Playtest 183 - Moar Squad & Pathing Tunings!
starfighter
Member, Administrator
Sunday's playtest features more squad and pathing tunings!
Vex
- Changed the behavior of the T3 ability, oil grenade. Units affected by oil now burn for 150 damage over 3 seconds when ignited.
Wind
- Sprite attack damage increased from 7 to 9 per hit
- Conduit attack cooldown increased from 2.2s to 2.8s
- Conduit attacks now have a brief windup and winddown on attacks
Alder
- Tree of Life health reduced from 550 to 450
- Tree of Life health reduced from 10 to 8
- Deeproot Terror health decreased from 1100 to 700 (reverted last playtest's change)
Poison
- Poison Archer unit cap increased from 12 to 20
- Poison Archer damage decreased from 15 to 14. This was more out of spite than balance.
Hydros
- Scuttleguard health decreased from 345 to 290
Hive
- Decreased health of Scarab from 750 to 600
Pathing
- Fixed a regression that prevented melee units from forming concaves during battles.
Questions
- Which squads were the most fun to play? (Not the strongest, just the most fun!)
- What squad matchups did you play? Were there any clearly problematic squads or bad matchups you noticed?
- Were there instances where pathing behaved unintuitively or incorrectly?
- Please rate the early/mid/late game from 1-to-5!
Comments
jordan please stop rubbing salt in the wounds ;_;
Bug Report
Replay: G71b95ad650ff44deab20901fe90bf92c
Bug: [Hydros Captor Ability : Healing Waters] seems to work through poison's Venomous Touch (at least in some cases)
Time stamps and Description
11:27 - Heal used on self, worked
13:00 - in replay, Vela [ally] does not appear to still be poisoned, but we all saw the red glow still there in the game (when heal worked)
Repro : Tried in some other cases, seemed to only happen sometimes
Bug Report [possible]
Replay: G71b95ad650ff44deab20901fe90bf92c
Bug: [Hydros Captor Ability : Turn the Tide] Venomous Touch seems to punch through invulnerability. Don't know if intended
Time stamps and Description
17:20 - Captor killed while invulnerable.
Repro : Repro'd maybe once or twice (only first time stamp listed above)
Most Fun to Play
Vex [Bottom] was the most fun tonight. Good Flamethrowers are a blast.
Squad Matchups
Vex Mirror Bottom This was a fun game to play, trying to figure out where to find the advantages.
Hydros w/ Vela vs. Poison/Hive Aside from the goofiness with healing, seemed pretty good. No real input on this matchup, things seemed gameplay determined.
Pathing
The only thing that stood out with pathing was attack preference blocking what would normally just trigger adjustments. Hydros' Scuttleguards could sidestep to let another guard in who has at minimum the same target.
Phases
Early: 4 Early game felt good today, there's a lot of early game variability. It feels like each test, we see more (different) openings.
Mid: 3 Mid game feels a bit more wobbly to me, and I think this might be due to the T1 counts. Bottom side, it seemed like you could respond to the opponent's choice to, for example, go heavy or light on T1 counts. Top side, though, (tonight playing Hydros) it seemed like you couldn't keep up with both opponents going heavy T1 counts.
Late: 4 Some games were lopsided tonight, but others had some good endgame maneuvering.
This week, I set out to play only Poison. Starting Wednesday, I put as much time into the squad as I could, and let me just say I LOVE playing Poison squad. Just WOW. You guys have made a squad that eclipses literally all others in fun for me. Interestingly, I heard that most people seemed to dislike playing against Poison in most cases. While I can see how it might be frustrating, I felt that Poison had a number of well designed risk/reward scenarios that I really enjoyed playing both with and against, though I did only have one game against Poison (where I was also Poison).
