Playtest 189 - Post-game Stats & Performance Tracing
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Tonight's playtest gameplay is almost entirely unchanged from Wednesday's. But something big is kicking off....
Post-game Stats
When your game concludes, or if you select a game in the Watch tab, you will be brought to a post-game screen that displays some stats about the game
- Squad matchups
- Hero levels
- Number of units created of each type
- Upgrades purchased
- Share, Watch Replay, and Play Again buttons (post-game only)
Performance
- Some tools have been enabled to track server activity and help us diagnose issues that may be affecting game performance.
Questions
- Were there any particularly bad squad matchups you experienced?
- What were the best "feeling" squads you played tonight? Not necessarily the most powerful, but the one that felt the most awesome and fun to play?
- What was the worst "feeling" squad you played? Not necessarily the least powerful, but the one that felt the least awesome and fun to play?
Comments
Sorry, but you said tonight's(Friday).Are there playtests aside from sunday and Wednesday? Sorry if I'm out of the loop.
Nope, we just post the Sunday notes on Friday! Sorry for the confusion ^^
What were the best "feeling" squads you played tonight? Not necessarily the most powerful, but the one that felt the most awesome and fun to play?
I went back to playing wind and it brought back some of the fun I felt like I lost from the Vela change. Swarming stuff, running around and picking off towers, diving in to their nexus. Really forcing the opponent to deal with things everywhere, not necessarily follow the traditional flow of a normal games.
Some replays:
First game I tried it, was mostly late game and to avoid Hive.
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Then I tried it from the start vs celsta/eris/alder and it crushed them in ~11minutes
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I did it a third time vs celesta/eris/fire and it got shut down a lot harder.
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What was the worst "feeling" squad you played? Not necessarily the least powerful, but the one that felt the least awesome and fun to play?
I felt powerless with Vela, I miss the super snipe and don't like being stealthy. You can either run away or use it to ambush but you have no AOE or enough burst (in my opinion). You're forced to the sideline just trying to outrange things and it feels awful to me.
Damn it I still like playing Alder.
So like, after the official playtest times were over, during which I played only Celesta and Vex (I think), we did one final game. Alder was favored because the opposing team was like, all melee squads, and I was able to get good engagements pretty consistently.
The key feeling for me was how much better it feels to be winning as Alder than any other squad. When he's finally being his seediest, I feel like a complete god -- this is opposed to doing really well as like, Vex or Celesta, where I'm still winning, but it's just not as visceral a feeling.
tldr: I don't know why, but Alder feels the best to me, even though he is expensive and his ability to clear titan camps is subpar.
There are no matchups in the game that I find frustrating or unfun atm.
mini-note: you guys seem to be changing how profiles are viewed? When I click my own profile I can see my new XP bar feature and stuff. If I try to go to a friend's profile, I can't see that information, but if I try to go to a friend's profile via the chat from the home page of the client, I am able to see their full profile. I don't think this is intended so letting you know :D
I'm so super hyped for the new build of the game. I'm hoping I can make it since it's up to the brutal midnight hour, but the build is so big that maybe I can sneak myself in :D
I played Hive and went fast Scarabs again in all my pvp games again. I guess I will need to practice one of the eight core squad for the upcoming large playtest weekends.
Scarabs are pretty strong, nothing new. I did have one very interesting 1v1 match-up against Lef on Vela:
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Watching the replay, its pretty clear that Hive is currently very strong against Vela in the 1v1 lane. Lef's experience gain was severely crippled by the low quantity of kills he was able to secure.
However, during the match I did not feel that I had an overwhelming advantage against him. He did a really good job of harassing my gem harvesting while staying close enough to his towers that I usually needed to dive under them to engage him. When I did engage I was able to wipe him, but I never had enough strength remaining to do meaningful damage while his army was down. Things definitely got more difficult when the Windrays came out and his squad became faster and better able to kite.
