this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Deadlock
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Undecided on the gameplay changes, I will need to get into some games tonight and see how they feel. However, I am pretty happy with the direction of the hero changes this patch, particularly the nerfs to Shiv and Seven's balls. Not that Seven was OP, but he was extremely obnoxious and un-fun to play against considering everyone was building into the ball and spamming it constantly.
I mostly play Paradox and Vindicta, so I'm happy to see some changes to them. Paradox was fairly well balanced already in my opinion, but the buffs to Kinetic Carbine play into the high movement, roaming ganker playstyle which is very fun. Vindicta has felt quite a bit tougher to play since the mega-nerfs a while ago, so hopefully this update helps with that though she will always be a difficult hero to balance because her movement and range is so unique. It's kinda sad to see the Assassinate souls-sharing be removed entirely as I thought it was an interesting team support mechanic on a hero that otherwise feels like it has a very stereotypically selfish DPS carry kind of vibe. Again, I get that it was a difficult mechanic to balance due to its uniqueness so maybe it's for the best. We will see if it returns.
Do you build a railgun Paradox and or do you build into the time bomb at all?
My playstyle on her is mind gaming people into standing somewhat still, for long enough to eat a bunch of time bomb pulses.
This duration change, along with the area growing with each pulse, added in the last big patch, now makes the time bomb utterly insane imo.
I mostly build around gun damage, Kinetic Carbine and high movement. I try to be aggressive in lane, then roam the map looking for ganks and split-pushing opportunities before carrying in the team fights. The Pulse Grenade is only really important for area denial in laning; later in the game it just gets relegated to clearing waves and jungle camps. I used to build more into cooldowns for the classic Paradox combo but at my level getting picks in a team fight matters a lot less than just being able to hard carry through raw damage output (because players are unorganised and generally pretty bad) and I am winning a lot more since switching to a DPS carry kind of role.
You're sleeping on truly insane damage potential.
With the buffs to time bomb, you can now get up to eight pulses out of it (improved duration+magic carpet). Improved range plus the T3 growth now makes is enormous. Throw in mystic slow, slowing hex, or mystic pulse to make it harder to get out of.
Escalating exposure stacks with the damage amp it already gives, and an echo shard lets you drop two for double damage or larger coverage. The pulse damage scales with spirit, of course.
And the damage amp it then provides on anyone hit with it means your gun and kinetic carbine are no joke either.
My problem with building into the carbine is that the damage never gets truly stupid. It scales with gun damage, but even when min-maxing that, it doesn't come close to what I've been able to achieve with the time bomb.
Hence I almost just use the carbine as yet another stun to make sure people eat the time bomb, along with strats like swapping people into narrow corridors.
Another trick that works way too often, is dropping the time bomb at your own feet, and then staying within its AOE while using a time wall to defend. Close range heroes that try stay close to you like shiv, yamato and abrams will have to eat a truly dumb amount of damage if they want to get anywhere near you.
Also, unlike kudzu bomb, the time bomb AOE is a sphere, and it works through walls. With the larger size, clever placements can do damage in ways people really don't expect. It's also an insane combo with anything that stops movement. Including enemy ults. When enemy seven ults I literally just drop a time bomb within range of him, and he basically has to choose between dying or stopping his ult so he can move. Same for an ulting haze or dynamo.
Yeah but I always play for fun first and foremost. AOE spam just isn't fun for me since it requires far less skill to execute. Kinetic Carbine is a skillshot that requires precise aim and it feels good to pull off, especially at higher speed.
Nothing wrong with playing to your strengths and preferences.
But no-one with half a brain sits still in an area that does damage to them, so the challenge comes from finding ways of forcing or tricking opponents into staying there anyway. You'll have an amount of success if you just spam giant AEOs all over the place, but that type of success is little more than coincidental. Planning where you put things, and when, only gets harder the better the people you're playing against.
It's about mind-games, the game-space, movement, sightlines, your gamesense etc.
I've been sniping people in titanfall to the point that landing vindictas ult (or the carbine, for that matter) is mundane, but I'm not about to start claiming aim doesn't require skill.
I think the removal of the soul sharing on the ult is a nerf to Vindicta overall, but we'll see. It's easier to counter one hero with big net worth than having it evenly spread across her whole team. At least in theory.
I played a few games on her last night. She definitely felt a lot stronger with the fire rate and flight time changes but it did feel like the souls sharing wasn't as impactful. I had one game where I had 14 kills in the first 13 minutes but, aside from creating some space on the map and helping to take a couple of objectives, those kills ultimately didn't translate to a meaningful advantage for my team. Part of that was definitely just the fact that our team had 4 useless players on it and it was basically myself and this cracked Grey Talon hard carrying. But also, like you predicted, the enemy team organised themselves and started hard focusing me in every fight after that big opening kill streak which limited my effectiveness for the rest of the game (I went 10/5 after the 14/0 opening). I feel like maybe previously those early kills would have made given my team more momentum than they did in that game. But it was only one game that stood out so maybe it was just a bad one. Overall she does feel more viable as a carry than she did prior to this patch.
Makes sense, she did get significant personal buffs this patch. I remember before they first introduced the soul sharing on the ult that you'd often see Vindictas balloon in personal net worth but get shut down fairly easily, so I was thinking maybe it would return to more of that. But it's possible the other buffs make up for it.