Poison adds an incredibly interesting aspect of attrition wars that I really haven't seen before in Atlas. Generally speaking, any unit that doesn't die in a fight can heal or recall fairly safely, negating all damage it received. In cases of close fights, this has been incredibly aggravating to me as a player, because I feel like I was not rewarded at all for the plays or harass I managed to achieve. One game from a few weeks ago that really highlighted this for me was a bot side matchup against MeltCat on Eris, who in between engages would sit on her healing tower until all her units were full. What this led to were half-committed engages where some damage would be traded on both sides, but no units would die, with my units often coming out healthier due to Eris's low dps in longer engagements. Then, as I tried to control the middle of the map, take gems, and exert pressure, MeltCat would move back out and deal heavy damage with her army, completely nullifying my advantage from our previous engagement. With Poison squad, you finally have a way to take advantage of simple engages that don't turn into full blown fights. By stopping the enemy from healing, you actually stop them from coming out into the middle of the map for the duration of a gem wave, creating real moments of zone control that I haven't felt exist on any other squad (though I haven't played much Celesta, I suspect purifiers may also be able to achieve a similar feeling). This works incredibly well with what I've found to be my favorite style of play, which is slowly poking down the enemy, dictating the flow of the middle of the map and gem collection, and taking smaller, more advantageous engagements, without always being forced to fully commit to trading kills.
The poison shaman's ability had an AMAZING feeling of risk vs reward when used on high priority targets. Damage-wise, it seems to do almost nothing to unpoisoned targets, doing hardly more than tickling them and giving them a nice green decoration circle for a few seconds. But, when the target is poisoned, it's an ABSURD nuke, especially when multiple explosions are stacked on a single target. This is the ability I was always looking for on old Vex's ignitors, and its low impact is what drove me away from the squad. Poison's explosions, on the other hand, give incredibly high reward, and start to feel actually worth the risk of sending units forward to ensure the enemy unit is poisoned. I also think this ability offers a very smart amount of counterplay, as keeping priority targets out of range of the poison archers nullifies the usefulness of the ability wholesale, and keeping poisoned units away from the army makes sure poison can't spread. I really liked using this ability, andI enjoyed playing against it too in the one game I did.
All of this said, I see two huge areas of power in Poison's kit that seem to compliment each other just a little bit too much. As I stated above, playing Poison does require risk to achieve the large rewards it offers. But, right now, the risk absolutely isn't high enough. This comes into play mostly for his t2 unit, the poison shaman.
The range on caustic eruption is WAAAAAY too high. 25-30% too large. Dropping an eruption on an unpoisoned unit is a no risk, small reward scenario, which feels silly and is always worth doing, and makes just throwing the ability on any unit in range whenever it's off cooldown way too appealing. As such a high impact ability, wasting it should both not be so easy, and not feel so totally okay within the overall game plan of the squad. That said, placing an eruption on a unit that is already poisoned is similarly low risk, and has massive reward. This means that once you have the shamans, disengaging from a fight against poison is almost not allowed, because as your poisoned units retreat, I can place a few parting long range eruptions on them for essentially free xp. This part of the problem ties really well into the second thing I think is currently wrong, which is:
Poison lasts way too long. This problem manifests in two different ways. First, adding to the strength of the t2s, poison almost always lasts long enough that after one poison-enhanced eruption, you can get a second eruption off after the cooldown comes back up relatively easily. That's frankly rather silly. It completely removes the risk for getting a poison-enhanced eruption, and takes many matchups from interesting fights to wholesale slaughters. Second, it keeps your opponents off the map for just too long. As I said in my first point of why I like playing the squad, if you manage to get poison down on the opponent at all, you can essentially keep them off the map for an entire gem wave, which is insane. I think bringing the duration down to 10 seconds and rebalancing the damage to either be 3 per second, still doing 30 over the duration, or even bringing it down to just 25 damage over the duration (up to 2.5 per second from 2 per second currently), would make the ability still not do much in short engagements, but not last literally forever anymore.
Just my two cents on a squad I find really, really fun, and hope can find a healthy place without getting totally gutted over the next few weeks! (I've seen too many of my favorite league of legends champions nerfed into the ground... Pls no more...)
Feature Request
Watch Menu Indicates Team Comps
When writing out my notes on a test, I often find myself having to reload replays a lot just to find what the matchup was. It would be really cool if a mouseover tool tip would show what people played. Would save a fair amount of time. Also useful if someone is looking for specific types of game comps to watch.
I played Wind all 6 games tonight and really enjoyed it. Sprites finally felt like they were able to deal the damage necessary to hit that point where when you get a full surround, you actually kill the opposing army rather than them killing you. I felt like it might have been a little too easy to get full surrounds though thanks to the Cyclone ability. I didn't even try using Transporters or Conduits this playtest because I feel like neither synergized very well with the Sprites in their current form. Instead I just upgraded my Sprites heavily (mostly going for magic / physical resist) which benefitted my favorite playstyle more.
