 2 upgrade gives both the spirit and gun route a reason to upgrade into it. Also, the hit detection while standing on the ground is a little funky. If you shoot directly at the trap with charged shot, it misses, to hit it you need to aim above it, which is counter intuitive and can cause you to waste two abilities. The ult always has utility regardless of build path, but a large portion of its identity is giving flat spirirt. Maybe rain of arrows could scale off of the spirit in a way that helps gun and not the spirit build, but also not too much cause then it could get a little crazy? Maybe as an upgrade, your rain of arrows shots can pop the spirit snare, and enemies cursed by the snare grant you bullet lifesteal that scales off of your spirirt power? This makes the skill attractive for both the spirit and gun paths, because now the spirit build doesn't need to use a charged shot to pop the snare early, but they don't benefit from the bullet lifesteal and they do not get the AOE damage application of the charged shot on the snare. For the gun build, they can choose to pop the snare in a smaller area for increased bullet lifesteal, potentially useful in a 1v1, or keep using charged shots to pop it for the AOE crowd control. These changes could make the character more dynamic and adds a lot more synergy and options for how to build him.
This game is incredible, it has complex systems with the item shop, macro elements of a MOBA, with the mechanical requirements of a modern shooter with a novel movement system. It is a difficult and intimidating game for people, but reducing these characters down to one dimension to attempt to appeal to a casual audience is going to cause the people that love this game for its depth to become frustrated. There are very dedicated and knowledgable people in this community that already make build guides and youtube videos to help those that struggle with the complexity. If all the other systems didn't scare someone away from playing the game, the character's themselves being complex should not be a tough sell to people. Just please try and avoid turning characters into ult bots because it makes the characters very unfun to play into and play as. Without nuance the games will become very frustrating and cause a game that is very difficult to get into in the first place lose its dedicated player base. I personally nearly quit after my first week of playing the game because it was so frustarting not understanding what I was doing. I stuck with it because I knew this game was incredible with its depth. Now, I still love the game, but there are certain interactions that just feel so cheesy and miserable to go into, that have very little skill expression involved, that it makes me feel like I shouldn't queue up because it is a coin toss of who gets the cornier character.
Add draft?
