All of this is just my totally subjective personal opinions after a single day of playing in the new updated battlegrounds. I’m sure my opinions will change and refine as people figure out how to play in the new map and I gain more experience myself
----Buffs, nerfs, and indirect impacts on class viability----
Scoundrel nerf feels great. They feel a lot more on par with rangers and they seem to really be incentivized to actually curve before they flame which is everything I wanted from them.
Mage nerf is a step in the right direction. they don’t feel quite as monstrous but they still feel a little too strong. The reduction in strength is kind of offset by the fact that it now stands alone at the top with the much stronger scoundrel nerf seeming to knock it out of the “big 3” meta we had before. specifically targeting fireball was the right idea but only nerfing it by 25% still leaves it as the most viable spell to spam. Mage’s biggest problem in my opinion is that even though it takes a lot of time and practice to get good at, the skill set you learn in dungeons is exactly the same skill set you use in battlegrounds. I think we should nerf fireball (and maybe buff frost if that’s deemed necessary) to the point that frost is the best spell to spam in battlegrounds. It would help in a couple of ways:
- it would lower the skill floor as newer mages have a lot easier time casting and spamming frost.
- It would require pvp mages to practice a skillset specific to pvp which would prevent mages who have practiced fireball spam in order to do dungeons from just stomping pvp matches without any actual pvp practice
I think time and practice should be rewarded but getting good at pvp should require practicing pvp not just general time spent practicing dungeons and other content.
Overall though it feels a lot healthier. the additional walls and minions give more cover to give the class some counter-play as they are a lot more vulnerable if you can safely get up close, the lack of linear objectives stop mages from just camping choke points, and the general 25% damage nerf to a class that was doing too much damage is appreciated.
warrior buff is appreciated but ultimately doesn’t matter. I tried to make warrior work pre-update and I tried it post update and playing the class in pvp went from feeling like a constant aneurism to a slightly milder constant aneurism. being able to charge my wound off of minions and having the payoff be higher would be great if attacking someone wasn’t a convoluted 5 step process where every step has a high chance to just not work for no reason. the rush is frustrating to get to lock on, I swear I swing my shield through people like 4-5 times before the bash will apply, sometimes the charged wound on my sword just won’t do damage, all for an attack that does like half the health of a mage and like 90% of the time it wont let me charge another wound after I hit someone with it and this is all assuming my opponent is standing still and not defending themselves. just walking in any direction that isn’t directly towards you totally nullifies the class. I really don’t think any amount of number changes could really make this class fun to play. you could make the wound one-shot and it would theoretically be viable to play but playing it would still feel like solving a rubics cube while wearing a straightjacket.
Ranger really benefitted a lot from this update. they had been previously really pushed out of the meta because they were basically just fair and transparent scoundrels that couldn’t easily one-shot people but now that scoundrel is more balanced they are seeing a lot more play. This is just a theory but I foresee ranger actually being one of the meta classes but it will be a lot healthier as they actually have counter-play as standing near them prevents them from generating pips and dodging their special arrows actually causes them to lose them.
I think paladin will continue to be a very strong meta class in pvp although I think they became a lot weaker. Paladin was lowkey the strongest class in battlegrounds before but no-one ever abused it because it wasn’t very fun just ignoring combat and hyper-focusing objectives. I think the much more volatile and smaller map will really curb the power of paladin’s ability to sneak around to steal objectives, tag people for combat and leave, and cover large distances very quickly. I think that they will be forced to actually fight people more to contest points as points no longer get forgotten for the whole match and grabbing points behind you is just a lot easier. that being said paladin will still probably be a meta class it just got knocked down a few pegs from oppressive to very strong.
I think musket actually got a decent bit weaker. This one is very speculative as my ability to make musket viable before was through leveraging my adaptability, superior map knowledge, and complicated pvp-specific strategies and I have yet to really redevelop those. The battlegrounds map before caused play to stagnate around mid which really benefitted me as I could sort of entrench myself there and make storming mid very hard. the additional points and much shorter walk to the fight leads to much more active and volatile play. players are mostly just constantly running between all of the points trying to just keep control of more than half of them. As I’m fighting I find myself constantly wanting to leave my team behind and fight on my own. keeping people alive just doesn’t feel like it matters as much as the effective respawn timer to walk back into the action is much shorter and by sticking with people that’s one less person running around harassing unprotected enemy points. Its also just a lot harder to stall out the game or hold a line because flanking happens a lot more and its very easy for the enemy to exhaust you very quickly with the very short respawn times. Playing solo is a lot easier now as you perform pretty well against both scoundrels and rangers and the abundance of cover and corners allow you to be pretty evasive but I found myself just wanting to play paladin as they do everything I do but just better with a lot of mobility on top. I will make the class work, probably using some complex strategy flowchart that takes like 2 hours to fully explain, but I suspect making musket really viable in pvp will continue to be an uphill battle.
That about covers everything I feel comfortable saying about the classes from what I had time to personally try and witness other people playing today.
----The Map----
I think my biggest takeaway from playing in the map was that it was better in some ways but mostly just subjectively different. some of my observations:
- The beacons are very appreciated even if they show the wrong color sometimes. the old map had a big problem with not knowing which points were held and this is just a good improvement.
- Matches are a lot shorter. The extra point and lack of entrenched warfare contesting one of the points makes matches feel almost half as long. I’m sort of torn on this but I think its probably mostly a good thing. A lot of times in the old map you would get stuck in unbalanced teams or generally frustrated with some aspect of the match and be stuck there for a very long time. with the new map by the time you really get a feel for how the teams are balanced, the match is already over.
- Matches feel a lot more fast paced. if you die you can get into the fight almost immediately. the points are constantly changing ownership and fighting is happening all over the place. this is again something that I’m pretty tentatively positive about. I personally enjoyed the stalled out intense grindy gameplay that could happen in a good balanced game of the old map, but if the match wasn’t super balanced, this really did magnify the problem and prevent the losing team from really participating.
- Matches feel a lot more chaotic and casual. The new map feels more like Mario Party while the old map felt more like League of Legends. Dying doesn’t really matter and matches are usually pretty close no matter how imbalanced the teams are. The aberrations add a lot of additional random chaos and the invis pots probably would too if they ever got used. The matches really never stall out and both teams are constantly flanking each other. On the other hand, in the old map I would have to do things like coordinate pushes to break entrenched teams in mid, or bait the enemy forward to exhaust their respawn times, or pre-emptively pull back to value my life or fight on more favorable terms. what I mean to say with this is that the old map felt more like a chess game with decisions and fights holding a lot more weight. This is something I feel very neutral about. I think they both hold value and cater towards different groups of people. I think I mostly just approach each with a different mindset. playing in the old map felt like a test of skill where I could try really hard to play to the best of my abilities. Playing in the new map feels like some casual silly random fun to pass the time when I’m bored. The new map is a lot more accessible for newer and casual players but I think late game players will really have a hard time centering all of their playtime around it or really honing their skills or making a name for themselves through it.
- The aberrations are very funny. I had a lot of fun just dragging them into control points and trying to point their flame breath at enemy players to mixed success. Like I mean a lot of my time was spent just unreasonably amused as I try my best to just utterly flex on the enemy team with my superior aberration-kiting gamer abilities.
Overall I think this whole update was very good. As much as development for this game can be a tad slow and I wish the devs would band-aid obvious issues in the time it takes them to release big thought-out refined fixes, I have never seen anything released and not been overwhelmingly impressed with it and this is no exception. I am still hoping that there will be a more comprehensive balance update for battlegrounds in the future but I think this will hold us over for a while in the mean time.
