"Misogi1981;c-1497981" wrote:
The protection mechanic is just... why? It's a massive road block that needs tweaked and toned down. Most teams are completely useless because of it. It's not forcing us to think about different team comps, it's literally narrowing the list of usable characters down to a handful.
After mulling it over for a couple of weeks, it seems that the issue is that there are simply too many mechanics in the Sith raid, and some of them are just unavoidable. If it's supposed to be a puzzle, then it's like someone ran off with some of the pieces. That's not a challenge, it's just annoying. Some of the mechanics work quite well, rewarding the clever player (P2 especially), while others are impossible to avoid. For example:
- Stacking tenacity on damage. Basically no way around this. They could have made it more interesting by such things as "whenever ___ takes physical damage, he gains 30 speed & 50% tenacity (stacking)". Then you can use heroes that deal special damage to work around that. Or, keep the bosses immune to Tenacity Down, but if Tenacity Down would have been applied, remove all stacking speed and tenacity, giving some use to heroes like TFP or Dengar. Instead we just have to wait for the next turn.
It also feels like the design team brainstormed a lot of different ideas to make the Sith Raid so it can't be soloed (good!) but decided to keep them
all (um, not so good). For example:
Nihilus' Annihilate is completely fine just destroying one hero and preventing them from reviving. But they decided to also have him absorb 30% of that units defense, speed, and offense - which quite frankly seems excessive and unnecessary.
Summoning minions: if any are still alive when he does this, it adds to Nihilus's protection.
He also starts the battle with "full" protection (whatever that might be)
Buffed heroes add 3% to his protection on his turn.
Basics inflict defense down on the hero, which in turn feed Annihilate via Drain Force and increase cooldowns on specials so that you're forced to use a basic again.
Heroes with defense down donate 25% of their protection to him when they hit him with a basic.
He bypasses protection entirely with all attacks.
He strips buffs on his basic, but not before using that buff to add to his protection.
The "impervious" buff is randomly assigned.
If they had only used some of these, I think we'd have reasonable mechanics for P1. But taken all together, they make the experience of playing pretty frustrating. There's just too many things to juggle in your head (no to mention monitoring the Drain Force and Annihilate cooldowns). It seems strange that this phase punishes you for having high protection and buffs, especially since Tenacity Up seems like a natural counter to the Basic attack mechanic, and we don't have mod management yet to easily swap protection mods.
In short, I think the devs could have achieved their goal of "Challenging and unsoloable" with fewer mechanics.