Playing as Wind, I felt like I dominated every game I played this playtest, but I did so with probably a 25-50% gold advantage in every game. The reason is because I took all of my expansions super early, often having 3 expansions (including the 2x) up by about 3:15 and the 4th started around the 5-6min mark. The resulted in me having a huge gold advantage.
The hardest match for me was vs Vex going for fast Pyrosaur. I think even then my opponent didn't commit to Pyrosaurs enough though, I honestly think getting 3-4 pyrosaurs right off the bat would have been the best strategy.
Theorycrafting, I think Hive going for fast Scarab would have been almost impossible to beat, fast Howling Commandos could have been good, and in a 2v2 a team grabbing early Purifiers could have done well. Otherwise I feel like in straight up engagements there wasn't really a good way to fight Wind. The combination of super early mass gold led to me simply having more stuff than my opponents, and that combined with Cyclone (which made it very easy to surround) meant that if my hero got within range of my opponent's army I felt like I was just guaranteed to do damage unless my opponents army could just crush mine in a 1a, in which case there was nothing I could have done to begin with.
That being said, battles still felt very one sided one way or the other like they did last playtest, where I either killed my opponent's whole army with all my units alive but at low HP or my opponent killed my whole army with their units all alive but at low HP.
I did feel like in late game scenarios my army was still quite extremely vulnerable to AoE, even with 2 of the 400g resistance upgrades. I'm not sure how or even if this should be fixed, or if Sprites should just be expected to fall off in late game. With the resistance upgrades though I did noticed that my Sprites stayed relevant for much longer in the game, often long enough for me to secure an insurmountable advantage (by killed bases / towers / ect).
Not for me today, except for Wind Hero's Ult like the last playtest.
Edit: Also ran into the units getting stuck together glitch with Wind's ult 3 times over 6 games.
It felt about the same as last time to me. Early game felt okay but not amazing, mid game felt super fun when on even match or at an advantage but super frustrating when at a disadvantage, late game today didn't feel very interesting because I always had such a huge advantage.
oh my god I played a Squad other than Alder's. Who am I even.
So as a preamble, the Artillery team's focus seems to be on "Squad Fun Rating" or SFR for short (official term). So I'll focus my feedback on the SFR for the squads and matchups I played as well, and only little on the actual balance/strength of things.
For me, I'll actually quantify ambiguously that SFR goes 1-10, 1 being "I would never play this Squad until something about them fundamentally changed" to 10 "I see no reason to play other Squads because this Squad is ridonkulificly fun".
I played two Squads - Seed and Poison. (brief side note: I'm having difficulty accurately referring to the factions in this game. Should I say Hero consistently? Squad? My gut says to say "I played two Squads - Alder and Poison" but this is a disconnect since I'm referring to the entire Squad by only the hero's name.)
Alder
Balance
SFR: 9
As is probably apparent now, I'm in love with this Squad and have been since the first day I played it. Synergy, zoning, multiple builds, flexibility, and powerful teamfight contribution make every stage of the game exciting and feel as though I have room to outplay my opponent.
Even the dreaded Alder v Eris matchup I've been enjoying a LOT since the Needlefern change. I would love to practice in a 1v1 map in each matchup to feel it out, but also just because engaging with Alder is super fun. Like it's just always interesting and always different. This is especially true for the new Alder v Poison matchup, which requires a completely different approach than any other matchup due to the healing-negation (actually, I think it's a pretty similar matchup to Eris since she 1-shots the ToL anyways).
Why not a 10? Alder in my experience cannot carry the entire team. His early game is passive and it's tough to gain an advantage until hitting key points like upgraded ToL tech or lvl6 for the ult. This isn't a flaw, but just a trait that any balanced squad would get by having high-cost early-game units. If his early game was stronger I think he would easily be the best squad in the game, both by SFR and also just raw strength and snowball potential.
Poison
Bug Note
Poison currently stops structures which are in the process of being built from gaining their initial life.
Preamble
I played Poison because I matched against Snow/RCM and I knew one of them was going to choose Seed (I believe it was RCM), and I knew this matchup is super tough for Seed. I wanted to explore Poison's toolkit and how it engaged in fights.
