How TV Head & Wildflower Could be Improved (In My Opinion)

With the latest update, we have received bug fixes, balancing, and the main topic: TV Head & Wildflower - The Swarm Characters. (Swarmers, as I'm going to call them)

     First, I need to appreciate the characters that we have been given.  The idea of a character that when more are around, they become even more powerful.  They're characters that are based around teamwork, since, on their own they're only a minor threat.  Combine this playstyle with their 3 abilities, and you have a really cool idea for a character!  However, it's not a good idea.  Well.. It is a good idea, it just wasn't executed to the best that I personally think they could be.  In this discussion, I'm going to explain why I think these characters aren't that great, how they could be improved, and how these improvements theoretically could be done, even though PopCap have already said they aren't going to update this game anymore.  And that's something I need to state too.  I know I'm just talking into the void right now, but if anyone at PopCap happens to see this, I hope you continue reading. Never the less, thinking about how these characters could improve was a pretty fun brain exercise, and all I want to do is help a franchise that I hold dear to my heart.  With that said, I'm a rank 1,200+, Mastered every character except for the 2 Swarmers (Advanced), have played all 3 PvZ shooter games, and I am not a game designer but I have always been interested in game design things, so take everything I'm going to say with a grain of salt.  Now onto what I think about these characters.

The Problems and how The Swarmers are Outclassed

     First, lets go over the problems with these 2, mainly how the Spawn Point ability and Drone ability conflict with idea of swarming.  The Drone is the most notably example, these Swarm characters are meant to be next to each other and be on the front lines, but when you use the Drone, you're doing the exact opposite of that.  Instead, you're staying in the back and being disconnected from the rest of your fellow Swarmers.  Now I know someone's going to say that the Engineer had a Drone in the 1st Garden Warfare, and that was fine.  But the reason why that was fine was because the Engineer had a pretty safe playstyle, he wasn't supposed to be as reckless as Foot Soldier.  This is especially the case in Turf Takeover, where the Engineer's main job was to build the Teleporter and the Turrets, which were (mostly) pretty distant from the Capture Point.  That place was (sort of) the perfect place to use your Drone then.  That's why if Engineer still had his Drone in this game, it wouldn't work, since he's probably even more reckless than Foot Solider now!  Basically, the more reckless the character is, the less a Drone-like ability is going to work for them, and The Swarmers are supposed to be pretty reckless.  Also, and I think everyone can agree with me on this, but going up against one of these Drones will always feel unfair to fight against if they stay the way they are.

     The Spawn Point ability is another ability that doesn't really work with The Swarmers, although, for a slightly different reason.  First, I'm just going to say that this ability has pretty much no reason to exist in any gamemode, other than Turf Takeover.  It's not useless, but it's not good.  The other problem I have with this ability is when you try to use it in the gamemode it's meant to be good in.  You can use this ability 1 of 2 ways: Either just decrease the distance between your spawn and the point, or, place it behind enemy lines and flank the enemy team.  When you try using this ability the 1st way, it works fine, but when trying to use it to flank, it falls short, and I know what you're saying "Why should these guys be able to flank?"  And my answer is: It would create more options for if you're playing The Swarmers, and could potently fit in with the Swarm playstyle (more on that later.)  There are 2 reasons why trying to flank with this ability doesn't work.  Reason #1 is trying to get behind enemy lines in the first place.  Needless to say, it's difficult to flank in this game without the help of a teleport or someway of increasing you're max speed, and both Swarmers don't have anything like that.  I mean, they have the Drone, but I already stated why I think those are bad.  Reason #2 is that these characters are ill-equipped for flanking.  In a game like Call of Duty, where the Time to Kill (TTK) is really high, a full-auto primary is good for flanking.  However, this game has a low TTK, so a full-auto weapon is not good at flanking, as the enemy will have more time to react and will probably out-damage you.  It's a shame that this ability isn't that good, because it's probably the coolest ability they have.

