JKA Potential Rework and Analysis
He's good looking. Well animated. All but completely useless for any play outside of C-Team action. As the shameful owner of a G9 Ani I am really hoping he receives a (successful, cough Mace) rework now that the Devs seem to be shifting focus to the balancing aspect of GoH. Here are some analysis points and potential suggestions, please fire critiques and suggestions at will with 20% chance for assist.
Starting off pretty broad, lets revisit the definition of an Attacker class unit. Given his character in Star Wars lore, I'd say I like Anakin being an aggressive and belligerent character who likes being dirty. He should definitely remain in the Attacker class, I think he can be successful with a few kit tweaks and buffs. The fundamental drawback he suffers from is the lack of threat he presents to opponents. He is SUPPOSED to constantly hit things when his teammates die and constantly threaten AOE offense up, thus causing serious annoyance to the player and being dealt with high priority. His base stats suggest the initial design attempt to make him consistently annoying rather than squishy but dangerous, as suggested by his oddly arranged stats.
Here are his base stats at max gear level 80.
Power - 8220
Speed - 144
Health - 18,907
Strength (8.4) - 960
Agility (5.6) - 714
Intelligence (4.7) - 609
This points to his primary stat line being one prioritizing Strength over Agility, that is what makes him so different from Rey who is an Agility based attacker. Rey gains mostly offensive buffs while Anakin gains defensive buffs with his primary physical damage buffer. This forces him into lower damage to avoid the existence of a tanky Rey. As demonstrated by the current state of Anakin, Kylo, and Kit, low damage attackers simply cannot muster the necessary threat to gain viability use despite any utility they may have. Attackers must be the first to be eliminated because of their scary damage and Anakin simply cannot have this imposing damage because of his high health.
To fix, lets start with a basic a stat realignment focusing on damage and sacrificing health and speed. We can look at something like a
Basic damage Interval increase (3389-3745) -> (4.1K-4.6K)
Speed reduction 144 -> 132
Health reduction 18,907 -> 14,000 range
This makes him hit respectably hard on basic while suffering drawbacks in health and speed. This will balance the improvements to his abilities which boost his overall productivity and team contribution. His basic damage must be kept in moderation to account for the significant buff he provides as leader.
On to abilities. I'll state their current state, why they suck, and what the need to be useful and compliment his stat line under the terms I reworked it into.
Deft Bladework - Deals physical damage to enemy with 55% chance for healing and buff immunity for 2 turns.
This is just not reliable enough to be good. As a player I look for consistency in units as well as power. This is no doubt powerful (Anakin has the potency to back it up too), but 55% will never be worth gambling on for a basic attack.
My suggestion:
Deal physical damage with a 85% chance to apply buff immunity for 3 turns.
Buff immunity is no doubt underrated because it is so uncommon. I think it is quite good against RG in particular, but buffs are so common that I think this places Anakin in a great niche place for countering excessive buff teams.
Smite - Deals physical damage to all enemies and buffs allies offense up for 2 turns on a kill.
The consistency on this one is TERRIBLE as well, it is so situational that you will never get your buff when you need it. Add dodging to ruin it even more. Offense up is to help the team win more and secure a kill, if I already killed a guy it is almost not even necessary. I think this exists to prevent Anakin from boosting Jedi damage too easily (leader is +30%, Offense Up is another 50%). Thing is, Jedi suck because of Dooku. This is not nearly good enough to make them overpowered and it hurts Anakins utility beyond belief.
Proposal:
Smite - Deal physical damage to all enemies. If all survive grant Jedi allies offense up for 2 turns and all other allies offense up for one turn.
This fix decreases the overall effect of the buff while promoting Jedi synergy. It is still decent with non-Jedi but is actually useful. Most AOE are used to kill an almost dead unit anyways, this is an unusual opposite effect of buffing the team to help get a kill. A damage decrease for this AOE may be necessary to balance.
Lead from the Front - Jedi allies gain 30% Offense
This is a really good ability. QGJ assist is like dropping a small building on the target when Snips goes to help. Barriss actually brakes 3K on a crit. Please clap, she really tries.
I would like his Omega to be the effect applies to all allies and cap the buff at +25%. Ani should lead everyone - Jedi teams suck so badly and this is not your average evasion leader. I'd even take the effect being halved for non-Jedi.
Passive. Here is the fun part. It currently reads
Righteous Fury - Whenever an ally is defeated, Anakin takes an extra turn and deals 75% more damage. (+25% from Omega)
This is bad for a few reasons. First off, it means diddly squat when Ani hits you with his pathetic basic damage. The boost makes it more of a smack but one attack will never be enough to recover from losing a character. Secondly, it is almost worthless due to the rarity of activation. The entire point of GW is to NOT lose characters, LS/DS/Cantina missions need all units to survive in order for 3 stars. Losing characters is only inevitable during Raiding and his damage is still not nearly potent enough to justify running over Rey, Leia, or GS. From testing this passive for a few weeks, it has activated 4 times total over the course of two games that I lost through LS/Cantina/GW modes. It wasn't enough to even bring me back into a position to secure a kill and catch up. Bottom line is it's too infrequent and not even close to impactful enough to function as the catch-up mechanism that it is intended to be and not threatening enough to justify killing Anakin with high priority.