Balance
No comment because I dunnoooooooo. It felt strong, as if I didn't have to try very hard to engage effectively, deal damage, or gain a lead. I think the only matchup I played was Poison + x v Alder + y in top lane though, so I feel like the existing advantage helped a lot in engagements.
SFR: 7
Poison feels very straightforward for the few games I played. It's definitely super fun to kill guys and do damage and be awesome, but since all the current abilities are just, well, more damage, Poison's role feels limited to DPS and heal-negation (which is essentially DPS in a roundabout way). For me, I like flexibility and utility in every game I play, and I'm not sure if Poison has those tools available.
Side note: I'm not sure if many non-Alder Squads at all have multiple roles available to them. This is probably also a reason why I like Alder so much in comparison.
Pathing
Saw a couple times where my Wind ally would move-command his army, but it would get stuck in his Warp Pad and just keep walking, warping, walking, warping in a loop.
Other Thoughts
bullet form here we gooooo
- please let me prehotkey my Research Facility :D
- 1v1 mode so I can practice with friends/teach people how to engage and micro?
- I dislike the new gem skin. colors and shading feel out of place with the rest of the art. darkness levels make them feel less important than they used to be (to me, bright/shiny/contrasted=important. I'm not sure if this new form is really contrasting any more than the old form was).
- super pumped for new economy model whenever it rolls out
No great timeline on when we're going to be adding more features to the Watch tab, but this one's going to be high on the list when we do that.
As more work goes into our pathing systems, we'll eventually decide whether things like this are behaviors we want. Glad you brought this example up!
Hopefully, the 2v2 region will get to a place where it feels like you and your teammate are making those decisions together to find the right solution. This may not quite feel that way yet, we're still dialing into it; and we'll be exploring that more with the expansion of the tech/weapon systems.
Thanks! <3
Super stoked that you're enjoying the squad this much. And what you said about playing AGAINST the squad is something we're dialing into and examining the problems (and potential solutions) of in the next few weeks.
We almost entirely agree with both this statement, and your reasoning. May not be acting on it immediately, but I think you're absolutely correct here.
The numbers on everything is subject to some changes on our next pass. This includes the percentage of healing reduction (may remain 100%, uncertain for now), duration, damage, and the ranges/speeds/sizes of everything in this squad. But we definitely want to make sure we're moving in the right direction with its design first. We may need to change those numbers in order to learn that, though. This squad is one where I'm particularly excited about iterating on it, though.
Thanks for testing and posting! WOO! <3
Had a full Monday digging out from the weekend storm so I didn't get my feedback in as quickly as I would've liked!
I played the Poison squad for both games because of how strongly I felt countered by it on Hydros on Wednesday, I wanted to see how it was from the other side - I was unfortunately not matched in a lane against a Hydros player so I couldn't make an accurate call on that end. However, I had a game against Eris which felt pretty good in the back-and-forth. I agree that the poison seems to last way too long, as when we parted from engagements and danced around each other, the flashing red just seemed to stay forever.
Can't say that I did, but I didn't use melee units this time which I feel makes things easier
OK, so early game I was GOING to rate a 3-3.5. It's interesting but how much variance do you have when you choice is "expand right away or tech up while we do the gem dance"? However, those jerks @AlienTree and @Pursuit made a play where they they quickly took the 2x expansions while we were gemming up during the first wave. Not only did this open my eyes to new possibilities, but also made me realize what I need to watch for (including a LACK of information) and how to possibly react against it. Given this, I think any comments made during the 1k playtest of not having a lot of variability in play is because people largely haven't explored it thoroughly yet. I'm going to bump the early game to a solid 4 at least after these revelations!
Mid-game is where I feel things are the most dynamic, so I'm going to place that at 4 as well.
Late-game, my experience may be off. I feel like I haven't had the right kind of game due to a learning curve. The losses are either "crap, we weren't watching mid because we were so tied up in our respective areas doing the gem/expansion dance", or "well, someone has a billion gems, let's just throw a ton of neutral units at the buildings!". I can FORESEE a bunch of back-and-forth on defense if I'm paying closer attention as I get more comfortable with the game (related to the next paragraph below), so for now I'm saying 3 but with the caveat that it may be more my limitation than the game's.
