AoD #2 loosers aftermath imbalance rage topic (without actual raging)

[Araton]

Hi everyone,

This should be a objective topic over the metagame that we've seen last day in the second AoD tournament.

Let's start with the elephant in the room. We know that now Superhinds are unstopable as US at the point where Cartel has access to its stealth lab upgrades, such as the speed and evasion upgrades. They can outrun any gunship of the other factions and can destroy all ground forces. Raptors, Blazers and Stingers have no chance against them. NLOS-C is one of the joker cards that you can pull out to kill mass Superhinds, but the chance to be able to do that against a player who knows how to babysit them, will not let those behemoths of flying choppers die to artilery fire.

If US is lucky it can bait the superhinds and try to kite them with Guardians and make them fly over Stinger and Blazer blobs. If the Cartel players looses all or most of their Superhinds they are done for. Even on the Cartel favored "The Day After". In the Szalami1 vs Big1 we have seen a nice example of this, where the US lost his base due to Superhinds but managed to rebuild and kite those superhinds until there was almost none left. Making the Cartel loose map control.

To summerize it: Superhinds are a great unit to gain map control and in harassing and boxing in the US opponent. Since AoE has been removed this unit became uncontested for the US. We in the community offered two solutions, either increase the damage of AA fire on single units by increasing the damage on impact or re-introduce a mild area of effect to AA units. It is almost not funny to see Raptors and upgraded Blazers struggling in taking out a single Superhind.

The second topic is about the Grinch's "low-high" upgrade. This upgrade should not affect the speed of the projectile of AA units, otherwise it just breaks these units and makes them useless against faster aircrafts in game. Instead it should just give them more damage. We've seen a game with Ganon fighting Big15 where Raptors outran the projectiles of the Grinches and painted the screen with smoke. I think this should be fixed in the next patch because it can be seen as an ugly glitch.

Lastly, the desynchronization of observers and players mid game. I have to admit it was funny to see Verdi and the Gartner scream on the stream on the players for not doing anything. As it turned out the game desynced for the observers (in this case for the casters). Now, we are not sure what is causing this, but it appears that the curse of selecting individual player views is back. This time building rendering stays normal, but the game desyncs for all observers when selecting player views.

I think Cruelty (who promissed to link all AoD #2 replays to Eugene developers) and dotDash hace more to say about other balance problems in the game. So, I'll just leave this topic open for discussion. Please let me know what you guys think of the meta game in AoA so far based on the second AoD 1v1 tournament.

[torinus]

I think the problem is with all helicopters, not just superhinds. Guardian blobs are also unstopable by ground forces.
As was discussed on stream, a change to damage of AA units needs to be implemented or AoE in a weaker form brought back.

Also things like airplanes being more effective vs Helicopters could be done.

[Araton]

I think the problem is with all helicopters, not just superhinds. Guardian blobs are also unstopable by ground forces.

True but at somepoint Superhinds will become fast enough to catch them, making them your go-to unit when it comes to getting rid of enemy helicopters.

[ZxGanon]

Well the complete removal of AoE while not adding/buffing something else was a bad decision.

Since Araton is mentioning some issues for Cartel like Loah-Hi and weak Berkuts I also wanna add some facts:

- The range of Otomatics against choppers is too short
- The tech path of Cartel after Tokamak is so weird since I need Prototypebay and Aircontrolecenter to unlock every building instead of just Techlab unlockig everything else

- Vanguards do not really have a clear usage since they take ages to build and are underperforming against other Hightech infantry

I got more of these but Im currently writting with my mobile phone so I will add the rest+reasons later.

[torinus]

You are probably supposed to use vanguards to take over enemy vehicles.

[Netput]

The current meta game is very painful to watch indeed.
Choppers every where. Not fun at all!

[DerGaertner]

The Fact is that with the new Patch Choppers are the new Meta Game. When you refuse to mass Choppers you will have a very hard time fighting those.

As Araton pointed out the Community got some good ideas how the Devs can fix this. I really hope to see some of the input we give to you in the next patches.

[AndreB]

Let me just add.

PAK-FA, BERKUT, RAPTOR are all bad versus helicopters, like super bad, and i think nerfing helicopters isnt the way to go here.

I think honestly they should really buff aircraft versus helicopters and then add a slight aoe back to at least pantsir/blazer and maybe a range buff to otomatics versus helicopters.

PS: dont forget, Ninjas got a severe nerf with the removal of aoe as well

[bvb09]

What does AoE mean?
Age of Empires ?

[AndreB]

What does AoE mean?
Age of Empires ?

Area of effect.

Means it defines how large the explosion of a projectile is and how many units can in theory affect.

The larger the AOE, more enemy units can be hit.