Character stragety confusion....

"DavionThunder;c-1864561" wrote:

"EduardoCadav;c-1864543" wrote:
There's a subtle but distinct difference between cases such as night sister zombie and choosing to focus all resources in a narrow number of characters.

In the case of nightsister zombie adding investments of gear and credits etc. categorically made her (specifically) worse. When you take 5 random characters up to level 85 and gear level 8, you are not technically making your roster worse although in the current matchmaking you are liable to result in having more challenging opponents.

But focusing on a narrow number of useful characters and not leveling the fluff in your roster should certainly be considered a strategy in my opinion. The 6 mil credits to take a character you don't need for something to level 85 is a conscious decision to say "I don't want 2 potentially great mods from the mod store" or "I don't want to level 10 grey mods to reveal the secondaries and see if one of them has speed".

The problem (which hopefully the change will readdress) is that the GP calculation is weighted towards the lower inputs with 2 gear 8 level 85 characters being almost as much as 1 g12 character. Since the resource investment for 2 gear 8 characters is much less than the resource investment for 1 g12 character the matching currently pits opponents that have used much fewer resources (but have large GP from fluff) against opponents that have used much more resources (but have lower GP due to highly focused g12 rosters with lots of g1 lvl1 characters).

So to reiterate, if a character gets worse when leveled up then that is against their desired philosophy. If a player chooses to invest the resources they have in specific areas and leave other areas under developed, that is not the same thing. If the GP ballance / matchmaking were better tuned you would see that a more even distribution of G12 / G11 characters for people of the same GP is going to result in closer matches. The people that focused narrowly on small parts of their rosters are still likely to come out on top though because they are almost certainly focusing their resources just as much on modding correctly and focusing on competitive PVP.

I'd just like to say I'm very pleasantly surprised by this change (although I was also perfectly happy with a consistent stream of mod slicing materials) and I think the only aim behind this change is to try and make matches more fun and engaging and I think CG devs should be credited with putting work in with that as their aim.

How do you know if a character is fluff or useful if you are penalized for trying things? If you can't then all you do is follow the meta based on what other players do without adding new ideas to the meta.

Well for sure you'll only get that info either from seeing what others are doing or by taking said character to gear 12 anyway. For HAAT full solo you are going to need a g12 team, for sith raid top 10 you'll need 4 g12 teams. For mythic and galactic bounties you are going to need g12 (g11 at a push). For legendary events (nowadays at least) you need gear 11 minimum. For the current TB you have teams already to clear every phase. For PvP you need equivalent gear level to your opponent (i.e. g12 because that's what your opponent has almost certainly). So everywhere in the game whether it's PvP or PvE you need g12.

So in my opinion the only way you are going to find out if a character is any good is by seeing what others are doing or by reading the ability descriptions, checking the mechanics and damage multipliers carefully in swgoh.gg and then taking a gamble yourself and investing in the character until it's g12.

And again, you are "penalised" for only half trying it if you leave the character at g8 or g9 vs taking it to g12 or for choosing to g12 a character that turned out not to be a good investment rather than another character or mods etc. and the clear aim of this planned changed is exactly to reduce the amount you are penalised to make the matches more fun.