I found the tension this match-up created very enjoyable. I don't think it is a problem that Hive is so strong against Vela 1v1. In a more try-hard situation, Vex could have rotated down to push me back, possibly forcing me to rotate top where Scarabs are weaker 2v2.
Match Info
It's a start. It is very useful to see the order and content of peoples upgrades. Eventually, I think it would be very useful to be able to have match timelines that show the rise and fall of deployed army values and other metrics, and have upgrade information placed into that context.
Squad Matchups
Any Vs. Poison
(1.1) - Poison still is an annoying squad to play against, not so much because of matchup, but because the block on recall doesn't communicate very well. I expect to not be able to issue a recall command when it won't work, but here, one can issue the command (even gets the sound effect and all), even though it won't ever complete.
Best Squad
(2.1) - Despite some difficulty with the squad tonight, would probably go for Ryme. Un-upgraded Glacial Rangers were tough to play with, a result of how the game on Ryme played out (resources and trying to get Frostcallers on the field early). The artwork on Ryme really nails it, though, and adds to my enjoyment of the squad, animatedly bouncing around freezing stuff. Gameplay-wise, Ryme is a lot more fun when you've got teammates who can really benefit from having locked-down targets, and trying to get into those positions is a lot of fun, and very rewarding when a team manages to do it well.
Worst Squad
(3.1) - Tonight, worst feeling squad would have to be Eris. I don't think there is necessarily something about the squad that wasn't working, it's just that the gameplay wasn't very fun. The Sandstingers weren't getting much work done early, partly because of engages. I play Eris comparatively little, and so I was still kind of used to the Surge giving an attack bonus without upgrade. Surging forward now without the upgrades does much less than it used to, so it just felt like I could do little.
Extra
Post-Game Stats
(4.1) - This makes me so happy! Seemingly small, maybe, but I think it is a huge QoL improvement.
I played a lot of poison and noticed that caustic eruption on heroes that aren't poisoned often won't do any damage.
It happened quite a few times across this game I think there is one case with Vela at around 13 minutes in.
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Were there any particularly bad squad matchups you experienced?
Alder vs Vela seems very difficult for Alder. I play Vela and completely walked over an Alder because it was very difficult for him to engage me if I just kited him. His seedbots "Spawn Sapling" ability has a short range, and the saplings have a short attack range. So short i believe that if he placed it at the max length in the direction of my raptors they could not shoot to slow my raptors.
I believe the Alder could have had better luck if he was better with his Living Vines ability trapping my raptors and THEN slowing them with Saplings.
Replay: G4dc81196d9d4484fbecd99b53fd580f3
I don't think it was unfairly good but yeah.
What were the best "feeling" squads you played tonight? Not necessarily the most powerful, but the one that felt the most awesome and fun to play?
I love Vela. I used to think Vela was unimpactful (Right after you reworked her ult) and i really didn't see the point of her new ult. After getting better and understanding how to play Vela effectively I find myself enjoying Vela a LOT more. I find myself using her ult less as a "stealth" thing but more of a "Get out of Jail" or "You're not getting away this time". Big fan. 5/5 on Yelp
Other Thoughts and Notes
I think strategies are a bit hard to figure out in Atlas. I think there aren't enough hints to the player on what they should DO to get better / play better which can lead to frustration. (It did for me and I thought Vela was terrible before I understood better how to play her/ the value of gold)
I would like there to be a bit more "follow the blue light" (halflife2 gg) instruction for players.
Example: If you mark a unit with Vela and then shoot it you do more damage to them. That's simple, it makes sense when you read it. But you still don't always mark them, or you do but after you shoot them you still don't quite believe that you are doing more damage other than maybe if you measured their health bars.
If instead when you shot them while they were marked they spurted blood, or some little animation/effect played when you specifically shot a marked unit I think it would be A LOT more fun and rewarding to mark and shoot units. I think it would also help teach players playing the units getting shot at to run away if units get marked (or micro them away)
I agree with this feedback! I think Vela vs Hive is a matchup that favors Hive in the early game, but I think if Vela plays well and get's her expansions she will do better than Hive in the late game. This is what I experienced on replay : Gcc7551a009304c2fa40643abdddfbbf5
We still lost but I didn't feel like it was terrible.
