Behind the Mask: I'm the king of the world (or the hill)
For the third week in a row, I'm covering Champions Online's PvP, and this week I'll be talking about the new King of the Hill gametype that was available for playtest last week on PTS. As of this writing, KOTH is not live yet, and I suspect it won't be until after the anniversary event. Still, this is sort of a sneak preview of the gametype, and I'll be sharing my experiences, some potential strategies, and some of the issues raised by the playtesters with the new mode.
For the first time ever, I actually had a chance to play with a lot of the PvP regulars. For whatever reason, whenever I play in PvP I do not see many of the big name PvPers. It was good to see some familiar forum faces and match myself against them for the first time. How did I fare? Well, hit the jump and you'll find out.
I didn't totally make a fool of myself, at least
For those of you following my livestreams, I've been using a slightly tweaked PvP FOTM build. It relies on Defiance, Enrage, Ebon Rift, and the primal sigils. It does good sustained damage and decent damage at a distance. My main damage is up close where I can hit with Eruption and my primal sigils, but even without the sigils my damage is pretty respectable. It isn't quite as bursty as I hoped it would be, but I don't have Imbue yet to maximize my offense.
In King of the Hill, I functioned best as someone who covers the hill, assisting damage dealers as needed for killing people. With Defiance, I was pretty tanky, and I have reasonably good survival instincts, so it took a fair bit of focused-fire to kill me. I got quite a few kills, and Ebon Rift (with the knockback advantage) was great for clearing the hill of unwanted elements.
One thing I noticed was that squishy players really needed sturdy defenders to be hill control threats. Without tanks to threaten hill control, squishies got focused and died frequently. Like any other PvP, squishies need to have escape and evasion options, especially Teleport for good stealth mobility. If a tank is threatening the hill, though, teams have a tendency to focus him, which lets squishy allies rip apart the enemy team's damage dealers. I got a lot of assists just by jumping on the hill, hitting Unbreakable, and being annoying with sigils and knockback. Another player, Xavori, did something similar with his tank, although he was more focused on defense and could survive a whole team if its members were not using timed alpha strikes (which no one was doing). In general, if I couldn't control the hill, I tended to ignore tanks in favor of killing squishy damage dealers.
In general, stacked teams are as much of a problem as they are in UTC. More than once my team would be loaded with PvP regulars like isometry, Empyreal10 and Xavori, and we would just steamroll the enemy team. Fortunately, this wasn't always the case, and we had a lot of close games. There appeared to be the right mix of high-, medium-, and dev-skilled players in the playtests in most of the matches. I am pretty sure this was random chance, though.
Healing and team support is surprisingly chaotic. In other team PvP modes, healers can be in the periphery of a battle and deploy healing and bubbles for their allies. In KOTH, healers have to be close enough that they almost always get ganked. Almost every time I had a healer on my team, he underperformed. One of my healers was reasonably skilled, but she still got focused often and was forced to retreat or die.
Overall, I did OK in KOTH. I performed as well as any tank, other than Xavori's, and I killed people much better than his tank did (he used Dragon's Wrath, which is only really dangerous if you stand there and get hit by it). The skilled squishy players tended to contribute more, though, I think.
The map layout
KOTH takes place in a graveyard with a gazebo where the tiny, 10-to-15-foot hill is located. The hill is elevated slightly off the ground and is difficult to get on top of for a character with no travel powers. It's slightly lower than the base jump height, which causes problems if movement debuffs are in place. I see this mostly as a good thing. A lot of people consider ebon sigils to be too good on this map, since they slow and debuff damage considerably, but I think they're fine, and a skilled team (wishful thinking I suppose) will just kill them.
The gazebo is about the same size as the "duel bubble" present in duel PvP, and the two high entrances have small ledges that provide opportunity for players to snipe with long-range powers. One player used these ledges to great effect in our playtest, continually sniping people with Force Cascade. It was very deadly, as you can probably imagine. Aside from these ledges and the hill itself, there is no other terrain in the gazebo to utilize.
Outside the gazebo are a number of fountains and other terrain features. These are non-factors in the actual battle, although Boosts will spawn outside for players who want to get a little edge. I tried to get red or yellow Boosts before entering the hill area, but they didn't always want to drop. Either way, most of the action takes place around the hill, so these features are mostly for show.
The team not in control of the hill begins to get stacks of a buff called Determination, which boosts team members' damage and resistance. This creates a slippery slope effect, as I'll explain in a bit, but it did make for quite a few close games when the teams were more or less evenly matched.
Also, a new feature of the KOTH map (and as a dev explained to me, all team PvP maps in the future) is little circles below each player displaying which team he or she is on. Most people disliked this effect, but I thought it was great. I think a good compromise would be an option to turn it off in the gameplay menu.
Feedback and suggestions from the players
A lot of players don't like the lockout mechanic -- when you die, you have to wait until the doors in your team's mausoleum open before you can enter the battle again. I think this is an excellent mechanic and every team PvP mode should have it (except for Zombies). Dying should be a big deal; you should not be able to affect the battle by returning to a battle area immediately after you die. Still, this lockout mechanic was almost universally reviled by the players. The best argument was that "we shouldn't have to force good teamwork on players," but I suspect that the real reason is that sitting in a respawn room isn't very fun.
Virtually everyone wanted some way to summon NPCs or otherwise add NPCs to the gametype. The most common suggestion was for players outside to be able to activate magical items outside the map to give them benefits, such as spawning NPC allies to attack the hill or creating explosions on the hill that would damage players and destroy pets. I agree with the overall thrust of these suggestions, since they encourage defenders to harass players trying to use these side objectives rather than to hide in the hill area. Anything that breaks up team focused-fire a bit is a plus in my book.
Everyone liked the basic concept of the Determination buff, but it has a lot of problems. Determination is a very slippery slope. If a losing team is down by three or more minutes of control time, it is almost impossible for it to come back. If the team gains control, it is almost certain to lose it again due to the escalating Determination buff. It would be better if Determination was tied to which team was actually winning, not to which team controlled the hill.
The hill mechanics themselves are sort of wacky. A team controls the hill until all of its players are ejected from the hill (either through KB, death, or voluntary exit). The attacking team cannot gain control until all of those players are removed. This is terrible if you're on a team with players who spam knockdown powers and an enemy tank is sitting on the hill. You can't knock the enemy off due to knock resistance and you can't kill him. It would be better to have hill contesting mechanics like other action games do.
Honestly, there's so much to talk about, but I can talk more about KOTH when the gametype launches on the live servers. As always, check out my Livestream on Tuesday, and until then, stay super!
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.