     The final problem with The Swarmers is that, well, they get heavily outclassed by other characters on their same teams.  The main playstyle with The Swarmers revolves around the idea of teamwork, problem is though, other characters do this infinitely better.  The easiest example is Wizard.  The Swarmers encourage teamwork by giving you Armor when near other Swarmers or consumables (Weeds, Heal Flower, Outhouse Zombie, etc.)  But that only goes for those characters, Wizard can give Armor to ANY zombie, plus tracking shots to yourself and wall hacks to both of you, you also can't forget Zee-lixir.  Now there is an argument to be made that Wizard can only work with 1 zombie, but I find that most Wizard-combos work more consist and better than 2 or 3 Swarmers, which is the likely the max number of Swarmers you'll find in 1 server.  Scientist and Sunflower are also good examples since they both increase their teammate's effective health as well.  But I also want to give credit to Citron, as I think he pairs with his teammates just as well as any of the support characters.  His shield has 600 health according to the wiki, that means that a zombie would have to do over 600 damage to vanquish both Citron and a teammate behind him!  But also, Citron has his Spin Dash.  This is a very good ability since it's able to put you and your teammate in a very strong formation: A Pincer Attack.  A Pincer Attack is when you and a teammate are on opposite sides and the enemy is in the middle.  This is a very powerful formation since the zombie is only able to attack one of you at a time, and assuming they took the 75 damage from the Spin Dash itself, the likely hood of them surviving is minimal.  Swarmers can do this, but not easily.  Since most of the time you and others are going to rush at people from the same direction, this allows the enemy to more easily run away or use cover to protect themselves when fighting you.

What Could be Done to Improve The Swarmers

1.     The first thing that I think could be done to improve The Swarmers is by buffing their max health to 135, I know it's a weird number for PvZ, but I do feel like these characters need more health than the average amount, but shouldn't be as much as 80's Action Hero.  That said, I know everyone's curious about what I'm going to say about their +25 health upgrade, and the answer is I think it should be completely removed from the game and replaced, especially since anyone who promotes The Swarmers 1 time will be using this upgrade.  To replace this upgrade, you could very well just make it something like 'Increase max ammo' or something since many characters have an upgrade like that.  Also, I think the Bucket/Terracotta can just be a cosmetic thing since the upgrade their tied to would be replaced.

2.     The second thing that could be done is encouraging players to do teamwork even more by giving a slight fire-rate increase for every Swarmer or Consumable around, much like the Armor.  It shouldn't be like Foot Soldier's Rapid-Fire Upgrade fast, but it should be just enough that it makes a little difference when more of those things are around.  The reason why I think this should be done, is because often when there are multiple Swarmers in 1 sever, they still won't stick next to each other because they don't feel like it (I'm one of those people.)  I also think there could be a buff to their accuracy, since it feels like they have random projectile spread, but this could just be me not used to their primary.

3.     The third suggestion I have is to buff their Spawn Point abilities.  The 1st thing is to make it instead of just placing down the ability, they instead throw the ability a similar distance that Engineer throws his Sonic Grenade.  The reason for this is to make it much easier to get your Spawn Point behind enemy lines, but still have it noticeable that your putting it behind enemy lines.  Which is why I also think that once the ability is thrown and deployed, if you hold the 1st ability button you will teleport to the destination instantly, much like Sombra in Overwatch.  Upon teleporting, you will keep the same health you had prior to the teleport, but will have your ammo refilled no matter what it was prior.  The reason for this is that it would become much easier for the Swarmers to be able to flank more consistently than having to throw their ability, die, then respawn.  This would also make it mush easier to do Pincer Attacks like what Citron can do easily.  However, a problem that would occur from this is people would start placing their ability at a safe spot, go into battle, almost die, then teleport to safety.  I don't think this would be very fair or fun to fight against, so either after a certain amount of time the ability would despawn, or have it so that at a certain distance you cannot teleport to the ability.  Either one would work.

