The elephant in the room that is crowd control.
Hi. I made this post over at Reddit, but someone suggested to also post it here to increase the chances that Popcap might see it. As I say within the post, I do not claim to be some master of game design, but as someone who is way deep into tons of competitive games (Including Garden Warfare 1 and 2) I can tell you a thing or two about what keeps a player, at least a player like me, interested. The post references Rose, but nearly the entire thing could also be applied to the Imp's crowd control as well.
Quoting myself from that thread:
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Yeah, it's insane.
When Rose's gigantic AOE super debuff hits you, the following takes place:
- EVERYONE within the deathsphere has all of their active abilities disabled
- All other abilities are completely disabled
- Turn radius is dropped to unbearably slow levels
- Movement speed is so low it is effectively 0
- Leaving the sphere does NOT remove the effect
This, combined with homing shots (often ones that leave fire debuffs and whatnot on you) is completely insane. Then she can go invulnerable and spam about 60 AOE damage afterwards, unchalleneged. If you manage to survive that nonsense, she might just turn you into a goat. The goat is the most merciful as the ram does a knockback and is fairly powerful, IF you hit with its huge telegraph attack.
Don't even get me started on Ice Rose. Do you like being unable to move, use any abilities, and unable to turn or fire ON TOP of all of what has been listed above?
This is even worse for a character like Super Brainz (Who is also pretty powerful, but still not quite a Rose) where the slow also disables his secondary basic attack, meaning unless the Rose is dumb enough to run into melee range, he's 100% helpless during the slow.
Popcap, I have something about game design to tell you. I don't claim to be a game design guru, but there is one thing I guarantee you:
Getting hit by debuffs that don't open windows of opportunity (or leave some open) is completely unfun. It doesn't matter if using the debuff is fun if the person on the receiving end may as well have their keyboard or gamepad taken away for several seconds.
In a competitive game, you need play (that is, an ability you use) and counterplay (an ability you use in response) to make things really interesting. The more doors you open or leave open when hit by an ability, the more fun and challenging the game is.
If I can do literally nothing, I am having no fun. If you take away every ability, what's my counterplay? "Avoidance" isn't counterplay, it's pre-play, counterplay is for use after an encounter begins, it is crucial to a fun experience.
As I've said elsewhere, these abilities of Rose's are still going to be unfun even if her main weapon is nerfed, even if she didn't HAVE a main weapon these would be unfun to get hit by, because you're not actively playing the game anymore.
Leave an ability available, let me hammer a button to "free" the ability, let me use a movement ability (like Hyper with the Pea Shooter or the Sprint Tackle for the All-Star) to break out of the slow. Then it becomes an exchange. Those abilities, on the classes that have it, suddenly become more versatile. I can use them offensively OR defensively, I can sacrifice them to remove a debuff. That makes things immediately more interesting without a direct nerf to the ability itself.
I've also suggested letting the "opposite" class (Imp vs Rose) use their own time snare ability to cancel out the others', again, making their ability far more versatile and interesting to use. It'd separate good from bad players more clearly without making the ability useless in either situation.
Whatever Popcap decides to do, I hope they lower the duration on all of these. I hate nerfing things like that, but they frankly last too long in a shooter where you go down in seconds. Especially since healing in this game isn't really designed to counter being pummeled while helpless. You can't "focus heal" to keep someone up as they're mauled alive.
A couple of seconds is fine, it can still be devastating and decisive, but it's not a guaranteed bad time for those that get hit by it any longer, you have to capitalize on it. It's already way too easy to land it without it turning everyone into sitting ducks.
Generally, the harder it is to land an attack, the more potent it is.
Alllllternatively, you can continue to go in the direction I suggested above. What do I mean? Well, let's make the time snare less effective on each individual the more people you hit with it. 100% potency if it only hits one person, 75% if it hits two, with it maybe capping at a lower efficiency of 25% or so. You can stop a person or two, but you can only slow a horde.
I really hope Popcap at least reads these suggestions. It's getting me really excited to think about how much more fun the game could be if they started to go in the direction of supporting counterplay and more dynamic ability decision use.
The best part is the abilities remain totally viable and usable if you're casual, so you don't have to think about this kind of more advanced stuff, but if you do, it opens up a lot of options and gets you thinking more about when to use your abilities. It's a win for everyone!
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To be clear, my main complaints are about both teams' time snare abilities and the complete lockout you get from being frozen. Not so much something like the Chomper's goop, because that's hard to hit with and affects just one person. Their little snares are also okay because you can see it by being careful and remove it. It's a lot more reasonable, a lot more fair.
Anyway, please feel free to disagree, but these are my honest feelings about this issue. It's far more pertinent to me than Rose's silly homing wand.
