my biggest bane in any multiplayer game is always teammates
Paladins have already 4 million owners! That’s a lot, even for a F2P game (let’s remember it’s a saturated market).
That said, I wanted to give some attention to how senseless can be these big numbers in f2p games sometimes.
From the 4 million owners, only 17.2% of them have played 15 hours or more. Most people seems to have played between 5 minutes and 3 hours and then left it. This is important, as I imagine only people who play it regularly will start thinking of spending some money on the game, in boosters, skins, packs or whatever.
That’s 688K players.
From that, it’s usually said only a small share of players end paying for something. Let’s say it’s 15% of these regular players. That’s 103.000 people that in my theoretical armchair analysis spent some money in the game. Which is a much more modest success, even counting for some of them to be ‘whales’.
It really shows why you need a big audience for F2P games, and why Blizzard preferred the normal retail model with Overwatch.
Founder’s Pack is going to change, you may want to buy it the actual $20 version before it’s too late:
Founder Pack Changes. Going to be replaced with 3 tiers of “Champion Packs”
Regular ($20): All champions + Fernando Skin + Flamehorse MountEpic
($35): All Above + 15 Chests + 800 Crystals + 7 Day BoosterLegendary
($60): All Above + 40 Chests + Nightbane Cassie Set + 1500 Crystals + 30 Day Booster
Also omygosh so cute!
http://i.imgur.com/yBm0ATw.png
Decided to give this a try today and like what I see so far. It runs great on my machine. I like the characters I have tried. Only done vs AI stuff so far.
I do wish the training area were a bit better. Hard to get a feel for characters when the enemies just stand there like punching bags.
Other than the play modes, it feels a lot like Battleborn, only with 100x more people playing.
The only reason Blizzard was able to do that was because they have an enormous advertising budget. Paladins would die faster than anything if they had done what Blizzard had done.
You can play directly online… as really, they cheat and your first five levels are played against the AI only.
Yeah it runs great, because they decided to limit a bit the visual quality thinking more on low-powered machines. I actually would prefer they throw moar graphics into it, Overwatch for example look much sharper and less WoW-cartoony.
I like the cartoony look, personally, and think it is perfectly appropriate to a game with bomb kings and dragons. And yes, I know it’s all vs bots until level 5. I meant the shooting gallery or whatever it is called where you can try out hero abilities, even if you don’t own them.
And FYI you get 25 crystals per day for the next three days for your first three wins each day. Not coincidentally, 75 is the cost of the new chests they are introducing in the next patch.
Did my three matches with Mal’Damba. Grohk, and Drogoz. Like all three, though I don’t think Grohk works well as a primary healer (adore his weapon, though). Drogoz is a lot of fun trying to shoot fire spit with rockets to explode it. Mal is pretty good…I like his heals a lot, and while I’m not nuts about his primary (mechanically…visually it is very cool), he has a stun attack that triggers when he reloads, which is rather neat.
I think tomorrow I want to try some front line guys…probably Fernando and Makoa. Grover too.
I could see the siege mode getting a bit old and the other mode is a simple variation of it. The pace feels a bit faster than Battleborn, but not quite as nuts as Gigantic.
I tried three front-liners today.
Makoa was first, and it was ok, but think he will take some time getting comfortable with landing things. Think I might like him once I get used to him. I hit level 5 on my account after this game, so the next two were against other players, not AI.
Second was Fernando. We won this one, but not because of me. Fernando doesn’t suit me at all. His range is just way too short and I’m not comfortable enough with the game yet to want to get in people’s faces. KDA was 1/2/4 in this game and I dealt almost no damage.
Last was Barik. This game went much better. I was 9/2/24 and earned the most credits by far. Barik is a turret champ. He’s pretty interesting to play. Definitely one I want to put some more time into.
Tomorrow I definitely want to try Grover and expect to give Viktor a shot. I will probably give Grohk or Mal’Damba another go. Maybe I will try Buck, since it would be nice to have a Flanker in my arsenal.
Had to work a lot harder for my three wins today. Took 5 games to get three wins and a couple of those were rather tense (in a good way). I got thrashed playing Viktor on one of the losses and playing Pip on the other (pip and buck are actually quite similar…not sure either is for me).
Not sure if it is coincidental or not, but all three wins I was playing support. The first was on Grover. For some reason, me keybinds reset and I hadn’t realized until the match started, which made things a bit nutty til I got it sorted.
