Paladins - It's also totally not Overwatch

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.

K:D ratio. Everyone wants to be the hero with all the kills. Same deal in OW with all the instalock DPS players that whinge when there ain’t no support on the team. I don’t get it personally, there is lots of satisfaction in blocking all the damage or keeping your team seemingly invincible with heals.

Indeed, I prefer tanky characters, because with them I can stay longer in a fight, which is the fun part. With the typical crystal cannons, I can make a pair of kills, but then I die and have to wait for respawn.

Next update, with the big changes in the shape of legendary cards.

Bummer. They removed a lot of mechanics I liked from various classes, i.e. Makoa extra damage after dredge anchor and things like that.

Are HiRez actually trying to kill their own game?

If you’re a new player looking for a new game why would you pick Paladins now? Unless you’re some sort of grind masochist.

It’s still there. Every champion has a free legendary card… and Makoa extra damage is that effect.They have done the same with lots of other champions. What you have now is the option of losing something of their kit (like in Makoa, or like 50% bonus damage in headshots from Androxus, or the bonus damage on consecutive hits from Bomb King) to gain another special effect.

Yeah, that’s the real problem, because I’m doing some math and testing their PTS and it’s going to be a huge grind. I don’t know how they are falling in this ‘trap’, they should have learned the lesson of Tribes Ascend and DON’T AFFECT GAMEPLAY, like in Smite.

edit: After 55 chests in the PTS I obtained 5 legendaries. So to obtain the 50 of them (for 25 champions x 2 locked legendaries each one) I would need 550 chests. 550 chests also give you essence to craft a few more legendaries (we don’t know the price, but minimum of 10k), which is good as more champions are coming in the next months. So that’s 550 x 3000 gold = 1.65M gold.

I can confirm that yes, they are trying to kill their own game.

Some people have crunched numbers, and it seems the grind needed to unlock all the gameplay options has increased tenfold. Yes, almost 10x more.

The normal cards are several times more expensive than before, but the kicker are the legendary cards, which are super expensive. From SA forums:

We have about a dozen more champions to go this year alone. Even though it doesn’t quite add up to four weeks per new character, let’s assume that’s what we’re getting.
So in four weeks you do all your FWOTDs and all the weeklies. That’s 6300g from FWOTDs and 3000g from weeklies, totaling 25200g and 12000g a month, as well as 2000g from the first four mastery levels on that new character.
Throw in ~1200g a day for six games to reach your three FWOTDs assuming a 50% winrate, and we get ~8400g from just match rewards over a week, or ~33600g over the month. Then let’s add the 5300g total from daily logins.
After we deduct the new champion cost, we end up with 70600g a month; or a total of 28 chests. Let’s once again be generous and say that the average essence reward from a chest is 1k essence.
At 28k essence a month, that falls short of being enough to even unlock the missing cards for a ~single~ character. And that’s with a 100% commitment to playing Paladins every single day for a whole month.