Pursuit's First Impressions 12/5/15 ~20 games

My Bias:

About 20 games in? Played each hero at least once and my favorites a few times. Haven't read anyone elses impression on the forums or played any games with allies yet.

General Thoughts / Feelings on Gameplay:

Gameplay seems to focus on securing expansions and gems, gems spawn in the middle of the map which forces engagements. This seems to work pretty well, the only problem I have with it is that it makes the game less diverse because if you’re not fighting in the middle of the map you’re basically giving up one of your primary resources and need to do some serious damage to make it worth it, which I don’t think is possible until much later in the game.

Units with a large collision size are much harder to control with the current pathing, and tier 1 units with a higher cost are much more painful to lose and seem to be just as easy if not easier to lose. I also think the healing done by the starting towers must be a set amount rather than a % amount because higher health units seem to take much longer to heal at them. I don’t like playing Grath / Alder / Hydros at all for these reasons (especially sad because Alder is the hero who I liked the best conceptually). Melee units also seem much weaker than ranged units in general due to the pathing + how important focus fire is. Even if you can get the melee units in close, unless you have a full surround you’re not going to trade evenly, and due to the pathing it’s really hard to retreat so you kind of just have to accept losing a significant portion of your army in every engagement.

In terms of ‘fun’ playing with the different squads right now, my ranking is something like Celesta >= Vela > Eris = Ryme > Vex > Alder > Grath > Hydros. Really Celesta -> Vex are all quite fun to play though. Grath and especially Hydros are very frustrating to play, I feel like I have very little control over my squad control with them. I’ve tried Hydros 3 times trying different things to see if I just haven’t ‘figured it out’ yet but IMO Scuttleguards just feel bad to use.

I think early game is going to become a bit boring after awhile (right now I still enjoy it) because I’m pretty much forced into the same thing every game; mass tier 1 units and try to control the middle of the map to collect more gems than my opponents during the first two gem spawns. After the first two gem spawns there is a pause, which gives me a chances to use what gems I’ve collected to expand / tower up until the next wave. I think this is intentional design, but I’m struggling to come up with any other ways to play the first ~5 minutes of the game (that would work vs humans; I’ve figured out a couple of exploit builds vs AI).

As a side note, having only played with bots atm I think this part of the game could become frustrating with teammates when it comes to picking up gems. Having a teammate who hogs all the gems could be very annoying, currently I end up with 20+ gems after the first wave consistently but I feel like with allies doing so would hurt them a lot. The optimal way to play this is probably to pick up ~10 gems (for a total of 12) in the first wave so everyone can expand and grab a tower or two in the first downtime.

Around 5 minutes is where the game starts becoming more interesting, this is where I feel like I’m actually making decisions on how I want to proceed. With my Gold I can upgrade and/or max out my Tier 1 units or start adding on Tier 2 units, with my Gems I can fortify areas with towers, try to take more expansions and/or add on some Neutral Weapons and try to be aggressive.

Around the 8:00 mark I think I have a pretty big influx of gold that I won’t be getting in real games due to the fact that I can typically double expand after the first wave of gems when playing vs AI. Despite this, I still don’t have enough gold to do all the things I want, which makes me feel like build orders and optimization is going to be a huge part of playing mid game. You’ll need to have a plan for exactly what you want to buy at this stage of the game because resources suddenly become extremely scarce. So far I'm really enjoying this part of the game and having a lot of fun experimenting with different ways to play the game.

One problem I have with the current way upgrades work is that in a lot of cases Armory upgrades are less interesting yet more powerful than the ‘Special’ upgrades. Just as an example, when playing Vela upgrading damage is stronger than upgrading Focal Retention Implant, costs less and comes into effect earlier. So even though the Eagle Eye upgrade is much more interesting and actually changes the way I play the game, if I want to minmax I end up grabbing damage first instead. This is true for a lot of the upgrades.

I can’t really comment on later stages of the game right now because I typically win around the 15 minute mark (push starts around 10-12 minutes?) against the AI when I try, longer games only result from me sitting back / experimenting with units / purposefully prolonging the game. This feels like a very solid game length to me, but I think games vs real players of a similar level will end up lasting quite a bit longer.

As far as Neutral weapons go, I’ve only played around with the Mini Ion Cannon, Ion Cannon, Vision Ward and Healing Ward. Vision Ward costing 2 seems a little high to me, it’s really only useful when attacking into line of sight blockers and it feels very easy to pick off even when you position it well unless you’re babysitting it. The Healing Ward is really powerful, I think 3 cost with the small radius is a good place for it since I often find myself throwing down a few of them when going for a big battle / tower assault. Mini Ion Cannon vs Ion Cannon I honestly feel like there aren’t really situations where I would prefer the Ion Cannon, it’s only real advantage is its greater range, otherwise making 6 Mini Ion Cannons almost always feels like a superior investment. AFAIK the only thing that actually outranges a Mini Ion Cannon is a regular Ion Cannon anyway.

A few small things I wish I could change:

• Have 14 starting gems instead of 12. This would allow you to ‘rush’ tier 2 without falling behind in economy by not getting an early expansion. Right now there’s no hero I would want to rush to tier 2 with anyway, but I think it would be a cool way to add some diversity into the opening stages of the game.
• Upgrading an armory removes it from whatever control group I had it in, I wish it would stay on that control group.
• Smaller collision size on the Scuttleguard would go a long way in making Hydros more fun to play. I’ll probably do a whole write-up on each squad later actually.

PS: Are all the characters of the same color supposed to be siblings or something? I just noticed how similar they all look and was curious.

edit: Didn't see first impressions subforum, I swear it wasn't there when I started this xD feel free to move it.