I laid out in this thread why I think B+ is currently a busted system. Many of you seem to agree.
These are some ideas to fixing it. First to lay out out some given assumptions this is based on:
1) Coop is never going to be balanced, but it should be consistently enjoyable.
Some commanders will always be easier to play. Different ones will have different peak power levels. And the most obvious one: your allies vary greatly in skill with no correlation to their level.
SC2 is a recreational activity and if you canât find most of your games to be enjoyable, then why are you even playing? Perfect balance is fortunately not required for consistent fun.
2) Mutator points is not additive or accurate.
Currently we use an additive point system that is grossly inaccurate both by the points assigned and their combined interactions.
3) Coop is not balanced for the highest skill level.
People who speedrun and solo brutations are always going to find ways to play the game in ways that others do not find enjoyable. Just think about how ridiculous it sounds to balance a cooperative game for players who donât even need/want to cooperate.
4) Most players want to win most of their games but not 100%. Retrying and overcoming a specific challenge is part of the fun of having so many different commanders and prestige kits (not to mention $$$ for blizzard).
Suggestions: 1) Let people change commander/masteries/prestige after learning what mutators they roll. Reduce experience bonus by 25% if changing commanders.
It is not fun to be hard-countered by RNG. Sometimes this can be mitigated by adjusting your masteries/prestige, sometimes not. Tychus + Nova vs killbots on a set length map like Malwarfare is simply a miserable experience.
2) Let players mutually agree to re-roll mutators at the start of a match. First re-roll is free, additional re-rolls reduce experience bonus by 25%.
If a player insists on playing a certain commander, they should not be forced to play a mutator that hard counters it.
3) Separate mutators into 2 buckets: harder gameplay, gameplay alteration. Do not have more than 1 gameplay alteration at a time on Brutal +1.
Harder gameplay are generic difficulty increases like heroes of the storm, aggressive deployment, alien incubation where you can play normal but you have less room for error and fights are simply harder. Most mutators fall under âharder gameplayâ.
Gameplay alterations are mutators like double edge, fatal attraction, diffusion, black death, killbots. They force you to either play in a very strange way or severely limit your kit. They usually elicit feelings of âthis is bull****â if you donât have a lot of experience playing against it. Random queue B+ should be somewhat consistent in difficulty to most players and having more than one gameplay alteration throws a lot of RNG into this.
4) Add a âmutator synergyâ point bonus for certain combinations or on certain maps. Readjust points of individual mutators.
Blizzard (4 pts) by itself is not more dangerous than going nuclear (3 pts) but blizzard or concussion combined with going nuclear is exponentially more difficult. A lot of these combinations have already been identified with the weekly mutations which is why they were chosen in the first place. A lot of other troll combinations have been cataloged by the community.
This is an area where consulting the best coop players make sense. They have the deepest knowledge of mutators and their interactions.
5) Allow people to random-queue Brutal+ Retry.
Brutal+ usually feels like a puzzle and retrying and overcoming it is a big part of the fun and satisfaction. There is no reason why you should need to party to do this. For the opposing player who did not queue up a retry, it makes little difference that you did. A lot of times I would narrowly lose a B+ game that I feel like I could have won, but not have anyone online at the time to retry with. So I would later have to boot up a Maguro map to play it and it just feels extra tedious and annoying to even have to do this.
A simpler solution than rechoosing commander/rerolling would be to allow a fixed number of mutator vetoes from each player. (maybe with an exp penalty)
[although They should allow adjusting of Prestige/Mastery after map/mutators/partner commander are known in the loading screen for all games]
also for additional fun, they should have a Hard+, Normal+, and Casual+ difficulties⌠everyone likes to have some variety
I think with the introducing of the prestige system, letting people rechoose/reroll might be better in the long run, although I certainly wouldnât mind a veto system as that was the fastest way to roll out something. I did suggest a veto in the other thread after all.
Blizzard has an incentive to sell as many commanders and stim packs as possible. Thatâs a given. If we look at every commander/kit as a tool and every B+ game as a puzzle, then figuring out the best tool for the puzzle is part of the game. At the same time, forcing people to play things they donât want to play also seems like a faulty system. For the most part, I only enjoy terran commanders like Nova/Raynor/Swann. I also like playing Dehaka but I also want a challenge and dehaka tends to kill that in many situations. Literally none of them are good vs killbots nor particularly good vs double edge.
I agree that a veto is the simplest fastest fix in removing a lot of miserable mutator sets. What it doesnât do is remove the boring-easy ones unless they give you a copious amount of vetos. What I proposed is more a major re-haul which would take a lot longer to implement but I think could lead to more granular optimization for enjoyment.
B+ to B+6 is suppose to be that difficulty. Its just a wildly inconsistent experience. Blizzard has explicitly said the reason they did it this way was to avoid just adding more enemies and hp, even though a number of mutators just adds enemies and hp.
With how prestige looks like it will just be more power creep, the actual coop experience is on the path to becoming meaningless when you can steamroll brutal if you have half a brain and one hand.
Fix it by getting rid of it. SC is already a great game. Theyâre just taking good things away from a game that already works well when they massively jack it up by radically changing basic components of gameplay like the ability to move across the map, the ability to see right in front of your face, the right to micro your units, etc.
Just increase challenge along the lines that already exist in gameplay, rather than trying to perform surgery on the game with a chainsaw.
If you canât handle a certain difficulty then step down one. Itâs that simple. They already made Brutal+ easier in a previous patch, why make it even more easier?
