Day-Late PvP Feedback Collection
Took me a day to really get all my thoughts together, but here are my main comments on my PvP experiences. NOTE that for all my PvP experiences I ended up in the 2v2 battle on the top side of the map, and my impressions may hold no ground on the bottom side, as in most games I kinda even forgot there was a third player on the team (though Day9 has already commented on that).
Sensor wards are incredibly powerful, and have little to no strategic drawback. In setting up around any position on the map, whether pushing forward or holding a siege, sensor wards are so cheap they are essentially free, and they provide an INSANE informational advantage. I think this is particularly present when holding a position, most commonly with Celesta's purifiers. The best way to counter a Celesta siege is with a good flank. But if a sensor ward is plopped down in the middle of the purifiers, any possible flank will be immediately revealed and countered. This led to situations where the only way to break through a position I was holding was to call the third player up to the top of the map, still netting my team a free advantage bottom. To give my Day[9] style summary of sensor wards, placing them ALWAYS felt useful, and I often felt that having a sensor ward when your opponent didn't entirely won fights. They are way too cheap to be that rewarding. A possible suggestion other than making them more expensive would be making them expire after a certain amount of time, so that a siege can't stay safe indefinitely at no additional cost.
Denying your opponent all gem control was both the most guaranteed and least rewarding path to victory. In many of my games, my duo top and I managed to get full control of the middle of the map before securing our second expansion, and this often led to games where we had almost no neutral weapon pressure put on us for the entire game. What this meant is that we were free to only spend our gems on sensor wards and healing totems while using just army combat to harass the enemy expansions, and then in the mid game we would just rush their nexus with reserves of 40-70 gems, place upwards of 20 mini ion cannons, and then just focus fire and win the game. While incredibly successful, and seemingly very hard to counter even when the other team realized what we were doing, those wins felt ill-gotten and cut short. Interestingly, this strategy was also most effective when we had won on top side but our bottom player had not been having as much luck. Because he still had an army, he could still run in with us to defend the mass of ion cannons we could place, and his disadvantage ended up having almost no impact on the outcome of the game. Day[9] summary: Wins felt unrewarding, but I simultaneously felt as though there were no other consistent way to secure a victory. I don't have any followup suggestions here, but this feeling was definitely one of my big takeaways from the day.