It felt really rewarding to struggle in the beginning but due to
good playcome out alright.I was torn on whether or not to give feedback, but I've decided that even if it's worthless it can just be ignored. The reason I was hesitating was because I thought I had a bunch of insights after that one final post-playtest-game Cycle mentioned. Going back to review the replay though, I found that I had made a bunch of misplays.
I didn't put down my first expansion and I was operating through most of the early game assuming it was down. That explained some of why I felt I was behind - because I was. I remember when I finally put it down that I thought I'd missed someone sniping it.
Then, I was reflecting on my earlier thoughts re: the isolating of bottom vs top, but again in looking through the replay I saw a time where I was near the middle lane on my squad and an enemy squad was attacking my ally near the 2x expansion. Had I been paying better attention, I was in a reasonable position to come in sweep them from behind.
The only thing I can say is continued thumbs up for Ryme. I feel like the squad has a number of options that I haven't yet explored - for example, it's tempting for me to go heavy glacial rangers with ice floes early on because it's easier to zone opponents out. However, with heavy swarm opponents like wind, there's a possibility to go a little lighter on the T1 and get some T3 since Freeze is so potent, dangerously so with the deep freeze upgrade. Unfortunately the last 3 or so times I've played Ryme, I've ended up in the bottom lane so I haven't had as much ally play as I would've like (though, given the above, part of that is my fault). When he DOES get to play with friends, boy it's fun to bring in the control aspect I used to like in Hydros.
Really brief comments today
-The new replay viewing system is great! I think there might be a small bug with Hero levels on it at the moment though since I've noticed a couple games were Hero levels are being displayed ~1 level lower than they actually were at the end of the game.
-Poison's Ult deals damage longer than the art for it, playing with Sprite / Eris this is super punishing since one tick of the ult kills your tier 1. I can think of at least two instances where I pulled back upon seeing the ult then ran in thinking the ult was over and lost half my army, and once instance where I was running in and didn't even know the ult had been triggered and lost my army, really just frustrating to play against.
-Related note, Poison in general still feels very meh to play against. It's probably the best "AP" squad at the moment with it's Tier 2 and Ult doing insane amounts of damage. The Tier 2 ability feels too strong to me, especially against players who build up AP, where it's short cooldown and ability to stack on a single unit makes it basically one shot anything. As someone who enjoys playing the "swarmy" swuadsIt benefits a lot from poking in, dealing damage then backing off and you want to be spreading the damage out over all of your opponent's unit rather than targeting one at a time.
-The new art for Wind looks great and Cyclone especially visually makes far more sense in terms of what it's doing.
-I played one game as Hive where I was literally winning fights 2v1 without any tier 1 units. Opponent's were Ryme and Wind, and I had an Eris ally. Zaphid felt like a Blademaster from WC3, able to dart into my opponent's early game army and pick off units on his own without much risk while I teched straight to tier 3. Not sure if it was just the matchup or what but it in general it felt pretty silly. Here's the game code:
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-Related note, also played a game as Hive not rushing tier 2 / 3 and it felt really bad. Was up against Eris / Alder with a Wind ally and the Tier 1's just didn't feel like they were pulling their weight relative to other squads. The mines are way too easy to trigger remotely, Alder can do so with a single sapling / his hero ability and Eris can could do so with her hero ability or get sandstingers out of the way quickly with their ability. Most non-melee squads have similar abilities that make mines super easy to trigger. Mines really only feel powerful in super late game where you can lay down so many they become an adequate delaying tactic. I personally think the Hornet needs better combat abilities on it's own given how weak the mines are in early game, maybe even making it an A type unit since mines are already effective against B types.
So much for brief haha.