Imposter bunny cooldown balance ideas

[tardy valley]

After time spent on the new 1v5 matches, and the additions of active imposters + listen, I feel a lot more of a struggle to have map pressure and kill bunnies compared to 1v4.

And to me I feel like the main problem is with imposters. Imposters are your only true way to have map pressure aside from just being in that area/actively chasing a bunny, so I'm not counting invisibility->teleport or using boxes in general as map pressure. It's way too difficult to try and keep all the bunnies occupied when they're progressing at the same time with Imposters on an enormous cooldown, frankly I NEVER have all 4 of my imposter slots used in the lobbies I go against, at least. They're always destroyed, intentionally tripped when I'm pinged on the other side of the carnival, or if it's an active and I'm in a chase it's used up fast. I feel like ideally, in any situation, magician should only have 1 slot available for imposters throughout a match, with your other 3 used on traps/actives.

You can use active imposters to counter a loop or to just try and end a chase faster (placing an active ahead of the bunny you're chasing), but now your strongest ability as magician is gone for 90 seconds. Active imposters only last 60 seconds, btw. At the very least, I think the actives should last as long as your cooldown for imposter takes to come back. However, I feel like this could be dangerously snowball-y with a lower cooldown for the classic trap imposters.

So my suggestion is this.
When you place a trap/playing dead imposter (infinite duration), your imposter ability is on a 90 second cooldown.
When you place an active imposter (60 second duration), your imposter ability is on a 60 second cooldown.
I think this could make the decision between using your imposter cooldown for an active or a trap a bit more fair for the time cost and sacrifice of the other option.
(... either that, or just lower the imposter ability's cooldown in general without any conditions. but i think that's a bit dangerous.)

[devout roost]

I believe the 90 second cool down versus 60 second active imposter is very intentional. Otherwise, you can just spam them out each time as you fail until you finally successfully catch the bunny with 0 counter on the bunny's part. The idea behind the cool down being longer is the bunny has a slight reprieve to make a move or get away prior to the next active imposter being on them. Maybe they can tweak down from 90 to 75 or 80, but I definitely would not have it at the same time as the use, because that just opens up to active imposter spam.

[tardy valley]

But my concern is with map pressure. I don't see an issue If a magician chooses to sit there and keep chasing one bunny for 2 entire active imposter cooldowns, they are deliberately making the choice to waste their time and cooldowns to catch one single bunny, while the other 4 get to freely progress without the worry of trap imposters, active imposters, or the magician. Frankly if a magician had to use 2 active imposters to catch someone they should've left that bunny ages ago. A magician should never have to waste so much time on one guy.

[devout roost]

Between a bunny plus teleporting (which technically doesn't cost any ability since teleport boxes are very common) pluuuus ticket guys, you can have decent map pressure, I feel. Even counting something as simple as closing a gate as map pressure.

Not all map pressure needs to be active map pressure, which is I think what you're getting at. For that, I feel like the extra 30 seconds would still just result in too many areas being spammed with the imposter and would give no downside to say using it in a chase (or using it outside of chase) since it recovers the moment it's inactive/useless. It just makes the power effectively a permanent 2nd body able to block off a room or area if the magi wants to exploit it (and they will, players always do, that's part of playing a competitive game). This means splitting pressure as bunny's, which is the bunny's main and almost only major tool to progressing, is nullified since you can now actively guard two places at once all the time, if wanted. I see that as a major issue, hence preferring the many methods of passive pressure that can be applied by undoing progress, putting up ticket bots, etc.

[tardy valley]

i see what you mean, i agree it could probably lead to more snowball scenarios if the bunnies are struggling, but honestly i'm pretty traumatized by full stack comms teams, which leads mostly to these feelings. an imposter can only deal with one bunny at a time, so all it takes is 2 bunnies going to that area together to nullify the imposter, while a 3rd bunny is being chased by magician, which is still leaving room for 2 other bunnies to do whatever else at the time.

i've probably just had mostly unlucky matches lately but it still sucks this has been happening so frequently where i feel horribly helpless against bunnies always pressuring at the same time.

[devout roost]

Yeah, I see how it can be tough at higher levels with fully comm squads. Playing as a solo bunny, I never run into that since they're full squads and I'd never fit into that, so I have the opposite experience with my teammates 😆

Always a tough balance to find when it comes to fully comm teams. They already put the extra keys mechanic in place (magi starts with an extra 5 keys - how many individual bunny groups there are. Ie. If it's one group of 5, you get 4 extra keys to start early pressure), but I feel like that also needs to take MMR and other pieces into account to be properly balanced (ie. A team of 5 newbies doesn't need that).

That said, it shows they're looking to figure out solutions that are specific to a 5-man group, which I think is what this calls for. Lowering the cool down for every magi means full comm teams may be more manageable, but now all other games (and a majority of them, I might add) are miserable with active imposter spam. Maybe there can be some "ability" that comes into play for full comms or majority comms (ie. 1-2 groups) at high MMR that can decrease some cool downs for those scenarios specifically, who knows.

It's also worth noting that MMR is super wonky right now, meaning better than average magicians are being put up against death squad bunnies because bunny MMR is much harder to grind up than magi, meaning in order to be a 2k MMR bunny, you either needed to play magi to boost it or be absolutely insane at bunny; so that may also play a role.

[tardy valley]

right. it is very early access and 1v5 is pretty new and experimental, so i try not to let much get to me since i know theres a lot of work to be done on the game still

and yeah i feel you on playing solo bunny lol. i play with one other friend sometimes but it still kinda sucks not having good comms with the other 3

[oak ridge]

I just want them to stop getting stuck, walking away from the point I want them to guard, and actually see the bunnies five steps from where I place them...

[tardy valley]

some way to anchor active bunnies to patrol a specific area would be neat.

[oak ridge]

the ones that irk me the most is when I put down an impostor on the opened exit gates to stop other bunnies from escaping, and the assh*le just fºcking walks right out instead

imagine my face