4.     The forth change that I personally think should be done to the Swarmers is to massively change their Drone ability.  BUT, don't worry, everything I'm about to say could be built by reusing code from this game, and pervious games.  Instead of spawning a Drone upon pressing the 2nd ability button, it instead brings up a spawn list menu to spawn any of the attacking Consumables from Turf Takeover (Like Weeds or Browncoat, but not the pots or bots.)  This would allow you to spawn Consumables at any time, and even in gamemodes where you shouldn't be able to spawn these like Team Vanquish or Battle Arena.  In the spawn list menu will also be the Drone.  The reason for this is because an ability like this fits more with the swarm playstyle, and could make them more viable in the non-Turf Takeover gamemodes since they can essentially spawn "Free" Armor for themselves and other Swarmers.  Notice how I said "Free" in quotes, this is because to spawn a consumable, it will require an amount of 'points'.  These points will be earned by achieving vanquishes.

[Vanquish = 1 point, Shared/Consumables = 0.5]

The cost of the consumables can be something like this (v)

Terracotta / Bucket Head = 1.5 points

Vase / Outhouse = 3 points

Dandelion / Yeti Imp (Non-playable) = 1 point

Hypno-Shroom / Screen Door = 2 points

Wildflower / TV Head = 1 point

Wildflower / TV Head (Armored) = 2 points

Heal Weed / Heal Zombie = 2.5 points

Drones = 6 points

If these numbers need to be changed, then that's fine, this is only a suggestion.  I mainly valued the health a consumable has to determine how expensive it is, since that's the main thing Swarmers will benefit off of the most with consumables, and obviously the Drones are the most expensive.  I should also mention that I think points should carry over between lives, and that you should only be able to gain points from the vanquishes you get when playing as a Swarmer, snice it would be stupid to play Foot Solider, get 15 vanquishes, then swap to TV Head, and have 15 points.  That should not be allowed.  I also think that the big number that displays how many seconds of cooldown is left on an ability can instead be used to display how many points you have just so that it's visible all the time.  Now, theoretically, it shouldn't be difficult to code this in, because you could reuse the code for the Party Character's legendary meter in GW2 since the way you gained points in that was exactly the same.  I know you should be able to reuse it since I think a bit of code meant for Hovergoat also exists in BfN's code.  So it should be possible to integrate this with ease.  But who knows, I may be thinking of this over-simplified and doing this would be way harder then it looks.

5.     The final thing I'm going to suggest is a new Legendary Upgrade for both Swarmers.  Don't worry, It'll be simple.  Unlike the other Legendary Upgrades, this one will only cost 2 upgrade slots and replaces either of their primaries with a shotgun-like weapon.  You can totally just copy Scientist's weapon and remove the part where when you zoom in, it decreases the spread.  This is the suggestion that you should take with a mountain of salt but the reason for I suggest an upgrade like this is because it would fix the final problem with flanking that the Swarmers have.  This would allow them to teleport behind enemies like the Scientist and also do pincer attacks in a more effective way, but I do think that the firing speed increase from other Swarmers  and Consumables around should be even less than the buff you would get if you weren't running the upgrade, since that could make this weapon a bit too powerful.  And last, I think that this should be an upgrade given to you when you have the character by default, much like Speedy or Level Up.  Or, who knows, maybe this could be the upgrade to replace that +25 health upgrade.

     I now want to end with saying that again, I'm not a game designer.  But I love this franchise a lot.  It's one of the many franchises that I hold dear to my heart.  In fact, the reason why I'm playing shooter games is because of the original Garden Warfare, I wouldn't have gotten into these types of games without Garden Warfare 1.  I just see that the 2 new characters, while really cool, are probably the most gimmicky and debatably worsted characters in the game, and I want to fix that with these suggestions.  Again, I know that PopCap aren't working on this game anymore, but the changes that could be made seem simple enough to code in, and if anyone from PopCap sees this, maybe think about integrating this in.  And for anyone not at Popcap, how do you feel with these suggestions?  Are they good?  Or are they some of the worst?  Either way, this way fun to think about and writing and I hope to see you guys at PopCap create more games in the future!