I honestly think the best treatment for this situation is the RG way. Changing his passive to
"Whenever an ally drops below 50% health, Anakin takes an extra turn"
This greatly increases the frequency of passive activations while maintaining balance through discarding the damage boost. With this mechanic players can actively use him by manipulating heals to gain extra turns, and it also maintains its current function of a catch-up ability when losing.
The real goal of the passive is to supplement the improved Smite ability, allowing Anakin to quickly cycle through turns and repeatedly blow short lived allied offense up buffs as he is left alive - the ultimate goal of this combination is to make Anakin highly irritating/threatening when he is living on the field. He focuses on boosting entire team DPS while left alive and still providing decent DPS himself.
This makes him rather average in damage output for an attacker (when not used as leader) and utterly unimpressive in terms of health/speed but raises his productivity through the roof. Think of him in terms of Poggle, who can boost offense for 3 turns every three turns. Anakin takes the same aggressive supportive role while buffing Jedi over droids and Geonosians and focusing more on DPS with extra attacks. Poggle is similar but would lose DPS in favor of better health/speed/evasion etc. Anakin wouldn't really be a support unit, just a team focused offensive hitter. Ideally he'd have similar DPS to QGJ with more prevalent offense buffing - still not on par with Rey and Leia but his extra damage contribution would stem from allied buffs.
To sum it all up, take an unproductive attacker with the goal of boosting his potential for threat and DPS by improving upon overly-situational abilities and weakening base stats to compensate. Anakin faces speed and health reduction, slight damage boost on basic, boosted consistancy for lesser effect on debuff, slight decrease in duration for a massive increase in utility of team Offense Up, slight decrease in Leader buff in exchange for feasibility outside his crappy synergy set, and heavy decrease in damage for increased activation and player control of his unique passive. His overall gain in turns serves to increase the frequency of allied buffs, thus contributing to the required necessity to remove him quickly less he rain massive damage. Lets all remember no matter the changes (with egregious exceptions of course) that no unit with the Jedi tag will ever break the game in an overpowered sense while Dooku is in his current stat. The best they will do is rise to viability in all modes but Arena. Long wall I know, any and all thoughts appreciated!
Starting off pretty broad, lets revisit the definition of an Attacker class unit. Given his character in Star Wars lore, I'd say I like Anakin being an aggressive and belligerent character who likes being dirty. He should definitely remain in the Attacker class, I think he can be successful with a few kit tweaks and buffs. The fundamental drawback he suffers from is the lack of threat he presents to opponents. He is SUPPOSED to constantly hit things when his teammates die and constantly threaten AOE offense up, thus causing serious annoyance to the player and being dealt with high priority. His base stats suggest the initial design attempt to make him consistently annoying rather than squishy but dangerous, as suggested by his oddly arranged stats.
Here are his base stats at max gear level 80.
Power - 8220
Speed - 144
Health - 18,907
Strength (8.4) - 960
Agility (5.6) - 714
Intelligence (4.7) - 609
This points to his primary stat line being one prioritizing Strength over Agility, that is what makes him so different from Rey who is an Agility based attacker. Rey gains mostly offensive buffs while Anakin gains defensive buffs with his primary physical damage buffer. This forces him into lower damage to avoid the existence of a tanky Rey. As demonstrated by the current state of Anakin, Kylo, and Kit, low damage attackers simply cannot muster the necessary threat to gain viability use despite any utility they may have. Attackers must be the first to be eliminated because of their scary damage and Anakin simply cannot have this imposing damage because of his high health.
To fix, lets start with a basic a stat realignment focusing on damage and sacrificing health and speed. We can look at something like a
Basic damage Interval increase (3389-3745) -> (4.1K-4.6K)
Speed reduction 144 -> 132
Health reduction 18,907 -> 14,000 range
This makes him hit respectably hard on basic while suffering drawbacks in health and speed. This will balance the improvements to his abilities which boost his overall productivity and team contribution. His basic damage must be kept in moderation to account for the significant buff he provides as leader.
On to abilities. I'll state their current state, why they suck, and what the need to be useful and compliment his stat line under the terms I reworked it into.
Deft Bladework - Deals physical damage to enemy with 55% chance for healing and buff immunity for 2 turns.
This is just not reliable enough to be good. As a player I look for consistency in units as well as power. This is no doubt powerful (Anakin has the potency to back it up too), but 55% will never be worth gambling on for a basic attack.
