Paladins - It's also totally not Overwatch

I like it a bit better than Overwatch, in fact.

Overwatch has higher end graphics, and better animations, sounds, and better art, and more polish in general. But it’s a bit too much spam/kill friendly: you kill fast, you die fast, you respawn fast. Not a much as say, CoD, but enough for the gameplay to be bland-ish, imo. Paladins has a lower TTK, and a bit higher spawn time, this means more fun 1vs1 encounters when people avoid fire and beat the opponent, or gets to run away using an ability, etc. The idea of the horse to reach fast the action is pretty nifty, other games should copy it. In Overwatch there are a few times where the time walking to the point kill the otherwise good pace of the game.
The other differentiating factor is how the heroes work: in Overwatch they are pretty specialized, you can switch hero when you die, and in fact you are supposed to use that feature, switching as your team needs more defense or offense, or a healer or whatever. In fact I would say it’s the most novel gameplay feature of the game.

In Paladins the heroes are a bit more rounded, even if there four different roles, each one has 5 abilities (lmb, rmb, skill 1, skill 2, ult), while that isn’t the case always for Overwatch. The balance is also preferable, Ults for example are good abilities but not game changing, they can feel a bit too cheap in Overwatch, where they are like “go, do this huge damage in this area, and have 3-4 free kills”.

Customization is also an interesting factor, you can select some cards (at the start of the game) and boosting items (through the match) to change your style of play. There is nothing like that in Overwatch, heroes are more… static in their design.

I like Paladins significantly more than Overwatch as well. I like it’s less spam/kill and it really bothers me in Overwatch how you can switch classes on the fly. Half the fun in these games (IMO) is having a team composition and how to utilize your strengths vs the other team’s composition.

Some footage of the new champion, Torvald

Change log

I also enjoy it more than OW. I especially like the ability to customize the loadout of the hero. Not huge on the during match purchases but it’s ok. I just wish they would hurry up with the console version.

Yeah, the in-game shop would be a negative for me, but it is much, much simpler than something like LoL and really doesn’t take long to get used to.

Torvald looks cool.

To me, the biggest issue with Paladins was lack of game mode variety.

I’ve been playing this daily for the last week or so. I even bought the founders pack with all the heroes. I’m still surprised how much I’m enjoying it. My biggest complaint would be crap players picking only damage or (even worse) flank characters. Its funny, because in the majority of games I play, the team with the better frontline hero usually wins.

As for lack of variety in gamemodes, I’m actually really happy with the modes included. I’m almost exclusively played Payload in TF2, and I still think its one of the best FPS modes out there.

I’m curious, having not read any of the forums about the game, does anyone know if any of the characters are unbalanced? I know that there are a couple that are pretty weak (i.e. the shotgun flank dude), but I haven’t seen anything too ridiculous.

Actually, last I heard, Buck was considered quite strong, but that was a while ago, so things might have changed.

More than OP characters, there are a pair of characters that were underpowered, like Grohk, Tyra and Skye. And that’s in the ‘competitive scene’, in casual play Tyra and Skye are fine. Grohk’s healing was buffed in the last update, so he doesn’t suck so much (though I would pick another healer before).
Next update will buff Bomb King and Pip explosive radius, if you want to prepare yourself.

I like the main mode, Capture, which is actually a mix of Capture and Payload mode of other games.

And having one front liner and one support is the most important thing that affects your chances of winning. I also had games where everyone picks damage/front liners. :/

Thats funny, because I see Tyra and Skye in almost every game I’ve played lately.

I had a really good time with Torvald and Bomb King yesterday. Of course with Torvald it was in part because people are bad playing, just buy Wrecker against him! But I like playing him with CD reduction cards.
Speaking of, I found some times playing with lots of front liners yesterday, for example one with Ruckus + Torvald + Fernando. It was fun buying Wrecker III with Bomb King and owning them.

Just played with one of the most pathetic teams I’ve seen in a while. There is no reason that a frontline character should have that many more eliminations/damage than the rest of the team.

On a side note, I really like Barik. I feel like hes one of the most intimidating characters to play against, even if his turrets do die pretty easily. Even though I still have a lot to learn about optimal turret placement, I’m really having a lot of fun with him.

Man, you weren’t kidding about Torvald. Against an unprepared team, he can be really overpowered. And his ult basically gives you free kills in any map with instadeath areas (water, etc). He is especially devastating against the other frontlines that he will inevitably bump into during the match.

And he was easy to pick since the first days of release, unlike when Tyra was released, then for the first two weeks it was hard to pick her as people instalocked her the moment the character selection screen appears. It really highlights people’s obsession with damage dealers.

Even though it seems like only 2-3 people here play this game regularly, I’m curious, does anyone play the Competitive mode? I’m slowly grinding up characters for it, but it seems like its taking forever. I’m worried that once i can actually play the mode, there will be no one else to play with. Any thoughts?

I play regularly but very casually. I think I have everyone except two champions at level 5. Maybe when I have everyone at level 5 I will try competitive.

My problem is that I don’t ‘main’ anyone, I rotate every champion basically in every match. So I never get very good enough at any champion. Master of nothing, you could say.

New character, Maeve

I’m still waiting for Gearbox to allocate some resources/devs back to patching Homeworld Remastered.

DAMN YOU OVERWATCH!!

:(

This is Hirez, not Gearbox…

Yes, but Battleborn was “totally not Overwatch” too, and it affected a game I actually care about.

I had a game today against a team that was made up of every Flank in the game. Of course, they lost pretty badly, but it makes me question the intelligence of the community. Why does it seem like there is an aversion to playing Frontline and Support? I end up playing Frontline almost every game because no one else wants to (not that I have any problem with that).

On a different note, now that the community has gotten used to Torvald, its really hard to win matches with him unless you have any Frontline supporting him. The Shield-Breaker item is pretty much a hard counter, and if the majority of the enemy team gets it, then it is really hard to push with him. He definitely needs some tweaking.