Behind the Mask: Those good old (PvP) days
Well, the holidays were a bit tight on my time, so for those of you who did send me messages regarding our hoped-for Andrith (and maybe Mandragalore) runs were probably a little disappointed that we couldn't find the time to run them last week. I'm still trying to get a run going before the end of the holiday event (on the 4th), so if you're interested in the boss-kissing perk, let me know!
This week, I'm going to reminisce about the development of Champions Online, but with a twist -- I'll be talking about only the PvP changes and the changes that indirectly affected PvP. Why, you may ask? CO has evolved quite a bit, and sometimes we don't realize the problems that existed (and were fixed) when we complain about what's currently in the game.
As far back as closed beta, PvP in Champions was extremely murky. The devs told us right out of the gate that PvP was not going to be in the game at launch, and it was only with extreme forum protest that they caved in and added in a duel function and some basic PvP modes. Our valuation skills were not very good back then.
The age before hold resistance
A large number of the CO community members in closed beta were former City of Heroes players who were disgruntled with homogenized PvP and warehouse maps. At the initial debut of PvP, we called it "city of holds." Holds dominated the game; it was not uncommon for players to have two or more hold powers, and most fights degenerated into who could score the first hold.
A short while later, Teleport was discovered. At the time, Teleport was game-breaking; it could allow you to instantly escape hold powers, and heroes could do almost nothing to deal with it. Anti-travel powers became a must, and people without could not hope to kill anyone. Even though Teleport has gone through nerfs since its original state, it remains dominant, and many players feel it makes PvP degenerate.
I'm one of them. I find that instant, anytime escapes from battle leave the game degenerate; I prefer in duels for Teleport to stay out of the running.
Knockbacks were also ridiculously overpowered; back then, Pyre's knockback advantage created a constant, pulsing knockback that you could trap your opponent in, pinning him in a corner while the patch knocked him continuously into a wall. As bad as "upper spam" was in the post-melee patch era, KB was brutally overpowered pre-launch.
Force Cascade gets its frightening reputation and Archery breaks the game
Some powers get a little too much credit, and the modern version of Force Cascade is one of those powers. Back in its heyday, though, FC was the bee's knees.
The devs made quite a number of little fixes in the final launch, not the least of which was nerfing Teleport (not enough, though!) and adding in hold and knockback resistance to hold and knockback powers respectively, so that hold/KB spam would not be the beat-all end-all.
What ended up being dominant in this metagame was brutal spike damage that came out of nowhere. Force Cascade was the forerunner of this, but other builds such as Gigabolt, PA toggle spike and Ego Blade Breach were all designed to overwhelm an opponent in a single hit or very small timing window. During this era, melee was at its lowest point. Although Haymaker dealt extremely large amounts of damage, getting into melee range was quite the chore. Holds such as Electrocute, which did not break on enemy damage, became essential.
The PvP community as a whole experimented with and discovered a variety of exciting new things shortly after launch, including the use of Crippling Challenge to remove blocking and more vigorous use of active defenses.
The release of the Zombie Apocalypse PvP mode during this era heavily favored spike builds. A spiker could stalk and single out an enemy and deplete his foe's HP in a single blast without his opponent ever realizing he was there. Even in the modern game, this is still true, although metagame shifts have pushed the game towards more up-close-and-personal confrontations.
CO PvP's most infamous game-destroying bug also reared its head in this era. The Archery power Explosive Arrow, powered by the Where's the Kaboom? advantage, allowed players to spam volleys of explosive arrows as though they were fully charged, delivering monstrous DPS. It was beatable, and it was very popular in the structured PvP modes. It was less common in duels; most people considered WTK spam to be an unfair and imbalanced strategy.
The golden age of PvP
The dominance of FC, PA spike, and WTK came to an abrupt end. WTK was nerfed to no longer stack, and the energy-reliant FC and PA spikes were hamstrung by the nerfing of Catalyst items. Both builds remained at least somewhat viable and are used even now. They are much, much less effective than in their dominant days, and most PvPers agree that FC is no longer a top-level strategy, despite the flak it continues to get from the community.
In this golden age, there were quite a number of imbalanced (yet fun) strategies to employ. The many viable PvP builds during this period are too numerous to list, and a ton of little fun glitches and bugs made PvP very interesting. Many of the old builds, such as Gigabolt and UA/Conflag, rose to the top.
The most common complaint at this point was the lack of melee potency. Although there were a tiny handful of viable melee builds, most powers languished in the doghouse, completely useless in any serious play.
Super Power Pack and gigantic nerfs
Melee got its day of reckoning, and the Super Power Pack and the immediate aftermath launched a huge number of changes to melee powers. It was at this time that the block advantage Laser Knight was discovered, and melee became the archetype to beat. Might became heralded as the best due to "upper spam" abuse. Because of the way knockback resist worked, the bonus damage from many KB powers was multiplying. Uppercut became the power of choice, and Hero Games was full of knock-spam abuse.
