Let's talk about balancing
Balance in a game with this many characters isn’t particularly easy. When you take into account both personal bias and experiences in game your perception of balance and therefore your ideas for said balance can be very different from another player’s own experience.
Some things stand out to me as more glaring than others though. As an example I like Captain Squawk and was playing around with him while waiting to jump into the portal over the weekend. He’s been adjusted a few times but he still feels lacking so I jumped from him to the basic Captain Deadbeard; both are max rank. While the basic captain does less damage per shot the fact that he can both fire more rapidly and his reticle is more stable made him clearly superior. While I could crit for more on a single shot with squawk his slower re-fire time and reticle bloom made the basic captain more effective at sniping consistently. While his toxic damage can’t be ignored I still don’t think he’s where he needs to be at this time for the sniping role.
Then we have Citrons. Not my favorite plant but not my least favorite either (that’s Chomper who I want to stress I still like; there isn’t a character in either GW game that I actually dislike) but the class and especially certain variants are just too good. The beam versions can snipe better than cacti thanks to both the way beams (hit scan) weapons work and that their gun is side mounted rather than being in their head so they avoid getting accurate return fire if they use terrain to hide their entire body while still able to shoot. The frost variant is very irksome in multiplayer and I’d hate to see how bad this one would be if the yeti was a plant boss! The high health combined with a shield and a rapid escape ability makes them very obnoxious to deal with. And then of course the EMP Peach stun grenade. No plant should be a better sniper than Cacti as that’s their main role, yes others can snipe, Sunflowers are decent at it, Roses can be nasty with their guided shots, and some variants of other classes are good at it too but Cacti feel almost superfluous at times with the Citrons out there.
But how to balance Citrons without making them underpowered or just bad? There were some good ideas in that reddit post linked before. I don’t think PopCap wants to drop abilities even with the hopefully temporary loss of the Engineer’s drones, so we need to adjust things within what we have. The idea of Citrons being tanks should be embraced as prior to Torchwood they were the only plants really able to fill that role, armored chompers notwithstanding. I would say don’t change their point blank damage but make them less dangerous at long range, nerf the EMPeach (make it just as effective or even more effective than it is right now versus Mechs but less so against non-mech targets), and perhaps a bit slower on converting from ball to non-ball mode to make those free escapes less effective.
Imps used to have 50 health. This didn’t last long as they were patched to 75 pretty early on in GW2. I love Imps as they have great animations, mechs are a lot of fun, and their constant giggling is highly amusing but teams with a lot of them can be very annoying. Imps are small and have high mobility making the very difficult for Cacti to snipe (most Cacti anyway, some like the petrified variant are more effective) but AoE weapons are quite effective against them. The mystery portal of corn vs. imps showed that even mechs can be torn down fast thanks to constant shuck shots and husk hops but it’s rare that I see a plant team with that many corn players at once barring these events. I had suggested 65 health for Imps before but not sure if that’s the solution here.
On Sunflowers I made sure to play the Vampire Flower for the Sasquatch hunt this weekend at least a couple of times. I did notice her nerf but it wasn’t a major problem and her self-reliance elevates her a bit over Stuffy for me. Stuffy is solid but if someone else gets the vanquish you don’t get the heal stars, even if you did the lion’s share of damage to say a coffin zombie, and someone else finishes it off. We had one time over the weekend where we had 3 vampire flowers and an alien flower and still won normal boss hunt easily. Stuffy got buffed and then nerfed again pretty quickly so never really saw her in that buff period for long.
At the end of the day I think the devs need to not only parse out damage and healing numbers but other factors such as efficiency, class and variant roles, game modes, ‘feel’, and all the other factors that matter to players before releasing a big balance patch and of course for the new game they’re working on. Things have been worse than now but we’re still not quite where we should be. If at any time a certain variant is always or never chosen they need to be seriously looked at. Captain Squawk is a prime example of a great character idea that just lacks compared to the other pirates. Also the party characters have been in constant flux and right now some feel too good like the party citron while others not so much. This isn’t just this game either by the way. Overwatch has had serious balance issues since day one and still has serious problems to this day with balance.
As a prime example look at Breakfast Brainz. He was terrible at first; low health, low damage, overheated too quickly, etc. He’s a great concept and even when he was at his lowest I liked him but now he’s much better and more playable and fun. I’m not claiming he’s perfect but he is better than he was. Balance with so many variables is not easy and yes we've taken some steps that feel wrong to many of us, but there's a lot of ground to cover and I feel that at time PopCap is under pressure to push patches out so we get the smaller balance patches instead of a single comprehensive one. There's work to do here but it's a better place than we once were too.
