Bored while units are respawning
I agree with a lot of the feedback in other posts about the game feeling sluggish and the lack of incentive to multitask, but there is one other key problem I felt while playing. That was the respawn time of the units. One of the reasons that I generally play SC2 instead of MOBAs is that I like to be engaged the whole match. I crave the franticness and constant action of RTS games and the lack of macro combined with the long respawn timer had me bored in a lot of the matches.
I think that adding an incentive to split your units into multiple groups could help both this issue and the lack of multitasking as it would be less likely that all your units would be dead simultaneously. Another thing that seems like it could help would be higher damage overall as well as significantly shorter respawn times for at least the basic units. This feels like it could create a situation similar to "parade" pushes in SC2 which are some of my favorite fights. I really enjoy scrappy constant battles where both players are microing a ton while reinforcements stream in from both sides, it makes for a really exciting battle with relatively low unit counts.
Comments
During death in a MOBA, you generally have time to buy items (strategy, resource management) or watch action. I found moving around on the minimap pretty hard (I think I may have been missing out on some camera hotkeys), and there is nothing to really buy / consider buying during death spawn besides upgrades.
Perhaps I should be spending my gold more balanced, but I feel like I'd rather have my 4 purifiers up ASAP, so I don't have any gold to think about while waiting for respawn.
I'm going to be doing some tests using the hotkeys for selecting each tier (these are unset by default, but I may use them in exchange for ctrl groups) and moving them around as groups. For example, as Celesta Z + Hero would be to deny / gather gems, X would be deploying into strategic spots to prevent neutral weapon siege. I've been keeping my C near my X to cloud any ranged units (normally Z, since people let them auto-attack) to force them into siege range or using their E to shield up any X while they try to escape danger.
With this strategy, X+C would be something to move around if my forward group of Z+Hero gets wiped out. Hero comes back faster than Z, so then Hero can provide extra support / vision for my X+C group. My only real issue with this is I haven't found a steady way to jump around the map fluidly (think macro in SC2.)
Can you link to the replays and give me the time at which the boredom was happening? There could be a number of places in the games where this is happening.
We definitely want more incentive to split added in the coming months. The idea of certain units having different respawn times is verrrrrry intriguing. We probably won't experiment with that in the short term, but as we have other systems finalized, adding respawn time variety could be a cool way to differentiate units/strategies even more.
@Artillery.Day[9]
I am not on my home PC so I will link specific replays when I get home, but in general I felt bored whenever the majority of my army was dead and I wasn't in combat or positioning for combat. One of the things I like so much about SC2 is that there is almost always something for me to do towards a victory. It is often macro stuff with no real decision making like building depots and sending workers to gas or other bases that I am happy are gone from Atlas, but I feel like that action needs to be replaced with something. Right now if my army is dead I feel like there is nothing useful to do with my APM.
I also felt bored in the late game after my army was dead. There were several times where I would actually lose every single unit, in which case I just waited around until my army came back.
In the early game it wasn't a big deal, because I could gem with just my hero; in the late game, I felt like I had to wait for the bulk of my army before I was safe to move out, and the respawn times were longer. These issues could very likely be fixed by changes to multitasking and more things to do, though; not only because you're less likely to lose everything at once, but then if only your hero comes back, there might be things you can actually accomplish with it.