The counter to Laser Knight's ridiculous resistance came in the form of the Dual Blades power Dragon's Wrath, which ignores most forms of damage reduction. With Dragon's Wrath, the meta became polarized between the Might upper-spammers (and other KB spam), and Dragon's Wrath martial artists, with some other melee builds such as Bestial and other martial artists also being viable. With the defensive powers of the new Brawler passives and Laser Knight, melee became flavor of the month literally overnight.
What made matters worse was a series of nerfs to buggy power interactions, crippling the effectiveness of powers like Collective Will and reducing the potency of UA/Conflag builds. Increases to player survivability also lowered the power of spike builds in general, keeping melee DPS builds firmly on top of the build heap. Some builds, like Ego Blade Breach, managed to survive and even thrive in this environment. A few, like Gigabolt and the new Defile, remained playable, although the dramatic improvements to melee damage and survivability made it hard for these builds.
Some players, fed up with melee dominance, developed "rogue" builds designed to counter melee. Because these builds tended to perform poorly in most other situations, they met with limited success at best.
Pet spamand the modern day
Melee remains powerful in the current meta, although Uppercut spam got a sizable nerf (and will be nerfed even more in the future). No changes have yet been made to Dragon's Wrath or Laser Knight, and overall melee remains the top dog. The drastic change in the current metagame came from an unlikely source: pet spam.
As a player who abused pets prior to the pet patch, I was really surprised at how effective pets became. The previous versions of pets weren't that bad (they were just limited in scope), so when people began summoning full pet armies to defend themselves in PvP, I just assumed that people would figure out the counters and the meta would shift.
Unfortunately, that didn't really happen. Most people aren't really embracing the old AoE spike builds like Force Cascade, and not enough people are using Gigabolt, the direct counter to pets. Pet spam is incredibly common, even if the counters are easy enough to implement. The biggest trouble with pets currently is that they dominate melee, which would otherwise be the most dominating strategy. Pet spam in turn is beaten by a more moderate strategy, which can be beaten by melee.
Unlike the melee metagame, in which the counters were very small and exclusive, I feel like the pet metagame just needs some time to work itself out.
I also think that being able to bind "target nearest non-pet enemy" or "target nearest player enemy" is probably essential. In fact, more than any clamoring for nerfs to pets, the biggest argument on the table currently is for players to be able to target enemy players more easily in pet spam.
F2P and the future
I hope that we see some nerfs to some of the extremely dominant melee powers, particularly Dragon's Wrath (to make its defense-ignoring property an advantage rather than an automatic ability). Obviously, I'd like to see a "target nearest hostile player" command, for Zombie Apocalypse more than for dealing with pet spam. I know that upper spam is getting another nerf as well; I hope that Laser Knight and the Brawler passives get nerfed along with it. Offensive characters should be relatively fragile, even if they're melee; there's really no reason why a melee DPS hero can out-tank a ranged tanking hero.
Holds and crowd control powers are getting reworked, and I'm not sure what to make of it. I hope that the short duration "Stun" powers don't break on damage, or I feel they'll be overlooked in favor of the more powerful "hold" powers. Crowd control will continue to be a critical element of PvP, but the Electrocute nerf shortly after the melee pass did a lot to weaken crowd control's power.
I feel that the Silver-only arenas will not be the focus of most PvP. I realize that F2P users will only be able to make Silver characters, but I think that current subscribers will not want to roll Silver archetypes just to PvP, and thus the most populated areas will remain roughly the same. I feel that Custom Zombie Apocalypse (especially the lower tiers) will continue to have the largest queues, and the Silver arenas will be less populated. As long as people continue to have fun (which is likely), they'll probably fight where they can battle the most people. This is especially true if the Archetypes get improvements to their current (still sub-par) state.
Overall, PvP in CO is one of those "surprisingly interesting" things I didn't really think I'd like. It's easy to get hooked doing Zombie Apocalypse, though, and you can actually level up doing it. If you've never really messed around with it, it's actually very interesting and worth checking out. As long as you don't get too upset over FoTM builds and just have fun, it can be surprisingly interesting.
Or you can play like I do and try to break FoTM builds with crazy rogue builds that produce degenerate gameplay interactions. Until next time!
When he's not touring the streets of Millennium City or rolling mooks in Vibora Bay, Patrick Mackey goes Behind the Mask to bring you the nitty-gritty of the superhero world every Thursday. Whether it's expert analysis of Champions Online's game mechanics or his chronicled hatred of roleplaying vampires, Patrick holds nothing back.