Misc thoughts:
-Echo @Cycle 's request for 1v1 mode, would help a lot between the "formal"ish playtests. Speaking as someone who's not west coast, I feel like a lot of those testers get to play multiple games on both Weds and Sun, whereas I can only really do Sunday (and that's tough if family obligations come up, etc, which are less likely during the week). This would go part of the way to alleviating that for me, and I feel I'd be able to give better feedback.
-If not this, then would it be possible to force the bots to pick certain squads? Sometimes when I've thought of/noticed something and I want to test it, it's mechanic-specific and I'm otherwise jut rolling the dice on bot composition until I get what I want.
Squad Matchups:
I played Eris every game for this test, and against Poison in some respect every game. @AlienTree has poison figured out really well against my overall style of Eris play, as he mentioned. The 1v1 matchup between Eris and Poison feels strange to me because Eris "wins" (I'd have more units left, but total unit cost lost is likely still in Poison's favour) in most all-in engages, but backing off after a pickoff like I prefer to just causes Eris to fall very far behind very quickly. Poison T2 also swings things into Poison's favour, and delaying T2 feels like a major mistake in this matchup.
I played top against Pursuit and Alientree with their Wind/Poison get-every-expansion-asap build and good lord the sprites were overwhelming. I felt helpless to engage against Poison (which is what I now knew I wanted to do to win) because sprites would surround and destroy me, and helpless to disengage from the sprites because then the poison would wear me down to the point where I couldn't do anything. In retrospect, earlier apocalytes may be helpful against sprites, but Pursuit is really good at dodging those meteors.
Other Feedback:
Apart from the games where I got handily obliterated by Poison (mostly Alientree's), every game for this test just felt great. I'm not sure if it was just getting matched with players that were all fairly close in skill or just a handful of great matchups otherwise, I had a number of moments sunday where I thought to myself "wow, I am really enjoying this match a lot".
Sorry for the sparse feedback on this test. It was largely dominated by Eris vs Poison for me, and I feel like that's been covered by the poison players above.
This is definitely a problem we've observed; Wind is "god-tier" at tackling Titan camps right now. As Sean alluded to in Discord, we've got a handful of changes to resources that will, hopefully, alleviate this and help us hone in on specifically the squad vs squad balance.
Could you point to when this occurred? The only time I've personally seen this is when units are surrounded, would love to track this down and fix it if it's still happening
Thanks! :D
Consider it unofficially coined!
Just a quick note - I think this change has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Good to see that echoed :D
I believe we've got this fixed for Wednesday. Please let me know if you see it again.
Alder deliberately has a diverse toolkit; so that this is being observed feels fairly correct.
Certainly not incorrect behavior (technically speaking), but we may want something that prevents this, as it's very-seldom intentional. I mean, we're going to be giving this more deliberate functionality eventually anyway, most likely, haha. But yeah, we've seen the very crummy-feeling MC Escher Warp Pad pattern more than a few times now.
One day. :P
For now, the best thing you've got access to is partying with that person and doing bot games. I'll see what I can do about (eventually, probably not soon) getting a 1v1-type thing, but no promises.
Passing this one onto Art.
Thanks as always! <3
While we certainly like that the way an engagement is taken has a big sway on the result, we probably want a greater scale of success to be possible than "only lost 40% of my army" as opposed to "lost outright." This will just be something we chip away at achieving over the next several balance/design passes, particularly as it pertains to Poison.
Just want to restate briefly, even though I mentioned it above, that we're expecting the next suite of gameplay changes to make this feel.... Less bad. Haha!
WOOHOO!
As much or as little feedback as you want is the desire. No sweat that it was terse versus verbose! Thanks for testing and, as always, for the feedback! :D
As a first note, we've got some things we want to try later on that will help this matchup in particular. :P
This is actually a result we see pretty often. I wouldn't call this abnormal by any means.
This would be an excellent stretch goal for the "vs Bots" game mode. Though it also may end up being the case that we do what other games have done, where when you play a "matchmade" bot game, you're against random bots; but if you play a custom-lobby game, you're able to choose each bot on either team to softly simulate a situation. But either of these features are still far, far off.
Thanks for the feedback, and welcome to the daily test group!