thoughts on bloodath and oneshots - from a rather high ranked player

[humble perch]

The thing about bloodbath is that it is way way more effective at dealing with 1 attack doing 100%+ of your health than it is against 3 attacks doing 33% or 4 attacks doing 25%. Funnily enough, I play Holden but without bloodbath for this exact reason, because he's extremely good at tearing down tank units who do have bloodbath because he just does too much consistent damage. But the issue is though that right now by far the most popular and performant way to do big damage is through one shot teams, also known as cleave teams. So bloodbath's value is really inflated because of the emphasis put on oneshots right now, tank teams must play bloodbath to counter it, and we end up with two teams of tanks unable to do significant enough damage hitting each others with wet noodles for 80 turns.

Now how do we fix this ? I have 3 ideas. The first one is to include damage reduction effects in the etherena effect to make them incrementally less effective every 20 actions. This way BB remains just as efficient in the opening of the fight but then bruiser teams are actually able to slap each other for real when the fight extends. The second one is to introduce more ways to fight against oneshots that do not involve bloodbath. We could use other defensive tempo units like Viper and Hoyan who force oneshot teams to slow down without the game degenerating into full bulk. The last one, which I think is the most interesting, is to offer more options to deal damage other than oneshots, with consistent but lesser damage. The perfect exemple of that is actually Fangus. This guy is actually perfect for ignoring bloodbath and just hitting through it repeatedly. Diversify the offensive and defensive options, and reduce the incentive to play oneshots and consequently maximum damage mitigation.

From a mythic etherena player able to consistently defeat rank 1 players, and near diamond RTA gamer rn

damn I made a horrendous typo in the title. Also on a sidenote, this is also the reason why Rahu is such an effective counter to those bloobath heavy strategies. And Holden, if built for his dps, may be even more devastating. Especially if he has a Lily with him

[robust oar]

I think the solution can't be to go back to the season 0 meta, the most obvious solution would be to nerf bb without buffing revelation and put in 2 or 3 sets of tanks so that you have options and you don't use bb or use bb, currently there is nothing that competes and makes you think "Maybe it's better to put this and not put bb"

[humble perch]

completely agree, I think the 2 factors contributing to bloodbath being so dominant are basically supply and demand. We desperately need a good answer against the cleave teams because otherwise they're just too effective and bloodbath is not only the most effective option but also basically the only one. We need different ways to fight against oneshots and also different ways than oneshots do be agressive and bloodbath usage should regulate itself

although I think alternative agressive drafts do exist, because that's basically what I like to play, but they're very underexplored and underutilized because of ressource shortage issues

[robust oar]

The one-shot build has many variations, from starters (Tsukiyomi, Dokidoki, Lily, Chiaki V, Freya) and perhaps I missed some, and you have DPS (Messi, Yeli, Rosa, Xiada) with additional options like Heinrich, etc. It's a huge amount of variation in a single play format. Bruisers all play the same five characters, and 80% of us carry the same pets and the same sets.

Someday they'll release options that will make you doubt, but right now, if they nerf the BB and release the Revelation like before, I'll see cries from the community. I hope they do it right and come up with a profitable solution, because it's like everything else; if they touch characters, they'll cry for a reset.

[small loom]

1. nerf/ban both revelation and bloodbath from pvp
2. nerf healings