My suggestion:
Deal physical damage with a 85% chance to apply buff immunity for 3 turns.
Buff immunity is no doubt underrated because it is so uncommon. I think it is quite good against RG in particular, but buffs are so common that I think this places Anakin in a great niche place for countering excessive buff teams.
Smite - Deals physical damage to all enemies and buffs allies offense up for 2 turns on a kill.
The consistency on this one is TERRIBLE as well, it is so situational that you will never get your buff when you need it. Add dodging to ruin it even more. Offense up is to help the team win more and secure a kill, if I already killed a guy it is almost not even necessary. I think this exists to prevent Anakin from boosting Jedi damage too easily (leader is +30%, Offense Up is another 50%). Thing is, Jedi suck because of Dooku. This is not nearly good enough to make them overpowered and it hurts Anakins utility beyond belief.
Proposal:
Smite - Deal physical damage to all enemies. If all survive grant Jedi allies offense up for 2 turns and all other allies offense up for one turn.
This fix decreases the overall effect of the buff while promoting Jedi synergy. It is still decent with non-Jedi but is actually useful. Most AOE are used to kill an almost dead unit anyways, this is an unusual opposite effect of buffing the team to help get a kill. A damage decrease for this AOE may be necessary to balance.
Lead from the Front - Jedi allies gain 30% Offense
This is a really good ability. QGJ assist is like dropping a small building on the target when Snips goes to help. Barriss actually brakes 3K on a crit. Please clap, she really tries.
I would like his Omega to be the effect applies to all allies and cap the buff at +25%. Ani should lead everyone - Jedi teams suck so badly and this is not your average evasion leader. I'd even take the effect being halved for non-Jedi.
Passive. Here is the fun part. It currently reads
Righteous Fury - Whenever an ally is defeated, Anakin takes an extra turn and deals 75% more damage. (+25% from Omega)
This is bad for a few reasons. First off, it means diddly squat when Ani hits you with his pathetic basic damage. The boost makes it more of a smack but one attack will never be enough to recover from losing a character. Secondly, it is almost worthless due to the rarity of activation. The entire point of GW is to NOT lose characters, LS/DS/Cantina missions need all units to survive in order for 3 stars. Losing characters is only inevitable during Raiding and his damage is still not nearly potent enough to justify running over Rey, Leia, or GS. From testing this passive for a few weeks, it has activated 4 times total over the course of two games that I lost through LS/Cantina/GW modes. It wasn't enough to even bring me back into a position to secure a kill and catch up. Bottom line is it's too infrequent and not even close to impactful enough to function as the catch-up mechanism that it is intended to be and not threatening enough to justify killing Anakin with high priority.
I honestly think the best treatment for this situation is the RG way. Changing his passive to
"Whenever an ally drops below 50% health, Anakin takes an extra turn"
This greatly increases the frequency of passive activations while maintaining balance through discarding the damage boost. With this mechanic players can actively use him by manipulating heals to gain extra turns, and it also maintains its current function of a catch-up ability when losing.
The real goal of the passive is to supplement the improved Smite ability, allowing Anakin to quickly cycle through turns and repeatedly blow short lived allied offense up buffs as he is left alive - the ultimate goal of this combination is to make Anakin highly irritating/threatening when he is living on the field. He focuses on boosting entire team DPS while left alive and still providing decent DPS himself.
This makes him rather average in damage output for an attacker (when not used as leader) and utterly unimpressive in terms of health/speed but raises his productivity through the roof. Think of him in terms of Poggle, who can boost offense for 3 turns every three turns. Anakin takes the same aggressive supportive role while buffing Jedi over droids and Geonosians and focusing more on DPS with extra attacks. Poggle is similar but would lose DPS in favor of better health/speed/evasion etc. Anakin wouldn't really be a support unit, just a team focused offensive hitter. Ideally he'd have similar DPS to QGJ with more prevalent offense buffing - still not on par with Rey and Leia but his extra damage contribution would stem from allied buffs.
To sum it all up, take an unproductive attacker with the goal of boosting his potential for threat and DPS by improving upon overly-situational abilities and weakening base stats to compensate. Anakin faces speed and health reduction, slight damage boost on basic, boosted consistancy for lesser effect on debuff, slight decrease in duration for a massive increase in utility of team Offense Up, slight decrease in Leader buff in exchange for feasibility outside his crappy synergy set, and heavy decrease in damage for increased activation and player control of his unique passive. His overall gain in turns serves to increase the frequency of allied buffs, thus contributing to the required necessity to remove him quickly less he rain massive damage. Lets all remember no matter the changes (with egregious exceptions of course) that no unit with the Jedi tag will ever break the game in an overpowered sense while Dooku is in his current stat. The best they will do is rise to viability in all modes but Arena. Long wall I know, any and all thoughts appreciated!