Grover is ok, but I think Mal’Damba has emerged as my favorite support. I was on Mal for the other two wins and I put up 98k healing in the second of those, which I was rather pleased with. I do wish he had a slow like Pip or Grohk, but with the stun on his reload, giving him more CC would be overkill (he has fear on his ultimate, but I haven’t felt it to be all that impactful…I wish it did some damage or lasted a bit longer).
But what I like about Mal is that he suits my tendency to hang back from the action perfectly. His right-click heal can be used from across the map, and though it isn’t easy to hit with, the cooldown on a miss is short, especially if you spec for that. His Gourd is a fun ability to use in team fights as it heals allies and damages enemies at the same time.
Had my first CTD during that second Mal’D match. Pretty sure I died (in a last ditch effort to score the payload partially on the target in overtime) at the exact moment someone popped their ultimate and the game had an aneurysm. Remarkably stable through over a dozen matches prior to that. Luckily, when I started the game up again, it dropped me right into the match, which was awesome.
So, I’ve accumulated the 225 gems from the event. Surprised more people haven’t given this one a chance. It’s pretty darned fun.
It is pretty fun actually. Your abilities feel much more powerful than they do in Overwatch. Supports can do a lot of damage and kill people just as easily as dps.
One thing I’d suggest is looking up some guides for card loadouts if you haven’t yet. The cards make such a huge difference in gameplay. For example, bomb king basically becomes a TF2 soldier, flying all across the map with poppy bomb. MalDamba becomes a semi tank because you can spec his heal to give damage reduction and healing.
If you like the game, the founders pack basically gives you every champion and every card for every champion. Pretty good deal for this kind of game in my opinion
I picked up the founder’s pack. I’m using the heal card on Mal’Damba, but not the damage resist (I’ve got the CD reduction on eliminations instead). Might reconsider.
Actually, I just dropped down a couple of cards a level and added in +21% move speed to allies when they have mending Spirits on them. Might scale that back to 14 to max the one that reduces cooldown on mending spirits when you miss. That skill gets used constantly and is easy to miss with.
Since damage numbers are so high in this game, 16% actually works out to be a lot, considering the duration is longer than the cooldown. I’m not sure if it stacks on consecutive casts though. I have 4 points of the self heal and the damage reduction, and the remaining 3 cards and reload speed and slither buffs. Getting some reload speed up can really shut down certain champions (Ruckus is especially vulnerable!)
I’m probably going to try it, it just means giving up some cd reduction.
I think he needs a buff, he isn’t a usually picked character and he mostly don’t do it very well in matches. Mal as you have checked is better, both in healing and even in combat.
Fernando KDA is unimportant, his defining stat for me is time close to the objective. He wins games pushing for victory.
A Hi-Rez thing, keybinds have a tendency to be lost after an update. Who knows why.
Yeah, in specific some of the characters that didn’t click with me improved a ton once I tweaked them with cards. Buck for example has a nice combo with the recuperation skill cards, you can him get 40% more healing when he is below 50% hp. He recovers 1000hp normally, so that’s 1400hp. Now add max CD reduction to that skill and a pair of cards more, and he has lots of sustain.
Same with Ruckus, I find it’s better to modify his cards to tank/heal better, instead of focusing on offensive skills.
I’m liking Cassie a lot, I thought she was the typical sniper-archer but not really, she moves around in a bit closer range, and shots arrows pretty fast. And she is easy to use because in this game the hit boxes are pretty big.
What I should probably do is adjust my keyboard loadout to match the defaults, but for the moment, I have several keys redefined, including alt-fire and F and E are flipped (copied my profile from Battleborn).
I’ve been meaning to ask: does sprinting work at all? Never seems to do anything, nor does the auto run toggle.
Re:Cassie, apparently the collision box on her arrows is the size of tree trunks from what I have heard. Imagine that will be tweaked eventually.
Just tried out Kinessa vs AI. her mines are great for some soft CC and you can increase their range/number of targets dramatically, which gets you eliminations by the truckload.
I’m just afraid vs real people I’d get annihilated with the low health.
The competitive mode has to be pretty hardcore, I played 26 hours of Paladins and I still can’t enter it, I don’t have the requirements.
You need 12 different champs at rank 4. you can’t have the same character on both teams in competitive, so it makes sense that they want the player to have some familiarity with a broad range of characters.
Yeah I know. I’m kind of close, I think I will have 12 in one hour and a half.
Five million players already.