But on a more serious note, vetoing would probably work best. I never did understand those people who queue Brutal+ and then leave because that didnât like the modifiers.
Another solution would be to remove the bonus xp (or all xp entirely) from Brutal+ and higher so people would stop queuing it for the bonus xp in mind. This would eliminate the complainers really quickly since they wonât feel forced to play Brutal+ to level faster. Then again, they could always lock Brutal+ behind parties only.
Iâve since only started playing B+ with parties. Then I started only playing custom with parties and just picking our own mutators. The options for people who are bored of brutal are all⌠kind of dumb and tedious. Iâve largely just stopped playing and now spend my time complaining on the forums.
This is what Iâm expecting too. Brutal is already such a cake walk and some prestiges arenât balanced with a positive and negative (looking at you, clone Dehaka). For some commanders, brutal+ will be the only real challenge.
They need to recategorize some of the mutations too. Leave the impossible/painful stuff at brutal+2-6. Brutal +1 should be possible to play with all commanders, though with varying degrees of difficulty based on commander and mutation rng.
So far the more well received prestiges are the ones that are (on net) commander buffs. Their disadvantages do not outweigh the massive power increase. If blizzard has no idea how to make the game harder than the wild mess that is B+, they might as well release this on tablets and phones next with how absurdly strong commanders are getting.
Iâm surprised none of the points mentioned adjusting mutator difficulty.
Scoring system is just one way to help matchmaking but balancing mutation itself needs individual adjustment to each mutator.
Many of the âhard counterâ is only due to poorly tuned effects of said mutator. It seems though on the other hand, whenever this is mentioned the first thing some people jump to is âover tuningâ.
If a relative balance of mutation can be found, then Iâm sure a more appropriate mutator difficulty itself can be found.
A lot of mutators are mildly annoying on their own but nightmarish in combination. I already mentioned concussion + going nuclear. Another one is life leech, which is troublesome by itself and maddening with diffusion since the diffused damage heals them - effectively making them invincible at close range if the only units around are yours. Alien incubation and infestation are pretty weak in general, but combined with avenger can get out of hand real fast. Mutators throw a lot of X factors into the system, but since Blizzard seems heart set on using them⌠this was the best I could do within that constraint.
Re: Warbird -
For some reason Blizzard has explicitly said that they donât want to just keep buffing Amonâs raw stats, hence why mutators was the chosen path for increasing difficulty. I donât get it either given how many mutators effectively is âmore hp, more enemiesâ.
Right, so if the Concussive Attack is adjusted to x seconds (arbitrarily for example 5 sec, or slow effect is not 50% but only 30%), then this combo would instantly not be a problem. Similarly, if Going Nuclear isnât 50 bazillion Nukes covering essentially 80% of mission pathing, then perhaps it isnât as much of a problem to begin with. A nuke will punish regardless of how many there are, having to dodge 1 nuke is the same as dodging 5 nukes (the way it currently functions). The only thing 5 nukes are adding is nothing more than the âannoying partâ, which is slowing down movement for no reason.
Exactly, another one everyone complains about. So again, adjusting Life Leech to not be 100% of damage dealt but rather than 75% or 50% would still be challenging but not broken. And similarly again, Diffusion works for 50% of damage within 5 range. Letâs adjust that to 33% and 3 range. Highly favoring melee units, still making them far more tanky (in the combo of LL+D) but way less favoring ranged units. Problem solved again.
Letâs take this 3rd example. Iâm going to skip out on the first 2 and just focus on Avenger. Hereâs the buff chart:
Stat
Buff
Attack Speed
10%
Movement Speed
10%
Armor
0.3
HP
10%
HP Regen
1
Shields
10%
Shield Regen
1
Avenger is based on supply, where no supply is an auto 1 stack. Letâs do a simple adjustment, make the supply count 1/2, or the effects 1/2. How hard is that? Not at all. Many of the problems (which arenât real problems) are solved, while still providing increased difficulty.
Are you seeing the theme here? While the difficulty is absolutely reduced compared to now. The real problem of completely unintended interaction is fixed. And all it took is some very very very simple adjustment to values.
One last thing, before someone barges out and say âwhat if it is intended?â Then the entire discussion is pointless because if it is intended to work in tedium (which I donât reject the premise entirely xD), then no amount of discussion will drive a favorable change.
Finally a good post, I thank you OP.
I generally agree on what you said but the RNG does help get rid of people playing the same stuff non-stop and always picking the winning formula.
I think a veto system & readjusting your prestige and mastery is suffice to keep enough RNG and not get absolutely hard-countered. If youâre unlucky enough to roll mutator combos then so be it.
Itâs quite possible, and is a reality, that there are players who can adjust gameplay around a mutation but not necessarily the attack waves Brutal offers. I wouldâve loved a Normal+ and Hard+ when I first started. (The only option at the time, and even now, is the weekly mutation - but how many times would you want to keep doing the same one in a given week?)
This is really only a partial fix, but for one, I think they need to add more mutators that are static changes to enemy strengths like HP, damage, and shields. Barrier and revive are decent ones, but for the people who want âa strong brutal difficulty,â that would be nice. And an aggressive deployment version that actually just has more spawns from the usual locations rather than dropping 4 BCs that yamato the second they land directly on top of your units.
And after that, they need to add a way to have mutator presets, so you can just select that with a friend and auto queue without the tedious task of going into the custom menu and selecting every mutator you want every time. It wouldnât help with random queuing, but at least itâd be something. As long as you have one friend, you can play the co-op you want to play without the red tape.
