I actually wrote a page-long pamphlet, but after taking a short break and eating something, i decided to rewrite it because it sounded too much like i am attacking somebody, which was never my intention.
Most games have both a casual and a competitive aspect, and pet battling doesn't differ from that. From what i've learned from competitivly playing trading card games for a very long time, these two aspects are usually exclusive and don't want the same things. The competitive side wants a clearly-defined, narrow metagame and win by making the best decision within those parameters, and the casual side wants to play with their favorite part of the game without always losing, or what you would call a very wide metagame where all decisions are kinda viable. This isn't an ideal situation for the competitive player, as a wide metagame makes it both hard to be prepared and makes the matchup more important than outplaying your opponent.
Game developers usually want to carry to both sides of the argument in some way, in this example by allowing pets to be strong, but at the same time balanced enough that a casual player has a low but viable chance to win against them without going out of his way to do so (Most card games do this by making either the ressource management or the outcome of playing a card a bit RNG based, which is not an option in pet battling.) Another visible problem of pet battling is that Blizzard has been notoriously bad at keeping the casual and competitive folk apart in most of their games, which means that in many cases the competitive aspect usually wins out - either because the casuals adapt or go away. This is a problem in its own right, as the casuals usually are the bulk of the players and those that usually put the money into the game (Money translates to game time freely in any part of WoW.) This means that the playerbase of any game that is obviously competitive start to dwindle with time, as casual players are pushed out and competitives slowly lose interest, until the time it takes to find an opponent makes even the most die-hard fans stopping to play the game.
Drudatz, i understand where your arguments are coming from, and i respect them, but having pets that are so oppressively dominant against the average pet like Teroclaw or BS are directly contraproductive to creating a bigger playerbase which would make pet battling more fun and enjoyable for those that already are playing the game. I don't want every pet in the game to be equally viable, there are obviously pets without any redeeming qualities like basic snakes or Core Hound Pup (it takes a sadistic mind to put a Bunny moveset on a pet with 211 speed) and building teams and finding out which pets are bad is half the fun, but i still think that those who tower over the top and especially those that completely dominate the average pets should be brought in line.
Yes, things like Iron Starlette are very scary in the hand of a competent player, but i'm pretty sure that i could easily get a winrate of over 60-70% with a 3 Bone Serpent team, pushing "123" at the beginning of every turn literally without looking at the screen. This is the worst thing about the Bone Serpent - you don't have to be competent in any way to be really successful with it, and that should even scare away competitive players. And even taking these aspects into consideration, Starlette still has way more counters than BS and gets countered by three full families of pets in some way depending on the breed.
About the Nexus Whelplings, i want to say that i'm pretty sure that whoever is bringing triple Whelplings into the queue doesn't actually enjoy the game but feels compelled to play it for rewards. I'd say the same about anyone bringing multiple Bone Serpents. Comparing the two is not really fair though. Nexus Whelpling is much easier to kill, mostly because it doesn't get two free attacks, is slower than the average pet (The fastest one is only a bit faster than most P/P pets) and has his main attacks all within the same family. Each of these arguments make it way fairer than BS, although it is still a lazy design that doesn't force the user to make any kind of decision himself, so i'm not a fan of that either.
Now, there are a few small points i want to address before finishing my post:
Drudatz wrote:Gráinne wrote:- Is Bend Time broken? Maybe I misunderstand, but I think it's OK?
The effect not working when the drake is dead sounds more like expected (ie like Apocalypse not hitting when the caster is dead)
If that is the case, i'd still say that they should change the text to reflect that. I don't want to guess the percentage of players that know that Apocalypse misses if the caster is dead, but i'm sure that it is very very low. This becomes way more problematic with an ability that is as thought-provoking as Bend Time.
Also, if it is the expected behavior, it turns the ability from a build-around-me ability into a completely unviable one, so i hope it isn't.
Drudatz wrote:Drlambda wrote:4. Lower the speed of the S/S Wicked Soul to 325.
I dont see a reason for that either.
I think i made pretty good arguments why i think it should be this way in my answer to Gráinne, but i'd love to hear your opinion on that. I just don't think that the drawbacks of a really high-speed Haunt are enough for all the stuff it does. I know Haunt is a powerful fan-favorite, but i think if you look at it objectively, you'll see that it is over-the-top.
Drudatz wrote:dunno what you play but a BS Team doesnt do much against a sunlight team. Especially with the hit chance of NS in Darkness being only 40% in darkness.
First of all, i'm usually not a person that plays a lot of Darkness teams, the thought of using ressources to take away ressources from my opponent to force both of us into a battle of feast VS famine has never sounded very entertaining for me in any game. That being said, considering an S/S serpent, i don't think that dealing an average of over 400 damage for 3 turns while changing the weather (taking away all "overheal" not included in the damage numbers) sounds like "not doing much." Of course the fact that most good Sunny Day users are elementals makes Nocturnal Strike way worse, but i'd still say that BS is pretty good there. Add to that the fact that with BS being where it currently is, the number of dedicated Darkness teams is probably a lot higher than it would be without BS, and full Darkness teams will always be a good counter to Sunny Day.
And like i said, this is the only positive aspect of having BS right now in my opinion, and that's only because Sunny Day is problematic as well (and this time only partially because of it's sheer power, but more because it works in a way that enforces 30-minute-stalemates - and i don't think anyone is genuinely enjoying those.)
