Let us know what you think about the latest Versus changes!
More information int he original thread: #1218192651908677782 message
#Versus March 2024 Feedback
prime gust
junior swift
I did two slates of duels with @balmy dew and @soft nova in the days leading up to the last clash event. I would like to thank them for helping run experiments, mostly involving either them or viewers playing on their side bombing/bustering me under various circumstances. In doing so, I believe I may have had a competitive advantage during the last clash event, although I think it was overshadowed by many captains choosing to participate in Dungeons instead after it was punted by a day.
My hope is that anyone who reads this can use this information to give captains some information to plan their battles better in Clash or in Duels, if they so choose to take the latter seriously.
Before I provide some results, I do want to provide some historic scenarios, mostly to frame actual use cases of the effectiveness of these recent versus changes. I think a lot of the way Clash is framed is it is often compared to the historic Versus.
One of the historic versus scenarios is the notion of a captain filling first, and this still often happens today in Clash. When a captain fills first, it gives the other captain carte blanche to do whatever they want to the first captain, and the first captain is unable to counter what the second captain does. The usage of assassin units is a common scenario here but I think it was more prominent in old-school versus.
In old school versus, busters, balloon busters, and rogues were all examples of very high-risk, high-reward units and were often "counterpicks". The risk is high because these units often had low HP but when placed early, they were easy to be countered themselves. I still have a clip from many years ago where I played for a captain and finally defeated a captain who I consider a dear friend with a rogue when her army filled early and the captain who I played for had that carte blanche scenario.
In the correct scenario, these units would have the ability to completely change a game in the early game, as was mentioned. There were also historic changes made to counter this - for example, Flying Rogues were changed to target flying units first, making it counter Balloon Buster. But then when spells were introduced, Haste made it a lot easier for a lot of these assassins to land and do damage. So, right at the end, place some stuff when you have carte blanche and you basically say f--- you to the other captain.
When Versus returned as Arena, I think one of the biggest changes in balance was the risk of these units was lower, but so was the reward. In old-school versus, a bomber's bomb was likely going to one-shot busters, minimizing the damage a buster likely could do. But in Clash, it often took two or three hits to nail a buster, but what does that matter when, at this point, a buster couldn't even kill an archer anymore if it lands on it? So in this sense, most of these assassins were nerfed to oblivion, save for maybe the Shinobi or the Flying Rogue. In Arena, and later Clash, I think the only really viable f--- you play was to curse a predominantly ranged pocket and spam Dark Shinobis. But as such, I believed that Rogues, Busters, and Balloon Busters were nerfed to oblivion in the Clash or Arena era of Versus.
Anyways, that might have been too much of a preamble. Let's now actually get to feedback on these changes.
junior swift
When I dueled Unclewich in particular, we were testing trying some of those historic scenarios, even if it was a lower type of scale. We tested various scenarios of a captain or a viewer spamming Busters or Balloon Busters towards my pocket or Army. Something we tested that was pretty consistent was that haste did not add any level of benefit in any scenario. However, with the presence of Curse, we did notice that busters actually were able to kill some melee or ranged units. Three busters into a cursed captain tank or paladin could finally kill it. However, if I then used Stronghold, then that was often enough for me to withstand a non-absurd amount of busters.
I think this is pretty consistent with what I expected. I do think that Curse is often the best spell in Clash or Duels to the extent that I think it is strictly better and outclasses Killing Field, even if there is a bit of a stigma against using it by many who participate in Clash. In conclusion, I think for Busters and Balloon Busters, while I noticed a notable increase, I do not believe that they are good enough to be that threatening and captains can create formations to be more resilient to these changes.
During the last Clash event, however, something I did notice was that Rogues placed by opponents were actually... surviving. Enough so that if my ranged pocket in particular was distracted, rogues could actually do some decent damage to my army. When you look back at the Cycrum vs. Athena_Latina battle, the reason why my rogue won the game was because Athena's ranged pocket ended up being distracted by the two armored units in the front, even though, funny enough, that versus had a boon which poisoned and weakened armored units, thus my Rogue was able to go in undisturbed.
Lastly, I did notice these changes weakened armored units as an entire class or group, which I think should be expected.
junior swift
In conclusion, I do think these changes went in the right direction but if the changes were intended to return us to a historic style of playing, I do not think they went enough. Regardless, I do welcome these changes because we do need to at least try to change things up from time to time and I much prefer these rebalances over some of the attempts at adding boons, which I personally believe have made the game unstable sometimes (eg. matches where both captains have seen a victory).
If I were to offer some potential ideas in further iterations, I would like to see changes to spells. I think the stigma against Curse is reasonable and I would like to see a Killing Field buff alongside a Curse nerf. As it stands, most captain melee units do not beat a captain armored unit if the captain armored unit plays a correct stronghold and the captain melee units play a Killing Field. If we want to restore some glory to assassins, another idea to consider is add a type of attack bonus for them to Haste.